The House on Dogwood Lane

The House on Dogwood Lane

Larry Oldham

Salisbury, NC

Word Count: 2151

Her laugh was like a winding spring brook, and I couldn't stop imagining what it would be like to have someone laugh like that in my kitchen again. She never knew my past life. I never knew her present one. I did know a little of her history.

Her name was Millie, but her friends called her Mil. I called her my hope. I didn't want her for an hour or a day. I wanted her for a lifetime, as family.

The trouble is, a witch can only cast so much. No witch can cast a spell that changes a person's life for eternity. Could I cast one that would last just our lifetime? Eternity could take care of itself. She didn't have to know I had powers. She called her life blah. I wanted to show her another one — a world of beauty and grace mixed with make-believe and truth, and teach her the survival skills that would make her whole again.

Mil had lost everyone, through no fault of her own. Her mother died in a car accident when she was young. After that, her father died not long after, because the grief of losing his wife was more than he could bear. That left Mil with an aunt to raise her, and a lifetime of loneliness almost too much to bear.

I planned to fix that.

There are good witches and not-so-good witches. No witch is all bad, but some are more twisted than others. I am a good witch. I am also a lonely witch. My goal was to make Mil my friend, and if I could get her to trust me without telling her my whole backstory, so be it. I wanted her in my life.

First, I had to meet her.

I had been watching the house on Dogwood Lane for three weeks. It's the kind of house that doesn't settle. Most houses creak when the heat comes on. This one creaked when there was no heat at all. A slight knock, a scratch, a sigh in the walls at 2:14 a.m. The exact sounds that still spooked me, even after seventy years of being what I am.

I told myself I was just going to say hello.

Rain had started, that thin Carolina rain that doesn't fall so much as hang in the air. The kitchen light was on, amber, low. I could see Mil inside, at the table, with her cat. Saunders. A big grey tom who never seemed to blink.

I raised my hand to knock. My little spell was warm on my tongue. It wasn't a binding spell, not really — just a nudge. A spell that says, notice me, trust me, let me in.

Before my knuckles could touch the wood, something knocked back.

Three slow knocks from inside the house, on the glass of the kitchen window. Not from outside. From in.

Saunders didn't jump. He turned his head, slowly, and stared past me, into the dark behind me, as if there was someone standing on the lawn with me. There wasn't. Or I couldn't see him.

Mil looked up. She wasn't surprised.

She opened the door. She was in a faded flannel shirt, hair pulled back. Her eyes were red, like she'd been talking to someone who wasn't there.

"You've been on my street," she said. Not a question.

"I'm Maggie. From the market. You dropped your —"

"I know who you are," she said. "You were there before."

That stopped my spell cold.

"What?"

"When I was eight. After they died. You came to the funeral. You told Aunt June you could make me forget."

I had no memory of that. Or I had buried it.

Aunt June appeared behind her, small, tight-mouthed, holding a saucer of milk with something dark in it. She looked at me and went pale.

"You said you wouldn't come back," June said to me.

June didn't wait for me to remember. She remembered for me.

It was November. Twenty years ago. Same rain, but colder. The house was already trying to be more than a house. The ambulance had come and gone for Millie's mother. The father's chair was empty for the first time.

June had called me. Not many people knew how to call a witch like me then. You had to leave a saucer of milk with salt on your back step at midnight and mean it. She meant it.

She met me in this same kitchen. She was younger, but her mouth was already tight. Eight-year-old Millie was supposed to be asleep upstairs. She wasn't.

"She hears them," June said. "She says her mother hums in the pipes. She says her father is still in his chair. She talks to the cat like it's them. I can't do this. I work at the mill. I have no husband. I can't raise a child who sees things."

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. I was younger too, and lonelier. "Make her normal," June said. "Make her forget what she is. Her mother told me once — before — that the line runs strong in their family. That Millie would be strong. I don't want strong. I want normal. I want her to go to school and not hear knocking in the walls."

From the stairs, a small creak. I looked up. Two dark eyes. Millie in pajamas with ducks on them, holding Saunders, who was then just a kitten. She wasn't scared of me. She was curious.

I was jealous of a house that could love that much.

"I can seal it," I said. It was a spell I had only read about. A binding of forgetting. You take a child's true name — the witch name her mother whispers to her when she's born, not Millie but something older — and you wrap it in a silence. "But a seal needs weight. It needs a price. If I take her power, I have to leave a space where it was. She'll be... alone. Not unloved. Just alone. People will like her but not stay. She will feel like a room where the furniture has been moved out."

June swallowed. "Will it hurt her?"

"No," I lied. I didn't know. I was a good witch. Good witches lie to be kind.

"And she'll be normal?"

"She'll think she is."

June nodded. She went to the sink and scooped a handful of damp earth from a pot — earth from the fresh grave behind the Baptist church, I realized later. She mixed it into the saucer of milk. "Her mother said if I ever needed to keep them close, feed this to the cat."

She set it down. The kitten jumped down from Millie's arms, lapped it. And for a second — I swear this — the kitten's eyes flashed amber, the same amber as the kitchen light now.

From upstairs, three knocks. Loud. On a window that wasn't open. On the inside of the glass.

Millie flinched. "They don't want you to do it," she whispered to me. Not to June. To me.

June grabbed my arm. "Do it. Now. Before I change my mind."

So I did. I knelt down, put my hand on that child's head — she smelled like baby shampoo and rain — and I said the binding. I felt her true name rise up like a fish to the surface, and I pushed it down. I wrapped it in quiet. I tied it with loneliness.

She gasped, just once, and then her eyes went blank for a heartbeat, and then clear. She looked at me and said, "Who are you?"

June started to cry. Saunders — the kitten — climbed back into Millie's arms and began to purr, loud, too loud, like a motor trying to drown out knocking.

I left. I told myself it was mercy. June never called. I got lonely enough to come back anyway.

"What did you put in the milk?" I asked June. My voice sounded thin.

June didn't answer. Saunders jumped down from the sill and padded to the saucer. He lapped at it. The liquid was dark, like tea with soil in it.

"He's not a cat," June whispered. "Not really."

Mil knelt down and put her hand on Saunders. For the first time, I saw the house clearly. The clock on the wall — it read 9:17. It had read 9:17 three weeks ago when I first walked by. The tea kettle never whistled, but steam always rose. The chair at the head of the table had an indentation in it, as if someone sat there, even when no one did.

"My mother knew she was going to die," Millie said, quiet, to me and not to me. "She told me in a dream. She said she and Dad couldn't stay, but they could leave a house that would remember for me. So they did. This house doesn't age. The clock doesn't move past when she left. The chair stays warm."

She looked at Saunders. "And they left him. He holds them. When he purrs, I hear her hum. When he stares at the corner, my dad is sitting there. Aunt June feeds him the earth from their graves so he doesn't forget."

That was old magic. Deep, maternal, terrible magic. Not a spell I could cast. A spell you cast because you love someone more than you love the rules.

"That knock," I said. "The one just now."

"That's them," Millie said. "When someone wants to take me away from them. They knock. They did when I was eight, to tell Aunt June not to answer the door to you. They did tonight."

Rain beat harder. Saunders finished the milk and shivered. He looked very old, suddenly. Too old.

I was still a witch. I still had my nudge spell on my tongue. I thought, if I could just say it, she would choose me, and this house could finally rest, and I wouldn't be lonely.

I whispered it.

The moment the word left me, Saunders made a sound no cat makes — a soft, human sigh — and fell over on his side.

The amber kitchen light went out.

The house went dead silent. No creak. No knock. No hum in the pipes. For the first time in twenty years, it was just a house.

Millie dropped to her knees. "What did you do?"

"I didn't —" I started. But I had. My little spell, selfish as it was, had been enough to break a holding spell that was already fraying. The earth-tea, the memory, the cat — it had all been holding two people who wanted to stay just a little too long.

She didn't cry. She put her hands on Saunders, and her hands began to glow. Not the soft glow I use. A dark, untied, furious glow. The glow of a girl who had never been taught she was a witch, who was learning in one terrible second that grief is power.

"You think I want a new kingdom," she said, and her voice was in my head now, not through the window. "I don't. I have one. It's memory. My mother hums when the pipes creak at night. My father sits in the chair that no one else sits in. You want to pull me into your world. I only want to stay in theirs, until I'm old enough to go where they went on my own time."

She didn't have to raise her hand.

The air between us went cold. The three knocks came again, but this time from the porch floor under my own feet, and then from the window behind me, and then from inside my chest.

"Go home, Maggie," she whispered.

And the house — her parents' house — obeyed her. The front door, which I had never touched, slammed shut behind me, pushing me out onto the wet lawn. The amber light came back on in the kitchen, but now Saunders was standing again, and there were two shadows in the chairs that hadn't been there before. One humming. One sitting.

My spell broke before it left my mouth. I was the one who had been lured to a window in the dark. And for the first time since I became a witch, I was the one who got spooked by a slight knock, scratch, and creak in the middle of the night.

I walked home alone. Behind me, I heard June set three plates for dinner, and a young woman's voice — Millie's — saying, "I missed you."

I didn't look back. Some witches are meant to be defeated. Some are meant to be dishonored by being refused. Millie didn't need to kill me. She just needed to not need me.

And that was the most tortuous spell of all.