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"Hidden agenda, command from the babysitter witch. She initiated me into the Craft. The inspiration for my book Bloodstone and Broomcorn: Curse of the W.I.T.C.H. came from a babysitter in whose care I was placed the summer before I started first grade. She spelled her name backwards. Thus written it was Ah Satan. When reading her name in a mirror it spelled Natasha.

During the day, while all the adults on our street were at work and the deserted neighborhood was eerily quiet, my babysitter put me in her little red demon wagon and pulled me down the gravely asphalt pavement to her house. There was no one there except the two of us. She took me in through the back entrance to the garage. There were no lights on in the garage. It was very shady and quiet in that musty space which was empty because there was no car inside, only a few cardboard boxes and lawn or garden tools along the blank walls of stained dented gypsum board.

In the center of the cool dank garage, my babysitter had a witch's altar arranged with pentagrams, candles, incense, crow feathers, corn dollies made of broomcorn, a few bloodstones, a stripped bare baby doll, and the bleached skull of one of the many cats she killed.

She hated cats and even though she was only 16 years of age at the time, she had developed uncanny skill at slaying neighborhood felines to the point that such pets were non-existent in the vicinity of our houses for a number of miles in all directions. She set cunningly devised wire traps for them. She hung them by their hind legs from the twisted branches of a dead Catawba worm (larva of the sphinx moth) tree in her backyard. She then hung weights from those doomed cats' fore paws so that their tissues and tendons were strung tight and totally immobilized. Their pitiful yowls as she skinned them alive then gutted them in the moonlight with a jagged razor-sharp obsidian blade still ring in my ears at this very moment.

On the day she took me alone into her garage, my babysitter had boiled a batch of new potatoes from her garden. She had debouched the cooked tubers in a ceramic bowl. She also had a container of cloves, turmeric, fennel, bleeding heart, spiderwort, and red pepper that she had blended thoroughly together. The babysitter liberally sprinkled a potato with the strong spices. She compelled me to speak a grim incantation. I hardly knew what I was saying. After chanting the witchy phrases, my babysitter forced me to eat the heavily spiced new potato.

I coughed and strangled. I begged for something to drink, but she would not permit me to drink anything until I recited the second half of the spell. The drink she gave me was passion fruit juice. I don't know if it was because of the spiced potato she made me eat or something she put in the drink, but whatever the cause, I sweated blood. My skin was blotched all over with teeny droplets of crimson. I was becoming very dizzy. My head lolled around on my unsteady shoulders as though I had been drugged with a powerful narcotic.

On her record player she had a psychedelic rock album - a band known as Coven. The babysitter put the needle on the LP and began spinning the record backwards. Slowly, as when the emulsion of a film reel decays, a distorted deep voice began groaning a grotesquely depraved poem which emerged as - "It's my sweet, sweet Satan, the one whose little path made me sad, the one whose power is Satan. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan." At that moment, I passed out.

I don't know how long I was unconscious, but when I woke, my babysitter was wafting incense smoke from her witch altar over me with one of her crow feathers.

After that, she stood me on my wobbly feet and walked me out the backdoor of the shadowy dank garage where she put me back in her little red demon wagon, then pulled me rattling noisily over the gravely pavement back to my house. That night was the first time I suffered what became a recurring nightmare about a huge monstrous serpentine green dragon with blood-red lips, claws, and multi-pronged arrow-tipped tail. His big sharp fangs were like curved needles of alabaster. His eyes were scintillating bloodstones, his tongue flickering broomcorn.

Many years later, when I was inexplicably seized with a mysterious compulsion to write the occult grimoire Bloodstone and Broomcorn: Curse of the W.I.T.C.H., the ghoulish diabolical green dragon appeared to me amid smoke from a crow-feather altar. The wicked beast spoke in the haunting voice of my childhood babysitter. It told me word for word what to write. Sixty-three chapters, over 230,000 words - the dragon beast of the witchcraft babysitter intoned the occult novel to me as fast as I could type.