The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

hesitation; even in moving away the Williams family had been as ramshackle as their furniture—Mrs. Williams had neglected to lock the doors in her haste to get to her new home; one window still had curtains. (“Sloppiest tenants I ever had,” the landlord confided to Miss Fielding that afternoon, when he came to see if Mrs. Williams had stolen the light bulbs.) Inside, Marilyn stood in the dim echoing air of a house still ringing with complaint; she looked into the living-room and saw that the sun never came there, she went down the long hall and knew that there had never been a carpet on the floor, she saw the still-dirty bathroom and the old grandmother’s room, which she supposed had been Helen’s, from the fifth on the floor, a calendar still hung in the kitchen, with the moving date circled. Marilyn looked into the refrigerator and found it warm and empty. On her way back down the hall she discovered a small memorandum book dropped into a corner, and she took it out into the sunlit doorway and opened it and found items like “call furnace man” and “black dress at cleaners thurs.” At the back of the book was a list of figures, identified occasionally, as “Helen spring coat $17.95.” That must be the red coat Helen has been wearing, Marilyn thought in surprise, so cheap. She had only seen it vaguely; it had been a warning sign of Helen’s approach, but now she remembered it, and it had
looked
cheap. The figures in the book totaled fifty-one dollars; Helen’s coat was the biggest item. Marilyn dropped the book back into the doorway, and thought, Mildred was a nice little girl,
she
was always nice.
    She came down to the sidewalk, and Tod Donald, riding his bike past in the street, braked to a stop and said loudly, “What are
you
doing, in other people’s houses?”
    â€œOh, shut up, dopey,” Marilyn said, and walked on home.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    The weather had to be very warm indeed before Mrs. Mack would venture outdoors. The children believed that she spent all day in her shack peering out at them through the boarded-up windows, putting spells on anyone who entered her yard or touched the battered apple trees. Mrs. Mack was allowed to continue on Pepper Street (although it would have been easy enough for Mr. Desmond or Mr. Roberts or even Mr. Perlman to get rid of her), because she had apparently always owned the little piece of land where she lived; and because she lived in a shack far back from the street, with the heavy apple trees in front and a hedge in front of these; and, finally, because she only ventured outdoors in the very warmest weather, and no one, as far as even rumor could discover, had ever been harmed by her spells, at least no one who lived on Pepper Street.
    The children called her a witch, and the parents called her an unfortunate old woman, and she looked like either one, with her hair in strings and her shoulders bent, and her perpetual whimpering mutter. If anyone passed her house while she was outside and neglected to speak to her the mutter would rise to an audible criticism, but Mrs. Desmond had been known to observe, and the parents believed her, that Mrs. Mack actually loved the Pepper Street children, and was a harmless old woman, very unfortunate. The day after Helen Williams moved away, Mrs. Mack came out. Mary Byrne, out picking roses from the side of their house nearest Mrs. Mack’s, came running into the kitchen to say to her mother that Mrs. Mack was on the front step of her shack in the sun, and Mrs. Byrne said absently, “Be nice to her, dear.”
    Peering through the line of rose bushed which were the boundary between the Byrne place and Mrs. Mack’s, Mary called, tentatively, “Isn’t it a lovely day, Mrs. Mack?” and the old woman, scowling around her, said, “Who’s calling me?” before she saw Mary waving through the rose bushes. Then she waved