The Sea Witch

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

5 minutes

General Audience

“Watch out for a sea witch,” his grandfather had said. “We don’t wander the island alone.”

But it was no fun on an island you couldn’t explore. When Mom and Dad began fighting again, spoiling the trip to Grandpa’s island, Dane slipped out the back door. Grandpa noticed him leaving, and stuck his head out the screen.

“Stay in view of the life guards,” he said.

His eyes said more. Be careful, they pleaded. Children had gone missing here before, and Grandpa believed they’d been taken. He hadn’t always thought so, but, in his later years, this was how the old man had begun explaining to himself the disappearance of Dad’s younger sister, many years before. Dane knew that Grandpa, then a young, busy father, had really fallen asleep, and hadn’t been able to prevent his daughter from drowning. And that had been on a different beach, at a different time. Now, in his old age, he’d re-fashioned the sea as a hag, a devious creature that could take any form, and sweep away unsuspecting little girls. Dane also knew that Grandpa’s mind was what his parents were fighting about. Mom wanted to put him in a home. Yet he smiled at his grandfather, to reassure him.

In the water, he’d begun playing with another boy. The child didn’t say much. He seemed distracted, and a little sad, like Dane. But the boy had a kite he was willing to share, and the two of them took turns running it in the light breeze. The water and wind were calm today, and it didn’t stay aloft very well.

“Want to look for sand dollars?” asked the boy, frowning at the limp kite.

They couldn’t find many at first, and they wandered further and further from the roped-off area where the life guards kept watch. At length, Dane looked up, and saw how far they’d gone. But I’m not alone, he reasoned to himself.

They were in shallow water, after all, and one couldn’t get lost on a beach anyway. It was an easy thing to walk back the way you’d come. So they kept walking.

The beach stretched out toward the horizon. It looked straight, but it must have curved, for they found themselves out of sight of the cheerful children, and their watchful parents. The two boys looked at each other briefly, but shrugged at the same time. They’d be fine.

The sand on this stretch looked grayer, and gray and black bracken littered it, like roots growing in and out of the sand. Dane noticed an old bungalow on a crest that overlooked the beach. The house loomed over the sand, leaning forward instead of away, contradicting the tawny trees that always stooped landward because of the constant sea breeze. But there many sand dollars here.

Dane had collected seven already, and he kept them in his t-shirt, which he’d turned up like a basket. The other boy was shirtless, and had collected so many that he couldn’t hold them in his hands. Dane looked on enviously at the pile the boy was making, just beyond the breaking surf.

“How did you get that much?” he asked, trying not to sound jealous.

The boy shrugged, but Dane began attending to his method. His companion didn’t walk in the dry sand, but knee deep in the water, at a depth where the surf reached just below his knees. He paused every few steps, and snatched up another white disk.

“Oh, okay,” said Dane, and began following suit.

The two continued like this for a time. Dane tried to imitate the boy, but with not much more success than he’d had before. Presently, he became uneasy, and looked back the way he’d come. He shuddered, feeling the distance to be greater than it was. When he turned back around, a woman, was standing ankle deep in the gray sand.

“Do you boys like sand dollars?” she said.

Dane froze. Her voice was thin, and it wavered, as if she struggled to keep it calm and gentle. He glanced past her toward the leaning bungalow. It looked as if it might sink into the sand. Could anyone live in such a place? But there was nowhere else she could have come from. When he looked at her again, she’d halved the distance between them. She stood in her new place, still as ever.

“Yes,” he said, compelled by habit to be polite. “But we found a lot already, so…”

Her answering smile was forced. Even pained.

“But I have many more in my home. It’s just up the way,” she said, gesturing at the dead-looking bungalow. “Won’t you come and see?”

There was a pleading in her voice, a desperation that sounded wrong. Dane’s heart thumped against his chest. He looked at the other boy, and was comforted to see that his companion hadn’t fled, but stood just beside him.

She can’t get both of us, thought Dane. Even if…

But in the space of that brief look, she’d halved the distance once more. She stood but a few inches from them now. Her dress, which looked thin, tattered, and out of place, fluttered in the light breeze.

“You should come with me now,” she said, looking at Dane.

He tried to back up, but there was nowhere to go but the water. In that moment, as he hesitated, she sprang towards him. Paralyzed as he was with fear, Dane would have been caught, but the other boy pulled him seaward. Her hands, like claws, snapped empty air. His companion dragged him away from her, into the deeper water where the two of them could swim away. Dane hoped to God she couldn’t follow.

The boys began to claw their way back, Dane sputtering and terrified, the other boy reaching out from time to time, to take his arm, and steady him. Yet whenever he looked up, she was there, ankle-deep in the gray sand just beyond the breaking surf. At length he grew tired, and began to sink. Every time he did so, the other boy reached out and tugged at his arm, both pulling him level, and farther away from where she stood. Exhausted, Dane tried to see the distant, cordoned-off beach that was safety, but it was still too far. He’d never make it.

Gasping for air, arms liquid, he stopped, and began treading water. He couldn’t stand to look back at her on the beach, to see the face of a predator, its quarry without hope. Yet curiosity overcame him, and he looked anyway. And she was gone.

“Where did she go?” he cried.

Now his arms and legs were burning. He was now too far out to even swim to the sand. Resigning himself, he laid out flat, and tried to ride the surf back toward the shore, but the boy took his arm in an iron grip, and pulled him further away.

“I can’t!” he screamed.

A wave broke behind him, and plunged him face-first into the water. He opened his eyes, and saw her there, rushing up out of the black. In her hand she held a long, narrow shell, blue-black like the night sea, thin like a dagger. In the green mist, he screamed, the air all going out of him in bubbles. She reached him, and he closed his eyes. He felt the other hand relinquish his arm.

There was a struggle behind him, but Dane was drowning now, and had no strength to help the other boy. Let the water take me first, he pleaded. But a new hand, thin and spidery, took hold of his ankle and dragged him toward the shore. If only he could die before she dragged him out. Before she she slid him up that gray beach, and pulled him into her dark house. If he kept his eyes pressed closed, he wouldn’t have to look at her. If he drank sea water, he might die first.

Now he was out of the water. The vice-grip dragged him across the gray, bracken-covered sand. She struck him hard in his chest. The bracken stuck into his back, piercing him a little with every cold blow. He spat up water, and screamed.

Dane curled up into a ball, and wept, not wanting to open up his eyes and see the Sea Witch leering down at him.

“Please!” he tried to say, but it came out hoarse, and sputtering.

“Look,” she said.

Her voice was sweet. Did she think she could deceive him now?

“No!” he screamed.

“Look, boy. Out towards the sea.”

She sat him up, and turned him around. Her hands, though cool from the water, were gentle. But her voice was a spell, commanding him. Bracing himself, he looked toward the water. When he saw it, he leaned forward and wretched. Her hand patted his back.

“Take it from an old person,” she said. “Don’t wander off on this island.”

He opened his eyes again, and stared at it through tears. There, rocking back and forth in the surf, its black corpse melting, and breaking into sand dollars, lay his companion.

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