Gretel

by Christopher Coleman

  “She’s down there, Mother,” Anika said, her voice so tempered that ‘mother’ came out as “other.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll hide here for now.” Anika hadn’t prepared for this recess. She’d figured that after they ran for the cannery the witch would have been a step behind them and that all of it—one way or the other—would be over by now. But that hadn’t happened, and now she needed a real plan. “We’ll move away from the window for now, out of the light, against the wall.”

  “And then what?” Gretel asked.

  “I don’t know, Gretel!” Anika immediately regretted her whispered bark, but let the effect of it stand. “Just move to the wall.”

  Anika scooted to the side wall of the cannery and frowned at Gretel, who had decided to move away from her to the opposite wall. Not really a good time for brooding, Anika thought, but she’s just a child. And God only knew what she’d been through. A tear formed in Anika’s eyes and her mind raced to red over the struggle that wouldn’t be rewarded. The reward she deserved! Her life! Her children!

  Anika quickly erased the tear, flicking it away in a redirection of anger. No. No. No. She wouldn’t let her mind straggle off in a countenance of the inequities of life. Not now, and not ever again. There was simply no gain in it. There were gains from love—and sometimes from fight—but never from blame. Never from self-pity. Those were the things that bred regret. Those were the things that dissolved power.

  “Mother.” It was Gretel from the opposite wall, whispering only as loud as necessary to be heard.

  “I love you, Gretel,” Anika replied.

  “I love you too, Mother. I can’t wait until Hansel sees you.”

  This time Anika let the tear fall, and she wanted to run to Gretel, to spend her last seconds on earth—if that what was meant to be—in the arms of her daughter.

  “And Mother,” Gretel continued.

  “Yes, angel?”

  “I found the hammer.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The witch staggered to the dry ground of the clearing and collapsed, gasping for air. She was thankful the women had run off—had they stood and fought, she may not have had the strength to defeat them both. She was desperately tired, and her injuries were not insignificant.

  But this challenge was a mere formality, a honing of her abilities, a further test of her dedication to Life. Rest was all she needed to continue. Rest and more potion.

  The old woman lay flat on her back now, breathing heavily through her damaged jaws. She could feel the effects of the magic broth trying to restore her once again, as it had earlier in the cabin after she’d been brutally attacked and left to die. But already she sensed the potency diminishing. In her bones and muscles she still felt young and strong, but she wasn’t healing the same.

  She needed more. She needed everything blended properly this time. And her earlier plans to kill the older one, her original Source, had to be recalibrated. She would need all of them. All of the Aulwurms. The girl and the woman she would get now, and later, when she’d regained control of the situation, the boy.

  She watched her prey squeeze beneath the wire barrier, scattering like so many vermin she’d hunted in her day. Her rest would be short-lived it seemed, and the witch felt a pang of panic as she watched the women disappear into the darkness on the opposite side of the fence. She was confident she could scale the fence, or even fit beneath it, but such efforts would take their toll, and leave her vulnerable in whatever conflict eventually awaited her.

  Still, she had to move.

  She climbed back to her feet and stepped slowly to the fence, peering through into the blackness. She took a step back and scanned the metal barrier top to bottom, calculating what efforts would be needed to lift herself over the barbed wire. Certainly burrowing under would be far easier, but there would be several seconds of defenselessness, and it wasn’t impossible that the women were waiting with a raised axe just on the other side.

  But the witch was anemic, and even the idea of taking flight exhausted her. She couldn’t wait to recover, and she couldn’t risk a failed attempt that would leave her caught in the barbs. The hole at the bottom of the fence seemed like the only decision.

  She kneeled back to the soft ground, preparing to follow the path the women had taken only minutes before, and froze at soft muffled sounds coming from the huge rusted building in front of her. There was silence for a few beats, and then the sounds again, coming from within. At first the woman assumed it was rats or bats, but then, magically, the faint hiss of whispers drifted down from the window above. The witch’s smile grew wide with joy, and she had to cover her half-mouth like a schoolgirl to keep from chuckling.

  She lay back down, this time at the foot of the fence just in front of the tunnel, and closed her eyes, listening to the sweet sounds above her, waiting for her power to return.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “How long are we going to stay here?” Gretel asked.

  It was the first words either woman had spoken in at least ten minutes, both Gretel and Anika seeming to understand that silence was safer. But Gretel was growing restless, and with every minute that passed, more wary of the situation. This plan of her mother’s to hide and fortify seemed as good as any before, but now it felt wrong, like it was working against them. Like they were trapped.

  “It hasn’t been that long, Gretel. It just feels that way,” Anika replied.

  Gretel could hear the doubt in her mother’s voice and capitalized on it.

  “We can’t just sit here, Mother. Maybe she’s gone by now. She doesn’t know we came in here, right? How could she? Maybe she went off into the woods somewhere looking for us, and now’s the time we should be leaving.”

  This didn’t feel right to Gretel either—she suspected the witch was still near—but she wanted to move, be proactive. Sitting and waiting, as a rule, always seemed to Gretel like the wrong course of action.

  “And if she’s down there, waiting for us, what then?”

  Gretel paused a moment and said, “Then we’ll fight her…and kill her.”

  Gretel’s words lingered for several beats, and then she saw the figure of her mother creep into view and head toward the window. She had her head bowed well below the height of the sill, like a bank robber dodging pistol fire with the local sheriff in some old movie.

  “I’m going to take a look,” Anika whispered, “but just understand, if she sees me, you’ll get your wish. There will be a fight. So keep the hammer ready.”

  Gretel held the hammer up, and then, not sure whether she or the hammer was visible to her mother from where she sat, replied, “I’ve got it.”

  Gretel watched the back of her mother’s head rise slowly up to the opening of the window, turning first in the direction of Rifle Field, and then rotating back in the direction of their property down the lake. She then stood up further to get a view of the ground directly below, and instantly collapsed back to the floor and turned toward Gretel, wide-eyed and stunned.

  Assuming her mother had seen the witch walking below, Gretel stayed quiet, and simply turned her palms up and matched her mother’s expression.

  “She’s down there. Outside the fence near the hole.” Anika was barely auditory, doing little more than mouthing the words. “I think she might be dead.”

  Gretel looked toward the window. “Let me see.”

  Anika nodded, indicating she wanted Gretel’s assessment about whether she also believed the witch dead.

  Gretel walked on her knees over to the window and looked out, scanning the ground below, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark. The night was still clear and the moon offered plenty of light past the fence. But Gretel didn’t see anyone. She scanned the grounds for a few seconds more and then turned back to her mother. “I don’t see her. You said by the fence, right?”

  “Yes, right next to the hole. Let me see.”

  Gretel backed off and a
llowed her mother to move in again.

  Anika peered once again out the window. “I don’t understand. She was…”

  A hoarse, high-pitched cry shattered the quiet of the night and rang through the cannery like the bellow of a bull elephant. Anika, screaming in disbelief, lurched in terror away from the window—so far, in fact, that had she backed up even another foot, Gretel could see she would have gone tumbling down the open stairway.

  A dark, amorphous blotch now filled the space of the window, blocking the full light of the moon, allowing only small strands of silver rays around its perimeter. It was the witch, and she was perched like a giant spider in the window, gripping the top corners of the frame with her long fingers. Her feet were wedged in the bottom corners. Gretel thought she looked like an enormous, disfigured bat.

  “That’s impossible!” Anika screamed. “How?”

  “You, my sweet Source,” the witch replied, “You are ‘How.’” Her words were breathy and, with her mouth and neck mangled, nearly unintelligible.

  Gretel watched the woman in the window silently, unable to look away from her destroyed face.

  The witch stepped down from the sill and stood tall, dropping the hood of her cloak, never taking her eyes off Anika. Gretel noticed instantly the woman had not even glanced in her direction, and had instead stayed locked on her mother during the entire exchange. As Gretel had suspected earlier with her mother, it was possible the witch couldn’t see her in the shadows.

  “You’ve given me so much trouble, Anika Morgan, more trouble than I ever would have believed you capable of. But you’ve also given me so much life. And you will continue giving. You and your family.” Blood and mucous dropped from the woman’s lips, occasionally bringing with it a stray tooth or shards of bone.

  Gretel’s hatred was searing as she knelt, frozen in self-preservation, listening to the mutilated woman threaten her mother. This horrible, deranged creature—miscreation—who’d fragmented her life, first by stealing her mother, and then by killing her father. And Odalinde, whom Gretel had hated for so long, yet in less than a day had grown to care deeply for. Perhaps one day she’d understand Odalinde’s tough love approach—and in some ways she supposed she did already—but there was no doubt now in Gretel’s mind that she was there to protect them. To save them.

  And now here this freak of life was again, threatening more torture and destruction, wielding the genius of Gretel’s own descendants, shamelessly, to destroy everyone she loved, as if everyone’s life belonged to the old witch and was lived for her pleasure alone. Gretel’s own life. And Hansel’s. And what of the Klahrs? And Petr? Certainly she wouldn’t stop until they were dead too.

  “I’ll kill myself first,” Anika shot back, “or, even better, I’ll kill you.”

  The witch chuckled. “That opportunity has passed young pigeon, and it shall not come again.” The witch took a step forward. “And though it is often thought so, killing one’s self is not as easy as one might think. Besides, I know of your will, and the love you hold for your progeny. You, I know, would use any breath of hope—however vaingloriously—to keep me from them.’

  Gretel placed her fingertips on the floor and began to gently push herself up to a standing position. She held her breath as she rose, thankful for the silence in her young bones and muscles. But the floorboards of the cannery were not so young, and as Gretel stood, the old wood detonated in a barrage of creaks and pops. The witch pivoted in the direction of the sound, but as she stopped to stare, her gaze was askew, off to the right slightly, in the direction of the window, hoping perhaps the light would drift over the source of the noise. Gretel knew, with certainty now, she was all but invisible.

  “Ah, there you are. Gretel, yes? The very special Gretel. Your grandfather—and your father more recently—have told me of your talents, talents which they tell me you have not even begun to explore yourself. You are young now, with no one to show you. But I will. I will show you. I will bring these talents from within you. Why don’t you come where I can see you better.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Anika blurted. “I’ll go with you now.” She hurried to her feet, nearly tripping over them and down the stairwell, and then lingered at the top of the opening, as if ready to follow the witch to whatever fate she had in store. “If you leave her alone, I’ll go with you. I’ll go with you and you can do what you will to me.”

  The witch looked over her shoulder at Anika and chuckled again, this time with more confidence. “You will go with me,” she said, and spun her head back in the direction of Gretel, this time lining her gaze up almost correctly, but not quite. “And so will she.” The words were bitter and hostile this time, her patience with coaxing and civility clearly at an end. “And once you’re both secure—confined—I’ll be back for the boy. Hansel, yes? I believe your brother’s name is Hansel.”

  Hearing the monster speak her brother’s name—threatening him—was the last evil Gretel could endure, and before she could consider the consequences of failure—consequences not only for herself, but for everyone still alive that she loved—she gripped the hammer, claw-end forward, and erupted from the shadows on the second floor of the cannery.

  The sound of fear in the witch’s scream, and the look of surprise and defeat in her eyes, fueled Gretel to the point of possession, and were the final sparks of power Gretel needed to bring the wide metal spikes of the hammer down and into the middle of the witch’s forehead.

  “No…no!” the witch begged uselessly, the words sounding gurgled and infantile, her hands flailing in the direction of the hammer, grasping at the iron lodged above her eyebrow but not quite able to touch it.

  Gretel held the handle of the hammer tightly and pulled the woman close to her, staring at her coldly as she extracted the claw from the woman’s head, causing a bloodfall across the witch’s eyes and cheeks. And then, with more leverage and fury than before, Gretel brought the hammer down once again, this time to the top of the old woman’s head.

  The witch’s eyes and mouth grew grotesquely wide, mummified in a silent scream, the blood and damage to her face now leaving her all but unrecognizable as human. Her body was still for a beat, and then began to convulse, wobbling ninety degrees at a time until the dying woman was facing forward and staggering drunkenly toward the stairs, the hammer jutting from her head like a deformed horn.

  Anika took one step to the side as the old woman stumbled past her. The witch paused a moment, looking blankly at the women, and then, involuntarily, her foot drifted to the empty space of the stairwell. She collapsed like a stone to the ground floor of the cannery, hitting only the bottom step as she fell, her body ending face down in a crumpled mass, the hammer still jutting from her scalp.

  Anika would later recall that the sound of the woman hitting the floor reminded her of a pie hitting a concrete wall.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Petr and Gretel descended the porch steps jointly carrying the last piece of major luggage: a large, antique trunk—the piratey kind, enveloped by bulleted leather banding and secured with brass lockplates. Gretel always imagined her mother had seen it fall from an old circus train one day and had decided to keep it for herself, perhaps to use one day when she, herself, ran off to join the circus. It was one of the first items Gretel had looked for the day after her mother went missing and was disappointed to find it.

  The teenagers heaved the trunk onto the tailgate of the truck and pushed it cozy with the rest of the things. Anika stood in the bed of the pickup, arranging space for the small items that still remained.

  “Is there anything else, Mrs. Morgan?” Petr asked. His voice was timid and whispery.

  “No Petr,” Anika replied without looking up, her tone with the boy curt and dry. “Perhaps Gretel has something.”

  Gretel had witnessed—without interfering—similar interactions between her mother and Petr over the last three weeks, and felt sympathy for both of them. But mostly she felt for Petr, who craved her mother’s acceptance a
nd seemed to be adjusting pretty well to his new life with the Klahrs.

  He was certainly adjusting better to his new life than her mother was to her old one.

  With Hansel, her mother had recalibrated fine, and had returned to being as sweet as she ever was to the boy. Perhaps she crossed the threshold into overbearing on occasion, but Gretel assumed such behavior was perfectly normal. With Gretel, she was also still loving, except that Gretel now detected more of a demureness from her mother, a newfound reverence toward her daughter that contained a dusting of dread. Awe was the word, Gretel guessed. Her mother was in awe of her.

  But with everybody else her mother had been cold. Even to the Klahrs, whom she’d lathered with thanks and blessings for days afterward, there was an uncomfortable distance—a mistrust that only the saintly Klahrs could and did understand. And with Petr the feelings seemed to be especially true, though for Gretel the reasons why were no great mystery. So, as difficult as it was to witness, Gretel didn’t intervene during these implied slights or moments of aloofness, and instead allowed her mother the room to recover. There was trauma to be worked through, and who could blame her for not being chipper and friendly after only a few weeks?

  Petr lingered by the truck looking down at his shoes, which surprised Gretel since normally he took any opportunity her mother gave him to scurry out of the kill zone of awkwardness. But today he stood pat.

  “I’m sorry,” Petr said, his voice solid, though tears had begun to plop down to the gravel below. “I know you’re angry at me. For what my father did to you. I never knew anything.” He paused, “And that’s not who I am.”

  The sentences came out quickly and evenly, as if he’d rehearsed them a hundred times; but there was emotion in every word, and on the last sentence Petr’s voice cracked, and he turned from the truck and broke into a trot toward the house.