by Blair Aaron
“How come?”
“Variety is the spice of life, doll.”
They continued walking down the trail, past the main street, into the cobblestone street that disappeared into the forest area between the town and the rest of the vast wilderness that stretched for miles and miles into nothingness. The moonlight lit up the trail as Elsa followed Freja through the dark woods.
“Hold my hand doll. It's chilly and I'm scared. We're such vulnerable women. Anyone--or anything--could follow us.” Freja seemed genuinely scared for her safety, and Elsa could imagine the dangers such a small woman must face when unmarried. She wondered if Freja had any children, or at her late age, any grandchildren.
“I know what you're thinking. You wonder if I have any children. Well I don't, bitch!” Elsa's heart stopped, as she wasn't sure whether Freja was serious or joking. “Just kidding doll. I get the question a lot, but I really don't have kids. It's ok. You didn't hurt my feelings.” They continued to walk in silence.
When they emerged from the woods into a clearing, a small cottage lay hidden in silhouette from the moonlight. Elsa's gut sank for some inexplicable reason, even though she felt safe with Freja and her little cottage emitted a vague scent of burned sugar. She found herself intoxicated by the white panels and solid oak door, and the murmur of music playing somewhere in the distance.
“Where is that music coming from?”
“There's probably a bunch of kids juking and jiving in the clearing behind my house. They have been doing that ever since I moved in. Can't get a wink of sleep.”
They stepped onto the porch, as Freja pulled out her cloth coin purse. She pulled out an ugly, rusted skeleton key to unlock her door and after some struggle the door clicked open, creaking slowly into the cottage to reveal dank, black space. Elsa could not see anything in front of her face, and Freja slipped into the darkness without saying anything.
“Freja where are you?” Elsa could hardly catch her breath. The air was ice cold and her heart raced faster than a hummingbird. She reached in front of her face, groping through the darkness. “Freja. Can you not hear me?” She called for her several times, making sure not to step on a cat's tail or fall over a piece of furniture. In the distance behind her house, she could hear a muted cackle and then a scratching sound next to her ear. Freja lit a match, and her skeleton like face emerged from the darkness, smiling not ten inches from Elsa's nose.
“Sorry doll. Place can't have fire when I'm gone. There is no one to watch the place and make sure it doesn't burn down. Remember, I don't have any kids or a husband, right?”
Elsa nodded. She followed Freja through the various corridors of her house, into and out of rooms. The layout of her cottage resembled something like underground catacombs, and Elsa got a sense the place was far bigger than it appeared from the outside.
“You're not going to kill me are you?” Elsa joked, an attempt to break the ice.
“Of course dear. I'm going murder you with an ax and then put you in an oven. I'll make a pie out of you,” she said. Elsa knew consciously she was joking, but Freja's outline blocking the light of the candle was very eerie. Her long slender fingers seemed to grow in the candle light as they continued ambling down the corridor.
“You can hold my hand if you want to,” she said, opening it up from behind. Elsa grabbed her hand and they continued walking for what seemed an eternity. Freja kicked open a door with her foot and guided Elsa through the door. She sat down in a rocker and waved Elsa to an area across a pit. She kneeled down and lit a small fire, and the room lit up with an orange glow. The whole area grew warmer and more comfortable by the second.
Freja leaned back in her chair and propped up her feet. “Ah, that's better. So what do you think, doll?”
“Well I haven't seen much. It's very dark.”
“Oh I'll show you more in a second.”
“OK great. I smell peach pie somewhere too.”
“You bet you do girlie. I made it special just for ya.” She smiled for second. “You're missing someone aren't ya?”
“How do you mean?”
“Someone's gone. They left you, not willingly. That was why you're upset.”
“You're a very intuitive woman, Freja.”
“Of course I am silly. Why do you think I rescued you?”
“That's true,” Elsa laughed, suddenly feeling more willing to open up to Freja, who seemed more welcoming than ever. Elsa thought she could trust her, felt Freja was her guardian angel. Added to that was the pure panic in Elsa's stomach as the memories of last night, which came barreling into her mind in regular intervals, despite the fact that she tried to keep them locked away, in order to concentrate on surviving in the moment. She breathed a sigh of exhaustion. “Well I guess I ought to tell you.”
Freja sipped a small cup of apple juice. “Go on girl. I'm waiting.”
“You mean you don't already know, Miss Clairvoyant?”
“I'm intuitive not telepathic. Let's hear it. Who killed him?”
“No one killed him. He was taken from me.”
“By who?”
“I don't know. That's the thing. I mean I think I know. But something tells me I'm wrong about it. I feel like my hunch will make me jump to conclusions.”
“I always trust my hunches doll. There is no other way to know anything.” She smiled at Elsa, with the same skeleton like grin. Elsa had surprised herself with the ease with which she'd accepted the existence of male witches, magic spells, glowing eyes, and such. To her, the past week seemed like an extended dream from which she'd only begun to awake. There was never any moment to stop and question the reality of what happened with Dorien and Theo. Maybe Elsa longed so intensely for one great passion for her life that she'd unconsciously accepted it was all fake and illusory. But the truth was obviously that it wasn't fake, she wasn't crazy, and she was going to do anything it took to find Theo, the only man whom she truly loved. On top of that, she had not met Theo and seen him for the true man he was. Her heart and body belonged to one person, the blond-haired French beauty who'd left her the night before and whom she would go to the ends of the earth to save. She knew, just knew, she could find him in the Forbidden Forest, but there was no way she would go there, because she knew she would never get out. If she did, the fire in her soul will have gone cold and her heart gone black. She cared nothing about committing atrocious acts.
She wondered what would happen if she talked to Freja about all her problems. On the one hand, she needed to vent to someone and find help. The night before had been so traumatizing her brain almost literally blocked it out. Who, after all, just goes back to work after their significant other disappears into the wind after transforming into sand? It was all very ridiculous when you put it like that, but even so, everything except her willpower must have betrayed her true state of mind today at the tavern to anyone looking close enough.
She looked around the room at Freja's small fire, the bolus of incense crackling in a small ceramic bowl. A meek bed sat under the window and a dresser and work desk was beside the doorway to the kitchen. There was nothing for sure dream-like or magical about Freja's place, and Elsa felt a stark, harsh sense of reality hit her like a ton of bricks. This sense of real life--with its disappointments and adversity and lack of organization--stood in direct contrast to the dream-state she found herself enjoying with Theo.
She was back in the land of the living, back down from cloud land. Freja might think Elsa lost her mind and concocted a bizarre story about warring warlocks to keep from facing reality. The whole town could find her and have her burned at the stake for participating in pagan rituals. There was clear danger to the dilemma, but she felt she could trust Freja. She took a deep breath, bracing herself for the possible repercussions.
“I have a kind of strange question, Freja.”
“Shoot sister.”
“Do you--do you believe in magic?”
Freja sat quiet for a second, staring down at the floor. “Maybe magic. If th
at's what you want to call it.”
“What else would you call it?”
“Spirituality. Channeling.”
“You have any experience with that?”
“No of course not,” she smiled without making eye contact with Elsa. “But when I was a kid, I liked to think I could have powers to read people's minds. Of course, this was just kid's daydreaming. I remember putting a pot of boiling water at the end of our driveway, taking 12 steps back from the pot, and throwing my grandfather's acorns one at a time into the bucket. I had overheard him talking about it with my mom. They were saying it was black magic. I was so young you know, so it didn't occur to me that it might be wrong. I was just wishing for a boyfriend to love me.”
Elsa laughed. “That's so sweet. No harm in that, I guess.”
“Maybe not. And then when I was a girl, we used to have this bucket of well water on our kitchen table, that I'd drink from at night. One night I got up from my mom's bed to get a drink and I could see this shape in the corner of the room with big bright eyes. I got real scared and threw the ladle at it, then ran into my mom's bedroom.”
“Ha! Must have been terrifying.”
“It was, girl.” Freja leaned back in her rocking chair and swayed to and fro, looking off into the distance. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“Well it kind of has to do with my boyfriend, who disappeared.”
“Oh dear. You're being serious?”
“Actually yes.”
Freja stopped rocking and bolted forward. “Listen to me right now. Promise me that what I'm about to show you you'll keep secret.”
“Ok,” Elsa said, a little scared, unsure of what Freja had in store for her.
Freja took a quick glance in the darkened area of the room behind Elsa and whispered, “Follow me.”
CHAPTER 19
Freja got up and wrapped a black shawl around her upper body, and Elsa followed her through the second doorway, into the kitchen, where Freja dug through the drawers for a large key. Then she followed her out of the house back into the shed behind her cottage. Freja unlocked the door and opened a small hole in the wooden floor of the shed. She pulled out a dirty book with frayed edges and a stained, hidebound cover. There was a strange, ornate design Elsa didn't recognize on the front of the book.
“This,” Freja said, dusting off the cover, “is something I found hidden in the well behind my house as a girl. I think my grandfather practiced witchcraft.” She sat on her legs, like a ten year-old child, showing her best girl friend her secret diary would.
“What's in the book?”
“Spells I don't really recognize.”
“Have you ever used it?”
“No never. I wouldn't know where to start. Some pages have been ripped out. There aren't any instructions either. I think whoever this belonged to used it like a reminder for the details but otherwise knew what they were doing.”
Elsa reached out to touch the book, but Freja pulled it away. “You don't know what will happen to you,” she said. “The book might have some kind of effect on you. And there's something else you should know.”
“What's that? Can you help me?”
“I can't. I have no idea what I'm doing. But maybe someone else can.”
“Who?”
“He's very old. My family, when I was very young, caught my grandfather in some kind of ritual and he was banished from the towns. They threatened to set him and the rest of our family on fire. So he went into exile, but only I know where he is.”
“Did he tell you before he left?”
“No but he left clues along the way. He told me things about where he used to live, and how much he would like to go back there. Then he said if anything ever happened to him, you'd know where to find him.”
“Do you think he's still there?”
“Maybe. I remember the cabin on the edge of a cliff.”
“So let's go. How far away is it?”
“A long journey, sister. I don't know if I can make it.”
“Of course you can, Freja. You're stronger than you think.” Elsa sat back and told Freja all the things that had happened to her over the course of the previous week. She confessed everything she knew about Theo's transformation, and his revelation about the Forbidden Forest. Freja simply listened without saying a word, content to make a comment for clarification every now and then. Elsa halfway expected her to show shock or skepticism about the whole matter, but she did nothing but crease her brow and nod her head.
CHAPTER 20
After some promises on Elsa's part to protect her from the dangers out in the wide world, she agreed to grab two horses from the stable and head out that night. Elsa was sure Freja's grandfather was still alive and could tell her and Freja how the book of spells might help them find Theo, if he was still alive. The forest echoed strange noises through the trail, as their horses plopped along the dirt path. Freja told Elsa about a childhood story her grandfather recounted called the Erlking. It was a German folktale about a demon who lived in the forest and under bridges, waiting for children to eat as they passed unprotected by their parents. Freja herself lost her parents at a very young age and was herself in many ways still a girl, despite her advanced age. In this regard, because they were both once again single, without children, Elsa could relate to her. But Elsa knew she had value as a busty woman. Before she met Theo (or Dorien) she knew she would survive somehow, without necessarily knowing who she would meet that would sweep her off her feet. Where Elsa found herself occasionally insecure about the width of her hips, Freja had no confidence whatsoever about her prospects of ever meeting anyone who would love her. She confided in Elsa that girl made fun of her for being skinny, and the whole experience of her teenage years did a load of damage to her self-worth. Elsa found herself pitying the woman more than she cared to admit.
They rode for the rest of the night, resting a bit in the morning for some breakfast. Famished from the journey and ready for some sleep, they came upon a small inn in the valley between hills that seemed to reach up to the sky. It was busy, full of burly men with hairy knuckles and bulging biceps. Freja walked close beside Elsa as they tied up their horses and approached the entrance. The closer they got, the harder she squeezed Elsa's hand. Elsa gave her one look and touched her should to assure her everything would be okay. As she followed Freja into the diner, she looked over her shoulder at an out-of-place dog in the distance, staring in their direction with a knowing look in its eyes that gave the impression of humanness. Elsa felt those eyes follow her into the diner.
Freja put on a facade of bravery and confidence, a front more than just Elsa could see through. She banged her elbows on the bar table, awkwardly getting the attention of the cook.
“Howdy pal! We're here to eat some breakfast. We've been traveling a long time and can't wait to get some sleep.”
The cook looked up. “What'll it be?”
“Ya got a menu?” Freja tried to laugh it off.
“Look lady you can't be wasting my time. What's your order?”
“Well don't you waste my time buster! Ha!” People were staring at this point. Elsa gave her a soft touch on the shoulder.
“It's OK, sir. We'll just have some grits and fried eggs.” The cook looked away to crack some eggs on the grill. Elsa looked around the diner again and noticed a hidden figure in a black garb standing conspicuously outside the main crowd, against the window. She found herself drawn to his image, even though he had his back facing her.
A fat gutted man landed his rear on the seat beside Freja, who looked straight ahead like a small dog afraid of confrontation.
“Hey baby. What you doing around these parts? You sure do have pretty arms--not!”
“Don't touch me,” Freja said, shaking now. “I'm stronger than you think.”
“I bet you are, string bean. How old and used up do you have to be to figure out you're gonna have to settle?” he asked, stroking her arm with his index finger. Tears welled up in Freja's eyes
. “I--I said don't touch me.” Elsa's face flushed hot with anger and injustice. No one would talk to her friend's like this, especially after Freja rescued Elsa from her boss yesterday. She opened her mouth to say something, but noticed a hooded figure emerge from behind the fat guy sitting on the stool. In a flicker Elsa thought she saw glowing eyes from the darkness of the hood, but chalked it up to her imagination and tiredness. Freja looked up, past the burly man on the stool, to the hooded figure and screamed. Then chaos ensued, several people got up from the table, screaming at Freja, insulting her for fighting back.
“Hag!”
“Take it off!”
“Where's your cane?!”
The crowd thought, it seemed, Freja attacked the burly man, and in the commotion the hooded figure reached out for her, and she slipped down onto the floor, as Elsa followed after. Suddenly there was a violent boom and the pile of men fighting to essentially crucify Elsa and Freja were thrown across the room in equally radial directions. They hit the wall, groaning, and Elsa and Freja jumped onto their horses from the outside. As they rode away, Elsa looked back at the hooded figure shoot out from the diner in pursuit of them.
“Do you have the book?” Elsa screamed at Freja, as their horses galloped through the wind. Freja had tears streaming from her eyes, but nodded yes. Elsa's heart sank for her. The whole ordeal clearly hurt the poor thing's feelings. They continued on in the cold wind, as Elsa looked over to her left, at a black wolf, the same animal who watched her and Freja enter the diner earlier, running along the tree line, just out of sight. Elsa's spine went cold, because her gut told her this was no ordinary wolf, with his massive paws and shiny black coat. There was the same humanness to its gaze she noticed at the diner earlier, too. Elsa thought her mind could be playing tricks on her so she looked away for a split second and when she looked back, saw the wolf was gone.
