The house at the end of Roderick Street had an odd reputation in the small neighborhood where 12-year-old Bagston Lewy and his mother lived. It was a beautiful, well-tended house; not abandoned, condemned, or overrun with the local undesirables. The pastel blue paint looked fresh. The wooden shutters shone with a rich wood stain. From the street, the three-story Victorian house looked like it just stepped out of a time machine from 1770, and the inside was just as beautiful and brand new, although updated into the 20th century. However, looks are deceptive, unless you can see with your gut rather than your eyes.

Bagston visited that house almost every day, and he didn’t understand the things the townsfolk said about the house. Usher was a tiny New England town, and somehow everyone believed that the picture perfect house, which belonged to the Cruesdnam family, was sent from somewhere that wasn’t heaven. Some people said that the little girl was a vampire or some other unholy creature. Others swore that 10-year-old Merry was an abuse or rape victim, and that was why she never came outside. Worst of all, Bagston heard his own school teacher telling another student that she was sure that Merry’s parents murdered her and hid her body in a secret room.

When he first met Merry, almost two years before, he tried to dispel the wild rumors by explaining that the Cruesdnam’s were his neighbors and that he played with Merry after school. She was a little weird; even Bagston admitted it. She wore funny, outdated outfits for a girl her age, she lived and slept in the dusty attic instead of her own huge bedroom, and she had several medical problems, but she was too alive to be an undead bloodsucker. However, since the gossip mongers hadn’t seen what Bags saw, the good people of Usher just shook their heads with indulging smiles and told Bagston what a kind and ignorant heart he had. Bagston thought that tales of vampires and homicide took more ignorance

(dementia)

than claims of meeting the harmless family that lived in the strange house. He was a quiet and respectful child, though, and he never argued with adults, especially the ones who lost the cheese straight off their crackers. He just continued to visit Merry every day and let everyone else try to outdo the latest nut sauce tale with new buckets of crazy.

Weird or not, she was smart and funny and she never made fun of him because he liked to draw and dance instead of play sports like the other young boys. She liked those things too, and Bagston discovered how much fun it could be when he had a friend who shared his hobbies.

Merry also loved to talk. She could talk for hours, about everything from her porcelain doll collection to all the interesting, grown-up things that her private tutor let her read in her textbooks. On her good days, whenever her anxiety and psychosis were buried beneath healthy doses of a medication that, according to Merry, was nothing but a diluted version of something that sounded like an ingredient used in household cleaners, it was easy to forget that there was anything abnormal about her. There was music in her laughter and a sparkle in her almost brown eyes. She would twirl around her little attic space pretending to style her long, gold hair, just like a normal, carefree 10-year-old girl. But her bad days often got scary, Bags soon learned. In fact, sometimes he got so scared that he ran home and refused to visit Merry for days at a time.

The first time things got that bad was the day Merry wanted to talk about bugs. More specifically, June bugs. Bags and Merry had been good friends for almost four months on this day, but after just a few weeks, he could see right away that Merry’s mood was different. When he opened the attic door, Merry was sitting on the oversized daybed that stretched out beneath an ornate, almost odd looking window in the middle of the comfortable room. The entire third floor of the house consisted of Merry’s sanctuary, and there was no lack of space, even when they brought up toys and built extravagant blanket forts.

That day, Merry had several jars in front of her, and Bags saw from the door that they all had things crawling in them. That was nothing new; Merry had shown him her butterfly collection, or what was left of it after three years in an old dresser. While many of her carefully pinned insects left little more than smudges, over half of them were well preserved, and Bags could see the time Merry must have put into completing such a vast collection. As Merry described the way she, or more often her parents, trapped the delicate creatures in jars to wait while she prepared a space for them among their pinned cousins, Bags thought he saw a spark of something almost barbaric in her eyes. It was gone before he could glance again, so he told himself he was just being a weirdo because he had never collected, or killed, tiny insects, and forgot the ominous rock in his belly.

However, for a reason he could never explain, the rock returned when he saw Merry with the jars that day. It was the beginning of summer, and kids flooded the streets, squealing and laughing until well after dark every day. But there was no trace of a smile on Merry’s face, and she would not look at Bags. She seemed hypnotized by the things spread all around her like grotesque minions, crawling in their slick glass cages. Bags used to trap bugs and worms in containers and study them until he got bored, or until his mother tried to yell intelligible things at him about filthy bugs and the plague, and then he would set them free exactly where he found them. But when Merry at last looked up, she was staring through him, as if he wasn’t there at all, and her face was twisted into a distorted snarl. Bags imagined the same look on a grasshopper’s face as it daydreamed about pulling apart and dining on helpless, perhaps wounded or dying, little ants.

Bags stifled a full body shudder as the grave’s chill rushed through his body. With tremendous effort, he smiled at Merry. He hoped that he would be able to distract her from whatever demented place had her mind trapped and get her playing and chatting in no time. The dread in his stomach swelled, and with each passing second, he held less hope.