A warm light illuminated the office, stemming both from the gently smoldering fireplace and the tinted electrical light above. The walls were painted the colour of amber; the floor was hardwood teak covered largely by a hand-stitched vermillion carpet embroidered with gold thread. All the bookshelves, the filing cabinets, the desk, even the chairs were made of richly coloured cedar with accents of brass and metallic leaf. This was an office designed to comfort, to relax, to make the average visitor drop their guard and grow sleepy-eyed and unsuspecting.
This was the office of the notorious Ebon Witch.
The stories that surrounded the Ebon Witch differed greatly; some said she was the ghost of a widow who had murdered her children. Others knew her as a fierce demon spawned from hell. Many claimed she did her bloody deeds for sustenance, others to pay a devilish fee, still others for vengeance. Parents used her as a threat to keep children in line, while the children in turn invented their own exaggerated tales—both the threats and the tales grew into legends themselves as they passed from mouth to mouth. The only unifying elements in the many tales of the Ebon Witch were the crimes she committed—or, rather, the crime. The crime of kidnapping children.
The ideas of what she did with the children varied—some said she merely ate them. Others claimed she used them as players in her savage rituals. Still more swore that she made her clothes from their skin, her house from their bones, her wine from their blood. All they knew for sure was that no bodies were left behind.
These theories, of course, were nothing more than myths, and everyone knew it. What they didn’t know was the truth, and that was what was so frightening about the Ebon Witch. For, only eight years previously, what had once been a mere fairy tale had taken on a terrible life. Someone had taken it upon themselves to become the Ebon Witch. Someone subtle, clever, and with motivations more grandiose than kid-skin clothes—someone who sat behind the cedar desk in the amber-walled office.
Urban legend had painted the Witch as a bent old hag—a cackling crone with long, knotted fingers and a warty nose. But the woman who sat in the office was far from bent and spotted. The Ebon Witch was somewhere between forty and fifty—exactly where, she’d never tell—and as spry as she’d ever been. Her hair, naturally a dark blonde, was just beginning to go grey at the roots, and her cornflower-blue eyes had only the slightest webbing of wrinkles around them. Her skin was only one of the many things she liked to keep in immaculate condition—never had a day gone by where her face didn’t glow like polished pink porcelain.
Today, the Witch wore white, something she hadn’t done since her wedding day twenty-five years prior. To her, white had always seemed the colour of confidence, of coolness—to wear white was to fear no taint, no blemish; it was to prove to the world that the imperfection of doubt did not affect you. Not since her wedding day had the Witch felt the need—or had the confidence—to wear white.
Her creamy jacket was buttoned up to her collar bone, where it splayed open—a tied neckerchief covered the base and bottom half of her neck. Two ivory-coloured boots were pulled knee-high over white pants; the Witch was tapping the toes of these boots on the hardwood teak floor impatiently. Something had gone wrong, she was sure of it. Everything she had ever worked for, everything she had done over the past eight years… she had staked it all on what was being done tonight. Somewhere down the hall from her safe little office, something had surely—surely—gone wrong.
A knock came at the door, and the Witch straightened up in her chair, rested her elbows on the wooden arms, and cleared her throat. “Come in,” she said pleasantly.
The door creaked open, and there stood James Buckley, the Head Surgeon. He was dressed in his surgical garb, the mask still over his nose and mouth, the fingers of his rubber gloves slick with fresh blood.
“Yes?” the Witch asked tersely. Something had gone wrong.
Buckley shuffled his feet. “There’s been a… complication, ma’am.”
“What happened?” the Witch tried to keep her tone level.
“Er… do you want me to close the door?”
“No, Buckley. You’ve nothing to say to me that everyone won’t know before the night is out. What happened in there?”
The man coughed. “She… the woman’s dead, ma’am. Died near the end—there was nothing we could’ve done for her.”
The Witch tensed. This, in itself, was no issue. She had been planning on having the woman killed afterward, anyway. Even Buckley, who didn’t like to know the predestined fates of his patients, had known this. So for him to announce the woman’s death as a complication meant some worse news was to come. “And?” she prompted.
Buckley hesitated—he couldn’t meet the Witch’s eye. “She died before she gave birth, ma’am. We had to cut the baby out of her... there were some issues at first, but she’s all right, now. But…”
“Don’t stall, Buckley.”
“Well,” the surgeon wiped his forehead with the back of a rubber glove, “she’s normal. The genetics are all there, we weren’t wrong about that, but… nothing seems to have been expressed, aside from a few structural screw-ups. We’re waiting on the results of one last internal scan, but, for now, all we have is a human baby with a screwed-up genome.”
The Witch stood up, her fists clenched. “Let me see!”
Buckley led her from the office down the metal hallway. They strode purposefully into the nursery—in the incubator, watched dutifully by two of Buckley’s unnecessarily attractive nurses, was a wrinkled, red-faced baby girl.
The Witch felt her throat catch with disappointment. She had spent two years developing the serum, nine months monitoring the affected fetus, and waited anxiously in her office during the nearly two days of labour for… this?
None of the physical traits she had implanted had been expressed, and if Buckley’s final scan came back negative, then the baby was as worthless as the mother. “When do you expect the results?” she asked in a deadly whisper. The nurses stared blankly back at her. Buckley cleared his throat. “I gave the sample to Manning five minutes before I came to get you, so…”
“I’ve got it, Buck—oh, good morning, ma’am!”
The Witch turned around to see Arthur Manning, her analyst, standing in the doorway and brandishing a sheet of paper like a weapon. “Is it morning?” she asked—she shook her head blearily. “What do the results say?”
“They don’t look good, ma’am,” Manning said sadly. “Overall, the kid’s fairly normal.”
The Witch groaned. Manning chuckled. “Relax. I said fairly. She’s normal… but she has the, er, sixth sense.” He wrapped the words “sixth sense” in finger-quotations.
“What?” suddenly, the dimly-lit nursery seemed infinitely brighter. The Witch grabbed the paper out of Manning’s hands. It was true. The Witch felt as if she could stand to hug everyone in the room—if everyone hadn’t consisted of a blood-soaked surgeon, two young women, and Manning. Instead, she graced them all with a broad smile.
“We’ve done it,” she laughed, looking lovingly down on the wrinkled baby in the incubator. “We’ve finally done it!”
