Excerpt From Early Draft Of Untitled Witch Story

This is an excerpt from chapter three, in which the nine-year-old character tries to gather more information about the witch[es] she believes must live in the spooky house.

If you want background, here's the first draft of chapter one: Untitled Witch Story, Part One, Draft One.

I asked my mother who lived in the spooky house. I cringed a bit as I asked, with a part of me expecting her to scold me for not paying attention to the reading materials supplied by my church – after all, if I had, I’d know it was the house of witches. Another small part expected she’d avoid mentioning the witch (after all, she’d never told me before, and keeping things from me to protect me was her way in many things) and just tell me to avoid the place. A part of me expected her to identify the resident.

All of me believed that she must know that there were witches in the house, and it was merely a matter of how much information she would impart.

No part of me expected her to say she didn’t know.

Our town’s population numbered in the hundreds, and among those who actually lived in town, rather than on the outlying roads and farms that had a Columbia address but weren’t in the normal walking routes, there were no strangers – or so I had always believed.

“I think she moved here from somewhere, a little while ago,” my mother said vaguely. “She hasn’t lived there long.”

“But you don’t know her name?”

“No, she’s not from here, probably. She might have come from Ohio or something.”

I knew where ‘Ohio or something’ was. That was the place that everyone came here from. It meant ‘up north where they talk strange.’ It meant ‘none of our concern.’ It meant ‘might as well be a different planet.’

Anyone who was from away was from ‘Ohio or something,’ and once they were discerned as coming from that foreign place, they could be dismissed: we would never really know them or understand them, and maybe if we waited, they’d go away.

“How long has she lived there?” I asked. I had a notion that maybe my reading the Halloween tract had caused her to exist.

“I don’t know, maybe ten years, or more. I didn’t see her move in.”

Somewhat insulted at the notion that a period of time longer than my own life could be dismissed as ‘a little while,’ I walked away and didn’t ask any more questions.