The Witch That Taught Me to Still Time (Part 1)

A story of magic and dreams

“How can you remember so well something that happened in a place you only lived in from a baby to 5 years old?”

“I have recollections of lying in a hand-pump wash basin looking into the faces of my grandmother, great grandmother and mother who were peering down at me in my bath. Years later, I described for them the smell of the homemade soap, the broken handle on the pump, the unique floral wallpaper in the kitchen, and the hairstyles and clothing they wore. I recalled for them how once I cried out to everyone’s alarm until my great grandmother noticed my curly red hair gathered in chubby fingers that had not yet learned to release their grip. My elders were satisfied with the veracity of my ability to recollect such early experiences, though you may not be. I have a precocious memory that began imprinting recallable events shortly after my birth...and I was born with a caul.”

She looks doubtful, yet subdued, and nods for me to continue my story.

It is a story she requests to be re-told ever so often since the first time she heard it. After a bit of time passes, she comes back to me with a deeper level of understanding, awareness and new questions. She’s searching for reasons not to believe me about the witch and the stilling of time and she hones in on areas to prove my subterfuge. My clever granddaughter of ten years likes to pin me down with astute cross examinations.  

I hold back from her certain elements of my story and present an age-appropriate version each time (though I have never said anything about the witch that is untrue). All this being said, the most probable reason my memories are so clear is that my great aunt moved into the house after we moved out. She was my favorite, Aunt Vi, and I spent a great deal of time till I was perhaps 11 or 12 with her and Uncle Earl in the house of the witch, though I had already begun to lose the facility of stilling time.

Eventually, my clever but very practical granddaughter will embrace her mystical side and come to accept and believe in the witch and the stilling of time, or she will not; I can only tell my story as I remember it.

“We slept in a very small room together but not together, in twin beds separated by a rickety nightstand, my mother and me. The room had no closet and later became a bathroom when the old two-story farmhouse was updated by new owners that were not renters as we were. A poorly constructed wooden door, made of slats and without a doorknob separated the mechanical area of the pump room where the Beast dwelt from our make-shift bedroom. A rusty hook inside it held a bedraggled rag – it was dirty, off-white, a bit smaller than a bath towel, probably made of cheap muslin. When the Beast began its ominous rumbling, the flimsy door shook and the floor vibrated. There was no light inside the room of the Beast, only what might be carried into it by someone brave enough to enter that realm.”

“You do realize, I hope, that I am fully aware the pump room did not contain a Beast – I am just trying to help you to see all this through the eyes of a small child.”

My sweet granddaughter lets out her characteristic sigh, but still listens intently despite the annoying narrator she must endure to once again hear the story of the witch and the stilling of time.  

“I hated giving in to sleep, both for short naps and the deeper, longer nocturnal kind. It was a typical toddler’s dislike of conceding to this bodily demand, but it was also because of my fear and dread of being anywhere near the pump room. Did I mention the ceiling above the Beast had attic access through a small hole covered with a piece of plywood slightly off kilter (more off-kilter each time after the Beast let loose its rumbling)?

“It did not happen every night but if one was observant, there were signs that foretold the coming of the witch.

“The night sounds of the house were familiar to me, and I obsessively tracked each one comforting myself with knowing where it came from and what made it. On the nights she didn’t come, I would eventually fall asleep listening to those reassuring sounds.

“But on certain nights, the house grew deathly still, and it became difficult to breath. This was when the witch would awaken. It was like in a forest when all the birds and insects cease their chatter, you know an intruder has arrived.

“The air would thicken as all sound became muffled – I knew of this phenomenon because time after time my screams, though deafening as they left my lungs, experienced a dampening effect as they left my mouth. My cries in the thickened air were no more effective than the tiny squeaks a mouse might make if startled by a kitty.

“If I threw something across the room to frighten the witch away (and several times I did), it would never hit the witch and only land noiselessly to the floor. My mother was often upset in the mornings about why I kept knocking over my little mug of water grandmother always left for me on the nightstand.

“The flimsy door to the Beast would slowly open. The hole in the ceiling over it gaped black and ominous, its flimsy cover pushed aside. I sensed a maniacal presence busily assembling itself for its nightly high jinks...its only witness to tell the tale a small child no one would ever believe.

“‘Mother…Mother…Mother…MOTHER!?’ I screamed out. She would never answer.

“I could see in the dim light the shape of my mother lying there in the other twin. Her back was always toward me, and her covers were drawn closely. She liked to wrap a feather pillow around her head, probably to drown out the sounds the Beast might make in the night.

“In the short moment of trying to confirm my mother’s presence and enlist her help I would take my eyes away from the doorway to the belly of the Beast, and the witch would step stealthily into the room.

“Ancient and bent with an iridescent glow that rendered her skin an eerie white (whiter than the muslin rag she wore to cover her wiry but emaciated body) she looked up slowly and straightened slightly. Hair wild and silver framed her face like an errant halo, and she looked at me, smiling. Always smiling.

“Her mouth was a gaping maw, no teeth, yet it worked nervously and incessantly as though chewing a solidified wad of nothingness. Her arms were bent to rest on her negligible bosom where her hands also worked feverishly, wringing invisible laundry.  It was as though with all the emptiness of both her mouth and hands, she was aching to fill them with something…something soft, sweet and nourishing.

“Her eyes were intent upon me, and she moved slowly like a deadly sloth, fingernails filthy, long, pointed, ready to rip and shred.

“I would call out even more frantically but dared not exit my bed. The witch always positioned herself so that I would have to squeeze past her to leave the room.”

“Did I ever dare to find the courage and leap across the small gap separating me from my mother and awaken her as she lay silently oblivious to the clear and present danger? No. And do you know why?”

“Was it because you were too afraid the witch would catch you as you leaped?”

“Yes, but no, that was not the main reason.”

“Because…if you did, you would wake up your mother and she would be mad at you and the witch would have gone invisible?”

“Very likely, but also no.”

“Why then, Grandma?! Stop trying to find out what I think so that you can make your story scarier!”

“I don’t need to try to make this story scarier – I’m already leaving out the scariest parts until you’re old enough to handle them.”

She lets loose an audible groan of exasperation. When she was younger, I would ask such questions during my story telling and incorporate her answers into the plot line of whatever tale I was weaving, but such devices have no place in the story of the witch and the stilling of time.

I look my dearest granddaughter deeply in the eye and gaze purposefully around the room as though assuring myself nothing is lurking in the corners.

In a lowered voice I continue.

“I will tell you what I most feared and what I believe might have come to pass should I have made my desperate leap of faith for my mother’s protection. I would have exposed my unblanketed body, small and vulnerable, and the witch would have ceased her sloth-like movements. Cat-quick she would become, and just as I reached the pile of blankets that I thought cocooned my mother and snatched them away…there would have been naught but emptiness. And that my dear, would have been the end of me.”

“You and your mother really had trust issues, huh, Grandma,” she says facetiously but still with a bit of caution as she also glances around the darkening room where we sit.

“I believe you are correct.”

“The witch knew she had me trapped and her smile broadened as her working mouth and hands quickened.

“Frightened out of my wits, I did what any reasonable child does when confronted by monsters of the night. I closed my eyes and hid my head beneath a thick layer of blankets.

“Now here’s the good part. Well, good in the telling of it, horrifying in the experiencing of it.

“I discovered, by total accident that as long as my eyes were shut and my head safely under the blankets, the witch didn’t move. She could not advance, and she would not retreat.

“Many a night I spent desperate hours in spell-binding repetition: Hide my head. Close my eyes. Threat mitigated. Time passes. I get curious. Take a tiny peak. Witch unfreezes and moves toward me.

“Each time she unfroze, she moved a bit faster…the sloth falling away, the feline predator taking its place.”

“Grandma, quit using too big words – what is methylated? And why the heck did you keep opening your eyes?!”

“Mitigated – to lessen. Are you goofing off during your vocabulary lessons at school? Curiosity, child. I had to see, to make sure she was still there and that somehow even though time was stilled, she had not figured a way of sneaking closer while I wasn’t looking.”

“We don’t have vocabulary lessons – that was in the old days, Grandma. We work on our Chromebook. Did she ever get close enough to get you?”

“Quit it with the Chromebook and study the dictionary.”

“After several repetitions during the long nights of her visits, she got close enough. Sometimes within inches of getting me. She never got me though, but I could smell her outhouse breath and feel its clammy warmth on my skin.

“Always, during the stilling of time, a great weariness would come over me – it takes a lot of energy to still time. Often, by the wee hours of the morning my body just gave up and sleep would overtake me. When I awoke in the light of day, my mother was still in her bed snoring and the witch was always gone.”

“Are you sure this wasn’t just a nightmare that you kept dreaming over and over, Grandma? And how do you know that time was stilled if you can’t do it anymore…maybe it was because the witch for some reason just stopped moving?”

“If it was a nightmare, it contained much of what I believe to be real. As for the stilling of time, it is a thing I learned from dire necessity – you know, like the room of requirement in Harry Potter – it could not manifest unless there was a strong need.

“Had it not been for the witch, I likely would have never discovered my ability to still time. Just as a bully has no intent to mentor you, the bully teaches nonetheless; you learn courage, resilience, and find you have reserves of strength hitherto unimagined. Certainly, the witch did not intend to teach me about this magic that lay dormant within me! She would have preferred that I grew too afraid and gave up, at which point she would have spirited me away, up through the hole into the attic for who knows what nefarious end.

“I have often wondered why I lost that magic of stilling time, but as my fear of her lessened over the years, she also visited me less and less. It was as though she sensed she was losing her power over me – besides it was a very small hole that led to the attic, and perhaps she knew I would no longer fit through it!”

My granddaughter laughs heartily.

The sound reaches my heart and I wish suddenly that I hadn’t lost my ability to still time and could keep her just as she is in this moment. A shudder runs through me even as I make my careless, selfish wish - no wonder the universe took back that power from me.

“Even though I lost the ability to still time somewhere around 11 years of age, I have no doubt that for several years when I was most in danger, that power was mine. Besides since it was a matter of necessity, and I no longer had great need for it, it left.”

“But you still haven’t said how you KNOW that you stilled time and the witch didn’t maybe just stop for some reason.”

I smiled and hesitated for a moment. I really do try to be somewhat cognizant of keeping things age-appropriate, but that look on her face…

“I really NEED to know, Grandma. It is a DIRE NECESSITY!”

It was my turn to laugh heartily.

“In that case, the protocol of dire necessity demands that I answer you.”

Her excitement is palpable, and I know that her mother will not approve of me administering a larger dose of new age mumbo jumbo as she puts it, but the story of the witch and the stilling of time is already enough to get me in hot water, so I may as well dive on into the Boiling Lake.

“I will give you a one word…no, a two-word answer, after which I will not be pestered by one who limits their quest for knowledge to Chromebook. You will need to do some research. Then, if you can tell me why these two words answer your dire necessity to know how I know, I will tell you all I have left out of my story due to your tender age.

It is a take it or leave it deal.”

“I take it.”

“Astral projection.”

Stay tune for Part 2 of “The Witch that Taught Me to Still Time”, coming in March, 2024.