 Her name was Dorothy Sawyer, and she was a witch. I know you don't have time to spare, no one ever has the time. But I want you to hear this story, and you need to hear it to the end. She lived on a rundown housing estate, the kind that was thrown up in the 60s, to house those coming from the torn down slums. But of course, in time these estates became just another kind of slum. The residents saw to that, or their kids did. The slums had not been slums to begin with. By the time I was stood on Dorothy Sawyer's doorstep, the place had been in a state of decrepitude for decades. Some property developer had bought the land, and they needed the place cleared out so they could raise it. Some of the residents had gone easy, probably just glad to get away. The ones with a bit more cunning had held the line, and had been offered amounts several orders above what the houses were actually worth. But some of them wouldn't go, and that's why I was there. Some of those now departed residents had been too stupid to know what a good thing they were being offered. But most were just stubborn. Dorothy Sawyer in particular was stubborn. The other agents had tried bribing her, cajoling her, and probably even threatening her. Not that this last bit was recorded in the reports. None of them had even got past the front door. But I was good. I was the best. You may sneer at the job that I do. Hard selling, dear old ladies, to give up their homes. But every man must have bread and a roof above. Some of them have wives and bosses and bank managers too. Wives and bosses and bank managers who give them no rest. So there I was, shivering on the windblown doorstep of the last occupied house for a half mile in any direction. Every street lamp on the road was off, except for one which glared a ghoulish pumpkin orange behind me. The face of the house was as black as the sky above, in which in the absence of the usual unnatural light which blights them, the stars shone as in the primeval. We were in the tail end of a storm, and the wind tore its way through the empty streets in short desperate bursts, like the howls of some dying beast. I wrapped gently at the peeling door. The sound echoed and the pause between gusts. I stooped down to the letterbox and pressed my lips to the cold metal. Dorothy, Dorothy, we need to talk. I called through the slat. But there wasn't a response, not that I had expected one. I think I smirked a little to myself. As grim as the situation was, I was enjoying the challenge. Dorothy? I called again in a sing-song voice. Dorothy, you know why I'm here, and you know that I won't be going away. In the far distance an emergency siren wailed. I put my lips back to the grate. I'm not about to threaten you like the others did, Miss Dorothy, but I must stress I won't be going anywhere until you've opened this door. I smiled to myself and stepped back off the doorstep, looking up to the windows. A single light flared, sputtered, and steadied behind the glass as a candle was lit. It glowed there against the dirty pain as, in almost the same instant, a gale tore through the rose, and the single streetlight behind blinked out into nothingness. I twisted between the now dark street and the glimmering light in the window above. The glass sang in its frame as the wind roared down through the houses. I stepped back onto the doorstep, but I hesitated to knock. My stomach was squirming, and I mistook the feeling for anger. A curious idea had come to me. I snuck around the side of the house. The passageway was pitch black, and I felt my way along the show concrete. The garden, barely lit by a clouded moon, was a forest of overgrown trees and shrubs. Their gnarled limbs leaning out into the patio raked my face, and I made my way for the back door. Peering through the murky window into what I assumed was the kitchen, I still found no light in the house's lower levels. Listening very carefully, I pressed down the door handle. The door leaned in, and a rush of dank air came out to meet me. A shallow light came in through the hall, leading off from the kitchen. The room was entirely bare, and slathered in dust and grime. Pale patches on the walls told me of where the appliances had once lived. I wondered if something had happened, and someone else from the company had managed to get her out. I stepped out of the kitchen and into the hall. The hallway was as bare as the kitchen had been. It didn't look like the house had been lived in for years, and the thin, bitter smell of stale dust hung in the air. There was a glow from the upper floor. The occupant of the upstairs had lit what had appeared to be a single candle, but the light was far too strong to be coming from that meager source. And the light, in fact, seemed to be growing in a most unnatural way. The heat, too, seemed much too strong, and I loosened my jacket as a prickling sensation spread from the back of my neck and across my shoulders. As I rounded the bottom of the stair, the heat started to roast the still cold skin on my face. It was like sticking my head into an oven. The light on the walls was flickering with a bizarre speed, more like that of a strobe than a wavering candle flame. I wrapped my scarf about my face to hide it from the furnace-like heat. It only grew in intensity as I fought my way to the top of the stair. The idea that, perhaps, the crazy old woman had set the house ablaze in an active sabotage had occurred to me. But there was no smoke filling the hallway or pouring from under the doors. Only the awful, oppressive heat. On the top of the stair, I saw that the door at the end of the landing from which the heat was so obviously coming was wide open. Inside, what seemed like a galaxy of candle flames flickered. I could not see the old woman anywhere. The heat was becoming almost unbearable. It was beginning to hurt to breathe in the scorching air. But I still pressed towards the open doorway. I reached the threshold, my face now having to turn away from the heat that was being thrown through the flame. I stepped into the swaying light. The chill that hit me tore the breath from my throat in ragged, choking plumes. My skin rive and puckered as I crossed the threshold from searing heat into abysmal cold. It was like stepping out onto the arctic tundra. The air was perfectly still, but of such clear and brilliant iciness, it threaded straight into your bones. A shiver went right through my core. But only partly was this due to the temperature. I looked around the room. Enough candles burned that the room should have been sweltering in the heat. In fact, the air shimmered slightly as if it were quite at odds with the great clouds that came with my increasingly rapid breathing. I began to look around. The floor was an obscene litter of twigs and leaves and moss. In places, this forest carpet twitched and rustled as unseen creatures churned the mass. There was no bed in what was otherwise plainly the bedroom of the house. The candles which lit without heat were arranged on every wardrobe and chest of drawers. Of all other ornament, the room was bare. Where the bed would most ordinarily have been placed, there was something quite other to normal furnishing. A pile waist high of loose gray soil. Something inside me, some instinct, now went into overdrive. My head began to swim as it seesawed wildly between two visceral urges. If perhaps the rational and human part of my brain had not been drowned in a wash of adrenaline, I might have identified them as fight and flight. I stepped towards the great mound of earth, flexing some heat back into my rigid fingers. I reached out. Something rustled in the mulch that littered the floor. A flurry of soil tumbled down the mound. The candles flared, and I heard a voice in the doorway. You try and chase me out, do you, boy? You try and scare me, is that it? An inexplicable dark silhouette stood on the threshold of the room, small and hunched and malevolent. But you're not like the others, are you? It cooed bitterly. You came in. I took a step back and staggered onto the pile of soil coming down backwards on it. The dark shape juttered as an icy little laugh carried on the freezing air. So sorry, I'm… please. I could barely stammer out the words. Something now stepped out of the dark shape, literally stepped out of it as a ghoul stepping from its tomb, and a silhouette fell away, like shed skin to lay on the hallway floor as a shadow. This shadow, attached to the heels of a small, wizened woman, wrapped from head to toe in skirts and shawls, Dorothy Sawyer, only sorry for one thing, I'd say, and only sorry for yourself. She took a gentle step into the room in a terrific gust of frigid air washed over me as I lay there. As well you might be. She muttered. I pulled myself half to my feet now, I was expecting some kind of hideous reprisal, but she only stood there a few feet inside the doorway and bathed in candlelight. Her withered hands hung loose at her signs, her roomy old eyes never left mine. I've made a big mistake, I know, I muttered, but if you just let me go, let you go. Why would you want to leave? What was it you called up to me from the street? You know I won't be going away. Dorothy, please. She bristled with anger now, and the sound was like a snake in the high grass. I think you need to take the taste of that particular name off of your lips. She hissed. I raised myself a little more. My intention was to bow the old woman from her feet and make a dash for the stair. Her head tilted a little to one side. If I were to go, I stumbled out. You know, I wouldn't tell anyone, right? I wouldn't tell a soul. You'll never see me again. You know that, right? She smiled. Not you, no. She took another step closer. Perhaps another meek one, like the last young man, or perhaps another bold and sneering child like you. Seeing that to talk was in vain, I tensed my legs, ready to barrel through the twisted old crone. She raised a crooked finger and every icy candle that burned in the room flared like a spitting dragon. The cold snapped around me and as the candles burned down to a timid and eerie blue flame, they seemed to draw the light from the air. When I was left in a darkness, pinpricked with cobalt stars. From the dark she spoke, I think perhaps it's time I put one of you meddlers to good use. The blue light now seeped out from the candles and began to dispel the blackness. She stood there in its ghostly glow, perhaps you should stay awhile. I felt vise-like fingers clamp down on my arms, my legs, and across my chest before pulling me down to the earthen mound. Cold, filthy, black-nailed hands that were rotted by the grave but with twice the strength of any living man, I screamed and the fingers dug deeper in towards the bone. Dorothy stepped towards me and I caught the smell of earth and blood and bonfires as she leaned in towards me. I thrashed my head this way and that, the only movement that I could achieve under the limbs that had shot from the earth to hold me in place. And as she took me under the chin with a grip that belonged to no wizened old woman, I saw that her eyes were no longer those of this earth either. They melted and swam and bulged until, not a foot in front of me, I was staring into the bulbous yellow eyes and horizontal pupils of some vile sheep or goat. I don't want to see another one of you on my doorstep, boy. She croaked, I don't want to hear another wrap at my door. I opened my mouth to speak and found I could only mutter inarticulately. She stared with those awful inhuman eyes and waited. At last, I found my tongue, I am not in charge, it's gl- I don't care who sent you, you made your way in here. You're obviously a resourceful young man, you're going to make these visits, stop. I can't, there's nothing I can do, please, Dorothy. I knew I'd slipped up, the eyes bulged in their sockets and her head shook at the end of her neck like some awful voodoo fetish. The candles flared in the gloom and the ghoulish hands reaching up from the soil hauled and tore at my limbs. You will do something to stop them coming, or you will regret it, boy. Don't think there is a place that I will not find you. She shrieked, okay, okay, I'll stop them, you'll never see them again, you'll never see them again. She cackled at this last phrase, those bulging goat eyes quivering. And if you were to tell anyone about what you saw here tonight, I won't, I swear to you, I will never. I shouted. She smirked at me with her thin lips and rows of blunted yellow teeth. If you were to tell anyone, boy, if you were even to hint, I would take them 13 days upon this earth from the point of telling would be the sum of their lives. To the tick of the second hand, I would slide out of the shadows wherever they were and have them. I will start. She raised a crooked finger, its nail like black and ancient iron. With their eyes, do you understand me, boy? Anyone you tell, I nodded in grim accord. She took a step back and the rotten claws that held me loosened their grip. I'll do it all. I promise I'll make sure I'll. She waved away my attempts to speak. The goat-like eyes were melting back to the red roomy eyes of any other elderly spinster. The blue candles became golden once more and the bitter cold that pervaded the room thawed. The hands scurried back to lurk in their earthen mound and Dorothy straightened up in as much as she could and took a further step away, her shuffling movements ruffling the leaf litter. I looked up at the open doorway. No visitors, no tales told, remember, boy? I have eyes at every window. She said quietly to my turned away face and as the adrenaline so sharp and strong that it had blinded almost every sense, ran thin, I found myself at the kitchen door by which I'd entered, bursting out into the garden and around the side passage and then my feet hammering at the ground. That return of consciousness was so like the waking from a dream that I might have dismissed all that had happened as such, but for the fact that as I tore through those deserted streets, a single light in each house's window blinked into life as I passed it. I was silent for some time. It was not easy. I would wake up at night, jolted from sleep and bathe in sweat, having dreamt that I'd said the words aloud and damned some poor soul. On top of this, I had my own sworn promise to uphold. For a good while, I held the management at bay with promises that she was ever weakening to our offers after numerous fictional visits. The pressure built and built and built, loosened by drink. My tongue slipped and true to her word, in thirteen days I heard nothing more from the man to whom I'd spoken, some recruit to the firm on his first work night out. It was natural to inquire why I'd seen no more of him. Just away at home, I was told, very sad, a healthy young man. It was a curse, I suppose, but maybe there was something more to the wry smile she gave me as I promised never to speak. To be able to plant a slow and silent blade between the shoulders of your enemies could almost be seen as a gift. If you have a wife and a boss and a bank manager who give you no rest, perhaps, perhaps. It was easy from then on. A phony claim about some protected species living in a nearby area of scrub ground was all it took to put a halt to the development. It wasn't hard to fabricate. I felt that I could do anything now. Who was to stop me? Who would be able to? If anyone stood in my way, all it would take were those ten words, her name was Dorothy Sawyer, and she was a witch, and the problem would be gone. You know that old saying about power? It's absolute, and the outcomes, I assume, never was a truer word spoken. If you can truly call it corruption, that is. People and their lives seem so different now. So much less. I suppose this is only natural. What do we care for the fly whom we can so easily swat without conscience or consequence? It was all too easy. For everything I had gained, it wasn't enough. It was the chase that was the thrill, the use of my new gift. I wanted that rush once more, but too many around me had died. Even at a distance, the threads were beginning to be followed back to me. I needed an anonymous medium, and I needed fresh blood. So here we are. No one has the time anymore, but you've stuck with me till the end. It really wasn't necessary. All it takes is 10 little words, and they don't need to be spoken. Mark your clock. You know something that you were not supposed to know, and now you have 13 days. To the minute, to the tick of the second hand. When she slips out of the shadows, and you feel those icy, shriveled fingers upon your face, and they begin reaching for your eyes, you mustn't be afraid. Just hold still, and hold your breath. You won't need to see her. You know what's coming. You know what she is. And you already know her name.