by Paula Guran
He was beginning to regret calling Tom Hustings over, although Hustings was big and good for scaring people. He was also beginning to regret that he was going to have to sell the brooch when he was done. It was special. The more it glittered under the tiny light on his counter, the more he wanted it to be his, and only his.
There was more where this came from, though. The boy would tell him. The boy would lead him to it . . .
A knocking on the outer door of the shop.
Bolger walked over to the door, peering out into the wet afternoon.
“Hurry up,” called Tom Hustings. “It’s miserable out here. Dismal. I’m getting soaked.”
Bolger unlocked the door, and Tom Hustings pushed his way in, his raincoat and hair dripping. “What’s so important that you can’t talk about it over the phone, then?”
“Our fortune,” said Abanazer Bolger, with his sour face. “That’s what.”
Hustings took off his raincoat and hung it on the back of the shop-door. “What is it? Something good fell off the back of a lorry?”
“Treasure,” said Abanazer Bolger. He took his friend over to the counter, showed him the brooch under the little light.
“It’s old, isn’t it?”
“From pagan times,” said Abanazer. “Before. From Druid times. Before the Romans came. It’s called a snakestone. Seen ’em in museums. I’ve never seen metalwork like that, or one so fine. Must have belonged to a king. The lad who found it says it come from a grave—think of a barrow filled with stuff like this.”
“Might be worth doing it legit,” said Hustings, thoughtfully. “Declare it as treasure trove. They have to pay us market value for it, and we could make them name it for us. The Hustings-Bolger Bequest.”
“Bolger-Hustings,” said Abanazer, automatically. Then he said, “There’s a few people I know of, people with real money, would pay more than market value, if they could hold it as you are”—for Tom Hustings was fingering the brooch, gently, like a man stroking a kitten—“and there’d be no questions asked.” He reached out his hand, and, reluctantly, Tom Hustings passed him the brooch.
And the two men went back and forth on it, weighing the merits and disadvantages of declaring the brooch as a treasure trove or of forcing the boy to show them the treasure, which had grown in their minds to a huge underground cavern filled with precious things, and as they debated Abanazer pulled a bottle of sloe gin from beneath the counter and poured them both a generous tot, “to assist the cerebrations.”
Liza was soon bored with their discussions, which went back and forth and around like a whirligig, getting nowhere, and so she went back into the store-room to find Bod standing in the middle of the room with his eyes tightly closed and his fists clenched and his face all screwed up as if he had a toothache, almost purple from holding his breath.
“What you a-doin’ of now?” she asked, unimpressed.
He opened his eyes and relaxed. “Trying to Fade,” he said.
Liza sniffed. “Try again,” she said.
He did, holding his breath even longer this time.
“Stop that,” she told him. “Or you’ll pop.”
Bod took a deep breath and then sighed. “It doesn’t work,” he said. “Maybe I could hit him with a rock and just run for it.” There wasn’t a rock, so he picked up a colored-glass paperweight, hefted it in his hand, wondering if he could throw it hard enough to stop Abanazer Bolger in his tracks.
“There’s two of them out there now,” said Liza. “And if the one don’t get you, t’other one will. They say they want to get you to show them where you got the brooch, and then dig up the grave and take the treasure.” She shook her head. “Why did you do something as stupid as this anyway? You know the rules about leaving the graveyard. Just asking for trouble, it was.”
Bod felt very insignificant, and very foolish. “I wanted to get you a headstone,” he admitted, in a small voice. “And I thought it would cost more money. So I was going to sell him the brooch, to buy you one.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you angry?”
She shook her head. “It’s the first nice thing any one’s done for me in five hundred years,” she said, with a hint of a goblin smile. “Why would I be angry?” Then she said, “What do you do, when you try to Fade?”
“What Mr. Pennyworth told me. ‘I am an empty doorway, I am a vacant alley, I am nothing. Eyes will not see me, glances slip over me.’ But it never works.”
“It’s because you’re alive,” said Liza, with a sniff. “There’s stuff as works for us, the dead, who have to fight to be noticed at the best of times, that won’t never work for you people.”
She hugged herself tightly, moving her body back and forth, as if she was debating something. Then she said, “It’s because of me you got into this . . . Come here, Nobody Owens.”
He took a step toward her, in that tiny room, and she put her cold hand on his forehead. It felt like a wet silk scarf against his skin.
“Now,” she said. “Perhaps I can do a good turn for you.”
And with that, she began to mutter to herself, mumbling words that Bod could not make out. Then she said, clear and loud,
“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind,
Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,
Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,
Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”
Something huge touched him, brushed him from head to feet, and he shivered. His hair prickled, and his skin was all gooseflesh. Something had changed. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Just gived you a helping hand,” she said. “I may be dead, but I’m a dead witch, remember. And we don’t forget.”
“But—”
“Hush up,” she said. “They’re coming back.”
The key rattled in the storeroom lock. “Now then, chummy,” said a voice Bod had not heard clearly before, “I’m sure we’re all going to be great friends,” and with that Tom Hustings pushed open the door. Then he stood in the doorway looking around, looking puzzled. He was a big, big man, with foxy-red hair and a bottle-red nose. “Here, Abanazer? I thought you said he was in here?”
“I did,” said Bolger, from behind him.
“Well, I can’t see hide nor hair of him.”
Bolger’s face appeared behind the ruddy man’s, and he peered into the room. “Hiding,” he said, staring straight at where Bod was standing. “No use hiding,” he announced, loudly. “I can see you there. Come on out.”
The two men walked into the little room, and Bod stood stock still between them and thought of Mr. Pennyworth’s lessons. He did not react, he did not move. He let the men’s glances slide from him without seeing him.
“You’re going to wish you’d come out when I called,” said Bolger, and he shut the door. “Right,” he said to Tom Hustings. “You block the door so he can’t get past.” And with that he walked around the room, peering behind things and bending awkwardly to look beneath the desk. He walked straight past Bod and opened the cupboard. “Now I see you!” he shouted. “Come out!”
Liza giggled.
“What was that?” asked Tom Hustings, spinning round.
“I didn’t hear nothing,” said Abanazer Bolger.
Liza giggled again. Then she put her lips together and blew, making a noise that began as a whistling and then sounded like a distant wind. The electric lights in the little room flickered and buzzed. Then they went out.
“Bloody fuses,” said Abanazer Bolger. “Come on. This is a waste of time.”
The key clicked in the lock, and Liza and Bod were left alone in the room.
“He’s got away,” said Abanazer Bolger. Bod could hear him now, through the door.
“Room like that. There wasn’t anywhere he could have been hiding. We’d’ve seen him if he was.”
A pause.
“Here. Tom Hustings. Where’s the brooch gone?”
“Mm? That? Here. I was keeping it safe.”
“Ke
eping it safe? In your pocket? Funny place to be keeping it safe, if you ask me. More like you were planning to make off with it—like you was planning to keep my brooch for your own.”
“Your brooch, Abanazer? Your brooch? Our brooch, you mean.”
“Ours, indeed. I don’t remember you being here when I got it from that boy.”
There was another long silence, then Abanazer Bolger said, “Well, look at that, we’re almost out of sloe gin—how would you fancy a good Scotch? I’ve whisky in the back room. You just wait here a moment.”
The storeroom door was unlocked, and Abanazer entered, holding a walking-stick and an electric torch, looking even more sour of face than before.
“If you’re still in here,” he said, in a sour mutter, “don’t even think of making a run for it. I’ve called the police on you, that’s what I’ve done.” A rummage in a drawer produced the half-filled bottle of whisky, and then a tiny black bottle. Abanazer poured several drops from the little bottle into the larger, then he pocketed the tiny bottle. “My brooch, and mine alone,” he muttered, and followed it with a barked, “Just coming, Tom!”
He glared around the dark room, staring past Bod, then he left the storeroom, carrying the whisky in front of him. He locked the door behind him.
“Here you go,” came Abanazer Bolger’s voice through the door. “Give us your glass then, Tom. Nice drop of Scotch, put hairs on your chest. Say when.”
Silence. “Cheap muck. Aren’t you drinking?”
“That sloe gin’s gone to my innards. Give it a minute for my stomach to settle . . . ” Then, “Here—Tom! What have you done with my brooch?”
“Your brooch is it now? Whoa—what did you . . . you put something in my drink, you little grub!”
“What if I did? I could read on your face what you was planning, Tom Hustings. Thief.”
And then there was shouting, and several crashes, and loud bangs, as if heavy items of furniture were being overturned . . .
. . . then silence.
Liza said, “Quickly now. Let’s get you out of here.”
“But the door’s locked.” He looked at her. “Is there something you can do?”
“Me? I don’t have any magics will get you out of a locked room, boy.”
Bod crouched and peered out through the keyhole. It was blocked; the key sat in the keyhole. Bod thought, then he smiled momentarily, and it lit his face like the flash of a lightbulb. He pulled a crumpled sheet of newspaper from a packing case, flattened it out as best he could, then pushed it underneath the door, leaving only a corner on his side of the doorway.
“What are you playing at?” asked Liza impatiently.
“I need something like a pencil. Only thinner . . . ” he said. “Here we go.” And he took a thin paintbrush from the top of the desk and pushed the brushless end into the lock, jiggled it, and pushed some more.
There was a muffled clunk as the key was pushed out, as it dropped from the lock onto the newspaper. Bod pulled the paper back under the door, now with the key sitting on it.
Liza laughed, delighted. “That’s wit, young man,” she said. “That’s wisdom.”
Bod put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the storeroom door.
There were two men on the floor in the middle of the crowded antique shop. Furniture had indeed fallen; the place was a chaos of wrecked clocks and chairs, and in the midst of it the bulk of Tom Hustings lay, fallen on the smaller figure of Abanazer Bolger. Neither of them was moving.
“Are they dead?” asked Bod.
“No such luck,” said Liza.
On the floor beside the men was a brooch of glittering silver; a crimson-orange-banded stone, held in place with claws and with snake-heads, and the expression on the snake-heads was one of triumph and avarice and satisfaction.
Bod dropped the brooch into his pocket, where it sat beside the heavy glass paperweight, the paintbrush, and the little pot of paint.
Lightning illuminated the cobbled street.
Bod hurried through the rain through the Old Town, always heading up the hill toward the graveyard. The gray day had become an early night while he was inside the store-room, and it came as no surprise to him when a familiar shadow swirled beneath the streetlamps. Bod hesitated, and a flutter of night-black velvet resolved itself into a man-shape.
Silas stood in front of him, arms folded. He strode forward impatiently.
“Well?” he said.
Bod said, “I’m sorry, Silas.”
“I’m disappointed in you, Bod,” Silas said, and he shook his head. “I’ve been looking for you since I woke. You have the smell of trouble all around you. And you know you’re not allowed to go out here, into the living world.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” There was rain on the boy’s face, running down like tears.
“First of all, we need to get you back to safety.” Silas reached down and enfolded the living child inside his cloak, and Bod felt the ground fall away beneath him.
“Silas,” he said.
Silas did not answer.
“I was a bit scared,” he said. “But I knew you’d come and get me if it got too bad. And Liza was there. She helped a lot.”
“Liza?” Silas’s voice was sharp.
“The witch. From the Potter’s Field.”
“And you say she helped you?”
“Yes. She especially helped me with my Fading. I think I can do it now.”
Silas grunted. “You can tell me all about it when we’re home.” And Bod was quiet until they landed beside the church. They went inside, into the empty hall, as the rain redoubled, splashing up from the puddles that covered the ground.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
Bod told him everything he could remember about the day. And at the end, Silas shook his head, slowly, thoughtfully.
“Am I in trouble?” asked Bod.
“Nobody Owens,” said Silas, “you are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your foster-parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed.”
And then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.
Bod pulled the jacket up over his head and clambered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher vault, and then he went down, and down, and still further down.
He dropped the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.
“Here you go,” he said. “All polished up. Looking pretty.”
IT COMES BACK, said the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. IT ALWAYS COMES BACK.
The night had been long, but it was almost dawn.
Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the final resting-place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives, Marion and Joan, to the Potter’s Field. Mr. and Mrs. Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong, and Mr. Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod’s bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs. Owens’s face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.
He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter’s Field and slipped between them.
“Hullo?” he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn bush. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble, too,” he said.
Nothing.
He had replaced the jeans in the gardener’s hut—he was more comfortable in just his gray winding-sheet—but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.
When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the Potter’s Field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.
From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colors, along with the paint pot and the paintbrush.
He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully
painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters
E H
and beneath them he wrote
We don’t forget
It was almost daylight. Bedtime soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.
He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.
“Not bad,” said a pert voice from the Potter’s Field, behind him. “Not bad at all.”
But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.
Baba Yaga is a witch from Russian folklore. A thin, ugly old woman, she lives in a forest in a hut that stands on chicken legs and can move about. She flies through the air in a giant mortar using its pestle to steer. She is a witch, but, as Andreas Johns points out in Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale, she takes on a number of roles in the tales about her and is not always wicked. She sometimes offers guidance and help, but the act of seeking her out is usually seen as dangerous. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp has noted her role as a “donor” who must give the hero something needed to complete his quest—whether she wants to or not. Modern English-language authors including Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Patricia Briggs, Catherynne M. Valente, and Sarah Zettel have used the legendary witch in their fiction. There are a number of books for children featuring Baba Yaga, including The Flying Witch (HarperCollins, 2003), a picture book illustrated by Vladimir Vagin and written by the author of this story—Jane Yolen. “Boris Chernevsky’s Hands,” however, is a very different tale.
Boris Chernevsky’s Hands
Jane Yolen
Boris Chernevsky, son of the Famous Flying Chernevskys and nephew to the galaxy’s second greatest juggler, woke up unevenly. That is to say, his left foot and right hand lagged behind in the morning rituals.
Feet over the side of the bed, wiggling the recalcitrant left toes and moving the sluggish right shoulder, Boris thought about his previous night’s performance.
