The house at the end of the cul-de-sac wasn’t a place of magic; it was a rotting blemish of crumbling limestone and damp half-timbering. It slumped tiredly against the city wall, as if trying to melt into the shadows of the battlements. There lived the widow—a woman whose sole remaining sin was that she had outlived her usefulness to anyone.
For the two children, the house was a laboratory.
At first, they just perched on the stone wall across the street, day after day, watching the woman lug her meager rations home. Soon, they grew bolder, creeping up to the dust-caked windows to peek at the shadows shifting inside. They even started leaving snapped twigs and scattered pebbles on the porch steps, just to see if she would notice the intrusion.
Once, the boy slithered through the open basement window, lured by the heavy scent of cured fatback in the cellar. But the dry-rotted door wedged shut from the outside. No escape. Forty-eight hours in pitch-black. When the woman finally found him, delirious with thirst among the preserves, she clutched at him, desperate to calm him down.
The boy ran for his life.
“She locked me in,” he said later, his voice defiant.
The girl nodded. She was smarter, viciously calculating. She planted the seeds of rumors: foul stenches bleeding from the chimney flue, bizarre rituals, butchered strays.
The town listened. Reacted.
The old woman found the world spinning out of control. After eighty years in this neighborhood, she had become a pariah, isolated by a hostility that seeped like venom through her doorframes.
Neighbors she had known since they were in diapers now crossed the street to avoid her, pulling their coats tight as if she carried a plague. The local grocer would turn his back when she entered, letting her stand in agonizing silence until she gave up and left.
Then the cruelty grew hands and weight. Methodically, they jammed the rain gutters until the black water bloated and breached her bedroom ceiling. They poached the coal from the shed, lump by lump, until the woman was forced to fire the baking oven day and night just to stave off the freezing cold. She spent hours stooped before its cavernous mouth, feeding it heavy logs that vanished into the darkness of the flue like offerings to a hollow god.
For days, she huddled in front of the hearth, hollow-eyed and catatonic. The world around her blurred into a numb, freezing haze, until she could no longer tell if she was awake or dreaming. The house had settled into an eerie, graveyard stillness, leaving her untethered from the world outside.
Eventually, the girl was standing in the kitchen. “It reeks in here. And it’s still not hot enough. You must be freezing,” she whispered. Her shadow swallowed the crone. “Want me to get the fire roaring for you?”
It wasn’t a struggle. The boy stood at the door, the heavy iron deadbolt thrown shut. They muscled her against the open oven with the cruel, inexorable weight of their youth.
A gentle, guiding shove.
To the old woman, it almost felt like mercy.
The iron oven door clanged shut, perfectly flush. The fire’s hungry roar diminished to a muffled tremor in the floorboards.
The boy fumbled for the white pebbles in his pocket. His fingers found nothing but chalky grit.
“Come on now, Hansel,” the girl said, swiping the bundle of the dead woman’s meager belongings from the mantle. “Father is waiting. We’ll just tell him we got lost in the woods.”
