Halloween Eve 1977
The four teenagers, all High School Seniors, drove slowly down the busy streets, heading out of town towards their destination, a remote location known as 'the Hill'.
All around them, younger kids wandered from house to house, collecting candy. Noise, laughter, and colorful costumes dotted the landscape. Three of the boys focused on their plans and ignored the trick-or-treating kids, while Sam watched them somewhat enviously from the back seat. To him, it seemed that it had been not so long ago that the four of them had been part of the festivities. Now, at 18, they were essentially grown-ups, adults. Sometimes he missed being a kid.
Eventually, they left the populated streets behind, houses becoming sparser and further back from the road. More trees and fields filled the landscape, dark and empty of leaves and crops this late in the year. No trick-or treating this far out of town, these were the kids whose parents piled them into the family station wagon and took them into town to wander with their friends.
Mike was driving, with Jimmy beside him and Colin and Sam in the back seat, all unsure of their commitment to the planned destination despite their earlier conviction.
"The Hill" was a long, sharp rise just outside of town that led to a large Victorian house, known far and wide as "The Witch's House." A place everyone avoided at all costs. A place where children repeated stories of witches with warty noses eating stolen infants for breakfast, a place where religious adults crossed themselves when driving along the main road and the house came into sight.
Earlier, in the basement at Mike's house in the paneled rec room, decorated equally with pictures of supermodels and baseball players, Mike, their de-facto leader, announced that instead of joining their friends at a party later that night, he wanted to brave the house up the Hill tonight. In search of infamy, they would confront the Witch and live to tell their tale to everyone at school on Monday. Or at the party, depending upon how long it took to get up there and back, he added.
The three other boys, all seated at the wooden card table, stopped what they were doing, and Jimmy dropped his chair legs to the floor, staring at Mike in wonder. "What the actual fuck?"
Colin and Sam shook their heads at Mike, both trying to hide their initial reaction of complete terror behind a façade of bravado.
"Yeah Mike, we'll end up dead if we go up there. Remember that kid, from Mr. Thompson's class a couple of years ago? He went up there on a dare and never came back!" Colin exclaimed. "We aren't that stupid, are we?"
They all took a moment of silence to contemplate the disappearance of 'that kid' whose name no one remembered, who had gone heroically to the Witch's House and never came back.
Well, no one remembered him coming back, or what really happened even. They'd heard the story from Sam's older brother, told in hushed tones one night around a campfire about a classmate who'd gone 'up the hill' to trick or treat at the Witch's house, and was never seen again.
"We're going." Mike spoke with authority. "That story is bull and you know it. Sam, your brother's a lying jerk and made that all up."
Sam shook his head and held up two fingers on his right hand. "Scout's honor guys, that kid went missing and is probably dead and buried in her back yard."
"Doubt it." Mike stood up, at 6' 2" the tallest of the boys, his glasses glinting in the overhead light. Leaning his hands on the table he said, "Are you all a bunch of pussies or something? Think about how cool it will be when we ALL come back down the hill. Every girl in our class will cream herself thinking about how daring we are. Even Jimmy will get a date for Prom and Colin, maybe Julie will suck your dick at last."
"Ok." Visions of the girls in their class fawning over complicated tales of bravery, not to mention the possibility of dicks getting sucked, danced in their heads and the three teens all nodded in agreement. "Let's do it."
"We all go up together and we all come down together." Sam looked at his friends. "We don't leave ANYONE up there alone."
"Deal." Again, a nod of agreement and all four boys trooped up the basement steps to where Mike's blue '72 Nova sat waiting for adventure in the driveway.
"We're gonna end up like that kid did." Sam moaned from the back seat, eyes wide in the darkening twilight. Streetlights left behind, they had only the full moon to guide them along the rutted side road. "I know everybody thinks that story is made up, but I swear it's for real."
"That's all bullshit." Mike tossed the words over his shoulder to the others. "Sam, you know your dick of a brother made that shit up to scare us."
Jimmy, riding shotgun, glanced around at the shadows that gathered at the side of the road, eyes alert for anything lurking. If he saw something, he wasn't quite sure what he'd do. Scream like a girl, probably.
The shortest of the boys, and very slight, he was often taken for a younger brother of one, rather than a peer. A perpetual smart-mouth, earlier in the evening he had mocked their intent to hang out at a Halloween party given by an underclassman. "Aren't we too old for this shit?"
That's when Mike had launched his plan, looking around the table into the eyes of his three 12th grade friends. They were all 18 already, two of them victims of the start date for first grade and the other two held back by over-protective mothers, all of them older than their school peers.
Given the drinking age in their state was 18, they usually skipped High School events in favor of a beer or two at the local bowling alley. Class parties, though they often had a kegger or two, were considered boring to the older teens.
A handful of mini-Snickers filched from the bowl upstairs sat on the table in front of them; the annual Trick or Treat candy coma had started early this year.
"C'mon guys." Mike grabbed the last Snickers bar before Colin could eat that one too. "It'll be fun. Let's go up the Hill to the Witch's House and scare HER."
After some more discussion of logistics and fear mitigation, Mike's plan had prevailed. No one wanted to be a chicken, so they all agreed to end up at the party in town later and go up the Hill together now, hoping to see the fabled Witch.
No one knew what the Witch looked like or even how old she was. Her groceries were delivered by the local Shop Mart, set on her porch, with money left in an envelope for the delivery person. She had never set foot in town and for years the stories rampaged through the small population of Lawndale. The postal delivery guy said no mail ever arrived at the house, no bills, no checks, no catalogues either. In fact, everyone guessed that the owner was a woman, but they didn't even know that for sure.
Every suspicion was based on the claim that years (more years than anyone wanted to admit) ago, a do-gooder named Charlie from the local Lutheran Church had headed up there, anticipating a convert and had been found on the side of the road, hours later, muttering to himself about how the 'Witch touched me'.
Now, Charlie was a known eccentric, rabid about converting non-Christians and already touched in the head from a bad horse accident in his teen years, so his descent into full incoherency was not completely unexpected. In response to his adventure, everyone decided to avoid the Hill in the future. Whether her soul was damned or not was none of their business.
The adults were certain she was just a hermit, keeping to herself, an ancient crone who no longer wanted to be part of a community. The younger people, hearing this from their parents, imagined a Wicked Witch, alone in her huge house, casting spells by moonlight. No one knew when she'd moved into the house, it seemed that she'd always been there.
During the time all four had been contemplating their potential deaths by the Witch, they had reached the incline of the Hill, and Mike's beater car groaned with the effort of climbing the steep grade.
