THE LONELY DARK WITCH

CHAPTER ONE

Many do not believe in ghouls, ghosts, goblins and of course witches, of those silly people.  

Nobody believed that there was a witch living at the big old gothic house on the corner of Herbal Street, number 64 to be precise, apart from those who actually lived in Herbal Street itself.

The milkman would not enter beyond the gate and would leave the full cream, skimmed and semi skimmed milk, yoghurts and streaky back bacon every morning outside of the big old iron defences between the public and the property itself.

It was one week before the biggest event of the calendar year for the scariest creatures of the night. 

So let me tell you a little more about number sixty four Herbal Street, which was placed right on the edge of the Endless Forest. I will come to 'Endless Forest' a bit more in a bit, but back to the residents of Herbal Street.

The big iron gates had remained closed at all times, nobody had ever seen them open. The leaves were wet and soggy that had fallen from the trees close to the gates and had clustered around the bottom of each one. This meant that any person who had tried to push one of the gates open would have been pushing against the heavy cast iron and the leaves.

Grass on the big lawn that was divided by the path leading to the front door of the property, was overgrown and the outside gave the impression that the property was vacant. 

The dark green paint was beginning to peel from the wooden window frames and the big front door which looked whether beaten and in similar state to the windows, had the number four hanging upside down.

Inside the hallway was gloomy, the front windows showed no sign of any life and in the bedrooms upstairs again there was no sign of any existence, apart from the rats who were holding a late surprise birthday party for Lee the rat who had just turned two and had been given the responsibility to naw through as much electrical cable as possible and create holes in the floorboards to ensure a quick getaway.

There were also two spiders in the bathroom that were playing a friendly game of cards. The game today was called snap, which gave Arnold Spider an advantage over Danny Spider because Arnold had a full set of eight legs. However, Danny had lost one of his legs when he had ventured out to get the morning newspaper and came upon Terrence Sharp, the thirteen year old school bully.

Now as school bullies go Terrence 'his mothers little darling' and everybody else's nightmare was to put it bluntly a pain in the bottom.  His nickname was 'Lightning', because when he was around it always felt dark and you never knew when he was going to strike and you were to get struck.

That morning when Danny had gone through the gate, climbed up the letter box where the postman left the mail and Mike the paperboy left the newspaper, he grabbed the newspaper with all his legs and very carefully keeping hold of the newspaper, began to shimmy down to the ground.  

Danny had always been so careful of collecting the newspaper because he had heard of the legend of the reckless Spider who had the job role before his father and his father before him, indeed so many generations a spider simply did not have enough legs to count them upon.  The story went that one day a spider called Zany who was always game for a laugh did not take health and safety into account.  

Zany had always been thinking of practical jokes to play on the other spiders and in his chuckling as he thought of another hysterical plot, one that would even beat the time he polished the web of Dougie his cousin. When Dougie had climbed the web he slipped because it was treading upon slippy soap, he fell from the web and broke four of his legs.

Anyway the story went that Zany was chuckling so much, he lost his grip of the postal box on his way down and although he safely landed, the newspaper came crashing down that morning and landed upon Zany and he was no more.  The ironic thing was that the following morning when the new spider collected the newspaper, there was nothing, not even one sentence about the great Zany accident.