In the clearing was a little house.
It was a playhouse, built perhaps forty years earlier for a child, or for children. The windows were Tudor style, leaded and crisscrossed into diamonds. The roof was mock Tudor. A stone path led straight from where we were to the front door.
Together, we walked up the path to the door.
Hanging from the door was a metal knocker. It was painted crimson and had been cast in the shape of some kind of imp, some kind of grinning pixie or demon, cross-legged, hanging by its hands from a hinge. Let me see…how can I describe this best? It wasn’t a good thing. The expression on its face, for starters. I found myself wondering what kind of a person would hang something like that on a playhouse door.
It frightened me, there in that clearing, with the dusk gathering under the trees. I walked away from the house, back to a safe distance, and the others followed me.
“I think I have to go home now,” I said.
It was the wrong thing to say. The three of them turned and laughed and jeered at me, called me pathetic, called me a baby. They weren’t scared of the house, they said.
“I dare you!” said Jamie. “I dare you to knock on the door.”
I shook my head.
“If you don’t knock on the door,” said Douglas, “you’re too much of a baby ever to play with us again.”
I had no desire ever to play with them again. They seemed like occupants of a land I was not yet ready to enter. But still, I did not want them to think me a baby.
“Go on. We’re not scared,” said Simon.
I try to remember the tone of voice he used. Was he frightened, too, and covering it with bravado? Or was he amused? It’s been so long. I wish I knew.
I walked slowly back up the flagstone path to the house. I reached up, grabbed the grinning imp in my right hand, and banged it hard against the door.
Or rather, I tried to bang it hard, just to show the other three that I was not afraid at all. That I was not afraid of anything. But something happened, something I had not expected, and the knocker hit the door with a muffled sort of a thump.
“Now you have to go inside!” shouted Jamie. He was excited. I could hear it. I found myself wondering if they had known about this place already, before we came. If I was the first person they had brought there.
But I did not move.
“You go in,” I said. “I knocked on the door. I did it like you said. Now you have to go inside. I dare you. I dare all of you.”
I wasn’t going in. I was perfectly certain of that. Not then. Not ever. I’d felt something move, I’d felt the knocker twist under my hand as I’d banged that grinning imp down on the door. I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.
They said nothing. They did not move.
Then, slowly, the door fell open. Perhaps they thought that I, standing by the door, had pushed it open. Perhaps they thought that I’d jarred it when I knocked. But I hadn’t. I was certain of it. It opened because it was ready.
I should have run then. My heart was pounding in my chest. But the devil was in me, and instead of running I looked at the three big boys at the bottom of the path, and I simply said, “Or are you scared?”
They walked up the path toward the little house.
“It’s getting dark,” said Douglas.
Then the three boys walked past me, and one by one, reluctantly perhaps, they entered the playhouse. A white face turned to look at me as they went into that room, to ask why I wasn’t following them in, I’ll bet. But as Simon, who was the last of them, walked in, the door banged shut behind them, and I swear to God I did not touch it.
The imp grinned down at me from the wooden door, a vivid splash of crimson in the gray gloaming.
I walked around to the side of the playhouse and peered through all the windows, one by one, into the dark and empty room. Nothing moved in there. I wondered if the other three were inside hiding from me, pressed against the wall, trying their damnedest to stifle their giggles. I wondered if it was a big-boy game.
I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell.
I stood there in the courtyard of the playhouse, while the sky got darker, just waiting. The moon rose after a while, a big autumn moon the color of honey.
And then, after a while, the door opened, and nothing came out.
Now I was alone in the glade, as alone as if there had never been anyone else there at all. An owl hooted, and I realized that I was free to go. I turned and walked away, following a different path out of the glade, always keeping my distance from the main house. I climbed a fence in the moonlight, ripping the seat of my school shorts, and I walked—not ran, I didn’t need to run—across a field of barley stubble, and over a stile, and into a flinty lane that would take me, if I followed it far enough, all the way to my house.