Gravedancer

1. WELCOME TO CALAMITY...

They burned a witch in Bingham Square

Last Friday afternoon.

-Witch-Burning, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, 1936.

They said, some monsters never learn.

They said, magic doesn't exist.

They said...

A flash of black took away my attention and snapped me back to reality. "Hey, watch it!" I yelped at a kid wearing a black cloak pedaling on his bike as I crossed the street. The kid grinned sheepishly at me as he pedaled away.

I sighed as I kept on walking. Why monsters? Why magic? They weren't the things that would normally cross my mind, really. Except, well, of course, there had to be the whole Halloween thing. Costumes everywhere, monsters here, ghosts there...but then again there were the witches and wizards, too. Honestly, the witchcraft theme was always so overdone.

I wasn't really paying attention to the black robe almost everyone was wearing as I walked along the sidewalk. In this nowhere town of Calamity, Oregon, it was almost a yearly sight. Why the founders of the town named this place Calamity, I would never know. Maybe it was because when the explorers, pioneers, and missionaries first came to this land, a mysterious Native American tribe was living here and casted a curse upon them, befalling each and every one of them with different personal calamities. At least that's the rumor around. In turn, the members of the tribe were hunted down to extinction and their belongings and artifacts were burned to ashes by the settlers because they thought it would lift the curse from them.

It didn't.

Well, they said that some Holy Water finally did the trick; they even baptized the land, as well. At least that's what the local church said and how they came to be pretty famous around.

I finally arrived home after running some errands. I had graduated from high school alright, but it wasn't uncommon for kids from Calamity to go to college late. We took care of our own businesses first, and usually, only about half of each generation actually left for the big cities to study. Besides, it was a small town. A small town like this would be pretty boring for people from big cities. The fact that the internet worked here was a miracle.

Technology wasn't the most favored thing here. Maybe because of this old urban myth that a genius, tech-savvy witch used to live here back in the colonial era. How the witch eluded the holiness of a baptized land, I had no idea. She resided and began collecting slaves. They said she was secretly rich.

Screams were making blanket every night in town when she lived here. What she did to her slaves, the people could only question. Allegations that she was a witch were of course deniable - she was as knowledgeable as a priest by then, and could evade any attempt to prove that she was a witch. So, in desperation to get rid of her, the townspeople finally turned against her with the charges of disturbing the social order.

The nightly screams were pretty scary. With the cursed history of the land, the people didn't need any more supernatural creep lurking among them.

That was when the townspeople warranted a search into her house. That was when she began to panic.

It was as if her house rejected the townspeople who entered: everything flew about in a poltergeist-like chaos. The priests got hold of her and began praying and spraying Holy Water. This time, she wasn't on her human guise and began screaming in pain.

Then they opened up her basement to see where the screams came from.

What they saw was too revolting for any human being, they shut the basement again at once.