In 2011, Brian Fatah Steele of
Dark Red Press asked me if I wanted to contribute a story to a Halloween anthology he was putting together. Brian is a horror writer extraordinaire, so the prospect was intimidating. Luckily, he said my story didn't have to be horror, so I agreed.
The result was "The Witch of Mistletoe Lane," a novelette featuring small town young boys who believe they have discovered a real witch living down the street. The experiences of these boys, minus the witch, draw heavily from my own childhood. Because of that, this story was a blast to write.
Once a week throughout the month of October I will post chapters of the story, until the whole thing is available here to be read for free. The anthology,
Past the Patch, is always available for free download at
Smashwords,
Scribd, and a host of other sites.
Part 1 of 5
Every autumn, the clatter of leaves somersaulting along
sidewalks reminds me of the October I met the witch. The small southern town of
Saint Claire didn’t have a lot to boast about but the worst football team in
the county, the annual watermelon festival, and Ag shows that brought the
fattest pigs and beefiest steers to Main Street, where they showed their
appreciation by crapping in front of the cafe, the antique store, and the True
Value hardware that still sold hard candy from glass jars. Unbeknownst to the folks
outside our insular world, Saint Claire had its very own witch, too. Mothers
all over town scared the devil out of us kids every time they warned us to
steer clear of the rickety old house that lurked on Mistletoe Lane. My own mother joined the
hype. “Colton,
you leave that place alone. I see you anywhere near it, I’ll bust your hide.”
To which I inevitably replied, “But why, Mama?” She’d only respond with the
look that meant, “You better do as I say.”
The first time I found myself outside the witch’s gate was a
complete accident. Jimmy Harden and I rode our bikes to the cow pond on his
grandpa’s place, hoping the fish liked the taste of the grubs on our hooks.
They did, as it turned out, so we kept tossing our lines in till almost dusk.
Realizing the time, we tied our stringers full of half-grown bass to our
handlebars and hustled back to town. We were in such a hurry to avoid a
whooping for being late to dinner that we turned one street too soon. Jimmy hit
his brakes; his back tire left a black streak that must’ve been a mile long
before he came to a stop. Pulling up alongside him, I stared in horror at the crumbling
gingerbread house. I’d only ever seen it from the corner, in passing, as Mom
hit the gas to get through the intersection fast as she could. Now that I was
getting a good look at the place, I decided she’d been right all those years.
It was a wonder anyone could live there at all. The house was scary as hell, staring
back at us in the manner of Hamlet’s skull, pondering our demise. Weeds grew
thick as jungles inside the leaning picket fence, and a pair of arborvitaes hid
the front façade like hands thrown over a face too hideous to endure. White
paint scrolled from the eaves, the wood underneath dry and gray. A couple of
upper story windows boasted holes big enough for birds to fly through. The
whole place reeked of cat piss.
To me, the creepiest part were the tattered Halloween
decorations left over from years past. Though it was June, plastic jack o’
lanterns lined the walk to the front door. They used to be orange, but had
faded in the southern sun to a whitish yellow, just like skulls of beheaded
children. One of those ridiculous “crashed witches” was nailed to a giant
catalpa tree near the rusted mailbox. Her broom had lost its broomcorn and was
just a plastic stick that made a likely perch for blue jays. On the front gate
hung a weather-beaten sign that read “The Witch Is In.”
Scared the witch might be watching, I backhanded Jimmy in the
shoulder. “Let’s get outta here.”
Jimmy grinned in a way that said he was contemplating mischief
and swept up a chunk of gravel from the ditch.
“No, man!” I cried.
He chunked it with his Little League arm; it sailed right
through a window. Clink, clink, crash, went the glass.
We hightailed it for home, scared out of our minds and
exhilarated at the same time, but Jimmy soon came to regret chucking that rock.
The next week, his dad fell off a roof and broke his spine. He’s been in a
wheelchair ever since. Then Jimmy came down with appendicitis that nearly
killed him before his mom got him to the hospital. We never openly blamed these
things on the witch or told our parents about the rock he threw, but he and I
knew. That was when we were nine or ten.
The autumn I met the witch in person, I was thirteen, suffering
through the tortures of Junior High and wet dreams about Elizabeth McDuffy, the
Freshman cheerleader with green eyes and hair the color of autumn itself. It
was Saturday afternoon, and the week before Halloween. A handful of jocks led
by our star running back, Trev Reynolds, were conducting the yearly cat
round-up. It was an unspoken tradition. Though all of us Saint Claireans knew
about it, we openly denied its existence. For the whole month of October, the
town’s cat lovers locked their pets indoors to protect them from the annual
purging. It was the vagrant alley cats and their unwanted litters that satisfied
the grotesque human desire for destruction. Me and Jimmy, along with Adam
Laughton and Tyrone Banks, weren’t invited to take part. The secret ritual
belonged to the cool older guys, not green, virginal junior high boys. We could
only stand back and watch Randy Tillman’s black pickup truck painted with
orange flames roar past just like a dragon. Piled into the cab and in the bed,
our heroes hollered and cussed and displayed their trophy: another plastic
grocery sack writhing with an irate cat.
All we had was our bikes, bigger and better ones now that we
were older, but we were still unable to catch up. At Jimmy’s urging, we tried.
We pumped those peddles as fast as our scrawny legs could go. Our war cries
sounded less inspiring, because our voices were cracking and we kept choking on
the dust kicked up in the pickup’s blazing wake.
Out on county line road, Tyrone hit a pothole and flipped over
his handlebars. We stopped to shovel him off the asphalt. “Ah, hell, Ty,” Adam
complained. “We’ll never catch ‘em now.”
Tyrone’s hands were bleeding, so was a gash on his leg where
he’d caught the jagged edge of a peddle. He groaned and cussed, and Jimmy said,
“Shut up. I hear something.”
We listened. Rrreeeeow! A cat in distress!
Up ahead, the road crossed Tallulah Creek. A dirt trail, no more
than twin lines of red earth veered off the main road and plunged out of sight.
We tossed our bikes into the ditch and followed it to the creek bank. Tyrone
hobbled fast as he could, dragging his bleeding left leg. Randy’s black truck
crouched at the end of the trail, silent and sleeping. The jocks clustered
under the bridge, struggling with a manic beast. Rrreeeeow! it shrieked. The bridge amplified the protest. I
imagined a creature the size of a panther, but when the hunters tugged the rope and
hoisted up the noose, all I saw was an ordinary alley cat, orange and white.
Her teets were heavy. She had babies somewhere. Jimmy, Adam, and Tyrone cheered
with the big guys as the cat kicked and scratched at the noose around her neck.
I watched, mesmerized and feeling like I might throw up. The cat was so scared
it dropped feces, and the big guys jumped back, squalling and cussing as if the
cat had done it as a purposeful act of revenge.
It was then that a couple of the jocks noticed us and chased us
down. Trev Reynolds grabbed me and Tyrone by the scruff. Joey Osborn, the
coach’s son, caught Adam by the shirttails. Jimmy stopped halfway up the trail
and measured his options. Ditch his friends or help them out. He was a beefy kid
by now, but nowhere near big enough to stand up to these guys. He crossed his
arms. “We just wanna see!”
The rest of the brave and bold hunters saw that they’d been
caught, and some began to panic. “Ah, man, they’re gonna tell Coach!”
“He’ll kick us off the team,” said Randy Tillman.
Joey Osborn said, “You dumbnut, we are the team! What’s he gonna do?”
“My dad’s the Baptist preacher! He’s gonna kill me.”
“They won’t tell,” said Trev Reynolds. He had eyes like a snake,
real cool and mean. They looked straight at me, then at Tyrone and Adam. “We’ll
beat the shit out of ‘em if they do, and they know it.” He jabbed a finger at
Jimmy, lingering a safe distance up the hill. “You! Get down here.”
Jimmy craned his neck, likely hoping there was some kind of help
coming along the road. No luck. He did as he was told and crept back down under
the bridge. Trev Reynolds grabbed him by the shirtfront. “We’ll let you see,
but you gotta get us another cat. All of ya! Go find us another cat and bring
it to the dumpster behind Al’s shop. We’ll meet you there. If you don’t show,
we’ll find you and hang y’all up instead.”
Over the crowd of taller heads, I saw the cat. Her eyes were
popping and her tongue stuck out of her mouth. She no longer struggled. Three
others hung from rafters under the bridge.
Reynolds slapped me upside the head. “You gonna cry? Go with
your girlfriends, Colton Brisby. Yeah, I know who you are, and I know where you
live, too. Go get that cat.”
#
“Ah, shit, we’re dead. We’re dead!” groaned Adam. We walked our
bikes back to town, our enthusiasm as withered as nuts dunked in ice-cold
water. “We shouldn’ta listened to you, Jimmy.”
“Did they mean one cat for all of us, or a cat apiece?” asked
Tyrone.
“Ah, shut up, man, we’re friggin’ dead.”
“Quit whining!” Jimmy bellowed, and Adam shut his trap. “We’ll
stop by my place and pick up an arsenal and catch as many cats as we can. Then
they’ll let us be.”
Our arsenal consisted of the pair of slingshots that Jimmy and I
used to shoot frogs at his grandpa’s pond. He held mine out, but I shook my
head. I didn’t want to shoot a cat, not after watching that alley cat strangle
to death. But what’s a guy to do when his friends look at him like, “What the
hell’s gotten into you?”
“Hey, I want it!” Tyrone grabbed the slingshot and practiced
aiming with it. The rest of us loaded our pockets with bright steel shot and
took off before Jimmy’s mom could ask what trouble we were up to.
The first cat we found was slinking around behind the police
station. “We can’t shoot that one,” I said. “What if Wade comes out and sees
us. He might arrest us for cruelty to animals or concealed firearms.” Saint
Claire was so small we only had three town cops; Wade was the police chief.
Jimmy shook his slingshot in my face. “Not very concealed, is
it, dimwit.”
“Well, for brandishing weapons inside city limits, then.”
Jimmy rolled his eyes. “How ‘bout jaywalking? We been jaywalking
all over town, stupid. Everybody does it, and nobody gives a shit.”
“Jaywalking don’t hurt nothing, dumbass!”
Adam, at least, saw my reasoning. He broke up the argument
before fists started flying. “C’mon, let’s find a different cat.”
We searched and searched, and the longer we searched the more
Adam panicked. By late afternoon he started looking downright sick, trailing
along behind, holding his stomach. We’d raked the town and finally found
ourselves on the northern edge. Past Seventh
Street, there wasn’t much but cow pasture.
Tyrone stopped cold and cried, “There’s one!” A giant beast
slunk through the tall grass in the roadside ditch, on the prowl. He turned
those malevolent yellow eyes on us and darted off. “It’s a black one, too! Get
it!” Tyrone wasted three good shots trying to hit him on the run. Jimmy took
slow, careful aim, leading the cat by a few inches. Then the stupid animal
paused in the intersection to glance back at us. Jimmy let fly. The steel ball
lit a bright streak across the breeze. The cat yowled, spun, looking for the
source of its pain, then took off like a bullet. We loosed our war cries and
gave chase, leaping fences and flowerbeds and scrambling over cars parked in
driveways. For a while we thought we lost it, but it darted out from under Mrs.
Stein’s garden shed, a dozen yards away. We were nearly on top of that poor
cat, when it turned onto a dilapidated street. I stopped so fast that I nearly
ran out of my Converse shoes. Mistletoe Lane. And that black cat was
limp-running straight for the witch’s house. The guys seemed to realize all at
once, and stopped in the middle of the street. Panting and sweating, we stared
at a shadow moving across a window. The front gate was propped open and the
ragged ol’ sign said, “The Witch Is In.” The cat hobbled through, leaving a
bloody paw print every time it stepped with its back foot.
A strangled, gurgling scream came from the house. The screen
door banged shut and a woman ran up the sidewalk between the faded jack o’
lanterns. Except for the green skin, she might’ve been the twin of the Wicked
Witch of the West. Long chin, hook nose, bony fingers, everything. Her black
hair was a wild mess of frizz, and her eyes bugged out of her face, full of
madness. She scooped up the wounded cat and cradled it like a baby, cooing and
whimpering in a strange, ungodly language.
The four of us backed away slowly,
but she looked right at us, and her free hand flicked and snapped out some
symbols. Jimmy wailed, “No! Nooooo!” He turned and fled. The rest of us weren’t
two paces behind.
(continued in Part 2, HERE)
"The Witch of Mistletoe Lane" copyright 2011 by Court Ellyn. No part of the story may be reproduced without written permission of the author.
Image credits -
background: FantasyStock
texture: GrandeOmbre-stock
fog brushes: BBs-Brushes
