Patricia Godfrey won third place for the second year in a row in this year’s Star-Advertiser Halloween Fiction Contest.

The vacation rental was an old ranch manager’s house halfway up a mountain. It had six bedrooms and three living rooms and a lanai looking over miles of pasture to the sea. The adults of the family loved it. The children not so much, even though each of the four of them had been allowed to bring a friend, and each pair of friends had their own room.

The chief mark against the house, from the kids’ point of view, was that there was no internet. The parents had chosen the house partly for that reason. “We’ll be off screens,” they said. “We’ll communicate.”

So far they seemed to be communicating only with each other, over large cocktails on the lanai. And then their friends started arriving. “We can check our email and stuff when we go into town tomorrow,” they said. “You go and play.”

The eldest four, thinking back into the olden days without phones, suggested hide and seek. In the large yard. The large dark yard.

But that was too scary for the younger ones. Then they remembered Sardines.

“Sardines is hide and seek,” the older ones explained, “only played indoors.

One person hides, and then all the others go seeking. When someone finds the person who is hiding, they go in the hiding place with them and wait for the next person to find them. And then he or she gets in until everyone has found the spot.”

They rolled a die from an old Monopoly game to see who went to hide. Muriel, who was twelve, was the winner, and got to the count of one hundred to hide, and when the counting was done, all the lights were turned off.

They split off in different directions, trying to remember where good hiding places might be. There were deep cedar-lined closets and old fashioned dressing rooms and attics.

The two youngest decided to hunt as a pair. They found the enormous linen closet in the long upstairs hallway and opened the door slowly by the light of a nightlight plugged in down the hall.

They saw toes sticking out from behind a pile of blankets and, giggling, crawled in.

They crouched, shivering, as they heard doors open and close and the old wooden floor of the hallway creak as the others passed back and forth. It seemed like ages until one of the older boys found them and climbed in, saying “shh-shh,” but too late, because his friend heard and crawled in too.

Muriel’s friend was having a hard time of it. She was quite scared, and lingered near the adults, near the light.

“What is it honey?” the adults said.

“We’re playing hide and seek,” she said, and they said, “What fun! Off you go.”

And she felt ashamed to stay and moved back into the dark. She met the other two hunters lurking just out of the light.

They all heard a door creak above them and without saying anything moved together up the stairs, toward the sound. They started along the long hallway. The nightlight flicked and went out.

They could hear the parents saying their goodnights, from what seemed like miles away. When their guests had gone, the children’s mother said, “There are too many slippers. There are nine pairs out here instead of eight.”

The three children bumbled forward in the dark. They let go their breath in a gasp of relief when they heard giggling inside the closet. They had a hard time fitting in, but they managed.

The youngest child whispered, “We found Muriel first.”

The blankets stirred.

“Are we all here?” whispered the eldest.

From under the blankets came “One.” The others followed. “Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.”

And then they heard Muriel, calling from the hallway. “Hey, you guys! Aren’t you ever going to come and find me?”