THIS BOOK WILL KILL YOU

_H Ɔ T I W_03

I was six years old when I first saw the witch.

I'm a child again now, pushing open the door to where she lives. I'm the same child who was taken from that liminal space between dream and waking, who was dragged here against her will night after night after night by a raggedy woman with a moon-yellow grin.

The room looks different, and it takes me a moment to work out why. I'm entering it through the door, not through the window, so the opening into the kitchen is to my right. I can see the window to my left and through the dirty glass I can see my bedroom, I can see a girl sitting on my bed with headphones on and her computer on her lap and her face hollowed out and lined with meat. She must sense me because she twists her empty skull and stares back for a moment before returning to her work.

I swallow, my mind empty too, everything good scooped out of it and slopped to the floor. I'm nothing, I'm nobody, I'm scattered and lost and I'm not even sure what I'm doing as I tread the bare boards, as I walk into the middle of that big, empty room, the knife held out in front of me and my head turned to the side to see the kitchen, filthy, empty, seared into sharp lines by a single bare, swinging bulb.

There's a table there, sliding into view with every step. There's a table there and it's covered in meat, a butcher shop's worth. There's a stove, saucepan bubbling.

Thump.

She's there. She's there. She's there.

I can't see her past the wall but I can hear her I can hear her I can hear her I can hear her moving toward the door. She can't move quickly, she's far too old for that. But she's coming, her bare feet scuffing the floor, the lump of her hand knocking against the wall.

Thump.

She's grinning. I can't see her but I know she's grinning. I can feel it through the wall, as bright as the bulb. She's grinning because she knows I'm not going anywhere.

She's right, I might as well be wrapped in duct tape. I cannot move, I cannot breathe. I just stare at that door, seeing her shadow flood the floor like dirty water, see the eclipse of her head push itself around the sill, twisted and bent, her face buried in clumps of matted hair but one eye sliding up in its socket, one blistered, boiling eye and beneath it one arm, too long and broomstick thin, sliding out to touch me.

And I know, I know, that if those crackboned fingers touch me I'll never be able to leave this place.

So I fight it, I fight it like there was somebody on top of me, pinning me down. I fight it like there was a hand over my mouth and nose and I was out of air. I kick against the broken shell of my body, I punch, I open my mouth and scream and scream and scream silently until suddenly my body responds and I'm screaming for real, I'm kicking, I'm hitting, I'm thrusting with the knife but there's no force grabbing me and pulling me out the window, there's no waking, I'm here and she's still coming, still coming.

I stagger back into the window. She's halfway across the room, broken-backed and bent almost in two, moving like a puppet moves, jerking her way toward me. Her feet barely touch the ground, her downward pointing toes scuffing the bare floor, clacking together like they're made of wood. Her arms are six feet long and sliding from the rags of her shawl, her hands too big, they're like the hands of the statue in the forest and they're getting bigger, they look like they could pick me up and fold around me and cup me like a songbird and that's exactly what they do because she touches me, she's picking me up and I'm skylark small, caught in the sweaty filth of her hands as her giant face looms in toward me, her eye a blister of rage, her mouth a nest of horse's teeth opening to reveal a slab of tongue and a throat red raw and hungry, so hungry.