"Ah, Hansel," cried the witch. She clicked her fingers, and Hansel walked over to them like a zombie, his fingers still twitching from the game.
"I have a particular plan for Hansel," crooned the witch. "Hansel with the beautiful, beautiful blue eyes."
She tilted Hansel"s head back so his eyes caught the light, glimmering blue. Then she took off her sungla.s.ses, and Gretel saw that the witch"s own eyes were shriveled like raisins and thick with fat white lines like webs.
"Hansel"s eyes go to a very special customer," whispered the witch. "And the rest of him? That depends on Gretel. If she"s a good apprentice, the boy shall live. Better blind than dead, don"t you think?" She snapped out her arm on the last word and grabbed Gretel, stopping her movement toward the door.
"You can"t go without my leave, Gretel," said the witch. "Not when there"s so much still for you to see. Ah, to see again, all crisp and clean, with eyes so blue and bright. Lazarus!"
An animal padded out from the rear of the shop and came up to the witch"s hand. It was a cat, of sorts. It stood almost to the witch"s waist, and it was multicoloured, and terribly scarred, lines of bare skin running between patches of different-coloured fur like a horrible jigsaw. Even its ears were different colours, and its tail seemed to be made of seven quite distinct rings of fur. Gretel felt sick as she realised it was a patchwork beast, sewn together from many different cats and given life by the witch"s magic.
Then Gretel noticed that whenever the witch turned her head, so did Lazarus. If she looked up, the cat looked up. If she turned her head left, it turned left. Clearly, the witch saw the world through the cat"s eyes.
With the cat at her side, the witch pushed Gretel ahead of her and whistled for Hansel to follow. They went through the back of the shop, then down a long stairway, deep into the earth. At the bottom, the witch unlocked the door with a key of polished bone.
Beyond the door was a huge cave, ill lit by seven soot-darkened lanterns. One side of the cave was lined with empty cages, each just big enough to house a standing child.
There was also an industrial cold room-a shed-size refrigerator that had a row of toothy icicles hanging from the gutters of its sloping roof-that dominated the other side of the cave. Next to the cold room was a slab of marble that served as a table. Behind it, hanging from hooks in the damp stone of the cave wall, were a dozen knives and cruel-looking instruments of steel.
"Into the cage, young Hansel," commanded the witch, and Hansel did as he was told, without a word. The patchwork cat slunk after him and shot the bolt home with a slap of its paw.
"Now, Gretel," said the witch. "Will you become a witch or be broken into bits?"
Gretel looked at Hansel in his cage, and then at the marble slab and the knives. There seemed to be no choice. At least if she chose the path of witchery, Hansel would only . . . only . . . lose his eyes. And perhaps they would get a chance to escape. "I will learn to be a witch," she said finally. "If you promise to take no more of Hansel than his eyes."
The witch laughed and took Gretel"s hands in a bony grip, ignoring the girl"s shudder. Then she started to dance, swinging Gretel around and around, with Lazarus leaping and screeching between them.
As she danced, the witch sang: "Gretel"s chosen the witch"s way, And Hansel will be the one to pay. Sister sees more and brother, less- Hansel and Gretel, what a mess!"
Then she suddenly stopped and let go. Gretel spun across the cave and crashed into the door of one of the cages.
"You"ll live down here," said the witch. "There"s food in the cold room, and a bathroom in the last cage. I will instruct you on your duties each morning. If you try to escape, you will be punished."
Gretel nodded, but she couldn"t help looking across at the knives sparkling on the wall. The witch and Lazarus looked, too, and the witch laughed again. "No steel can cut me, or rod mark my back," she said. "But if you wish to test that, it is Hansel I will punish."
Then the witch left, with Lazarus padding alongside her.
Gretel immediately went to Hansel, but he was still in the grip of the PlayStation spell, eyes and fingers locked in some phantom game.
Next she tried the door, but sparks flew up and burned her when she stuck a knife in the lock. The door to the cold room opened easily enough, though, frosted air and bright fluorescent light spilling out. It was much colder inside than a normal refrigerator. One side of the room was stacked high with chiller boxes, each labeled with a red cross and a bright sticker that said URGENT: HUMAN TRANSPLANT. Gretel tried not to look at them, or think about what they contained. The other side was stacked with all kinds of frozen food. Gretel took some spinach. She hated it, but spinach was the most opposite food to meat she could imagine. She didn"t even want to think about eating meat.
The next day marked the first of many in the cave. The witch gave Gretel ch.o.r.es to do, mostly cleaning or packing up boxes from the cold room in special messenger bags the witch brought down. Then the witch would teach Gretel magic, such as the spell that would keep herself and Hansel warm.
Always, Gretel lived with the fear that the witch would choose that day to bring down another child to be cut up on the marble slab, or to take Hansel"s eyes. But the witch always came alone, and merely looked at Hansel through Lazarus"s eyes and muttered, "Not ready."
So Gretel worked and learned, fed Hansel and whispered to him. She constantly told him not to get better, to pretend that he was still under the spell. Either Hansel listened and pretended, even to her, or he really was still entranced.
Days went by, then weeks, and Gretel realised that she enjoyed learning magic too much. She looked forward to her lessons, and sometimes she would forget about Hansel for hours, forget that he would soon lose his eyes.
When she realised that she might forget Hansel altogether, Gretel decided that she had to kill the witch. She told Hansel that night, whispering her fears to him and trying to think of a plan. But nothing came to her, for now Gretel had learned enough to know the witch really couldn"t be cut by metal or struck down by a blow.
The next morning, Hansel spoke in his sleep while the witch was in the cave. Gretel cried out from where she was scrubbing the floor, to try and cover it up, but it was too late. The witch came over and glared through the bars.
"So you"ve been shamming," she said. "But now I shall take your left eye, for the spell to graft it to my own socket must be fueled by your fear. And your sister will help me."
"No, I won"t!" cried Gretel. But the witch just laughed and blew on Gretel"s chest. The breath sank into her heart, and the ember of witchcraft that was there blazed up and grew, spreading through her body. Higher and higher it rose, till Gretel grew small inside her own head and could feel herself move around only at the witch"s whim.
Then the witch took Hansel from the cage and bound him with red rope. She laid him on the marble slab, and Lazarus jumped up so she could see. Gretel brought her herbs, and the wand of ivory, the wand of jet, and the wand of horn. Finally, the witch chanted her spell. Gretel"s mind went away completely then. When she came back to herself, Hansel was in his cage, one eye bandaged with a thick pad of cobwebs. He looked at Gretel through his other, tear-filled eye.
"She"s going to take the other one tomorrow," he whispered.
"No," said Gretel, sobbing. "No."
"I know it isn"t really you helping her," said Hansel. "But what can you do?"
"I don"t know," said Gretel. "We have to kill her-but she"ll punish you if we try and we fail." "I wish it was a dream," said Hansel. "Dreams end, and you wake up. But I"m not asleep, am I? It"s too cold, and my eye . . . it hurts."
Gretel opened the cage to hug him and cast the spell that would warm them. But she was thinking about cold-and the witch. "If we could trap the witch and Lazarus in the cold room somehow, they might freeze to death," she said slowly. "But we"d have to make it much colder, so she wouldn"t have time to cast a spell."
They went to look at the cold room and found that it was set as cold as it would go. But Hansel found a barrel of liquid nitrogen at the back, and that gave him an idea.
An hour later, they"d rigged their instant witch-freezing trap. Using one of the knives, Hansel unscrewed the inside handle of the door so there was no way to get out. Then they balanced the barrel on top of a pile of boxes, just past the door. Finally, they poured water everywhere to completely ice up the floor.
Then they took turns sleeping, till Gretel heard the click of the witch"s key in the door. She sprang up and went to the cold room. Leaving the door ajar, she carefully stood on the ice and took the lid off the liquid nitrogen. Then she stepped back outside, pinching her nose and gasping. "Something"s wrong, Mistress!" she exclaimed. "Everything"s gone rotten."
"What!" cried the witch, dashing across the cave, her one blue eye glittering. Lazarus ran at her heels from habit, though she no longer needed his sight.
Gretel stood aside as she ran past, then gave her a hefty push. The witch skidded on the ice, crashed into the boxes, and fell flat on her back just as the barrel toppled over. An instant later, her final scream was smothered in a cloud of freezing vapor.
But Lazarus, quicker than any normal cat, did a backflip in midair, even as Gretel slammed the door. Ancient st.i.tches gave way, and the cat started coming apart, accompanied by an explosion of the magical silver dust that filled it and gave it life.
Gretel relaxed for an instant as the dust obscured the beast, then screamed as the front part of Lazarus jumped out at her, teeth snapping. She kicked at it, but the cat was too swift, its great jaws meeting around her ankle. Gretel screamed again, and then Hansel was there, shaking the strange dust out of the broken body as if he were emptying a vacuum cleaner. In a few seconds there was nothing left of Lazarus but its head and an empty skin. Even then it wouldn"t let go, till Hansel forced its mouth open with a broomstick and pushed the snarling remnant across the floor and into one of the cages.
Gretel hopped across and watched it biting the bars, its green eyes still filled with magical life and hatred. "Hansel," she said, "your own eye is frozen with the witch. But I think I can remember the spell-and there is an eye for the taking here."
So it was that when they entered the cold room later to take the key of bone from the frozen, twisted body of the witch, Hansel saw the world through one eye of blue and one of green.
Later, when they found their way home, it was the sight of that green eye that gave the Hagmom a heart attack and made her die. But their father was still a weak man, and within a year he thought to marry another woman who had no love for his children. Only this time the new Hagmom faced a Gretel who was more than half a witch, and a Hansel who had gained strange powers from his magic cat"s eye.
But that is all another story . . .
HOPE CHEST.
INTRODUCTION TO HOPE CHEST.
I LOVE WESTERN FILMS . ALWAYS HAVE , and I daresay always will. Strangely, I don"t much care for Western fiction in print, with some notable exceptions, like Larry McMurtry"s Lonesome Dove Lonesome Dove. But I love the films and regularly watch old favourites and try to catch up with the ones I"ve somehow missed along the way.
As I said in my original note that accompanied this story when it was first published in Firebirds Firebirds (edited by Sharyn November), the origins of "Hope Chest" lie in watching too many Westerns, and I quoted some favourites, such as (edited by Sharyn November), the origins of "Hope Chest" lie in watching too many Westerns, and I quoted some favourites, such as Winchester "73 Winchester "73; Red River Red River; The Good The Good, the Bad and the Ugly the Bad and the Ugly; and They Call Me Trinity They Call Me Trinity. As I have a little more s.p.a.ce here, to that list I would add The Wild Bunch The Wild Bunch, The Far Country The Far Country, and the miniseries Lonesome Dove Lonesome Dove.
Of course, I couldn"t write a straightforward Western. I find it very difficult to write a story of any kind without introducing elements of fantasy or science fiction. I seem to have a natural tendency to divert from the straight and narrow of realism. Even writing a Western, as here, I found myself setting it in a kind of alternate United States, with a supernatural Hitler a.n.a.logue, inherited magical powers, and parallel worlds. In retrospect, the latter half of the story is more Peckinpah than Hawks or Ford, but I do admire the work of all three in Westerns (and elsewhere).
HOPE CHEST.
ONE DUSTY, SLOW MORNING IN THE summer of 1922, a pa.s.senger was left crying on the platform when the milk train pulled out of Denilburg after its five-minute stop. No one noticed at first, what with the whistle from the train and the billowing steam and smoke and the labouring of the steel wheels upon the rails. The milk carter was busy with the cans, the stationmaster with the mail. No one else was about, not when the full dawn was still half a cup of coffee away. summer of 1922, a pa.s.senger was left crying on the platform when the milk train pulled out of Denilburg after its five-minute stop. No one noticed at first, what with the whistle from the train and the billowing steam and smoke and the labouring of the steel wheels upon the rails. The milk carter was busy with the cans, the stationmaster with the mail. No one else was about, not when the full dawn was still half a cup of coffee away.
When the train had rounded the corner, taking its noise with it, the crying could be clearly heard. Milk carter and stationmaster both looked up from their work and saw the source of the sound.
A baby, tightly swaddled in a pink blanket, was precariously balanced on a large steamer trunk at the very edge of the platform. With every cry and wriggle the baby was moving closer to the side of the trunk. If she fell, she"d fall not only from the trunk but from the platform, down to the rails four feet below.
The carter jumped over his cans, knocking two down, his heels splashing in the spilled milk. The stationmaster dropped his sack, letters and packets cascading out to meet the milk. They each got a hand under the baby at the very second it rolled off the trunk. Both men went over the edge of the platform, and they trod on each other"s feet as they landed, hard and painful-but upright. The baby was perfectly balanced between them.
That"s how Alice May Susan Hopkins came to Denilburg, and that"s how she got two unrelated uncles with the very same first name, Uncle Bill Carey, the stationmaster, and Uncle Bill Hoogener, the milk carter.
The first thing the two Bills noticed when they caught the baby was a note pinned to the pink blanket. It was on fine ivory paper, the words in blue-black ink that caught the sun and glinted when you held it just so. It said: "Alice May Susan, born on the Summer Solstice, 1921. Look after her and she"ll look after you."
It didn"t take long for the news of Alice May Susan"s arrival to get around the town, and it wasn"t more than fifteen minutes later that fifty percent of the town"s grown women were all down at the station, the thirty-eight of them cl.u.s.tering around that poor baby enough to suffocate her. Fortunately it was only a few minutes more till Eulalie Falkirk took charge, as she always did, and established a roster for hugging and kissing and gawking and fussing and worrying and gossiping over the child.
Over the next few months that roster changed to include actually looking after little Alice May Susan. She was handed from one married woman to the next, changing her surname from month to month as she went from family to family. She was a dear little girl, everyone said, and Eulalie Falkirk was hard put to decide who should adopt the child. Her final decision came down to one simple thing. While all the womenfolk had been busy with the baby, most of the menfolk had been taking turns trying to open up that steamer trunk.
The trunk looked easy enough. It was about six feet long, three feet wide, and two feet high. It had two leather straps around it and an old bra.s.s lock, the kind with a keyhole big enough to put your whole finger in. Only no one did after Torrance Yib put his in and it came back with the tip missing, cut off clean as you please right at the joint.
The straps wouldn"t come undone either, and whatever they were, it wasn"t any leather anyone in Denilburg had ever seen. It wouldn"t cut and it wouldn"t tear, and those straps drove everyone who tried them mad with frustration.
There was some talk of devilment and foreign magic, till Bill Carey-who knew more about luggage than the rest of the town put together- pointed out the bra.s.s plate on the underside that read "Made in the U.S.A. Imp. Pat. Pend. Burglarproof trunk." Then everyone was proud and said it was scientific progress and what a pity it was that the name of the company had been scratched off, for it"d get some good business in Denilburg if only they knew where to send their orders.
The only man in the whole town who hadn"t tried to open the trunk was Jake Hopkins, the druggist, so when Stella Hopkins said they"d like to take baby Alice May Susan on, Eulalie Falkirk knew it wasn"t because they wanted whatever was in the trunk.
So Alice May Susan joined the Hopkins household and grew up with Jake and Stella"s born daughters, Janice, Jessie, and Jane, who at the time were ten, eight, and four. The steamer trunk was put in the attic, and Alice May Susan, to all intents and purposes, became another Hopkins girl. No one out of the ordinary, just a typical Denilburg girl, the events of her life pretty much interchangeable with the sisters who had gone before her.
Until the year she turned sixteen, in 1937.
Of her three sisters, only Jane was at home that birthday, enjoying a vacation. Janice and Jessie had married up and left, both of them now living more than twenty miles away. Jane was different. She"d won a scholarship that had taken her off to college back east, where she"d got all sorts of ideas. One of them involved criticising everything Alice May Susan did or said, and counting the days till she could get on the train out of town and back to what she called "civilisation".
"You"d better study harder so you have a chance to get away from this place," said Jane as they sat on the porch eating birthday cake and watching the world go by. None of it had gone by yet, unless you counted the Prowells" cat.
"I like it here," said Alice May. "Why would I want to leave?"
"Because there"s nothing here!" protested Jane. "Nothing! No life, no colour, no . . . events! Nothing ever happens. Everyone just gets married and has children, and it starts all over again. There"s no romance in anything or anyone!"
"Not everyone gets married," replied Alice May after a short pause to swallow a too-large bite of cake.
"Gwennifer Korben, you mean," said Jane. "She"s a schoolmistress. Everyone knows they"re always spinsters. You don"t want to be a schoolmistress."
"Maybe I do," answered Alice May. She spun her cake fork into a silver blur and s.n.a.t.c.hed it handle first out of the air.
"Do you really?" asked Jane, momentarily shocked. "A schoolmistress!"
Alice May frowned and threw the cake fork into the wall. It stuck, quivering, next to the tiny holes in the wood that showed several years of practice in the gentle art of cake-fork throwing.
"I don"t know," she said. "I do feel . . . I do feel that I want to be something. I just don"t know what it is."
"Study," said Jane firmly. "Work hard. Go to college. Education is the only way for a woman to have her own life."
Alice May nodded, to avoid further discussion. It was her birthday, and she felt hot and bothered rather than happy. The cake was delicious, and they"d had a very pleasant lunch with her family and some friends from school. But her birthday somehow felt unfinished and incomplete. There was something that she had to do, but she didn"t know what it was. Something more immediate than deciding her future life.
It didn"t take more than two hours in the rocking chair on the porch to work out what it was she needed to do, and wait for the right moment to do it.
The steamer trunk. It had been a long time since she"d even looked at it. Over the years she"d tried it many times, alone and in company. There had been times when she"d gone up to the attic every day to test if by some chance it had come undone. There"d been times when she"d forgotten about it for months. But no matter what, she always found herself making an attempt to open it on her birthday.
Even when she forgot about opening it, the trunk"s brooding presence stayed with her. It was a reminder that she was not exactly like the other Hopkins girls. Sometimes that was pleasant, but more often not, particularly as she had got older.
Alice May sighed and decided to give it yet another try. It was evening by then, and somewhat cooler. She picked up her lantern, trimmed the wick down a little, and went inside.
"Trunk?" asked her foster father, Jake, as she went through the kitchen. He was preserving lemons, the careful practice of his drugstore carried over to the culinary arts. No one else in Denilburg preserved lemons, or would know what to do with them once they were preserved.
"Trunk?" asked Stella, who was sewing in the drawing room.
"Trunk?" asked Jane on the stairs, as Alice May pa.s.sed her. "Trunk?"
"Of course the trunk!" snapped Alice May. She pulled down the attic ladder angrily and climbed up. It was a very clean attic, in a very clean house. There was only the trunk in it, up against the small window that was letting in the last of the hot summer sun. A red glow shone on the bra.s.s lock and the l.u.s.trous leather straps.
Alice May was still angry. She set the lantern down, grabbed a strap, and pulled. When it came loose, she fell over backward and hit her head on the floor. The sound it made echoed through the house. There was a noticeable pause, then three voices carried up in chorus.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes!" shouted Alice May, angrier still. She wrenched at the other strap and it came loose too, though this time she was ready for it. At the same time, the bra.s.s lock went click click. It wasn"t the sort of click that was so soft, you could think you might have imagined it. This was a slow, drawn-out click, as if mighty metal gears were slowly turning over.
The lid of the trunk eased up half an inch.
Alice May whispered, "It"s open."
She reached forward and lifted the lid a little farther. It moved easily, the hinges free, as if they"d just been oiled.
"It"s open!" screeched Alice May. "The trunk is open!"
The sound of a mad scramble below a.s.sured her that everyone had heard her this time. Before they could get there, Alice May pushed the lid completely back. Her brow furrowed as she looked at what lay within. All her life she had been waiting to open this trunk, both dreading and hoping that she would find some clue to the mystery of her birth and arrival in Denilburg. Papers, letters, perhaps a family Bible.
Nothing of that kind was obvious. Instead, clipped into the back wall of the trunk there was a lever-action rifle, an old one, with a deeply polished stock of dark wood and an octagonal barrel of dark-blue steel chased with silver flowers.
Underneath it were two holstered revolvers. Big weapons, their barrels were also engraved in silver with the flower motif, which was repeated on the holsters, though not in silver but black thread, somber on the leather. A belt with bullet loops was folded up and pinned between the holsters. More dark leather, more flowers in black thread.
On the left side of the trunk there was a teak box with the word "ammunition" burned into the lid in slim pokerwork.