The online ad had been strangely specific, but also annoyingly vague.

Wanted: Male human. Not a child. Not a man. Halloween night only. No experience required. No experience desired.

The ad claimed only one hour of work was required. And the pay it offered was ... enticing. Robin was saving for his first car. Just acquiring enough money for a decent downpayment was taking a frustratingly long time. Flipping burgers part time didn’t pay much. Mom and Dad were helping, but there was only so much they could afford. That one hour of work ... a mere sixty minutes ... would bring him so much closer. Robin was tired of his friends having to taxi him around everywhere. They’d all been driving for at least a year. He was still just a lowly passenger. Even worse was when one of his parents had take him anywhere. It made him feel like he was still a little kid.

A week before Halloween, he’d answered the ad. An hour later he received a survey in his email that could only be described as creepy. Besides some innocuous inquiries into his interests ... comic books and the school baseball team ... there was a long series of questions that were odd, almost invasive. It never blatantly demanded his sexual history, but it crept around the edges of that particularly sore subject, poking and prodding. The truth was, he had no sexual history ... unless long hours masterbating in his darkened bedroom counted. Which it didn’t.

All of his friends either had girlfriends or told lurid tales of sweaty one-night encounters. They weren’t virgins. Or so they said. Robin sometimes wondered. Actually, he hoped at least some of them were exaggerating, or lying outright. He hated the thought of being the only inexperienced one in the group. He’d tried telling his own lies to compensate, but he didn’t fool anyone. He was a terrible liar. When they demanded names and particulars, his stories always fell apart. His virginity and his attempts to lie about it were the source of a lot of teasing.

Robin had the uneasy feeling the questionnaire had rooted out this embarrassing virginity with its oblique yet incisive inquiries. It was embarrassing. Someone, somewhere ... a total stranger on the other side of the computer screen ... knew Robin’s most shameful secret.

Was that faceless person some kind of pervert, trying to lure innocent young men into a lair of danger and debauchery? The name on the email was Wisteria Vale. Wisteria sounded like a woman’s name. Surely a woman wouldn’t be some kind of sexual predator. Or maybe he was being naive. On the other hand, Robin wasn’t so naive he believed that name was necessarily the sender’s real name. In fact, it sounded fake. Wisteria Vale? Really?

He agonized over his decision for days. Was he really willing to accept the risk of being molested by some big, hairy pervert just to get a few hundred dollars closer to his dream car?

In the end, his answer was what he’d known it would be all along.

He’d bicycled by the vacant lot a million times over the course of his life. It was perpetually choked with weeds and covered in gnarly, misshapen oak trees. Even on a bright afternoon, those trees shrouded the lot in gloom. It was a mysterious anomaly in an otherwise well-ordered suburban neighborhood. No one knew who owned it. The local kids avoided it.

At exactly nine o’clock on Halloween night, as stipulated, Robin stared at the lot from the street with a growing anxiety. What was he doing here? Was he crazy? The sounds of rambunctious trick-or-treaters were far away on other streets. The only other person he’d seen in the vicinity was someone walking unsteadily about a block down the street. The guy had probably overindulged at an early Halloween party. Now even the drunk was gone. Robin was alone.

The scariest feature of the dark abandoned lot was that it was no longer abandoned. A dilapidated old house stood far back from the street, nestled in the tress. Robin would’ve sworn it had never been there before. But there it was, with warm, yellow light flickering through the windows. Maybe he’d never been by at nighttime, so there was no light to give away its presence. He couldn’t remember. His mind seemed strangely foggy.

The trick-or-treaters sounded even further away than before. Their voices were muted. The neighborhood around him seemed to retreat into the distance. Robin could’ve been inside a bubble, isolated him from the rest of the world. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t remember how. There was only one move available to him, and that was forward through the thick weeds towards the front door of an old decrepit house that shouldn’t even exist.

Robin stepped onto a gravel path he only just then noticed. He ventured forward, following it as it weaved through the dark, menacing trees. There seemed to be more of these than before. It was a forest. The pointy ends of branches, looking like skeletal fingers, snagged the sleeves of his hoodie as though trying to remove his clothes. Robin felt a chill of premonition.

When he reached the house, it was larger than it had originally seemed, though still in a ramshackle state. The stairs to the porch creaked beneath his feet. The porch itself was littered with clay pots spilling over with all manner of plants. Three rickety looking rocking chairs sat off to the side, moving eerily in the slight breeze. The boards of the wooden siding warped outwards.

Two jack o’lanterns sat on either side of the front door. Orange flames burned behind their eyes. Their sly, grinning faces told Robin they knew things he didn’t.

The front door opened with the high, squawking sound of rusty hinges. A heavyset old woman stood in the doorway. She wore a long, shapeless black dress that draped all the way to the floor and a pointed black hat with a wide brim.

In a rasping voice, she asked, “Are you trick-or-treating, young man?”

The spell that had pulled Robin from the street to the house was broken. His mind immediately cleared. The renewed clarity brought a sense of outrage at being mistaken for someone young enough to engage in such childish frivolities.

He proclaimed haughtily, “I’m way too old for Halloween.”

The old woman’s laugh became a coughing rattle. When she recovered, she said, “I’m over a hundred years old, and I’m not too old for Halloween.”

Robin thought to himself, Obviously not. You’re dressed like a cartoon witch.

She said, “Then I suppose you must be Robin, the young man who answered our online advertisement. You’re our nine o’clock.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. He noticed how she’d mentioned the time. Her wording made it sound as if there’d be other respondents at other times. Was he even the first?

He was also amazed this old woman knew how to use a computer. Weren’t old people completely lost when it came to modern technology?

Then he recalled how she’d used the word our. She wasn’t alone. His suspicions flared up again. Something had always seemed off about this short-term, high-paying employment. It was even more shady now that he’d arrived. He should never have agreed to come.

“Ma’am,” he said nervously. “I think I’ve changed my mind. I’m just not sure about this at all.”

The old woman’s expression hardened. “Young man, your acceptance of our offer constitutes a contract. And contracts with witches are binding. I believe you noticed that on your trip to our front door. I could detect your feeble, unconscious attempts at resistance. If you were of stronger will, you could’ve broken the bond. But that would’ve been a very unwise act, one that would have lasting consequences ... at least for as long as you lasted.” Her face brightened in a smile. “Luckily for you, you’re a typical, feeble-minded young man of your generation. So, here you are, in compliance. You should be fine.”

Robin didn’t know how to respond. The old woman was both reassuring and insulting at the same time. But some inner voice of warning told him she was quite serious about the perils of defaulting on their agreement. After all, he had been compelled by some mysterious force all the way to this front door.

The old woman stepped aside. “Come in, young Robin. Your hour has already begun.”

Robin reluctantly entered a large, rustic room. It was lit with dozens and dozens of candles and lanterns scattered about haphazardly on old tables and shelves. Another jack o’lantern sat at the end of a wooden table in the center of the room. It’s features were alight with an internal flame. Green vines coiled around the table legs and spread out on the floor. Potted plants were everywhere. The air was thick with the smells of the scented candles, incense, the earth in the potted plants, and other nameless odors. Robin felt light-headed.

Two other women, their features and garb indistinguishable from the first one, awaited him.

Wisteria said, “Robin, these are my sisters. Ivy is on the left and Briar on the right. In case you hadn’t guessed, we’re triplets. The power of three holds even more power when the three are all born of the same woman at the same time. This means we’re not witches to be trifled with, young man. Just a friendly warning.”

Robin said, “Oh ... ok.”

Wisteria continued with the introductions. “My sisters, this is Robin, a young man who has graciously offered the entirety of himself to us for an hour of our evening.”

Ivy spoke. “In the interests of transparency, we should mention that an hour within these walls can be however long we wish it to last.”

Briar added, “You could spend a hundred years with us here tonight, and still emerge only an hour later into the outside world.”

Wisteria said, “But don’t worry your very pretty little self about that. You’ll only age the promised hour. Once we’ve done all we wish to do to you, you’ll still be the same youthful, puerile young man you were sixty minutes before ... if a bit more experienced ... and a bit more aware of the shadows that can surround you even in the light.”

Ivy said, “And perhaps with a haunted look in your eyes for the rest of your life.”

Briar said, “And you may cry yourself to sleep some nights.”

“Or wake up screaming.”

They’d been moving around in front of him, looking him over in a disturbing intensive way. Robin had lost track of which witch was which. The only one he continued to sure of, for some reason, was Wisteria.

Another one spoke. “You’ll never be able to take yourself in hand again for your lonely pleasures without thinking of this hour on this singular Halloween night.”

“When you finally coax a partner into bed ... probably years from now, if ever ... you’ll see our wizened features over her own as you move inside her.”

“And Jack, of course. You’ll see Jack.”

“You’ll feel Jack.”

Robin was growing increasingly alarmed. He whispered, “Jack?”

Wisteria said, “You’ll meet Jack soon enough. You’ll wish you hadn’t, of course. But we’re paying you well for your troubles. You have nothing to complain about.”

“In the old days, when we’d finish with one of you young virgins ... usually your age or younger ... we’d just leave him naked and quivering on the side of the road ... sometimes with a few foreign objects up his butt just for fun. Being found in that state by his fellow townsfolk always made his life more interesting from then on.”

“The townsfolk were terrified of any lingering effects of being used by witches. The boys had to undergo some very embarrassing cleansing rituals in the middle of the town square, including being bathed aggressively with lye soap and stiff brushes by all the women in the town.”

“In those days, the word women included all females from ten years and up.”