Season of the Witch

George Sanderson’s first encounter with the supernatural surfaced when he came to face the entity known as Baba Yaga. Spending most of his early life in the town of Morristown, New Jersey, George was a teacher of language arts and had been for four years before the events which changed his life forever had occurred.

It began on Monday the 11th, 1993. This morning George had awoke to another day off, as an unexpected leave fell upon the school’s occupants due to a worrisome gas leak discovered coming up from the basement. The teachers were all glad to be off on a paid break, despite the pay being half of what they usually make, but most didn’t mind as life in the town of Morristown wasn’t all too expensive at the time.

This was just one of the town’s many little charms. In Morristown you would come to find all the comforts of small town life. There were only two major roads leading out of the town, which sat near the great Lake Michael. It is here where most summers were spent and where many of the local students found themselves during that peculiarly warm month of October.

On this Monday, at about 2:54 p.m; there came the buzzing of an alarm clock at the end of a modestly sized cul-de-sac where the day had just begun. For within this dead-end street sat an unusually large garage which George called home. George’s abode, which was left to him by his deceased mother, was a small library, bedroom and kitchen all contained within one room.

Visitors to George’s house, few as they were, always remarked upon the great many books which he had accumulated on shelves which took up an entire wall of his one-room home. This was merely a side-effect of George’s love of literature and his minor-obsessive interests in mythology, folklore, fantasy and the literacy of it all.

It was a passion that not many other people in the town of Morristown shared, much to George’s dismay. George was twenty-six, a bachelor and planning to spend the remainder of his life in quiet bliss, growing into a wise old man and passing away at the age of seventy or so. This plan was not to last.

The only thing more sacred to George than his books, and his quiet little life, were the people he knew. Ami Fuller was a twenty-seven year old, brown haired and green-eyed, woman who ran the Morristown Postoffice and served as George’s only reason for walking four blocks and one left-turn, to her job, to send out things he could just as easily of put in his home mail box.

George did this every Monday in the hopes that one day he’d work up the courage to ask Ami out while passing through. Each Monday he failed. Daniel Pierce was, perhaps, the closest thing George had to a friend. However, the aging of their mild friendship did little to hid that fact that George saw Daniel as a loud, womanizing, egomaniac with sharper-than-usual looks and a degree with which he used to teach high school mathematics.

George spoke to Daniel only when he could not avoid it, but believed the man to be more capable of nobler living if he tried. Tobias Turner was an elderly man and a science teacher at the school where George worked. Toby was perhaps the kindest of all the faculty and the least likely to be hated by anyone.

This was what made his sudden death so unusual to all those who knew him. It was one month after George’s sudden vacation that his colleague was found, dead of something foul. Turner was at home, with his wife, when he got up from his living room chair, went into the kitchen to make a sandwich and collapsed dead due to a strange spawning build-up of flies and maggots which appeared in his stomach and ate their way outward till half of poor Tobias’ torso was gone.

Hearing him collapse, Misses Turner waddled into the kitchen, saw the frightful sight and dropped dead of a heart-attack. The news swept Morristown and all the townsfolk gathered to mourn the beloved elderly couple. All except for the, even older, Agnes McCarthy. At least, that’s what George had always known her as.

The truth of the old lady, down the street from George, was that no one really knew her name. No one even knew where she had come from. In fact, most people just took to calling her: The old lady down the street from George. Some folks remember her always living there and others say she had just arrived in recent years.

George had memories of the old lady from his boyhood days and always knew the woman would leave Morristown in the winter, then return once the snow would leave. George’s father always called her a witch. The people of the town, or those particulars who kept their ears to the ground, few as they were, saw Agnes as a strange creature.

If and when she did speak, it was with an Irish accent and one which seemed to carry age with it. George remembered the stories of his father. He remembered his father’s stories, about how the old woman had been part of a coven and how she owned animals who did her bidding. As a boy George laughed off his father’s stories as tales to shock and amuse him.

In the years to come George fell away from fairytales, and yet the behaviors of Agnes never seemed to cease from afar. The old woman would surround herself with black cats, seclude herself in her house at halloween, cackling away into the night and tend to the black goat she kept in a pen on the right side of her home.

Now, in the town of Morristown not many folks worship cats, own goats, laugh un-ironically and seem hostile to anything that even lays eyes upon them, and it was all this that made George, from his younger years into adulthood, feared the old woman. And with good reason. George would have probably never discovered the truth of the old woman’s identity, if it hadn’t been for the connections he stumbled upon, tying her to the murder of Tobias Turner.

It was two days after Tobias’ death and George was attending the funeral aside the rest of the faculty. It was there, in the distance, behind a blackened tree, where he saw the old woman, glaring from afar. Things only began to stir once Jack Dempsey, a local butcher, turned up missing his tongue and eyes in the dumpster behind his shop in town.

Once again, at the funeral, George, who once worked for Jack before taking up a career in teaching, spotted old Agnes. She stood behind another tree this time, glaring as she had before. After the lowering of the body had concluded, George looked up to see Agnes  gone and after the burial began, he walked over to the tree where she had been.

After walking over he stumbled upon a strange image, written on the blackened tree, in chalk. The image, which consisted of many lines, an upside-down cross and outstretched points from an upturned arch, baffled George. He flashed a picture with his phone and headed back home to see what he could find on it.

Of course, witchcraft came up in his search and George began to suspect more and more that something strange was going on in town. The following day George went to the cemetery to inspect the tree and the symbol again. While there he thought he felt eyes on him. Just before leaving, he noticed other trees within the cemetery.

Taking another stroll of the grounds, George found the symbol on every tree within the gates of the burial grounds. On his way home George still felt eyes on him. During his afternoon visit to the postoffice, George took a cut by the old woman’s house. Just strolling by sent a chill up his spine. The next day George rang by Daniel’s house and the two went out for lunch at the local diner.

George got into a discussion about witches and tried to bounce thoughts off of Daniel. Daniel was unresponsive and only concerned with getting the phone number of the waitress. Perhaps George would of had a trip to the ER that afternoon if he hadn’t noticed their waitress approaching him, holding back a glass pitcher of black coffee, ready to swing.

George caught this out of the corner of his eye and ducked to miss the coffee. He grabbed the arm of the waitress and she dropped the coffee on the floor, confused as to why George had stood to grab her. Daniel asked what her problem was and she replied by saying she felt as if she had blacked out for the last few minutes.

George, believing this attack to be the work of the old woman, headed to the library. He looked up all the lore he could find on witches and it was here where he found the most answers. The waitress must have been  victim of hypnotism or, at the very least, a tulpa sent to kill George has he was uncovering the old woman’s identity.

A tulpa is a mental extension of a being. Like a spiritual clone, but meant to serve out a purpose, and then stop existing. George read how if you drew the picture of a witch, that was plaguing you, into a cemetery tree and drove a silver nail into the area of the picture where the witch’s heart would be, the witch would die.

This explained why all the trees within the cemetery were marked with the old woman’s symbol. For if the witch claimed a tree with her rune, it could not be used to kill her. When George finally decided to go home, he left out the front entrance of the building, but began to hear hooves following him along the marble floor.

He turned to see the old woman’s black goat trailing him. George gasped as the goat standing in the middle of the library’s exit hall. People stepping out of other rooms asked George what he was looking at, as it was apparent that they could not see the goat. George ran home, frightened. That night George woke to a vision of the goat and Agnes standing in the far corner of the bedroom section of his home.

George shot up and ran for the light, missing a whole night of sleep out of fear of seeing them again. By this time George was sure the old woman was watching him. He was convinced she was sending her goat to keep and eye on his exploits. That following day George felt he had to take action and he was more than willing to do so.

After getting dressed, George received a phone call from Daniel. He sounded scared and told George to meet him in the center of town immediately. On his way out the door George was met with a paperboy, swinging a knife. George fell back as the boy, looking to be about eighteen, relentlessly swung for him.

George backed up against his door and the boy’s knife came down, just barely missing George’s shoulder and getting stuck in the wood frame. George apologized as he punched the boy in the face, breaking him of his hypnotic trance. George left the boy on the ground, bruised and confused. Half asleep, he ran to the center of town to meet Daniel.

There, before a group of people, Daniel ran to George, flailing his arms and crying out. He looked to be sickly and bloodied. As Daniel ran to George from across the street, a garbage truck turned the corner and ran Daniel over. It happened a mere five feet in front of George, who fell to his knees and went into a minor panic attack.

Ami happened to be walking down the street. As a group of people stopped to assess Daniel’s death, the garbage truck driver backed up and attempted to run down George with his vehicle. George ran into an alley and kept running as the truck smashed between two brick ends of the buildings to his sides.

George saw a group form from behind, to assess the trucker, as he felt time was running out for him to fight the witch. George fell to the ground and took a moment to collect himself. There came a ringing on his phone and when he answered Ami was on the other line. She was upset, asking why George hadn’t been by her work lately and questioning what had just happened.

George could think of nothing to say and hung up, shaking. Then, there came a spark within him. He thought of the people who had died, his nightmares, his attackers and how it all added up to the old woman. It was then that George realized that it was the people he knew that were paying the ultimate price for truths he refused to let go.

It hit him that Ami might be next, and that was a proclamation he could not see come to light. And so, that very same day, George collected up every weakness ever written in lore about witches and planned an assault on the old wicked witch. George was a lover of literature and he knew, well enough, that any anticipated attack could be countered.

He learned this from the many famous betrayals found in mythology, the art of war and the enigma of shakespearian espionage. So, George gave the witch no wiggle-room and planned to attack directly, swiftly and mercilessly. It was in his gathering, and last few hours of study, that George compiled his research and realized who he was up against.

Baba Yaga. The Queen of the Witches. The Hag of Hierarchy. She was the pinnacle and first of all those who followed. In the beginning she was a peasant who sold her soul to an unnamed demon. In exchange she became something less than a demon, but more than a human. This named woman existed through the ages, having to feed on the lives of others and making sacrifices to herself to keep her powers intact. 

Only she had supreme knowledge of tulpas, familiars, in the form of her black goat, advanced possession and immortality. It all traced back to the symbols in the cemetery. That night, at eight o’clock, George took his tools, readied the remedies and, armed with a revolver full of silver, copper and iron bullets, kicked in the back door of the old woman’s house after throwing a leafy medicine over the fence, into the black goat’s pen, which made it fall asleep.

George knew her schedule by now and knew she would return home from the market at exactly eight-fifteen. He only got a few feet in the door before he noticed spell bags and symbols carved all around the house. One by one he defused them and placed witch-imprisonment seals around her home. On the inside of the old woman’s front door George placed a weakening spell rune.

All of it was prepared so that, from the outside, all looked to be at ease. George went in and sat in the armchair, facing the front door and the television next to it. He heard the old woman approach and listen to her dress the goat. When the goat made no noise it seemed as if the old woman was going to run around the house and see what was the matter.

George’s heart sunk, realizing that if she came around the back she would realize what was the matter. These anxieties passed as he heard her sigh and witnessed the front door begin to unlock. George hid in the darkness and waited until she was inside. When she closed the door behind her, before George could fire his pre-cocked revolver, the old woman remarked not to bother.

As she flicked on the light her groceries dropped and George fell back in the chair as she made a jump for him. He fired off the gun twice, hitting her with a silver bullet and a copper bullet. He wrestled the gun away from him and began to grow long black claws with which she used to scratch away at his face and chest.

George pulled, from his shirt, a crucifix with runes upon it and placed it on the old woman’s head. Baba Yaga howled in pain as her flesh burned where the cross had been. The old woman grabbed George by the throat and began to squeeze. With a final motion George took the thinned horn of an antelope, covered in tree sap and his virgin blood, shoving it through the chest of Baba Yaga and piercing her heart.

As the old woman fell to the ground, dead, George stepped back, bloodied and battered. George stumbled for the door, stepping out and into the quiet night air. It was finally over, he thought. All of it was real. Witches, the supernatural and the black arts had always been. George contemplated all that had happened and all that could be as he strolled back to his home, down the block.

As he made his way inside, closing the door behind him, George threw his herb packets, gun, blade and rune scrolls aside, collapsing onto his bed in exhaustion. He fell into a deep sleep and slumbered in peace for the first time in a long time. However, he awoke suddenly, about an hour later, to the feeling of a strange presence closing in on him.

George jumped up as all the lights within his home blew out. His house began to shake as his book collection fell from the shelves. His front door began to crack and break until it eventually blew apart into shards which flew about the room. George covered his eyes, then looked again to see a shadowy figure standing in the doorway.

He ran for his gun and picked it up, but dropped it before firing as it began to burn and melt in his hand. George dived down to the floor, for his scrolls, but they burst into flames before he could reach them. Before he knew it, George was flung against the wall and strung up by an invisible force.

The blackened figure moved into the house and up to George, holding a long surgical knife. As it came closer, George used the corner of his palm, that had been sliced open by the flying shards of the door, to draw a magic-canceling spell into the wall at his side. As the figure winded back to impale him, George hit the symbol with his palm and the figure howled back in pain as a light burned in its chest.

George fell from the wall, grabbed the surgical knife from the shadowy figure’s hand and stabbed it with its own blade. The figure cried out in a scream and fell backward, landing with its arms reaching out. As George began to notice the scrolls setting the floor and wall of his home ablaze, he looked back down to see the shadowy figure melt away into the shape of a small black goat.

It was the witch’s familiar. As George ran from his burning abode, he now knew that it was truly over. Before exiting, George collected up what he could of his cloths and personal items before darting across the street and watching from a distance as his home fell to ashes. As George heard the police and fire department approach, he fled through backyards and out of Morristown, New Jersey.

With nowhere to go, George knew he couldn’t return. He left behind Ami, who he wished would never to learn of the true horrors of this world. Believing it would be best for everyone to believe he had perished in a fire, George disappeared to pursue a new purpose which drew his interest in the supernatural into an obsession.

George walked until reaching Summit, New Jersey, in Union County. Up until a mile outside of the city he had noticed a green Imperial Chrysler following him. He’d glance back now and again, attempting to lead the car down somewhere where he may inspect the driver and their intentions. Eventually they reached a stretch of road behind a mill and the car followed George down, appearing to know that their pursuit had been found out. 

George stopped walking and turned around to face the car that was creeping up behind him. The backroad was deserted as George grabbed his hunting knife from his pocket and bent over as the window to the car came down. There was a man inside, roughly George’s age, who introduced himself as Jack Dempsey.

George took his hunting knife and put it up to Jack’s throat, questioning why he was following him. Jack smirked and drew attention to a pistol he had aimed at George’s chest from inside the car. George pulled back his knife as Jack tucked his gun away, telling George that he knew all about his run-in with the old hag queen, Baba Yaga.

George put his knife away and listened to what Jack had to say. Jack told George to hop in. George had been walking for a while and Jack asked if he could treat him to breakfast while explaining his reason for picking him up. In a local diner the two men sat across from one another in a booth. Super Tramp’s Goodbye Stranger came on over the radio and Jack began to tap his foot.

After remarking that it was his favorite song, Jack told George that he’d been traveling the country for years, trying to catch Baba Yaga. That was until stumbling upon Morristown where George took her out faster than Jack could act. Jack sympathized with George, as he too had to leave behind his old life due to events surrounding the paranormal.

Yet, like George, Jack found comfort in his new life as a slayer of all things otherworldly and evil. Jack revealed that he’d been trailing George to ask him if he would be interested in joining him on his life’s mission to hunt down the biggest and baddest creatures roaming the United States, eventually killing them all.

George was intrigued, but unsure as he was still so new to all of this. He had no home, little money and few articles of clothing. Jack revealed that he had a place that they could both lie low, just until they were ready to move on. George was still doubtful. That was until Jack told him that the beginning of any great journey starts with a first step and assuring him that he could walk away from this offer at any time.

With that George was sold and agreed to join Jack in his war on evil. The two finished their breakfast, didn’t tip and left for Jack’s hideout. The two of them got in Jack’s Chrysler and headed for the far side of Summit until pulling up on Mountain Avenue. Jack parked his car by the woods near Soldiers memorial Field and had George follow him.

Eventually they came upon a plot of leafs which Jack brushed aside. Beneath them was a latch and door, leading to the underground. Jack went in and George followed. When they got inside George could see it was a modestly sized bunker with archaic runes carved all around it. Jack explained that they were all put down to ensure a variety of various supernatural entities could never enter the bunker.

The two men moved on and Jack brought George to a room filled with books. Jack told him that his private library, being made of various accounts and encounters with the paranormal, would provide George plenty of insight into killing the un-killable. The bunker was long and held three rooms: the library, the kitchen and the sleeping quarters.

Jack welcomed his new companion and told him to get some rest. Tomorrow they’d begin their first job together. That night George fell asleep quickly, but not before rolling over in his mind if he had made the right decision or not. That morning George awoke to the smell of eggs and bacon. He walked into the kitchen at eleven forty-five to find Jack making breakfast and enjoying a cigarette.

Jack turned, took one look at George and dropped his cigarette, apologizing for smoking without asking him if he minded. George said it was fine and Jack resumed. A bit later they sat down to eat and Jack wasted no time jumping into the details of the days events. First they were going to study up on werewolves, as a town down south was suffering from one and Jack had been itching to face one.

He told George, normally, he would train someone coming along with him, but seeing as how he slew the queen of the witches, Jack believed George had what he’d call a fighting spirit. A characteristic keen to this kind of work. For a moment everything went quiet and George finally asked the question he had been bouncing around in his head.

He asked Jack that if he knew about his fight with Baba Yaga, why he didn’t step in. Jack replied by saying that it looked like George’s fight. He said that he has met so many people like them, who go their whole lives seeking retribution from monsters and desire to be the only ones to end their existence.

Jack believed that George’s journey into his new self had to conclude with him killing the hag queen, and no one else. George thought about it for a second and accepted it, assuring Jack that he was ready to get to work. They cleaned up breakfast and went hard to work, studying up on the lore of lycanthropes.