I was setting the table for supper when my younger sister Amy yelled, "Katy, the witch is putting up her lights!"

I dropped the knives on my mom's placemat and rushed over to the window, where ten-year-old Amy was watching the house next door.

My mom, my sister, and I have lived in our house all my life. Dad bought the house before I was born, and Mom got to keep it after he left, which was only fair, since we lived with Mom. Dad's apartment only has one guest room. Amy and I have to take turns visiting, when he remembers to ask us to visit, which lately hasn't happened very often.

Our house is pretty comfortable with the three of us in it. We have our holiday traditions -- Mom lets me and Amy help her make the Christmas cookies (which means we get to taste everything before it gets baked. Sometimes I like the dough better than the finished product). We put up a tree, with ornaments that belonged to Mom's parents. We light six candles in the silver candelabrum on the dining table on Christmas Eve.

Dad used to drive us out to look at other people's Christmas lights two days before Christmas, but he hasn't done that the past three years.

Every December Fifteenth, the witch next door puts up her holiday lights.

We'd never seen her do it. We thought she was a witch because we'd come home from school on December Fifteenth and her dark, gloomy house would look just like it always did, scary behind a yard full of weeds. By the time we sat down to supper, her house would be transformed into a fairy palace of lights.

That night, the witch was on a ladder, just like a normal person. She had loops of lights around her left arm. She was hanging them from the eaves. Anybody could do that. Besides, the lights were worn-out colors, pale in the cold twilight, like they'd been left on in the rain for a couple years. How could the witch be so boring?

Amy jiggled my elbow. "Look at the ladder."

At first I didn't get it. Sure, it wasn't every day you saw an old woman with masses of frizzy gray hair on a ladder. She was wearing a long-sleeved black dress, black tights, black ankle-high shoes - maybe it was her uniform; we never saw her in anything else. She hung lights. She hung more lights. Then she moved farther along the front of her house, hanging lights again.

She hadn't gotten down to move the ladder.

I watched the base of the ladder. It slid to the left. Was it on wheels?

"Let's go over there," I said.

"No!"

"She didn't really put a curse on you."

"How do you explain that wart? You never had a wart. Mom never had a wart. Where would I get a wart?"

"People get them all the time," I said. But probably not right after they spat out their gum on the witch's daisies. Amy was obsessive about washing her hands, so it seemed weird she'd get a wart on her index finger. I didn't understand warts, though, or how people got them. Amy had had hers frozen off at the doctor's office, but it came back two more times.

"I'm staying right here," Amy said. She was always like that, scared to take chances. She still thought Dad left because she was too bratty. But she was never a brat.

I was the bratty one. How could Amy not know she was Dad's favorite, and I was the one he never liked?

I watched the witch and her ladder move across the front of the house to the far corner. She started back at a lower level. Now she was swirling lights in spirals, and the lights were sticking.

I raced through the house and out the door, then along the sidewalk until I stood in front of the witch's house. The night was cool. The witch hummed while she worked.

She was halfway down the ladder now, and her house was more than halfway transformed into its late December self.

She looked over her shoulder at me. "Katy," she said.

"Mrs. Nyx," I whispered.

We had never spoken. Her name was on her mailbox; that was how I knew her. How did she know me?

"Come here," she said.

I walked up the flagstone path between the weeds until I stood at the foot of the ladder. I wanted to lean over and see if the ladder was on wheels, but I couldn't look away from the witch's face. I'd never looked at her face before. When we saw her in the supermarket, we spied on her from behind. If she came toward us in the street, we turned away.

Her eyes were large and dark. Colored sparkles danced there, reflections of the lights. She smiled. "I've been waiting for you."

"What?" I felt stupid and stuck.

She came down the ladder and held out the end of her lightstring. "Help me."

The lights pulsed, like something breathing. Each one was a little globe with a small glowing creature inside. The string they were attached to was more like a vine than an electric wire.

I reached out, and she laid the lightstring across my palm. It was warm. I closed my hand over it. It squirmed inside my fingers.

"Touch it to the front of the house," said the witch. "It will go wherever you want."

I glanced back at our house. Amy was staring out the dining room window, her face a white blur. I felt very strange, as though I were balancing on something high and might fall off. I looked at Mrs. Nyx.

She had a wart on her chin, with two little hairs sticking out of it. Her face was so interesting the wart looked like a beauty mark.

The vine moved in my hand. It was sticky, as though there was sap on it. I stepped to the wall and pressed the vine under a window, then swirled it in a spiral, the way I had seen Mrs. Nyx do. When I got to the center, I ran out of vine. I stepped back. The tiny firethings inside the globes hovered, their light fading and growing, fading and growing.

"Good." Mrs. Nyx smelled like peppermint and patchouli. "Would you like to do another?"

"Are they trapped in there?" I touched one of the globes. Its light went out. I jerked back, and it lit again.

"They stepped in willingly." Her hands rested on my shoulders now, warm through my shirt. She spoke right by my ear. "They come back every year. They must get something from it, don't you think?"

I helped her with the lights, and followed her into the house afterward. She gave me a cup of mint tea and two licorice-flavored cookies. Her house was full of small, complicated things and shadows. While I drank my tea, a paw darted out of a shadow and slapped the back of my hand. It left a print that looked like a clover.

"I think he likes you," said the witch.

When I went home, my own house felt alien to me.

Dad wasn't the only one who could leave. I touched the cloverleaf on the back of my hand. I didn't even have to go far. Next door.

The End

Nina Kiriki Hoffman has been writing for more than twenty-five years. Her short fiction has appeared in ASIMOV'S, ANALOG, ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, WEIRD TALES, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, and a variety of other magazines and anthologies. Her young adult novels STIR OF BONES and SPIRITS THAT WALK IN SHADOW were published by Viking.

She lives in Oregon and has cats.

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