Enter Three Witches by Kate Gilmore

himself thinking about the actual fate of a frog at the hands of a witch—a witch who also happened to be his mother.
    Erika, he reflected bitterly, might prefer people who were out of the ordinary, but the eccentricities of Miranda West went beyond the merely unconventional. He wondered if one could have a lasting relationship with a girl and never bring her home. Many teenagers seemed to be ashamed of their parents and their living quarters, but this notion was foreign to Bren. He had always felt close to his mother and fortunate to live with her in the extraordinary old house. Now it occurred to him that he would do well to invent some dreary setting for his home life—a tiny, cramped apartment in one of the tenements that stood between Broadway and the park. It was an unappealing idea and one which would probably prove difficult to sustain.
    The gray stone house looked forbidding in the darkening afternoon. No lights shone from the long, narrow windows; it had an expectant air, as if it waited for some shattering event—a scream, a bolt of lightning, a dark figure hurtling from its topmost floor. Bren was surprised to find his home so suddenly transformed into the set for a low-budget horror movie. “Halloween,” he muttered, as he climbed the stairs. “It’s being a Halloween house, and this is Halloween weather.”
    He slammed the front door and headed for his mother’s studio, a strangely subdued Shadow slinking at his heels. The stairwell was filled with an eerie glow as light filtered through the stained glass skylight. From above floated Madame Lavatky’s scales, making the silence below seem more intense.
    “Enough of this,” Bren said, and started flipping light switches as he went. He unbuttoned his shirt and dropped the frog into the terrarium, where, to his relief, it opened its eyes and limped bravely off to the pool.
    The house had seemed empty when he came in, but his grandmother appeared from the shadowy depths of the parlor as he went down the stairs. “So here’s the young prince,” she cried. “Every light in the house he must have on, but does he pay the electric bill? Not he!”
    “I’ll get a paper route,” Bren said, “and give my all to old Con Ed, but please, Gram, let’s have some light. It’s such a gruesome afternoon.”
    Rose stopped with her hand on the light switch. “Got the willies, have you? Me too. Something’s brewing today for sure. Get your mother away from that black witch is what I say, or creepy will come to crawly, and what goes bump in the night might come to stay.”
    Bren was now genuinely alarmed. “They’re down there together?” he asked.
“Doing
things, you mean?”
    Rose nodded. “They’re down there together,” she said, “and if you think they’re knitting baby clothes, you’re entitled to your opinion.”
    “I’ll take a look,” said Bren, resolute now, the man of the house. He was not, in fact, afraid of either his mother or Louise LaReine, having lived with both of them all his life, but he very much disliked the idea of their combining forces. “Shadow, you stay here,” he added as he started down the basement stairs. Shadow, in fact, showed no enthusiasm for a merry chase among black chickens. He lay down at the head of the stairs and followed Bren’s descent with worried brown eyes, a whimper at the back of his throat, the plume of his tail quiet on the floor.
    The door was ajar, and Bren gave it a gentle push. It opened onto a surprisingly large, low-ceilinged room which was painted black and hung with dark purple draperies. At the farthest end a black table stood inside a white triangle painted on the floor. There was a cupboard full of dusty bottles behind the table, and on it a thurible which sent a column of smoke wavering up around a small brass pot suspended by three chains. Here, in the cozy glow of a fringed Victorian lamp, Bren saw the two witches. They were not knitting baby booties, it was true, but neither were they