Welcome to the 9th annual #SpookyShowcase, a Halloween artist and author showcase. A full schedule of submissions can be found here so you don’t miss a single entry for THESE DEADLY CURSES. Now, on to today’s submission!

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THE CURSE OF THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER BY JOSH DAVIS

Mom came home just after lunch with a car full of coffins.

We were eagerly awaiting her return, me and Willa, my five year old sister. We sprinted out the door before she had a chance to turn off the engine. My dad followed, slower.

“Can we see them? Can we see them?” we shouted.

“Yes, yes. Where was all this energy at your soccer games?” Mom pressed a button on her key fob and the trunk of her gray SUV rose like a treasure chest.

Sitting on top of one another, a couple tilted on their side, and not room for a single item more, lay four, mostly black, certainly dirty, very old coffins. 

We Grays take Halloween very seriously. Our yard is the talk of the neighborhood, most of it good, some of it whispers from the kind of neighbors who report houses to the HOA for showing too much spirit. The Grays have done it again. How tasteless. Ghouls and ghosts and zombies have no place in a neighborhood like ours. They’re the reason housing prices are flat here.

Every year we’d add new features. This year’s was a haunted cemetery, and these coffins were our center pieces. Mom had found them online. Someone was just giving them away. Unbelievable.

“How old are these things?” Dad asked as he tried to pull out the top one, but only succeeding in pulling a piece off as easily as pulling dead grass from dried dirt.

“No clue but older than fifty years. Listen to this girls, the woman I bought them from said her daughter disappeared fifty years ago and she and her husband were only now ready to get rid of her stuff. She had these stored in an old barn alongside even creepier things. Apparently, somehow their daughter loved Halloween more than mine,” said Mom.

“Cool,” we said back in unison. Willa and I had been Halloween-crazy since we were probably babies. People said we were weird, mom just said we were mature.

Together, Mom and Dad slowly pushed and pulled the top coffin, this time more carefully. They laid the coffin on the grass and went back to pullout the three remaining ones while we girls stared. 

Inside was a dented, chipped, cracked yellowed skeleton, somehow sawed in half so that the front half was flush against the back of the coffin, stuck on with so much glue it seemed like the skeleton was part of the coffin itself. Its eyes were two red Christmas lights that I could tell would never turn on again.

Willa reached out and touched a leg bone which instantly fell off, the glue that was holding it on turned to dust.

“Watch it,” I said in a tone only we older siblings could use when their younger counterparts did something we deemed obviously dumb.

Our parents laid two other coffins of similar size next to the first. Each was about the same: made of plywood with black, fading and peeling paneling covering it with a plastic skeleton glued on the inside.

“Where’s this one’s head,” I asked.

“Here,” dad said, holding up a plastic skull as dirty as the others.

I jumped up to grab it but he just moved it higher out of reach. Sometimes I’ve wondered if he was a bully when he was younger.

“Come on Dad, cut it out,” I said still jumping and just missing the skull as Dad laughed.

“Wiwi to the rescue,” Willa shouted, her baby nickname and call to arms, as she came running up to Dad. She kicked him in the shin. She might have been younger than me but we all knew who really protected whom. 

She always loved hearing Mom tell of the time when Willa had just turned two and we were at the playground and some kid was pushing me. Then out of nowhere came Willa shouting, “Wiwi to the rescue” and she bit the kid on his leg so hard he never messed with me again.

“Here,” Dad said laughing, tossing me the skull.

“I don’t like this one at all,” said Mom as she laid the final coffin next to the others. 

This one had the same peeling black panels as the others but it was made of thicker wood. And while the others were as tall as Mom and Dad, this one was the perfect fit for us.

It had a skeleton inside my height but this one was different from the others. I could instantly tell it wasn’t plastic. It was certainly more life-like. It looked harder and wasn’t cracked even though it looked much older.

Instead of the entire body lying flat like the others, this one’s arms were covering its face as though protecting it from something.

I shivered.

Willa, in her react-first-think-second way of life, reached out to touch it, ignoring my warnings from last time – as she always did. But the skeleton didn’t fall off this time.

“That’s on their properly,” said Dad. He looked at our new decorations. “They need a wash but they’ll do nicely. Our nosy neighbors are going to be petrified.”

Mom asked us to gently clean off the coffins before adding them to the other decorations we had put up the week before. 

Willa and I went inside and brought out paper towels and dish soap and started to scrub. I took the three bigger coffins and Willa took the smaller one.

She was wiping down the inside of the child coffin’s lid when she shouted, “Is this blood?”

Without turning around I shouted back, “It’s just red paint. Don’t be a baby.” 

“I’m serious. Come look,” she said. I knew Willa and she wasn’t going to let this go until I did what she asked.

Sure enough, there were dried, red drips and smears on the wood. They seemed to follow deep gouges that twisted their way across one another like vines. At the end of one I scrapped my finger on something sharp. I pulled at the object until it came out.

“I think I found a nail.” I moved the unmistakably human nail between my fingers.

I had to admire the family who made these. They certainly went the distance with their details. I threw the nail away, figuring it was fake and got back to work on the adult coffins. Then my sister called for me again.

“What is it this time,” I asked as I marched back to her coffin. I had three large ones, she only had a single small one, yet she was taking way longer than me and I was starting to feel frustrated.

Willa showed me the front of the coffin’s lid. She had peeled off the thin layer of paneling, and before I could open my mouth to yell at her for that, I noticed why she had called me over and for the second time I shivered.

On the lid were more marks except this time they looked like they meant something. I could make out a large cross and below it odd words that looked to me like English but not quite the kind I knew. The letters were scratchy and uneven as though the writer was in a hurry. Some of the markings were worn smooth from old age.

I read aloud what I could.

“Here be something. Daughter of something something.” I paused as I puzzled over the last part. “Keep closed. And there’s a date: October 29 in the year of something.”

“Tomorrow is the 29th of October,” Willa said, proud of herself for remembering. She had been singing the days of the week song since school started and it was finally paying off for her.

I eyed the skeleton plastered against the back of the coffin. I felt it and it was cold which was surprising as the weather had been almost unbearably warm for October. I felt chills (for a third time) as ice water seemed to run down my spine. I shook it off and dismissed the markings as just more details added by the former family. Though my confidence was fading a little.

“I think we’re done here, it’s good enough.” I tried to put the black panel back on the lid but failed. Instead, I grabbed it and put it on the curb where the trash goes. “We don’t need that part anyway,” I told Willa. 

She nodded back. 

I could tell she was a little scared too, though none of us really knew why. We’ve always loved Halloween and watching scary movies from the stairs when our parents weren’t looking. Surely a simple Halloween decoration couldn’t scare us. Right?

We carried the coffins to their place in the front yard and placed them in a half circle around a cauldron that would glow and fog at night when Dad turned on the lights (his contribution to last year’s witch scene). By the time we went back inside for dinner, we had both forgotten about the strange lid and the uneasy feeling we shared about the little coffin and the skeleton inside.

But that night, I didn’t sleep well. I woke up multiple times from nightmares I couldn’t remember. I wrestled with my sheets and pillows. Then I heard a voice in the dark.

 “Front door.”

It was our alarm system. The voice called out when the door opened so Mom and Dad knew if were trying to sneak out. Yet as far as I could tell no one was up. I could hear Mom and Dad snoring together in their room. I looked over to Willa – we shared a room – and she was asleep in her bed.

That’s when I heard it. A heavy scratching sound, as though something hard and rough was being dragged on the wooden floors downstairs.

I pinched myself – hard – to wake up. I yelped in pain. The noise didn’t stop, it only got louder as though it was coming for me.

I leapt out of bed and shook Willa awake. She was about to yell at me when she too heard the sound. Rrrracch.

We looked at each other, and in that way only siblings can, we soundlessly communicated what to do next: run to Mom and Dad’s room.

We scurried across the hall and I quietly closed the door to our parents room behind us as the dragging sound became a thud. Thud. Thud. As the thing was being dragged up the stairs.

I couldn’t believe our parents were still asleep. I tried wake up Mom, who was always awake before we even entered their room ready to ask “What now?”, while Willa tried waking Dad. But neither moved. They were Sleeping Beauties, though they seemed so asleep not even a needle prick could wake them. 

Willa climbed onto the bed and jumped up and down in desperation.

At first, I feared they were dead but then noticed the sheets rise and fall with their breathing.

The thudding sound once more became dragging – rrrracch – as the thing reached the top of the stairs and moved toward us.

I saw the fear and tears on Willa’s face and pulled her off the bed and under it, my big sister instincts waking up to the situation. I grabbed her hand and squeezed and whispered, “Everything will be ok,” as the dragging reached the doorway.

From under the bed we saw the door open in slow motion. Bare feet were in the doorway pointing inward at each other the way a toddler would stand, and I could just see the bottoms of an old, shredded yellow dress with lace on the bottom. And behind the feet I saw the small child-sized coffin, its lid still missing.

“I only want to play. How about a game of hide and seek? I know the perfect hiding spot: inside my coffin.” Then the small girl began to count. “1. 2. 3,” as she left behind the coffin and stood in the corner closest to the door.

Willa and I exchanged looks and I willed our parents to wake up though deep down I knew it was useless. I’d read enough fairy tales to know better.

“4. 5. 6.”

I didn’t know why she wanted us in the coffin and I didn’t want to know. I knew evil without being told. 

“7. 8. 9.” A pause. “10! Ready or not…” And I watched in horror as the girl’s feet turned slowly to face us then move in our direction. “Here. I. Come…”

I knew what would happen next and didn’t want to wait for it to happen. I grabbed Willa’s shirt and tugged, shouting, “Run!” 

As we sprinted from the bed, I had only a second to see the girl. She was about my age and her skin was the color of sawdust. Her hair had once been in beautiful braids but the ribbons were missing and the complicated knots were coming undone. She looked like a porcelain doll that had been left outside for years.

I purposefully crashed into the girl, knocking her off her feet, to buy us time. We ran around the coffin, and down the stairs hand-in-hand.

We were nearly to the bottom when I heard thumping from behind us. The coffin hit our pajamaed legs with only three stairs remaining. We smashed into each other and on the foot of the stairway as the coffin slide past us. It landed upright against the wall. The inside was so dark that I could almost see myself in its reflection.

I forced myself to get up though everything inside hurt and I just wanted to cry, which Willa was already doing. I pulled her up and saw she had twisted her foot.

“Get on, quick,” I said offering her my back. She did her best to hop on and I lifted her up higher and began to run, bent over to keep her from falling off.

I heard the doll girl laughing as though were in a race that I knew were losing. I also heard the dragging of the coffin again getting louder as she got closer.

“Get inside the coffin,” the doll-girl said, losing all sense of the fake kindness she had in her voice before. 

I didn’t know where to go so I let my feet lead me. We were by the front door and I quickly used one hand to open it, holding onto Willa as best I could. We were about to step out when I felt the doll girl tackle us from behind. 

My momentum was too strong with Willa on my back and I couldn’t stop from crashing into our porch railings and getting caught up in the thick spiderwebbing Willa and I had spent hours putting up as I fell into the front yard.

I heard Willa crying louder and tried to force my way out of the webbing but every twist and turn I made just seemed to wrap the white, sticky fabric around tighter. Red shadows danced around my vision from the fire-themed lights Dad shown on the house at night to make the house creepier. 

Through the white sheered webbing, I saw the doll girl dragging the coffin outside. My eyes darted around but I couldn’t see Willa anywhere and I realized I couldn’t hear her either. My heart pounded and I began just tearing through my restraints.

“I found you,” the doll girl said as I finally freed myself, but I was too late. The doll girl had placed the coffin on the porch railing and pushed it open-side first over toward me. 

I closed my eyes and stuck out my hands in a lame attempt to stop the inevitable, and waited for the coffin to devoir me.

But I never felt the hard wood of the coffin fully enclose around me though my hands grazed a part of it.

Although my eyes were still closed I saw a scene from what looked like a Halloween movie. There was a crowd of people dressed like the pilgrims I had seen in my history books in their instantly recognizable black and white and brown clothing.

There were five women in bonnets that stuck out far from their faces. They held onto their children whose faces were buried in their white aprons. 

Two bearded men held a woman who wore only black and who did not resist. She was sickly thin. 

They were all looking into a hole next to me. Lying inside it was a little girl no older than me. She was in a coffin the same shape and size as the one Willa had cleaned only yesterday, the same one the evil doll child dragged, and the one I had touched.

The little girl was screaming. “Please, please. It’s not my fault! I’m not a witch! I’m not her!”

“Be brave,” said the woman being held by the two men in a soothing tone, the kind used by a parent trying to get their baby to sleep. “For you will walk out of this soon.”

That did nothing to calm the small, frightened girl. 

She reminded me of Willa and I wanted to help. I bent over the hole and reached for her hand but my own went through the girls’ outreached arms, and my shouts were left unheard. It was as though I was in a movie that couldn’t be changed or stopped.

A final man held a wooden cross and was speaking a language I didn’t understand. He blessed himself like my grandpa did before eating. 

One of the men let go of the woman and walked over while holding the lid of a coffin which he put overtop of the still screaming and struggling girl, barely silencing her cries which raised in volume as the new horror beset her. I could hear her scratching from inside the wooden box and I instinctively rubbed my own nails.

On the lid was the same etchings Willa had shown me on the coffin Mom had brought home. I realized then that I wasn’t dreaming or watching a movie but witnessing a memory.

The woman, who I understood was the girl’s mother, said in a voice far deeper than the soothing voice from before, “By the Beast that grows inside me, may my daughter arise on the anniversary of this date, and switch her fate with one of your own children.”

A black bird took flight from the surrounding forest and spread its wings. It was so large that it momentarily blocked out the sun. A shadow covered us all, and the women fell to their knees and cried with their children while the men rustled in place.

“Burn the witch,” said the priestly man holding his cross, and the lone man holding the calm woman they called a witch pulled her toward a town in the distance while the other man began putting dirt back into the hole from where the girl still yelled.

Then all was black again but the screaming did not leave my ears.

When I opened my eyes I was looking into Willa’s. She was kneeling overtop of me, her back against the coffin’s rear where the skeleton had once been, propping it up above me. To my horror, she was already merging with the wood, already her once soft, kid skin was disappearing, leaving only bone which was fusing to the wood.

“No, no, no,” I said in a voice that wouldn’t go any louder than a whisper.

“Wiwi to the rescue,” Willa said with words that faded as they were spoken.

A tear fell from her face and landed amongst the ones already falling down my own. I reached for my little sister who reached for me, her big sister, and as our fingers grazed, Willa’s stopped moving and her touch was no longer the warm kind I had felt since she was born. Instead it was cold and smooth. Smooth as bone.

“No, no, no,” I repeated. 

In an instant where once my sister was I could now only see a skeleton. Willa’s blue eyes faded. She closed them and there was nothing but empty sockets.

The coffin was shoved off me, and standing there was Willa in the flesh just as she was before.

My first instinct was to jump up and embrace her, relieved that this shared nightmare was somehow over. But that didn’t match reality. She may have looked like Willa but behind those eyes, I knew she wasn’t my Wiwi.

“Where’s my sister,” I said scrambling to get up and backing away.

“You touched the coffin, you saw, you heard the curse. We’ve traded places,” her voice was like Willa’s but it sounded older. “The curse is lifted once a year, a few hours to change your fate with another,” said the girl whose voice was the sweet sound of my sister’s.

“Bring her back. Now,” I said.

“Too late, I’m afraid. The curse has reset. Nothing you or I can do now except,” she let the tantalizing maybe stay in the chilled air. I grasped for it in my mind and my hands went through that hope like fingers in fog.

“Except what…”

“Except if we burn the coffin and end this curse once and for all.”

I screamed without words as the banshees did. “My sister is in there because of you!” 

“It’s the only way,” the doll said, holding onto my shoulders and shaking me as though she could wake me up to her twisted logic. “I was locked away for what seemed like forever like other kids before me. Do you know what it’s like to be in darkness for that long, spending every second neither alive nor dead, just waiting in the dark, screaming to no one but yourself, hoping soon the coffin will open? Even if your sister emerges next year, she won’t be the same. The darkness changes you.”

“It wouldn’t change Willa.”

“The only way to free your sister is to find a kid to exchange. Will that be you? Some other innocent kid? You’d condemn them? Are you willing to become a monster?”

“I…I…” I didn’t know what to say in that moment.

“Help me end this curse. Destroy the black coffin. It didn’t start with us, this isn’t our fault and it wasn’t that innocent girl’s either. The only good is to destroy it.”

I grasped for solutions. “I’ll tell my parents. They’ll find a way.”

“And they’re going to believe you? You aren’t that dumb.” She paused. “Are you? There’s no proving anything happened tonight. I’m certainly not going to say anything except that you’re crazy and that coffin is too scary and needs to be destroyed immediately.” She pleaded now, and I saw the insanity behind her eyes. “End this with me. Tonight.”

I stared. And in that moment my mind cleared and I understood. 

“You’re right,” I told her. “We’ll leave it on the street corner. It’s trash day tomorrow morning, they’ll take it and it’ll be crushed in the truck and burned at the dump.”

The doll sister smiled and I knew she was happy. She put an arm around me and the hairs on my arms stood up.

“I never had a sister before. I can tell we’re going to become best friends,” she said.

We dragged the coffin to the curb in silence and I did my best not to look inside. The doll Willa picked up the lid that was already lying there and put it on top. I pushed it off. 

“Let her see the stars one last night.”

The doll Willa shrugged and walked away back to the house. I followed and didn’t look back.

While the doll was tucking herself into Willa’s bed and admiring her new surroundings, I walked into my parents’ room. 

Mom stirred and said, “Go back to bed honey,” and that was enough for me to lose all my composure. I hugged her and soaked her shirt with my tears.

“What’s this,” her mom asked, waking up enough to hug me back. I could have held on forever.

“I had a nightmare,” I said truthfully.

Dad was awake at this point and got out of bed, his eyes still closed. He lifted me up without a word and carried me back to bed. 

“It was just a dream,” he told me. “Dreams can’t hurt you.” 

He tucked me in and kissed my forehead. Then he kissed the doll Willa’s head and I felt sick.

The doll was already asleep, and I figured it was the first time she had been in a bed for a very long time. But I did not pity her.

Instead, I waited. Hours later, when my digital clock changed to 4AM, I got out of bed and stared at the imposter. It made my skin crawl to see her wrapped up in Willa’s favorite dinosaur blanket.

I whispered in the dark for her and when she continued snoring, I was confident that the girl who was not Willa was properly asleep. I took my chance and crept back outside and to the coffin.

Making as little sound as possible, I carried it to the shed in our backyard where Dad kept all the things we never use. It took me awhile but I finally managed to take most of the items out and to drag the coffin to the back, still not daring to look inside.

I put a black tarp over it, hiding it from view. I whispered to it, “You will come back to me. Hold on Wiwi. I won’t forget you. I love you.” 

It took me the rest of the night but I placed all the items back into the shed the way they were and locked it as the sun began to rise.

By then my eyes were so dry they hurt and I couldn’t shed a single tear more. 

Even without telling me earlier, I knew that doll girl didn’t have a sister because if she did she would have known I would never have abandoned Willa. Let her think the coffin was destroyed.

I glanced at our window to make sure I wasn’t being watched then looked at the shed one more time before heading back to bed. 

“Just wait,” I said to myself over and over until sleep overtook me.

And wait me and my little sister did. Waited for tonight, for midnight one year after when she would finally be released. 

Do you hear her? Do you hear the coffin? She comes.

About the Author

Josh Davis started writing stories when he was five. He hopes he’s improved since then.