The Mussorgsky Riddle

by Darin Kennedy

  The full import of her words still blossoming in my mind, I sprint for the frame hung in space and dive back into the gallery, the light even dimmer than before. The walls have begun to follow the fractured floor’s lead, crumbling from the bottom up.

  I’ve taken a single step in the direction of the last alcove along the hall when groan of metal on masonry fills the air. Above my head, the chandelier at the center of the white stucco ceiling rocks as if struck. Cracks proceed along the plaster in every direction like the strands of some colossal spider’s web. Before I can so much as take a breath, the enormous mass of wrought iron and crystal tears free from its moorings and falls straight for me. I sprint to the side and dive behind a pile of rubble that until recently had been the brick wall blocking the passage to The Catacombs.

  I wait to see if a second shoe drops before standing and brushing myself off.

  “Surprise, surprise,” I mutter with a bitter chuckle. “Anthony’s seen Phantom.”

  My smile fades as I force my feet along the last few steps to the end of the Exhibition hall and stand before the darkened alcove I’ve dreaded since first entering Anthony’s mind. Though my every step has led to this moment, my instincts still say to run, hide, anything but enter her realm.

  As if I have any choice in the matter.

  My fingers white on the hilt of the dagger at my side, I step into the dim alcove and for the first time look upon the home of the witch.

  gaze at the painting I’ve only seen glimpses of during my previous visits to the Exhibition. Though no placard proclaims the name of this particular piece, I know it well. The subject of the painting has haunted my nightmares for days.

  A log cabin with a steeply pitched and doubly gabled roof crowned by a jagged stone chimney, Baba Yaga’s hut rests atop a pair of gigantic chicken legs. At the uppermost reach of the front gable, a bloodshot eye the size of my head stares out from beneath a slate roof into the surrounding forest. The yellow and green iris contracts as the hideous eye focuses on the small army laying siege to the witch’s bizarre home.

  Scattered around the structure and just out of reach of the hut’s cruel talons, the remaining residents of Anthony’s Exhibition stand gathered to fight. To one side of the hut’s octagonal wooden base, Modesto works the keys of his silver saxophone, producing a triumphant tune I’ve never heard before. Hiding behind the trunk of a tree a few feet away, Antoine looks on, the boy’s face an odd mix of fear and pride as the troubadour stands his ground with music his only weapon. On the opposite side of the clearing, Tunny works at the base of a dead tree with a hand axe, no doubt in an effort to send its colossal mass careening into the hut’s cedar plank roof. To the hut’s rear, Hartmann the Cart Man stands atop his oxcart brandishing an old wine bottle stuffed with a flaming rag.

  Everyone is accounted for, save one. As I scan the battlefield for any sign of Trilby, the significance of Rachel’s most recent seizure dawns on me. I leap into the painting and rush to Modesto’s side.

  “About time you showed up,” he shouts at me between strains of his newest melody. “This rebellion is, after all, your doing.”

  No point in arguing. “Where’s Trilby?”

  “The ballerina?” Modesto asks. “She’s–” His hesitation speaks volumes.

  “She’s there.” Antoine points to the octagonal shadow formed by the witch’s hut. I strain my eyes for any sign of Trilby in the darkness there, but it’s not until one of Hartmann’s cocktails misses and spills liquid fire beneath the hut’s wooden foundation that I see her. Still dressed in her deep red bodice and black lace, her tiny form squirms beneath the hut’s taloned left foot. As the flames draw ever closer, she tries to scream, though the sound comes out more like a gargled hiss.

  “Stop it, Yaga.” My shout shatters the silence of the forest. The eye at the hut’s front gable halts its roving gaze to focus on me and me alone. “Leave Trilby alone, you ugly old hag.”

  “And so the battle is joined.” The craggy voice booms down from the hut’s upper reaches, the thick Russian accent punctuated by the metallic clack of tooth on tooth. “The storyteller, friend to all but Baba Yaga and fomenter of this little rebellion, has finally deigned to show her face.”

  “Come down here and I’ll show you a lot more than my face, witch.”

  A window just beneath the eye opens, revealing the witch’s baleful sneer. Her gaze shifts first from me to Modesto and Antoine and then to Tunny who despite his valiant efforts has barely made a dent in the ancient tree’s massive trunk. Yaga shakes her head in mock disappointment even as her smirk widens into a full, iron-toothed smile.

  “Mind that sharp tongue of yours, Scheherazade. You fared well against me in other frames along the great hall but today you face me in my own wood.”

  “Let the girl go,” I shout. “I’m the one you want.”

  “But I have you already. You’ve stepped through my frame and into the Dark Forest, a jaunt from which few ever return. No one looks upon my home without paying a price, and you, my dear, will pay the highest price of all.”

  The entire hut shudders as the right fowl’s leg rises from the ground, placing the full weight of the structure on the left and consequently onto Trilby’s tiny form. The shrill scream that accompanies the crunch of snapping bones lasts but a second, followed by an orchestral hit from the end of the Mussorgsky suite.

  “No!”

  “Yes, Scheherazade. See now the devastation you have wrought with your poisoned words?”

  “And yet it’s you they fight, witch.” I take a step forward. “Baba Yaga, strongest and wisest of all, should strive to protect the others along the hall, not try to destroy them.”

  “And around and around we go, Scheherazade. Once, I did protect them. Before you came, those gathered against me today were more than content to remain within their frames and live the lives to which they were destined. You and your mad talk of freedom and change, however, rained destruction down upon each and every picture and indeed the Exhibition as a whole, their collective ruin wrapped in the smile of one they considered friend.”

  “And you think your way was better? Not one of them followed you out of respect or admiration, but out of fear. The Exhibition may have been safe under your iron grip, but even Trilby, lying dead there below the foot of your cruel hut is more alive than any of them were before.”

  The momentary silence fills me with hope I’ve gotten through to the witch, a hope dashed by her next words.

  “If they choose to disobey, then they’re better off dead.”

  The hut begins to dance as the penultimate movement of Mussorgsky’s suite blasts through the darkened wood. More than any other part of Pictures at an Exhibition, “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs” evoked an intense visceral reaction when I heard it the first time sitting in the Faircloth living room. Mussorgsky somehow captured the sound of an impossible structure dashing madly through a murky forest, a sound that echoes through my mind as a pair of booming orchestral hits signal the beginning of the hut’s onslaught.

  Hartmann is the first to fall. The hut’s right leg returns to the ground even as the left rises from Trilby’s mangled form. Then, as if in tribute to the crushed ballerina, the entire structure performs a pirouette, the slashing talons of the hut’s outstretched foot lopping the heads off both oxen from Hartmann’s cart even as the Cart Man himself is sent flailing into a dark tree trunk.

  “Clumsy house.” The hut spins around again and the witch stares down at me triumphant. “I meant to take all three heads at once.” She cranes her neck out the window to see Hartmann’s body lying at the forest edge. “Still, decapitated or crushed, the Cart Man is done.”

  “Stop it,” I scream. “If you kill them all, you kill yourself.”

  “Don’t you think I know that, storyteller?”

  “But…”

  “Would you want to live this way? Betrayed by everyone in your life, forced into hiding by those to whom you have devoted your all, only to watch those
selfsame ungrateful souls rail against the walls of your last refuge?”

  My heart races. Am I speaking to the witch, or to Anthony himself?

  “Now only three remain. Who shall be next, Scheherazade? The grotesque gnome, the charming musician, or the all too innocent boy from the garden?”

  “Leave them alone. Your quarrel is with me.”

  The witch laughs. “Ah. The gnome you say.”

  Baba Yaga and Tunny meet each other’s gaze and an image of a cobra staring down at a helpless mouse flashes through my mind. Terrified, Tunny begins to flail away at the tree trunk as quickly as his short limbs will allow. Yaga waves a hand and one of Hartmann’s unlit Molotov cocktails rises from the cart and flies into her grasp. With a snap of her fingers, the cloth ignites.

  “Dangerous, I suppose, to have skin of wood.” She hurls the cocktail at Tunny, his scream engulfed by the exploding ball of orange flame that surrounds his form. “Dangerous indeed.”

  I rush to Tunny’s side and rip off my sarong to beat out the flames blackening his face and torso.

  “Don’t die, Tunny.”

  “Just let me go.” Tears of blue flame rush down the rough wooden grain of his face. Why he isn’t screaming in agony is beyond anything I can understand. “Have I not suffered enough?” he groans. “Being as I am, maybe this is for the best.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the way you are, Tunny. There never was.”

  My every attempt to extinguish the flames scorching his face seems only to make the fire burn hotter. My fingers blister, the aroma of burnt flesh joining the smell of charred hickory filling the air. As real as any pain I’ve felt in either world, a part of me wonders if my inert body resting a universe away burns as well.

  “Leave me, Scheherazade,” Tunny whispers as he pushes away my scorched hands. “Save the others.”

  “Fear not, little gnome.” The witch cackles from her window vantage. “I will ensure you do not suffer alone.”

  As I continue to beat at the blaze engulfing Tunny’s form, Yaga turns her attention on Modesto and Antoine. She raises her arms, and like some colossal marionette, the hut rises to its full height. At a wave of her left hand, the corresponding leg of the hut comes off the ground. The witch winks at me, a sparkle in her eye as she brings her hand down to her thigh in a swooping gesture, the movement echoed in the hut’s raised leg. The scaly foot strikes the forest floor with a resounding thump, its black talons missing Modesto’s form by no more than an inch.

  “Funny.” She raises her right hand above her head and the hut’s other leg rises. “Never developed a fondness for saxophone.”

  “Run.” My shrill scream even hurts my ears. “Both of you. Before it’s too late.”

  “It’s already too late,” the witch cackles.

  My sarong, the only tool I have to put out the flames surrounding Tunny catches fire. I leap back from the blackening cloth and watch helpless as the hut’s right foot slashes the air between Modesto and Antoine and plants itself between them. Terrified, Antoine backpedals and falls across a raised root. Staring through his broken glasses, the boy lies frozen to the spot as the hut’s other foot comes off the ground and hovers above his trembling form.

  “No!” Even as my body launches in Antoine’s direction, there’s no doubt I’m too late. I steel myself for the inevitable, dreading the inescapable moment where this reflection of Anthony suffers the same fate as his sister’s doppelganger.

  A burst of silver light flashes from the forest. An unseen force pulls Antoine to safety as the hut’s foot, a taloned pile-driver, impales the ground where he lay a second before.

  As one, my gaze and Yaga’s shoot to the wood line. From across the clearing, the composer stares at both of us, a grim smile across his face.

  “How dare you enter my realm?” The rest of us forgotten, Yaga stares down at Mussorgsky, her eyes filled with a hatred tempered by sadness and perhaps a hint of longing. “All this time, and now you come.” She spits a foul gob of phlegm in the composer’s direction. “Where were you when everything fell apart?”

  “Oh, my dear Yaga. That is precisely why I have come. I understand, as does the Lady Scheherazade, that in your mind all you do is for the good of the boy, however misguided your methods. To your credit, your efforts until recently kept safe one who could not care for himself, but you know as well as I that she and the others are right this day.”

  “I know no such thing.” She raises a hand and one of the hut’s feet rises from the dank forest earth.

  “Yaga,” the composer says. “Stop this now, of your own accord, or we will be forced to bring you down.”

  “I’d like to see you try.” The witch’s teeth clang like a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil. “All you have remaining is a musician with a broken instrument, a walking campfire log, and a frightened little boy.

  “And the storyteller.” He motions to me. “Do not make the mistake of underestimating her.”

  “She is nothing. Perhaps elsewhere in the Exhibition she had influence, but here–”

  “Enough.” Mussorgsky silences the witch with a raised hand and turns to me. “Lady Scheherazade, despite your many trips to my Exhibition, it seems one of its truths has escaped you.”

  “Silence, you old fool.” Disappearing from the window, the witch raises quite the racket making her way to the ground floor, where I suspect awaits her mortar and pestle.

  We don’t have much time.

  “This truth,” I ask Mussorgsky. “What is it?”

  “It’s quite simple actually. Did you not notice each of those gathered possesses a certain talent?”

  Tunny and his way with the woods. Modesto and his music. Trilby and her dance. Even the witch and her perverse wisdom.

  “Their defining characteristic.” I glance around the wooded battlefield. “The thing that makes them who they are.”

  “And did you not hear what the arguing Jews told you?”

  I consider for a moment. “That I’ve become one of the exhibits?”

  “Gnome, Troubadour, Teacher, Farmer, Ballerina, Gossip, Composer, Witch…”

  “And Storyteller.”

  “Exactly, but if that were all you represented, you would still be at the mercy of the witch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every work of art needs two things to exist.” The composer smiles. “The art itself…”

  “And someone to experience it.”

  “Without you, Scheherazade, there is no Exhibition. Not only are you the storyteller, but this, all of this, is your story.”

  The door of the witch’s hut slams open and the witch flies out atop her stone mortar, her pestle brandished like a knight’s lance while the broom behind her continues its unceasing back and forth motion.

  I look up into the darkening sky. “A violent rain began to fall, dousing anyone and everyone in the witch’s forest.” My voice rolls like thunder and a second later, a bolt of lightning splits the sky. Clouds roll in and before I can say another word, a deluge begins to fall.

  “What have you done?” the witch screams.

  “What you should have been doing all along.” The smoke roiling off Tunny’s body turns to steam as the downpour quenches the flames surrounding his wooden form.

  “No matter.” Yaga raises the massive club of wood above her head. “I have more than enough strength in these old limbs to pound the rest of you into nothing.” Her gaze focuses on me. “Less than nothing.”

  “Nothing, you say?” I glance at the composer, and at his subtle nod, issue another proclamation to the sky. “Then, just when all seemed lost, the witch lost her balance and her mighty pestle slipped from her grasp.”

  Yaga glares at me for half a second before her arms begin to flap. The swooshing broom flies from her hand and wedges itself in the crook of a nearby gum tree. The pestle is the next to fall, its wooden head cracking as it wedges between two half buried boulders. Yaga manages to maintain her balance a few seconds long
er, but ultimately tumbles from her stony perch, her angular head missing the tip of her pestle by no more than an inch.

  “You’ll pay for this, you―”

  “And then, the witch fell strangely silent.” My lips curl into a wicked grin as the words are literally taken from the witch’s mouth. “Now, Baba Yaga, you will listen to what I have to say for a change.”

  My heart drops as instead of anger, the witch’s eyes fill with amusement. I glance over at Mussorgsky, his puzzled expression mirrored in the eyes of Tunny, Modesto, and Anthony who have all gathered close. As one, we all look back at the witch.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  She points to her throat and shrugs, a mischievous smile playing across her features.

  “Fine.” I wave my hand before her face as if I’m erasing something from an invisible chalkboard. “Speak.”

  She rises from the ground and clears her throat, the sound reminiscent of a half-drowned cat clearing a hairball.

  “Well?” I bring my face close to Yaga’s despite my revulsion at the hag’s rank breath.

  “For what do you need me, storyteller? You’re the one who seems to have all the answers.” She glances around at the remnant of the Exhibition. “You’ve gathered everyone together, attacked the mean old witch in her own realm, and somehow managed to emerge victorious. What could I possibly add?”

  I grunt in frustration. “I don’t understand. You’ve always insisted your role, your sole purpose, is to protect the other pictures, and yet here lie Trilby and Hartmann, not to mention you burned poor Tunny within an inch of his life.”

  “I was merely defending my own space. They did, after all, attack me.”

  “After you went into the Exhibition and slaughtered Goldenberg, Schmuÿle, and the women of The Marketplace.”

  “The women of the Market?” Yaga’s voice trails off. “Ahhh. It all makes sense now.”

  “What makes sense?” I ask. “There’s something you’re not telling us. Something important.”

  “Perhaps.” She strides over to Antoine and brushes her rough fingers through his already mussed hair. “Perhaps not.”