18 Jul Touch of the Witch

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on July 18, 2021

“Touch of the Witch”

Written by Chisto Healy
Edited by Craig Groshek and Seth Paul
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 17 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

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Henry stepped towards the witch, torch blazing in his hand. He smiled at the sight of her being tied to the stake. They were wrapping her in iron chains this time. She wouldn’t be escaping, not again. No one else’s family would die by her hand. He would make sure of that, once and for all.

Henry was proud to be the one to light the flame, to burn her evil out of the world, while the rest of his town looked on. They watched with both anticipation and fear. They needed to see her burn, to know that she was actually gone, but they feared even the idea of being in close proximity to such a foul creature. Henry understood their trepidation all too well, but it would be over soon.

Behind his eyes, Henry could still see the bloated mottled green faces of his wife and children, their tongues sticking out and their eyes bulging unnaturally. The foul witch’s disgusting magic poisoned them, turned them into sickly looking monsters, their beauty stolen from them, from him. They were nothing but good before she got a hold of them. The witch herself was a poison, a cancer plaguing their town, a disease they would soon be rid of. Henry smiled as he thought of the good health and prosperity that would follow in the wake of her burning. It would be like the sun rising after a terrible rain. Her death would bring peace, something they all yearned for and prayed for daily.

“Iron silences magic, witch,” he said, spitting the words into her face as she recoiled from the heat of the torch, her pale face beaded with sweat, and her deep set brown eyes pleading with him. He would have stayed there and let her beg after what she stole from him had the crowd not been so anxious for him to get on with it. He looked her over with hate and disdain in his gaze. She would have been beautiful had she not been so ugly on the inside. Her soul was filthy, decrepit, and overripe with the decay of evil.

“You won’t be getting away this time,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning up. “You will burn, and it will hurt. It will take the flesh from your bones, let your organs fall away and expose the darkness inside of you. Then that will be burned, too, for everyone to see, and we will clap and cheer when you are gone. Not a single tear will be spread for you, not one head bowed. Good riddance, monster.”

The witch squirmed and writhed against her chains. She wanted to speak, to plead her case, but her mouth had been sewed shut to be sure she couldn’t utter any incantations. Her lips fought against the thread and bled down her chin as her eyes screamed what her voice could not. Henry would feel no sympathy for this foul thing. He knew she was not the woman she appeared to be. She was born of the Devil. It festered in her heart. He pictured the dead faces of his family to remind him of this. Witches were keen at manipulation. They always seemed to have one last trick, even on their deathbed.

They had tried to burn her once already after they found the mayor and his cronies fixed to the walls of the town hall like holiday decorations, their innards wrapped around their limbs like organic rope, blood spilling from their opened guts to pool at the room’s center, the Devil’s decorative fountain of gore. When the town doctor arrived at the grisly scene, he declared that it was definitely the work of witchcraft. No one needed to be told who the culprit was. She lived alone in the woods outside of town in a ramshackle hut of her own design. She had no man in that putrid little home, but yet she ended up with child. No one in town knew her or her ancestors. It was unknown where she came from or how she came to be there behind their town. She just seemed to appear one day. From the first sighting of the strange woman, the townspeople were wary. There was something wrong with her, and they all knew it. Henry had actually been one of the few to advocate for her. Foolishly, he had said she was harmless and should be left to her bizarre self-imposed solitude, a decision he now regretted more than any in his life.

When the doctor declared witchcraft, the town militia marched right into the woods and stole the witch from her home. They didn’t even want to put her into a cell because they feared what she could do from behind those bars, so they rushed her directly to execution.

She was tied firmly to the stake, bound with thick ropes, but before the torch even reached the kindling, the witch turned the ropes into serpents. They slid and slithered right off of her body in an almost sensual, sinful manner, and the demonic serpents made their way into the crowd, sticking their poisoned fangs into everyone they could before they were cut down, hacked to pieces by swords and axes. The witch sauntered off back towards her home in the woods, walking with a swagger that enticed both men and women even as the poison took hold of their bodies. As they watched her leave, their loins writhing, townsfolk spewed bile everywhere, soaking each other in it, then falling from the venom in their tainted veins.

Henry could still recall looking upon that horrible scene and seeing the ground littered with the dead, their stomach contents and the hacked chunks of mutilated serpents. He felt sick himself, but he kept it contained and made the sign of the cross. There was no question as to Satan’s presence in his town.

The doctor had been one of the people to fall to the poison of the spell-bound snake fangs, so they had to look elsewhere for what to do next. Henry had been amongst the crowd of survivors that ran to the church. Father Samuel told them iron was the answer, and it seemed he was correct. Henry recalled the look on the witch’s face when they returned to her shack. She showed no fear. Her eyes glistened, and her lips curled in a smile, not unlike the one he wore now as he looked upon her, facing her end.

Her face changed when she saw the chains. She tried to flee, throwing her chair backward and bolting towards the window, but a chain was wrapped around her ankle, and she was tugged to the ground. She screamed as they surrounded her and wrapped her tightly. Then the town seamstress went to work on her mouth. Behind the chaos, Father Samuel recited prayer after prayer, bellowing the word of the Lord to combat her evil in his own way.

Now she was back on the same stake that never burned, tied with the chains she feared more than any man, and she looked at Henry with her chestnut brown eyes, windows to an evil soul. “It’s over,” he told her. “Today, you die.”

Somehow her hand had gotten free of the chains, not enough to cast a spell or do whatever she did in Satan’s name, but enough to grab Henry’s arm. He looked at her hand on his flesh, and he was sickened by the sight of it. She grasped him firmly, and he felt like it was burning into his flesh. She was indeed pleading with him quietly, finding another way since her mouth couldn’t open, but he wasn’t listening. He would never listen.

Her snow-white flesh was touching his, and it filled him with revulsion. It felt like holding hands with the Devil himself. Henry swore he could feel it seeping in through his pore and spreading its sickness into him. Its evil was acidic. Did he smell the hair of his arm burning beneath her grip? He curled a lip like an angry dog, but he didn’t want the townsfolk to panic, so he kept his anger and panic reeled in.

Henry dropped the torch then, setting fire to the kindling at the witch’s feet and assuring the end to her reign of terror. Then with his now free hand, he drew his knife from a sheath at his side. She was begging for mercy then, her eyes wild and that lone pale hand gripping him tightly as the fire caught and grew, charring her feet, singeing her legs, burning the hair off and then the flesh, to mar the bones beneath. As she blackened, her lips broke their binds, and she screamed in horrible agony. It was primal and guttural and awful, and even the people who couldn’t wait to see her die looked away and covered their ears. Her elongated fingernail cut into the flesh of Henry’s forearm, slicing open the meat of his taut muscle. He responded in kind by slicing at her hand with his knife, sawing at the fingers that held him in their evil grip. He felt the steel hit bone, and he continued to cut through. It was enough for him to get away from her with an exasperated sigh of relief.

Henry made the sign of the cross again as he backed up and watched with the rest of the sickened crowd as the fires consumed the evil that had been terrorizing their town. He glanced down at the cut on his arm for a moment and saw that her severed finger was still on him, hanging there like an ornament from a holiday tree.

Repulsed, Henry flung his arm to shake it off, but the cursed fingernail was still attached to him, buried in the meat of his arm. The pain of her grip had been real after all. The severed finger just swung from him, back and forth as he shook his arm. He couldn’t get it to come loose. He grimaced in pain and realized that some of the people in the crowd were now watching him with the same horror and revulsion in their gaze. Henry tried to compose himself and lowered his arm, trying to focus on the woman that was burning alive before him. He nodded to them to let them know that everything was okay. He only hoped he wasn’t lying to them and to himself.

Henry could smell her flesh cooking in the heat of his flames, and he wished they would burn faster and do away with her. He wanted her screams to stop, her cries to cease, her evil to fade into smoke and be gone. He watched her shrivel like bacon in a pan, the meat of her curling inward as it fried in the flames, her fat dripping off to sizzle at her now skeletal feet.

When prying eyes were off of him, Henry lowered his gaze to the finger that still clung to him, and he watched as it pulled itself up into the open wound in his forearm, squeezing itself between flaps of filleted flesh in a parasitic way. His eyes bulged, but he bit back his scream. He didn’t understand how this could be happening. Her evil carried on even as she burned under the wrapping of those iron chains.

The cursed finger wriggled up underneath the meat of his muscle like a squirming worm. It was impossible, one last bit of evil from the dying sorceress, whose screams rang out behind a wall of flame, even as her mouth melted and her teeth fell away like ivory leaves from a dying tree. He raised his arm and watched as the finger then crawled under his skin, a large lump rising upwards and moving inside of him towards his bicep, like a roaming tumor.

Henry pinched his arm and tried to cut off the finger’s route. He wrapped his free hand around his arm like a tourniquet. He tried to drag his hand down and force it back towards the opening where he could retrieve it and do away with it. The pain was intense and made him sweat worse than the nearby fire. The long pointed nail of the finger inside his arm broke free from his skin, tearing its way out like the claw of an animal ripping through a curtain, and it dug into his exposed hand, eliciting a snarl from him.

Henry feared drawing attention to himself and making a scene when these people had been waiting and praying to be free from the witch’s evil, so he tried to walk away from the crowd, his arm bleeding in thin rivulets. He didn’t want anyone to know that he had been touched by the witch because he knew just how they would see it, even though he was the one who burned her and erased her evil from their world. The townsfolk would see him as tainted, and under the advice of Father Samuel, they would most likely kill him, and quite possibly in the same brutal fashion they were now watching. Henry’s stomach lurched at the thought. He didn’t think he could withstand that kind of pain. To emphasize that point, the witch’s screams ripped through the air like the wail of a siren. Many people hugged themselves against the high-pitched shrill sound that emanated from her as her eyes melted and her scream fell into the more simple crackle of flames.

Henry just had to get the damned finger out of his arm and destroy it, and then everything would be fine, and they could get back to rebuilding and resuming life as it was before she came there. They were so close to freedom, and Henry mouthed the words to the prayers he’d been taught as a child.

He didn’t want to go home where people would come looking for him in a moment. That would only lead to him being caught and killed, and he wasn’t as cocky as the witch. He thought again about the shock on her face when she realized she was in real danger as they brandished those chains.

He didn’t know where to go, though, how to keep himself and the others safe. How could he hide such a repulsive thing? He needed privacy, time to deal with this predicament, so he fell back into the surrounding trees, wandering away from the crowd and into the woods, her domain, the place she called home until today.

Henry felt the finger worming its way back up his arm towards his shoulder, pushing through the meat and bone as it went, cutting through tendons with that wretched nail. It was horribly painful, unlike anything he had ever felt or even imagined. He felt the muscle and sinew of his arm tearing as the razor-like fingernail cut its path. He felt it being pulled away from the bone as the finger forced its way underneath.

Where was it headed? Would it go to his brain and make him do terrible things? Did that wretched finger intend for him to be the witch’s puppet? He would kill himself before he would allow that to happen. He would not become the witch’s pawn, not ever. He still had his knife and one good arm. Good would prevail today. He would see to it.

Henry finally judged that he was far enough away to cut the finger out without prying eyes. He sat down on the ground, his back against a tree and shrugged his shirt off, which proved more difficult than he realized with his addled arm. The finger was in his armpit now, pressing on nerves under his flesh, the pressure of it moving the underarm hairs around like living tentacles. Henry was sweating profusely now. Tears had formed in his eyes. The pain was excruciating and made his nerves go haywire. His arm spasmed and tensed, throwing itself around against his will.

He jammed the tip of his knife into his armpit and bit his lip against the scream, but the blade clicked against the witch’s fingernail, and the finger just backed up, moving away from danger and remaining inside him. He growled furiously as the sweat poured towards his eyes, and he was forced to blink it away.

Henry slashed at his tricep, opening his arm wide like he was skinning a rabbit for dinner, and he could see the pale finger in the torn meat of his arm that now bled into the grass. It was wiggling, trying to get free. Henry felt like he was going to pass out, but he gritted his teeth and dropped the knife. He dug his fingers into his now open arm, tears running in rivulets down his cheeks, and he grabbed the wriggling finger between two of his own. It squirmed in resistance, bucking and fighting against capture, but he tugged it free and tossed it onto the ground, cursing at it as he did so.

His arm was in bad shape, torn and bleeding. It felt useless, not responding to his brain’s commands. He knew that he couldn’t let any part of the witch survive, so he bounded to his feet and quickly stomped on the finger that was dragging itself through the grass like an earthworm. Henry leaned that way, putting all his weight onto that foot in an effort to crush it under the sole of his boot, grinding it into the dirt beneath his sole.

He yelped in pain then and jumped backward, banging his head on a low-hanging tree branch. He had underestimated the sharpness of the witch’s disgusting fingernail. It had cut right through his boot, tearing into the soft flesh on the bottom of his foot, slicing it wide. He could feel the hot sticky blood pooling inside his boot. Henry begged God for strength then as he wobbled, lights before his eyes that had nothing to do with the daytime sun.

Henry looked at the spot in the grass and saw that the finger was no longer there. He feared what that meant. No! God help me. No.

It could only be two things. It either got away and was hiding in the grass somewhere, or it was in his shoe. He dropped to the ground in a hurry and tugged his boot off. The blood poured out like lager from a cask. The damn thing had gotten him good. The sight of all that blood made him woozy, but Henry knew that he had to remain conscious until he knew for sure that the finger had been disposed of. If he lost consciousness now, who knew what the consequences would be, not just for him, but for everyone.

Henry shook his shoe ou,t but nothing fell free, and he moaned. He knew how the thing could hold on, after seeing it latch to his arm how it had when he first cut it free from her hand, so he reached his hand inside the empty boot and felt around to make sure. As he was digging around in his boot, he felt it, but not with his hand. It was in his foot, working its way up and around the bone of his ankle, snaking through his nerves and cutting through his muscles, fingernail glancing off of the bone and cartilage in its way. The intensity of the pain made him jerk and spasm, kicking his leg out awkwardly.

Henry threw his boot down on the ground and grabbed his leg for a closer inspection. He could see the shape of the finger bulging under the tight skin of his ankle. He picked his knife up from the grass with his working hand, and the finger disappeared, moving further up inside his leg. Henry was starting to feel crazy, and genuinely afraid. The finger was driven by black magic. It was inside of him. Who knew what it was doing to him? Was it poisoning him from the inside, laying some kind of sickening egg under his flesh, leaving rot in its wake? He didn’t know, but he knew whatever it was doing, it wasn’t good. He started quickly rambling through prayer.

Henry could see the finger, the bulge under his flesh disappearing and reappearing in a new place as it moved, new lumps jutting out constantly like there were enormous beetles crawling under his flesh.

The witch had started with the farm, killing the livestock, ruining their crops. Henry hadn’t believed back then that she was the culprit. He had thought she was just a strange loner that lived in her misery in the woods. He thought the townsfolk just needed someone to blame because they couldn’t understand why God would let their crops die and their food dwindle away.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. She was evil, a blight on God’s world. Even now, as she tortured him with her last remaining bit, he could recall seeing the eviscerated cows, their organs scattered for yards, and the headless chickens running around in their gore. It was then that he knew there was more than nature at work, but even still, he had thought it was a starving wolf or some other animal at work. He never imagined that it could be the sweet but sad-looking woman that lived in the woods.

No animal killed the mayor and the others, though. No animal made her ropes into snakes. Henry had misjudged the girl, and his own family paid the price, but they got her, and it should have been the end. It should have, and it was, all except that one damned finger.

Evil always found a way to keep going, no matter how hard good folks fought against it. It was balance, and Henry cursed it now as he tore apart from within, little by little, muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon, ligament by ligament.

Henry held his leg then, and he turned it in his hands, trying to see where the foul thing had gone. He knew it was still there, inside him. He could feel it, moving around under his skin, burrowing through him like an insect with a hard shell and pincers. The fingernail was cutting through the meat of him, slicing at it, and tearing it out of its way, his leg going black with the blood that was pooling up under his skin. He was sweating and trembling now from pain and fear alike. He couldn’t hold on to consciousness that much longer, but he knew that he had to. It was so important. Through gritted teeth, he swore prayers to a God that didn’t seem to be able to hear him.

Henry just needed the finger to be gone. He needed the witch to be gone in her entirety. Even if he was to die here, he had to make sure that damned finger went with him. He couldn’t let it remain in this world. It was a blight on God’s world. He knew in his heart it would mean the end of everything.

Henry sliced open the meat of his own calf and was surprised how much it reminded him of chicken breast. He watched his blood run freely down into the grass. Henry stuck the handle of the knife into his mouth and bit down on it then. Then one finger at a time, he dug his hand into his calf between and through the shredded muscle, and he felt around for the damned finger squirming inside. He was pushing through his own tendons now, tearing his own flesh around as he went past his fingers and forced the bulk of his hand into the wound.

Henry could feel the finger moving as his own digits forced their way inside him, but he couldn’t seem to grasp it for some reason. It sensed the invasion and moved, allowing him to chase it further into his own body, destroying himself as he went. His own fingers got caught in something, tangled. He didn’t know what it was, but he could feel the witch’s fingers squirming back and forth just above it so he knew he needed to get free. He pushed and pulled against whatever strands held him inside his own flesh, and the pain was unbearable, white light exploding behind his eyes. The moment he got free, the finger crawled further up inside him. He cursed, shaken by pain-driven tremors. The finger was still evading him, forcing him to tear his own leg open more and more in his effort to catch it. He screamed around the knife handle in his mouth, battling against the agony of the act as his muscles split and fell away from the bone in the torrent of rushing blood that escaped him.

Henry knew he was close to losing consciousness, but he knew if he did that the witch would win. He couldn’t allow that to happen, not this time. He owed it to his family and all those lost to her black magic, so Henry dug further still, pushing his whole hand down into his leg, the flesh shredding as it couldn’t stretch enough to fit his thick hand, his fingertips knocking into the cartilage of his knee. He quaked with the tremors of shock, and his vision blurred, tears spilling down his stubbled cheeks.

Then he finally got the damn thing. It had nowhere to go, pinned against his kneecap, caught in the severed tendons around it. Henry actually laughed.

“Go to hell, damn you,” he said to the finger. He grabbed it, and his eyes went wide with horror. Henry felt the wicked digit push its way into his hand, long fingernail cutting through the soft meat of his palm and re-entering him once more. His other arm was already useless. He doubted he could even walk back to get help now that he had butchered his leg, and now the witch fingernail was cutting its way through the hand of his only good arm. He had already lost a lot of blood and was continuing to lose more. He could do nothing to stop the witch’s wicked finger.

Henry pulled his hand free of his leg and stared at it, soaked in his own blood. He could see the end of the finger flipping back and forth as it pushed itself the last of the way, disappearing into his arm and cutting through the tendons in his wrist. With eyes of horror, he stared on at the shape of the finger worming its way up his arm, bruises spreading out in its wake like a growing darkness. His flesh was bulging with the movement, shrinking and bulging again, bubbling, and sometimes the bubbles popped, his dark blood oozing out.

Henry tried to grab the knife from his mouth with his other hand, but he couldn’t get his arm to do what he wanted it to. The muscles and tendons had been too destroyed by his earlier efforts to remove the foul thing. He started to cry then, to whimper and beg God to forgive him. All he could do now was watch.

The finger kept moving. It was almost to his shoulder. He tried to hold the knife in his teeth and stab at his arm. He cut himself repeatedly but never the finger crawling underneath his flesh. The slipping blade cut through the soft tissue of his mouth, widening his crying lips. He started to really weep then. Somehow, after all he had done to stop her, the witch had still won. She had still beaten him. All he could do was stare at the crawling finger moving through him at its will. He was at its mercy. The finger was in complete control.

Henry leaned back against a tree. He watched the bulge under his skin travel its upward course until it had crossed his collarbone with an excruciating scrape of the nail, moving on to his neck and then he couldn’t see it anymore. He could still feel it, though. He started to choke on it, gagging as it forced its way up his throat, rising up like a second Adam’s apple. Then it stopped at last and cut its way out of him, severing his jugular vein in the process.

Henry choked and gagged harder as the crimson tide fled his body to fill the grass around the tree. It rained downward, soaking his clothes and the strange finger rode the flow down into the grass. As life left Henry and he rejoined his family in the afterlife, the finger inched through the grass and dirt, knuckle up, knuckle down, and headed in the direction of the town. The witch had unfinished business.