The House on Juniper Lane

The House on Juniper Lane stood apart from the others, alone on the edge of town.  Trapped somewhere between civilisation and the wilderness, the old and unloved house had been home to a Miss Montfort at one point, but no-one had seen or heard from the old lady in years.  It loomed over the single-track lane that ran between high hedges and over-grown trees on its way up to the moors.  People went to the moors to disappear, and it was said that some of them really did - following the false-lights and corpse-candles until they were welcomed into the cold, earthen embrace of the moors.

Knocking on the door or one of the windows was a right of passage for every child growing up in town, and Brodie was no different.  Whole generations had taken their turn, encouraged by their friends and bullies alike, marching up to the front of the house and knocking a trembling hand against the flaked green paintwork of the front door, before running back to the relative safety of the lane.  Everyone would hide behind the hedge, waiting for signs of life from within the house.  Signs that never came, at least not until it was Brodie's turn...

Brodie had moved into town with his parents six weeks earlier.  He made friends easily and, apart from a few scuffles in the schoolyard at the very beginning, he had settled in quite easily.  As September turned into October and the school term stretched on, whispers in the corridors said that if Brodie really wanted to fit in, it was time for him to knock on the door of the House on Juniper Lane.  He didn't see what the fuss what about - it was, after all, just a house.  It was just a building after all, and it hadn't been a home for a long while.

Without even having the conversation himself, Brodie somehow agreed to the dare to take place on the first Saturday of the school holidays.  The day in question started without incident - Brodie had breakfast and went through his morning routine while his parents were still in bed.  He was out the door before they came downstairs, and minutes later was on his way to Juniper Lane.  There was quite a crowd gathered out the front of the House when he arrived.  Among the friendly and not-so-friendly faces he saw Lacey - the girl he secretly liked, and was hoping to impress with his bravery.

'Here he is!' Shouted Mike, the bully who lived on Elm Road, 'Get a move on, we haven't got all day.'

'You don't have to do this, you know,' said a nervous Lacey.

Brodie gave her a wink, said 'It's okay,' and puffed up his chest as he stepped up to the front gate.

He held on to the iron for a moment, tightening his grip on the top of the gate, feeling the rusted metal dig into the soft skin of his hands. He tried telling himself not to be scared, but he had heard the strange stories about the house in the past week. How someone's cousin had broken in to the House one Halloween, and was so petrified by what he saw inside that his hair turned white and he stopped speaking altogether...  How a lovers' tryst had been stopped short by the sound of screams coming from inside the House...  How even the police were afraid to check it out...

Brodie looked up at the house, taking in the crumbling gables, the loose shingles on the roof, a boarded-up window on the upper floor, grey net curtains hanging limp in the ground floor windows.

'Go on,' Mike whispered from behind his left shoulder, 'just give it a knock.'

Brodie nodded, and pushed open the gate. The metal protested against his efforts, but he prevailed, and managed to push it open enough to slip through. He walked up the broken concrete path, making a note of the slabs sticking up at odd angles that might trip him up if he needed to run. He eyed each and every window suspiciously, searching for signs of life. Behind him the gathered children fell silent. The leaves of the trees overhanging the garden rustled in a cold wind that crept down the collar of Brodie's shirt and chilled him to his core.

He stood on the doorstep, his heart racing, and raised his hand. There was no going back now, no matter how much he wanted to run away. If he did that he would never be able to show his face in school again, and he was certain Lacey would never do so much as breathe in his direction. He balled his fingers into a fist - now or never - and rapped it against the wooden door. Small flecks of green paint came away and fell to the floor in front of his feet. Nothing else happened, so he turned to his audience with a grin on his face and shrugged.

This didn't have the desired effect. In fact, the faces that he saw were full of dread and fear. Mike, as pale as virgin snow, raised his arm, and let his mouth hang open.

'Look!' Lacey shouted, with an urgency in her voice that scared Brodie.

He followed the line of sight from Mike's outstretched arm to the bay window to the left of the front door. There, in a gap in the net curtains was a candle, burning brighter than the daylight, it seemed. Brodie was transfixed - he hadn't noticed it on his approach to the House. Someone, or something, was clearly present on the other side of the glass. He watched the flame dance in the air on the inside, and wondered how quickly the curtains would take to go up in flames, should the candle catch one of them in the breeze.

Brodie was so engrossed in the strange candle that he didn't hear the creak of the door opening on its hinges. He did, however, hear Lacey screaming, and that snapped him out of his reverie. Before he could turn to look away from the house, he felt a stabbing pain in his shoulder. He looked down and saw a gnarled, grey hand clasping his coat, skin stretched over the knuckles so tightly that the bones were in danger of bursting out of it. The overgrown fingernails felt like they were piercing the material of his coat and shirt and digging into his very flesh. Frozen to the spot with panic, Brodie forced himself to look up from his shoulder and into the dark doorway of the House.

What happened next could never be agreed upon. Some of the children said that Brodie fainted on the doorstep, others said that a hand had grabbed him and dragged him through the doorway. One thing they did agree on was that they wanted to put as much distance between them and the House as possible. In the days that followed, and in all the years to come, each one of them regretted running from Juniper Lane, and felt ashamed at leaving Brodie there alone to confront whatever evil lurked inside the House.

An assortment of emergency services personnel and parents gathered outside the House, but none of the children would return there. The adults, at some time or another, had all knocked on the door themselves, and understood the fear that the children felt, but a child was missing, and something needed to be done. The police had to break the door down, as it had rusted and rotted in place, and couldn't possibly have opened of its own accord that morning. A full search of the property was conducted and a full set of bones, assumed to be those of Miss Montfort, was discovered upstairs in the master bedroom, hidden from the outside world by the boarded up window.

Brodie was never found. It seemed that the House had claimed another victim in addition to the old lady. Brodie's parents stood outside the gate and wept on the day that the bulldozers tore the House down. They had hoped to find something - anything - to shed light on their son's disappearance, but the House kept its secrets even at the hour of its destruction. They moved away within a year, unable to get over the tragedy, and always reminded of it whenever they saw any children about town. For the children's part, it was a long time before they felt safe enough to play in the streets. As the years rolled into decades, Brodie's name all but disappeared from the town's lips, and as the grasses grew over the plot where the House had once stood, a younger generation found it hard to believe that any of the stories about the place were true.

One further note to bring this curious case to a close - when the police searched the House looking for Brodie on that awful day, an officer found the candle in the bay window burned right down to the end of its wick. The wax was still warm, proving the children's claims that it been burning in the window, and it had dripped down the inside of the windowsill to the floor below. How it was lit, and by whom, were just two of the questions that remained unanswered about the House on Juniper Lane.