by Cameron Jace
“Wait! It’s messing with your head,” Cerené ran after Shew, slapping her hands before reaching for the house. “Did you hear me?” she shook Shew harder. “The house is messing with your head. Once you eat from the house, you will faint. I just told you that.”
Shew felt as if waking up from a dream within a dream. She blinked twice to make sure she was herself again. The house surely had and effect on her.
“What does she need all those children for?” Shew asked.
“Like I said, she eats them, mostly the boys,” Cerené pulled Shew away from the doorstep. She crouched so they wouldn’t be exposed if someone opened the door. “As for the girls, you should be able to guess what she does with the young, ripe and beautiful ones.”
Shew took a moment to think about it. She gasped as the answer hit her.
“Yes,” Cerené nodded. “She sends them to the Queen, your mother, to feed on them so she can stay beautiful forever,” she made a silly face when saying ‘beautiful.’ “That’s horrid,” Shew gazed at the door over Cerené’s shoulder.
“What’s not horrid in your family?” Cerené shrugged her shoulders. “No wonder you’re called the Sorrows.”
“Again, I’m not insulted in any way,” it was Shew’s turn to shrug her shoulders.
“News has been exchanged in Sorrow recently about a number of peasant girls disappearing in the Schloss,” Cerené elaborated. “So the Queen came up with the plan to use Baba Yaga’s hunger for young people to supply her with plenty of them. Once the Queen drinks and bathes in their blood, she sends the bodies back to Baba Yaga to stew them and eat them. Baba Yaga likes the flesh but spits out the bones.”
“Baba Yaga? What an unusual name,” Shew remarked.
“Of course she has to have an unusual name,” Cerené said. “She eats children!”
The two girls started laughing.
What’s there not to laugh about, Shew thought. This whole dream with Cerené was made of mountains of silly upon mountains of sillier, mixed with a great deal of blood and scary stuff. It was just like life in the Waking World, a set of unfortunate incomprehensible happenings that made no sense. The best way to come back at life is to laugh at it.
“I heard her name resembled the voices she makes when chewing,” Cerené elaborated. “Baba is the sound she makes when she gulps: babababa! And yaga is the sound she makes with her mouth when she tries to chew the bones: yayayaga!”
She also noticed Cerené’s laugh was more infectious and bigger than anyone she had ever met. She laughed as if it was her last day on earth. Her mouth stretched, and her eyes became bigger, her two cute dimples showed from underneath the sticky ashes—and of course, her freckles popped out.
Looking down the hill, Shew noticed a small village in the distance, “do the people in the village down there know about this house?” Shew wondered.
“I don’t think so,” Cerené said. “They are nice people. The village is called Furry Tell. There is a funny story behind the name—“
Suddenly, the door of Candy House sprang open.
13
A Sack Full of Dead Children
A nose appeared from behind the door.
It was a crooked nose, bigger than the biggest carrot they’d ever seen, and slightly dented in the middle. Baba Yaga’s deformed face came after, creeping out under the thin beam from the pumpkin lantern above her. Her face reminded Shew of crumple pies, covered with bumps and sticky juice. Baba Yaga’s face looked like a face someone had nibbled on many times.
“It’s her,” Cerené whispered, shivering and holding Shew’s hand. “The shawl she wears is made of cracked children’s bones.
“Don’t worry,” Shew said.
Shew watched as Baba Yaga began to step out of the house. She walked as fast as a dead turtle. Her body was round, like a cauldron with a head. Her feet protruded from under her feathery cloak. Shew gasped as she noticed Baba Yaga had chicken legs and chicken feet! She thought they must have been the creepiest feet in the world.
“Why is she taking so long to come out of the house?” Shew whispered, noticing that Baba Yaga, with her crooked nose and chicken legs, looked like a giant evil bird.
“It’s the sack that’s slowing her down,” Cerené whispered back. “The sack on her back is full of sedated girls. She’s on her way to the Queen.”
Shew saw Baba Yaga bend her already-arched back lower and pull a sack twice her size through the door. She walked down three wooden steps on the porch, flapping her eerie chicken legs as the children’s heads thudded against the floor.
Baba Yaga seemed more comfortable with pulling the sack behind her when she got to the grass. As she walked, she smoked a cigar.
“You want to know what the cigar’s tobacco is made of?” Cerené said. “It’s Rapunzel ashes!”
Shew shook her head and listened to Baba Yaga sing as she pulled the sack down the hill:
Hush little children, don't say a word.
Baba’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird won't sing.
Baba's gonna cut and slice its wings.
The birds in the trees fluttered away immediately. Her voice made the squirrels run; abandoning their precious nuts, and it made snakes come crawling out of the trees. The witch took another drag from the cigar and sang again:
Hush little girls, don't you cry.
Baba’s just sacked you and you don’t know why.
Hush little girls, now say goodbye
Baba’s gonna eat ya, ’n tonight you’ll die.
“Sometimes when she needs more money, she sends some of the boys to Georgie Porgie, the Boogeyman,” Cerené added. “He likes to make children cry, and he pays well for the children’s tears.”
They watched as Baba Yaga disappear in the dark, then Cerené and Shew dashed into Candy House and closed the door behind them.
“You’re sure she’s not coming back now?” Shew said.
“No, it’ll take her some time to reach the castle,” Cerené said, hiking the stairs down to the basement.
Wherever Cerené went, Shew followed, even if it was into Hell itself.
Cerené, still holding her glass urn against her chest and her broom in one hand, ushered Shew through a maze of candle lit corridors in the cellar, which looked like a small dungeon. They passed through rooms that had bars like jails where Baba Yaga kept the children. The prison-like rooms were empty now that she had the children in her sack outside.
“Come on, hurry,” Cerené demanded. “Don’t act like a princess walking on eggshells. It doesn’t suit you.”
“This place looks like Hell,” Shew commented.
Cerené crouched under a lower ceiling leading to a bigger room. Finally, she stopped and pointed at a furnace in the middle of the space. She looked excited.
Shew couldn’t believe Cerené was happy about this place. The smell was unbearable. Something had been burning recently, probably the children Baba Yaga ate. She wondered about the people in the Waking World who thought fairy tales were fluffy stories that made children sleep and what they would do if they knew the Brothers Grimm forged the happy stories.
Cerené patted the furnace gently then looked back at Shew, “beautiful, isn’t it?”
The furnace was rusty, brown, and covered with green sticky vines that snaked slowly around it. It had dead frogs plastered to it like stickers on a refrigerator. Its door had two holes that looked like eyes staring back at Shew. Behind the eyes, she only saw the blackness left from burning children.
Shew wanted to play along and pretend it was beautiful, but she couldn’t do it. The cellar of Candy House was the scariest place she had seen.
“I guess it’s time to show me your magic, Cerené,” Shew sighed, praying Cerené’s magic would not turn out to be something wicked. She hoped it was as fascinating as she’d claimed it to be after all they’d been through. It would be painful to discover that Cerené was just another lunatic stained by evil.
S
he is just like you, Chosen One. You are made from evil clay, designed to fight your own kind. In a world so bleak like Sorrow, who do you think can face the darkness and lead people to the light? Cerené with her naivety and hurt she’s suffered? Axel and Fable, two teenagers still trapped in the paradise of childhood?
“Aren’t you excited to finally see my Art?” Cerené knelt down and lay her heavy broom aside. She opened her glass urn and smelled it as if it were an exotic perfume. “Do you still remember the elements needed to conjure the Art?”
“Heart, Brain, and Soul,” Shew showed her she was paying attention. “The Heart is ashes from a Rapunzel plant, the sand is from the eyes of one of the sleeping beauties in the Field of Dreams which is property of the Sandman himself, and the lime is just chalk from school.”
“Toothpaste!” Cerené celebrated while mixing the ingredients together in the urn. She watched them glow slightly purple as Cerené decided to wipe her teeth again with some ‘toothpaste’ she’d saved.
“Now what?” Shew was curious.
“Now this,” Cerené held the iron broomstick. “You think it’s a broomstick, right?”
“It is a broomstick,” Shew dared her.
“Nah. I just had to fool the Queen of Sorrow and all the other servants into thinking it’s a broomstick,” Cerené smiled proudly. “And it’s not a witch’s broomstick either—”
“What is it then?”
Cerené cleaned the iron broom with the tip of the red dress Shew had dressed her with in the Field of Dreams—she was wearing a ragged blue servant’s dress Tabula had given her today.
After cleaning it, Cerené pulled the broom up to her mouth and blew into it, producing a sound like a heavy fart. She blew into it one more time then peeked with one eye into the hole of her tool. “You still don’t know what it is?”
Impatiently, Shew shook her head into a no.
“A blowpipe,” Cerené whispered. “The first part of the tool, the Brains, is the furnace we came all the way for. The second part is the blowpipe, a magical one, in fact.”
“What does a blowpipe do?” Shew said.
“It’s better than a magic wand!”
14
A Breath of Magic
“Better than a magic wand?” Shew wondered.
“A blowpipe is even better than a magic wand. I’ll show you in a minute,” Cerené held the blowpipe underneath her armpit and clapped her hands together three times. The furnace lit up. “This isn’t my magic by the way. I saw Baba Yaga do it.”
“At least she didn’t say ‘Open Sesame,’” Shew mumbled—another thing she’d read in one of her victims’ books. Cerené didn’t quite get what she was talking about.
Under the shimmering fire of the furnace, Cerené smeared one end of the pipe with the Heart’s purple and sticky mix. It stuck to it looking like a liquid lump. She gazed one last time toward Shew, winked at her, and pushed the sticky end of the blow pipe into the furnace, holding the other end with the two folded layers of the red dress.
Swoosh went the mixture once it met with the fire from the furnace. Slowly, it turned into a molten concoction, and the purple color turned into a hellish orange like the surface of coals on fire.
“Beware!” Shew warned Cerené as the fire flickered.
Although the blowpipe was too long and a bit heavy for Cerené, she titled her head back, smiling with a sweaty face at Shew.
“Why are you smiling in God’s name?” Shew’s face knotted.
“You care about me?” Cerené asked, almost losing balance.
Shew shrieked, but Cerené adjusted her small feet awkwardly as if walking the tight rope in the circus.
For the first time, Shew finally understood what was so strange about Cerené’s shoes. They were made of … glass.
Shew furrowed her eyebrows.
The black texture she couldn’t identify before was as flexible as rubber but looked like dirty glass in the shimmering fire. She could tell they were glass because of the way their surface reflected the shimmering light of the fire from the furnace. Momentarily, she thought the shoes were made of Obsidian stones, but no, this was glass, an unusually flexible type of glass that fooled the observer into thinking they were poor quality leather.
There was something else about the shoes, nonetheless. It was what had caught Shew’s attention here in front of the furnace. When Cerené was about to lose balance from tilting her head back and holding the heavy blowpipe, the shoes helped Cerené keep her balance. Cerené’s shoes were not ordinary in any way.
“Don’t you worry, Joy,” Cerené gritted her teeth, gripping the blowpipe with both hands as if she were pulling a stubborn fish out of the water. “I’ve done this many times.”
Having gained balance again, Cerené pulled the blowpipe out and placed it on what looked like a butcher’s table, the glowing molten mixture glued to the blowpipe’s far end.
Cerené knelt down and started blowing from her end into the blowpipe, shaping the molten into a bubbly looking mold. The molten breathed like a frog’s throat when she blew. The fiery substance looked as if it were alive; submitting to the amount of air Cerené blew into it through the pipe.
“Wow,” Shew said. “How do you do that? What is that?”
Cerené took a deep breath, tired after blowing, “You’ll see in a second,” she said. “Could you pull a rock from the floor and run it over the mold?”
“What?”
“Just do it,” Cerené said. “While I blow into the pipe, shape the mold however you like. Did you ever carve wood or work with clay?”
Shew said nothing. She felt embarrassed that she never had.
“Don’t worry,” Cerené understood. “Use your imagination to make this into whatever you like. I will see what shape you’re thinking of and then I will breathe into it to create what you’re imagining. I’m very good at it.”
“I can’t.”
“Just think of something. Make it into a vase or cup,” Cerené’s cheeks had reddened like coals from under the sticky ashes on her face.
Although Shew didn’t know what this was, she picked a rock and started molding the fiery clay-like thing. She worried briefly about the unbearable heat, but then started doing as Cerené had directed her.
The rock’s sharp edge cut through the molten like a knife through butter. Cerené rolled the blowpipe on its axis while Shew shaped her imagination into existence. She found herself creating what looked like a cup. When the molten began taking reasonable shape, she cut a bit too deep. A sticky part of the mixture thumped like thick mud onto the floor.
“Ooops,” Shew stepped back, watching the molten crawling on the floor like lava from a volcano.
“Ooops?” Cerené raised a single eyebrow. “I like the way you invent those silly words. “Ooops, sounds like someone suffering from a hiccup,” she amused herself one more time. “Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to do it. I have made the same mistake.
“Other artists think that at some point when the new creation is hot, for the shape to hold it needs to cool down, but I know better,” Cerené said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this is my Art, Joy. I don’t need to cool it because when I breathe into it, it becomes alive,” Cerené said.
“Alive? You mean this glass is alive?”
“You haven’t seen anything yet. This is only the beginning,” Cerené said.
“Are you aware that you’re literally playing with fire?” Shew couldn’t help but wonder if this was the reason for Cerené’s wounds. Maybe she just burned herself playing with fire.
“Playing with fire!” Cerené jumped in place, shaking the mold. “Never thought of it like that. Isn’t it enchanting?”
“It is,” Shew said, staring at the piece of the molten she’d shaped into a cup.
“Now, come hold the blowpipe so I can show you the real magic,” Cerené handed her the pipe.
“There is still more to show than this?”
�
�You have no idea. Hold the pipe about one third away from my end for balance. I will blow into it now,” Cerené said. Then she took a deep breath closing her eyes. She squeezed her fingers and took an even deeper breath. “If I pass out, don’t worry,” Cerené said.
“Pass out, why?”
There wasn’t enough time to get an answer. Cerené blew into the pipe with all her might, eyes closed again. Her face and ears reddened, and her cheeks bubbled like shimmering light bulbs. It looked like she was blowing into it with her very essence, with her own soul.
Soul? She said the third part was the Soul! That’s her talent. She completes the magic with her breathing.
While Cerené breathed into the pipe, the molten grew increasingly bigger like a balloon about to explode, except this one was getting more flexible like warm clay she could shape with her breath.
Cerené blew harder without stopping for a breath. The molten color changed from orange slowly to blue. It was a lovely light blue like the color of clear skies, waving like a ghost among the darkened walls of the cellar.
Shew struggled to hold tightly to the blowpipe. Cerené’s mouth was fixed on the other end of the pipe, eyes still closed as if she were shaping the mold with her imagination.
The blue changed into lighter shades, almost transparent with a glittering surface like some kind of see-through diamond.
Isn’t it beautiful? Shew remembered Cerené saying about the furnace. The furnace was as ugly as the witch who owned it, but the molten was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. It was mesmerizing to see evil fire assist the glowing molten mix take shape and turn into something more resilient and sparkling.
“Cerené,” Shew uttered, lost in the beauty of the transparent diamonds sparkling inside the witch’s hellish basement. “This amazing Art of yours I’m looking at, what is it exactly? “
Cerené stopped blowing for a moment. She took a deep breath, eager to reply, “This is glass, Shew, the Forbidden Art, and I’m a glassblower.”
15