WE ALL KNOW ANNE IS A WITCH

WE ALL KNOW ANNE IS A WITCH
by Harrison Shimens

We all knew there was something strange and evil about Anne Lamarque and we all wish we had done something sooner. But how could we have known? That the witch would do something? Something like this?

We always made sure to hush our voices as we passed her old white house. Under our breath we’d agree that there wasn’t any way she could’ve been happy in that musty place. It was desolate; antiquated and obsolete architecture more suited to the middle of the forest than the centre of a col-de-sac. Easily the oldest house on the block, its white siding was a tapestry of crawling ivy, living and dead. The wire screens in disrepair, the storm windows filled with condensation. One summer, when Dan’s kid was in college, they tried to clean her windows. Two hours they spent mopping, rinsing, squeegeeing, until finally they told Anne that the filth and muck was so deeply set in that she needed to get them replaced. Then she chided them venomously and slammed the door in those young men’s faces.

My theory: that horrid, twisted tree out front of her house caused moisture to get stuck in the windows and seep into the wood. It’s a chestnut tree and sits directly in front of the house. Keeping the morose cottage in perpetual shade, it drops brown spikey balls each October along with the typical dead leaves. She would leave the chestnuts, along with the fallen leaves to rot and decay on her front yard and the sidewalk. The damned thing is an eye sore, and at multiple community meetings we tried voting to remove it. We managed to force her to clear what landed on the sidewalk, but she remained adamantly against beautifying her own property. When it moved forward with the city, they told us that because it sits between her house and the sidewalk, it was her property.

We had no power over her or that gnarled monstrosity.

I remember neighbourhood boys would toss the spikey green balls that fell from the tree and pelt the wooden siding of the house. Hearing the noise from my own backyard, I’m sure that inside Anne could feel each thud deep within her skull. After the first time, she had spoken to the parents of the kids who’d done it. Not of mine of course, Jason and Kimberly are good kids. Real good kids. It was John and Mary she spoke to, about their boys Jacob and Henry, God bless them.

Anne was met with faces of shock and concern and “we’ll make sure to speak with them.” But these days she is too old to scold the children every time they did it. So, they kept tossing those chestnuts every autumn. Through the cloudy bay window, we could see Anne, just sitting in her rocking chair. Rhythmically, back, and forth, eyes on the wall in front of her, in time with the banging on the walls.

My neighbour John has been in the neighbourhood a good seven years longer than me, and he’s filled me in on everything I need to know. He told me that Anne was once beautiful, but that the quiet hopeful expression on her face putrefied into a dull vacant stare. John says its because she stopped pretending around us.

“She’s finally not afraid to show us her true face, who she really is,” John told me. And I trust John, he’s told me everything: the Markus’ divorce, the Henderson’s alcoholism, and every kid who’d gotten so much as a parking ticket in a five-kilometer radius.

But Anne. Anne always remained a mystery. A puzzle we all had our hands on, teasing and tinkering. We wondered: what secrets would spill from her head if we cracked it open like one of those chestnuts on her lawn? Now that we know, now that innocent blood is on her hands, we wish we could have burned the bitch alive.

Anne didn’t work. Only ambled listlessly around the neighbourhood. No one knew where she was going, or for what purpose. Her outfits were always gloomy and unsuitable for walking long distances. Plain long dresses, black and grey and sometimes navy, silver hair put up in a dishevelled bun. Her face crisped up in the summer sun, so she took to wearing a black large, brimmed sunhat around April when the UV index rose. She was old sure, but she would walk for hours each day. Up and down the streets and the avenues lined with tidy juvenile maple trees, past lawns, manicured and green and much nicer than her own. She would look through our windows like an alien observing humans for the first time. Vacantly examining TV’s, couches, happy families, quickly harboring a quivering smile that blew away like ash in the wind. John told me that when Anne first moved to our neighbourhood, her walks were nimble, quick paced even. But it was as the years slipped by, her pace slowed, to barely a shamble.

“See? She’s stopped trying,” John would tell me over an afternoon Molson as she stumbled down his street. Passing John’s house, her scarce smile soured. The sides of her lips slipped down her wrinkled face into an abhorrent arch.

We never knew what she was so unhappy about, but we all figured it had something to do with the situation with her husband. Or lack thereof. She had never lived with a man—not in our neighbourhood. And this made us question. What had happened to him? Was she a widow? A bitter divorcee? Publicly, we all had assumed she had a husband at some point, and that he had divorced her or died.  

Privately, we had other theories. Hilary from down the street was convinced it was poison—that Anne was a black widow who had moved to their neighbourhood to find a new man to extort and murder.

“She ain’t touching my pension!” was contributed at a barbeque, and met with guttural laughs from the men, myself included. John and Mary hypothesized she had cheated on her husband, and then upon being found out murdered them both with a knife. Or a gun. No one could remember the truth. Jason and Kimberly came up with, what we thought, was the most entertaining theory. Lord, if only we knew back then. God, how we laughed at the childhood naivety and superstition.

Anne was a witch. She killed her husband in a sacrifice to some pagan perversion of God.

She took him and hung him up upside down, painted a pentagram around him, lit red candles, drained his blood, drank it. Or turned it into a soup. Or baked it into the chocolate cake she had given to John and Mary upon moving to the neighbourhood. The cake that was promptly tossed into the garbage.

Our kids would stand on chairs and look over the fence at the old wooden house, covered in orange leaves from the chestnut tree. They would take turns scaring each other with stories of witchcraft and magic. Wide eyed tales of a mysterious green light coming from the house at night, the smell of dead bodies in her backyard, old books of spells stacked high to the ceiling. At the time the other parents and I never took them seriously—we’d never seen anything to suggest real witchcraft or satanism or anything like that.

We would promptly inform them: witches aren’t real, and magic isn’t real. They would then continue on and discuss their own theories of where her husband had gone and why she didn’t work. It was never long before those conversational wells ran dry. That’s when we would discuss her kids. Or lack thereof.

Those were the rumors that disturbed me the most.

Did we tell any of this to Anne? No, of course not. But I am convinced that she heard it all. Peering through her window, that impenetrable wax of condensation obscuring the outside world, watching us. Watching us all. Her old, wrinkled face, mapped by blue and purple veins, black dead eyes, watching and listening. Hearing everything we said.

As the light of summer morphed into the dim orange glow of autumn, Anne stopped her walks completely. Neighbours walked past and all they could see was her ghostly distorted face through the congealed window. All through September she stayed inside. It wasn’t until nearly the end of October that I saw her outside again, finally raking the leaves out front of the decrepit old shack.

I remember saying something like: “that’s a pretty big job for someone like you. I could send Jason over to help, lickity-split. It wouldn’t be a problem.” I’m sure that I smiled.

Children in bright and colourful costumes ran past, and Anne’s haunted eyes followed them down the road. Several jack-o’-lanterns with toothy grins guarded the front steps of the white house.

“I think I’ve had enough of children,” she mumbled, almost to herself. I began to think that maybe she was beginning to go senile. “My house. It creaks all day and night this time of year. It’s the change in the air,” she laughed. It trailed off into a sore croak. “In the creaks, I hear the sounds of the children.”

That was the last time I interacted with Anne before the end. My supposition of her unravelling mind was shared with John and Mary at dinner, where they expressed concerns. We debated over whether or not we should call a doctor, have her institutionalized. We never reached a conclusion on what to do about Anne. But at that point, it was probably already too late.

Because now, here I stand on the night before Halloween inside that old witches’ cabin. Drawn in by the sounds of sirens, twinkling red and blue lights. Two small bloody bodies lay heaped, crumpled in a corner, yellowed wallpaper shredded to ribbons. John and Mary howling in despair at the full harvest moon. The two boy’s heads atop two separate wooden chairs. I bring myself to look into their eyes.

And old Anne. Stocking’s slipping down off her wrinkled legs, delicately dragging across the floor as she swayed, the banister creaking with each movement. Candles burning, the stench of death in my nose like when those squirrels crawled into my chimney to die. John and Mary still squealing in grief. Symbols I don’t understand, haphazardly finger painted on the walls in syrupy red, surrounding the haunted words of an unravelled mind: NOW I AM YOUR WITCH.

Fiction © Copyright Harrison Shimens
Image by Peter H from Pixabay