The Spider-Worm Witch
by Paul O’Neill
part 1
When the headteacher leaned down, whispered in Becca’s ear that she was a write-off, that she was “irredeemable,” it felt as if some final nail had been hammered into the coffin of her life. Some pre-high school pep talk that had been. Becca could barely keep a hold on the temptation to slap the pleased, crooked-looking cow in the chops. Rage was a friend she’d known all her life.
Becca grabbed her bag, stepped out of the cold, dark classroom, into the spring air, and straight out the school gates.
The sea frothed its way up and down the sand as she hugged her knees tight to her chest. She could smell its salt from where she sat, almost taste the way the sun baked off the sand, killing the afternoon. The gentle breeze sighed along her face, cooling her stupid baby tears.
She was due to go to Levenmouth Academy after the summer. It was supposed to be a new start. A way to find people who wouldn’t talk to her with that far-off look in their eye she’d come to hate, that straight-backed posture that told Becca she wasn’t welcome. Everyone she’d met on a recent high school visit mocked her, pretended to hold an invisible hammer in their hand, tapping at the air.
It seemed everyone in Scotland had heard the tale of the girl who’d crumpled a teacher’s knee with a hammer. That was in primary two when she’d been just six years old. Right before that had happened, her dad had got sent back to Broadshade for stealing an old man’s car, crashing it into the side of a shop.
No one tried to address the rage that filled her. She’d been stuck in a corner, playing by herself ever since. Untouchable. A write-off. No matter how hard she tried, how much she wanted to help people, they wouldn’t let her in. Her role was Becca ‘the hammer’ Moreland. That was the box she’d been confined to.
“Stupid, stupid, baby,” she said to herself, wiping her tears. “They won’t—”
Something black and pointy caught her attention. It was so out of place on the golden sand that it froze her hand by her face. A witch’s pointy hat.
It shifted around like a crab was stuck inside, raging to find a way out.
Seagulls looped in the blue sky above, squealing warnings as she dusted the sand from her school trousers. The beach was empty. No one was walking their dog. No one sat drinking the day away.
The hat’s shadow spilled over her black Converse. Everything in her gut told her to flee, and all her hair stood on end, at full alert. The thing was covered in dirt and crooked as a broken finger.
A muffled voice spoke from inside. “H-Hello?” said Becca, leaning closer.
When she reached out, her hand looked as if it belonged to someone else, like there was some force guiding her to do it. It irritated her fingers when she touched it, pulled it to the side. The hat made a dull thud when it hit the sand.
“Aw, there it is. Thought you’d never see me, lass.”
Becca felt the blood drain from her neck, down her chest. It was a woman buried in the sand up to her head. A ring of hair like a barren crow’s nest. Eyes that gleamed like dead stars in a night sky. Skin mottled every rotten shade of green, black, brown.
It was the worms that made Becca turn to the side and gag on the suddenly thick air. Purple worms danced out the side of the woman’s dry mouth. Three others hung from an eye, stretching its bottom eyelid. The worms squirmed, looking so moist, Becca felt their maggoty noise build up in the centre of her brain.
“You’re a witch,” said Becca, taking a step back.
“Allow me to introduce myself.”
The sand grumbled beneath Becca’s feet, sending a warning vibration up her calves. The soil-like smell of wet sand reached her as she stepped away from the ring around the witch that quaked and shifted.
A long, hairy, jagged spider’s leg poked free of the sand. Becca landed on her backside, a pain groaning up her spine as she craned her neck at the thing that dug itself free. The sand collapsed around it, creating a wave of static noise that filled the air.
Becca felt her mind wanting to rip in two. What she saw couldn’t be real. She’d bumped her head somewhere, or gone full bananas to the point where she couldn’t get back to reality.
The witch towered above her on eight enormous, hairy legs. Atop its bulbous tarantula body was the top half of a human. A human with ash-blackened skin, worms writhing out its eyes, a black, pointed hat.
Becca’s skin went cold as it blotted out the sun. It crawled closer in that jittery way only slow spiders can. Heat radiated from it like a frothing horse near collapse.
The witch coughed into a balled up fist. “Our kind have gone by many a name. I like spider-worm witch the best. Now, what brings you to me? I can taste the desperation.”
Becca blinked, trying to keep her mind grounded. “W-What?”
“Och, don’t be daft, lass. Always find me when they need me. It’s what we’re here for. And the desperation is rolling off you in waves. Ah, I can smell it. The reeking beauty of it.”
“You’re here cause of me? No, no, no. Someone’s taken revenge. Finally pranged me upside the head like I deserve and sent me la-la.”
Becca held the thing’s gleeful stare, resisting the urge to loosen the tie from her polo shirt that felt like it had snaked tight round her neck.
The spider-worm witch lowered itself, bending all eight legs until it was inches from her face. One of the dangling worms swayed in the space between them. “This is as real as a box of frogs. Tell me, what’s in your soul, dearie? What do you need help with?”
“Is this, like, a wish thing? I summoned you and get three wishes to—”
“I am no one’s donkey,” the thing hissed in Becca’s face. The fetid mushroom odour of its breath made her move her head to the side.
One of the dripping worms touched Becca’s chin. She couldn’t tell, but somehow the purple worm seemed pleased, like it was trying to make her throw up her lunch of corned beef roll.
When the spider-worm witch continued, Becca saw its green fangs glinting in the day’s light. “Do you understand me, lass? You’re not here to rub me, and I’m not here to sing. There’s nothing stopping me from gobbling you up.” It scuttled back a couple of steps. “We’re much the same, you and I. Been cast aside. Never given any chance. Yes, yes. I sense it in my smellers. Tell me of it.”
A slow wave of unreality washed over Becca as the giant spider thingy made its way beside her, settling down on the sand like a pet crab. Its eyes were hidden shadows beneath the brim of the hat. It was an effort to keep standing, to not let her knees buckle with the fright streaming in her blood.
“Tell me,” it repeated.
“About me? Not a lot to say, really.” She gave herself a one-armed hug, stared into the sky. “I’ve only started noticing how everyone puts on a different face when I get close. It’s like they’re actors just remembering their lines, turning their plasticene faces at me, chortling too hard. They’ve never given me a chance. Won’t even let me help tidy up. I just get told to sit in the corner like I can’t be trusted.”
“And can you be trusted?”
“I get angry sometimes, alright? No wonder. My chances have been written off since I was six. Since I smacked that skinny bastard in the kneecap with a hammer.”
“That’s a new one. My worms love it. Bet that knee went pop real nice. That’s not all you did, though, eh?”
Becca eyed the length of the beach that curved around the coast. All was eerily quiet.
“Always had a problem with anger,” said Becca. “First time I ever played with someone my own age was in primary one. They all had their wee chum groups I couldn’t ever seem to break into, you know. I didn’t get what was happening, but the write-off process had started. Guess that’s what happens when your dad is a prison-hopper. The way the teachers looked at me, even then. No wonder I went nuts. Something’s rotten in me. I can feel it.”
The witch dragged a pointed end of a foreleg through the sand, making a wet scritch, scritch sound. There was something wanting in its eyes. “I’ll help you out, my lass. Sort them right good.”
“Sort them? What you mean? No one needs sorted, alright?”
It rose itself high. When it turned to face her, tipped her a wink, three worms dripped from that eye, hitting the sand.
“Wait,” said Becca.
Its smile was slippery and too large on its leathery face. Becca wanted to scream at the witch to stop. Using all eight legs, it tore at the ground, sending sand and stones flying behind it.
In the space of a few seconds, it had buried itself, leaving Becca alone on the beach.
* * *
On her walk to school the next day, she avoided the mumbles and the stares whenever anyone passed by. She’d been more than used to that by now, and the lack of sleep last night had her blood up. If they weren’t careful, she’d do something stupid today, something angry.
All last night, as she tossed and turned in her thin bed, she told herself she’d made up the whole thing with the spider-worm witch. It couldn’t be real. She was going off the deep end.
Proud mummies and daddies steered their little kids away from Becca as she walked by the cracked stone walls at the school’s entrance. The sun-baked concrete odour changed to the plasticky smell of overheated school uniforms, springtime grass, and stale sweat.
The straps of her bag dug into her shoulders as she kept her head down, marched on into a day filled with fake smiles and cold distance. A sudden urge to kick the next person who crossed her path in the chest with the sole of her boot rampaged through her, becoming a full on red fantasy and—
“Y-Yo, Becca, what’s s-shaking?”
She spun round. Gerald McDunn walked out from the shade of a tall oak tree. The morning sun hit his too-perfect hair. She wondered how much she could mess it up. How much she could make him bleed from that piggy little nose of his.
“Calm the fire, Becca. I-I just wanna see how your night was. So... You get up to anything cool?”
The conversation had Becca standing with her mouth hung open. An actual attempt at conversation from the most popular boy in her class. Not that he was her type. Too well done. Too boybandish. Too boy.
“Say,” he continued, his eyeballs scanning to left and right, “wanna hang later? Me and you, what you say? Be well cool, us being pals. Don’t e-even know much about you after all this time.”
“What is this?”
“We’re pals now, right? About time.”
Becca opened her mouth to tell him where to go, but the fright-glistened look in his eyes stopped her. He was so scared he almost quivered on the spot.
“Oi, you,” Johnny Campbell sauntered over, shoving his bag between Gerald and Becca, “leave hammer girl alone. She’s mine.” He turned to face Becca. “Don’t go hanging with that One-Direction looking prick. Come chill with me. Please?”
“What you two all about?” said Becca.
Gerald charged forward, pushed Johnny in the back with all the might he had in his slight frame. Johnny’s palm slapped the ground as he stopped himself from falling. He darted forward, tackling Gerald by the ankles.
“Stop,” said Becca. “Stop it.”
It didn’t take a crowd long to circle its way around the brawling lads. The chant of “Fight, fight, fight,” echoed in the morning air, attracting all attention.
“I got there first,” yelled Gerald.
“She’s mine, you rat,” roared Johnny. “My dog will die if I don’t be her pal.”
The sound of brick on skull made Becca’s bones squirm around inside her skin. Johnny’s body turned into sprung rubber, landed on the concrete with a skull thudding noise that made the crowd gasp.
Gerald stood over Johnny, a small cube of a brick still clutched in his hand. He looked at Becca with a look of such manic glee that she shuffled into the crowd.
“I won, right?” Gerald shouted after her. “Hit me up, d-darling.”
Becca felt hands paw at her, grab her by the elbow, trying to get her attention as she stumbled through the mob.
“Get off!” She broke free, ran, dragged her bag behind her by one strap.
“H-Hi, Becca,” said someone behind her. “Looking nice today.”
“Chloe?”
Becca’s heart did a jump kick in her chest as Chloe stepped out from the shadow of a doorway. The sunlight trickled along her lip gloss. A whiff of her strawberry perfume drifted between them, making Becca almost lean forward like she smelled a baking pie on a windowsill. Chloe had the same manic look in her eye that the others had. Like her soul was trying to squirm out of her body at the thought of being forced to talk to her.
“I didn’t dream it,” said Becca, letting go of the bag, stepping forward. “The witch is real. She... She paid you all a visit. You’d never speak to me otherwise.”
“Come here.”
“What?”
A hot whirlwind seemed to take Becca when Chloe took her hand, planted a kiss on the back of it.
“Chloe? You don’t—”
“I’ll be your girlfriend. I... I’ll do anything.” Chloe’s voice broke, her face scrunched up. “Anything. Please? She said... She said—”
“What did the spider-worm witch tell you?”
“She says she’s with Gran at the home right now. If I don’t get at least a snog from you, then she’ll smother her. Please? Say you’ll be my girlfriend. I can’t lose her. I can’t—”
“You’re hurting me.”
She let her go. Little crescents formed where she’d dug into Becca’s palm. The warble of an ambulance sounded not far off. Mrs. Randall, army tank of a headteacher, glared at her, eyes saying it all. The write-off strikes again.
“We can do Frenchie,” said Chloe. “Right here. Come on.”
Becca closed her eyes, welcomed the breeze that held a sting of cold in it. How many times had she hated herself to sleep thinking about just this? How many times had she called herself stupid for going all lumpy inside when Chloe so much as passed her by, strawberry heaven drifting between them? How did the witch know her most secret of secrets?
Chloe shivered as if maggots crawled over her skin.
“You don’t have to fake,” said Becca.
“Kiss me.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“I said no. Not like this.”
“Tongues and everything. She’ll chew Gran’s fingers off one by one, she said. Just say I’m yours.”
A wave of anger flashed through Becca. She swallowed the urge to pounce forward, push Chloe to the ground, pull on her stupid, perfect hair.
* * *
Soon as the bell rung, Becca leapt over the rusted fence, ignoring the barking orders of Mrs. Randall to come back. On her way to her usual spot, she smelled the cold, metallic quality of the sea air. A fire built in her belly.
This wasn’t what she meant. Wasn’t what she wished for. The witch had gone off and done its own thing, terrifying everyone. How was she supposed to face life at school now?
A figure shuffled its way down the grass path, hood over his head, looking down at worn Reeboks.
“Dad?” Becca stopped, arms dangling at her side.
She’d recognise that figure anywhere. The man who had an endless supply of hoodies. The man who never put that hood down for any reason. The man who’d been there, been taken to jail, been there, been taken to jail again as part of a vicious cycle.
“Dad?” she said again. “You alright there?”
The look he gave her was like he’d gotten slapped in the face with a cold trout. He stared at her in open-mouthed shock, his chin moving up and down, not saying a word. She’d never seen him cry before. Tear tracks silvered their way down his face.
He said nothing. Just fidgeted with his hood and stomped off, letting out a groan of such frustration that he looked set to punch the first person who came close.
Copyright © 2023 by Paul O’Neill
