She swept out of the room.
“I say!” said Hans again, staring at the closed door after she had gone as if he might be able to see through it and watch her some more. “Not a hint of witchiness there, eh, sister mine?”
“Maybe not, Hans,” Gretel agreed, pulling her damp boots off her damp feet. “But have a care: charm can undo a man quicker than a sharp knife.”
Zelda Burgdorf continued to ooze charm for the entire evening. And very irresistible it was too. Gretel herself soon succumbed to it. After lurid-colored cocktails of Hans’s own invention, they were shown their own small but comfortable rooms where they were able to change, wash, and dress in the few dry, clean clothes they had left. Most things had received a dunking in the brook and so had to be hung up by the kitchen stove to dry. Their host kindly provided them with curious flowing robes and housecoats, prompting Hans to declare as they went to the table that they resembled nothing more than a party of artists and poets. There followed a delicious meal of trout stuffed with cream and almonds, served with minted potatoes and green beans, and then a pudding of treacle sponge. All the while Zelda regaled them with tales of her glamorous past.
“You have lived in so many fascinating and faraway places,” Hans observed, dabbing brandy from his chin. “How came you here?”
“Oh, a girl can tire of the city,” Zelda told him. Which is to say she told him nothing.
Gretel fought to resist the effects of food, drink, and the soothing environment. She must see if the woman knew anything about the sorcerer, without, of course, giving away too much about her own reasons for venturing into the woods. Which Zelda had not asked about at all. Which either meant she was extremely discreet and well-mannered, or something else. Besides which, much as Gretel wanted to enjoy her hostess’s company and relax both mind and body, she could not shake off the niggling sense that something was amiss. And niggling senses that could not be shaken off should not be ignored. They were, experience had taught her, tenacious for a reason.
“And what of Herr Burgdorf? Is he … not here, your husband?” Gretel asked, deliberately leaving the question as open as possible.
Zelda gave a shrug and took another gulp of her viridian cocktail. Despite serving two types of wine with supper and now a good cognac, she herself never drank anything else. “No, none of my husbands is here,” she said.
“How many were there?” Hans wanted to know. Thanks to Zelda he had a fresh, neat dressing over his eye, but the bruising the hazel stick had inflicted was spreading out to blacken and blue half his face. The other half was its more customary after-dinner pink.
“Four. Poor lambs, I couldn’t keep any one of them for long. The first stepped into a bear trap—oh, he was such a fine, handsome young man! The second drowned in Lake Como on our honeymoon—he was a weak swimmer, you understand. The third,” she paused to drink a little more, “the third was rather elderly. A beautiful mind, so insightful, so clever, that was what I loved about him. And a lover of fine art. We traveled to so many places to view masterpieces.”
“What happened to him?” Hans asked.
“He took up painting, wanting to emulate his heroes. Then one day he mistook his turpentine for his water glass and …” she made a rueful face and shook her head. “So very sad. His paintings were getting really rather good, poor dear.”
“And number four?” Gretel asked.
“Ah, my true love! My fourth husband was a dealer in diamonds. Oh, what times we had! Amsterdam, London, the Orient …”
“And he is not living still?” Hans ventured.
“Alas he is not. Fell down a mine shaft. It was so deep they could not recover his body. And he’d only owned the mine a few weeks. However,” she said, brightening a little, “they did find two very large diamonds down there when they were trying to reach him. Poor dear lamb must surely have been trying to get one for me. See here?” She extended an elegant hand and I saw that the emerald ring of earlier had been exchanged for a large diamond solitaire.
“A fine memento,” Gretel said.
Zelda gave a sigh. “I suppose it is. But a memento won’t keep a girl warm at night.”
To her left, Hans’s color deepened and he gave a little cough.
“Tell me,” Gretel pressed on, “have you ever had a guest staying here by the name of Ernst Arnold?”
“I don’t believe so. But then, guests do not always give their real names. I pride myself on running a discreet establishment, Fraulein. Their business is not my business.”
“A laudable sentiment. I wonder then, might you have noticed a sorcerer among your clientele ever?”
Zelda’s face was inscrutable. She sipped her drink some more, running a long finger around the rim of the glass. “Sorcerer? No. No, I think not.”
Gretel nodded and swirled her brandy in its snifter. It was possible the woman was telling the truth. What seemed to undermine that possibility, however, was her complete lack of interest in the subject. It seemed only human nature, having been asked about a particular man with a particular name and a very particular profession, to wish to know more. Why did Zelda not ask even one question about why Gretel was looking for him, or why she thought he might have stayed at her house? Such a lack of interest struck Gretel as suspicious.
“You live quite a solitary existence now, Frau Zelda, if I may say, compared to your earlier years. Do you not find life in the woods a little quiet?” Gretel asked.
“Darling, I’m done with all that running around!” Zelda insisted, dunking another olive in her cocktail. “No, it’s the simple life for me now, although as I say,” here she paused to pass a scrutinizing eye over Hans, “a girl can want for male company now and again.”
Hans drained his glass.
Gretel rolled her eyes. All she needed was her brother getting into some sort of romantic entanglement with a merry widow. She hauled herself to her feet and took Hans by the arm.
“We have an early start. Thank you for a fine meal and a pleasant evening. We will bid you good night.”
She steered Hans to his room and then went to her own. It was small, low-ceilinged, and cottagy, but the furnishings were, like those of the downstairs, plush, lush, and just a touch decadent. The bed looked particularly inviting, with its satin-edged velvet quilted cover and feather pillows. Still wearing her borrowed clothes, Gretel pitched forward onto it and, medicated by cocktails and brandy, and without bothering to extinguish the candle on her bedside table, she was soon sleeping deeply.
This blissful rest did not, however, last more than an hour. She awoke from a disturbing dream, in which she was once again ensnared in the gingerbread house of the witch of her childhood. She came to, clawing her way out of the nightmare, sweaty and breathless. For an instant, when she opened her eyes, the room was transformed from being the small but sumptuous bedchamber she had entered earlier into a pokey, bare room filled with dust and cobwebs. The image was fleeting, but unsettling. Brushing it off as a remnant of her dream, Gretel got out of bed and threw open the shutters. It was a clammy night, so that little by way of fresh air was to be had. She sat at the dressing table and pulled toward her the vanity case she had so devotedly carted so many miles. A tiny shiver of excitement ran through her at the thought of what lay within. On an impulse, she opened the case and lifted out her wonderful wig. It felt soft and luxurious and expensive in her hands. She took a brush to it and repaired any flattening brought about by its being confined and conveyed. Then, with great care, she set it upon her head, pushing her own wayward locks up underneath it, and securing it with several hairpins. She considered the results in the looking glass. For a better view, she dropped the chain of her lorgnettes over her head—taking pains not to snag the wig or its adornments—and lifted the glasses to her eyes.
“Splendid!” she said to herself. “Simply splendid.”
But as she looked she glimpsed, just for a fraction of a second, something that caused her heart to skip a beat. It seemed that the room behind her,
as reflected in the mirror, was again altered to the version she had seen in her nightmare. She whipped around, but all was as it should be, velvety and lovely. The candle had burned down to a short stub, so that it gave off a feeble and unreliable light. Rubbing her eyes and silently chastising herself for giving in to her overfed and overstimulated imagination, Gretel decided she needed to freshen up in order to feel better, and hopefully to get back to sleep. Her borrowed shift dress was clinging to her uncomfortably, and her throat was unpleasantly dry. She needed water, and her own nightdress, which should by now have dried out.
Taking the candle and tiptoeing so as not to wake the household—and still wearing her wig—Gretel left her room and descended the narrow stairs to the kitchen, where the wet garments had been put to dry. The room was still messy with dishes and leftover food, but was otherwise as one might expect, with simple wooden furniture, a dresser of jars and bottles of preserves and pickles, bundles of herbs and onions hanging from the beams, and a large, black stove with a sizeable oven in which, no doubt, the evening meal had been cooked. Gretel found her clothes on the wooden rack. Her nightdress was perfectly dry, so she changed into it, taking care not to dislodge her wig as she dropped it over her head. She found her short, green woolen cape that had been in Hans’s pack, and that too appeared to be free of river water. She pulled it around her shoulders for ease of carrying, and pushed her feet into her nicely warmed boots. Feeling restored a little already, she fetched a cup of water from the pail beneath the window and then headed back to her room.
As she climbed the stairs she began to feel a building crossness take hold of her. What ought to have been a simple walk over a few miles had left them battered and bruised, particularly Hans, with ruined supplies and equipment. They had both drunk more than was good for them, which meant they would both be traveling under the weight of headaches the next day, a fact that would not be helped by her lack of sleep, and to cap it all, Frau Burgdorf had not only been unforthcoming about the sorcerer, she had been downright secretive. Why, Gretel wondered?
In her chamber, she unfolded the map once more and squinted at it in the candlelight. Tomorrow would see their trek begin in earnest. Without any further information as to Herr Arnold’s whereabouts, they had no option other than to rely on the map and trust it to lead them to him. With a sigh of irritation she folded the thing up and stuffed it into her cape pocket. She was at the point of flopping into bed once more when a curious noise snagged her attention. She cocked her ear. There it was again. It was something between a snigger and a cry, and appeared to be coming from one of the other bedchambers.
Stepping onto the landing and hearing the sound a third time, she identified its source as Hans’s room. Perhaps he too was experiencing a bad dream. As the thought formed in her mind, Gretel was certain she saw the purple and scarlet rug under her feet fade to nothing, revealing bare boards, worn and splintery instead. She blinked hard and clutched at the handrail of the top of the staircase to steady herself. But her palm landed not on a polished walnut balustrade, but a broken chunk of rough-hewn pine, crumbling from the work of the woodworm that inhabited it. The guttering light of her candle threw out jagged shadows, upon the edges of which half-glimpsed forms jumped in and out of her vision. She began to feel a dark foreboding churn her stomach.
She thought of calling out to Hans, but something made her hold back. She crept to the door of his room and pushed it open so that she could peer inside. What she saw made her quail. Her brother was sitting up in bed, sporting a black eye patch, and wearing a pair of borrowed red Chinese silk pajamas and a dopey grin. Zelda, wearing a feather-trimmed chiffon chemise barely long enough to cover her embarrassment, was dancing seductively around the room. Such a scene would be naturally disturbing, given that she was witnessing erotic goings-on involving her own sibling, but that was not the worst of it. Her vision continued to register two versions of everything, slipping from one to the other as if the house was under some manner of spell. And that spell appeared to be losing its hold, so that the glimpses of the darker, scarier reality it was designed to obscure were becoming more frequent and more prolonged. As she watched, Zelda herself altered from the glamorous, winsome woman of a certain age to an ancient, hook-nosed, toothless, wart-ridden crone. Her soft, lithe body revealed its true self to be bony and saggy and mottled. It was clear Hans was only seeing the pretty version, for even half-drunk he would have screamed and fled in terror had be realized the nature of what was now climbing onto the bed with him.
Gretel flung wide the door and hollered, “Hans! Hans, get up! You are being deceived!”
“What’s that? Dash it all, Gretel, a little respect for a fellow’s privacy …,” he gasped, coyly pulling the coverlet to his chin.
“She is not what she seems!” Gretel insisted.
Zelda the Terrible let out a furious hiss in her direction before turning back to Hans, simpering in her guise as Zelda the Tantalizing.
“Your poor sister is just jealous, Hansie. She is a lonely woman, don’t let her spoil your fun,” she cooed, tickling Hans under the chin as if he were an oversized pussy cat.
Hans all but purred. “Yes, go away, Gretel, do,” he begged, flapping a hand at her.
Gretel knew she had to get him to see the real Frau Burgdorf. She searched her mind for what she could recall about witches, but everything was deeply buried. It was not a subject she wished to think about. She forced herself to remember all that she had learned after her childhood trauma. Witches were dangerous largely because they were experts at beguiling, and Hans was, at that moment, just about as beguiled as a person could get. She ran through all the witch tests she could think of, but there was no time to strap the woman to a ducking stool, or feed her witch cakes, and the chances of getting her to agree to some sort of intimate search seemed slim.
“Hans, I tell you it is all a glamour, a spell, an enchantment! She is not what she appears to be!”
“Do go back to your own room, sister mine. You are evidently still feeling the effects of those rather wonderful cocktails.”
At that moment there was a disturbance in the air about Gretel’s head. Sensing movement, she turned just in time to see something dark come flying through the doorway, whiz past her wig, and speed into the room. It turned and swooped close to her face long enough for her to see that it was a small, fast, apparently agitated bat.
Zelda noticed it too. She let out a furious shriek as it flew toward her. It was only then that Gretel recalled that witches, though they take all manner of creatures as their familiars, won’t touch a bat. Certainly Frau Burgdorf seemed to hold a fierce antipathy toward the things, for she swiped and swatted at this one as it swooped and swooshed around the room. Not only did this cause the woman to break off from seducing Hans, it also adversely affected her ability to maintain the spell of illusion she had placed upon herself and her home. Which meant that even Hans could now see what she was.
Gretel had heard her brother utter many strange sounds over the years. Some had been drunken expostulations. Others had been gleeful exclamations (usually prompted by food). Others still had been strangled cries uttered in the midst of some perceived danger. However, never, never before had she heard anything like the scream of horror that now came forth from him. And as he screamed he leaped up from the bed as if fired from a slingshot. Zelda was busy with the bat, which seemed to be making a point of tangling with her. It broke off to fly close to Gretel for an instant, so that she could stare right into its bright little eyes, and then it went back to attacking the witch. Gretel suddenly grasped that this was not any old bat, it was Jynx, the sorcerer’s bat. She had no more time to ponder this point, however, as Hans was forcing her out of the room.
“Run, Gretel! For pity’s sake, don’t just stand there. Can’t you see what she is? What that is?”
Indeed she could, for now, her trickery exposed, the witch dropped the pretense of the illusory spell, and all and everything was revealed in its true state.
The house was no longer an inviting, sumptuous Bohemian retreat; it was a fetid, dank, and filthy witch’s lair. As Gretel and Hans charged down the stairs they could hear the witch cursing them and giving chase. The stairs wobbled and shook, as if trying to trip them up. The kitchen, which had looked so warm and kempt while ensorcelled, was now a stinking space, piled with rotting food, all of which crawled with maggots and worms. Hans screamed again, and Gretel might have joined in, had she breath for both shrieking and running, which she found never to be the case. As they sped for the back door she had the presence of mind to grab Hans’s rucksack from its airing place next the stove. She thrust it at him.
“Take this!” she yelled, “and stuff it with anything else useful. Hurry!” She could hear the witch’s footsteps thundering along the landing. Although slowed by the redoubtable little bat, she would soon be upon them. Gretel could not imagine what the woman’s intentions were, but she herself had no intention of waiting to find out. She bundled Hans toward the exit.
“Wait!” he cried, “I haven’t got the …”
“There’s no time. Go on!”
The Sorcerer's Appendix Page 7
