People who knew the house spoke of it with equal amounts trepidation and wonder, and often, to pass the time, would imagine their own stories about it.
When I was seven years old, my mother told me of a beautiful princess who would spend her days high up in the turrets of the old house, hiding herself away from an arranged marriage with a miserable and boring prince. By the time I turned ten, kids in the neighborhood had decided it was the spellbound home of a wily old witch. She would fill the sprawling rooms with cats and frogs, cauldrons and brooms, and, deep in the night, she would fly out into the sky and scour the neighborhood for stray children who should have been fast asleep in bed. When I met Millie, she told me about the vampires, who stood just inside the cracked windowpanes, peering out with glistening crimson eyes.
Then, at fourteen, when I was completing a school history project about Cedar Hill, I stumbled across the chilling reality of the mansion. There were no witches, no princesses, and no vampires — just a story about a young woman named Violet Priestly, a frontline nurse during World War II who had come out the other side as a drastically different version of herself. Traumatic memories haunted her like ghosts until her hallucinations became too strong to ignore. Not long after poisoning her husband and their young son, she hanged herself in the foyer of the old mansion.
Of course, no one wanted to buy it after that.
Nothing could sweep away the darkness that huddled around the Priestly corner. Even during the hottest summer days, when the streets shone with mirages, there was an unmistakable iciness shrouding the mansion. And so it endured for decades, as a beacon from another time and place, resolutely empty, and utterly unconquerable.
That was, until tonight.
As I drew closer to the mansion, rubbing the warmth back into my suddenly chilly arms and second-guessing my decision to come this way in the first place, I realized with a start that the house had changed entirely since the last time I had seen it. Someone had finally done it — really done it. The abandoned Priestly mansion had been dragged into the twenty-first century, and now, it was alive again.
I stopped walking.
The rusted wrought iron gates were wrenched open and pushed against hedges that no longer languished across the garden wall. The weeping willows had been pruned to an almost unnatural neatness, revealing windows on the second story that I didn’t know existed. The ivy had been cut away to reveal sturdy wooden boards and a newly painted red door lit up by a teardrop lantern on either side.
And in the light of the lanterns were two black SUVs parked side by side on freshly strewn gravel.
My phone buzzed against my hip — a text from Millie letting me know she had made it home safe, and an inadvertent reminder that I hadn’t. Reluctantly, I moved to continue on my way, but something inside was stopping me. The Priestly mansion, the frozen heart of Cedar Hill, was beating again, and lateness be damned, I had to know more about it.
And that’s when I sensed something. I shifted my gaze up past the trees and caught sight of a flickering figure in an upstairs window. It was a boy. I couldn’t be sure of his age, but even from a distance his bright eyes were unmistakable. They were too big for his delicate face and as they watched me from what seemed like another world, they rounded into discs that grew unnaturally. He leaned forward and pressed his palms against the glass, like he was about to push the pane from the window frame. Was he waving? Or telling me to go?
I raised my hand to him but it stalled, clammy and unsteady, in midair. And then, as quickly as I had noticed him, the strange boy was gone, vanished into the darkness behind him until the house, with its brand-new face, was still again.
Frowning, I let my eyes slide down from the empty windowpane across the driveway as the darkness ahead of me came alive. The faint sound of rustling wafted through the air, and I squinted until I could make out another figure behind one of the SUVs. He was hunched over, searching for something inside.
I tried to fight the desire to investigate, but my palms grew shaky at my sides as curiosity overwhelmed me, pushing me toward the house. I shuffled forward from the sidewalk, creeping just inside the open gates, and the rustling stopped. A car door shut and the sound of loose gravel shifted in the darkness. The figure straightened, his head appearing from behind the vehicle, moving in tandem with the noisy gravel until he stood between the house and the gates, watching me watch him.
Even beneath the lanterns, he was just an outline: a tall shadow with broad shoulders and sure movements. He paused and lowered his arm, easing a duffel bag toward the ground with deliberate slowness until it was settled at his feet. He stepped to the side and pushed it with the force of his boot until it disappeared behind the closest SUV and away from my prying eyes. But I had already seen it, whatever it was, and we both knew it.
He tilted his head to one side and stepped closer, one purposeful stride and then another, as he closed the space between us. With each step, my heart thumped harder in my chest. My curiosity evaporated, leaving reality in its place: I had been caught trespassing, and now this shadowed figure was stalking toward me.