by A. W. Jantha
I believe in fairy tales about as much as I believe in witches, but I’ve always wanted someone who would look at me the way my dad looks at my mom in that picture. The way he still looks at her, when they think I’m ignoring them. I think about Travis teasing me about Isabella making eyes at me today at lunch. Sometimes I don’t know if I’ll ever find someone who makes me as happy as my parents make each other, and the idea of that makes me so sad, like feeling a loss without knowing exactly what I’m missing.
I put the photo back on my mom’s dresser just where I found it, make sure I’ve shut her jewelry box without disturbing anything, and slip back into the dark hallway and down the stairs, but not before grabbing Mom’s bright red vintage coat off a hanger.
So what if we’re going to the Sanderson house during a blood moon? Magic isn’t real. And besides, we’ll be back before anyone even knows we’re gone. Not a lot could go wrong, but a lot could go right. And then, who knows what’ll happen?
I kind of can’t wait to find out.
Ishrug on Mom’s coat against the chill of the October air and step outside and away from the party, the hum of conversation following me onto the back porch.
Travis and Isabella are waiting for me there, where the kitchen light reflects on the white-painted railing, making the posts look like ribs surrounding my parents’ colonial-style house.
“Let me get this right. You want to talk to spirits?” Travis is saying to Isabella.
“Ten bucks says they’re friendlier than Katie,” she replies with a laugh.
Travis, who made a grab bag of cookies, kettle corn, and chocolates, is snacking and leaning against my dad’s grill, his white lab coat protected from soot by the grill’s tarp. Isabella has pulled on a white peacoat and her messenger bag over her Athena costume (minus the shield), and Travis has tied a striped scarf around his neck, obscuring his outfit’s stethoscope. The bloody plastic unicorn horn seemingly stuck through his shoulder makes me smile. He may have gone as a magical creature researcher for Halloween, but in real life, Travis prefers his science with more physics and less of a pulse.
Isabella’s standing a few feet away from him, down in the yard, neck craned as she stares at the moon—the blood moon—which hangs in the sky above the trees as full and heavy as a ripening peach. The light reflects off the gold circlet of her costume and washes over her upturned face. Something about her expression is eager and hopeful, like she isn’t Isabella Richards, with the weight of constant pressure sitting heavily on her shoulders, but just a girl staring wide-eyed into the face of a grand adventure.
Travis turns to me. “Pops, we thought you’d never come,” he says through a mouthful of sweets.
“I was gone for literally a minute.” I pull my pointed witch’s hat back on, though I’ve left the mask and wand Travis gave me inside my house along with Isabella’s shield. I know I was supposed to be an undercover witch, but I guess I’ll have to be an out-and-proud witch for this expedition. I loop the strap of my heavy camera back around my neck. It’s a clear night for photographs, so if I get busted, at least I’ll have some good photos of this blood moon. I walk down the wooden steps to join my friends, and Isabella turns to me as I spin the leather key ring around one finger.
“I got the keys,” I say.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” says Isabella, as if she’s never broken a rule in her life.
Travis shrugs. “Believe it.”
Isabella grins and tucks her spirit board box under her right arm. There’s a giddiness in the way she carries herself. Her eyes are bright and glinting. She seems excited to check out the Sanderson house, and honestly, so am I, even if I know my parents might kill me.
Fighting my instinct to stay put, I say, “Let’s go then!”
We circle my house, slip out through the garden gate, and hurry down the street, the sounds of laughter and music from Mom’s party growing more distant.
Trick-or-treaters swarm Salem with sugar-crazed faces and bags full of loot. A princess waves at us. Her dad, who’s dressed like a pea, throws in a good-natured nod. Buzz Lightyear and Woody aren’t far behind them, their Green Army Men buckets heavy enough that they each have to use both hands to hold them. They catch up to their dad, showing off their candy bounty. Two kids—a boy and a girl dressed as peanut butter and jelly—shove past us rolling a red wheelbarrow full of candy.
I pull my phone from my coat pocket. “Isn’t it almost ten?” I ask my friends.
Travis nods to an adorable gaggle of kids dressed as Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs. “Kids in Salem go hard,” he jokes.
“Will you two hurry up?” Isabella calls playfully over her shoulder.
We quicken our pace. “Travis, why am I suddenly freaking out?” I whisper to him.
“Because you’re doing the one thing your parents don’t want you doing,” he points out.
“Right. Thanks,” I hiss. “Now I feel much better!”
We near Old Burial Hill, where the streetlights are farther and farther apart and the yards are large and overgrown.
“You don’t think we’re going to actually find anything there, do you?” Travis asks me.
“Definitely not,” I say. “But if getting into that rotting building twenty-five years ago catalyzed the world’s most bizarre love story for my parents, maybe there’s something to a healthy dose of Halloween hijinks,” I add in a whisper.
Ten paces ahead, Isabella stops and points at the graveyard in front of us. “Creepy, right?”
“Are we even going the right way?” Travis asks, looking around.
“The Sanderson house is just on the other side of the graveyard. Let’s cut through it,” I suggest. “Unless you’re both too chicken?”
Isabella turns around and smiles at me. “Gumption. I like it.”
“Oh, gum? I’d like a piece, please!” says Travis.
Isabella and I shake our heads, and we all stride forward arm in arm.
At the top of the hill, tucked into the woods, there’s a dusty little chapel that no one ever uses. There’s not much to it—just four stone walls, a handful of pews, and some miraculously intact windows—but I’ve found myself going there more and more as graduation looms closer. There’s a profound sense of calm that comes with sitting among the rows of dusty candles, the sun slanting through cobwebbed windows. Gloomy though it may be, there are few places in Salem better for being left alone than the cemetery, and with the solitude beyond that aging wrought-iron gate with old burial hill emblazoned atop it comes a certain amount of peace and security, even now.
“So ‘Bella,’ huh?” Travis puts words to a question that’s been nagging at me, too.
We leave the graveyard gate behind and start up the hill. There isn’t a path, so we have to unlink our arms and pick our way around the headstones, which run the gamut from barely visible to morbidly ostentatious.
“Katie Taylor isn’t as good at anything as she is at pushing buttons,” Isabella grumbles, annoyed.
I glance at Travis, but he shrugs.
We both know Isabella’s ignoring the actual question. Did the sweetest and most popular girl at Jacob Bailey High used to be friends with its most vicious bully? I think I’d remember something like that, but maybe it was supposed to be a secret.
If it’s true, maybe it’s too hard for Isabella to admit. She saw how awful Katie was to me today. Maybe Isabella doesn’t want me to think less of her for their onetime secret friendship.
“I can’t believe I let Katie get to me.” I pass a towering tombstone engraved with willow branches, and for a moment, it blocks out the moon.
“I can,” says Travis. “You care way too much about what other people think.”
“I know,” I tell him. It’s a critique I’ve heard before—including from him. “But it’s not like I can just...turn it off.”
“It’s a curse,” Isabella chimes in. “But that’s also a good thing, in a way. It means you’re a person who cares about things.”
> I look gratefully at her, the spirit board box still clenched under her right arm. She maneuvers expertly around gravestones and overgrown swells of grass as if she’s done it a hundred times before. She even evades an unmarked stubby headstone that I trip over a moment later.
“It’s not a curse,” says Travis. “It’s a choice. As my mom would say, you decide not to pay any mind.”
“Yeah, well.” Isabella breathes heavily from the incline. “My mom would say you need to take them to court.”
Travis laughs but shakes his head.
The chapel appears on the rise ahead of us. Its small bell tower peeks above the tree line.
“You know”—Travis pops a handful of candy into his mouth—“when my family first moved here, I read that the bells in the chapel toll on their own each Halloween night.”
Isabella glances at me, her eyebrows raised. “Poppy?”
“What, now I’m the resident expert in everything supernatural?” I slowly narrow my eyes and my mouth sets into a long straight line.
“Pretty much,” says Travis.
“Well, I’ve never heard it ring,” I say.
“It’s supposed to wake the spirits,” Travis adds, “and let them regain their bodies.”
An owl hoots loudly nearby, and all three of us jump.
I clutch the silver keys more tightly in my hand, and then Travis and I laugh nervously.
Isabella turns her head around so wildly looking for the source of the noise that I fear it will do a complete three-sixty spin. “This was a bad idea,” she says. “We should turn back.”
But I press onward. “Come on, we’re almost there!”
From the trees comes a series of sharp snapping noises, like bone-dry branches being broken for firewood.
I grab Travis’s arm. “What was that?” I point with the key ring to the trees.
“A rabbit?” he says. “Or maybe a fox? Pedestrian by magical-creature-expert standards.” He straightens his lab coat, showing off its brightly colored mystery stains in the thin light of the moon.
I take a deep breath, then smile reassuringly at a frozen Isabella. “Come on, guys!” I say, hurrying forward into a grassy clearing while they follow right behind me. “No rest for the wicked.” I’m thankful we left the claustrophobia and bad juju of the house party, despite whatever we’re about to do. “Once we get to the Sanderson house,” I say, “we can use the spirit board to—”
Before I can finish, something grabs my ankle.
I shriek, tumbling forward, and crash into Travis, whose body softens my fall.
“Sorry!” I’m careful to protect my camera as I roll off him.
He grunts and sits up, rubbing the shoulder that has the bloody plastic unicorn horn in it.
“Are you guys okay?” Isabella asks us.
“Yeah,” Travis manages, though he sounds as if the horn actually stabbed him.
“Poppy, what about you?” asks Isabella.
I check my lens. Luckily, it’s undamaged. I feel stupid for bringing it. “I’m okay.”
“How’d you even trip?” asks Travis, standing.
Someone grabbed me, I think.
But I know that’s impossible—there’s no one around but us.
“On a tree root,” I say as Isabella helps me up. I notice there are no tree roots nearby. My confidence wavers. “Er...a rock?” But I don’t see any of those, either. It’s quiet again.
I realize my hands are empty. “Crap! I dropped the keys.” I pull out my phone, which is fortunately also not broken, and turn on the flashlight app, sweeping the beam over the grass. I take a few steps back and look in the other direction, in case the keys bounced when they hit the ground. “They’re not here,” I say, running my hands through thick tufts of grass.
Travis cleans his glasses on his lab coat before slipping them back on. The bold green frames seem to glow a little in the moonlight. “That’s impossible. They can’t have gone far,” he says, turning on the flashlight on his phone, too.
“Well, I guess this means we should go back,” Isabella says, her phone’s flashlight app also turning up nothing. “The party’s going to wrap up soon, and your mom and dad are going to realize you’re missing. And if they call your parents, Travis, you’ll be grounded until Cyber Monday.”
“We’re almost there, though!” I say, shining my phone into the darkness ahead. The chapel is off to our left, shrouded in crooked trees, which means the cemetery’s back fence and rear access gate are just a few feet away.
“But no keys,” Isabella says, seeming glad to have a solid excuse to turn back.
“My family’s story aside, the house is a Salem landmark. Everyone’s tried to get inside at one point,” I say, feeling the desperation rising in my voice. I refuse to give up on this plan. “Anyway, the place is over three hundred years old. I’m sure we can get in without the keys.”
“Isn’t that breaking and entering?” Isabella asks, concerned.
“Luckily, both my mom and your mom are pretty good lawyers,” I say. “Plus, my parents practically own the property. Well, my nana used to run it, anyway.”
Isabella and Travis size me up.
“I’m pretty sure my parents broke in!” I point out. “Well, maybe they used my mom’s keys. But it’s pretty much the same thing. So if they find out, they can’t possibly be mad at me.”
“Touché,” says Travis.
Isabella sighs and shrugs. “Fine.”
We let ourselves out of the cemetery and hurry across the deserted, cracked black asphalt overgrown with weeds. No one ever really drives this part of Cemetery Loop. The graves here are so old and their inhabitants so long dead that no one’s alive to remember them, much less go to the trouble to visit or leave flowers. The streetlamps seem to reflect that, too: they’re low and dim and barely give enough light to illuminate the street, let alone anything beyond it. Ahead of us is the tall wrought-iron fence that runs along the sidewalk between the street and the decrepit Sanderson property. The black iron spikes rise out of a low, crumbling rock wall, which seems to shrink back from the streetlights as if it’s trying not to be seen.
I run my fingertips along the stone. “They say the sisters’ victims were buried in these walls, brick by brick.”
“Delightful,” Isabella mutters. “You know, I kind of like this Halloween historian side of you.”
“So, they were witches and bricklayers? Triple threats!” says Travis. “Well, sort of.”
Isabella turns to him. “It’s not as cute when you do it.”
We reach the gate, which is fairly plain—just a big arch with wrought-iron double doors. It’s locked, as expected.
“Come on.” I take Isabella’s boxed-up spirit board from her and slide it through the bars, then hoist myself onto the stone wall. “We can climb over.”
“Is that something we can do?” Isabella asks.
I land with a huff and an ungraceful thud on the Sanderson side of the fence, then pick up the spirit board box. Travis joins me. Isabella hops the low stone wall and lands beside us, delighted.
Somehow, it’s far darker on this side. The only sound is the rustle of dried leaves, and I get this heavy, oppressive sense that we’re being watched. Probably by security cameras put up around the premises. Not by ghosts or supernatural things. No, sir, no way.
Because that’s just a bunch of hocus-pocus.
I’ve never set foot in the Sanderson house before; I’m not allowed. I’ve only heard about it from Mom, Dad, and Aunt Dani, the building described through the lenses of their memories. Seeing it in person, and so close, sends a chill down my spine, but I tell myself that my goose bumps are linked to the thought of getting caught at the house. It’s a squat old cottage with a sagging roof and broken, grimy latticed windows, and there’s an ivy-covered waterwheel on the side that looks like it’ll never spin again. The front door of the house is framed by windows that look out onto a porch with a few rotten wooden steps.
“Oh, look. Gal
lows in the front yard. How quaint,” Travis jokes.
We make it to the front porch without further complications, but Travis’s attempt to break in with one of his fake scalpels ends with the plastic blade breaking clean off in the lock.
Travis turns to us with his hands out. “No such lock.”
“Ha, ha,” I say flatly.
“Hold up.” Isabella vanishes around the side of the house.
I turn to Travis. “This’ll be fun. Beats my mom’s party.”
“You’re just thrilled to be breaking rules with Isabella Richards,” he whispers.
“So?” I retort, elbowing him. “Shut it.”
“She can be your Isa-bae-lla,” he sings softly with a wink. I know Travis is trying his hand at matchmaker, but he’s been insufferable ever since I told him about my crush on Isabella, and I could so throttle him right now.
The moon, mostly obscured by leaves from the canopy of trees, peers down at us curiously.
There’s a loud thump from inside the house, and both Travis and I go dead silent.
“What was that?” I whisper.
Then the deadbolt thuds and the door creaks open.
I can hear my pulse thundering in my ears.
The door opens wide enough to let moonlight in, revealing Isabella, who’s grinning at us like she’s just discovered Atlantis all on her own.
“I climbed the waterwheel,” she explains matter-of-factly before ushering us inside the musty-smelling house.
“Now we’re going Raiders of the Lost Ark up in here,” murmurs Travis. “Nice.”
I follow him into the house. It’s smaller than I expected. The walls seem to press in on one another, and the sheer quantity of furniture inside doesn’t help.