Witch’s
Head on the Tracks
Mr. Wibbly Wob was born eating right out of the Dust
Bowl.
He fought in two wars, the second of which made his legs
jut inwards like a bowlegged flamingo. He had no interest in killing. Mr.
Wibbly Wob lived his life to collect.
Collect what?
Well, when he was thirty, he bought a train. Not so he
could make money with it like his old man wanted, but because he wanted a
mobile collection of strange and peculiar kids.
The train was all bright colors painted poorly on a once shiny
black surface. Mr. Wibbly Wob had painted his face at the head of the train,
and it had become as decrepit and worn as his real face was. Sometimes, me and
the rest of the collection took bets on when he’d kick the bucket, but no one
was sure if anything could kill the old man. One kid had even dared suggest his
name might actually be ‘Billy Bob’, but he shut up pretty quickly when someone
threw a knife an inch past his ear.
Mr. Wibbly Wob had survived kids that put the rest of us
to shame – deformed, half-crazed, wolf-bred savages. The Dust Bowl hadn’t
starved him. The war had only made him wobble. A kid that, according to legend,
breathed fire just made him laugh; maybe Mr. Wibbly Wob was some crazy vampire
who collected crazy kids.
Those has been the big
performers. Our group mostly just sat on a stage and let the Church families gawk
and tap us with their Bibles. Parents liked us the most. We made them feel
better about their own parenting. We also liked to take bets on whether we’d
ever see their wide-eyed mongrels on the train with us.
I always came back no matter how many times I boarded
that train at Station 22, Nowhere Louisiana. That train loved the swamps. It
loved the Deep South where misery bled from every tree. I always came back with
my one worn bag. That’s why they called me Fade.
I
didn’t know all of the group this year, but I did recognize some of the
longstanding customers.
Parker
was a boy with skin like the softest chocolate, and was much too pretty to be
with the rest of us. He wore a soft blue football jacket and jeans that had
seen better days. If you asked him why he was with us, he wouldn’t say, but the
collection knew.
You
see, Parker always carried a small shoe box with him. If you could get him to
open it, you’d see the bones of about three or four rats: two adults, one or
two babies, depending on the light. Tommy told me that Parker used to live in a
big, gorgeous mansion with well-to-do parents. One day, his parents had let his
rats go in the forest area behind their home simply because they didn’t like
them. A snake had made short work of the rat family.
Their
son had made equally short work of his parents, depending on who you believed.
Some kids said that he showed them the bones of his rats and then pushed them
down the stairs of their big, fancy home. Others said he had wielded the guilty
snake like a whip and caught his mother and father in the throat with its
hungry fangs.
Parker
himself wouldn’t say.
The one time he did talk it was to tell me not to mind
the baby rats squirming.
I did mind, but they’d bitten my neck enough times that I
knew better. I felt those little buggers every night in my hair, my pajamas,
even in my teeth. They’d sort of grown on me, though.
Oh, and of course there was Tommy.
Tommy was a weird case, because Tommy had an imaginary
demon in his closet.
That’s why his parents had told him he couldn’t play in
the closet anymore. When they told him that, legend has it that that mean old
demon sprung right out of Tommy’s closet and slashed them to bits.
Mr. Wibbly Wob had been nice enough to give the poor kid
a closet in his tiny room. That demon didn’t like being outside of it for long,
and that’s where Tommy would sleep at night, wrapped in a pile of clothes that
were far too big for him. Some liked to call him Scarecrow, but never to his
face.
You’d look at Tommy and
think of a lamb, I think. He’s got a baby face full of freckles, tufts of
ginger curls on his head and wide blue eyes – sweetest kid you could ever meet.
His demon, from what I had seen, stood seven feet tall
and looked like a man made of black barbed wire. He had little wicked white
eyes and a crooked white smile, but always looked dashing in his crooked top
hat with a single loose band aid on the brim. The collection and I had learned
from Tommy that the demon liked to be called Mr. Stokes – so that’s what we
called him.
The last familiar face was Helen.
Helen was the human embodiment of gluttony, I thought. At
least when it came to the spotlight.
That prim ten-year-old had golden curls that could make a
Vaudeville actress blush, and big honeyed eyes. She knew the exact pitch to
wail in, the exact whine level to get attention, and all the right moves to
have the crowds gather around her, cooing and awing.
I’d told her she was full of it exactly one time, and
she’d screamed like a banshee until Mr. Wibbly Wob hobbled down from his office
in the caboose and whacked me with his cane.
No one was a big fan of hers inside the train.
Those were the faces I was familiar with, and the exact
ones squinting at cards when the train suddenly pulled to a stop.
We could all hear Mr. Wibbly Wob cursing from the
conductor’s chair before a buzzing speaker blared, “SHORT STOP! BACK IN THREE
HOURS!”
Tommy, Parker and I all jumped at the chance to get out
on land.
Helen started to stand but I held my hand up, “No way. I
don’t care how much you bitch to Wibbly Wob, we’re not taking you along again.”
The pout started but the boys and I hopped out before her
face could light up like an explosion in the sunset.
The three of us hopped down into dirt that was half dust
and half mud. No one knew why, but Mr. Wibbly Wob loved to coast the train all
around the swampy areas of the Deep South.
We’d agreed, under the cover of blankets and an old oil
lamp, it was because of the Hat Men – the solemn spirits in all black with
wide-brimmed black hats that haunted the swamps. They carried fishing nets with
them to collect souls for the God of the Lost, who ate up any lost people in
any form that he could.
In turn, we each patted the side of the train for good
luck, right on the first ‘W’ of the painted: MR. WIBBLY WOB’S PHANTASMIC PAIN
TRAIN.
Then, it was off down the Northern side of the tracks.
We chatted about nothing and everything, watching the
lightning bugs begin to blink like a grand parade throughout the swamp. The
smell of gaseous ooze and vernal pools mixed with the fading heat of the sun
prevailed; we were all drenched in sweat in two minutes.
Tommy stopped and held his hand up, shirt sliding down
and exposing his frail shoulder, “Look at that!”
Parker and I looked.
There was a squat, semi-round object in a white sack on
the train tracks. Someone’s laundry blown out off a swamp tour boat, I thought
at first, but then I noticed the blood. It was seeping out of one side of the
bag only, and a trail of it slowly faded off into the waters.
“Hat Men?” Tommy asked, eyes wide.
Parker said nothing.
“Nah,” I murmured and approached it, “It’s a witch’s
head.”
Tommy gasped as I rolled it over with my foot, “That witch’ll
come back with a vengeance!”
“Nah. If you cut off their heads, they don’t come back.”
I told him and knelt down. The head was wrapped in plain white cloth and tied
loosely with a faded rubber band.
“Don’t more grow back?” The ginger asked.
“That’s a devil-snake,” I told him.
Parker added nothing.
The innards were sticky and stained like rust. The skin
of the witch felt almost like plastic as I pulled it out.
That was a witch alright. “Hello, Marta.”
The other two approached, though Tommy was noticeably
behind Parker. “Marta?”
Slowly, I turned the head around in the fading sunlight.
“This here is Marta Dean Wilson. She was one of Mr. Wibbly Wob’s original
collectibles back in 1950.”
The years hadn’t been kind to the once fiery red-head. I
recognized her from the portrait that rattled and shook in the dining hall. She
had a bright yellow bow in her hair and one Hell of a scowl compared to the boy
with a humpback on her right. Now, Marta Dean Wilson’s fire had turned gray and
the green eyes that once held disdain for the whole world had become sullen and
glassy.
“Do you reckon we hit her?” Tommy asked.
“Nah. There was no bump and the train was behind us. She
must’ve lied on the tracks with her neck on the rail and waited for another
train. Must’ve used her witchcraft to make sure it was a clean cut, otherwise
her head would be squashed.”
I held it up like a sacrifice to the swamp. “Ashes to
ashes, Ms. Wilson.”
Parker tugged on my sleeve and cradled his shoe box.
“Her story?” I glanced around and found an old stump sat
on the side of the tracks. Perching her head there, I turned to my audience and
cleared my throat: “Marta Dean Wilson once put ants in Mr. Wibbly Wob’s tea.
She was born to two broke farmers in the 1950s who left her with a cracker
shack that looked like a doll house. Some say she once shook hands with the
president at the time and then farted on him – on purpose. Marta Dean Wilson
loved to eat food that was too spicy and then blow in people’s faces. She was a
right witch, true and true.”
“Amen,” Tommy mumbled.
“When I reckon she was about thirty, some man showed
interest in her and they got hitched. Back then, there was a small town around
these parts, and the townspeople would murmur about Marta and her man. They
said she was a loon that talked to the despicable creatures and crawlers from
the swamp like they were her babies. She couldn’t have a human one, they said,
so she was trying to trick some poor animal into acting like she’d given birth
to it. After a few years of that, her husband turned into a mean drunk. Never
hit her – man knew better than to hit a witch – but was dumb enough to leave
her for some red-shoe wearing businesswoman who passed on through. They say she
put a wicked curse on him and the man was found dead before he could even
change his will, so she got all of his money to spend on her critters and
spells.”
I stopped and rested my hand on Marta’s crown. She still
had that look of malice in her eyes, but it was the malice of a cornered
animal. Some spirit or angry demon had come to take her soul and she’d died
farting in even its face by lying on the tracks.
“Let’s get her on home,” I suggested.
The other two didn’t like it, I could tell, but they
weren’t about to question me on not upsetting dead witches, demons and swamps.
We bundled her head back up and trudged through the
hardening mud until we found her cottage.
It was a right sight: the windows were blocked with
yellowed papers and books, and the lawn had grown nearly as tall as us. Yet,
the little rows of flowerbeds around the white picket fence were immaculate.
So, we decided to bury her with her violets.
After we replaced the flowers over her eyes, the three of
us joined hands under the moonlight.
“To a fellow collectible,” we muttered in unison. “May
you board the train once again and haunt Helen until her curls turn white.”
With that, we turned back towards Mr. Wibbly Wob’s
Phantasmic Pain Train and watched for any Hat Men that might come take our
souls.
When we were back onboard, I took a favorite leaky pen
from my coat and crossed out Marta’s angry face in the portrait. For a moment
or two, I thought our eyes met in that black and white time capsule.
There was no time to think of the witch’s head on the
tracks. We had a show to do.
Amber E. Colyer is an
aspiring novelist who loves all things horror, fantasy and science-fiction. She
has been writing since the age of eleven and is currently writing about an
action story about witches fighting in giant robots. Any spare time she isn't
writing, at work or in school is dedicated towards music, video games and
daydreaming.
Tags:
Poetry