I still remember the first time I saw the Bucks when I was twelve. It’s still the first thing I think about when I meet new people. If I knew then what I know now, I would have avoided them entirely.
On a Friday, my Dad had made me come out to the car to help him unload groceries, and to this day I wish he had come home even one hour earlier. When I walked out of the house, he was hefting a couple of milk gallons and staring across the street at an unmarked box truck that was backing into the driveway of a vacant house a few doors down. Between returning to pick up more bags and walking back into the house, we saw a white man and woman exiting the cab and then lifting the rear gate of the truck to reveal stacks of cardboard boxes and various furniture pieces within. They were just so… non-descript. The man wearing a white, short-sleeve button-up shirt tucked into dark blue jeans and the woman in black jeans and a baggy grey sweater. The couple appeared to be retirement age or approaching it, but moved like they were middle-aged, climbing up and down the back of the truck with little difficulty. What struck me at the time was the silver hair that both of them had. When my Dad and I were on the last trip of our chore, we walked out of the front door together as the silver-haired man was bent over an open box next to his truck, rummaging through it. The man abruptly stood up and happened to catch my Dad and I looking. He froze on the spot and just… stared.
My Dad waved his arm over his head and called out “Hey there, bud!”
I cringed and said “Dad, he’s not that far away, you don’t have to shout,” but the volume didn’t seem to bother the guy. He stared for entirely too long and then raised his hand to shoulder-height and gave a weak little wave.
“Huh,” Dad grunted and stopped waving as the man quickly picked up his open box and scurried into the house, “they must be tired from moving. That ‘For Sale’ sign was barely up for a month.” We finished bringing the groceries in and Dad told Mom about the couple moving in while they put packages away. I popped a cookie into my mouth from one of the boxes and got a hand slapped for it.
“Stop that,” Mom said, then she clapped and excitedly exclaimed, “Oh! I’ll make some lemon squares to bring over to them. I don’t want them to get the wrong idea about our neighborhood.”
“That sounds great, honey,” Dad said and kissed the side of Mom’s head, “but let’s give them a few days to get settled. Now you, stop stealing cookies and go wash up for supper.”
And so, it was decided. On the following Monday after I got home from school and Dad got home from work, the three of us would go over to the new couple’s house and introduce ourselves. Mom didn’t have a lot going on in her life and fixated on upholding this ‘classic’ image of a traditional family. We never cursed, we went to church every Sunday and prayed over our meals. My father was clean-shaven and my mother wore dresses. You get it.
The following Monday, we walked across the street as a family in the afternoon, Mom carrying a ceramic tray and Dad holding the leash worn by our golden retriever, Baxter. I wished I wasn’t empty-handed, since Dad forbade me from walking with my hands in my pockets. He said it made me “look like a hippie”. Mom rang the doorbell and Dad commanded Baxter to sit. I’m sure we were a picturesque portrait of American suburbia. But after several minutes and two more rings, Mom’s plastered-on smile began to fall. Just as Dad began to say “Well, I think-“, we all heard the chunk of a heavy door lock opening. The front door cracked open and a pale face peered out at us. Now that we were up-close, I could see that her hair wasn’t gray, but bright blonde shot through with large silver streaks.
“Yes?” the woman asked after a few heartbeats of us all staring at each other.
“Oh!” Mom said, re-activated, “We’re the Jones’, we live right over there?” Mom turned and pointed. The woman nodded.
“What’s going on?” a deep voice called out from behind the door. The door was pulled open fully to reveal the silver-haired man. His hair was gray all the way through. “Oh,” he said after seeing us. Seeing them stand side by side, they just looked so… exhausted. I could tell that they were middle-aged, around my parent’s age. But their faces had creases and huge bags under their eyes.
“I’m Claire, this is my husband Dean and our son Dennis, and this handsome boy is Baxter. We live right over there?” another turn and point. I waved and smiled as I was told to before we left our house. The man made a non-committal noise while to woman looked up and down the street.
“Well, we just wanted to give you a few days to recover after your big move before we came over here to introduce ourselves and welcome you to the neighborhood. I’m something of a social butterfly around here,” Mom went on and on. I wish I have told her that she was babbling. Luckily Dad was more straightforward.
“This is a nice house, congratulations. Good bones. What should we call you by?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I guess we are still recovering a little bit. I’m John Do-“ the man suddenly stopped talking and coughed, “uh, sorry. I’m John Buck. This is my wife, Jane.” Jane did a little wave with the hand that wasn’t holding the door. I was beginning to feel rushed and uncomfortable.
“John and Jane! How delightful,” Mom bubbled as she held out her covered tray, “Here dears, I’ve whipped you up some lemon squares to make you feel welcome. Just come on over with the tray and give us a knock when it’s empty.”
“Oh.” John said and stared at the tray for the briefest of moments before quickly looking up and stating, “I’m allergic.” He looked and sounded as if someone else had just informed him of this.
“It’s not real lemons, just flavoring,” Mom assured him.
“No,” John said, furrowing his brows in concentration, “that too. Thank you for the thought.”
“No bother at all,” Dad said, getting the message loud and clear, “just give us a shout if you need anything. Welcome to the neighborhood, bud.” Dad handed the leash to me and began steering Mom away from the house, then held his hand out to John. Jane said her thanks quietly and drifted off into the dark hallway beyond the door. I stood by Dad as John hesitantly took his hand and shook it. Mom was halfway down the drive and Jane was nowhere in sight.
“Real nice family you have, it was nice to meet you,” John said, then flicked his eyes over to me for an instant before seeming to decide on something. He gripped my Dad’s hand hard and pulled him in close. I wouldn’t have heard what he said to my Dad under his breath if I had walked away with Mom.
“It comes with us, no matter how many times we run. I’m sorry.”
-–
Mom wasn’t happy with our reception by the Bucks’ and Dad chalked it up to “new-age living leaving tradition and Christian values behind.” He said that “that man John had some awfully silly things to say.” I think he suspected the couple to be smoking reefer.
I didn’t know what to think, other than the gut feeling that I didn’t want to have to interact with them if I didn’t have to. That’s exactly what I did in the following weeks, never looking at the house and keeping my head down to and from the school bus stop. When I walked Baxter to do his business at bedtime, he would always pull at the leash while he lunged towards their house, growling and barking like mad. I heard complaints from Mom about how the Bucks’ barely maintained their yard and often missed the garbage collection date, leading to overflowing garbage cans that you could smell from the street. Apparently, her calls to the HOA had gone unanswered on that matter, or so she said. Dad wasn’t pleased either, but he didn’t want to confront them himself, finding them to be quite standoffish and rude in our first interaction with them. Nobody else had gone to introduce themselves after the word got around in Mom’s groups and clubs about the strange attitude we received for simply being good neighbors.
After that first meeting, on the very same night, that’s when the nightmares began. As a kid, I had had nightmares here and there, but after the Bucks’ moved in, it was like watching a horror movie at night. It didn’t happen every night, but it was frequent enough that my parents struggled to get me to bed most times. That first night, though… I have only had that dream once. I dreamt that I was standing in a dark hallway with the floorboards creaking under my feet. I stood in front of a closed door, a strip of light coming through the gap at the bottom. I tried to turn the knob, but it was locked. This made me angry, so I slammed my fists against the door and scratched at the wood as hard as I could.
I could hear a man and a woman inside the room. They were crying.
-–
A little over a month after the weird neighbors moved in, missing animal posters started appearing on light posts and traffic sign poles. Everything from small cats to medium-sized dogs. The lack of maintenance on the Bucks’ house made it stand out in the neighborhood, and the kids on my block started referring to it as the “Dead House”, since the people who lived there looked like ghosts in the few times they actually came outside. One of the kids called Marko, trying to spook all of the other kids out, called it the “Hungry House” and suggested that the house was eating up all of the animals and good dreams. That was how we discovered that we had all been having nightmares recently. I wonder if that kid went on to play the stock market or professional poker when he got older.
I was eventually convinced by a girl from the neighborhood named Jessica to join her and two other boys in creeping around the Dead House at night, when she implied that I was “too chicken” to check it out with the “other men”. We snuck out of our respective houses and met up at the end of the block in the flood of a lamppost.
“Dummy forgot that I told him to bring his flashlight,” Marko said as he slapped the back of the head of a chubby boy named Eric.
“Quit!” Eric hissed, stepping away and rubbing his head. “My old man took it to work and now I don’t know where it is. ‘S not my fault.”
“There’s prolly enough streetlight to see,” I said, shrugging.
“See! It’s fine, Denny said so,” Jessica chirped and weaved her arm around mine, making me blush, “so let’s go.” The other boys rolled their eyes.
There was no fence around the front yard, so we should have been able to approach the house with ease, but the stench became a barrier in itself. It got so bad that we each had to pull the front of our shirts over our noses and hold it there, meaning Jessica had to let go of me. Marko wanted to see what was making that smell, claiming the garbage at his house never stank so bad. Eric told him that that was because Marko himself stank enough for the whole block, and our laughing rapidly pushed and pulled our shirtfronts to and from our mouths in an eerie way. The laughing abruptly stopped when we crept next to the house and saw the trash cans.
“What… is that?” Eric asked. Either he could not process what he was seeing, or his mind wouldn’t allow him to understand it. Jessica looked up from the piece of paper she had picked up from the ground along the side of the house.
“Is that… Is that a cat?!” Marko almost shouted while slapping my upper arm with the back of his hand over and over, pointing at the can. Protruding from under the lowered can lid and hanging down the side was a long, furry tail and an what was obviously a cat leg. The pattern was one we all recognized, since Ms. Anders’ cat sat with us at our school bus stop every morning, rubbing against us and winding through our legs. Once there was no way to deny what we were looking at, Eric turned and vomited. I tried not to do the same, and Marko backed away with his hands up. I realized that most of the cans had old, dried blood streaked on the sides.
“No way, yous guys. I’m out, I don’t want nothin’ to do with this,” Marko stammered. We watched as he turned and bolted down the street. Eric began to say something, probably a similar sentiment, when we heard a bang, bang coming from the house. Eric, Jessica and I looked at the two windows on the side of the house, then at each other, then back to the windows. We were frozen. Another bang.
“Go Denny,” Jessica whispered in a shaky breath and lightly pushed me towards the window, taking a step back. I couldn’t believe they were doing this to me, I just wanted to run. Eric’s face was all wide-eyes and little else. I took a few steps toward the nearest window and stood on tip-toes until I could see in. I was suddenly very envious of Marko’s fight-or-flight response.
I was looking at a dark hallway. At the end was a closed door, a thin rectangle of light coming through the space at the bottom of it. For an instant, it seemed familiar and I felt like the world was spinning faster. When the moment passed, I realized there was just barely enough light from under the door and the streetlights behind me to make out what was happening. Jane Buck stood in the dark, facing the door. With her hands at her sides, she leaned back, much to far to be able to remain standing, and rocketed forward until her forehead and face collided with the door. Bang. Again. Bang.
I looked to my friends and saw Eric peeping in the second window towards the back of the house, looking into the room that was behind the closed door I was seeing. Jessica was behind me, looking in over my shoulder. In the hallway, Jane said something to the door, much too softly for us to make out. She was met with a loud “NO!” from John Buck. Eric jumped and staggered back from the window at the shout, and we watched him tripping over a pile of garbage and falling down with a clatter. Jessica and I whipped our gaze back to the hallway, Jane had stopped her banging and tilted her head as if listening. I looked at Eric to see if he was okay. He was climbing to his feet. I looked back to the window.
Jane Buck had her face pressed against the windowpane, looking me straight in the face with smooth white eyes. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound on her forehead and her nose was clearly broken from beating her face against the door. Her skin looked… thin. I could see all of the veins in her face and her eyes looked sunken into her head. Some of the skin was ripped, like it had been pulled too tight across her head. Everything about her looked wrong. Jessica screamed in terror and ran, still clutching that piece of paper and screaming the whole way. Eric was right behind her. I felt frozen, locking eyes with Jane for what felt like an hour but was probably a few seconds. I backed away slowly, never taking my eyes off of her. She watched me go, smearing blood against the squealing glass as she dragged her smiling face along it. As soon as the window was out of view, I ran for my life. I didn’t look back, not even when I heard the front door slam open and wet feet slapping the pavement behind me faster and faster, just until I was about to run up my driveway, where they stopped completely. I didn’t see any of my friends on the street. Instead of sleeping, I spent most of that night praying to God to protect me from whatever evil the Bucks were living with. I’m not sure that anyone heard me that night.
-–
We only talked about it once. Eric was out sick for a while, he had caught some kind of infection from falling into that pile of rotting pet meat next to the garbage cans. When he got better, we all sat at the back of the school bus. It seemed like nobody wanted to start, or knew how to. Eventually, Marko apologized for running. He was relieved when we all assured him that we had never held it against him for a second. He got in big trouble for sneaking out. Jessica showed us the piece of paper she accidentally took with her. It was a collections letter addressed to a John and Jane Doe, at a different address. A ‘mail forwarding service’ label was stamped on the back. Eric told us what he had seen through the back window. The window of the room that Jane had been trying to get into. Eric saw John Buck, sitting in the corner of a room with a single chair in the center of it. A looped rope hung above the chair. A few candles were spread around the room for light. John had his knees to his chest, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth. The poor guy had jumped every time Jane smashed her face into the door, and she laughed at him. Eric told us that there were empty and flattened cardboard boxes all over floor. The walls were entirely covered in crosses. He told us that he didn’t jump back because of John Buck yelling, it was because some of the crosses were moving. They were spinning upside-down.
We still don’t know what Jane was saying to try and get John to open the door and let her in. It wasn’t long after that the four of us stopped speaking to each other entirely. I wasn’t able to look at any of them without thinking about what we saw. Maybe we should have supported each other better, considering the fact that I still think about Jane Buck’s face to this day. Or Jane Doe, or whatever her name is now.
All in all, the Bucks moved in and were gone in less than two months. I found out from Mom that the reason the HOA wasn’t responding to her complaints was because the house was still for sale. Nobody had purchased it yet and the landscaping crew who came to maintain the yard was on a schedule. They stopped showing up when the smell of rotting carcass became too overwhelming to approach the property. The sellers were really disturbed by the blood splattered all over the room at the end of the hall. Some parts of the wall had the outline of an upside-down cross in the blood. “Like a stencil,” Dad had said. The only evidence to show that anyone had ever been inside the house was all the blood, a single chair in the middle of the room, and a short stub of torn rope tied to a banister above the chair. The front door was found open days later by the homeowners.
My parents didn’t go to introduce themselves to the next family that moved in. As soon as I graduated high school, I moved away from that neighborhood. Animals and even children continued to go missing several times per year. I swear there have been times in my teenage years where I thought I saw a silver-haired woman with her skin stretched too tightly across her face in my peripheral vision. I go to church on Wednesdays and Sundays now, and swallow as many sleeping pills as it takes to get through a night without dreaming. I don’t want to see those blank white eyes. I want to ignore the occasional pounding at my door.