Gretel (41 page)

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.

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 and 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.

“Petr!”

Anika’s voice stunned the boy, who was nearly past the porch and on the path down to the lake. He stopped immediately and stood tall, though he didn’t turn to look at her.

Gretel moved aside as her mother stepped over the trunk to the tailgate and down to the driveway before running to where Petr stood, turning him toward her and pulling him in close.

The boy collapsed in Anika’s arms, sobbing like an infant. And for the first time in Gretel’s life, she heard her mother cry.

An hour later the truck was loaded with everything that would be travelling with the Morgan family—whatever remained now would simply remain. Gretel’s mother mildly alluded to ‘coming for it another day,’ but Gretel doubted that day would ever arrive.

Gretel said her goodbyes to Petr—whom she imagined would live in her story as her first love, though love wasn’t quite what it was. But it was something. Something to grow and learn from. And she would see him again. About that she was as certain as the sunset.

“We have to stop at the Klahrs, Mother,” Gretel reminded, “don’t forget.”

“I want you to give them this.” Gretel’s mother handed her daughter a note. “It has all the information about where we’re going. Once they have it, Gretel, they’ll be the only ones—other than the three of us—who know where we are. I want you to tell them that.”

“Where
are
we going?” Hansel asked, a pitch of pleasure and adventure in his voice. If his mother had said to the other side of the moon, Gretel knew Hansel would have been okay with that answer. She was home. They were together. That’s all he cared about. He had it right.

“Pretty far, sweetheart,” his mother replied, “pretty far.”

Gretel had asked the question the night before and, essentially, had gotten the same answer, with the additional provocation of ‘We’re going to get some answers.’

But Gretel had already begun getting answers.

She opened Odalinde’s copy of
Orphism
at the bookmarked page and began reading. Not much had made sense when she started a few days ago, even with the translation, and she had gotten only ten or twelve pages in.

But it was beginning to come together.

 
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