The Third Bear (4 page)

He tried to keep the vision of the terrible winter in his head as he walked, because concentrating on that more distant fear removed the current fear.

"If not for me, the Third Bear might not be here," Horley had said to Rebecca before he left. It was Horley who had stopped them from burning the witch, had insisted only on exile.

"That's nonsense," Rebecca had replied. "Remember that she's just an old woman, living in the woods. Remember that she can do you no real harm."

It had been as if she'd read his thoughts. But now, breathing in the thick air of the forest, Horley felt less sure about the witch woman. It was true there had been sickness in the village until they had cast her out.

Horley tried to focus on the spring of loam beneath his boots, the clean, dark smell of bark and earth and air. After a time, he crossed a dirt-choked stream. As if this served as a dividing line, the forest became yet darker. The sounds of wrens and finches died away. Above, he could see the distant dark shapes of hawks in the treetops, and patches of light shining down that almost looked more like bog or marsh water, so disoriented had he become.

It was in this deep forest that he found a door.

Horley had stopped to catch his breath after cresting a slight incline. Hands on his thighs, he looked up and there it stood: a door. In the middle of the forest. It was made of old oak and overgrown with moss and mushrooms, and yet it seemed to flicker like glass. A kind of light or brightness hurtled through the ground, through the dead leaves and worms and beetles, around the door. It was a subtle thing, and Horley half-thought he was imagining it at first.

He straightened up, grip tightening on his spear.

The door stood by itself. Nothing human-made surrounded it, not even the slightest ruin of a wall.

Horley walked closer. The knob was made of brass or some other yellowing metal. He walked around the door. It stood firmly wedged into the ground. The back of the door was the same as the front.

Horley knew that if this was the entrance to the old woman's home, then she was indeed a witch. His hand remained steady, but his heart quickened and he thought furiously of winter, of icicles and bitter cold and snow falling slowly forever.

For several minutes, he circled the door, deciding what to do. For a minute more, he stood in front of the door, pondering.

A door always needs opening, he thought, finally.

He grasped the knob, and pushed - and the door opened.

Some events have their own sense of time, and a separate logic. Horley knew this just from the change of seasons every year. He knew this from the growing of the crops and the birthing of children. He knew it from the forest itself, and the cycles it went through that often seemed incomprehensible and yet had their own pattern, if you could only see it. From the first thawed trickle of stream water in the spring to the last hopping frog in the fall, the world held a thousand mysteries. No man could hope to know the truth of them all.

When the door opened and he stood in a room very much like the room one might find in a woodman's cottage, with a fireplace and a rug and a shelf and pots and pans on the wood walls, and a rocking chair - when this happened, Horley decided in the time it took him to blink twice that he had no need for the why of it or the how of it, even. And this was, he realized later, the only reason he kept his wits about him.

The witch woman sat in the rocking chair. She looked older than Horley remembered, even though no more than a year had passed since he had last seen her. Seeming made of ash and soot, her black dress lay flat against her sagging skin. She was blind, eye sockets bare, but her wrinkled face strained to look at him any way.

There was a buzzing sound.

"I remember you," she said. Her voice was croak and whisper both.

Her arms were mottled with age spots, her hands so thin and cruellooking that they could have been talons. She gripped the rocking chair as if holding onto the world.

There was a buzzing sound. It came, Horley finally realized, from a halo of black hornets that circled the old woman's head, their wings beating so fast they could hardly be seen.

"Are you Hasghat, who used to live in Grommin?" Horley asked.

"I remember you," the witch woman said again.

"I am the elder of the village of Grommin."

The woman spat to the side. "Those that threw poor Hasghat out."

"They would have done much worse if I'd let them."

"They'd have burned me if they could. And all I knew then were a few charms, a few herbs. Just because I wasn't one of them. Just because I'd seen a bit of the world."

Hasghat was staring right at him and Horley knew that, eyes or no eyes, she could see him.

"It was wrong," Horley said.

"It was wrong," she said. "I had nothing to do with the sickness. Sickness comes from animals, from people's clothes. It clings to them and spreads through them."

"And yet you are a witch?"

Hasghat laughed, although it ended with coughing. "Because I have a hidden room? Because my door stands by itself?"

Horley grew impatient.

"Would you help us if you could? Would you help us if we let you return to the village?"

Hasghat straightened up in the chair and the halo of hornets disintegrated, then reformed. The wood in the fireplace popped and crackled. Horley felt a chill in the air.

"Help you? Return to the village?" She spoke as if chewing, her tongue a thick gray grub.

"A creature is attacking and killing us."

Hasghat laughed. When she laughed, Horley could see a strange double image in her face, a younger woman beneath the older.

"Is that so? What kind of creature?"

"We call it the Third Bear. I do not believe it is really a bear."

Hasghat doubled over in mirth. "Not really a bear? A bear that is not a bear?"

"We cannot seem to kill it. We thought that you might know how to defeat it."

"It stays to the forest," the witch woman said. "It stays to the forest and it is a bear but not a bear. It kills your people when they use the forest paths. It kills your people in the farms. It even sneaks into your graveyards and takes the heads of your dead. You are full of fear and panic. You cannot kill it, but it keeps murdering you in the most terrible of ways."

And that was winter, coming from her dry, stained lips.

"Do you know of it then?" Horley asked, his heart fast now from hope not fear.

"Ah yes, I know it," Hasghat said, nodding. "I know the Third Bear, Theeber, Seether. After all I brought it here."

The spear moved in Horley's hand and it would have driven itself deep into the woman's chest if Horley had let it.

"For revenge?" Horley asked.

Hasghat nodded. "Unfair. It was unfair. You should not have done it."

You're right, Horley thought. I should have let them burn you.

"You're right," Horley said. "We should not have done it. But we have learned our lesson."

"I was once a woman of knowledge and learning," Hasghat said. "Once I had a real cottage in a village. Now I am old and the forest is cold and uncomfortable. All of this is illusion." She gestured at the fireplace, at the walls of the cottage. "There is no cottage. No fireplace. No rocking chair. Right now, we are both dreaming among the worms and the beetles and the dirt. My back is sore and patterned by leaves. This is no place for someone as old as me."

"I'm sorry," Horley said. "You can come back to the village. You can live among us. We'll pay for your food. We'll give you a house to live in."

Hasghat frowned. "And some logs, I'll warrant. Some logs and some rope and some fire to go with it, too!"

Horley took off his helmet, stared into Hasghat's eye sockets. "I'll promise you whatever you want. No harm will come to you. If you'll help us. A man has to realize when he's beaten, when he's done wrong. You can have whatever you want. On my honor."

Hasghat brushed at the hornets ringing her head. "Nothing is that easy."

"Isn't it?"

"I brought it from a place far distant. In my anger. I sat in the middle of the forest despairing and I called for it from across the miles, across the years. I never expected it would come to me."

"So you can send it back?"

Hasghat frowned, spat again, and shook her head. "No. I hardly remember how I called it. And some day it may even be my head it takes. Sometimes it is easier to summon something than to send it away."

"You cannot help us at all?"

"If I could, I might, but calling it weakened me. It is all I can do to survive. I dig for toads and eat them raw. I wander the woods searching for mushrooms. I talk to the deer and I talk to the squirrels. Sometimes the birds tell me things about where they've been. Someday I will die out here. All by myself. Completely mad."

Horley's frustration heightened. He could feel the calm he had managed to keep leaving him. The spear twitched and jerked in his hands. What if he killed her? Might that send the Third Bear back where it had come from?

"What can you tell me about the Third Bear? Can you tell me anything that might help me?"

Hasghat shrugged. "It acts as to its nature. And it is far from home, so it clings to ritual even more. Where it is from, it is no more or less bloodthirsty than any other creature. There they call it `Mord.' But this far from home, it appears more horrible than it is. It is merely making a pattern. When the pattern is finished, it will leave and go someplace else. Maybe the pattern will even help send it home."

"A pattern of heads."

"Yes. A pattern with heads."

"Do you know when it will be finished?"

"No."

"Do you know where it lives?"

"Yes. It lives here."

In his mind, he saw a hill. He saw a cave. He saw the Third Bear.

"Do you know anything else?"

"No."

Hasghat grinned up at him.

He drove the spear through her dry chest.

There was a sound like twigs breaking.

Horley woke covered in leaves, in the dirt, his body curled up next to the old woman. He jumped to his feet, picking up his spear. The old woman, dressed in a black dress and dirty shawl, was dreaming and mumbling in her sleep. Dead hornets had become entangled in her stringy hair. She clutched a dead toad in her left hand. A smell came from her, of rot, of shit.

There was no sign of the door. The forest was silent and dark.

Horley almost drove the spear into her chest again, but she was tiny, like a bird, and defenseless, and staring down at her he could not do it.

He looked around at the trees, at the fading light. It was time to accept that there was no reason to it, no why. It was time to get out, one way or another.

"A pattern of heads," he muttered to himself all the way home. "A pattern of heads."

Horley did not remember much about the meeting with the villagers upon his return. They wanted to hear about a powerful witch who could help or curse them, some force greater than themselves. Some glint of hope through the trees, a light in the dark. He could not give it to them. He gave them the truth instead, as much as he dared, but when they asked questions he could not stand the truth, either, and hinted that the witch had told him how to defeat the Third Bear.