There are witches and witches and this one was one hell of a witch. She had come from hell to be precise and she had never ever combed her hair in her whole eternity; she didn’t have to, she was a witch. Her mortal mother called her a witch from the day she had been born just because her hair had come out bright red and with tight curls, a most uncommon thing among her family or her husband’s family as they were all northerners; pure descendant of the Vikings, as her mother used to say. Little had she known that her daughter was a real witch that kept on coming back to earth just for the pleasure of it. No one, in the magical world, knew the reason for this particular fetish of hers; some thought she was simply a masochist and liked the pain of being born and of growing up as a reminder that life was a never ending process. Some others believed that she liked to inflict pain on the families she decided to be born into as most of the time the families ended up locked up in a psychiatrist ward and labelled as mad whilst she was set free to roam the world and play tricks on people, specially children.

Her favourite trick was to steal children away at Halloween. She knew that most people didn’t believe in the old folkloric tale that long time ago people used to offer things to the witches so that they wouldn’t steal their children or harm them and for that same reason she made sure she stole quite a few children on that night. She didn’t steal just any child at random, no; she chose them carefully by observing them for a whole year beforehand. She only picked on the children who dealt in magic or that had that inclination. She loved to lure them into doing what their parents and loved ones would consider a silly thing. She would give them a Ouija board. She knew that children would not be able to resist the answeringboard, as she called it, and that in no time at all she would have them enthralled and in her pocket.

She wouldn’t just make the Ouija board appear just like that at their homes. She would make the board appear on the pavement of wherever they used to go and stop on their own. The board had all the elements of drama and eccentricities that one of those answeringboards would have. On the pavement the shapes of two skeletons would form, and in between them the letters of the alphabet would appear one by one together with the typical yes and now answers. No Goodbyes, she didn’t believe in goodbyes so she never added that in her answeringboards. The children would invariably be amazed and thought themselves to be the greatest witch or wizard in the world and would quickly place anything they had in their pockets on the board, and whether it be a pencil, a rubber or even a little toy or a bubble gum, the answeringboard would give them answers without them even thinking of a question.

On the night of Halloween, these same children would make sure they dressed up as witches or at least what they thought witches looked like, as in truth witches don’t look any different from other people, and would go about telling everybody that they were the real thing. If up until that night, the Ouija board only formed on the floor when they were on their own, that night the board would form in the presence of other people. Needless to say that people were usually frightened by this and immediately took the child away from the spot the answeringboard had formed thinking that in that way the child was safe from God knew what. God always came into the equation for some reason and because of this, the children always ended up in the nearest church for a quick blessing. The priest would always send them away telling them that they were being silly and that is exactly what brought the children to Mandriana, for this is what the witch was called.

Mandriana would then collect what she considered her children one by one as their souls flew up towards her. She would collect their souls with a silvery net and then as the sun rose on the following morning, she would carefully put each soul in a little vial that she then hung to dry on the trees of her favourite wood in the northern part of the hemisphere just for the fun of it. The children didn’t die; whilst their souls hung from the trees, they led what other people considered very boring lives as they had no opinions, no dreams no hopes. Only when a strong wind blew in that wood and one of the vials fell and broke, their souls were released and the child, who by then was usually quite grown up, suddenly seemed to wake up as from a lifelong dream and began to have opinions and thoughts which at the end of the day caused more trouble than anything as by then, their lives had already been decided and directed for them. Those were the lucky ones.