A Witch's Burden

by D. W. Goates

  “Whose hut is this, anyway?” asked the constable aloud, almost rhetorically, as he neared the building.

  “It belongs to no one now,” replied Fuchs. “We have all shared its use on occasion since old Kraus died. It makes for a keen shelter when the storms catch us out here.”

  The constable stopped. In spite of the distance, Elke was sure she heard him gasp. The police officer with him was given pause too when he reached the window. They were both now staring into the cabin, transfixed.

  It was more than a moment before the constable recovered himself and tried the door. It would not budge.

  “Did you not go inside, then?” asked the constable, turning to the huntsman.

  “I most certainly did not. When I saw her through that window I knew that she was dead. I went to you straight away.”

  “How did you know that she was here, in the cabin?” The constable appeared to be beginning a proper investigation.

  “Well, I didn’t,” responded Fuchs matter-of-factly. “It’s just that that girl knew these woods, so she surely knew of this cabin. There are other camps out here as well.”

  “So, you were just checking here?”

  “That’s right. The Bürgermeister told me she was suspected in the woods, and knowing how cold it has been, and how long she was gone . . .”

  The constable seemed satisfied with this, as did his deputy who then circled around the back of the building.

  With the exception of Herr Fuchs, the others now began to approach, Elke in the lead.

  The constable began shaking the door violently to no avail. Like the cabin, it had been built to last. There was no lock mechanism associated with the outside door handle, so it was clearly barred in some way from within.

  Reaching the window, Elke screwed up her courage and peered inside. Though she’d thought herself prepared, she still experienced quite a shock. There, in a shady corner of the single room, sat a frightening corpse—its knees up to its chest, and its horrible grey head perched unnaturally upon them. One arm was splayed out from the thing weirdly; the other rested by its side. It was almost as if it had been looking at this small window in death.

  The monstrous thing looked nothing like Milla, but Elke knew this had been her friend. That hair, pretty and blonde as before, and so incongruous now, confirmed it.

  Revolted yet trapped in macabre fascination, Elke could not bring herself to look away. It was with relief finally that she greeted distraction; the constable began loudly throwing his shoulder into the door beside her.

  Again and again he tried, but the door would not give. Coupled with the unbroken windows—three by Elke’s count, with no sash, and too small for man or beast—it made for an intriguing dilemma.

  “How could she have died?” Elke asked, after turning away from the window and considering the matter.

  “We need to get in there and find out,” said the constable, enlisting the aid of his deputy to break down the door.

  “Wait, might I have a look at it?” Elke stopped them.

  With no reason that she shouldn’t, the constable stepped aside, certain that the woman would have no more luck than he had.

  Stooping down, she peeped into the very narrow space between door and jamb. “There’s a heavy bar here,” she observed to the attendance.

  “We know, fräulein. Now if you will please . . .” The constable was becoming annoyed.

  “Wait.”

  Still kneeling, Elke reached back and pulled a hatpin from her hair. Carefully, she slid the stiff metal pin—some six inches long—between the door and the frame, then stood up while holding it tightly in her grasp. Once standing, she gently pushed the door open before turning back to the others who all looked quite impressed.

  “Well, that’s one way of doing it,” said Loritz, one of the mayor’s men, chiding the constable.

  “Yes, thank you, fräulein. Now, please stand aside,” said the constable, forgetting that first entry to this cabin was no reward.

  While the rest remained outside, the constable and his officer entered to investigate. They took their time. It was some minutes before they stepped back out, and both now wore deerskin gloves.

  “Horrible. She’s as stiff as a board,” complained the deputy.

  “There’s no sign of foul play,” added the constable. “We will need to get her back to town for a proper burial and consecration. The Lord God only knows what the Margrave has done to her out here.”

  This was the undertaker’s cue, and with the help of the two officers, the three men began the process of removing Milla’s body from the cabin.

  This work was clearly beneath the two councilmen who milled about. The skittish huntsman too made himself scarce.

  They had removed the body from the cabin and were in the process of bundling it in wool blankets when Elke finally entered the structure. It was cool and dim, with a faint scent of death. The scant afternoon light cast broad shadows in the tiny room.

  There was a pack, a large jug alongside it, and little else in the place. Inside the pack, Elke found a stale loaf of bread, some moldy cheese, a small knife, a cloth, and other basic items. The jug, stopped with a cork, was half-filled with icy water.

  How could she have died? Elke could make no sense of it. Milla had food and water available to her, and she was safe inside the cabin with no signs of entry—the door barred from within.

  “Not even a stick of furniture . . .” observed the younger and more attractive of the two mayor’s men, again Loritz, who had poked his head in the doorway.

  “Yes, these hunting cabins are quite rustic, aren’t they?” Elke replied, surprising herself with such small talk at a time like this.

  There was something about his fresh face; even his goatee could not mar it.

  After glancing outside again, Loritz turned back to her and said, “It looks as if we’re almost ready to go. Come, fräulein. It will be dark soon.” With this he reached out his hand to help her up. She had sat down on the stone floor as she examined the contents of the pack.

  Nothing was worth taking from this place, and given that anything she took would have such a terrible association, she resolved to leave it all. As they stepped to the door, Elke made one last pass with her eyes, still looking for any clue to her friend’s fate. She spied something in the fireplace—dark, obscured among the ashes.

  “Wait,” said Elke, pausing near the doorway and staring at the fireplace.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Elke, as she moved over and stooped down to peer into the ash.

  With a crude metal poker from the hearth, she stabbed at the thing until realizing it was a piece of metal. She raked it out onto the hearth while Loritz came back in to stand behind her.

  “It’s an axe head,” said the young man curiously, as Elke picked it up with her hand to examine it more closely.

  It had been burned black.

  “Why on earth would you put an axe head in the fire?” he continued, perplexed.

  “Perhaps it was the whole of the axe,” Elke countered.

  “So . . .” he said, puzzling aloud, “Why would you put a whole axe in the fire? Especially when there is half a cord of wood stacked outside . . .”

  “There is?” Elke asked. “Where?”

  “It’s around the back, along the chimney.”

  They both looked blankly at one another. She could see that he too now was interested in solving this mystery. After a moment she stood again, and they went outside together where Elke confirmed his observation about the firewood.

  At this time the constable called to them to make ready to leave. Behind him the undertaker was already on his horse, and there was a new woolen bundle upon the pack horse lashed behind him.

  “We found this in the fireplace,” Elke said, holding out the axe head as they appr
oached the rest of the group.

  “It’s an axe head. So what?” replied the impatient constable.

  “Why would you burn an axe?” countered Elke’s fellow detective from beside her.

  “Let me see that,” said Herr Fuchs. He had been keeping his distance from the cabin, but now seemed more inclined to give the undertaker a wide berth. After examining the axe head, he went over to the cabin and looked in from the doorway. Turning, he expressed with surprise, “There’s no furniture . . . Where is the furniture?”

  “You mean to say that it had furniture?” Elke asked.

  “Naturally! A small bed, a table, and a chair. Where are they?” Fuchs was clearly confounded.

  “Well, were they not there when you found her?” inquired the constable.

  “I don’t know . . . I’m not sure . . . I told you, I didn’t go inside,” replied the distressed huntsman.

  Walking back to the cabin, Elke examined it again, looking inside and out, but nothing else caught her eye.

  “Come, fräulein, we must go. We are already late and will not beat the night as it is.” The constable sounded now more concerned than annoyed.

  “Wait! Let’s think about this for a minute.” The determined teacher then quickly tried to spell out what they knew in a last-ditch attempt to resolve the mystery. “We know that Milla knew these woods. And we know she was alone; the door was barred from the inside.”

  Before Elke could continue, however, the constable, seeing where this was going, put the kibosh on the young amateur. “We don’t know that. You assume that. The Margrave has many agents in these woods—fiends not the least concerned with door bars. You may meet them yourself here if you like, but we are leaving.”

  Unswayed, Elke continued. “We know she had food and water. We know that she had firewood, but that she chose instead to burn the furniture, even the axe . . .”

  With sudden realization, Elke shot Loritz a knowing look—one that he returned before rescuing her from the constable’s wrath.

  “Something was outside the cabin preventing Milla from getting her firewood.” Loritz said this with a flourish, as if they had solved a crime.

  The group stood there considering this until Herr Fuchs, the huntsman, re-approached the cabin and began surveying the ground all around it. Returning from behind the cabin, he bid Elke to quit the doorway, and this too he carefully and intently examined.

  “Here, look here . . .” he said finally, indicating scratches and nicks upon the sturdy door, “and here . . .” as he pointed to paw prints in the dirt.

  There were so many prints that Elke wondered at how they could have missed them before—so many prints, still, despite the cover from their own clumsy feet.

  “Wolves,” said the huntsman, gravely.

  “It must have been some siege . . .” Elke shivered as the chill of night began to slowly creep upon them.

  They did not make it. Despite the faster pace set by the huntsman in their return to Waldheim, the group still spent most of the journey in harrowing blackness, feeling their way through the forest.

  Lanterns had been brought for this contingency, but Elke still could not fathom how it was that their dim light was sufficient to prevent Herr Fuchs from getting them hopelessly lost. In contrast to their journey out, the company was rather loquacious in their return. Elke had never heard grown men chat so about matters amounting to nothing. Their nervous small talk convinced her that she was perhaps the bravest of the bunch, though she too was quite afraid.

  Once clear of the canopy and in the fields at the edge of town, the relief of these travelers was palpable; the tinge of tension in their voices relaxed. The teacher could see now by the moonlight that their guide had set them upon a course to Rösner’s house.

  Once there, the constable rapped upon the door.

  “Georg.”

  Georg Rösner answered the door and looked around at the assemblage. All had dismounted and were standing there, solemnly, in a half circle.

  “Is it . . .?” This was Helma Rösner from inside behind her husband.

  “Milla is dead, Georg. I am sorry. We have her body,” related the constable dolefully.

  Distraught, Helma cried, “My Milla! My precious child!” before pushing past Georg and out into the night. “Where? Where is my daughter?” she pleaded, inconsolable, before spying the odd woolen bundle bound upon the horse.

  She ran to it, embraced it, startling the horse.

  No one else spoke. Herr Rösner remained in the doorway—a sad shell of a man.

  Weeping, whimpering with her face in the wool blanket, Helma lost all strength and fell to her knees. Throwing her head back she expelled a hair-raising and throaty dead scream. This scream—half lament, and half tortured release—then gave way to a fresh wave of sobs from the pathetic woman. The whole scene unnerved even the undertaker who finally spoke, compelled from his somber stupor.

  “We can make the funeral arrangements tomorrow . . .” he said to nobody in particular, though he faced more the baker.

  All found it difficult to look directly at such anguish as Milla’s mother now embodied.

  The undertaker had scarcely finished speaking, when Helma, with newfound fortitude, rose to her feet. Whirling in the direction of the door, she spoke again, this time implacable.

  “You!”

  She was staring at her husband.

  “You!”

  This time she was louder, even more forceful, and she began, with menace, to approach the doorway.

  “What have you done?!”

  And with this final shrieked accusal, the mad woman fell upon Georg Rösner with her claws as if to put out the man’s eyes.

  IV

  The nightmare of Milla’s fate only served to reinforce Elke’s determination to leave Waldheim and its inhabitants at her earliest opportunity.

  Furthermore, her attendance at the funeral services represented the last of her free association with the townsfolk, and this was more out of a sense of obligation to her departed friend than in answer to any request from the Rösner family.

  Loritz called at the school late the following afternoon to notify Elke of the times set for the vigil service and interment. She took him up on his rather gallant offer to act as her escort to the sad ceremonies but, given the circumstances, was of no mind to deal with his obvious interest in her.

  At the church, Elke felt compelled to give the Rösners a wide berth, and this was further facilitated by the behavior of Frau Rösner. The priest found it impossible to conduct the service over the distraught woman’s ravings, and she eventually had to be ushered out. Later, at the gravesite, the bereft mother was nowhere to be seen; with her unsettling disruptions absent, Elke was afforded the opportunity to consider Georg and his clan more closely.

  They were certainly a solemn lot: Georg, his daughter, and her husband, Herr Hartmann, all looking down into the dirt, yet there was a certain superficiality to their mournfulness. Elke wondered to herself as she stared intently at the baker—the priest busy intoning—was this the face of a man who had just lost his daughter? Was this the face of a man whose wife had lost her mind with grief?

  Elke found this family’s behavior so off-putting, especially that of Georg, that she later declined Loritz’s kind invitation to luncheon and went straight home.

  Several days passed before Elke would overhear scuttlebutt suggesting that the crazed Helma Rösner had been sent away to Munich for incarceration in an asylum there. Despite her withdrawal from all society beyond that at school, Fräulein Schreiber could not avoid Fräulein Rückert, who relished promulgating such gossip—yet another factor the unhappy exile found revolting.

  With little joy and growing isolation, Elke sought merely to endure. Even the weather seemed against her. Each day it grew colder and the sky more grey. Before, she had been assured of pleasant sunshi
ne at least a day or two each week. Now all that she could rely upon was a dreary blanket of clouds that cast even midday as twilight.

  The nightmares that had begun with worry over her friend’s plight never did subside, though neither did they persist in vividity to her initial vision of horror. Elke would often wake in a feverish sweat in spite of the cold and draft of her lonely house. Wolves, the forest at night, a faceless Margrave, Helma’s scream, and the staring sockets of that corpse all featured prominently in her near-nightly torture.

  One night, upon again starting from a deep sleep, Elke, in her confusion, suspected another nightmare. However, this time something was different: her body was not wet with perspiration, nor did her heart race. It even occurred to her now that she had been quite warm and comfortable under her blankets mere moments before; only the sudden upright shift and resulting chill gave cause to her immediate distress.

  She listened carefully. It was as quiet as a grave. And yet for some reason here she was, sitting bolt upright in bed. Surely another terrible dream had to have been the cause, but this obvious culprit seemed less likely the more her mind stirred its faculties into operation. No perspiration, no palpitations, nothing present of what had accompanied her previous terrors, and unlike times before, she could recall no fresh disturbing imagery. Thus finding no cause for alarm, beyond her queer inexplicable arousal, Elke lay back down into sheets that had unfortunately cooled during her brief absence. She was just beginning to re-nestle herself in among the blankets when it came again.

  There was a loud rattling noise, unmistakable—something was messing about with the door downstairs.

  In an instant she was in her slippers and robe, had lit a candle, and was at her door. But just before opening it, it dawned on her that the candle might reveal her position. Leaving it on a chest behind the wall, though still lit, she crouched and slowly pulled open the door to her small room.

  The sound was louder now. Clearly someone or something outside was trying to get in through the locked door. That they, or it, did not have a key was evident from the way that the door shook. Elke was terrified, but also mindful of the fact that if she stayed in her room, she could be trapped. Her plan was to use the starlight to navigate the stair, as she had in times past. That light on many a night shone plenty enough through the downstairs windows to guide her to the toilet room below. Tonight, however, she was having difficulty. Whether by cloud cover, or perhaps the candle fouling her night sight, she could not see anything—not even the faintest outline of the stair beyond her doorway. There were un-blinded windows flanking that outside door downstairs as well that betrayed not the faintest glow. If the thing at that door required illumination then it was as deficient as she in this regard.