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

by Coleman, Christopher

  Kacper’s eyes well instantly and he makes no play to hide this weakness. He lets the instant reaction pass and then takes a very deep breath before he begins his tale.

  “Tomek was a schoolmate of mine. We couldn’t have been a day older than ten. He wasn’t my friend really, he wasn’t friends with anyone, but that was because he was very different from the rest of us. Smarter yes, we all knew that, but it was more than intelligence. He had an...ability. One that was beyond us. Even at nine I knew it. We all did.”

  “Ability?” I ask. But I already know. I grew up with a version of the person he’s describing.

  “He knew of things that would happen before they occurred. It wasn’t quite seeing the future though; it was more like a noticing. An aptitude for receiving clues from his surroundings that that the rest of us were blind to. It was animal-like, I suppose.”

  A ‘Noticing.’ It was the perfect word for Gretel’s talent.

  “Everyone in Stedwick knew about Tomek, and soon he became a bit of an attraction. Women would come with their sick children for his diagnoses and treatment advice. They were asking for counsel on medicine from a nine-year old.”

  “Is his family still here?” Maja asks, riveted. “Why have I not heard of Tomek?”

  “They were—” Cezar begins.

  “It’s a good question, Maja,” Kacper interrupts, his eyes firmly locked on Cezar. “And I will get to that part.”

  “It was a winter day. Snow had fallen quite heavily the night before, but by morning the clouds had cleared and the sun was shining high, creating an amazing glare off the white crusts. Back then we had mid-morning interludes at school, when children could simply leave to play as they wished. Most would stay and play with friends on the grounds, and a winter day as I described was the perfect time for building forts and having snowball battles. But Tomek would go home during the interludes. Every day he would walk alone to his home which was closer than we are now to the shop.”

  Kacper and Maja’s shop was perhaps a half-mile from where we sat.

  “Every day he walked alone, and then he would return on time for the late morning lessons.”

  Kacper pauses and looks off to the distance, the pain of the memory clearly draped across his face.

  “I wouldn’t have paid a gram off attention to Tomek as he walked home on this one particular day, except for the presence of a man who was standing at the gate of the school. He was only of average height, I suppose, but he was large, broad. And though his neck and head were covered with a scarf and hat, his face was...his face was bald. Thin and long. I couldn’t make out all of his details, but it looked as if every feature had been burned from his face.”

  Kacper shakes his head, as if the description he’s just given isn’t precise, but he doesn’t have the words to correct them.

  “I stood and watched as Tomek neared the man. I was silently praying for him to stop, to turn back to the school, but it was as if he was entranced by the stranger. And this man was a stranger. The village had far more people then, when I was a child, but I knew instantly this man was no resident. I would have recognized him in a second.”

  “What happened next?”

  “All of my friends were involved in their games or books, but I stood watching. I saw Tomek waver not at all from his route, and then the man turned and followed him, sidling beside him, stooping to talk with the boy as a father might with his son.”

  “Did Tomek resist the man at all?” I ask. “Or act suspicious of him? With his abilities, he would have known something wasn’t right about him, yes?”

  “I don’t know, Hansel. But I feel you may have more insight to this ability than I. Gretel had similar talents, did she not?”

  I study the faces of the three villagers at the table and realize they know nothing of Gretel’s or my mother’s story. Of Marlene. It’s refreshing in many ways, but I know that I’ll need them to help find my sister. “I do, Kacper, and some day I have a story to tell you.”

  “What happened after that?” Maja asks.

  “He was there walking, as I said, and then he was...just gone.” Kacper swallows and shakes his head. “It was the last we ever saw of Tomek.”

  “So the man kidnapped him. And very likely murdered him.” These are not questions, and Maja is astounded by the story, dumbfounded. “The village must have been in arms. Surely they formed a search for your friend. At the very least.”

  “I was only a child, but as far as I know, there was never a search.”

  “What? How could that be? I couldn’t imagine Stedwick Village allowing a boy to disappear from the grounds of the grade school without waging some response. Some investigation.”

  “Tomek’s parents explained it all away. It was as simple as that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was only I and a few others who saw the man—I wouldn’t know him as Gromus until years later—but we were few in numbers. And the next day, once the village got word of Tomek’s disappearance, his parents informed the village that they had sent their son off to the New Country to live with his uncle. And then they left with their three other children a few days later.”

  “So what do you think happened, Dedu? Are you saying his parents sold him off to the man? Sold him to Gromus?”

  “I only know what I saw, Maja. But it would seem there was something at play along those lines.”

  A silence emerges within the group, all of us trying to find a connector to what has happened with Gretel and those events from some sixty years past. I have my own theories, knowing the powers of the potion which drove my mother to madness.

  “When I was a boy, he returned. Gromus.” It’s Cezar now, looking at the ground as he speaks, eyes closed. “But this time, there was no secrecy about his arrival.”

  He looks up and meets everyone’s stare individually, slowly moving his head in a clockwise semi-circle, stopping on Maja’s grandfather. “You remember it, Kacper.”

  Kacper frowns and nods. “Of course I do. Jana’s wedding.”

  The story Cezar told was not unlike the one I had heard from Gus last night: a man matching Kacper and Gus’ description makes a dramatic entrance at a crowded event and declares himself ‘Gromus.’

  “He was deranged,” Cezar says, “Nothing like the secretive person of Kacper’s tale. He made demands.”

  “Let me guess,” I say, “he wanted his Source.”

  Cezar’s eyes widen, matching his look from my earlier utterance of Gromus’ name. “Yes,” he whispers. “He spoke of a Source. That was the word.”

  “What is this, Hansel?” Maja asks. “How did you know that?”

  “I’ve heard a version of this story before.” I direct my attention back to Cezar. “Did you know what he meant? Did you know what he wanted?”

  Cezar shrugs and shakes his head.

  Kacper speaks up. “I suspected. And it gave me hope. It had been thirty years since that day when I saw him with Tomek, but I knew it was the same man. It was impossible, I know, but it was him. As I said, he was very unique in his appearance. So I screamed at him, before I had time to realize what I was doing, I shouted, ‘What did you do with Tomek?’ Do you remember Cezar.”

  He nods. “I thought you were a crazy man.”

  Kacper grins in understanding. “Many of the villagers at the wedding were old enough to remember Tomek, but most of them had always believed the story of his parents. That he had suddenly gone off to live in the New Country. No one ever saw him or his parents again, and any lingering narrative about Tomek being stolen by some strange man in the light of the day was accepted as simply a tale of childhood terror. But I knew the truth.”

  Cezar picks up the story. “Mr. Baran—Kacper’s—accusation had an impact on those of us at the wedding. We were all in a state of paralysis when Gromus first appeared, and then we felt even more terror from Kacper’s words, that decades ago this wild man had taken one of our own. We knew intellectually it was impossible, that the man befo
re us couldn’t have been old enough to be the same person. But we also knew Kacper was right. We felt the truth of his words. And then slowly people started to put the pieces together. The wedding guests began to move toward Gromus, becoming aggressive, demanding answers from him about Tomek.”

  “Did he give any clue as to who he was he was looking for that day? Did he ever say a name?”

  Cezar shakes his head. “I don’t think he really knew what he was looking for. It was like he was just looking for...food. But he seemed to sense the momentum changing amongst him with the crowd. That he was in possible danger. And then he made a horrible screeching noise and ran off, fleeing in the direction from which he came. To the west boundary of the village. It was the first and last time I saw him. Until...”

  “As you can imagine,” Kacper continues, “the event was all anyone could speak of for many weeks. And in the end, those of us who knew the name ‘Gromus’ made a pact never to speak it again. As I said, we weren’t predicting that any superstition would grant our wishes, we just didn’t like the sound of it. It may seem absurd to you now, but it seemed like the proper decision at the time.”

  “You said you were hopeful. You said you suspected you knew what Gromus wanted when he asked for his source. I assume you meant you thought he was looking for your friend from when you were a child.”

  Kacper stands and walks away from the table, looking to the horizon. “It was nonsense, I suppose, but after that day at the wedding, I waited for Tomek to return. I was hopeful. Gromus was angry, accusing us of taking what belonged to him. I could only guess it was Tomek he was referring to. So I believed it was possible he was still alive.”

  I know this was impossible. If Gromus had taken Tomek for his immortal purposes, and succeeded at holding him captive, the boy would have been dead within a few weeks, perhaps months if he was strong, like Anika Morgan had been. I had heard the details of the process from my mother; no person would still be alive over thirty years later. Whoever he was looking for was to be the latest in a long line of victims. But I play along. “What did you do?”

  “A group of us, including Cezar’s father, formed a search group to track the grotesque man and to find the boy. Of course, Tomek would have been a grown man at this point.”

  “Would have been? So you never found him?” Maja asks.

  “No. Not Tomek. And not Gromus either. He made only the one appearance at the wedding. As Cezar said, I believed the villagers frightened him that day. And I always regretted that we didn’t do more to capture him then. We were so many in number, if we had just...But he never came back.”

  “But he did.” My response is reflexive, tinged with anger.

  “Yes. Understand, Hansel, when I first heard of your sister’s...incident, I didn’t know it was him. Not for sure. Not until today.”

  “But you did,” I say, turning toward Cezar, “and you gave him my sister.”

  Cezar puts his hands up and shakes his head. “It wasn’t like that, sir.”

  “But you must have known, Cezar,” Kacper says, this realization seeming to just occur to him, his eyes widening as the magnitude of this fact sets in. “He doesn’t change. You would have remembered his face like it was that of your father’s. You only told us that ‘a very ugly man’ asked for Gretel, that he said he was related to her, and that you told him in which room she was staying. That was all. Never that it was...And then you simply reported that she was gone. All of her possessions left behind. Some signs of a struggle.”

  At this latest fact, I want to lunge at Cezar, take him to the ground with my hands squeezing tightly around his fleshy throat. But I restrain myself. Ending up in a local jail won’t improve my situation.

  “Many here believed she simply left with the man, Cezar,” Maja continues. “My grandfather never believed that, but I thought it may have been possible. And you knew all along it was this monstrosity.”

  Cezar blinks desperately, feeling the walls of shame closing in around him. He takes in a gaping sigh before exhaling the air in short stuttering gasps. “But...but you understand, Kacper. You were there. He has a way to him that...”

  “Did he remember you?” I ask. The question is somewhat peripheral, but it’s important to me.

  “I don’t think so. Not my face anyway. But he...” Cezar shakes his head, signaling a strike of the thought he was about to speak.

  “He what?”

  “He...it was as if he remembered my...smell.”

  I recall Gus’ story of the sniffing maniac in his bar, trying like some stray hound to locate his source.

  “I didn’t tell him who your sister was. He said her name and I...she was staying in my hotel. What was I to tell him? He would have found her eventually and then I would have paid for the lie.”

  It was the same as marching her out to Gromus in handcuffs and leaving her at his feet, but I let the excuses stand. The fear in his eyes is real, and I can’t say I don’t understand what that fear feels like. I’ve felt it many times, mostly from when I was a child. First from Marlene and later from my mother.

  “Then you believe this story we tell you, Hansel?” Kacper asks. “That the man who took your sister is the same man I saw as a child? Having barely aged in over sixty years of life? We have never told anyone outside of the village these stories. Tell us, how can it be true?”

  The man’s question isn’t a test of my belief as much as a plea for an explanation. Perhaps an outsider with a different perspective could decipher this lifelong mystery that has become lure in the town of Stedwick Village.

  And, of course, I do have the explanation.

  I reach to the ground and bring up my rucksack. I flip open the fold at the top and reach in, immediately feeling the cold leather of the book. Orphism.

  “This is how.”

  Chapter 4

  “What’s wrong with her Gretel?”

  Gretel tried to keep her eyes on mine, but she dropped her stare after just a few seconds.

  “It’s the potion, right? It’s making her sick. It’s making her like Mar—”

  “I don’t know, Hansel.”

  “Of course you don’t know, but what do you think?”

  It had been over a year since Gretel gave the first dose of potion to my mother—the antidote to the disease of evil—bringing her back to health. Back from the precipice of death.

  Mrs. Klahr had played a key role in the miracle, having made the split-second decision to grab the vial of fluid from the table in the witch’s kitchen. It was that decision that had saved my mother’s life. Anika’s sickness was the result of my mother being force-fed Marlene’s pies during captivity, and it had only one cure: the bloody concoction the witch had made from the contents of my mother’s own body.

  It was the final piece to a puzzle that had taken Anika to the far corners of our ancestors’ home, the Village of the Elders—only to discover that the answers resided in the Back Country all along. Anika’s homeland had ironically housed the solution the whole time, and Orphism had shown Gretel the way to it.

  But barely two months after the cure had taken hold, the joy of our mother’s recovery had all but disappeared. There was a tension with every interaction now, a low-level feeling of dread that either escalated or waned depending on Anika’s behavior. There had been stretches of peace, of course, times of lucidity and happiness, therapeutic nights during which Gretel, mother and I purged the details of our respective tales, re-living our versions of the nightmare that had turned our lives into something unrecognizable from those of years earlier.

  But there were the other nights too. Nights when Anika Morgan was nothing short of disturbing and strange. And as the weeks progressed, those nights became more typical.

  “Clearly there is something wrong with her,” Gretel replied, “but she’s gone through so much, more than either of us. We can’t really know yet what is happening to her. Who could really know the effects? But she’ll be fine. She just needs time to...”

 
Gretel didn’t finish the thought, and it was clear it was because she had no real answers. She no longer believed that time would heal Anika’s affliction, or that ‘fine’ was waiting at the end of my mother’s journey. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to think about what waited there.

  Even after her death, the Marlene train kept barreling onward down the tracks of the Back Country.

  “I have to go.”

  “Where?” The question came out too quickly, revealing my panic at being left alone with her.

  Gretel continued to avert her eyes. “I need to check on Mrs. Klahr.”

  It was the stock answer. Check on Mrs. Klahr. I knew it was true, of course, that Gretel went to the orchard daily since Mrs. Klahr had returned home; our neighbor—who became as much of a mother to me as Anika—was elderly, and the ordeal she had been through was as unspeakable as ours. She had seen her husband murdered and had been held prisoner and tortured for days under the most heinous of conditions.

  Understandably, all of these incidents had taken their toll on Mrs. Klahr, and Gretel was going to do everything she possibly could to ease her back to recovery. Gretel loved Mrs. Klahr. That truth was unquestionable.

  But I knew that the trips to the Klahr orchard were also convenient excuses for Gretel to get away. To escape what my mother was becoming. Her growing absence from our home was reminiscent of the days when Odalinde had first come to our farm during my father’s sickness, just before Gretel had begun working for the Klahrs. Gretel had dug her teeth into the work there, and soaked every last hour from that job in order to stay away from Odalinde. Even after her duties ended each day, Gretel would spend hours on the lake, rowing until exhaustion and then drifting aimlessly on the water under the light of the moon.

  Her avoidance with our mother was more subtle, of course, unspoken, but to me, it was just as profound. More so perhaps. She would stay with Mrs. Klahr through dinner, and then launch the canoe on the water for another hour or two. When she finally came home, she quickly headed off to her room with barely a word uttered to either mother or me; though, in fairness to Gretel, Anika was usually in her room and rarely noticed.