Paul Avis, my brother Carl and I were about to cross a line. The invisible wall separating the real world from the sorcerer’s realm of Mrs. Price’s back yard. It wasn’t a yard, it was a dense stand of woods, and we had to see for ourselves if it was filled with the heads and skulls of cats and dogs. We were the Hardy Boys on another adventure, out to solve “The Mystery of Price’s Woods”, and to see for ourselves if Mrs. Price truly was a witch.
We stood in the no-man’s land of ground that was a part of Mr. Collins’ back yard, standing between the Gerber house and the woods.
We dared each other to be the first one in, but the fear and uncertainty held us back.
Finally, Paul Avis darted in and just as quickly came out, not enough time to see anything at all.
We giggled and laughed to pretend we weren’t nervous or frightened, but none of us were going in.
After a few moments we summoned up enough courage to begin entering the woods, trying not to make any noise whatsoever.
So far so good, and no signs of any dead animals yet, but we were just on the fringe, the deepest part of the woods ahead of us.
We crept forward silently, like Indians, and we could all feel our hearts beating faster and faster.
“What are you boys doing?”
The voice shattered the silence, and our instinct was to run, and we would have, but the voice called out once again.
“Don’t you boys go anywhere. You heard me. Stay right where you are.”
It was Mrs. Price herself, coming out of nowhere, and her voice was everywhere, and we froze in our tracks.
We froze out of fear, but also out of the respect we were taught to have for all adults, so we stood waiting to see what Mrs. Price had in store for us.
Mrs. Price was her usual grimy-looking self. Sweat-stained, hair askew, smudged up glasses, working gloves and all. She must have come up from out of the ground to have been able to surprise us so thoroughly, at least that’s how it seemed, and she was covered in enough dirt to make it seem possible.
She looked at us for a long time in silence, and asked us once again what we were doing on her property.
We gave her the usual reply young boys caught in the act of doing something they shouldn’t.
“Nothing, Mrs. Price. Just looking around is all.”
This was really awkward and really frightening. What was she going to do to us? Would she cast a spell on us all and make us disappear or something, or would she do that which we feared even more and call our mothers over to punish us?
She listened to our feeble excuses and stared at us a while more.
Finally, she said, “You boys think I’m a witch, don’t you?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Price, we don’t believe that,” we lied, “We never said you were a witch.”
“I know that’s what you boys think,” she said. She turned away from us and pointed towards the deepest part of the woods.
She turned back and looked us straight in the eyes, and said,
“Come with me boys, I’ve got something to show you.”
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