The Witch Hickinson

Just a short plot I free wrote this afternoon.

It took a day and morphine to stop the scratching, but still the worms persists. The Doctor, in his education, has been indoctrinated to place the worms in my head, and I, in my itching, am inclined to place them in my hand. I write this, type this, with the half smile a cleverly placed affront often brings; a sick sap that pen and skill can refine to a point, and in bitterness shove through the eye of the tension bringer�" The Doctor. I ask you not misperceive what you cannot see, as I cannot properly paint it, and I fear the tone of my writing is far more foul than intended.

The Doctor is not the focus of my agitation, though he is the denier of it. What brings me to pain and that dreaded itch are the worms from the grave of Mrs. Hickinson, like the writer Dickinson but without the talent or the tact. She came to inhabit her 5 foot home by the way of a drop and a lick of rope, and the hungry hands of an angry mob. The worms, whose names I never learned, came to inhabit my left hand through the misplaced saw blade of one Samuel Turner, who, while helping me lift the coffin thought it wise to drop the late maiden over her empty grave.

I suppose you’ll want further introduction now that I’ve opened these cans of worms, pun intended, however misplaced it may be. You will find, reader, that I have misplaced a great deal of important... virtues during the great walk of my life. Just look to this writing, I’m only a short step in the writing door and I’ve already misplaced the point. Point aside, Samuel Turner, and I will never address the b*****d in part, was a snake and a thief and a fool. He was my fool though, and the only man crooked and brilliant enough to help me dig up the wicked broad.

Hickinson was killed violently and swiftly by the women of Akorn for witch craft. What the witch did, beyond her real crime of cannibalism, was a matter of speculation and a matter of interest to the town and the late Samuel Turner. I say late Samuel Turner knowing full well he is still alive... but intuition says the devil is beating down his door, and I will tell you why. The witch Hickinson ate children for two reason: immortality and bones. The first, immortality, was of no use to her and no use to me, but the second, the bones, that was a curiosity.

The children’s bones were found in neat rows on her kitchen table, each and everyone laid out with its fellows, and all of them notched with a knife made of whale bone. The notches were set like marks on a wall, counting or measuring something she observed. The finger bones were shaved to points and set apart from all the rest in a box of onyx and fox fur, and beside it was placed a skull. At this point I realize I am even further from the point of the worms, but let us continue and hope we return to the beginning.

The skull was unique from the other bones in that it was clearly a man’s. They had not the faintest clue as to who the man was or to how his skull came into the witch’s possession, but they do suspect he was the victim of another, that is, a victim of some being other than the witch. His skull was packed with a mysterious wax so that nothing could leak from it and so that the inside was divided into seven chambers. Each chamber could be accessed though holes in the dome that were corked by the fitted children’s fingers. Even stranger still, when they were uncorked, by The Doctor no less, the skull was filled with worms.

And look, we are back to the beginning. The worms that itche my palm crawled from the skull corked with children’s fingers, and that skull happened to be buried in the cracked coffin Samuel Turner was dumb enough to drop. The reason I know that Samuel Turner is facing Peter’s judgment, or Mrs. Hickinson’s, is because the skull was the sole content of her lovely coffin. I suspect she is just now cutting his throat in that rat shack of a home in the moor. As for The Doctor, he continues to agitate, saying the worms are in my head when he himself let them out.