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.

Untitled Witch Story, Part One, Draft One

Note: If you live in Columbia, you may know what house I'm talking about. Please be aware that while the house exists, and the story is inspired by a real fear and a real tract and a real childhood belief, the story itself is fiction. As far as I know, there are no witches in Columbia, and all our old ladies, even those from away, are nice people.

Halloween

The Halloween when I was seven years old, I finally understood why I wasn't allowed to trick-or-treat.

Our church gave all of us copies of a Jack Chick tracts about the dangers of Halloween, and I read it quite credulously, and learned that witches were real, not make-believe, as I had previously thought, and were in direct and constant connection with Satan.

On Halloween, witches used the evil of the night to draw children into their clutches, feeding them apples with glass shard, candy with needles, and, if they were lucky, drawing them into their covens, adding to Satan’s army.

The tract included a picture of the house where some of these witches lived, and in the way of children, who believe their own little lives are the whole world, I understood it to be a house in my town.

After some study, I worked out which house it was. The house didn't look exactly like the one in the tract, but it was close enough for drawings, and naturally, I developed a healthy terror of the house.

I never saw anyone come or go from it, but it must contain witches, because my church had said so, or at least, I’d understood my church to say so.

The house was at the corner of Martha Street and Road Street, and I did not have to pass it in my daily walk from my grandmother’s house to my own home, but I usually did walk that way (unless it was getting dark out) so that I could look at it and shudder in the amount of terror that comes from knowing, on one level, that a scary story is absolutely true, while knowing on another level that it mustn’t be.

There was never anyone there – not that I saw then, anyway.

[Photo Credit: Jack Chick]