“Just a little old simple wish,” she said one time more. She reached into a pocket of her patchwork skirt and out came her hand with a pinch of purple-looking dust in the fingers. She flung it onto the fire, which sent up new flames that same shade of purple, with pale, greasy smoke.

“I made my wish before this,” she said, with the words spaced out like as if she was a-reading them out of a book. “I make it now. There was no day when I have not seen my wish fulfilled.”

I’d heard those same words spoken before, long years back. They were what a witch person says to do you harm.

The purple fire cracked and popped as it grabbed the twigs. I had an ugly sense of a crowd gathered close round us–a crowd, maybe not of people, but a crowd. Close in, close enough to see if I looked over my shoulder. I didn’t look. I knew words I’d better say my own self, another set of words, and say them quick.

“Hazel Techeray,” I said, a-remembering the thing as I repeated it over. “I forbid you this house and premises. I forbid you the sheds and stables. I forbid you each bed, that you may not breathe upon them. Breathe elsewhere, until you have climbed air hill, until you have counted air fence post, until you have crossed air water. And thus dear day may come again into this house, in the name of the three holy ones of power.”

Right as I finished, the fire blinked out, like as if somebody had doused water on it. And that sense of the crowd all drawn up behind and round us, it went, too, and I well knew that she and I stood there alone.

–After Dark, by Manly Wade Wellman, pp. 87 – 88