The realty agent’s smiling face on the “For Sale” sign had long ago eroded into a grotesque caricature. One foggy morning, the residents of Willow Brook Lane watched with wide eyes from behind their curtains as that very agent pulled up in front of the old Carson house—which over the years had itself become a grotesque caricature. The flecked paint, boarded windows, and weedy lawn belied the quaint Victorian’s better days. It was something quite unusual when someone stopped there now.
The agent sat in his car for several long minutes, hand on the latch, surveilling the property, growing agitated. Perspiration beaded on his brow, despite the cool of the spring morning. At last he flung wide his door, power-walked to the sign, and placed the “Sold” placard atop it. Then he leapt back into his vehicle and peeled out, leaving a trail of rubber smoke to mingle with the swirling fog.
In the ensuing days, it was the talk of the town. Who had bought the Carson place? Didn’t they know it was cursed? What kind of person would want to live there?
As it turned out, Sylvester Bishop was the only one to witness the new resident’s arrival the following weekend. The nine-year-old had been out riding his bike when a rickety LTD creaked into the carport and rattled to a stop. It backfired, drawing his attention to the edifice from which he normally averted his gaze. His blood moved like ice-water through his veins when his eyes met hers from across the street.
“Who was it?” asked his mother, after he’d hurried home with the news.
“It was an old woman.” Sylvester swallowed dryly and caught his breath. “She looked like a witch.”
This report unleashed a flurry through the well-worn gossip channels on Willow Brook Lane. Each retelling became embellished with new and horrible details about the evil presence that now dwelt amongst them.
By the time it had circulated back to Sylvester’s ears, it bore little resemblance to his original account. His circle of friends were cross-legged in Will Denkins’ tree-house with a bag of candy between them.
“I heard she has yellow eyes and eats the neighborhood cats,” said Molly Parker through a mouthful of red licorice.
“My dad said she turns into a bat at night to fly in your window,” said Will Denkins, a green apple Tootsie Pop embedded in his cheek.
Sylvester didn’t understand how these discoveries had come to light. As far as he knew, the woman hadn’t left her house since she’d arrived. And he’d exaggerated his own description because of the butterflies he’d already felt that morning. To the neighborhood kids, the derelict home had earned the nickname of the Butterfly House. Not just from the sensation they each experienced in its vicinity, but also because the flowering shrubs that lined its front yard were always undulating with hundreds of butterflies.
Once that new folklore had wormed its way into their collective fears, they all stopped riding their bikes past the old Carson place. They’d go the long way around the block in the other direction to meet up on the far side. As for the adults, drapes stayed closed on every window with a vantage point of the terrible witch.
And tension grew daily.
Elizabeth Miller woke to loneliness that smothered her like an abusive spouse.
To say that her welcome on Willow Brook Lane had been chilly would have been an understatement. Aside from the strange little boy she’d waved to the other day, the only sighting of any neighbor had been fleeting glimpses of peeping faces between hastily shut curtains. The real estate agent had said the neighborhood was close-knit and friendly. But if this was his idea of friendly, she’d have hated to see what he counted as hostile. The incredible deal she’d accepted was starting to make a lot more sense. Willow Brook Lane might as well have been the neighborhood she’d fled after the acquittal.
That boy, too, had been a sight. His scowling, whiteless eyes had shone like polished onyx embedded on a pale, gray face, making her heart leap into her throat before she’d dashed behind the fence. Each time she ventured out to get the paper, she’d look up and down the street to make sure he wasn’t around. Upon hurrying inside and closing the door, her pulse would be a drum-roll.
That morning, she was deflated to discover she was out of coffee, and willed herself to tamp down the learned self-flagellation that bubbled from her subconscious after such an oversight. Still in her nightclothes, and lacking the ambition to make herself presentable, she consulted her smartphone and was pleased to find an app for grocery delivery. Gnawing on a stale granola bar left over from her interstate move, she placed an order and sat down to wait.
She rubbed her wrist absently, which still ached each morning, even after all so many months.
Sylvester Bishop coasted to a stop two houses down from the Butterfly House. At the curb next to him, a teenage boy sat on an idling Moped. His face was pale as he turned toward Sylvester.
“Hey kid,” said the teen, “how’d you like to make ten bucks?”
“Sure!” he said. Ten bucks will bring in a pretty good haul at the candy store.
“All you have to do it take this bag up that house there, ring the doorbell, and leave.”
Sylvester followed the teen’s pointed finger to the Butterfly House. “No way!”
“Come on, kid, it’s ten bucks—here.” He pulled the bill from his wallet. The guy looked pretty desperate.
The sound of a door slamming startled them both. On the porch of the Butterfly House stood the witch, watching them. “Excuse me,” she said. Her voice rattled Sylvester’s ears as if she were shouting into them at close distance. “Are those my groceries?”
The teenager yelped, dropped the sack of groceries onto the grass, and gunned the Moped. In his haste, the vehicle wobbled beneath him, and he fought to stay upright as the wheels lurched and bounced down the street and around a corner. Sylvester tiptoed over the groceries, which were strewn on the grass.
Turning back around, he froze. Terror pulled a scream from his chest. The witch was coming for him.
She wore a tattered black toga that sucked all the color out of the space between them. Her feet were snarling honey badgers. Her hair was a tangle of gold snakes that weaved and hissed atop her wrinkled, yellow face. Her wild eyes pulsated and burned with white fire. It was the most horrible thing he’d ever seen.
“Are you OK, kid?” she asked, voice booming from all directions.
“Please don’t hurt me!” Paralyzed, Sylvester clamped his eyes shut and braced for an assault. The breeze stopped and the world fell still and silent.
“Hurt you?” said a woman’s voice. “Why would I hurt you?”
Sylvester opened one eye to peek. Before him stood a young woman in a cornflower nightgown and fuzzy slippers. She had hazel eyes, and messy blonde locks spilling over her shoulders. He leaned to see behind her, expecting the witch to be there to devour both his and the woman’s souls. But there was no one around. The two stood gaping at each other.
“Your eyes look different up close,” she said, kneeling to retrieve her groceries.
“Where’d the old witch go?” asked Sylvester.
“Witch?” The woman looked all around. “What witch?”
“The witch that lives in there,” he said, pointing at the Butterfly House.
The woman laughed. “Don’t be silly. That’s my house. I just moved in.”
As a floral breeze wafted over them, the woman’s eyes flashed white again. Sylvester finally regained control of his limbs and pedaled away as fast as his feet would pump. He never looked back. His bike was still rolling when he jumped off it and scrambled through his back door.
There was something very strange about the people on Willow Brook Lane, Elizabeth thought. The demon-eyed boy had looked almost normal for a moment, but then his eyes went dark again just before he tore away. And she could swear that delivery person had looked more like a lizard than a teenage boy. For several minutes she’d watched him perched—on horseback, of all things—with his scaly skin and bulbous eyes, before she dared approach him. Eventually, she’d figured—lizard or not—she still needed her coffee. But as soon as she’d called to him, he’d spurred his horse away.
After all the excitement, coffee seemed almost redundant, since she was already wired. She went upstairs to shower and get dressed for the day. The warm shower was just what she needed, as her agitation seemed to wash down the drain with the water.
She’d just gotten done dressing when there was a knock on the door. Delighted at the prospect of a neighbor finally being neighborly, she hurried downstairs and flung the door wide. There on her front porch, a man-sized cockroach stood on its hind legs, tapping its chitinous hind leg against the wood. After she slammed the door in terror, the hideous beast resumed knocking.
“Go away! Leave me alone!” she shouted, breathless.
“Open the door,” said a piercing staccato voice. “I want to have a word with you.”
She stood, silent and motionless, as the clicking and scraping of the beast’s exoskeleton moved back and forth across her porch. Its shadow passed over her curtains as it tried to peer in through the windows.
“Look, lady,” the voice stabbed, “you can’t go around scaring my kid.”
Elizabeth was perplexed. She had done nothing of the sort. So, on top of everything else, the giant, talking cockroach on her porch apparently had confused her with someone else. And the fact that she’d even had such a bizarre thought suggested she might be having a mental break.
“This has to be a nightmare,” she said under her breath. She pinched the skin on her arm to wake herself up. In the moments that followed, the insectine noises receded from her home, and silence embraced her once more. She inched to the window to peek from the side of the curtain, but the swarm of butterflies on her hedgerow was the only sign of life she could see.
“I triple dog dare you,” said Will Denkins. He and Sylvester were back in the tree-house, hopped-up on sugar from the last of the candy haul their allowances afforded them.
“Heck no,” said Sylvester. “I’m never setting foot near that place.”
“What are you, chicken?”
“OK then, if you’re so brave, you do it.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“Didn’t what,” said Molly Parker as she pulled herself into the tree-house.
“Ding-dong-ditch the witch’s house,” said Will.
Molly scoffed. “You never did that.”
“Did so,” said Will.
“Hey, you got candy without me!” Molly grabbed the last watermelon Now-n-Later and unwrapped it with nimble fingers so as not to tear the paper.
Will groaned. “You owe me a Now-n-Later, candy thief.”
Molly stuck out her reddened tongue. “Hey, guys,” she said. “Look what I got.” She rummaged in the large pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a gnarled branch. It was lined with diamond-shaped leaves, and had several small boughs of trumpet-shaped flowers on it.
“Woah,” said Will. “Is that from the Butterfly House?”
Molly nodded. Sylvester squirmed as adrenaline made its way through his innards. His pulse quickened, and he felt clammy and hot. A glance at the others suggested they felt much the same. It was odd, though. He’d never noticed before, but the whites of Will’s eyes were almost completely filled in with capillaries. And Molly’s canine teeth suddenly seemed elongated. The red candy she’d been eating now gave her the appearance of a vampire having just fed.
“Molly,” said Sylvester, “throw that thing out of here.” He’d expected an argument (Molly always argued), but something in the urgency of his voice must have held some weight. She tossed it through the tree-house window without objecting. Within moments, the three of them could catch their breath once more, and they sat, bewildered.
Molly blinked and shook her head. “What just happened?”
“Not really sure,” said Sylvester, “but I have an idea.”
Elizabeth watched from an upstairs window as the crowd gathered outside. She was fully convinced of her insanity now. The crowd was a writhing mass of creatures that might have crawled right out of Hollywood horror movies. There were zombies, mummies, human-insect hybrids—including the giant cockroach from earlier—demons, giant snakes, and everything in between.
She wished now that she hadn’t been acquitted. If the jury had found her guilty of murder, she’d be safely in a prison cell now. If the jury had found her guilty of murder, she wouldn’t have spent the last ten months being ostracized by the people she’d once called neighbors and friends. If the jury had found her guilty of murder, she could have forgone the months of intensive therapy to help her accept her lawyers’ winning argument—that she’d acted in self-defense. That she’d had no alternative than to fatally stab her husband’s stomach. That she’d had to stab him left-handed because he’d just broken her right. That fleeing would never have been the end of it—only her death would.
Now it seemed that death would find her after all. The crowd was rabid and loud, with inhuman voices from low rumbles to piercing screeches, all shouting the same thing: “Kill the witch! Kill the witch!” Then, the terrible chanting quieted, and a singular voice rose out of the silence.
“Witch! We know you’re in there. Come out now and give yourself up.”
She shouted through her sobs. “Go away! I’m not a witch!”
“If you don’t come out now, we’re going to burn you out!” They all whooped and hooted and waved their torches in the air.
“Wait!” came a small voice from the distance. From up the road, three small figures approached. It looked like the black-eyed demon boy, flanked by a bipedal warthog and a snarling white leopard.
“Syl,” said the giant cockroach, “go home. You can’t be here for this.”
“No,” said the demon boy. “Listen to me, mom. You have to burn these bushes.”
“Son, you don’t understand,” said a zombie with one eyeball dangling on its optic nerve. “This woman is a witch—you saw her yourself! There’s only one way to dispatch a witch, right folks?”
“Burn her! Burn her!” came shouts from the crowd.
Sylvester leapt up and tore the torch from his zombie-parent’s hand and waved it at the crowd. “Listen to me,” he said. “It’s these bushes. Look around you. Can’t you see that you’re not yourselves right now?”
Murmurs from the crowd were interspersed with some gasps, some wails, as the townsfolk began to see.
“Maybe it’s the pollen or something,” he said. “We’ve all felt it, every time we walk past.” He set light to one of the bushes, which began to spark and sputter in the dusk. “We can still see each other, because we’re familiar.” He touched the second bush with his torch. “But throw a stranger into the mix, and the unfamiliar comes out as something scary.” Another bush caught up in flame. Butterflies, some on fire, darted through the crowd, sending the crowd weaving and ducking. “But really she’s just another person. Someone just like us.”
The entire hedgerow was in flames now. As the flames licked each flower, they burst into multicolored blossoms of sparks, like fireworks. And as the smoke spilled out into the street, the crowd breathed it in, and their apprehension became almost unbearable. They were each inebriated with fear. No longer was the witch the focus of their rancor, as even the most familiar among them became monsters—unrecognizable perversions of reality. Some fought, some cowered, others fell over in prayer, many wept.
Then, as the fires died down, and the smoke dissipated, their heads cleared. Disfigured monsters dissolved back to humans. Those who had fought, now embraced. Those who had cried in terror, now rejoiced. Then they turned to the old Carson place—the Butterfly House—and to the woman in the window. Who was in fact not a witch, but rather a terrified young woman, whose tear-streaked face shone in the dwindling firelight.
“Welcome to Willow Brook Lane,” said Sylvester.