My Little Witch
The light came into the room at a sharp, almost unnatural
angle that evening, all orange and yellow as if through a smoky filter in the
early autumn sky. I walked into my bedroom and saw it in the light; a small,
plain black box, lying innocently on my bed. I moved first, walking towards it,
drawn by invisible cords that I could no more break than fly. The game had
begun. I stood looking at it, waiting. The sunlight swept across my bed and
began up a wall as the sun began to hide behind some distant horizon, like a
child caught at naughty play.
It was time to caress the box’s black sheen. My hand reached
out, not trembling but resolute, white against the box’s black (so black)
surface. As if from some experience, I knew it would be cool to the touch although
it had only recently shed its sunlit cloak. My fingers caressed the blank box,
smooth and cool as obsidian. The corners of the box were perfect, with no
creases, only corners although it was made of what appeared to be cardboard. It
was as if one thick piece of cardboard had been carved, created for one
purpose. And what was this purpose?
I noticed that my thumb began to move closer to the edge of
the box. It was going to happen soon unless I did something, but alas, I was
powerless. As if gaining confidence in my inability to scold or control or
discipline, the thumb of my right hand inched towards the left edge of the box.
It did this as slowly and deliberately and inevitably as those interminable
seconds that stretch as the school bus slides sideways towards the semi truck. My
blood chilled.
And then, like that it was done.
The box was flipped, my right hand was again at rest at my
side, but it was tingling, laughing. This side of the box was not blank. It was
not plain. Oh how I wished that it would be! Oh that I could have been
pleasantly surprised at a box with four sides as plain as the back had been!
But it was not to be and I knew, in the outer reaches of my mind, that this box
was never plain, had never been plain, and would never be plain. The words at
the top of the box above the cellophane written in Halloween orange with
dripping writing said, “My Little Witch”. I stared at the words, willing my
eyes to stay there, not wanting to move them to the cellophane that made up the
bulk of the front of the box. The sun stayed put now, guiltily peeking through
the windows, throwing long, cross-shaped shadows up the wall.
Someone was watching me, and I knew who it was. I was
successful at staring at the letters for a long time. My hands would not move,
nor would my feet. I was there, the box was there, and no one was leaving. It
was my move, and time would not progress until the correct move was made. I
began to be aware that beads of sweat were forming on my forehead, and running
down my face. My hands continued to hang limp. My feet were part of the floor.
My heart hammered in my ears. The crosses, the orange writing and the smoky
light were all with me in the room, an evil and silent audience, waiting.
I didn’t mean to do it. I don’t know how long I could have
stood there, simply avoiding my duty, looking at the dripping orange writing,
but I was prepared to do it longer than I did. However, I had to blink. One’s
eyes eventually dry out. Staring indefinitely is not an option for the living,
is it? And in that instant that I did so, in the moment that my eyes were
closed, some synapses or muscles or brainwaves, something, malfunctioned. And
when I opened my eyes, they were locked on hers.
Her cherubic young dolls face told all lies, for her black
eyes told the truth. I was locked in them, as dark as a deep forest at midnight on a moonless night, as cold
as the deepest underwater cavern, as endless as eternity. They stared straight
ahead, but straight ahead was into my soul through my own eyes. She never
blinked, but my eyes grew wider until I was able to turn them away.
She was dressed in black, a broom at her side. Her dress was
tattered and worn. Like most of the doll boxes that I can remember seeing at
department stores, there was a backdrop. I imagined that most “box backdrop”
scenes are of a home, or show the doll with her doll friends, or with her pony,
or whatever is appropriate. However, this scene, which just peeked around her,
was a rural scene. I could see what could be an early American town, as if the
doll was standing in the middle of a street in this village. Faces of excited
people crowded the edges of the package, young and old, some excited, angry or
even fearful, looking at her. But she stared straight ahead at me.
It was her move now.
It started, I think, with her eyes; just a crinkle in the
skin around them, almost like a blemish in blemish-less skin, a twinkle of life
and laughter in the black pools in her face. I blinked hard, trying not to see
what I was seeing, hoping for madness over this reality.
When her mouth began to move, just an upturning of the
corners, mind you, and as subtle as a snake in tall grass, I wanted to run. I
wanted to run! My mind said run and in the past that always meant run. Tears came,
temporarily blurring my vision. I stood wide-eyed and open mouthed, my breath
coming in short gasps now. I licked my lips and tasted salt, the nectar of my
terror. Running was not an option. Not now. I was here and here I would stay
until the game was finished.
Her mouth was moving more readily now, trying to form words
through a wooden smile. She was speaking to me, saying the same sentence over
and over, but without voice. The light changed to a fiery orange in the room,
the crosses darker on the wall, when she finally spoke, when her voice came. “I
am your little witch,” she said in a three-year old girl’s voice, as sweet as
any child’s, filled with innocence. A scream rose in my throat and was
almost immediately extinguished before it escaped, like a fire. But like a dead
fire has smoke, so my dead scream came as a squeaking noise, the embers of what
would have been as mighty a howl as I had ever. She added, in words drenched
with black meaning, “I will do anything you want me to.”
Scenes of murder and carnage flowed before my eyes that were
unspeakable, unthinkable. Never before had I imagined such things being done to
a human body, and to my friends, my neighbors! For a few seconds these scenes
filled my vision, always with my own maniacal laughter in the background. The
vision ceased and I squeaked again. More tears came.
“I need out.”
My hands, which had been as good as dead to me until those
words came, suddenly sprung to life. Oh traitor hands! Why can’t I control you?
They seemed more her hands than mine as they inched towards the box, pausing
six inches above it as if waiting for me to bend at the torso so that they
could reach the box and begin their dark chore. There was, in actuality, no
cellophane, nor had there ever been. The sorceress was held in the box only by
bands on her hands and neck.
My body was in full rebellion now with only my thoughts
still with me. It was my clarity of thought through this horror that made me
realize what I had to do, for as my hands undid the knot on her left hand I saw
the background picture move. Why was there a knot on her hand? Because it was
attached to the rope that the man in the black cloak in the picture was holding
as he yelled silent syllables at me, his eyes bloodshot, his face hot with
rage. My evil hands untied the knot and the rope moved as he pulled it from his
two-dimensional world, slipping it back in to the picture never to be seen in
my three-dimensional world again. I saw him slam the end of the knot down and
grind his foot on it as he and the rest of the people on his side of the box
turned to glare at me. The witch’s tiny hand worked itself into and out of a
fist furiously, as if trying to get the blood to flow. Her smile grew larger.
“Now the other!” She said this to me as if I had just untied
one of her shoes.
I had no choice but to repeat the process with the other
hand. After all, since she had spoken it was my move. The results were the
same, with similar people displaying similar emotions, except this side had a
little girl crying in frustration, looking down at the ground.
One knot to go, this one at her neck. I saw that the knot
was in the back of her neck, so it would be impossible to untie it without
turning her over. As I did so, grasping her warm and grotesquely breathing
body, I saw the rest of the background picture in the box. The people had now
all vanished, but there was a scaffold upon which she had been standing. The
rope that had been around her wrists had been held by people with small but
common knots. This rope though, had a hangman’s noose and was attached to a
two-dimensional gallows which had been obscured by her head.
The room in which I was standing now grew deep red, the last
glow of a dying sun, the tops of the crosses from the window reaching the
ceiling. I knew what I must do.
As the witch lay on her stomach in the box, pinned there
lightly by my left hand, control was regained in my right hand long enough to
do my bidding.
I took the witch’s neck between my thumb and forefinger and
pinched and pushed as hard as I could.
Her head came off with a deep pop, followed by a single drop
of red blood. Her body twitched twice and rested. My left hand seemed, somehow,
to glare at me even as it relinquished control once again to the body to which
it was attached, namely mine.
The last of the light fell from the room. My head cleared.
My breathing returned to normal and a cool breeze came in through the open
window. It was over. I picked up my right foot, then my left, still standing in
place. A smile came to my face and I laughed, small at first, then growing into
a belly laugh the likes of which I had not had in quite some time. As my laughter subsided,
sweetly echoing in the darkened room, I picked up the box with the witch still
in it, face down, head severed by just an inch, lying as it were on a dusty
street in early America
at the foot of a gallows. Steadying the still warm but cooling body and
head so that they wouldn’t fall out, I walked to the small wastepaper basket at
my door and dumped her, the box, the experience in. I walked out with a sigh.
Two steps down the hall I heard it. That sweet voice – in
intonation filled with a warning so severe, so grave that I immediately froze.
“Come back.”
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