<\/p>\n
Tactics<\/em><\/p>\n The Witch stood by the train station, watching hopefully down the line.\u00a0 She knew it was pointless.\u00a0 The tracks were overgrown, impassable.\u00a0 The bridge was gone.\u00a0 The tunnel was a wall now, an artificial bandage over a hole in the mountain.\u00a0 A thin trickle of water forced its way from beneath the old bricks but no train would ever come through it again.<\/p>\n She remembered Shelby.\u00a0 How surprised she was that he could see her, for the Witch had come to believe that she didn\u2019t have a form.\u00a0 Not anymore.\u00a0 25 years had passed since the last person came who could see her.\u00a0 But Shelby had seen, and, more importantly, for so long, he had given her gifts.\u00a0 He had been kind.<\/p>\n She was heartbroken when Shelby discovered the house.\u00a0 Heartbroken for many reasons.\u00a0 To see his horror at her deeds, and to know that their strange passing acquaintance would end. But there had been a silver lining.\u00a0 The thought had always festered in her mind that Shelby would help free her.\u00a0 The sheriff and his men had almost done it.\u00a0 They\u2019d nearly set her free.\u00a0 But then they cleaned up and left.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t see, and that was the key. Being able to see\u2026like Shelby.<\/p>\n Not that freedom was truly her goal. She had no real goals anymore. So she just watched with a neutral calm as the sheriff\u2019s men stomped through her house. She could have snuffed each of them out, squeezing them like grapes.\u00a0 With a wave of her hand she could have turned them against each other.\u00a0 A wild, panicked deputy with his gun could have done her job for her.<\/p>\n Her job.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t her job.\u00a0 She just did it.\u00a0 She got so angry sometimes and she just did it.\u00a0 All she wanted was to be seen\u2026 She wanted to leave.\u00a0 She\u2019d been in Romney Wood for far too long.\u00a0 Wandering the ruins of Black Hill now nearly two centuries after her Great Suffering, when the residents of Black Hill, a company town led by a madman, took her deep into the woods and snuffed out her life\u2026after all of the men took a turn with her.\u00a0 She still flinched.\u00a0 Still felt the bare rock against her body as they turned her over, as they shoved themselves into her.<\/p>\n Anger.<\/p>\n Her job, when she woke to find herself a part of the woods, was to release that anger.\u00a0 Black Hill\u2019s oil ran dry, yet the town lingered.\u00a0 Lingered until people started to go missing, or accidents started to seem not all that accidental.<\/p>\n They all left and the town fell into decay, falling to nature, and storms, and age.<\/p>\n Some time later, the first of those who could see the Witch showed up.\u00a0 A daughter of the company man who had run the town, so long ago.\u00a0 A seeming hereditary position of wealth and power that carried down for generations, though this poor girl told the Witch that everything was gone.\u00a0 Lost in some great turmoil.<\/p>\n The girl stayed with the Witch for a few years, moving through the ruins of her family\u2019s town, and speaking every morning with the Witch, who was always watching, always following.\u00a0 She told the witch of great wars, of an America that was very different from the young country the Witch had grown up in.\u00a0 The Civil War was still an open wound for all back then, but, even so, the Witch didn\u2019t really pay attention.\u00a0 In Black Hill, there were no wars.\u00a0 No politics.\u00a0 There was only oil.\u00a0 Though even that was drying up by the time the Witch died.\u00a0 The writing was on the wall even then that the Atherton\u2019s brief run-in with fortune was fading into the night.<\/p>\n The Witch knew about coal and timber which rose after the oil and gas boom.\u00a0 The forest told her about that.\u00a0 About the open mines, and the blasting.\u00a0 The forest gave her the simplest of overviews of the world she was living in, and it rarely made sense beyond impressions of pain and fear.\u00a0 And anger.<\/p>\n Always anger.<\/p>\n The Witch was glad for Amanda Atherton\u2019s presence.\u00a0 The girl was so broken and so sad that it was pointless to seek vengeance against her family.\u00a0 Her family had come to ruin, and would die with her.\u00a0 And she would die in Romney Wood.\u00a0 The Witch always knew this.\u00a0 She could see what would happen to Amanda and, when the girl finally hung herself from one of the oak trees, the Witch let her stay up for some time.\u00a0 She hoped, secretly, that Amanda\u2019s spirit would linger.\u00a0 That she would have some form of companionship.\u00a0 But Amanda was gone, so the Witch allowed her to fall to the ground and roll down the slope.\u00a0 Her bones, long scattered by the time the sheriff and his men came, were never discovered.<\/p>\n Sometimes, the Witch talked to her.\u00a0 Amanda became an imaginary friend.\u00a0 The Witch wanted to know why she was still what she was.\u00a0 Her duty was done \u2013 she was avenged.\u00a0 The Atherton family had tumbled into obscurity and despair. Black Hill was gone.\u00a0 Nobody remembered anything that happened.\u00a0 Nobody except for the Witch, and she seethed.\u00a0 She seethed because now she realized that she was trapped.\u00a0 Forever in Romney Wood, forever surrounded by dead Black Hill, forever stalking the land where she had been so brutally raped and murdered and, now, abandoned by whatever power had kept her conscious and aware of herself.<\/p>\n So she appeared to campers, hikers, and hunters.\u00a0 To unwary tourists and suspicious locals.\u00a0 To fishermen and lost children.\u00a0 None saw her.\u00a0 All panicked when the stalking began.\u00a0 All fought her.\u00a0 And so they died.\u00a0 Vanished into the Wood.\u00a0 Until, finally, the Witch was all alone.\u00a0 Nobody came to the Wood.\u00a0 The few who did stray across the creek bored her.\u00a0 The Witch allowed herself to get lazy.\u00a0 To wander the avenues of memory \u2013 waiting for a long forgotten train, or stalking Black Hill muttering to an imaginary Amanda Atherton, or simply watching the road from the furthest point she was allowed to reach \u2013 the second support of the collapsed rail bridge. There on a small table of rubble and weeds, a hunk of metal encased in concrete, birds circling away from her and the river beneath steaming with an inexplicable cold.<\/p>\n It was from that perch she saw the canoe, and the film crew, approach her side of the river.\u00a0 One woman and two men, armed with two cameras and camping gear.<\/p>\n The Witch narrowed her eyes and retreated to Romney Wood, to Black Hill, to her house. She sat and allowed the woods to flow through her, and she watched through the eyes of the land as the four strangers beached their canoe and leapt onto a cursed land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[252,405],"class_list":["post-659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-romney-wood","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=659"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1258,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions\/1258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}