And I did not want to open that door.

It was too late, though. Elizabeth moved toward it, slogging through the thick heavy muck, and I wanted to warn her away, to turn and run from this terrible place, but I couldn’t; I was rooted in place like a tree, thinking only that this was not right, this place was not right. My ears rang as she raised a fist to knock on the door.

At first, nothing happened, and I was glad of it. Elizabeth took a few steps back, clearly not wanting to be so close to the house, although not willing to voice her own fears.

Then, without warning, the door swung open with a creak.

Inside the doorway was an utter blackness unlike any I had seen before. It was not merely dark, the dark of a windowless interior; it was pitch, utterly without shape or light or form, inky and thick. A black hole. It was as if the interior of the shack did not really exist, or at least did not exist in this or any familiar dimension.

Elizabeth backed up quickly to stand beside me, unable to tear her eyes from the impossible black, the negative space inside.

Clouds gathered over the sky and began to drift in front of the sun, casting us in a dull gray light that prickled the hair on my arms.

Now a shape started to emerge from that doorway.

Just a silhouette, slowly revealing itself from the black, as if it were peeling away from the darkness bit by bit, and the thin gray light would only go so far as to light up the shape of a tall figure, a person who was about to step out of the doorway, a person who I did not want to step out of the doorway. The next thing the light touched was a pair of eyes, gleaming uncannily in the weird light, and all it took was the sight of those eyes for us to turn and bolt the way we’d come, running at full speed as if we were trying to outrun a fire licking its way toward us, running until our legs screamed and our sides pinched with pain, muddy water sloshing up at us in great dirty splashes, our shoes sticking, running, running back along the waterway, past the abandoned canoe, until we could not run anymore.

Who was it, coming out of the shack? The Swamp Witch? What would we have seen if we had waited a moment longer?

Darkness fell, surrounded us, and we were still lost. I don’t like to think about that day, the day the magic broke, the day we lost the old canoe, because we spent that night in the swamp, shivering and afraid, huddled together for warmth without speaking. It was a long, dreadful night. The next morning, a police officer found us. When he saw us on the ground with our arms wrapped around our knees, he said into his radio, “Call off the search. I got ’em.”