The Wells had plastic deer in their yard, and I didn’t like them.

Their property was across the street from ours, and their land stretched away from our house, up a bit of a hill, to where their house sat. It seemed like miles away. We never went up there. They didn’t have kids that we would play with.

They had two plastic deer that grazed in apparent peace on their front lawn, and I would look at them through the window of the schoolbus every day and wonder what exactly it was that they were doing there.

In the daylight they were harmless enough, although their frozen demeanors made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. But at night they seemed to change.

At night, the house on the hill with the streetlight shining down on it seemed even farther away, and cold, and deserted. And the deer loomed larger than in the daytime. They lurked in the shadows, and the play of light and darkness made it look as though they were shifting and shuffling in the damp grass. The movement was almost imperceptible, but I was sure that it was there.

I would stare up at the house, at the deer, my eyes watering from the strain of trying to separate light and shadow, movement and immobility. I knew that they could come alive at any moment and come bounding down the hill, and they wouldn’t be just deer anymore. I could imagine their faces still frozen in the placid plastic expression that they had in the daytime, and the idea of creatures with such faces on them galloping towards me in the flat light of the streetlamp sent chills down me, and made me not want to look up at that house on the hill for very long.

The deer even entered my dreams. I dreamed of a house in the distance, sitting ominously in the white light of a streetlamp, with dead black eyes for windows and rattling windchimes for a voice.

There was something wrong with that house, and I stared at it from behind the tall grass of the ditch I was in. Nothing happened, but there was something wrong. And on a corner, across the fields from that house, I stood with my best friend and my favorite neighborhood dog, and their legs turned into the legs of the deer, into horselegs, and they ran away from me screaming, screaming that they had horselegs, and I woke up frozen with terror, as frozen as the deer. I was too frightened to look under the covers to see if I, too, had horselegs.

And I was too frightened to go near those plastic deer.