The Comox Valley Lifelong Learning Centre held a “Spooky Scribbles Writing Contest” for Halloween. Dozens of entries were received, in three different age categories. Winners were chosen based on the spookiness of the story and quality of writing.
Here is nine-year-old Payton Howell’s winning submission.
The Wicked Witch
by Payton Howell (age 9)
A thousand years ago there was a woman, and she was not nice.
She was a real nasty witch, but she took a love potion every day. The love potion made her a caring and happy person to lure in unexpected men. She lived in the forest in a big house. She is 49 years old according to human years but in witch years she is 400.
One day she killed her husband, because she needed him for a potion to bring back her sister from the dead. She was not sad and she remarried a week later. She took her dead husband’s remains she didn’t need for the soup to the garbage when her new husband was not looking.
A day or two later she was going to kill her new husband in the afternoon, and the day finally came where she could complete the potion and bring back her sister. She was so excited. She grabbed her knife and said, “Meet me in the bedroom”. He said “ok”. He went to the bedroom and didn’t see her. He heard a silent creak of the door and soft footsteps. She came up behind him and… “Bam” … He is dead.
She had stabbed him in the neck and then the heart. He was dead. She collected what she needed for the soup and threw the rest into the garbage. She went about tidying the mess and wiped the blood off the knife. Placing the knife back in the kitchen and removing all of his belongings from the house. Building a big bonfire, she burned everything she had of the two men. Except for a single picture of her second husband, she placed it in a drawer beside their bed. Maybe taking the potion had made her soft all these years. Turning those thoughts out of her head she returned to the task at hand.
Entering the kitchen, she made a big pot of soup. Placing carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, mushrooms, fresh water, pumpkins, meat from the cows, herbs and the men’s heart and blood from their bodies for dinner. She stirred it with a metal spoon. While stirring she opened her spell book and she flipped to the page that said ‘Return the dead to life.’ She said the spell and her sister appeared sitting at the table as if she had not been killed all those years ago.
She decided to celebrate and started a spell for the table to be set and invites to be sent to all the witches and wizards in the world. Witches and wizards came flying through the door all happy to see her sister Chelsey. They sat down and she was serving soup and the witches said “yum and delicious.” They loved it. It was getting late, and they said their goodbyes and good nights.
They grabbed their broomsticks and left. The next morning, she wanted to go get herbs and food, so she took her human potion and she looked like a human. This potion changed her appearance so she could go into town. She headed to the market and bought carrots, herbs, lettuce, cucumbers, apples, and meat. She headed home and unpacked all the groceries. Some people found out that two men had died.
The witch started to get worried that she would be found out. After all, she was a witch and at that time they were hung for just being witches. Even worse she had killed some people to bring her sister back. A month later some people found out she was a witch and came to her house to kill her.
They brought weapons and dogs to hunt her down. When they found her, they showed her no mercy they killed the witch and then hung her in a cage. Leaving her to be eaten by animals. They hung her by her wrists and ankles. A few months later, some teenagers came to her cage. They shook her cage trying to wake her up only realizing she was actually dead. Her ghost came out of nowhere and scared the teenagers. They ran for their lives. Tripping over branches and dead trees. They were scared to death. In fact, one of them died right on the spot of what people think was a heart attack.
That witch haunted that small town for centuries. She was like a Venus fly trap, just waiting to lure them in, and then devour these poor innocent souls. If only they knew that she only wanted them for her soup to share with the other witches.
A soup that could return the dead and make those witches long young and human if not hundreds of years old. The teenagers never came back, and they went back home except for the one that died after he had a heart attack (or so they think.)