The Gretel Series: Books 1-3 (Gretel Series Boxed set)

by Coleman, Christopher

  Like a reptile, she swallowed the rodent whole. It wasn’t her ideal method of eating, but she didn’t see the point in wasting energy on skinning and gutting anything so tiny. This was purely for sustenance. Her delicacies would come later. Perhaps even later tonight.

  The woman grabbed the bow of the boat and pulled it toward the steps leading to the water’s edge. The slope leading down wasn’t too severe, and she managed the canoe to the shoreline with little fuss.

  And then she waited. Another few hours maybe, and then she’d be on her way to discovering the whereabouts of Anika and Gretel and Hansel Morgan.

  Chapter 12

  Dodd read over his notes one more time and then tucked the book deep into the glove box of the cruiser. It was his interview with the boy who had heard the screams of his friends coming from the backyard of the cabin. The cabin where the infamous woman of the Northlands once tried to make a meal of a young mother.

  During the interview, which Dodd had tried to make casual and conversational, the boy’s mother had sat in with her son—Franklin—while the father roamed from room to room, uninterested in the plot of the investigation, scoffing at the suggestion of foul play.

  “The boys were no good,” he had offered. “They ran away. It’s as simple as that. If you knew the boys’ parents, you wouldn’t be considering any other possibilities.”

  “I’ve spoken with them, Mr. Blixt,” Dodd had replied, just to keep the record straight.

  “Well then, you know.”

  “And the screams, sir? What about the screams your son heard?”

  “What do you mean ‘screams?’ Those boys are pranksters. They were only scaring Frankie. And they done it too. All of ya. Look at all of ya.”

  Had Dodd not known better, he may have considered Mr. Blixt a suspect, so eager to turn thoughts away from the idea that a crime had been committed.

  But Dodd did know better.

  He had questioned Mr. Blixt further, fishing for more details about the missing boys, gathering what theories he could to form a reasonable explanation for the disappearance of seemingly happy, if somewhat neglected, children. But Dodd had no doubt about the truth. He had been waiting for months for a call just like the one that had come across his radio two weeks back. And when it finally came, he had known instantly the woman was free from her hatch and had murdered the children coldly.

  Obviously though, his report would have to say something much different.

  And so, it had. After a week of searches from the local constabulary and a handful of volunteers, and then another week of searches and interviews from the System, Dodd had closed the case from his end and turned it over to the Department of the Missing and Absent. Dodd’s official conclusion: runaways.

  M&A would disseminate pictures of the boys, but the System searches would not continue. If the boys’ bodies were ever found, it wouldn’t be by his organization. He supposed the boys’ parents could finance whatever search parties they could afford—maybe hire some hounds from a local hunter to go over the area around the cabin one more time—but judging by his official interviews with those folks, Dodd doubted there would be much to finance their own investigation. Dodd didn’t care what they did now; he was clean of the case and could now focus his efforts on the only thing he cared about—finding the witch.

  Dodd stepped out of the cruiser and walked to the area where Franklin had said he and his friends were when he ran off. It wasn’t far from the pit where the woman had hidden for all those months. He’d been here several times during the investigation, of course, but he wanted one last look to make sure he hadn’t bypassed anything noteworthy.

  Finding nothing on the ground, he walked around to the back of the cabin and stepped into the house through a door that led to the kitchen. He walked to the counter where the residue of Officer Stenson’s blood and brain nuggets remained. Despite the post-investigation cleaning of the place, the stains remained. Wood was a stubborn possessor of human fluid.

  “Where did you go?” Dodd spoke aloud, clearly, as if the woman were standing in front of him.

  He looked at the ground where the broken shards of the clay cauldron had been; he recognized the exact place by the stains. Stains of the broth. This was what it was for, he reminded himself. There it was, the brew of life.

  He thought back to those first hours when he’d arrived on the crime scene, his initial nausea at the sight of Officer Stenson’s body wickedly mauled on the kitchen floor.

  And the book that sat so innocently on the counter above.

  The huge weathered folio had sat spread like a prehistoric moth, beckoning to be read, teasing him with symbols and hieroglyphs that looked as if they had been rubbed from the inner walls of the Great Pyramids. He’d been entranced by the thing, momentarily taken out of the moment to some unknown past like an actor in a play, or a child steeped in the funhouse at an amusement park.

  There had been no time to think; he had folded the book shut and grabbed it, covering it between his arms and chest, rushing the tome to his cruiser like a burglar, violating countless steps of crime-scene protocol.

  He thought of the book now and the decision he had made to pull it from the shelf of his office and stash it beneath the passenger seat of his patrol car. The boy, Petr, had seemed drawn to it in his office, but that may just have been Dodd’s own paranoia. Whichever, bringing the book with him had felt like the proper call at the time, and standing here now in the stale lair of this killer hermit only reinforced the feeling.

  Dodd stared toward the front entranceway of the cabin. “Where would I go if were you? Maybe that’s the better question?” He paused, giving his question sincere thought. “I’d bury those boys somewhere nice and safe, far from this place. Deep in the ground, but not so deep that scavengers wouldn’t get to them within a few days. And then where?”

  Dodd walked out the front door and stood on the cabin’s porch for a moment, staring into the woods at the possibilities. He descended the staircase of the porch to the warped, faded boardwalk that met the bottom wooden step. He breathed in the crisp air and closed his eyes, bowing his head forward meditatively.

  And then he had his answer.

  Dodd opened his eyes and lifted his head and turned his whole body south toward the tree line.

  “If I were you, I’d want revenge.”

  Chapter 13

  The woman smacked her neck reflexively and instantly felt the splatter spread between her palm and throat. On the down stroke, the nail of her middle finger caught high on her cheek, slicing the skin wide and deep. She’d fallen asleep, and the mosquitos had taken advantage of the blood source. She’d felt the bites in her dreams, and now she wondered whether the potion had made her more attractive to the pests.

  She was awake now, alert, panicked at the notion that morning was close. There was no sign of the sun yet, and she didn’t have the feeling that she’d been asleep for long, but there was no way to be sure.

  The witch stood and stared across the lake at the Klahr house. The structure was so still and quiet it looked abandoned. But they were there. Old and beaten by life. As vulnerable as a cricket in a spider web. If she was going to go tonight, which was the decision she’d made earlier that morning, then there was no more time to waste.

  She moved the boat into position and shoved it out on the water, hopping in deftly just as the stern end of the hull caught the waterline.

  There was only one oar, and it took the woman a few moments to figure out the propulsion at first, but she adapted quickly, learning to alternate the oar from starboard to port with every other scull, moving the canoe effectively toward her target. And with the wind direction in her favor, she was moving at a speed that she figured would put her at the bank in little more than five or six minutes.

  She held the flashlight between her feet, careful not to let it roll too far. If she lost the thing over the side or if the bulb broke, her upcoming mission would be far more difficult. By now she’d learned the nuanc
es of the Morgan property; the Klahr orchard, however, was a much different story. She’d been able to study it a bit from across the lake, secretly, ducking behind branches at every chirp or plop of the water, and from what she’d learned, the landscape appeared to be an obstacle course of trees and uneven ground. And that assessment didn’t include the ladders and tools that littered every farm as well as the vast collection of picking buckets strewn about the property, idly tossed aside by the pickers, now waiting in vain to be used for the next harvest that was still months away.

  The witch felt the resistance from the bottom of the lake, the signal that she’d reached the bank of the orchard. She dug the oar into the muddy ground and raked the canoe up as far as possible to the shore, stepping over the bow carefully and stretching her foot as far as possible to avoid sinking her shoe beneath the water. She cleared the water, but her foot found a thick pocket of mud that instantly devoured her foot up to the ankle. She brought her other foot to the ground, trying to get leverage to free her first foot, but her second foot found a similar patch of mud, and she nearly toppled completely to the wet ground, only the deep, muddy capture of both her sunken feet keeping her upright.

  The woman whispered a curse as she slowly freed her feet, careful not to lose her shoes, before taking the first steps up the bank in the direction of the house where she continued to find weak, damp earth beneath her feet. The wet heaviness of the mud and lake water seemed to pervade her shoes and cuffs, and she cursed again, louder this time, as she finally stood on solid ground kicking and shaking the loose strands of mud from her shoe.

  The woman now turned toward the house, but she was disoriented from the gloom and her missteps out of the canoe, and in the darkness she could only vaguely see the structure in the distance. She could just barely make out the shapes of the orchard trees, which, judging by the smell, were almost directly in front of her. She reached a hand forward and touched a branch and then formed her hand around the pear that hung from it. She plucked the ripened fruit and held it to her nose, grimacing at the smell before dropping it at her feet.

  The woman pulled the flashlight from the pocket of her robe and reluctantly switched it on, keeping the direction of the beam to the ground. She then began walking toward the Klahrs. The hunt was about to begin.

  Chapter 14

  “Gretel!” Amanda Klahr woke with a scream and raised her hands to her mouth to catch the last part of the gasping cry. It was the third time this week she’d awoken this way, and it was only Wednesday.

  The dreams weren’t new though; they’d started almost immediately after Gretel left for the Old World. They hadn’t started off as debilitating—she had almost expected them to come—and at first they had done little more than leave her with a residue of disappointment in the morning when she awoke to the reality of Gretel’s absence.

  But gradually the dreams had grown more intense and detailed, and by around the sixth month of Gretel’s absence, Amanda began to dread sleep.

  “You okay, hon?” Georg’s words were mechanical and barely above a whisper. He’d recently adapted to her outbursts and now mostly slept through them.

  “Yes,” Amanda replied absently. Even now, she felt the hint of embarrassment at her unconscious eruptions and had resigned herself to the belief that she’d likely never overcome them. “I thought I might have heard something outside.”

  Georg only cleared his throat and turned toward her, never opening his eyes.

  Amanda climbed from the bed and walked to the bathroom, replaying the sound in her head, knowing full well the “something” she might have heard almost certainly had occurred in her dream. She used the toilet and then stood at the sink, staring in the mirror at her tired eyes.

  The sound resonated again, outside the dream this time, somewhere in the distance.

  Amanda’s drooping eyelids shot open, and she jerked her head toward the window. Her mouth hung open as she looked toward the ceiling, listening.

  The sound once again, this time fainter than the last.

  Amanda walked slowly toward the window, barely lifting her feet from the floor. The last sound had been almost imperceptible, and even the patter of a slippered step would have drowned it out. She debated waking Georg but decided against it. She knew if she did, he would tell her that he was happy she’d done it, can’t be too careful, but it wasn’t fair to continue robbing him of his sleep because there was a fox in the orchard or a rat scavenging through one of the picking buckets.

  Amanda arrived at the window that overlooked the orchard, but she could see only her reflection in the glass. She’d left the bathroom light on, and the glare made the night invisible from the room. She turned and began walking to the bathroom when she heard the noise again. A voice this time. She was sure of it.

  She took the three or four remaining steps to the bathroom, this time as if she were escaping a fire, and toggled the light switch off. She rushed back to the window and pressed her face to the glass. And she saw it instantly, fifty yards or so in the distance, just in front of the lake. A light. No doubt the same one she’d seen coming from Gretel’s house. And next to the light, hovering above like a phantom, was the black outline of a person. She was standing erect, staring at Amanda, a wide dirty smile just visible on her face. Amanda knew instantly who it was. There was no question at all in her mind.

  “Georg!”

  “Amanda.” Georg Klahr sprang upright in his bed at a speed he’d probably not demonstrated in thirty years.

  “Georg, I saw her! She’s right outside!” Amanda squinted out the window now, cupping her eyes, trying to find the shape of the woman. The beacon of light was gone now, but she thought she could see movement somewhere in the orchard.

  Georg had bypassed the slippers beneath his side of the bed and was now standing at his wife’s side, pressing the sleep from his eyes with his fingertips.

  Amanda looked over at him in disbelief, a new thought now lodged in her mind. “Oh my god, Georg,” she said, her voice low and hoarse, “Petr was right. He was right all along. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s alive.”

  Georg was fully awake now and immersed in the moment. He had made his way to the armoire that faced their bed, reaching into the space between the wall and the wardrobe where the twelve-gauge shotgun patiently waited. “Are you sure it’s her? I mean...” He shook his head, confused. “How can you be sure, Amanda?”

  Amanda wanted to scream at her husband for doubting her, but she could hear the fear in his voice, and she wanted to bring them both back to a state of calm. They needed to be clear-headed right now. “It’s her, Georg. And if it’s not, then I don’t—”

  The unmistakable creak of the front door hinges rang through the house. The sound was deafening, as if amplified by the night and the tension.

  “Stay here, Amanda,” Georg commanded. He picked up the gun, holding it casually as he walked to the door of the bedroom.

  “Georg!” Amanda replied in a whisper.

  “It’s okay.”

  Amanda saw the look of stillness in her husband’s eyes and knew that he’d summoned something deep from within him. Whether it was true or not, Georg Klahr believed he was ready for whatever thing entered their home. She said a short, silent prayer that it was so.

  From her position at the window, Amanda watched her husband cross through the bedroom doorway and stop at the landing. He was staring down the staircase into the blackness of the main floor. “What do you see, Georg?” she whispered.

  Georg Klahr turned and looked at his wife for a beat and then turned his focus back to the stairs. He held up his index finger to Amanda, pausing her while he attempted to hear the noises coming from the level below. His mouth was open, anticipating, and he looked back at Amanda.

  Amanda shook her head in confusion.

  Georg shrugged at his wife; something was there, but he couldn’t make out just what. Maybe they’d been wrong, after all. Maybe it was the wind.

  But that wasn’
t right. She saw her. Smiling.

  Amanda sighed and closed her eyes for just an instant, and in that moment—two seconds at most—the world filled with a sound so painful and unpleasant that Amanda’s knees buckled under her, collapsing her to the floor. It was the sound of distress and agony. Georg’s agony. She’d never heard a sound like it—from him or anyone. That sound would replace Gretel in her nightmares for the rest of Amanda’s life.

  “Georg.” The words rattled from Amanda’s mouth as if they’d been shot in the air on their way out. She got back to her feet and looked toward the top of the steps and then walked slowly to the threshold of the door. She wanted to rush to where he’d been, but her instincts took over and throttled back her pace, saving her from diving into her own disaster.

  She couldn’t see Georg anymore, but his screams continued below.

  Amanda was crying now, covering her mouth to muffle her location; but the sound of her husband’s pain, horrifying and tortuous, drowned her out completely, and seemed to be coming from every room of the main floor. Amanda fell to her knees again, distraught, and listened to the final dying sounds of her husband diminish into silence.

  There was a pause, and then Amanda heard a final sound, a sustained wet, shredding sound that nearly caused her to vomit.

  He was dead; Amanda did not allow hope for anything else. The tears streamed down her face in two equal rivers, one on each side.

  “No. Not me. Not today.”

  Amanda backed away from the bedroom door and then felt her way back to the bathroom. Once inside, her instincts overpowered her grief and set her to work.

  She kept the light off and locked herself in, positioning herself behind the door. It was no plan at all, really, but there wasn’t much else to do at this point. If the woman forced herself inside, Amanda would fight. And likely die. She couldn’t imagine much of a life without Georg anyway, so the prospect of death suddenly didn’t trigger the fear that it had for most of Amanda’s life. But she still had reasons to survive. Petr. Gretel.