"The Return of the Witch" is a short story by Ramsey Campbell that appeared in his 1964 collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants.
Synopsis[]
The witch of the title is Gladys Shorrock, who in the late 1910s comes to live, with her son Robert, at 7 Victoria Road in Brichester's Mercy Hill neighbourhood. At first little things are amiss: Her shrubbery grows unnaturally quickly, and a neighbour complains that "it rains on’t garden at them Shorrocks, though there ain’t no wet ground anywhere else!” The windows on one room facing the street are permanently shuttered.
Later incidents are more uncanny:
| “ | what flapped from the roof of no. 7 were not birds; that the vines which climbed that wall swayed back and forth on windless nights; and once someone saw Gladys Shorrock leave the house, mutter something, and the gate open and close itself behind her. | „ |
One man says that he "followed her toward Severnford and fled a gigantic glowing figure which strode after him through the forest."
Her son Robert, who was once fired from a construction job for walling up a black cat "in imitation of an ancient street-christening ceremony", dies in 1924, and Gladys dies the next year, on Halloween, found staring out her window with glazed eyes.
The house remains empty for some 35 years, when on February 1, I960, Norman Owen, a novelist from Lancashire, moves in. He is not deterred by the warnings he receives--particularly from Stanley Nash, a doctor at Mercy Hill's hospital. When he enters the house's shuttered room--against Nash's advice--he suffers a dizzy spell, and finds a neon pentagram hanging from the ceiling, that seemed "as though it radiated darkness".
Owen begins having bad dreams, including one involving grave robbing--the ends with him waking up fully dressed, with his shoes caked with mud. Nash diagnoses that "the— soul, spirit, life-force, whatever you like—of the witch has been co-existing in your body." His advice: "drink as much black coffee as you can hold.”
Owen has another dream, where he retrieves a three-foot round wooden chest from a passageway in a hill in the countryside--only to wake and find the chest in his living room. Fighting an urge to open the chest, he telephones Nash and has him smash the pentacle--which seems to dispel the possession. They burn the chest--"only a long white member fell out as the lid warped"--and then Owen moves back to Southport in Lancashire.
Severn Valley[]
"The Return of the Witch" takes place in Campbell's Severn Valley setting, and the story gives him an opportunity to provide a sketch of the Mercy Hill locale:
| “ | Few outsiders passed through the Mercy Hill area of Brichester at the end of the first World War, for it was notorious for crime, and routes through it led nowhere important. Those who entered that area of narrow streets and tall red-brick houses with their hostilely peering tenants might vaguely notice that the streets toward the hilltop, around the hospital, were less crowded and dirty; but that was all. | „ |
Later, when Nash is explaining Shorrock's background to Owen, he provides a tour of some of the Valley's shadier locations:
| “ | She went to the lake in the woods some miles from here, and watched — from a distance — what happens at Goatswood… There were other places, too — like the island of the white stone beyond Severnford which nobody visits; and she knew the secret of the evil clergyman at Severnford — that’s where she got the knowledge to make this — return. | „ |
Behind the Mythos[]
Campbell writes, in the introduction to Cold Print, that the story was based on two notes from Lovecraft's Commonplace Book: "Live man buried in bridge masonry according to superstition--or black cat", and "Salem story. The cottage of an aged witch, wherein after her death are found sundry terrible things."
He explains that "The Return of the Witch" was not included in Cold Print because "it developed as a rewrite, virtually scene by scene, of a Henry Kuttner story ["The Salem Horror"] I had never read and didn't encounter until several years after my story was published.,,, I think the story can be allowed to rest in peace."