Witch Won?

Some people swore that the house was haunted.

It looked the part… the hundred year old oaks lining the driveway needed pruning, the Kentucky Bluegrass was overgrown, and the steps to the old farmhouse had the obligatory squeak. When the boys peered through the grimy window, they saw the peeling floral wallpaper looked as faded as the lumpy furniture. What they thankfully didn't see was Old Widow Wilson. Chevy and Dodge Dealer...yes, their parents had actually thought those were clever first names...locked eyes, then crept to the door and tried the doorknob. It opened.

Old Widow Wilson closed the lid of the autoclave, a self- satisfied smile exposing her ghastly ulcerated gums. The little Dealer twins had finally worked up the nerve to take the bait. She’d greased a few palms to ensure they overheard tales of great fortunes to be had under the floorboards of the haunted house, along with the tidbit that The Widow does her shopping every Sunday morning. She was shopping, alright…for a set of identical eight year old twins.

Her gnarled finger flipped the switch labeled PARALYZE.

Time is fluid; it can flow like Niagara Falls, but for Chevy and Dodge, it oozed like congealed motor oil. It seemed they had an eternity in which to notice the toothless old hag in a lab coat with a six inch metal syringe in one hand. There were ages to wonder about the sterile laboratory in the next room containing child-sized tables with restraints. A violet light beam bathed the porch and froze the boys in their tracks. Then panic and fear, those superstar twins of negative emotion, had a nice long spell in which to grab what was left of the boys breakfast and drag it through their bowels before they passed out.

Witching wasn’t like it was in the old days, grumbled Old Widow Wilson under her breath as she tightened the restraint. A cauldron, a few newt’s eyes and frog toes, and a witch could feel respectable. Nowadays, you had to have a modern laboratory and a PhD in chemistry and theoretical astrophysics. It just didn’t seem right, all these modern sorcerers with their pharmaceutical companies and multi-million dollar estates. Well, a hundred years had taught her reverence for tradition and she was keeping this house. So she’d begun working with the relative nature of space and time; pure, mathematical time and the duality of its relation with absolute space. It was thought that you couldn’t separate time from space, but that was just the constraints of the human brain. The Pauli exclusion principle, Einstein’s twin paradox, bosons, photons

…humans were just casting about blindly. Unbound by human limitations, she had found the formula for the ultimate witches’ brew, and the key ingredient was twin boys.

Chevy and Dodge opened their eyes to a searing light, and although they both closed them again instantly, an after image of infected boils scorched itself on the inside of their eyelids. “Sorry for the light, boys. Photons, you know. It’s a particle/wave thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Chevy struggled with the straps which held him to the table. He could sense Dodge was similarly bound on the other table.

“Boys, you are about to become the first humans to travel instantly through time and space; and they don’t sell postcards where you’re going….not that you’ll feel like writing! Please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position…”

Then came the cackling…a sound any witch would be proud of…

Nothing was ever the same again after that.





















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