The Sea Witch Of Ventnor City

Victoria clutched her 7 year old daughter closer to her as the noise intensified at the front of the paint and decorating store.

“Mommy I'm scared!”

They couldn’t see over the crowd but heard the voice. “I am entitled to and demand a refund since I used only three-quarters of the can. There is still one quarter left for someone else!”

The store clerk repeated the return policy. “Once the can is opened it can’t be returned.” The demands from the the other side increased until the clerk finally said that either “you leave or we call the police, and if you leave voluntarily you are never allowed back in this store again. You are banned for life.”

With a crash of paint cans the customer turned sharply and slithered down the line in our direction. With a collective gasp we beheld a creature of indeterminable age, 5 feet tall, green complexion with slime oozing down her head. Her whole body was dripping of rancid sea water. It was one of the most horrifying sights anyone had ever seen. Victoria tried to shield her daughter’s eyes as the creature stopped in front of them, eyes beady red, and hissed “that’s mine you lazy girl. You have to WORK for that,” and tried to wrap her unusually long and icy fingers around a small milk carton Victoria had bought for her daughter at the convenience store. As the hand slithered towards the carton, Victoria raised her arm to stop it but as she made contact with the oily digits she experienced a jolt unlike any other she had ever experienced and a chill burrowed into her body, shaking each vertebrae as it traveled down her spine.

The creature lowered her fingers, turned to leave and said, “I’ll come back for that another time. You just WAIT and see.” He daughter began to cry. Customers started to rush out of the store leaving the two of them standing there alone. They both looked down and saw a string of wet green lights that the creature had dropped as she rushed out of the store.

Victoria put her terrified daughter to sleep when she got home. She tried to convince herself they had not really seen “a green Sea Monster" as her daughter called it, but rather, just an unhappy customer at the decorating store.

Still, she couldn't stop thinking about it. As a culture reporter for the local press, she had covered all kinds of stories and had experienced many strange things but nothing like this. Who was that? And why had this creature fixated so on Erika's milk carton?

Were they all dreaming?

She was startled when her husband Jeff came in and said, “Erika was pretty upset earlier What happened?”

“Oh nothing, really,” she said

“Well, she was pretty shaken.

Victoria opened her mouth to speak but different words gushed out.

“There was an irate customer in the paint store, a woman of about 65 with an out of date pouf hairdo and sparkly shirt who was fighting with the clerk about the return policy on some paint and green lights, that's all.”

She couldn't believe she had lied to him but she was too embarrassed to tell him what she had really seen. How on earth would he believe that they had seen a creature covered in slime and sea water at a local store?

Weeks went by. She was busy with deadlines and article research and had almost completely eliminated the incident from her head when, one day while scanning the online news, she noticed a strange phenomenon brewing. Apparently there was an entire tribe of Sea Witches throughout the country who were falling down in stores both large and small, screaming that they “couldn’t breath,” that their God given “Sea Witch” rights were being denied them and demanding to speak immediately to the manager to correct this wrong. The businesses often had to resort to police authorities to wrestle them to the ground and take them away which resulted in the officers being slathered in that foul smelling sickening slime which enveloped each Witch. What was more alarming was that some of them were taking human form and adopting names such as “Karen” or “Becky” to hide their true selves. Could this be one of the creatures that Victoria and her daughter had encountered in that paint shop?

She started to inquire of her many contacts to see if anybody had seen such a creature locally. Stories started to emerge. It appears that the same Sea Witch of Ventnor City had been seen in human form throwing hot coffee at an employee of a Dunkin Donuts and again, in Sea Witch form, on the Boardwalk throwing scalding pizza cheese at a passerby who was wearing some sort of medical mask.

Further research uncovered even more disturbing news. The Sea Witch tribe, of unknown origin, seems to have arisen out of a deep resentment of those lower down in the Sea Witch world, for example the Sea Anemones. They take it upon themselves to beat down any other creature of the sea world that they deemed either as “takers” of their resources or deniers of their overall world view, a view in which only they rule. They adopted similar behaviors when in human form.

Victoria realized she could be onto something. A week later, the milk carton incident made sense when it was reported by the neighbors of a local inner city school that they had seen an enormous green figure perched over the school, her long icy fingers multiplied by the hundreds as she reached in through the windows and pulled the milk cartons and school lunches from the disadvantaged, all the while gleefully sneering, “It’s all mine, you don’t deserve any of it, you lazy children of lazy parents.” The police dismissed these neighbors as crazy and no photos of the creature revealed any images. Similar incidents emerged when it was reported that some Witches were using their powers to hack digital platforms, take back social service benefits from the poor and cover soup kitchens in green slime, rendering them virtually useless. It was reverse Robin Hood with a twist, steal from the poor and take it back for yourselves.

So as not to alarm her family, Victoria said nothing of this but decided that she needed firm evidence to expose the truth. She had, some time ago, done research on the Jersey Devil, a local monster rumored to live in the South Jersey Pine Barren forest, and knew that the biggest problem was that no one had ever been able to photograph this Devil, so it remained part of folklore. She was determined to get the photo this time. Firstly, she had to figure out where the creature lived.

She went back to her local contacts to see if there had been any reported sightings of the creature, say in any one particular location, and it seemed that she had been most commonly sighted in front of a house near the far bay blocks of the town, alternatively in Sea Witch and Human form. Through a careful study of local maps she believed she had pinpointed the exact location and created a plan. She would attempt to take the photo next Tuesday when Jeff was away on a business trip and the babysitter available.

Over the week she gathered up the equipment that she would need, a camera with telephoto lens and clothing that could disguise her at night. Tuesday arrived and Victoria kissed her daughter good night, got into her car and drove to the location. The night was clear.

Once on the block she nervously got out of the car and crouched down on her knees. For some time she noticed no activity outside of any house and was convinced that she had the wrong location. She was about to get into her car when she was surrounded by a strange odor, the same one from the paint store and saw the Sea Witch upon the porch of a house halfway up the block.

She watched as the creature moved around muttering, “mine, mine mine” and then realized that she wasn’t alone. Directly in back of her was a creature as ugly, taller and male. His outer shell was baked to a bright red crust and had the consistency of a lobster shell. On top of his shoulders sat the tiniest head she had ever seen with 2 black dots for eyes, white bushy eyebrows, his whole face etched over with a permanent scowl.

A Sea Warlock! He was ranting about something or another and his tiny mouth twitched nervously back and forth as he shouted about something called “takers.”

Victoria slowly raised the camera to capture the evidence when a bright red beam shot through the air and landed on her face. The Sea Witch was glaring in her direction. She fell to the ground in a panic as ten long green darts shot through the air like razors attached to strings. The creature had pulled her elbows back and thrust her slimy fingers through the air toward Victoria. As she fell, the digits flew by her face and one of them grazed her on the back, drawing blood.

Her heart was beating furiously as she heard the two creatures march towards her, she splashing in her brine and stench and he crunching on his baked skin. The Sea Witch yelled “Come out right now. I’ve got a gun and we live in a right to kill state in a right to kill country.”

Victoria held her breath as they moved back and forth amongst the cars. They had not noticed her as she had wedged herself between her car tires and the wide curb. Time stopped and she waited. Only when she heard them pass into the distance did she slump into the drivers seat, start the car and gun the engine.

The car lurched halfway up the block when she felt a “thump” and the whole car was pulled backwards. The Sea Witch had whipped her fingers around the car and created an octopus like tentacle web that was pulling it back towards her and the Warlock. The car whipped back and forth - as Victoria floored it forwards the Witch pulled it backwards and the car rocked like a boat on the ocean. Panicked, she pushed the pedal hard to the floor and the car lurched forward, ripping the digits from the Witch’s hands. Victoria was thrown back in her seat and heard the cursed screams of the Sea Witch who was bleeding from her hands. The maniacal detached digits continued to thump wildly around the car until they slowly died, released their grip and fell off.

Not knowing what to do and badly shaken she went home to bed.

Upon waking the next day she decided to take action. She picked up her phone to call the police at the moment an emergency evacuation order went out across the island. There was a major hurricane about to bear down on the coastal areas and all were ordered to evacuate. She gathered her daughter and a few items, called Jeff to tell him not to come home and headed for an offshore motel.

The storm raged for two days and caused mass devastation on the islands. They returned to their damaged, but intact house. She called one of her contacts, the one who tipped her off to the possible location of the Sea Witch to relate to her recent disturbing encounter.

“Didn’t you hear?” the voice on the other end queried.

“What?” Victoria replied

“That house you were staking out is gone along with over half the block. As a matter of fact a whole section of the bay area is gone, swallowed into the sea.”

This contact reported that some of the more distant neighbors (who had also disobeyed the evacuation order) reported hearing a large group of women all named Karen shaking their fists into the air and shouting in unison:

“The news is all lies. They lied about the last storm.”

“They won’t tell me what to do”

“I’m stronger than any storm.”

These same neighbors reported that they later heard terrible shrieks of "help" at the height of the storm, but as the bay had bisected the neighborhood and it was impossible to go outside, nothing could be done and all the Karens were swallowed up along with their houses.

The Sea Witch and Warlock were gone.

Some months after the storm, Victoria, her husband and daughter returned to their native Chicago for other employment prospects and she gradually forgot about what had happened. She would hear national reports about human Karens but nothing more about the Sea Witch.

However, local teenagers who visit the post storm bay shoreline to drink and party at night regularly report hearing the moans and cries of world citizens who encounter the horrors of the Sea Witch and Warlord of Ventnor City as they hijack the Cruise Ships of the seas, travel the world and torture unsuspecting souls.