“Listen,” Alfie says, but Willa’s ear is already pressed against the rough oak of the cabin door. She frowns, hearing only the fingers of rain drumming against the overhanging eaves.

“You’re lying,” she says, voice small in her throat. 

“I’m not!”

“You are! There’s nothing out there.”

“There’s a witch in the woods.”

It isn’t the first time someone has said it. It isn’t the third or seventh or even the twelfth time, either. The warning—or rather, the accusation, depending on who was speaking—has through the years surpassed the reign of common gossip and suffused itself in the realm of bedtime horrors.

It is the kind told by older brothers to frighten the little ones, and Alfie is no exception. He languishes in the story, his mismatched eyes gleaming, eager to see Willa’s face pucker and lips open, her breath sticking against her ribs.

“She’s old and crooked,” Alfie continues. Willa’s small fingertips dig painfully into his palms. “There’s a lump on her nose. She flies like a warbler between the trees and sleeps in the boughs, scouting her next victim.” With one hand Alfie draws his sister close, feeling her small back stiffen. The other creeps its way slowly around the nape of her neck.

“I heard in the winter, when it’s cold and dark and the rain raps against the walls asking to be let in, she slips inside, too.” His voice softens, forcing her to lean closer, careful not to miss his words. She smells of earth, dank and sweet, and the dark wetness of rot. “She crawls under the cracks in the door and the gaps in the floorboards, and she waits. She watches us. You’ll know when she’s marked you.”

Willa’s eyes are black huckleberries, glittering in the gaslight. “How?”

“She takes her needle… and she pricks you!” Willa screams as Alfie pinches the soft skin at the top of her spine then bursts into pig-like sobs, her misshapen nose hindering her cries. Alfie howls in laughter, rolling lengthwise across the small cabin and banging his fists against the floor. They are interrupted by a voice from the back of the room.

“Telling stories again?”

The sobs are quieted instantly and the laughter chokes itself on the way out. The children scramble to their feet.

“No, Mama.” Willa wipes her eyes and Alfie his nose. “No, Mama, only playing. We didn’t hear you come in.”

The woman says nothing but steps from the shadows, the hearth’s dying light illuminating her sharp features. A nose like a dagger and cheekbones made of ice peer out from beneath the hood of her cloak. Pale, translucent eyes survey them from a lanky figure much too tall for a woman. She lowers the basket she carries, careful to keep its covering in place.

“My heart and my soul,” she purrs in a voice too soft, and crosses the room in graceful strides, wrapping Willa in the protection of her thin arms. The girl stiffens. “You know better than to lie to me.”

The boy stares at his hands. He scratches a pattern on the backs of his knuckles.

“We were just playing, Mama. Only playing.” His fingers move slower, the patterns more defined. He leaves marks where he draws his nails across his skin.

She watches him. He digs a thumbnail into the creases of his palm. There’s a small tearing noise, a gasp, and he’s gone too far. The blood drips three times before it clots and the sound is lost in the pounding of the rain.

“Enough,” the woman says. She reaches for the boy and leads the children toward the fire, sits them down before her. Threading a bone needle, she takes his hand. He grimaces.

“I didn’t mean to scare her. It’s only a story.”

“I know, my heart,” she murmurs. “But you should be careful when telling stories. Fiction has a nasty way of becoming reality.”

“And is it true?” Willa asks. “Is there really a witch?”

The woman sighs. The fire’s roar has subsided into an ember’s cackle, the light all but drained from the room’s lambent shadows. She cuts the thread tethering her hand to the boy’s and pulls her young ones close. Pets their soft curls. Stares past them into the hearth and sees only a witch in the smoke.

“She came from the mountains,” she begins. “She was born from the sycamores, or carved from them. She settled in those branches like a bird, like a giant raven, and instead of feathers she grew leaves. But she’s pale, like the skin of a sycamore, and her back is a knotted scar.”

The children look up then. “A scar?”

“As if an axe had been taken against her, the edge caught between her shoulder blades. The skin is puckered, white veins like spiders’ webs pulsing under a perpetual purpling bruise. And her fingers—knobbled fingers, the skin grown tight against her knuckles—they’re stained black. That’s what happens when you deal in souls.”

“When you deal in souls?”

“When you trade against the living.”

“How do you mean?”

A small sigh. The gathering of thoughts. How much to lay bare, how much to frighten.

“The witch deals in secrets—secrets and promises. One she’ll grant and the other she’ll keep, but they’re heavy, my heart. They’re difficult to trade. Not like apples.” The woman reaches into her covered basket and retrieves a tired crabapple, wrinkled and dry so late in the season. She tosses the husk of fruit to the girl. “You can’t pass them hand to hand. They must be scratched out, pulled, yanked and coerced from the gut. Secrets, they’re a messy process.”

“They stain her fingers?” Willa thumbs the apple’s leathery skin.

“Her fingers and her heart. And the tongues of those who pass them on.”

The children pause.

“And the souls?”

“Secrets are stitched in the seams of the soul,” the woman answers. “When strings are pulled to empty the secrets, the soul begins to unravel. The more secrets ripped out, the more unstable the whole fabric becomes.”

“What happens to the parts that fall off?”

“They rot.”

Alfie blinks at her. “They rot? That’s all? They don’t, I don’t know, explode?”

The woman takes his chin in her long white fingers. For a moment her gaze flits between his eyes, one black, one green, and she smiles. Her teeth are sharp.   

“Can you live in a rotted house, my son? Can you stand the reek of the dead wood, the water seeping in from above as below? Will the chomping of beetles not gnaw on the remains of your sanity? And that isn’t to speak of the mice that pay you no mind but scramble up your arms, eager to build their nests in your hair.” Alfie squirms in her grip. She releases him and leans back in her seat, fingering her bone needle. “The soul rots. The owner lives within their secrets. And the witch keeps the pieces that are torn away.”

“Why?” Willa asks. “What good is a rotten soul?”

“They’re useful to her. Ripped fabric can be re-sewn, scraps can be pulled together.” She strokes the mottled skin of Willa’s cheek—the tones swimming between ebony lakes and snow streams, marbled and stained—and looks out the window to stare at the night. She doesn’t see the rain beating against the glass, the tap-tap-tapping of something else asking to be let in. The shadows churn in the corners of her eyes. 

“Sometimes the fabric isn’t perfect,” she murmurs. “Sometimes there are holes that can’t be patched. The stitches may be messy. But it’s her mess, and she enjoys it.”

The fire pops then, a small sound made large in the whispering room. Willa jumps at this, but Alfie edges closer, his fingers suddenly chilled.

“Why bother?” the boy asks. The woman answers him with a small, sad smile.

“The witch becomes tired. Her work—it isn’t easy. She must reach their desires to grant her promises, lacerate those secrets, destroy those souls. Sometimes she needs to create something, to feel her own soul not grow stagnant in her veins.” Her eyes are gray and misted over, like dandelions gone to seed. She blinks to clear them.

There is silence then. It’s the quiet of three souls caught in their own dreams, unaware of the others or how to return to them.   

Willa speaks first, her desperation pungent.

“You don’t really believe that, do you Mama?”

“Of course not. Just a ghost story. A good one to be sure, but no one is truly afraid of a ghost story,” she says. A stained smile.

But the children laugh and the fire cackles and the slashing rain against the roof is nothing more than water dancing against the eaves again.

“It’s late,” the woman says, and she leads the children from the protection of the hearth and into the shallow comfort of their beds. The two settle into each other and wait with the quilt pulled to their chin, expectant.

The woman crouches next to the boy. “My heart,” she says, placing two of her long fingers between his eyes and tracing a path to his parted lips. “And my soul.” She repeats the gesture on the girl’s cool forehead. Their little mouths yawn and the woman smells the damp earth of them. 

They won’t remember their pale dreams in the morning, of that the woman is certain, and she glides soundlessly back to her place near the fire. The covering of her basket is twitching. Mewing. She peels back the cloth to reveal the speckled cat, one ear missing and tail broken at an odd angle. She croons to it. Scratches its scarred belly.

You’ve done it again, the woman laments. She kisses the beast’s freckled nose, wrinkling her own at the smell, and places it once more in her basket. The cat purrs. Turns once around itself, twice, and settles into the nest the woman made for it, the sycamore bark as bright as lightning against the thunder of its black fur.

Sarah Raymond is a recent graduate of Western Washington University where she studied creative writing. She describes her personal style as magical realism woven in history. She gravitates towards historical fiction but finds it requires a touch of the everyday magic and the abnormal realities we all experience. This is her first published piece.

Photo: JR Korpa