Witch

1.

Dahlia Abrams took one look at her daughter and said to her, Honey, did someone slap you in the face? I see a red handprint there.

Nikki nonchalantly replied, Oh yeah, but I deserved it. We didn’t do what the smoke-lady said so she slapped me. She tried to hit Nelson too but he was too fast for her. He ran away to his room. She can’t get him there.

Smoke-lady? What do you mean, Nikki?

Oh, she comes and goes from the old sewing machine game; that is if we let her out. But we can only see her outside the bubble just before dark. She said she wouldn’t play with us if we told anyone; especially you and daddy. Don’t let her know that I told you. She can be real fun. She does magic for us if we bring her things.

Bring her things, like what? asked Dahlia.

Well, we brung her a baby bird once. She made it disappear; all but two feathers. She gave one to me and one to Nelson.

It’s brought, honey, not brung. What else did she have you take to her, Dahlia asked her daughter, humoring her.

Well, I’m not supposed to tell you this either, but she wanted one of your old tampons from the wastebasket next to the toilet. And some tissues that had daddy’s blood on it from when he nicked himself shaving. She made them disappear too. She says she can smell it when we bleed. She likes it.

Trembling slightly from that macabre explanation, Dahlia took hold of Nikki’s hand and led her up the stairs to the old sewing room where her children played with their toys and read their ‘Fun with Dick and Jane’ books.

She won’t be in there, mommy. I think we made her mad, Nikki said as they approached the door.

Just the same, Dahlia opened the door and turned on the light.

In the split second when the ceiling fan light first came on, when the light seems the brightest, she saw a figure in the corner of the room. It was dressed in tatters.

The apparition was that of a woman. It was dressed in a dark bodice and what could have been a white hooped skirt that was now shredded and dragging on the ground. She looked at Dahlia with sunken dark eyes. The skin on her cheeks was stretched taut against her facial bones giving her a mummified look underneath her matted yellow hair. Her mouth was a rictus; a grimacing sneer filled with broken teeth; jagged and black. Her bare feet were inches above the floor.

The moment their eyes met she was gone. It was as if she had taken a digital photograph, looked at the picture for a second, and then the camera batteries suddenly went dead.

She was wondering if she was seeing things out of paranoia after the story that Nikki had told her.

Nikki didn’t seem to notice anything so Dahlia kept quiet about what she thought she had just seen. She turned out the light and closed the door quickly, if not a little over hastily.

What does the smoke-lady look like, Nikki?

Well, she’s real pretty. She has long blond hair that she parts in the middle and sometimes wears it in a ponytail. She has the most prettiest purple coat she wears over her white dress. I’ve never seen her wear shoes though. She’s got little feet like mine.

2.

Salem, Massachusetts. 1692 AD

Gallows Hill

Prudence Perriwinkle was standing in the crowd with all of the other onlookers waiting for the hanging to begin. They had had the pleasure of watching three witches die on the gallows yesterday and it had just whetted their appetites for more. They were starting to get impatient. The promised commencement was already a quarter of an hour overdue.

Prudence thought that she shouldn’t have to wait for anything. After all, her mother had come over on the Mayflower. Her mother, being a Separatist, had an adventurist’s spirit and would do anything for her religious freedom. Only the most God-fearing and righteous made the pilgrimage first; unlike all of the other riff-raff that had later followed. Those people were the lowest of the low class and it was no wonder that there were heathens and blasphemers among them.

Some, probably witches themselves, made the argument that the town elders and magistrates had been too paranoid and judged the accused ones too harshly on circumstantial evidence alone, but after becoming acquainted with the indigenous people of the area, heathens all, they couldn’t take any chances that the Devil wouldn’t infiltrate the populace through their evil ways as well.

She glanced behind the crowd towards the roughly-hewn wooden structure that served as the community meeting hall.

Suddenly the door burst open and three of the councilmen stumbled out holding their hands over their eyes. They were moaning and wailing and dropped to their knees once outside the door.

Prudence Perriwinkle quickly made her way over to them.

One of the men said to her, There will be no hanging today. The magistrate and most of the council are dead. Oh, what have we done?

Jonathan Watkins, please…elaborate!

Miss Perriwinkle, Jonathan croaked, his palms still pressed firmly against his face. Miss Perriwinkle, my eyes are burning. Please, some cool water.

I’ll take care of that, said a bystander as he rushed to another wooden structure down the street.

Just relax for a time, sir, and collect your thoughts, soothed Prudence while she patted the distraught man on the shoulder.

Jonathan stammered on, We were examining one of the accused girls for the stigmata that is consistent with witchcraft when councilman Bakersfield accidently touched inappropriately upon her…you know; down there. She suddenly looked up with fire in her eyes and Sir Bakersfield’s head separated from his shoulders and thudded on the ground. It rolled behind him and stared dumbly at his own posterior before it too crashed to the ground on top of it. There was no blood. Diana Westerling is her name. She’s seventeen. All of a sudden she changed in front of my very eyes. She was replaced by another woman who screamed out, ‘You killed her future! You’ve taken her betrothed!’ She was of course referring to William Buttercuddle who was tried, convicted, and hanged yesterday for witchcraft.

The fellow humanitarian returned with a pail of water and a rag. He dipped the cloth into the cool water and applied it to Jonathan’s eyes.

Jonathan went on, "She yelled out, ‘You have accused them of witchcraft! They were innocent all! I will show you a true witch. I will destroy you and any seed that may spring forth from you!’

Then she floated up until her wild flagellating hair touched the ceiling. She cast her red glowing eyes on the first councilman in line seated at the table. His head separated from his neck and dropped into his lap. She then turned her gaze on the second man in line, who was now catatonic with fear, and his head, too, fell into his lap. Before anyone could respond, each of the remaining councilmen, one after the other, on down the line, suffered the same fate. I ran through the door; my eyes burning.

Prudence looked towards the wooden door. It was still closed. There was no sound coming from inside. She gestured for some of the men to help up the wounded three and get them away from the door just in case the witch decided to come through it.

Just as they had managed to drag the three councilmen away from the entrance the young woman appeared on the porch. Prudence had not seen the door open, yet there she was.

She was fully clothed now after having been stripped for the examination. She was hovering above the floorboards, barefoot.

Penny looked slowly around as if in a dream. When she spotted Jonathan a sudden rage appeared on her face. Her whole body tensed up as if resisting a backwards force.

Jonathan saw the woman on the porch and yelled, You are not Diana. Who are you?

The woman sneered and spat out, I am one and the same, but different. I am your worst nightmare. I am Penelope and you are making a surprise visit to hell!

Suddenly, Jonathan and two of the townspeople nearest to him burst into flame; throwing fireballs of burning clothing in all directions. Prudence was struck in the knee by a burning boot causing her dress to catch fire.

Penny saw Prudence frantically attempting to extinguish the flames and said to her calmly, Let me help you with that, Prude.

Prudence burst into a ball of fire from underneath her clothing. Her flaming wig blew off of her head and landed on the roof of the community center, igniting the wooden tiles there.

Penny looked at the fleeing crowd and let loose a focused beam of red light from her eyes. The people’s legs were bloodlessly cut out from underneath them, dropping them where they were in mid-stride just a fraction of a second before. The raging fire on the roof quickly spread to the other rooftops until all of Salem was in a whirling conflagration of chaos and mayhem with the smoke and fire and dying people wailing.

If anyone had been left to see her they would have witnessed Penny calmly looking around at her handy-work. She smiled and then vanished.

3.

Dahlia plucked the cell phone from the clip on her front jeans pocket.

Hey, Marcy. I was just gonna call you.

Okay. You tell me what you were gonna call me for and I’ll tell you what I actually called you for, said Marcy jovially.

It’s my kids, Marcy. They have me worried, especially Nikki. Nelson just follows her lead. But she talked about some kind of ghost or something that’s in the sewing room.

Oh c’mon Dahl, she’s seven years old. And Nelson’s only five. What could be the problem?

Well, I can understand imaginations and all that but when she tells me that her imaginary lady friend wants one of my used tampons from the wastebasket in the bathroom I begin to feel a little queasy; like something’s wrong, ya know?

She’s just curious; that’s all. She’s afraid to come right out and ask you about it so she brings it up in an indirect way. You obviously haven’t brought up the birds and the bees with her yet, huh?

No. She’s way too young for that. I don’t know. Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing, Dahlia sighed into the phone. Okay, your turn to tell me.

Well, I heard it through the grapevine that your hubby has gone away for three weeks on business and I just wondered if you wanted to bring your kids over and hang out one weekend. You know how your kids love my kids and it’s only a three hour drive.

Yes, sure, um…I’ll let you know tomorrow, okay? I really do appreciate that Marcy. It would do me good to get out of this place for awhile. Right now I have a whole house to straighten up. Kids, ya know. I’ll call you in the morning, okay Marcy?

Okay. Have fun cleaning. I know it’s always been my favorite chore. See ya.

Bye, Marcy.

Dahlia clipped the phone back to her pocket.

She knew that she had to start cleaning up somewhere so she chose to work her way from the top down. There wouldn’t be much cleaning necessary upstairs anyway because the only rooms that were used were the kids’ rooms and the sewing room that they loved to play in.

Why they liked that room so much was beyond her, other than the huge old wooden sewing machine box that they had climbed on since they were little. It was like a desk but with a built-in box on top of it. The box had a wooden slat-like overlapping roll-up door on the face of it that, when opened, allowed access to the machine inside. The wooden slats had ornate carvings etched and molded into them that, when closed, formed the figure of a lion in mid-leap with a woman riding on its back. The woman rider was clutching at the lion’s mane with one hand while the other was up in the air behind her like a rodeo cowboy enjoying a good bull ride.

Dahlia had never seen the box opened. Ian, her husband, had found it stuck like that at an old antiques place. It was over two hundred and fifty years old and a beautiful specimen of wooden craftsmanship, but the curiosity of what was inside of it had faded long ago. Ian said that they couldn’t open it without destroying the wood so there it sat.

As she walked into the room with the sewing machine on her mind, she couldn’t help but look at it as soon as she went through the doorway. Something looked strange about it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

She walked over to it to get a closer look and noticed how dusty it was. She didn’t realize that it had been so long since she dusted in here. She noticed a clean spot right up next to the roll-up wooden door. It looked as if the kids had been trying to open it; but why only in this spot? She looked along the seam where the door met the desk-top. It was untouched and still dusty. The right corner was the only clean place on the desk.

She reached over and