A warlock lives in the house across the street. Not directly across the street, because the houses are all sort of offset, so the left half of our house is across from this perfectly ordinary creamy house with white trim and white hydrangeas and tidy, weedless grass. Most of the houses on the street look like that. My dad says it's because our neighborhood used to have a covenant ordering you to paint your house earth tones. So the other houses are cream, beige, or brown. The most hideous one is also the biggest, with diseased-beige paint and dried-out-orange trim. It's a huge house, too, so big it takes up almost its whole lot, so all you can see of it is too many ugly garage doors. A real eyesore.
Anyway. The warlock's house is earth-toned too, if the earth you're on happens to be a tarry bog. Except that makes it sound greenish, and it's not. It's just black. Worn, weathered, dark-magic black with black trim and a black roof and gnarly trees the warlock decorates with absolute masses of cottony cobwebs every Halloween. Honestly, there's no telling what secrets that house holds.
But my house has secrets of its own. There's a reason I named it Cardolon, after the Barrow-down kingdom in The Lord of the Rings. That's right: I build my house on top of an ancient king's barrow. But it's okay; it was falling apart, and now he has a brand-new house to rest under instead, and his voice in my wi-fi . I painted my house the color of blood, too (red is an earth-tone, I will argue until the day I die). He'll look after us.
