The Witch That Was

Story of pain from the ancient to the modern.

Just keep running. Follow the path. Keep ahead, but don’t lose them.

I need them to keep with me.

Especially him.

I cut through the bushes of the path. The downhill run to the forest I practised last night gives me the advantage. They know this forest from stories, but have never dared tread it themselves. I know it now, and am moving them toward her. Moving him toward her.

This is the only way it will stop.

With every length, one more of them falls. The final ones slow as they stumble. Except him. He is determined to hurt me. Like an Olympian, he bounds over the obstacles before him.

He was my best friend once.

Now he is my hunter.

We had been friends since first grade. He loved Transformers while I loved Avengers. Our mums would try to co-ordinate our shirts on casual day. Then his mum died. I remember sitting in my room as he told me how much he missed her. How he cried as I hugged him, as he let it all out. I was his rock; he needed me.

He doesn’t need me anymore.

When once we were equals, high school changed all that. Puberty favoured him. He was now the strongest, fastest in his track team. I was the small boy who watched helplessly as he became a stranger in the halls. Even at his worst, when I would come home with busted lips, torn underwear, or an even more broken reputation, I would still watch him. I would watch him laugh with his new friends, see him smile with his girlfriends.

I wished he’d smile at me like that.

Watching him was the reason I found her. The hatred for all things different that he and his followers shared, led me to making a deal in the darkness.

His friends and he were passing the ball to each other, laughing and posing. The hot day gave them the easy excuse to take their shirts off, where they flexed to the blushing girls that flocked around them.

I sat away from them and just watched. Jealousy surged in me past the point of rage to merely dumbfounded at the inequality of nature. My body was skinny and pale. My growth into manhood had seemingly stopped. Hair grew along their jaws, and spread across their chests and down past their navels. Mine stayed defiantly just on top of my head. This always made the gym-room showers embarrassing. He and his friends were always sure to point and mock to whoever would listen.

Everyone listened.

My eyes had lingered too long. They saw me watching, and felt something that scared them.

That brief instance of fear turned to disgust then quickly to hate. It was insults he had only ever thrown at me, or watched as his new friends belittled me. This time, I stirred in him a way he did not like.

He stalked toward me. I didn’t move. All I saw was my friend again. He smiled, not like a Cheshire cat but like my friend. He struck me in the face. Laughter rang loud and joyous as I fell to the ground. I scrambled to my feet and ran.

Tackling me to the ground, my tormentors dragged me away from unsympathetic eyes to the hillside overlooking the forest. My back scraping against the gravel of the access road leading to the hillside, screaming for help as teachers turn their attention to the normal children. Once I dared to confide in the principal, he’d told me it was common for boys to rough house. “It is pivotal for some boys to be hardened against their own weaknesses,” he’d said.

I never complained again.

The forest loomed menacingly at the bottom of the hill behind our school. Like a black spot on the green hills of our community; like the sun dared not enter. It was dense and old, holding the stories created from the fears of our community. It had been home to our old gods, then communist meetings, satanic rituals. And lately, just men and boys filled with the devil’s temptations.

The one constant was her.

It is her home.

They tore at my clothes until I was bare. He bent toward my face, then spat that word at me. A word written on my desk, in my books and, one day, on my fence at home. Crudely sprayed in a scarlet red with an accusatory arrow pointing toward my bedroom window.

It was him all this time.

I should have known, only he knew where I lived. Only he knew which bedroom window was mine. I had tried so hard to keep those words at school, but it had touched my home.

I spent the day painting over the insult and my shame. Now he was writing it again, in black marker across my body

Tears filled my eyes, and they cackled as I cried. They picked me up again and tossed me down the hill like garbage.

The autumn grass was soft as I tumbled, but as I got closer to the forest the hillside changed to branch and burr �' cutting and slicing. I hit the forest floor with a thud that shook my body awake to the cuts and bruises it had sustained. Naked, bleeding and broken, I curled up and cried. The distant sounds of my attacker’s laughter bleeding into oblivion.

I woke to darkness. It was cold, and the nightly frost was creeping its way across the countryside. I limped toward the moon, hoping it would guide me home, dreading the moment I would have to explain this to my dad, to watch the frustrated, almost embarrassed expression cross his face and settle into his body. Again. His poor boy, the son of a worker who was too much like his mother in all the wrong ways.

I stumbled into a clearing, and there it was. Just like the stories. The full moon breaking though the canopy to beam onto the dirt mound. No grass grew around it, and it looked freshly turned. Like a tombstone, a burnt and disfigured tree jutted toward the sky, casting a shadow-like figure clawing toward you. This was the resting place of the ‘Witch That Was’.

There were two stories of the Witch That Was, and both ended in her fiery demise. The first story is told in church, filled with immoral acts, fire and brimstone. Whilst the second�' told out of church �' speaks of a nature-loving girl who was just different than those around her. I always preferred the latter but in both stories, the witch was violated then burnt.

She became the Witch That Was.

Naked and still bleeding, I stared as something emerged from the mound. At first it leaked as if of dark oil, but then gathered into shadow and swept behind me. Frozen in fear I could feel it harden and gain form. I could hear her breaths, feel it ice-cold on the back of my neck. It sent shivers down my body and into my soul.

She could see the town’s stigma tarred across my skin. She sighed as she saw my pain, felt it. With a gentle Celtic lilt she asked me what I wanted.  As I turned to look at her she knew my answer.

“A price must be paid,” she told me. “Nature is balance.” 

I nodded.

“Nature requires sustenance” she said as she ran her blackened hand over the bleeding scars on my leg.

“Yes” I say, and she drinks.

 

Today, we are on the path again. I am running and he is gaining on me. It is only he and I now as the others untangle themselves from the birch. I reach the clearing and stop to see the mound empty. He slams me with his shoulder and we fall to the ground. He throws punch after punch, and I feel my teeth loosen. Blood flows from my broken mouth and nose as he roars above me.  I created this rage that is pummelling me, I needed him to chase me and the only trigger I had was his mother.

The punches stop.

Opening my eyes, and he is staring at her. Her small, blackened and ragged frame stands above me. Instinctually, I crawl behind her. He looks to her then to me, fear filling his demeanour as he realises the trap.

Her scorched arm shoots out and grabs his neck, lifting him off the ground. His legs dangling, he again looks to me, and in the most childlike tone speaks my name. I turn away, and bury my face against the dirt.

”Is this what you truly want?” her voice now resembling the horror of the moment.

Without looking up, I nod. 

With her free hand she turns my face to hers. Her burnt face, almost featureless except for her vivid green eyes reflecting the forest surrounds. Her long, brittle fingers gently caress my cheek.  

Her eyes softening she says simply, “You do not deserve this world.”

Turning back toward him her eyes start to glow, bright green light encompassing us all.

 

I wake in my own bed. My body is still-hairless but it bears no scars. I put on my uniform and head to school.

A voice yells from behind. Hands shaking, I turn in fear.

He is hanging out the window of his mum’s car, and she playfully smacks him on the shoulder. “Lukas, you shouldn’t talk to Tyler like that.”

He smiles at her. “Oh, Mum. Tyler knows I’m joking.” He gives her a kiss on the check and jumps out the car.

His size overshadows me as he puts his hand gently on my shoulder.  “She’ll never get our sense of humour,” he says, laughing as he waves her goodbye.

“You’re lucky to have her,” I tell him.

He gives me an odd look then excitedly begins to tell me of his crazy dream where his mum had died and we weren’t friends.

Shock widens his eyes. “I am so sorry, man. I forgot about your dad. I’m…”

I wave the issue away and smile. “That’s the price we pay sometimes.”

He nods, slightly confused as we walk into school. I look toward the forest in the distance. Tonight I will go back to her; as Nature requires balance but also sustenance.