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The Woods in the House

by Amanda Cecelia Lang

Those magic-duped beat cops warned me not to return to Old Lady Sybil’s brownstone. They ordered me to leave the odd-bird alone, let her totter about her dying years in peace. Said the myths us punks on 13th Avenue spread about her were just that. She didn’t skin alley cats for bubbling potions or hex the afternoons with yellow smog. She didn’t whisper haunted prayers and open portals into other realms. Her house was just a house.

And she didn’t kidnap Tina.

The whole neighborhood agreed—from the bodega owner to the apartment rats to the sidewalk gossips. Something wretched had happened to my little sister. Just another big city statistic. Kids like her go missing every day, run off, tumble through cracks, take ill with sinister luck—same as alley cats and treasured parents. One thing the cops promised me: telling wild lies about lonely spinsters was never gonna bring Tina back.

But I know what I saw on Halloween.

“Life’s no fairytale, dumbass,” I told Tina that night, walking three steps ahead. Eleven was too old for trick-or-treating, too old to get dreamy-eyed about candy apples from wacked-out crones. Just like fifteen was too old to waste my Halloween brat-sitting.

“But Old Lady Sybil makes them with honey-crisp apples and starlight spells,” Tina whined, attempting to tug me across 13th Avenue. “Only nobody ever takes them. They run past and throw eggs at her door. I feel sorry for her.”

I yanked my hand free. “I don’t. Everyone’s right. She’s creepy and kinda gross. I wouldn’t eat anything she gave me. You’re on your own.”

I shoved her, fairy wings and all, toward the brownstone, then loitered across the street as she clambered the stairs to the grand stoop. I was missing out on stolen Schlitz and comic books with buddies for this. Cracking my knuckles, I watched a haggard silhouette fill the golden jack-o-lantern doorway. Tina selected an apple then planted herself on the stoop, chatting to the witch. After an eye-rolling eternity, Tina pointed my way, and Old Lady Sybil caught me in her cobweb gaze. Grinning, she whispered in Tina’s ear.

Most nights, wondering what the witch said keeps me wide awake and cold.

Because then she stepped aside and Tina skipped across her threshold. And in that endless blink before the door slammed shut, I witnessed something impossible.

The parlor of the brownstone stood full of trees.

An entire starlight forest of them.

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Sky-high trees with knotted mossy boughs, zig-zagging fireflies, a moonglow lake.

Hell was that? Eyes sharp, pulse sharper, I waited for the brownstone’s door to reopen. Infinity crept by. Tina never came out.

On eerily wobbly legs, I crossed 13th and bang-bang-banged the door. Nobody answered. Stained-glass windows warped my view inside, but I wasn’t desperate enough to break in. Not yet. Rabid annoyance outweighed my confusion.

I should’ve been more freaked out, should’ve done something, anything.

Instead, I ditched-off home. I abandoned her. If Tina wanted to break Dad’s curfew to slumber-party with hags, let her. Dad stopped being Dad two Septembers ago when endometrial cancer stole Mom. The man barely acknowledged us anymore, except to bust us breaking the rules—and his belt was something I’d already learned to avoid.

But morning came and Tina still hadn’t returned home. I fessed up—leaving out the bit about the forest. By then, I’d convinced myself it was Halloween decorations. Novelty lights, cardboard trees, dime-store stuff.

Dad grabbed my scruff and marched me down 13th. In the swirling morning chill, he pounded on the brownstone’s door.

This time Old Lady Sybil answered.

She stood there wearing an antique housecoat over droopy narrow bones. I’d never been so close to her. She had a smell about her—like spoiled apples and the leopard exhibit at the zoo. She smirked my way, a knowing smile. Pruned-up lips stretching like creepshow elastic. I thought her face might unhinge.

Behind her, the parlor was just a parlor. Gaudy paisley wallpaper, overstuffed chairs, mahogany tables cluttered with Tiffany lamps. Not a forest in sight. She invited Dad inside to peek around, let him circle every fancy-schmancy room. Later, when we returned with the beat cops, she side-eyed me the whole tour, biting down on her little secret. Her little trick. She’d never spoken to Tina, she promised.

And everyone bought it.

Everyone thought I was lying. The cops hauled me in, made me tell my story a hundred different ways. Finally, I blabbed about the starlit forest, how Old Lady Sybil possessed sneaky eldritch powers. The cops probably would’ve chuckled, if they weren’t so suspicious of me. Later, when they released me home, Dad took his belt to me, tried to get a different story out of me. Those welts deepened, but I never changed my tune.

I know what I saw.

There was a search, complete with MISSING posters and a cadaver dog. The whole neighborhood showed up, folks who used to know Mom. Detectives searched the witch’s brownstone again, then every cranny of our crappy apartment building. They looked inside car trunks, fished dumpsters—and came up just as empty as I knew they would. Barely took a week before they gave up.

After that, the sidewalk gossips started saying I’d done something to Tina, knocked her around, maybe tossed her down a sewer drain. Everyone whispered about what a comic book villain I’d mutated into after Mom died; brought up the all times I forgot Tina at the bodega and drop-kicked her schoolbooks and splashed gutter water on her corduroys, all the nasty name-calling. And the worst thing? They weren’t wrong about those last bits.

But I know what I saw.

Thanks to Tina’s encyclopedia, I even identified those trees. Yews laced in elf moss. But if I hoped to clear my name, I needed to explore the brownstone when the witch wasn’t expecting visitors.

My first flailing attempt was November 13th. Thirteen days missing.

Mom used to love this time of year. Golden-fire leaves, cinnamon spices. Used to be that Halloween was a carnival to usher in Thanksgiving feasts and the giddy anticipation of Christmas. Not anymore.

I swiped a hammer and lurked in the alley across from the brownstone. Waited until the witch lurched outside with her shopping cart and wheeled off to market.

Ducking low, I raced to her stoop. 13th Avenue stood quiet, empty of the usual loiterers, window curtains drawn against the smoggy gloom. I waited for a lone Chevy to turn the corner then hammer-smashed the stained-glass window. Reaching in with trembling fingers, I unlocked the deadbolt.

The door swung inward.

But beyond the threshold, I didn’t discover a forest.

It was something else.

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My eyes played shivery tricks. The witch’s parlor fuzzed over with whorling yellow fog like toxic fumes in comic books.

The mist eddied, becoming vague silhouettes like pictures in clouds. A bench, a trashcan. Rodents scurried, and I heard the clanging echoes of pipework in tunnels.

Struck dumb, I froze. Where was the forest that swallowed my sister? Instead, a new impossibility took shape in the mist.

A subway.

The twisting, rotting intestines of the city. Graffiti, the shrill screeches of trains arriving off-schedule. Dad was a hard-ass in every way, but he avoided subways. They rode the subway the day mom got her diagnosis. Stage 3. Doctors said there was still hope, and Mom wore a sunny face right until the end. But on diagnosis day, riding the train home, a man reached for Mom’s purse. A scuffle broke out, Dad fought for her—but even so, Mom came home with cancer and a black eye. That bruise mutated everything, tipped the scales. Hope disappeared down a grimy subway tunnel. After that, Dad said he’d rather walk blisters into his feet than climb into a tube with thugs. How long since we’d braved it? Two years without Mom, two years going nowhere. Guess subways filled my nightmares, too.

So, standing on the witch’s stoop, was I awestruck to discover the B-line.

Maybe not as awestruck as I should’ve been.

I made a quick survey of the empty street, then pushed through a brass turnstile. Old Lady Sybil’s parlor carpet plushed beneath my sneakers—even as my vision promised a cement subway platform with mahogany benches and swinging Tiffany lamps. Trashcans overflowed with rats and comic books. Crooked MISSING posters hung on graffitied walls—Tina, Mom, Dad, me—all of us gone, each in our own way.

A pit lined with electric tracks ran the length of the platform, disappearing down sewer-dark tunnels. A train would arrive soon. Metallic screeching rushed closer, and hidden inside the shrill careen of echoes I heard Tina calling me.

“Buster!”

Except… Buster’s not my name, not God-given anyway. It’s what Tina called me when we were both little, before diagnosis day, before I turned mean. Don’t know the origin story—nothing about the nickname resembles my real name—but I bet Mom could’ve told me. I didn’t dare ask Dad. He hated talking about the happy past. Anyway, none of that mattered.

“Buster! Come out wherever you are! Buuusteeer!”

Platform echoing, rattling, yellow mist eddying from the tunnel, a bullet train rocketed out and screeched to a stop before me. Sleek futuristic windows infested with elf moss. The sliding doors hissed open.

“Buster!”

“Tina! You little shit, I’m here!” I rushed inside, sneakers faster than my eyes.

Every seat empty, every dangling straphanger unoccupied. Guts sinking, I pivoted as the exit doors slid closed, trapping me like a fly inside the clap of witchy hands.

The train jerked forward, instant top speed—I barely had time to snag a handhold. Swaying wildly, I managed to plant my sneakers and brace for whatever came next.

I still wasn’t prepared.

Scenery blurred past the windows. Yews, I thought at first, those filigree giants of the witch’s misty woods. Then my dizzy vision found its bearings in the smog.

Not trees out there—buildings. 13th Avenue. Apartments, brownstones, the bodega… gliding past like a movie reel. Moving like stop-motion puppets, two siblings rambled down the sidewalk. One tall, and one small, ever-scrambling to keep up.

Me and Tina.

Another witchy illusion—except… I remembered that Halloween. Last year, our second without Mom, our first lousy attempt at trick-or-treating alone. After we returned home, Tina sat in bed cradling her candy bucket, still wearing her princess dress and Mom’s sunny amber eyes. She looked happy for once—and where’d she grow the nerve anyway? After she fell asleep, I’d scraped under the fridge, chasing roaches into her trick-or-treat bucket.

Gripping the subway’s handholds, I grimaced and turned away, but the flashback playing through the opposite windows proved equally heinous.

Tina pounding on a door in trickster darkness, wet terror streaking her cheeks. Last Thanksgiving, Dad passed out drunk, and Tina asked me for a bedtime tale. I’d shoved her into our closet and told her green hands would spider-crawl from the shadows and steal every thankful prayer…

The scenes streaked past the windows, blurring, growing darker now:

Dad holding Tina’s Christmas gift in one fist and her struggling report card in the other. “What would your mother think?” And there I lurked by the exit, decent at math, better at keeping my head down—I could’ve helped Tina out. Instead, while Dad slammed her gift into the trash, I popped my hoodie and ghosted out the door.

Too many scenes like that—countless cruelties possessing the windows. When I shut my eyes, the memories shone inside my brainpan, twice as vivid.

“I get it!” I shrilled. And maybe I did—or maybe I felt indignant about having my nose rubbed in salty wounds. The journey blurred. At some point, the ugly memories stopped rolling and the subway slammed to a halt, warp-speed to zero in the time it took to send me skidding down the aisle.

Doors whooshed open. I smelled the witch’s forest before I saw it. Piney and muddy with a sparkle of pumpkin spice. I scrambled to the train’s threshold and cocked my ear.

Silence greeted me.

If I wandered into those woods, would the witch claim me like she claimed Tina? I pressed one sneaker into the loam.

A bony hand clamped my shoulder.

“We call that breaking-and-entering.”

Daylight scrubbed me, slammed me back onto the brownstone’s stoop with the beat cops who’d responded to Tina’s kidnapping. They wore jackal smiles, obviously jazzed to catch me red-handed.

“My sister’s in there—” But as I turned toward the brownstone’s gaping front door, the subway train and the forest beyond vanished. Poof.

The parlor was just a parlor.

I blinked, stunned stupid by the snap-sudden change. Didn’t matter.

“My sister’s in there!” I dodged into the witch’s lair. “I heard her voice! Tina, I’m here, it’s Buster, dammit! I’ve brought help! Call out again!”

“Buster…” Faint, ephemeral, far-far away.

The cops wrestled me onto the parlor rug and cuffed me fast. Two of them, but when they dragged me down to the street, neither bothered to stay behind and sniff around for Tina. Enchanted incompetence? Had to be.

The witch arrived home as they shoved me into their cruiser. She peered into my window with that rubbery grin, eyes shining a sulfuric misty yellow, grocery cart empty—like she never even bothered with the market. Another trick? Had she known I’d been hiding in the alley, waiting for my chance?

The cops filled her in. She played her role like a pro— the rickety, kindly crone—properly aghast when the cops showed her the shattered stained-glass and gaping front door. Even so, she waved off pressing charges. The cops kept me caged in their backseat, determined to drag my juvie-ass back to the station.

As we rolled away, I twisted in my seat and watched Old Lady Sybil step into the street. Cackling with her smile, she raised a skeletal hand and spoke with a mouthful of yellow mist.

“See you soon, Buster boy.”

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No shocker, Dad was boiling mad when he picked me up at the cop-shop that night. Had to forgo double-time at the factory. Teeth gnashing, he looked ready to disown me—and maybe the feeling was mutual.

Things got pretty nasty back at our apartment. Only a few grimy steps separated the front door from the bedroom I shared with Tina—but before I found sanctuary, Dad nabbed my arm and unbuckled his belt. The welts from our last heart-to-heart still hadn’t healed, and I don’t know… something snapped. Riding the witch’s subway had flayed me open, exposed my ugliness—even as it revealed a magic no other schmuck knew about the world. I was a crappy big brother. Despite that, I felt superior to the punk I’d been hours earlier. Sounds stupid, but I imagined myself as a villain turned hero, gritty for redemption.

So, when Dad whipped his belt loose, courage gusted through me like misty yellow wind. This man wasn’t scary. This man feared prickly emotions and subways—and I’d already faced down the freakiest transit system of all. My hand shot up and I caught Dad’s wrist like the hilt of a battle-axe, blocking his belt mid-swing.

For the briefest instant, his red-fury seized, stunned to awe—then he raged against me double-time, straining to twist free. We tussled and threw wild swings for an eternity of heartbeats. I’d never fought Dad before. Oddly dispiriting, discovering he wasn’t so strong as I’d always imagined. Our fury burned out quickly and we collapsed against each other, a squabbling embrace like how boxers hang onto opponents in the ring. Too beaten and exhausted to stand alone.

Dad’s temper simmered into a low, tortured moan. “Where’s your baby sister? Where, dammit? What’d you do?”

“Not me, the witch.” I wept into his shoulder. “She’s got Tina in there, in her woods, I swear it. I’d never hurt my sister… not like that.” But my words choked, my veins felt cold and false and villainous.

Dad clamped arms around me a heartbeat longer, fists digging in. “We keep losing our girls…”

Then he shoved free with a grunt, retreating to the bedroom he once shared with Mom. His door slamming unfroze me, and I hustled to my own tiny bedroom and sealed myself inside. Wanted to break something, to scream. Didn’t know who I was mad at—or maybe I did. I flopped onto my bed, realizing I still had Dad’s belt hard-clenched in my hand. I batted it away, disturbed by the bloodstains on the leather and the sickness crawling my gut.

If Mom could see us now, we’d shatter her heart.

Bedsprings creaking, I curled onto my side and faced Tina’s half of the room. Already her little slice of the world seemed like a relic in a museum. The unmade bed, the desk piled with scented markers and construction paper dragons and broomstick witches, the overstuffed bookcase. I hadn’t touched so much as a dirty sweat-sock over there. When I brought Tina home, I wanted everything to be like she remembered.

Except, you know, for all the nasty ways I used to terrorize her.

Inside my head, flickering train windows played on, a barrage of regrets hexing my conscience. What kind of brother was I?

Cringing, I dragged my worthless hide over and collapsed on Tina’s mattress. Was this how she saw the world? Winged dragons hung like sky-clouds, and that haphazard bookcase looked ready to unleash an avalanche of fairytales upon me. One storybook in particular—thick purple spine, gold lettering—jutted farther than the rest.

Blinking, I sat up, recognizing the book Mom read at bedtimes. I begged-out of the childish ritual several years after Tina was born. But Mom used to read to Tina every night—first, sitting at Tina’s bedside, then with Tina sitting beside hers in the hospital. Those magical old make-believes delighted them both. Sure, I pretended not to listen, and maybe I stopped hearing the words. But the honeyed drone of Mom’s voice always lulled me into Sherwood Forest dreamscapes right alongside Tina.

On my feet again, bruises from my scuffle with Dad burrowing in, I wiggled the storybook free like a dragon’s tooth—careful not to dislodge the whole overstuffed library.

But with the storybook silently in my hands, my guts plummeted, feeling sunk—probably like how Dad felt when he realized his son was grown enough to fight back.

Obvious facts ignored for too long.

The cover of Mom and Tina’s storybook had a colorful illustration hard-pressed into the leather. I’d seen it before, sure I had, a thousand-and-one times. A starlight forest of tangled yews, elf moss, and twinkling will-o’-the-wisps.

Exactly like the forest inside Old Lady Sybil’s brownstone.

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…to be continued