The Brixen Witch (2 page)

It had been a blustery morning, with more than a hint of snow stinging his nostrils, when Rudi left his warm cottage and climbed the high meadow to hunt rabbits in the shadow of the Berg. All day long he scrambled on the mountain, but his aim was crooked, or perhaps it was his slingshot. By dusk, icy pellets stabbed Rudi’s hands and face, and he had nothing to show for the day but the golden guilder in his pocket and its rightful owner flinging hexes down the mountain in his wake.

So now here he was, half running, half stumbling downslope, the wind and sleet screaming in his ears.

Or was it the witch?

Rudi didn’t stop to find out. He hurtled down the mountain, his legs threatening to give way and send him off the edge and onto the rocks below.

But he wasn’t thinking of that. Or he was trying not to. He was thinking how remarkable it was that the witch was real after all. All this time, he’d assumed she was nothing but a fairy tale; a bedtime fable told to every child in the village of Brixen. His own mother had often told him the story of the Brixen Witch, who lived under the mountain, hidden and silent so long as no one disturbed her domain.

He had never liked that story at bedtime. It did not result in happy dreams.

And other than a few stories, nothing much was said about the witch in Brixen. People said it was bad luck to talk of such things.

“So I found the entrance to her lair,” thought Rudi to himself as darkness fell and the lights of the village appeared below through the slanting pellets of ice. “I wonder if anyone else knows where it is. I wonder if I’d ever be able to find it again.”

But he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to find it again. Every blink of his eyes brought a flash of memory: the gaping mouth; the teeth like spikes; the foul icy breath. And the screech—it had been painful to his ears, like a thousand cats fighting in a room with walls of stone.

Rudi shuddered as he hurled himself toward his own front door. One last look over his shoulder. One last ear-piercing shriek that may have been the storm, but may have been—

And he crashed into the house, somersaulting onto the floor as the door hit the wall with a bang. In one quick instant he was surrounded by everyone he loved most dearly in the world, and he had never been happier to see them.

“Close the door, boy!” yelled his father, jumping from his chair and spilling his pipe onto Rudi’s head. “You’re letting October into the house!”

“By the saints!” said his mother. “You’re muddy as a salamander. And now look at my rug.”

“Where are the rabbits?” said Oma. “I’m getting too old to eat my dinner so late.”

Rudi blinked up at them, trying to catch his breath. He swallowed hard, lifted his head, and croaked, “Witch.” Then he collapsed into a heap.

“Which what?” said Oma,
tsk
ing and nudging Rudi with her toe. “The boy needs to learn to speak up. I don’t see any rabbits on his belt.”

“Nor do I,” said his mother, sighing. “Then it’s barley soup again.”

Rudi sat up, dug pipe ash out of his ear, and tried to speak calmly. But all he could manage was, “A cave … on the mountain … something chased me….”

“What was it?” said his father. “A bear? A wolf?” He squinted at Rudi. “A bad-tempered marmot?”

“Should have shot it anyway,” said Oma. “It would have been as tasty as rabbit, I’m sure.” She smacked her gums.

Rudi regarded his slingshot and his grandmother in turn. “It was bigger than me,” he told her. “With teeth. And claws. And a screech like the Devil himself.”

“Rudolf Augustin Bauer!” scolded his mother. “Such stories you tell!”

Rudi considered that the stories he told were only those she’d told him first, but he kept silent in that regard.

Rudi’s father refilled the bowl of his pipe and struck a match. “Your eyes were playing tricks on you, son. You know better than to be caught up there as the light wanes, especially when a storm threatens. Are you sure you didn’t come upon a fox sleeping in its den? That would raise a snarl, I’ve no doubt.” And he snorted and clapped Rudi on the back, so that Rudi nearly collapsed again onto the rug.

Rudi sighed. His father must be right. It had been getting dark, and the snow had started to fly, and it had become difficult to see. He smiled crookedly, and felt his face grow warm, and scratched the back of his head.

“You’re right, Papa,” he said. “That was it. I’m sure it was a fox.” And Rudi stood on the rug, kicked off his muddy boots (to his mother’s exasperation), and took himself up the stairs to clean up.

But as he pulled off his grass-stained trousers, a new thought popped into his head. He plunged his hand deep into his pocket, and his fingers closed around something hard and flat and round.

A golden guilder.

It gleamed softly, even in the dimness of the loft, and it was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Not that he’d often seen any gold coin up close before. But it had a thickness about it, and markings he couldn’t read.

“What kind of fox keeps an old gold coin in its den?” he whispered to himself. But he decided it was just coincidence. If Rudi had stumbled upon the cave, why not someone else? Another hunter had dropped the coin long ago, and today Rudi had found it. That was all.

His mind wandered to what he might be able to buy with such a coin. A new pair of skis? A new rug for his mother? A slingshot that actually worked?

And then one ragged syllable burst from Oma’s mouth, flew up the stairs, and scraped Rudi’s eardrums.

“Witch!”

Rudi’s breath stopped in his throat. The coin fell from his hand onto his stockinged foot and rolled under his bed. He stifled a curse.

“Which what?” boomed Papa’s voice from below. Then he laughed. “Is that how you play the game, Mother?”

Rudi scrambled into clean trousers, fumbled beneath the bed for the coin, and jammed it under his pillow. “How’s that, Oma?” he called over the railing, his voice cracking.

“When you first spilled into the house all breathless and red in the face,” she called up to him, “you said ‘witch.’ Didn’t you?” Oma’s mind was sharp. It was her ears that sometimes lagged behind, but they always caught up eventually, and that’s what they were doing now.

Rudi gulped, and resisted the urge to glance back at his pillow. “I was being silly,” he called down. “Like Papa said—it was a trick of the light.”

Oma squinted up at him for a moment. Then she shrugged and sat herself down to dinner. “As you say. You were there, not I.”

Rudi breathed a sigh of relief, which brought the aroma of hot barley soup and fried apples to his nostrils. He bounded down the stairs, his appetite surging.

“All I mean to say,” said Oma, as if the conversation had not just ended, “is that if you did visit
a witch, I hope you didn’t take anything. Anyone who steals from the Brixen Witch’s hoard is hounded without mercy until she gets her treasure back. That’s all I mean to say.”

And Oma dipped her spoon into her bowl and slurped her soup.

RUDI COULD not sleep.

He blamed the storm, which continued into the night without relief. The wind rattled the shutters, and it made an eerie noise that sounded to Rudi’s ears like some kind of tuneless singing, or the distant playing of a pennywhistle. In their own corners of the loft, his family somehow managed to sleep undisturbed.

Rudi dragged his pillow over his head, and his cheek came to rest on a spot of cool metal. The golden guilder. The cursed coin. Oma’s words pushed themselves at him again, as they had done all that evening, no matter how he’d tried to keep them away. And if that weren’t enough, it seemed to Rudi that the pillow did nothing to muffle the tuneless song.

He sat up and scanned the darkness. Then he slid out of bed and stepped to his trunk, not bothering to tread softly. The noise of the storm stifled all other sound, even Oma’s snores. Rudi buried the coin deep within the folds of his summerweight woolens, dropped the lid of his trunk, and scuttled back to bed.

At that moment the wind gave a frightful howl. It wrenched a shutter free from its latch and banged it against the house. The panes of the window rattled as the sleet battered the glass like handfuls of stones. For the briefest instant, Rudi thought he glimpsed a flash of color through the window—red, and then yellow—and then he saw something else just beyond the glass.

A face?

“Brrrf!”
came a groggy deep voice from the other end of the loft. “What the—
grmph
—shutter!” And Papa tumbled out of bed and lurched half-asleep toward the window. Rudi was sure that the face outside the window was only a result of his own terrified imagination, but just in case, he jumped out of bed and grabbed the hem of Papa’s nightshirt.

Papa swung the windowpane inward, reached out into the storm, gasped
“buh!”
as he was splashed with sleet, grabbed the shutter, pulled it tight, and hooked the latch. Then he shut the window again
and turned back toward the room, now fully awake and blinking away ice pellets.

“What?—” Papa said, nearly stepping on Rudi.“Why didn’t you get the shutter if you were up? And why is there still a draft in here?” Papa’s gaze fell upon Rudi’s hand, which was still holding his father’s nightshirt and revealing a good bit of beefy bare leg.

Papa tugged his shirt out of Rudi’s grasp, and a laugh burst from his lips. “Twelve years old and still afraid of a storm, eh, boy?” He tousled Rudi’s hair. “I won’t tell. It’s a night for the Devil himself out there, don’t tell your mother I said that.” A shiver ran its course from Papa’s knees to his shoulders, and for a moment Rudi wondered if the source of the shiver was the storm, the Devil, or his mother. Papa shuffled back to bed, leaving Rudi to stand on the cold floor with his mouth hanging open.

Now it was Rudi who blinked. What had he seen outside the window? It must have been an illusion, created by the slashing sleet against the panes. He recalled how the wavy glass shone with rainbow colors during summer rainstorms, when sunlight peeked from behind the clouds and struck the window at just the right angle. Yes, that’s what had happened now. Something like that.

Proud of himself for thinking so logically despite
the disturbances of the night, Rudi clambered into bed for a second time. He turned over and tried to sleep.

It was no use. He couldn’t shake the tuneless song from his head, even though he knew it was just the wind twisting itself through the chinks in the walls and into his ears. He concentrated on hearing only the wind, and blocking from his mind whatever musical sound he thought he heard entwined with the sound of the storm.

But he could not. If anything, Rudi heard the tune even more loudly than before.

And now he heard a scratching at the window.

It was only a pinecone, Rudi told himself. Or a bit of branch that had caught in the shutter, and now it was rubbing against the windowpane. Rudi would not prove his father right about being frightened of a storm. He sat up in bed, intending to scold himself, but instead of whispering “Stop it, Rudi!” different words spilled from his mouth:

“Go away!”

But the scratching continued, and the shutter rattled (though this time it did not give way), and now Rudi was certain that the music—the tuneless song that sounded something like the wail of a pennywhistle—was not the wind, and it was not his imagination.

He slid under his blankets until they covered his
head, and he did not sleep, but could only wait for morning.

Rudi sat up with a start. He must have dozed after all, because now he heard a different sound outside the window. The sound of the wind not blowing.

No sleet lashed against the house. Nothing rattled the windows. The storm had passed.

So why did that maddening tune still prickle his ears?

It was not yet first light, but Rudi rolled out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to clear his head.

“So,” came a familiar voice from somewhere in the room.

“Oma?” Rudi rubbed his eyes and strained to see in the dark. “You’re up already?”

“Of course I’m up,” she said. “It’s morning, isn’t it? Besides, I couldn’t sleep with that infernal noise.”

“Noise?” Rudi squeaked, and he glanced over his shoulder and up the stairs.

“Did you miss the whole storm, child? By the saints, you’re a sound sleeper.”

“Oh, that,” Rudi said weakly, and he recalled how he hadn’t heard her usual snoring. He wondered how much of the night’s activity she might have heard or seen for herself. He stirred the
embers in the hearth until a small tongue of flame awoke.

“Truthfully, Oma, I did not sleep well either,” confided Rudi, though he hadn’t planned on saying it. But it seemed that Oma … knew things. He decided to venture a conversation. “Have you ever gotten a tune stuck in your head?”

Oma nodded, which started her chair to rocking. “It happens every time I hear little girls skipping rope in the lane,” she said. “It’s a sprightly melody they sing, but after a few minutes I’m ready to scrape a spoon across slate just to chase it out of my head.” She rocked, and joints creaked. Rudi wondered if the creaking joints belonged to the chair or to Oma. Perhaps to both.