by Max Candee
The hands scuttled off. They brewed tea in an ornate samovar and arranged beautiful cherry pies on an elaborate silver tray. I settled on a little stool and observed them. I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to speak to disembodied hands as they worked. But surely my grandmother spoke to them? Whom else would she have spoken to, holed up in this place all by herself? The hands placed two glasses in intricate metal holders on the tray and scuttled off to help the other pair dust.
“Thank you, er, hands,” I said, acutely aware of how strange this interaction was. I was in Siberia in a cabin on chicken legs, talking to a pair of disembodied hands. Ghosts flew about, and my friends fought multicolored Horsemen with the help of a Jewish monster made of clay. My life had morphed into some fantastic dream.
I went back to the main room.
“You took your time,” my grandmother grumbled. She was still in her bed, watching the TV.
I placed the tray down gently next to her and took a seat in a big armchair nearby.
After fiddling with the remote and lowering the TV’s racket to a low mumble, she slowly poured the tea, her arthritic fingers cracking as the dark brown liquid filled the clear glasses. She didn’t ask how I took my tea. Wordlessly, she spooned sugar into it before stretching her hand out to me. “Here, Anna Sophia.”
I took the glass from her and took a sip. The tea was very nice. It was when I tasted its sweetness that I really started to feel I was at my grandmother’s house. Even though my grandmother was an evil old witch and there was a chance that the tea was poisoned… It wasn’t a big chance, but there were certain risks when dealing with Baba Yaga.
Still, she was drinking tea from the same samovar, so unless the poison was already in the glass… I remembered the orphan girls that the Black Horseman had been hoarding for her in the Montmorency castle dungeons back in Geneva. But Geneva seemed a long time ago and far away. Did it even exist? Surely the quiet, orderly Geneva couldn’t exist in the same world as floating hands and ghosts and children being raised by bears? Obviously, this was the real world I was in, the one where houses had chicken feet and walked about and cats changed into hares. It had to be the real world because I was there. So was Geneva a dream, then?
I sipped more tea. Yes, this is what families were supposed to be like, wasn’t it? Grandmothers and granddaughters sitting together, having tea. Granny giving me a treat, a bit more sugar in the tea than Mother — I mean Sister Constance — would have allowed.
“Eat up, Anna,” said Granny, passing a plate to me. “You’ve had a long trip. Let me fatten you up.”
“Thank you so much, though I don’t know if I want to get very fat,” I replied with a smile, and bit into one of the pastries. It was quite delicious.
I leaned back in the chair, happy to let my feet rest. It was a long trip, I thought, with all that running. I was actually feeling a bit sleepy. I drank more tea. Tea was good for staying awake, wasn’t it? That’s why Sister Daphne always had a pot of it ready at night to be sure she’d stay awake until curfew. I smiled a little. What a silly thing to do, make tea in a pot. Why would you do that when you could use a coal-powered samovar?
Silly, those dreamlike people in dreamlike Geneva, I thought. Why would I ever dream of such a dull little place, where hands couldn’t fly and you almost never got treats? I picked up another cherry pie and began to eat it.
“Everything is absolutely delicious,” I said.
“Only the finest for my granddaughter,” she croaked, and gave me a tentative smile as if she weren’t used to smiling and had nearly forgotten how. “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
“You have?”
“Almost since your birth. I’ve always known you were my kindred spirit, Anna Sophia. Not like your parents.” I thought I saw an expression of intense anger flash across her face. But I must have been wrong; she was smiling again.
I finished my pastry and tea and curled up in the chair, tucking my legs under me and watching the screen. This was so normal. I was full and tired, and I fell into a light sleep. I dreamed that Baba Yaga was a normal grandmother, who lived somewhere in dream-Geneva. I lived with my parents a few blocks away from her but loved to drop by for tea in the afternoon. We ate pies and watched TV on her fancy flat screen. She gave me advice about life, cooking, and sometimes, with a little giggle, about boys, even though she knew it embarrassed me.
I was awakened by loud yelling. It was confusing; in my dream, I had thought the noise had been coming from rowdy children throwing a ball around outside Granny’s apartment, and she’d yelled at them to be more careful.
But when I opened my eyes, I was definitely in the cabin in the woods and Granny was yelling. She wasn’t facing the window, as in my dream. I didn’t immediately understand what I was seeing. My dream had been a lot more realistic, after all. My grandmother, the unstable old witch who lived in a house full of disembodied hands, was screaming at the television on her wall. She had gotten out of bed and was pacing up and down, a torrent of vitriolic abuse pouring out of her mouth.
The man inside the television was smiling widely, holding a small device in his hands. “As you can clearly see, the latest phone model has an array of new features that justify the price increase. The screen is bigger, the handset thinner, and the battery lasts two hours longer than in the previous models. And look here. Under the hood…”
“Well, as long as the battery lasts longer,” Baba Yaga yelled over him.
“The camera is also much better,” the man said, as if responding to her. “We’re going to talk to one of Instagram’s most-followed users, who will tell us about why he has chosen to upgrade to this model. Let’s welcome him to the studio, ladies and gentlemen.”
“He’s one of the most followed people on Instagram. Of course he is! Thank goodness we have an expert in being followed on the Internet! Thank goodness there’s someone who can tell us about why it’s better to have a bigger screen because of the idiots who follow him on a website!”
Baba Yaga was pacing up and down, gesticulating. From the way she was carrying on, I wondered whether the men in the studio could hear her. Surely nobody would get this upset without being able to impact events? And besides, why was she so angry at a man on the technology segment of a program? It seemed ridiculous. It was surreal. Baba Yaga, the world’s most powerful witch, was having a one-sided shouting match with a man on TV.
“Granny?” I asked, my voice squeaking.
She spun round, her eyes wild. “Oh! I forgot about you.”
“Are you all right?”
“No, of course I’m not all right, you silly girl! How can I possibly be all right? Look. Look right there!” She pointed at the man being interviewed.
I frowned, even more confused now. “Why are you so upset? I don’t understand. They’re just talking about phones, aren’t they?”
She seemed to deflate, the anger leaving her body. She moved over to the bed, appearing to age by the second. When she spoke again, her voice was older, crankier.
“I am angry at our world, Anna Sophia. When I was your age, people cared about real things. Real issues. Determination and change were in the air. People cared.”
“They still—”
She stopped me with a raised hand. “Then as I got older, they stopped caring. They started focusing on other things. At first, I thought it was just the people around me. But this TV shows me people all over the globe, and all of them are busy with absolute nonsense. They don’t care about each other or real problems. They’re playing with toys and shooting their guns at each other and buying new cell phones to get more followers from places to which they will never go.”
I felt the need to defend the world I had come from. “It’s just—”
“A follower should be able to follow you, Anna Sophia. Not be a virtual set of pixels on a screen. Why does this man need a new cell phone if the one he has works well? So that he funds the company, and the company sends money to the government who runs
the army, and they go shoot people so that they can earn even more money and buy more toys!” She leaned back, apparently tired from her endless rant.
“And this all worries you … why?” I asked.
When she looked at me, the sorrow of the entire world seemed to show in her ice-gray eyes. “People used to believe in me. And so I was … strong. Now, even the dead ones … they don’t even know my name. Just a nameless old hag taking their souls over into the Great Beyond.” She spat on the floor. “Pathetic.”
I felt a twinge of fear at the base of my spine. I wasn’t sure why I was scared, but suddenly I remembered the look in the Black Horseman’s eyes as he stared at me back in Geneva. And I remembered how the Montmorencys had hoarded children in their dungeon of a basement so they could be sent to this woman — my grandmother — who was so deeply angry at what the world had become. I doubted this great witch would be defeated by some cell phones.
She had a plan. She had to.
And however good her cherry pies were, I was worried it was a wicked plan.
Chapter 12
Dear Diary,
I’ve been at my grandmother’s house for a full day now. We’re getting along fine, but I haven’t gotten any closer to figuring out where my father is. Granny just doesn’t want to talk about him. Instead, she watches TV and rants about consumerism! I don’t know much about cell phones. To be honest, I don’t really care. But I do care a lot about where she’s got my dad hidden.
At least I’ve been able to make her call off the Horsemen from Blackwood Castle. She wasn’t very happy about doing that. There seems to be bad blood between her and Uncle Misha, and she wanted him taken captive. But she did as I asked. She said someone called the Great Trapper had called up many forest animals and they had pushed the Horsemen back anyway. One Horseman had been maimed by a bear, she also said.
Today, I’ve decided to go exploring. I’m going to try to forage for information. Granny is too busy yelling at the men on the television to pay much attention to me…
Another thing. I wish I had my dream stone with me. I truly do. It could have shown me the way to my father … but I guess I left it back at the orphanage. Didn’t I?
* * *
“Go on, show me another clip of her Tiffany diamonds!” Granny shouted at the screen. I’d learned that she particularly hated TV ads. They seemed to set her off big-time.
I’d never really spent too much time thinking about everyday things before I got to Baba Yaga’s cabin. Although my trust fund had allowed me to go to one of the best schools in Switzerland, Monsieur Nolan had never approved of luxuries. I always had nice clothes, stationery, and books. Perhaps some of my things were nicer than what the other kids in the orphanage had, but I never paid too much attention to that. The only time I was offered nicer things was when the Montmorencys tried to woo me. But I wasn’t easy to bribe with possessions. I always thought there was something suspicious about people who had too many things, like Marie with all her jewelry. Now I wondered if that was Baba Yaga’s spirit playing inside me the whole time! Granny and I do have a lot in common, after all.
Watching the ads, I remembered that a lot of children I had grown up with had thought about material things a lot. Kids used to talk to each other about trading cards and new cell phones and fancy gadgets. Girls chatted about clothes and jewelry while boys discussed all the different cars they wanted to own when they grew up. Jean-Sébastien even saved up enough to get that scooter of his. I remembered that I had ridden on it once, which had been fun.
But many of the children in the orphanage were poor, so while they sometimes dreamed of being rich, such conversations rarely went on too long. We tended to be realistic, focusing on what we knew, what was within the four walls of our house and school and what the Sisters discussed. I had been shielded from the world, I suppose. Sister Constance didn’t seem to approve of the world. And now I was being exposed to it from Baba Yaga’s cabin, of all places.
Baba Yaga leaned against a pile of pillows on her bed. Picking her long nose, she grumbled, “You see, Anna Sophia, people have lost all good sense these days. All they do is stare at screens scattered around them. They forget about real things, like life and death.”
“Hmm?” I said, wondering if I could steer this conversation to the topic of where she was holding my father.
My grandmother blew her nose into a paper napkin (how did she manage to get that in this isolated place?), crumpled it, and tossed it into a corner of the living room. A pair of hands whizzed in from the kitchen and cleaned it up.
“They forget about love. About hate,” she continued. “And they care about money because they need it to buy what the TV tells them they need. Not want, you see? Need. And what happens then? When they get that, they’re told they need another something. These screens have turned people into drones. They’re no better than my flying hands! Just like them, they don’t have any brains of their own.”
“But why do you watch that thing, Granny?” I asked, curling up in my chair. I had been wondering about that ever since the first time I’d seen her shout at the television. Living in this secluded cabin in the woods, wouldn’t it have been better for her to ignore the rest of the world and be happy?
“Only cowards hide away from things they don’t like. Brave people confront them.”
“But it makes you unhappy!” I exclaimed. “Turn that thing off. Let’s go outside for a walk—”
Baba Yaga narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t be silly. If you want to go outside, you can. But I won’t be coming with you. The next program is on in ten minutes. I don’t hide from the problems of this world. I never have.”
“Why do you live in the forest, then?” I asked, drawing my knees up and wrapping my arms around them. “Why not live in a city, where you can deal with these problems head-on all the time?”
“You’re too young to understand, vnuchechka,” she said, waving a dismissive arthritic hand. That’s what she called me, that or my full name. It was either Anna Sophia or vnuchechka, little granddaughter. It was odd, but I liked it.
Little granddaughter. Family. Mine.
“Oh, sure,” I said.
She coughed. “Bring me some water from the kitchen.”
I nodded and scuttled off, much like one of my grandmother’s hands, except with feet. She often told me what to do, giving me silly chores around the house. Perhaps it made her feel a little less lonely. What was weird (aside from the hands everywhere and Baba Yaga’s odd views) was that she never acknowledged I’d only just arrived in her life. She didn’t ask about my past, and she never told me anything about my parents or what had happened before I got here. She just complained about the people on TV and in the world at large, and bossed me around. There was another weird thing … a memory … no, a hint of a memory. Like there was something or someone I had forgotten after entering this house.
I took the glass of water into the living room and stood studying Granny. She was watching a game show. “Here you are,” I said.
“Look at this, Anna Sophia. These girls in their skimpy clothes! How much do you think they’re being paid to open a briefcase? This game’s just a matter of chance. It’s clouding up people’s minds, don’t you think?”
“I guess you’re right,” I replied, giving her a tiny shrug. It wasn’t that I thought she was wrong as such; I just didn’t care about people on TV. I wanted to find my dad. I wanted to know about my mom. I even wanted to know more about my grandmother. But she never talked about any of that, and I hadn’t found a way to get her to tell me.
Instead, she rambled on. “Why do they need more money? Do you think this man knows what to do with a million dollars? It’s not like he’s going to use it for anything important. No, people who do important things don’t go on TV. It’s—”
“Were you being serious about me going outside for a walk?” I interrupted. If Baba Yaga wouldn’t talk to me about my parents, I’d have to find things out by myself.
She l
ooked at me carefully. “I was. If that’s what you want to do, of course.”
“Thank you, Granny. I’ll just take a look around.”
I opened the door and walked out onto the porch, smelling the air outside. I patted the black-and-white cat, who immediately morphed into a hare. The house was standing upright on its chicken legs, and I had to clamber down the stairs to get to the ground. I looked around. I’d had to leave my backpack inside so Baba Yaga wouldn’t suspect I was up to mischief. But for the sake of my father and for the sake of—
Of what? What was it? Friends, maybe? Or something.
But I had a family now. My very own granny. What did friends matter?
Blackwood Castle. That name kept popping up in my mind like it meant something.
I had to stop sitting around watching that silly TV. One full day doing that was already one day too many.
The skulls on the fence seemed to scrutinize me. I hadn’t noticed that when I’d first arrived here, but then again I’d been on the other side of the fence. I scowled at them. They didn’t move. Obviously, Baba Yaga had put them there just to scare people off. I shrugged at them and made a face. I was being silly. They were just skulls; they weren’t alive. After all, if they were, I’d be able to tell, wouldn’t I? I’d feel the magic.
That was strange.
Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t feeling that familiar churn of dark energy inside me. In fact, I didn’t feel any magic inside me at all. It was as if I’d somehow walked into a place where my special powers just didn’t exist. In fact, I could barely even feel any magic around the house. Hadn’t I found it almost overwhelming when I’d arrived?