The driver had us again in his inexorable grip, and Hansel allowed him to propel us forward a few steps before he reached into his pocket with his free hand and cast what appeared to be a handful of scarlet dust into the man’s face.
The driver’s reaction was immediate; he let us go and clawed at his face with both hands, screaming in an incongruously high pitch. Hansel burst into a run, and I hitched up my skirts and set off after him. From somewhere close by came angry shouts and stampeding feet; something brushed at my back, a pursuer’s grasping hand perhaps, and I yelped. Hansel slowed just enough to allow me to pass him, then threw another handful of dust over his shoulder. The irate yells gave way to cries of pain, then receded altogether as we left our would-be captors behind.
We ran like hunted rabbits, with no consideration for our whereabouts, our only thought to put distance between ourselves and an uncertain danger. We ran until I could run no further and my legs gave out underneath me, pitching me into the gutter where I retched with exhaustion. Hansel threw himself down beside me and huddled close, as much for his own comfort as for mine.
“Where are we?” I asked when I could finally draw adequate breath. Neither landmarks nor street signs looked familiar. The street on which we sat was narrow and ill lit, the cobbled road slippery with moss as if it were seldom used. Hansel looked around with wide-eyed bewilderment.
“I…I don’t know,” he finally said.
I could not recall another time when he had admitted to an absence of knowledge on any subject; of everything that had befallen us in recent days, this confession was the most frightening.
___
Our headlong flight had worn through the last vestiges of leather on the soles of my boots, making me wince and limp with every step. Hansel’s footwear had fared no better. Tired, cold, hungry and lost, we sagged against each other for support. We would have asked a passer-by for directions, but the quarters through which we staggered were oddly deserted. When we stepped out of the carriage, I had thought it no later than noon, yet dusk seemed to descend with unnatural rapidity; the neighbourhood was evidently too stingy for lamps, and darkness descended all too soon.
Then, just when I thought I could go no further, Hansel called out with joy.
“Look! A light!”
A few doors down, a warm glow emanated from a shopfront window. The light illuminated a sign that swayed enticingly from a multi-coloured awning. Painted on the sign in an amateurish yet enthusiastic style was the image of two children, a boy and a girl, with enraptured expressions, sitting side by side and reading from a book large enough to take up both their laps. The children bore an eerily close resemblance to Hansel and me.
It seemed so inviting, and we were so sorely in need of respite, yet as we drew level with the door, I hesitated. Surely the shopkeeper would tolerate us, two penniless ragamuffins, for no longer than a second before throwing us back onto the street…
With a cheery chorus of tinkling bells, the door flew open. A diminutive old woman, her gray hair pulled back into a dishevelled bun, peered up at us. Her face bloomed with creases as she smiled.
“My goodness, children! Whatever are you doing out alone on such a cold night? Come in, come in, you must come in!” She stood back to make way for us, beckoning vigorously. We all but fell through the doorway – and stopped abruptly in wonder.
It was a bookstore. A warm, glorious, light-filled bookstore. The abundant space was rendered intimate and maze-like with a multitude of shelves, all of which were crammed full with books. They overflowed onto the floor in dusty, teetering piles. I inhaled deeply, savouring the musty vanilla aroma.
“Sit, sit,” the old woman said, waving a hand at a pair of overstuffed armchairs wedged into a corner. “You two look famished, you poor dears. I’ll fetch us some tea and cake.” She disappeared into the far reaches of the store.
I threw myself onto a chair as I had been bade; I barely had the energy to open my eyes, let alone explore the shelves, as intriguing as they were. But Hansel could not resist the lure of the books. He moved along one shelf as if in a trance, a forefinger caressing the spines as he mouthed the titles. Halfway along, he stopped and gasped. He stood stock-still and staring for several heartbeats, then with trembling hands lifted one particularly thick and ancient tome from its place and carried it with infinite care to sit beside me.
“Gretel, do you know what this is? It’s an original treatise by Johannes Kepler, one of our most influential astronomers. It’s exceedingly rare - there are rumoured to be only three copies left in existence.” He lowered his voice and leaned closer to me, his eyes glittering with devilment. “They say that his mother was a witch, and that it was she who imparted to him knowledge of the stars.” He opened the book and turned the yellow pages with a delicate hand, his mouth falling open in avaricious awe.
Somewhere towards the back of the store, a door slammed, and our hostess’s jaunty humming could be heard as she made her way back. Hansel started and shut the book, sending up a cloud of dust, and concealed it beneath his coat. I opened my mouth to protest, but then the old woman was upon us, and the moment was lost. Hansel and I were reduced to trading baleful looks, mine silently exhorting him to return the book, and his warning me to hold my tongue.
“Don’t be shy, children – eat up before it goes cold,” the woman said as she pottered about pouring tea and buttering thick slices of an aromatic toasted fruit loaf. “You know, I get so few visitors, and my customers seldom care to stop and talk. They only want to make their purchases and rush off. So you do me a kindness by staying to humour a lonely old woman.”
My instincts were at war with each other; one impulse told me to take Hansel by the hand and run before his theft was discovered, while another urged me to fill my empty belly with the delectable offerings before me. The latter won out, and I stuffed food and drink into my face as quickly as propriety would allow. Hansel also took the cup and saucer he was offered, and took several polite sips from his tea, but he held one arm pressed awkwardly against his side to keep the purloined book secure, while his gaze kept sliding towards the door.
“I thank you for your generosity, kind lady,” he said, “but I fear we must depart. The hour is late, and we must get home – our father will be anxious for our return.”
“Your father?” the woman inquired. She stood with her back to us, her posture suddenly tense and alert. “And what of your mother?” An innocent enough question, yet it seemed laden with portent.
“Our…our mother is…” I began. A lie was forming on the tip of my tongue, but the wayward organ became suddenly sluggish.
“Your mother is dead, isn’t she?” The old woman turned around, the movement seeming to set the entire room spinning. The cup and saucer slipped from my nerveless fingers to shatter on the floor. Indifferent to my plight, she continued. “Perhaps if she were still alive, she might have taught you better than to steal from defenceless old ladies.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hansel said brazenly. He tried to stand, but staggered and dropped back into the chair. The book fell from its hiding place, landing with a thump at the old woman’s feet. Her lips curled into a mirthless smile.
“A thief and a liar,” she said. “And a scholar to boot, judging by your choice of reading material.” She nudged the book with her slippered foot. “My my, what an interesting fly I have caught in my web tonight.” She studied Hansel for several long seconds, still bearing that unnerving smile, then approached him to take hold of his head, one hand beside each temple, and peer intently into his eyes. I tried to move, but a supernormal lassitude gripped my entire body; judging by Hansel’s passivity and his glazed expression, he experienced the same phenomenon.
“Interesting,” the old woman said. “Your mind…it is quite unlike any I have ever encountered before. You may be just what I need.” She glanced at me with a look of disdain. “As for you – you’ll only eat my food and prove yourself a general nuisance.” From the
folds of her apron she produced a wicked-looking carving knife and advanced on me.
“Wait!” Hansel’s brow was beaded with sweat, his eyes wide with strain. “Whatever it is you want from me, if you harm so much as a hair on her head, you’ll have none of it.”
The witch – for that is what she must surely have been, given her uncanny influence over us – hesitated. “Ah, familial love…what a useless emotion! Mark my words, children, if you survive to escape these walls, you would be best advised to dispense with love entirely, as it will only be used against you.”
If you survive… I shuddered in anticipation of the blade cleaving my throat. But the witch sheathed the knife and turned back to Hansel.
“Very well,” she said. “I will not slay her – yet – but if you both value your lives, you will do what I say, to the letter.”
___
We spent our first night huddled in a dark and dusty closet into which the old woman had dragged us whilst we were still incapacitated. Her name, we learned, was Rosine, and she set us to work immediately upon waking. My tasks, although tiring, were familiar and commonplace; I cooked, scoured pots and dishes, scrubbed floors, and dusted the rows of books that extended much further than the modest store front suggested. With us as her captives, Rosine did not bother with the charade of opening the “store” to the public. In fact, although I explored every nook and cranny, I could find no trace of the store window or of the door through which we had entered. Besides kitchen and closet, there was only one other door in Rosine’s library, and that was kept locked.
Hansel’s purpose was more obscure. She kept him chained by the ankle to the wall, albeit with a comfortable armchair in which to sit, and I was ordered to keep him well fed and watered with whatever he desired, while I was only permitted the paltry scraps from her plate. Rosine brought him book after book on a wide range of arcane subjects, urging him to read far into the night and fuelling him with stimulating medicaments when exhaustion dragged his eyelids southwards. Her manner towards Hansel veered between extremes; one moment she spoke in gentle, cajoling tones that sickened me with their resemblance to Valda’s manipulations. The next she stormed and raged and cursed, promising all manner of gruesome fates for us both if he did not master the texts. Hansel bore it all with equanimity, his only response to bend his head to the books in silence.
Rosine would not let me speak with Hansel, saying that I distracted him from his work while I neglected my own, so we were limited to brief, clandestine exchanges when opportunity arose. But I did not need him to confirm what my vision already told me; Rosine’s books had enchanted him more thoroughly than any spell or elixir the witch could conjure. The eagerness with which he received each new tome was unfeigned, and his eyes shone with a fervour that bordered on madness. Many of the books contained obscure, long-forgotten languages, and from time to time I heard him quietly reciting the unfamiliar words in an urgent cadence that set the hairs rising on the back of my neck.
“What does she want of you?” I whispered, and his reply nearly stopped my heart.
“She wants me to summon the gods.”
___
Hansel had discovered that the summoning ritual culminated in a human sacrifice, so he claimed a state of unreadiness to keep the witch waiting as long as he could, although I suspected it was as much to continue reading from the library as to prolong our lives. Rosine had been gathering her unholy texts for decades, attempting unsuccessfully to decipher them for just as long, and had searched for many years for the person with just the right paradoxical combination of brilliance and foolhardiness to interpret them for her; one might think that her solitary virtue of patience was well developed. Yet her state of agitation mounted exponentially by the day, until she could stand it no longer.
“The time is now!” she shrieked as she unfastened Hansel’s chains. She grabbed us both by the hair, and with a strength surprising in such a frail looking woman, hauled us to the mysterious door, which now stood open at the top of a steep flight of stone steps. We were both too weak to mount much resistance as she lit a torch and pushed us before her. The steps descended into darkness to a seemingly impossible depth, the air growing colder and damper with each tread, and Rosine’s flickering brand cast demonic shadows before us. I detected a hint of ocean brine, the stink of rotting seaweed and a spicy, more elusive odour not entirely in keeping with the scents of the sea.
At last we reached the bottom, where we slumped against icy stone walls and breathed great gulps of fetid air. Rosine took her torch to light several others mounted at regular intervals about the chamber in which we found ourselves. The flames revealed a frieze of symbols chiselled into the stone on three sides of the chamber. I did not know their meaning, but recognised some of the symbols from the books Hansel had been studying. On the fourth side, more stone steps went down into an underground lake, large and still and inky black.
Panting for breath with his head hanging low and skin pallid, Hansel looked close to collapse, yet the sight of the symbols seemed to invigorate him. Rosine twisted my hair in her fist and forced me to my knees. She drew her blade and pressed it against my throat.
“Say the words!” she screamed. “SAY THEM!”
She needn’t have forced him; he had already begun, in a soft and low voice that gradually grew in intensity. Back in the library, the language had sounded forced and guttural, but here the words were in their natural element. Echoing off the walls, Hansel’s voice was powerful and melodic, yet subtly ominous. It was like listening to the call of giant, fantastical birds coming home to roost. He paced about the chamber like an actor upon a stage, his steps choreographed to music only he could hear.
The water in the lake began to move. It rippled at first from the centre outwards, as if struck by droplets of water from the unseen ceiling. A sound like the heartbeat of some huge creature insinuated itself into Hansel’s chants, and as its volume rose, so too did the ripples, turning into waves that leapt higher and higher.
Then the first of the beings emerged.
They came one by one, snaggle-toothed or swarming with tentacles or domed all over with multi-faceted eyes. Some were small and agile, like an unholy hybrid of eel and ferret. Some were leviathans, dripping sediment from the ocean depths, their great domed heads hinting at an immense bulk concealed below the water’s surface. And some defied all human perception of dimension and form, their very manifestation threatening to send me plunging irretrievably into insanity. They sang back to Hansel, these god-monsters, and the sound was like the torture of angels.
Rosine released me, dropped the knife, and stepped forward to descend the first few steps into the lake. She stood shin deep in the water, her arms wide in obsecration. The creatures paid her no mind; Hansel was their sole focus, and they swam and crawled and slithered towards him.
“Hansel! You must stop!” I struggled to make myself heard over the cacophony.
He turned to me, the torch light distorting his features. In that moment, he was no longer my brother, but the god-monsters’ kin. Then the illusion was gone, and I looked upon the face of a terrified boy.
“I can’t!” he cried. “I MUST KNOW!” And he returned to his chant.
The ritual required a sacrifice, he had said. Very well, I thought grimly. They would have their blood – but it would not be ours. I picked up Rosine’s abandoned knife and with all my strength, plunged it into her back. She stiffened and half-turned to claw at the spot where the knife entered her flesh, but she was not quite able to reach it. Uncomprehending, she looked up into my face. At the instant the awful understanding reached her consciousness, I pushed her into the lake.
The water churned with the feeding frenzy. I caught a flash of red, a glint of bone, a hank of gray hair whipping through the air, and I turned away. Hansel’s face was frozen in a rictus of anguish; whatever I had done, it had not been according to the plan. Terror lent me strength, and I grabbed his hand to drag him up the interminable flight of stairs and
into the library. With Rosine’s enchantments broken by her death, we found the exit easily.
It led out onto the very street in which our home stood.
___
I wish that I could say that we lived happily ever after, but that is the province of fairy tales. In our absence, our guilt-ridden father had come to his senses and banished Valda. He was overjoyed to welcome us home, but never quite forgave himself for sending us away in the first place, and as a consequence held us both obsessively close until long after we reached adulthood.
Hansel never truly recovered. As we were leaving the library, he tried to take some of the books with him. He lacked the strength to resist when I forced him out empty-handed, and wept as if I were taking him to his death instead of away from it. He spent his first week of freedom in a delirium, and when he finally arose from his sick bed and went out onto the street, he found Rosine’s library razed to the ground, its contents nothing but ash. Of the secret stairway and subterranean chamber, there was no trace.
Although I had ample opportunity, I never married. Instead, I became my brother’s keeper, guarding him on his frequent visits to the ports where he was wont to stare into the sea and speak gibberish until the fishermen and stevedores threatened him bodily harm. Sometimes I felt the lure of the language myself, even although I did not understand it; it whispered to me in quiet moments of wakefulness and crept into my dreams. Rosine’s words too came back to torment me - you would be best advised to dispense with love entirely, as it will only be used against you.
The god-monsters will return one day, of that I am sure. And when they do, I fear for humanity. The best I can hope for is that my bones have long been turned to dust before that day comes.
There was something moving out there in the dark.
He had heard it, something that trudged through the undergrowth not twenty yards away, just beyond the stand of tall birch trees.
A Mythos Grimmly Page 16