The Gate of Sweet Nettles

In the summer of 1987, when I was nine, my twin brother Leo and I were playing in the long gravel driveway behind our house in the hills of Vermont. Our house was an old Victorian with peeling white paint, and a rusted fence with a wooden gate cut across the driveway halfway, dividing the front where our parents parked their station wagon from the back where an abandoned garage stood, its doors padlocked and overgrown with sweet nettles.

It was a warm Sunday afternoon, and our mother was on the porch reading a romance novel, while our father was inside at his desk, buried in his fishing magazines. Leo and I were deep in a game of pretending the driveway was a river and we were explorers crossing stepping stones, when a soft, honeyed voice called out, ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ We froze and looked up.

At the gate, a woman stood clutching the wooden slats, her fingers pale against the rot. She wore a flowery sundress that seemed too thin for the season, and her face was pretty in a faded, washed-out way, like a photograph left in the sun. Her eyes were the color of slate, and they held a strange calm. ‘Could you open the gate for me?’ she asked, her voice dripping with sweetness. ‘I’ve lost my little dog, and I saw it run behind your garage.’

Leo and I exchanged glances. Our parents had told us never to open the gate to strangers, but this woman was so gentle, so reassuring. She smiled, showing small, even teeth. ‘Please, I’m so worried. It’s a little white terrier, with a blue collar.’ I felt a tug of pity. Leo, always the braver one, stepped forward and lifted the latch. The gate swung open with a creak.

The woman stepped through, and I noticed she moved without sound, the gravel barely shifting under her bare feet. She walked past us, her eyes fixed on the garage at the end. ‘Thank you, dears,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You’ve been so helpful.’

She reached the garage door and pressed her palm against it. The padlock fell away as if it had been waiting for her. The door swung open with a groan, revealing darkness inside. She turned back to us, and now her smile was wider, too wide, and her teeth seemed sharper. ‘Perhaps you’d like to help me look inside?’ she said, her voice now slurred, as if she’d been startled from sleep.

We backed away, but our legs were heavy, as if the gravel had turned to tar. The woman’s dress suddenly seemed to cling to her, damp, and I caught a whiff of something foul, like wet earth and old leaves. She took a step toward us, and the sunlight dimmed, as if a cloud had passed over the whole yard.

‘Come on, now,’ she crooned, but her voice was deeper, a rasp. ‘I’ve been waiting so long for company.’

Leo grabbed my hand and shouted, ‘Run!’ But when we turned toward the house, the fence that had been behind us was now in front, and the gate was closed, though no one had touched it. We were trapped between the woman and the house. She began to shuffle toward us, her head tilted at an unnatural angle, her mouth opening wider than should be possible, revealing a dark void that swallowed the light.

I screamed, and my voice echoed off the garage. The woman stopped, her head snapping up. A loud crash came from the house, and then my mother’s voice, sharp and worried: ‘Kids? What’s going on?’ The woman’s face flickered, and for a moment she looked almost translucent, like a heat haze. She gave a hiss of frustration, then turned and vanished into the garage, pulling the door shut behind her.

The gate swung open on its own, and my mother came running down the driveway, her book discarded. Leo and I sobbed, pointing to the garage, but when our father came out and opened it, there was nothing but dust and an old bicycle. The padlock lay on the ground, intact. The woman was gone.

But we never played in that driveway again. And sometimes, on warm afternoons, when the wind is still, I think I see a flutter of a sundress near the garage, and I hear a soft, sweet voice calling, ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ But I never look. I never go near the gate. For that voice is not a memory; it is a lingering chill, a promise whispered among the nettles, waiting for another child to unlatch the gate and let her in.