by Jack Dann
Hansel didn’t answer. He tucked the bone behind his ear; his long hair covered it. ‘I might stab her in the eye with this,’ he said. He seemed very young, a little boy, playing a game of superheroes.
My hand stole between the bars, and he took it. I noticed he held it very tightly. We said nothing for a long time.
IV.
‘Almost the dinner hour,’ said the witch. ‘I need to heat the stove. How much fat is on you, boy? If I roast you too hot, you’ll get tough. I do despise chewy children.’
I shuffled out of the way and watched as the witch reached blindly for Hansel. The bars sang, but she didn’t mind. Quickly, Hansel pulled the rat bone from behind his ear and thrust it out towards her. Her fingers caught it.
‘My!’ she said. ‘You are very thin.’
‘I’m only a boy,’ he said in a little voice. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same moment.
‘Hmph.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Hmph. I have the stove far too hot. I’ll have to adjust it. You looked so succulent when you first arrived.’
She turned to me, fixed her pale gaze just above my eyebrows. A smile formed, a very unpleasant smile.
‘Gretel, perhaps you can help me.’
I scrambled to my feet. She grabbed my hand and hauled me behind her. ‘I can’t see the controls on the stove properly since your brother busted my spectacles.’ She thrust me in front of a large dial on the side of the stove. ‘What does that say?’
‘H for hot,’ I replied.
‘Put it on M for medium.’
I would like to say that I saved my brother then, that I had the forethought to turn the stove off all together. But while my mind tried to process the impulse, the witch guessed my hesitation and whistled for two rats, who came to supervise. I turned the dial to M. Medium. Hansel would be roasted at a medium heat, and there was nothing I could do.
The witch opened the stove door. A wall of heat blasted out, making me stagger back. The long cylinder inside was deep enough for a tall boy like Hansel to lie, curled in a foetal position. It was lined with coals that glowed orange. She handed me a poker. ‘Rake those coals so they lie even,’ she said. ‘I want him roasted nicely all over.’
I reached in as far as I could. My arm grew hot. I raked the coals.
‘Get right into the back.’
‘But —’
‘Climb up on the lip of the stove. Do as I say! I’ll cut him to pieces!’
I climbed onto the lip of the stove. My hand burned against the soot-streaked enamel. I reached as far as I could. My shoulder was pushed up against the opening to the stove. I turned my head away, trying to keep my face from roasting. I saw her piles and piles of gold coins on the bench next to the stove. And I had an idea.
My heart thudded, because I doubted myself. But necessity made me bold. I crouched, pretending to peer into the stove. ‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘What’s what?’ she asked, myopic gaze seeking me out.
‘Is that a gold coin at the back of the stove?’
She jumped. ‘What? Is it melting?’
I stepped down, adopted a casual tone. ‘Oh, it wasn’t a coin at all.’
‘A coin? Melting in there?’
‘No, no. Nothing at all. Nothing. Here, let me keep raking the coals.’
‘You’re just saying that, now. There’s a coin in there. You are going to rake it up and keep it.’
‘No, it was a trick of the light.’
‘Rats!’ she exclaimed, and immediately three of them were at her feet. ‘One of you climb up and tell me if you see a gold coin in the back of the stove.’
The first climbed up. ‘Nothing, witch,’ it said.
‘I don’t believe you. You want it for yourself.’
The second climbed up. ‘Nothing, witch,’ it said.
‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, pulling at her hair. ‘I can’t trust you. There’s gold melting in there!’
The third climbed up. ‘Really, witch. There is nothing there.’
She kicked the rat out of the way, doubt possessing her, ravens in her brain. ‘I’ll look for myself.’ She pulled out a big pair of oven mitts and leaned into the mouth of the stove, muttering, frantic.
I kicked her. I kicked her so hard that I tore the muscle in my right thigh. Her upper body slammed onto the coals. Rats began to bite my feet. I pushed the stove door, but her bottom was in the way. She was screaming. I lifted her legs and cracked them between the door and the stove. Something broke. I folded her in, slammed the door shut and dropped the latch.
Then I went to the dial and turned it up to VH. Very hot.
Hansel had heard the screaming, and was shouting at me to come. I limped out, my blood still thundering.
‘What happened?’ he said.
‘She’s in the stove,’ I said, panting, shaking the bars of his cage. The cage began to sing, but this time the music was out of tune, warped and dripping. The bars began to dissolve in my hands, turning to sticky sugary syrup. Hansel leapt free and embraced me. The rats were in chaos. Some were shouting that they had been liberated, while others tried to trip us and bite us.
Hansel linked his arm through mine and we turned to the witch’s cash register. We filled our pockets with gold coins, then ran out of the shop and stopped at the mirror. Already, four rats, gold coins clenched between their teeth, were trying to bash their way through. Again and again they struck themselves against the unforgiving glass, until they were battered and bleeding.
I put out my hand. The mirror was cool. It did not bend, it did not melt, and it certainly did not let me through.
Hansel hammered his shoulder against it, grunting. Sweat formed on his brow. In the mirror, I saw the white bird sitting on the exposed brickwork of the half-demolished building to our left. I looked behind me. In reality, it wasn’t there.
‘How do we get in?’ I called to the bird in the mirror.
It didn’t answer. I watched as Hansel knocked himself against the mirror, as the rats began to drop, one by one, in bloody mangled heaps.
And I knew.
We all go empty-handed into the unknown.
‘Hansel, turn out your pockets,’ I said. I reached into my own pockets, dropping coins on the ground as if they were as inconsequential as dust-balls. ‘But the money,’ he moaned. ‘I’ve never seen so much of it.’
I was too young to articulate my conviction: that wealth could be measured without coins, that youth and health and love — oh, god, love — were blessings not to be squandered. All I could say was, ‘I know this will work.’
Hansel stopped. He turned his pockets inside out. A clattering, ringing shower. Gold coins in shining, seductive clusters at our feet along with the dull rusted ones our father had given us. We faced each other. He leaned down, kissed me hard. He tasted like candy and fear. I took his hand, and we walked forward.
Softly. Into the forest.
AFTERWORD
It only struck me recently that the scariest thing about Hansel and Gretel isn’t the witch, but the idea that your parents might abandon you in the woods. It got me thinking about generational conflict and what forms it takes, about cashed-up boomers so freaked out about their own immediate security that they’re eating the future: selective blindness to environmental damage, ridiculous wars that need never be fought, pricing young slackers like me out of the housing market. So, I thought the story of Hansel and Gretel might be an interesting way to express some of these ideas.
— Kim Wilkins
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ROBOTS & ZOMBIES, INC.
LUCY SUSSEX
LUCY SUSSEX was born in New Zealand. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia, with interests ranging from genre fiction to Australian Studies and Victoriano. Her work includes both creative writing and the scholarly. She has produced editions of the pioneering women crime writer Mary Fortune — The Detectives’ Album and The Fortunes of Mary Fortune — as well as Ellen Davitt’s 1865 Force and
Fraud, the first Australian murder mystery novel. In addition she has compiled three anthologies for younger readers: The Patternmaker, The Lottery, and Shadow Alley. She’s Fantastical, an anthology of Australian women’s non-realist fiction edited by Lucy Sussex and Judith Raphael Buckrich, was shortlisted for the 2005 World Fantasy Award.
Her award-winning fiction includes four books for younger readers: The Penguin Friend, Deersnake, Black Ice and The Revognase. One adult novel, The Scarlet Rider, won the Ditmar Award and was shortlisted for the Kelly Award. She has written three short story collections: My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, and Absolute Uncertainty. Currently she reviews weekly for The Age and West Australian newspapers. She is also completing a book on early women and crime fiction.
Here she writes about the KGB, George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Ollie North, rendition, the obligatory robots and zombies… and did I mention giant lizards?
Editors’ Note. The following was transcribed from a tape, clearly record of interview, mailed from a fictitious address in Uzbekistan (we checked) to the Oakland PO Box of ConspiracyTheory.com. The quality of the tape is poor, with obvious miking problems at the time of recording. The interviewee is audible, but his interviewers little more than mumble, even with digital enhancement. Such would suggest an amateur recording, rather than that of an experienced journalist or police professional. But we see no reason to doubt its authenticity.
My name? Well, there’s two of them. George Washington Reynolds, also Donald McIvor Smith, depending which passport I was using. Such happens when you get split.
Same birthdate for both: 11/01/51. Fake, of course.
Ditto the birthplaces. Reynolds was Nutley, NJ. Smith, some godforsaken Scottish New Town.
We had each other, a necessary narcissism. And for back story, Reynolds had a wife, two kids, and a rottweiler, somewhere out beyond Langley, VI. Smith was less complicated — or so I thought. Gay. Kept gerbils. That’s unexceptional in the British Secret Service.
The cover was various Spooky actions. It got strange at times. Like when I was acting Liaison Officer between the US & UK secret services, which meant liaising with … myself. No, nobody ever noticed. But just to be on the safe side, after that Smith went bald.
The first time I came to Tashkent was in 1975. An urgent security meeting of Mammelia Corp. My real employers.
Yes, that was also my first murder.
Well, what would you do with jetlag, the latest in concealed weaponry, and a jetlagged hippie earbashing you in the transit lounge about Giant Extraterrestrial Lizards mind-controlling the world’s leaders?
I later found out it was a genuine cult. Shame it was a little too close to the truth.
I blamed the KGB and just forgot about the murder, until now. Look, I had other things to worry about. Like eliminating the Soviets.
They were nearly onto Mammelia, that’s why. After Tashkent we knew we had to get the Subjects into place and pronto.
Subject A had actually been a sleeper for some time. A back-up model, just in case. For a model blown up by the IRA, half our luck.
Yes, Subject A was experimental, and given to transmogrification. I did know about the sudden change of sex. Apparently it happened spontaneously.
Mammelia’s British Office had to go and completely rework the back story. Including the spouse, Denise. She took it rather well, except for the time Smith sang Blondie’s ‘Dénis, Denise’ sotto voce to her during a NATO reception. Burst into tears, and said she’d preferred being a woman, unlike Mai, I mean Mags.
The Office gossip was their sex had gone pear-shaped.
Oh, that was nothing compared with Subject B, Ronald Reagan. He only went and died in the middle of the Presidential election campaign.
Of course Mammelia revived him, nobody had thought to split a copy. What a pro, what a ham, even when dead meat. Knew his lines, well, at first. Projected avuncular warmth whilst stony cold.
No, that was rouge. Without it he looked like death warmed up.
My role as Reynolds was spin doctoring, everything from Chile to Gorby. Then Ollie North showed up.
No, I still don’t know who North was working for. The competition was kinda nebulous at that stage. But I knew big trouble when I saw it.
I requested an immediate transfer. Ended up in the Canada office. Boring as batshit. But safe.
No, Reynolds never was on the team running Reagan. Nobody with any sense did. Of smell — he whiffed of the mortuary.
Yes, that’s why they kept him a safe distance from the White House Press Corps in his later years. He was visibly deteriorating, and not only in memory.
The finger in the soup incident is perfectly true. Luckily it happened in front of the Australian Prime Minister, who was too drunk to notice.
Yes, he actually ate it.
As Smith I was in and out of Downing Street. Hands on. Unlike Reagan, Mags couldn’t act for toffee apples. Completely synthetic.
The word Simulacra was never used by Mammelia. Officially the term was Subject, unofficially, Robot. Only R&D were so crass as actually to say Meatbot.
I heard they spliced in some components from an earlier prototype, a 1950s British Nanny. Without it Mags didn’t know if she was Arthur or Martha. After that she at least crossed her legs when wearing skirts.
Came to terms with it eventually. Said it helped being ex-male, she knew how their minds worked, and they didn’t expect her to think the same way. That’s devious …
The beauty was the Brits got so fazed by a woman in power they couldn’t spot Mags’s total unreality.
Yes, they had the Queen, but she couldn’t act either. Completely robotic, even though natural. Indubitably.
I beg your pardon. Smith had nothing to do with the Diana model. Another experiment — Helen of Troy was the working title. Quite prophetic, as without someone riding shotgun 24/7 she was way-out wayward. I think the Brit branch of Mammelia never quite got things right. They deserved to be liquidated.
No, actually turned into liquid and recycled in the vats. Smith was in Paris by then, cleaning up the Diana mistake. He had the wit to move sideways when Mags managed a second transmogrification. Into a good actor, convincing even, as she fought for her political life.
Didn’t work. After politics Mags went onto the lecture circuit. I heard somebody high up in Mammelia finally got jack of her and pulled the plug. Head first into the lectern, time to retire, girl. At least Reagan had the grace to zombify in a rest home.
Late 1990s. The times were a-changing, I could smell it. Like Reagan’s decomposition.
The order came from Mammelia Central: splice time! I think that’s when things really started going downhill.
Reynolds and Smith met in the Canaries, spent a week in a very exclusive health farm, and I emerged, whole again.
No, it was horrid. Smith had developed a taste for exotic rough trade, and had decided on the ultimate deniability: memory wipe. The sorta thing you see all the time now in politics. He had his done on the cheap, and it showed. Every time I got anywhere near a dodgy memory, I got an instant migraine.
Mammelia put me on light duties. Bloody Canada again.
If I’d known about Smith’s affair with the Jihad mole, I’d never have agreed to a Middle East transfer.
What can I say? I was sitting in a bar in Cairo, and the pest from Tashkent reappeared. Still rattling on about giant lizards thought-controlling the world.
Of course I thought he was a split. In the world I live in, the coincidence was too big to be believed.
So I killed him. How was I to know he was natural — my original victim’s identical twin brother? And vice-prez of the conspiracy theory cult, which now had a worldwide membership. Even in Uzbekistan, I can see.
I blamed the KGB again. Bad idea.
Because things were different. The Soviets had gone, but the Russian Mafia were picking up where they’d left off. Strange alliances were being made, between bedfellows odder than Smith and his gerbils.
> I found myself bound and gagged, on a cargo flight back to Tashkent.
Yes, I know it’s called rendition. But if you tried to torture all my secrets out of me, I’d just disintegrate. I’m made that way.
Does it really satisfy your paranoid fantasies that the world isn’t run by giant telepathic lizards, but much worse? Well?
Since you ask, Mammelia is finished. The competition’s simply too strong. And it’s not just the Bush family franchise. They’re probably finished too.
I can point to anywhere in the world and show you little Mammelias. Outrageous copies, of course. But slowly perfecting the business of Robots & Zombies, Inc.
AFTERWORD
The writer Ben Peek has a story called ‘Johnny Cash’, which uses the format of fifty questions. Ben says he got the idea from J. G. Ballard’s Complete Short Stories, which includes ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’. Ballard used one hundred questions, Ben cut it down, with tighter results. I started playing around with the form, and ended up with forty-nine answers, the result of an interrogation. Because I’m variously informed by reviewing, media consumption, life, I married Jon Ronson’s Them, on conspiracy theories, with a documentary I saw on Margaret Thatcher. She came across so robotic that I wondered how anyone could have voted for her. Of course, the story also gave me the opportunity to be irreverent about many other things, one of my favourite pastimes.
— Lucy Sussex
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THIS WAY TO THE EXIT
SARA DOUGLASS
SARA DOUGLASS has become Australia’s premier bestselling fantasy author, since the publication of BattleAxe, Book One of the Aurealis award-winning Axis Trilogy in 1995.
She writes: I was born in Penola, South Australia, raised in Adelaide by Methodist Ladies, condemned by apathy to the respectable profession of nursing, and escaped via the varied kindnesses of the Department of History at the University of Adelaide into the preferable world of writing.’
