Night of the Witch-Hunter, page 1
Night of the Witch-Hunter
Killer VHS Series
Book 6
Patrick Barb
Shortwave
Night of the Witch-Hunter is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are creations of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2025 by Patrick Barb
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover illustration by Marc Vuletich.
Cover and Interior design by Alan Lastufka.
First Edition published March 2025.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-959565-64-2 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-959565-65-9 (eBook)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note from Shortwave Publishing
This is a story about witches. The ones who came before and the ones waiting to make their presence known.
When the classroom VCR quit working halfway through her presentation in U.S. History, Josey knew she was in trouble. Gears spun faster and faster inside the machine’s dusty black casing. The high-pitched squeal made everyone, including her teacher Ms. Roberts, cover their ears. It was worse for Josey, standing at the front inhaling chalk dust fumes, helpless beside the monolithic, black TV/VCR media cart rolled in on presentation days for students (like Josey) too shy to stand with poster board or diorama and read from note cards, shaking with nerves.
She was close enough to hear the out-of-control VCR gears devouring the magnetic tape from inside her cassette—destroying her recorded project. Desperate to do something, anything, she smashed her fingertip against the EJECT button. Pressing it over and over, sometimes with a fast jab and, other times, holding the button longer to see if it made a difference.
It didn’t.
Goddesses, help me.
Nikki was the reason she’d started using phrases like that. Nikki was the one always going on about earth goddesses and Tarot and witches and other impossibly cool things whenever they snuck into the woods behind school, smoking menthols stolen from Nikki’s mom, complaining about teachers and their snobby, ultra-judgy classmates at Fallen Church High. Josey wasn’t sure how much of the actual magic component she believed. But, then again, pleading her case to a goddess certainly seemed more viable than praying to God—that one from the Bible with the beard and the smiting of sinners and Jesus too.
As if intervention, divine or otherwise, had seen fit to come to her aid at last, the VCR belched out her VHS, sounding like a dying robot in a sci-fi flick. The black cassette, hot to the touch, emerged first. Then, the ruined magnetic tape spilled onto the pilling, tangle-weaved carpet.
Watching from her podium, Ms. Roberts wrung her hands and folded them one over another, mumbling prayers.
And it was all going so well before this! A detached, sardonic tone to her thoughts came easy to Josey. However, there was truth to her words. She’d worked hard on the project. The assignment? Cover an aspect of their town’s history and demonstrate how it tied into a broader national history topic.
She’d picked the witch trials. Or, in the case of Fallen Church’s past, the singular witch trial.
Josey had taken a shoebox full of scribbled-on, spiky-haired Barbie dolls from a neighborhood yard sale and “dyed” one of the doll’s hair black through an intense permanent marker scribble session. One her mother had watched closely to ensure no stray marks ended up on her precious kitchen table. That doll was Josey’s star, set apart from the other dollfolk which she’d kept blonde or auburn-haired, paired with shorter-in-stature He-Man, G.I. Joe, and Power Ranger figures borrowed from the homes of kids her Mom had her babysit—their parents only agreeing to take on Josey’s services because of her family’s standing in Fallen Church.
Then, she’d used her Nan’s sewing machine and patterns she’d downloaded from a historically accurate doll clothing message board to create period-accurate, 1600s New England garb sized for her “cast.” It was extra, different, unexpected. It was exactly the sort of thing Josey loved to do.
Her fingertips displayed the scabs and scrapes from the sewing needle whose tip ended up rust-colored when all was said and done. Josey imagined the dolls and action figures also had enough of her blood in and on them that her enemies could use the toys as voodoo dolls—if they bothered to go that far.
Her raven-haired, plastic-molded featured player “stood” on a makeshift display base of cardboard, her stiff arms rising and falling in jerky stop-motion, surrounded by other dolls in coarse black woolen jackets and dresses.
Josey’s monotone voice-over demonstrated how she was the one person in her family who’d mastered all the video editing and recording equipment her dad purchased years before to film Christmas morning present-opening sessions, but had never quite got around to using. Syncing the audio and visuals wasn’t exactly easy. So, there were moments when Josey’s recorded voice lagged behind the on-screen visuals.
JOSEY: The town of Fallen Church, New Hampshire isn’t as well-known as our New England cousin, Salem in Massachusetts. But we share a common historical bond. The bond of American witchcraft.
While those accused, tried, and executed in Salem numbered around thirty, our hamlet saw just one resident charged with “consorting with the Devil, spoiling the innocence of village youths, and tempting elders with her wanton lust and debauchery.” All of that’s real too. You can read it for yourself in the town records.
Josey had added a quick cut to a new shot at a wobbly angle, the best she could manage in the one-room town archives located downtown in a small, non-descript brick building adjacent to the town hall. She’d had one long drawer of museum-quality artifacts pulled open for viewing, her camera zooming in and out until she focused on a crinkled yellowed piece of parchment that’d served as a broadside displaying the news across the New Hampshire colony and was now preserved under a slab of glass. This official notice served as Josey’s proof and evidence that she understood primary sources—one of the particular requirements of the assignment.
But when the document appeared on-screen, her classmates paid little to no attention, certainly not enough to give any signs of being impressed by her discovery.
JOSEY: Rebecca Josephine Wesley, who’d lost both her elderly parents on the sea voyage from England to the Colonies and who’d finally settled alone in the village of Fallen Church in the New Hampshire Colony was formally accused of witchcraft in 1693. At the time, the Puritans controlled almost all aspects of life in the New England Colonies. Following a trial during which Rebecca was blamed for nearly every misfortune affecting the township and which she was not even present to testify on her own behalf, she was sentenced to die.
However, initial execution plans did not live up to expectations. The “witch” survived attempted drowning and hanging. Even getting crushed between boulders could not end the young woman’s life. Indeed, according to the records at least, her body was revealed to be remarkably unscathed after the top stone slab was rolled away. It was not until she was set ablaze, burned at the stake down to ashes and bone, that she finally expired.
The next part of Josey’s overly ambitious production involved a gasoline-soaked doll and flickering flames, melting globs of plastic sizzling on the asphalt of her family’s driveway. It was the highlight of the whole endeavor as far as Josey was concerned. The recording even caught her tiny, whispered “Yes,” uttered as she peered through the viewfinder.
JOSEY: Rebecca was survived by a son, newly-born at the time of her capture. A bastard, with no father’s name provided in the village records. William took his deceased mother’s last name. The Wesley line continued in Fallen Church as a result, with male heirs born in each subsequent generation. Until me.
Today, I am the first and only blood-related female descendant of the Fallen Church Witch Rebecca Josephine Wesley. Part of my name—Josephine ‘Josey’ Wilhelmina Wesley comes from hers. I am. . .
Josey had turned from the TV cart and faced the rows of desks before her, all occupied by her bored and bemused classmates. She held out hands filled with the crinkly remnants of her video tape.
She willed herself to try and find the words to extract herself from this disaster, the ones that’d allow her to sit down with some dignity intact, returning to her seat at the rear of the class where she’d pull her too-large black leather jacket off her seatback, drape it over her head, and sleep—her participation grade be damned.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t quick enough for Ashton Gore, he of the All-American curly blonde hair, pristine white home game
In the classroom, the other members of the football team, their hangers-on, and those kids who saw which way the wind was blowing and didn’t dare risk association with Josey by abstention, all picked up the chant.
“WITCH! WITCH! WITCH! WITCH!”
Even as Josey rolled her eyes, attempting to appear unaffected by the taunts, tears blurred her vision. Their presence made her desk seem suddenly much farther away.
Suddenly, a hand gripped her upper arm, squeezing it tight.
Keeping a hold of Josey, Ms. Roberts’s nostrils flared and her bottom lip quivered.
“Young lady,” she said, each syllable followed by a hitched breath, a theatrical performance of outrage, “remove this blasphemous videotape from my classroom immediately. Take it to the dumpster behind the gymnasium, put it there with all the trash.”
An outraged voice inside Josey whispered retorts:
My ancestor didn’t do anything wrong.
I didn’t do anything wrong either.
Did you even watch my tape? Did you listen to the words in the report?
These witches—here, in Salem, all over—were never the villains. The people who accused them, who testified against them, who took them from their homes, their families, and ended their lives, they were the bad ones. They were the corrupt, immoral ones. They used people like Rebecca as scapegoats.
But instead of speaking up, Josey let silence fall across the classroom. Ashton and his hangers-on smelled blood in the water. Putting a fist over his mouth, he faked a cough, “covering” a too-loud “Witch! Bitch!”
The outburst set off a new rolling tide of laughter.
Screw this! Josey thought.
Stopping at her desk to pick up her jacket, but leaving her books and backpack behind, she stomped in scuffed Doc Martens to the doorway and made her exit, pulling the door closed after her. But not slamming it.
The tape came too.
Nikki stood by the dumpster, cigarette smoke curling past her fingers, obscuring the emerald polish she’d applied to her nails that morning. Josey couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy to see another person; but she was certain that whenever that time was, the person she’d been grateful to see had to have been Nikki then as well.
Nikki, with her long, straight naturally auburn hair. Nikki, wearing a thrift store-purchased Army jacket over a long-sleeved purple top and a brown skirt that fell to her ankles. Nikki, displaying her Goth bona fides in black combat boots, heels thick and unashamed, and by a pile of charm necklaces draped around her neck, displaying ankhs, inverted crosses, and pentagrams, a veritable bouquet of occult symbology.
Cigarette to her lips, she sucked in smoke. At the same time, she fished in her satchel for a pack of smokes, flicking the box top open and offering it to Josey.
Saying nothing yet about what’d brought her to the dumpster, Josey reached into her best friend’s bag and retrieved one long, thin menthol. She held it to her mouth, while Nikki made a quick one-handed search inside the satchel for a lighter. “Presentation went that well, huh?” she asked, breaking the silence first.
Something between a sob and a laugh exploded from Josey. Finally, the tears came. For real, this time. She knew she wouldn’t have to hide them from Nikki.
Her friend plopped onto the concrete in front of the dumpster, keeping a soft hand around Josey’s wrist. She didn’t squeeze tight or pull down, but made space for Josey, let her know it was there—if she wanted it.
Soon, Josey rested her head on Nikki’s shoulder. She studied a dark brown mole under Nikki’s chin. A single aberration in an otherwise perfectly pristine snowfield of pale skin. To Josey’s thinking, that solitary blemish made the other girl appear that much prettier. She hadn’t told Nikki that, though.
The red-head girl ran her fingers through Josey’s hair, the green-painted nails becoming jewels in the darkness of the brushed-aside strands. They stayed like that for a while. Outcast girls before the dumpster.
It wasn’t long enough as far as Josey was concerned.
“Roberts called the video blasphemous?” Nikki asked with a throaty chuckle, after blowing another smoke ring.
The mint smell of their menthols undercut the stench of school garbage, but didn’t eliminate it entirely. Josey had smoked a single cigarette and scraped the cherry off on the bottom of her shoes before flicking the butt into the dumpster. One was more than enough for her.
“Yeah, she did,” Josey said. “She sucks. This school sucks. This town sucks. This whole. . . this everything. . . it—”
“Hey now!” Nikki cut off Josey’s rant, a wry smile appearing on her face. “It’s gonna be the new millennium soon. Everything’s gonna be different like those posters downtown say. Or ya know, maybe the world’s gonna end. Or something.”
Her lips thinned, her expression turning grave and serious.
That lasted until she blew another smoke ring, and the devious smile from before crept back onto her face.
“You bitch,” Josey said with a matching grin. She playfully shoved her friend’s shoulder.
“So, wait. Was the Fallen Church Witch really your great-great-great-great-however-many-greats grandma? Like for real?” Nikki asked, changing conversational direction with manic ease.
Ever since meeting Nikki in middle school, when the new girl’s family moved to town, and she’d finally, finally felt like she’d found someone who truly got her and everything she was about and wanted to be, Josey had learned to embrace her friend’s chaos.
“Yeah,” she answered. “You missed out on the fifth-grade class trip to the execution site. They used to do a reenactment on the anniversary of her execution. Or at least they did until that year. . .”
Nikki’s eyebrow raised. “What happened?”
Josey shrugged.
“I started crying when the woman—probably just an acting student, college girl taking a semester off from Juilliard or the like—was playing the part of Rebecca, burning at the stake.
“It was weird. We were standing in the place where this woman was killed, but it was so clean, those period-authentic cobblestones reeking of ammonia. Then, it melted away and I had, like, a vision of how it was back in the 1600s. I mean, what it must’ve felt like. When I looked at the girl playing the part of my ancestor, her face was different. More like my face. But not quite, you know? Close though.
“And the skin, her skin, my skin—all of it was on fire. I saw roaring flames shoot up in twin towers of orange, red, and yellow. I was screaming by that point. Next thing I remember, my teacher’s pulling me away from the reenactment. Dragging me.
“Then, I dunno, I wasn’t there with the class anymore, so I’m not sure what actually happened. I didn’t see it, but I heard secondhand what happened. The girl playing Rebecca started screaming and it wasn’t part of the show. She screamed and collapsed to the ground. Then, everyone got quiet. That silence lasted until someone finally went to check on her. Lot of kids who were there that day claim that they rolled this girl over and. . . her face was red. Like a bad-bad burn. Skin all blistered.”
