“My word!” exclaimed Hans, peering into a jar of something slimy. “This place is filled with things I can’t put a name to.”
“Best if you don’t look at that shelf,” said Gretel, gesturing at the label over it that declared the collection to be Eyes, teeth, essential organs, and other body parts.
Hans recoiled. “I had no idea magicians had any use for that sort of thing.”
“This one did, apparently. Though by most reliable accounts, even such extreme ingredients did not improve his wizardry.”
“Where did he get all these, d’you suppose?”
“As I said, best not to dwell upon the contents of those particular jars.”
“But they might contain Clues. How do we know they don’t?”
“We don’t know, we just hope.” Gretel dragged herself to her feet to resume her own search. “We hope that a Clue, when we see it, presents itself as such loudly and clearly and sends us in a direction we might actually wish to go.” She stood next to her brother and followed the line of his appalled gaze. It came to rest on something greenish-blue and wobbly that bobbed about in a yellow liquid. “And that,” she said, pointing, “is not a direction I wish to go in my worst nightmares.”
They continued to hunt in hungry silence. Despite the heat of the day, the sorcerer’s shed was grimly damp and cold as evening descended, having no sunshine or fire to cheer it. The room was so stuffed with artifacts and paraphernalia that looking for anything was slow and difficult work, let alone looking for something that might not be there. Or if it was there, might not be as willing to reveal its importance as Gretel hoped.
“I say, look at this!” Hans held up a dusty crystal ball. “Perhaps we could peer into it and see the future.”
“Seeing the sorcerer’s body would be more useful.”
“That too. Shall I give it a rub? No, wait, that’s for lamps and genies.”
Before Gretel could respond to this there was a rustling on a ledge above their heads, just beneath the ceiling. Scrolls and packets and bundles were dislodged by Something, so that they rained down upon the seekers. The Something that had done the dislodging then flew about the crowded space, swooping and flapping in a manner that immediately set Hans squawking and flapping, while Gretel issued stern commands for him to calm down and stand still. The more he flapped and crashed about, knocking things over with every panicked movement, the more the Something zipped back and forth with increasing alarm until at last it caught its feet in Gretel’s hair, from which it dangled, trembling, silent, and terrified.
“Don’t move, sister mine! There is Something stuck in your hair!”
Gretel ground her teeth but kept otherwise perfectly still. “Yes, thank you, Hans. I had noticed that.”
After the sudden frantic activity there followed a tense, silent stillness.
“I wonder, Hans,” said Gretel softly, “without troubling yourself to get up, are you able to tell me what exactly that Something is?”
After his flailing about, Hans had washed up, supine, atop a pile of sacks filled with heaven knew what, and righting himself would have been a clumsy task. Gretel had no wish to startle her passenger further, for who could tell what it might do next?
“It appears to be a small bird. No, not a bird … a bat! It’s a tiny bat. Aaah, quite a charming little thing really. If you don’t look at its piggy nose. Or those rather beady eyes. Or … those teeth.”
“A tad more detail than I required, but thank you again, Hans.”
At that moment the door opened and Frau Arnold arrived carrying a tray bearing two steaming mugs and a plate of biscuits. Hans, galvanized by the sight of food, hauled himself upright. The resulting noise—much of it puffing from Hans—caused the bat to struggle, so that its feet became ever more tightly ensnared in Gretel’s hair.
“Oh!” cried Widow Arnold, “I see you have found Jynx. I have not seen him since poor Ernst … left us. I had thought him lost forever too.” With great tenderness, she untangled the shivering creature, stroking it and speaking soothing words to it until it became sufficiently calm to perch, like a miniature pitch-black parrot, upon her shoulder.
“Jynx was my husband’s dearest pet. He was never without him. He would even encourage the little thing to assist him in his sorcery.” Evidently sitting upright did not come naturally to Jynx, for he quickly flopped forward to hang upside down from Frau Arnold’s lace collar.
Gretel frowned at the furry creature. “Most magicians choose a fluffy rabbit or a snowy white dove …”
“Oh, Ernst had no interest in domesticated beings. He loved nature, all things wild. He found Jynx on one of his walks.” The widow’s eyes filled with tears once more. She looked up with a quivering lip. “Oh, but this is proof indeed that my poor dear husband is dead, for he would never have gone anywhere without Jynx!” She fell to weeping again, so that the bat was forced to tighten its grip while sobs racked the woman’s frail frame.
“Let us not come to hasty conclusions,” Gretel said, and then, in an attempt to divert Evalina’s thoughts from sadness she went on, “I see you have brought us some refreshment. How very kind.”
“Oh, yes. I thought you might be in need of it after so many hours in here.”
Hans brightened. “Exceptionally thoughtful of you, Frau Arnold,” he said, taking the mug and sniffing its contents.
“Warm milk,” the hostess explained. “And some oatmeal biscuits I baked myself.”
“A nip of something reviving in there, perhaps?” asked Hans hopefully.
The widow shook her head and resumed her sobbing.
Hans made a face at Gretel, who made one back. He attempted to bite into a biscuit but it would not yield to his teeth. He set to dunking it in his drink in the hope it might be rendered edible. Gretel felt her own appetite fade. She turned back to Frau Arnold.
“Let’s just suppose,” she said as gently as her patience would permit, “just for a moment or two, let us suppose that Ernst is living still. Is there anywhere special to him, other than his beautiful home, naturally, anywhere else he loved that he might go if he was distressed in any way? Somewhere he went alone?”
“Oh, we always did everything together! Ernst used to say that an hour spent apart from me was an hour without joy. We would go away to charming little towns for weekends, and once he even took me to Munich, though that was quite a long time ago, and was very expensive, and anyway Ernst said there was more beauty and delight to be found in our own dear home than any city in the world.” She paused to give a little hiccup of sadness. Gretel waited. At last Frau Arnold fetched from the fluffy, marshmallow realms of her mind another spoonful of information. “Though of course I never went with him when he was gathering things for his work. He always made those trips alone. He said I would be bored, and too much of a distraction for him because he would always be gazing at me and holding my hand when he should have been paying attention to his work.”
“A highly perceptive and considerate man,” Gretel said, raising her pencil over her notebook to write down what she was sure would be the very place where questions would be answered. At last, something that could be called a lead! She would get herself there as swiftly as possible, and was confident her investigations would then bear fruit. And therefore payment. “And where, pray tell me, was it that the good sorcerer took himself off to on these … work trips?” Behind her she heard a squashed, cynical sound emerge from Hans. Fortunately Widow Arnold was deaf to its implications.
“Always the same place,” she said with a flat sigh, as if her husband’s guess that she would be bored there was being borne out. “The woods.”
Gretel hesitated, pencil poised. “The woods? You mean the forest to the west of Gesternstadt?”
Hans made another small noise, this one involuntary and provoked by the very mention of the place of his childhood trauma.
“Yes,” said Evalina, “Ernst went there to gather the special items he required for some of his magic.”
Gretel suddenly found the magicarium rather airless, and the stays of her corset rather tight. She tried to take a steadying breath, but little by way of air could be found.
“Herr Arnold foraged for herbs and fungi, perhaps?” she asked the widow. “Along the perimeter, one assumes.”
“Oh, no. He would be gone for days. He said that the things he needed could only be found deep, deep, deep inside the woods.”
Hans echoed with a squeak, “Deep, deep, deep …”
“That’s right,” she went on. “In the very darkest of dark parts.”
“Darkest of dark …,” Hans murmured.
“And he always made these forays alone?” Gretel tried to write something down, but found her hand was on the shaky side for good penmanship.
Frau Arnold nodded. “Except for Jynx,” she explained with a wan smile. “His faithful companion always accompanied him. Always,” she repeated, the smile crumpling into a grimace of woe. Excusing herself, she hurried out of the shed, the bat detaching himself to flit back to find a beam from which to hang.
For a moment neither Hans nor Gretel spoke. There sat between them, fatly and heavily, their shared horror of the woods. This abhorrence was so very fat and so very heavy, that, given the space already taken up by the siblings, it pressed up uncomfortably against both of them. At last Gretel shoved it aside and resumed her search.
“What are you looking for now?” asked Hans. “There are no Clues here, I am certain of it, and after what Frau Arnold said about the deep, the dark, the you-know-what, well, that’s that, isn’t it? I mean to say, you have your work to do and all that, but you can’t go … there. You wouldn’t countenance going … there. Would you?”
“I must go where the trail leads me, Hans.”
“Yes, but the deep … the dark …”
“Even there. If the sorcerer vanished into the forest, then into the forest I must go after him.”
“But, Gretel, so much deep darkness, so much dark deepness.”
“Will you stop that. You are no help to me if you fall to pieces. I shall, of course, do my utmost to be safe. Believe me, brother mine, I am not in a hurry to risk my neck or my sanity if it can be avoided. No, what is needed here—to minimize risk—is planning. Clearheaded thought. And as much information as possible.” Gretel sifted through a pile of papers upon the table as she spoke. “What would assist me most would be some manner of directions; some details regarding the precise spot visited by the sorcerer; something resembling a map,” she explained.
There exists, of course, a natural bond twixt sister and brother that binds them through all the trials and tribulations of life. That bond is strengthened tenfold should they endure particular hardships and calamities while young. So it was with Gretel and Hans, which meant that even with her gaze averted, even with her back to her brother, even with Hans’s best efforts to appear casual and nonchalant—or perhaps precisely because of those efforts—she was able to detect a subtle shift in his stance, a tiny twitching of his nose, a minute flickering of his eyes that gave away the fact that he was Hiding Something.
She turned to face him, hands on hips. “Let’s have it,” she said.
“Have what?”
“Whatever it is that you have just this moment attempted to conceal with your ample posterior. A good try, and a fair chance you might have succeeded, given your rear end could probably bring about its very own lunar eclipse if the need arose, but you can’t fool me, Hans.” She held out a hand. “The Whatever, if you please.”
Hans resisted for only a matter of seconds, knowing that he could not outwit his sister once she had found him out. He shifted away from the workbench, reached behind himself, and pulled out a faded, folded, ragged, and worn sheet of paper, marked with drab colors and smudged lines and points.
“This?” he asked, his face a study in innocence.
Gretel took it from him and shook out the folds. “Yes, Hans,” she said, still maintaining a stern glare, without even lowering her eyes to look at it. “This thing that so resembles a map that it is, in fact, a map.”
Hans watched her as she peered at the chart through her lorgnettes. “I was only trying to do what’s best for you, don’t you know? Trying to protect you. As a brother should. I mean to say, we haven’t fared well in woods in the past, you and I. And the worry is, my worry is, that if a person is handed a map, and once they have that map in their hand, then they oftentimes take it into their heads to follow the thing wherever it directs them. Which in this case is somewhere …”
“Hans, I swear, if you utter the words ‘dark’ and ‘deep’ …”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Gretel spread the map on the table and traced a wobbly line with a determined finger. “Your concern is touching but unnecessary, Hans. The way is clearly marked. Herr Arnold must have used this to guide him to his secret destination many times.”
“Well, if he did, and it’s here, and he isn’t, then how is he there without it?”
“Presumably the route is now so familiar to him he has no more need of it.”
“So you do believe him still alive and gone to this … place?”
“I believe it possible. Possibly even probable.” She refolded the map and gently but firmly pushed it down her cleavage so that it nestled securely in the tight embrace of her corset. “What is more, it is the only real lead we have. Whatever drew the sorcerer into the woods, whether he be there now or not, will reveal to us the truth about what happened to him. I am convinced of it.”
“So you are going then? Into the forest.”
“Not I, Hans. We.”
Gretel was a firm believer in a firm hand when it came to managing her brother and his more expensive habits. Not the least of these was his propensity for whiling away evenings that turned into whole nights at the Inn. There he would drink and gamble, and depending on the cards, the company, and the quality of the ale, he might come home having made a gain, or—and this was more likely—he would return with empty pockets. Time and again Gretel had impressed upon him that his talent for poker, and indeed all games card based, was compromised by his talent for drinking. The Inn, unfortunately, promoted the pursuit of both at the same time. Given their parlous financial state, she would ordinarily have ushered Hans home after their work at the magicarium, directing him to their own brandy bottle and then the kitchen. However, these were not ordinary times. Gretel was all too keenly aware of the terror with which her brother regarded even the shallowest and palest of woodland glades; to ask him to go with her into the heart of the gloom on a quest for who-knew-what was to test his mettle and his loyalty both. It seemed to her, therefore, that to allow him to scuttle off to the Inn for the remainder of the evening was both fair and politic. He had seized the opportunity and the coins offered, and hastened away before she could think better of her generous gesture.
The streets of Gesternstadt were still pleasantly warm, and as Gretel made her way home she saw, to her dismay, that there were numerous couples still strolling arm in arm. She was just muttering darkly to herself about people not having anything more worthwhile to do when she noticed a particular person of a particular build and a particularly dashing burgundy cape (with gold silk lining), walking toward her. Ferdinand. She would face him. She would speak plainly. They would not converse, she would merely tell him what opinion she held of men who played fast and loose with the affections of women they had begun to give particular ideas. But then she saw again how handsome he was. Noticed anew the attractive curve of his calf. Started to feel the same blend of fuzzy warmth and sharp thrill that she always experienced in his company. Her resolve collapsed like a cheese soufflé whipped too fast from the oven. She would no doubt have humiliated herself then and there on the Grand Strasse had not a tall, slender, young woman emerged from a doorway to take General Ferdinand’s arm.
Moving more quickly than she had done for many a long moon, Gretel darted into the cover of an alleyway. She peered out. The couple st
rolled on. Arm in arm. They chatted. They smiled. They laughed! The laughter was the pin in the balloon of Gretel’s composure. The second they had moved out of sight she bolted from her hidey-hole and strode across the square, turning sharp left, not toward her own door, but in the direction of that of the dressmaker. The next time she saw the Uber General, she promised herself, she would be resplendent not only in her new wig, but in a new gown. She would be the most glamorous, most sophisticatedly turned out woman at the concert when the day came, and no flippety-gibbet slip of a look-at-my-tiny-waist fiancée would be able to hold a candle to her.
FIVE
The next two days were filled with rather too much activity for Gretel’s liking. Having studied the map, she spied a small dwelling indicated at a point she calculated to be less than a day’s walk from where the stagecoach would drop them. This calculation was based on nothing firmer than a vague hunch, propped up by an uncertain feeling, and further supported by a desire for it to be so. Gretel had sent a letter to the occupant of the cottage requesting food and lodgings for one night, with the promise of fair payment and heartfelt gratitude. Beyond that, they would have to camp. The notion was a depressing one. Gretel was a connoisseur of life’s little luxuries, and the least of these she believed to be good food and a comfortable bed. Camping, from what she had heard, seemed to be defined by an absence of both these things.
The Sorcerer's Appendix Page 4
