Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Tee Morris

  The Boy, the Bomb, and the Witch Who Returned

  By Alex White

  Whitechapel, East London

  England

  Winter, 1876

  Snow whipped Vasily’s face as the witch threw him to the ground. “Hag,” they called her. “Old Bones,” he’d heard her named. She’d arrived in the night and stolen him, just as his mother warned. His heart pounded to look at the crone, but he could not turn away: crooked nose and spiteful eyes, long white hair, glowing blue in the moonlight. Baba Yaga had stood over him, a nasty smile withering on her lips.

  Now, the icy cobblestones scraped Vasily’s hands and knees. Clanking factories and bells in the mist rattled in his ears like bones. He begged in his native Russian for her to take him home. He cried, tears streaming down his face in the winter air. He wet his pyjamas. She laughed, her shrill cackle echoing through the alleyway. Vasily clenched his eyes tightly, certain the hag would eat him soon.

  He waited for the death stroke, his skin electrified with fear. It never came.

  He sensed light behind his eyelids and opened them to a roaring green bonfire. Baba Yaga sneered as she backed away into the flames, and they consumed her before vanishing with a sucking pop. The wet cobblestones where she’d been standing hissed and steamed with her passage.

  Vasily was now alone.

  The little Russian peasant boy whimpered and stood, his hot urine now frigid on his legs. The foreign city echoed around him, and he smelled a river nearby. He dared to look beyond where the witch had stood and saw something of which he’d only heard tales—a tremendous clock tower watching over the city like a second moon. And in the same way he’d recognised the legendary witch on sight, he recognised the legendary clock, as well—Big Ben. Surely, this was London, which meant Baba Yaga had taken him quite far from home, indeed.

  When he turned to see the rest of the alleyway, he spied a fat man in a bowler hat, making steady progress toward him with the aid of a cane. The fellow called out to him in English, but the young boy had no knowledge of the language.

  “I can’t understand you,” Vasily sobbed.

  “I said,” came the fat man in perfect Russian, “it looks as though you’re having quite the extraordinary evening.”

  “Who are you, sir?”

  The man smiled and doffed his hat, his nose chapped red. “My name is St. John Fount. I’m a scientist and a servant of Her Majesty’s government. I’ll give you a hot meal in exchange for a good story.”