Dreams of Darkness

by D L Pitchford et al.

  “You took Anna’s baby from her womb and put it in yours, didn’t you? Didn’t you!” He pulled up her nightdress, and Elsebeth tried to push his hand away.

  “No, I didn’t. No, no.”

  His hand found her pelvis, squeezing and pressing, trying to feel for the swelling that came as a baby grew.

  “Please, stop. Nikolaus, please. I didn’t do anything.” She screamed as he yanked her hair, holding her firm to the bed.

  “You had best say your prayers tonight, Elsebeth. If I find you with child from this…” He finally released her and left the room.

  She lay unmoving on the bed, listening as Nikolaus donned his boots and left to join the rest of the town. When she heard the front door slam shut, she gave a rasping sob and climbed beneath the covers.

  Chapter Three

  There was no fetus. There never was. The town had almost come to expect the desperate and desolate scream that broke the stillness of the morning when a pregnancy was announced. The happiness of cherry-cheeked expectant mothers gone in an instant. Bellies shrank overnight, replaced by a sticky pool of black between the sheets in the morning. Some tried to hide it, believing the dark spirits of the forest couldn’t target them if they remained locked behind bolt and shutter. But Anna couldn’t hide it. Not from the town, or the forest.

  The tarry slop that stained both bed and girl was all that remained as dawn broke the horizon. Try as they might, it could not be washed from the linens. As the women of Eisenwald came together to comfort and cleanse young Anna, the men took the sheets into the forest and burned them, the smoke rising in putrid, black tendrils through the boughs of the trees and over the town.

  Elsebeth brewed a tea to calm Anna from the terror that plagued her every time she closed her eyes. She lifted the cup to Anna’s lips, and the townswomen turned uncomfortably away.

  “Thank you, Elsebeth,” Anna whispered through ragged breaths.

  Elsebeth smiled warmly and moved a strand of hair from Anna’s face. “You are most welcome,” she said, and set the cup on Anna’s bedside. She gathered her skirts, ready to stand when Anna grabbed Elsebeth’s hand in her own. She leaned closer to Elsebeth, bringing with her the pungent smell of the black, sticky curse.

  “Why me, Elsebeth?” she whispered. “Why has God turned away from me?”

  Elsebeth dared a steely glance over her shoulder at the women who had gathered in a tight knot in the corner of the room. Anna wasn’t the first girl they had frightened with their nonsense.

  “Keep sipping that tea, and rest,” she said, easing Anna back onto the pillow. She rose from where she sat on the bed, letting the older women swoop back in to pick and prod at Anna as biddies were wont to do.

  Elsebeth stepped out of the heat and putrid smell of the house. The sun was high in the sky, and the men could be heard chopping at the forest in the distance, trying in desperation to keep the trees and branches from creeping closer to the town. She lifted her face toward the warmth of the sun, straining to hear any sign of life from the forest. There was life in there. Someone was in there. The forest gave no sound, but Elsebeth knew. The eyes that had stared out at her from the tree line only hours ago were as real as the silence of the wood, or the death between Anna’s legs. She knew it. The forest was hiding secrets.

  She heard the words of the song, the forest’s song, that had crept into her mind the day she came to Eisenwald. Forest dark and forest deep, forest doth my secret keep. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and Elsebeth turned toward the forest. A breeze swept across her arms, bare and naked from cleaning Anna, but no leaves shifted on the black trees. To anyone else who would have dared come to Eisenwald, the forest looked dead. But she knew it was very, very much alive.

  The door behind her creaked open, and Elsebeth started, turning toward one of the old women who had swooped upon Anna. She wiped her hands on her apron, her movements sturdy and deliberate, surprising for her age.

  “All right there, dear?” she asked.

  Elsebeth’s eyes darted toward the forest, and the woman followed her gaze. “Yes,” Elsebeth said, turning back to the woman and smiling.

  The woman smiled, but her eyes narrowed in grave suspicion. Elsebeth followed her gaze as the woman scrutinized her with that kindly mirage of a smile plastered on her face. Her eyes swept across the bruises on her neck, down her chest where a piece of polished moonstone hung upon her breast and settled on her trim waist and belly. “Any little joys of thy own?” she asked.

  Elsebeth placed a hand on her belly and swallowed. She had tried hard to push her fears of losing a child to the curse from her mind. Negative thoughts breed negative outcomes, her mother had always said. But the woman’s narrowed eyes made that fear rise in her throat. She swallowed again. “I-” she stammered, and the woman’s face fell.

  “God will bless thee with child when it is the right time.”

  Elsebeth felt her hands clench. “Time?” she snipped, as the old woman knew full well she wanted nothing more than to be a mother. “Eisenwald is dying.”

  The old woman crossed the sign of God before her. “Blasphem- “

  “Do not pretend you did not once leave offerings beneath those boughs when you were a tow-headed young girl,” Elsebeth said, her own eyes narrowing at the woman. Her hands clenched and unclenched, her eyes focusing and unfocusing on the woman before her. And as the old woman stood before her, shifting from one foot to the next, again, the forest’s song seemed to scream within her mind. From the earth you only take, until the forest doth awake. “You turned your back on the forest, didn’t you?”

  “Th-the forest will take care of itself if it is God’s will.” The old woman seemed to grow smaller as Elsebeth’s accusations hung in the air between them.

  “A forest whose people do not scatter seeds and kill does in the fawning season cannot be expected to care for itself any more than a newborn babe can feed and clothe itself.”

  The old woman opened and closed her mouth, little flecks of white foam forming at the corners as she tried to fashion a retort, tried to deny to Elsebeth, the stranger who saw through Eisenwald’s façade, the truth of the town’s past.

  Elsebeth watched her squirm, watched her shuffle from one foot to the next. She sighed as the forest’s song died away, and her voice softened. “Forgive me. The smell of – well, the smell can be overpowering. But surely this is not the way it has always been.” Elsebeth had heard the tale in pieces, for the townsfolk of Eisenwald would not speak of the forest for too long.

  First the fields, then the livestock. No seedlings grew from the once rich soil. No corn or wheat, no squash or beans. And when the cows birthed no calves, when the sheep had clearly mated and there were no spring lambs, when the altar tables lay empty in the clearings, then the Eisenwald forest betrayed them.

  The old woman softened as well. She looked to the forest and the black smoke that still rose in the air. “The old ways were dying. If we were to survive, we had no choice but to embrace God.”

  “I don’t think the forest was ready to submit,” Elsebeth said, her eyes also following the black smoke.

  The old woman saw the group of biddies gathered on Anna’s doorstep, watching them. She stood straighter and stepped away from Elsebeth, spitting on the ground at her feet. “But you wouldn’t know of such devil’s work, would you dear?” she raised her voice so those behind her could hear, and Elsebeth saw them lean in close to one another, whispering secrets only the forest knew. The old woman picked up her skirts in a flurry and headed up the winding street.

  Elsebeth watched her go, her heart fluttering in her chest. They were liars. All of them. They had welcomed her with open arms, believing her to be the key to ending the curse of the forest. And when it did not end, when the livestock did not birth again and the surrounding towns had shunned them, they turned on her. They turned on what was different. She clutched at her belly again. Did the witch of the forest take Anna’s child and give it to her? No matter what sh
e did, child or no child, they would never accept her.

  Elsebeth clenched her fists against the anger in her heart. She picked up her skirts and hurried back to her home. Nikolaus was still gone, and she wondered how the forest would twist his blackened heart today. She opened the oven door and pulled out the mushroom pie. Its perfectly domed crust was a luscious golden brown. She smiled, wrapping it in a cloth and loading her basket with the loaves she had baked the day before. The town of Eisenwald still needed to eat, and she hoped the pie which still contained remnants of her blood would go to someone special – someone very special.

  One by one, the golden-brown loaves disappeared from Elsebeth’s basket as she stepped through the pebble-strewn streets. And though each house inquired about the pie, no one bought it. Elsebeth only smiled and whispered a new song beneath her breath.

  “Forest dark and forest deep, forest doth thy secrets keep. Secrets of the love they stole and twisted black your nurtured soul. Take back that which once was thine, if so deserving beneath thy pines. And fill thy soul with life once more, take back that which was always yours.”

  She knocked three times upon the old woman’s door and waited patiently, humming the tune under her breath. No one answered. She waited. She knocked again. When no one answered, she turned from the doorstep, adjusting the pie at the bottom of her basket. The old woman peered out through a crack.

  “Come to speak of the devil again, child?” she said, her voice high and condescending.

  Elsebeth smiled. “Just delivering your bread. You do still wish your weekly bread, madam?”

  The old woman wrenched the door open, reaching toward Elsebeth with claw-like fingers. She snatched the bread from her basket and tossed Elsebeth a coin before pausing and staring at the bottom of the near-empty basket.

  “And what is this?” she demanded.

  “It’s just a pie,” Elsebeth said, pulling back the cloth from the golden dome with delicate fingers. “Carrots and beans and garlic from Drokenstein.” She smiled as she watched spittle form at the corners of the old woman’s mouth.

  “How much?” she demanded.

  Elsebeth cocked her head, pausing for an uncomfortably long moment until the old woman squirmed beneath her gaze. “Take it. My treat to you.” She lifted the pie from the basket, setting it gently into the greedy woman’s hands. “After all, ‘tis God’s will that we give more than we take.”

  The old woman licked her lips, then ascended the stairs and shut the door behind her.

  Elsebeth smiled, turning back up the road. Magic was simply science, she thought, and hummed the song as she went.

  “Forest dark and forest deep, forest doth thy secret keep…”

  Chapter Four

  First, the humans betrayed them, chopping, slicing, hacking at twig and tree and limb. The seedlings never came. The saplings broke and burned within their hearths. Their greenwood snapped and whistled, screaming under the threat of the fire that came for them too soon in life. Next, the animals betrayed them. Their dens lay empty, unprotected, undefended. Nothing lived to move the seeds. Nothing stirred to till the soil at their roots. Eisenwald was dying, and the forest would do whatever it took to protect itself.

  The old woman was the first to die. Under cover of dark, she took her last breath, Elsebeth’s pie barely digested in her stomach. The trees of Eisenwald forest slipped quietly through the boards and windows, pulling her into their blackened roots and soil. In the morning, all that was left was a sticky pool of black upon the bed covers. Not even enough to bury.

  They did not whisper in the shadows of home and hearth. The accusations against Elsebeth were blatant and unabashed.

  “Witch,” they said.

  “Death,” they called her.

  Nikolaus warned her to stay hidden until the fear had died away, but Elsebeth refused.

  She baked her breads and cakes, knotted doughs, and the cronk pies. She carried them in her basket from house to house where the townsfolk sneered and spit at her. But they bought her breads and slammed the door in her face, slinking back to their tables where the remnants of a few potatoes and carrots remained from the meager harvests they had been able to yield.

  The months passed. Autumn turning to Winter, and Winter to Spring. The trees of Eisenwald forest did not rest. They continued to grow in the night, reaching their blackened tendrils toward the town, searching for nourishment and, as Elsebeth finally understood, revenge.

  As the forest’s hatred grew, so did Elsebeth’s belly, and the orders for her pies. Each time she offered them willingly, waiting, hoping, praying that one person would offer an extra shilling, a shawl against the cold, a few hours for tea and company. But it never came. Even Anna seemed fearful of her now, huddled in her home, dark circles growing beneath her red and teary eyes since the loss of her baby.

  The only company she could rely on was the witch of the forest. The mysterious figure continued to beleaguer her. It came every night, rustling the leaves outside the door, its pale eyes shining by moon and firelight. It peered out of the darkness at Elsebeth, watching her, waiting. For what, she did not know.

  The rest of the town seemed oblivious. No one else whispered of the dark figure at the forest’s edge or spoke of the pale glowing eyes that stared from the darkness. Somehow, the figure or the forest, Elsebeth knew not which, had chosen her, and it was the last thing the town of Eisenwald needed to be concerned with.

  Elsebeth pulled the cloak tighter around her and adjusted the basket on her back. The moon was but a sliver hanging in the sky of fading light. Nikolaus would be home soon. She quickened her pace despite the child that grew within her and the heavy load of wood upon her back.

  A fever had run rampant through Drokenstein that month, and Elsebeth had had her work cut out for her. Though Drokenstein had long since shut its gates to Eisenwald, fearing whatever curse had befallen the town would infest their own wood and women, Elsebeth still had something they wanted, something they needed more than protection against an evil forest: knowledge.

  Each week, on the morn of the seventh day, Elsebeth would make her way to Drokenstein and treat the pangs of injury and illness of its people in exchange for fresh wood to light her fires and flour to make her breads. It had been a simple arrangement at first, but as her belly grew, the trek became more and more precarious.

  She shifted the basket of wood on her back again, huffing and heaving the last few steps across the threshold of her home. She slung the pack to the floor, the wedding broom above the door dropping bits of dust as it shook with the vibration. She lowered herself into the rocking chair and sighed. The last remnants of wood burned low in the fireplace, warming a stew she had made before departing. The smell filled the house and made the child inside her tumble and roll with excitement. She smiled, rubbing her stomach with both hands.

  “At least you waited until we came home,” Elsebeth whispered to her child.

  She sighed and rose from the chair, the smell of supper overwhelming her self-control. Nikolaus would indeed be home soon, but not soon enough. She pulled bowls and spoons from the cupboard and ladled out a healthy serving. She set the lid upon the pot and heard footsteps in the rain-soaked mud outside.

  The door opened, and Nikolaus’s black-streaked face stared down at her. She forced a smile when she saw him, setting the bowl on the counter to attend her husband.

  “Welcome home,” she said, pulling off his coat and hanging it by the door. Nikolaus didn’t answer. He said little these days, and Elsebeth wondered what the forest whispered to him as he hacked and chopped away at its black and sticky branches. She swallowed. “I made stew this morning. I saved the last of the cronks from Autumn.”

  “Hmph,” he said, taking the rocking chair.

  She handed him the bowl from the counter and steadied herself, preparing to lean over and remove her husband’s blackened shoes. She sighed, feeling the child within her shift as she reached, when Nikolaus lashed out. He kicked her stomach, knocking her fl
at on her back.

  “Leave them!” he bellowed, his eyes flashing with darkness.

  Elsebeth pushed herself up. The baby flailed and tumbled, then was still. She rubbed her hand over her stomach, brushing away the mud and black sap that had left its mark upon her dress.

  “What are you doing?” Nikolaus shouted. “Get up. Eat. I cannot have my way with you if you aren’t fed.”

  “Nikolaus,” Elsebeth said, still rubbing her stomach. “Nikolaus, I-I think something is wrong.”

  She was met only with an icy stare that cut daggers to her confidence. She blinked, forcing back the tears that threatened to brim her eyes and run down her cheeks. She shifted, twisted, tried to force herself to stand. A sharp pain stabbed her side. She winced, her breath hitching.

  “What’s wrong with you? Get up!” Nikolaus said. He rose from the chair, towering over her. He grabbed the collar of her dress and drug Elsebeth to her feet, tossing her into the counter. “I said eat!”