Gretel

by Christopher Coleman

  “Honestly, Gretel, I don’t know, she may not be. But I think if you believe she’s alive—truly believe it—that’s a very good sign. Do you believe she is?

  Gretel could only nod.

  “Okay then,” Odalinde said, “Okay.”

  “But how? Where would she be?”

  “The whole process of creating the formula is complicated; it takes time. The source needs to be healthy and strong to start, and then it needs to be fed correctly. And the extractions can often take months depending…” Odalinde’s eyes had grown wide, and the first two fingers of her right hand instinctively went to her lips as if giving an emphasized signal to a child to stay quiet.

  Hansel now stood in the doorway, frozen, listening to this impossible conversation. His mouth hung wide and Gretel thought he looked a bit like a nutcracker.

  “What are you talking about?” Gretel asked, nearly whispering. “Extractions? Fed?”

  “I’m so sorry…” Odalinde began.

  “What are you talking about!” Gretel violently recoiled her hand from Odalinde’s.

  Odalinde closed her eyes and exhaled. “The book—Orphism—is about a lot of things, much of it to do with what we discussed earlier, controlling the powers of Life and all that.”

  “But it’s also about living forever,” Gretel added, her impatience brimming.

  Odalinde opened her eyes. “Yes. It’s about that too. The first part—the part about Life and spirit and the ways of the universe—is not only powerful, it’s also quite beautiful. The people who wrote it were unusually synchronized with the world. These were an ancient people, untraceable to any known descendants. Perhaps as old as those of Asia and Mesopotamia.”

  She paused, signaling a transition.

  “But there is the other part of the book. The part on solving death.” Odalinde gave a deep, nervous swallow. “This part was written by your people, Gretel. And yours, Hansel.”

  Odalinde waved for Hansel to come back and sit, which he did, reluctantly.

  “This part is not beautiful. In fact, it’s quite horrifying.”

  “Hansel, maybe you should go,” Gretel snapped, her tone signaling she would have no tolerance for any more weak-stomach distractions.

  “I’m fine,” he replied, unconvincingly.

  Gretel glared at her brother with a “you’ll be sorry if you’re wrong” look, and then immediately shot her attention back to Odalinde.

  “It’s a recipe, essentially, for a potion that stops the dying process. The brew is ingested, in small amounts at first, and then gradually, over decades, the doses need to increase for the formula to continue working. I don’t think anyone knows exactly how it works, and it isn’t like it’s ever been studied properly in a laboratory.”

  Odalinde stopped for a moment to arrange her words, and Gretel tried to appreciate her aim to be delicate.

  “Many of the ingredients—not all, but many—are derived from the human body.”

  Hansel brought a fist to his mouth but quickly composed himself. “That’s disgusting,” he said.

  “Yes, it is, Hansel. It’s despicable. But what is even more despicable, and what you would correctly assume, is that people don’t usually give of their body parts willingly.” Odalinde dropped her eyes ruefully. “There are victims.”

  “So they’re killed?” Hansel asked, each word coming out with a beat in between.

  “The final part is always fatal. Some die sooner than others. Those are…” Odalinde stopped and shook her head as if to strike the beginning of the sentence.

  “Those are what? What is it?” It was Gretel this time.

  “Those are the fortunate ones.” Odalinde frowned and bounced a sad stare between the two children. “The true horror is the torture. The mutilation. It’s abominable.”

  Gretel narrowed her eyes and sneered. “But you’ve done this,” she challenged, unable to pitch down the shrillness in her voice. “You are one of the people who has tortured. You are someone who has eaten people. You must be, right?! You’ve lived for what? Centuries!”

  “I have killed and tortured people, Gretel. Yes, I have done those things. More times than I could ever count or wish to remember. And the shame that I feel now—not just for those deaths, but also for the lack of feeling that I had for them at the time—I will feel that shame until I am buried.”

  Odalinde stood again and walked away from the table, her back to the children.

  “And that time will come. I haven’t blended for several years now. And I won’t do it again.”

  “So you’ve decided to die then,” Gretel stated flatly, with satisfaction. “Why?”

  Odalinde turned back toward Gretel.

  “For all the reasons I’ve explained. This discovery is a mistake. It’s monstrous. I understand that. I’ve always understood it but…I couldn’t stop. I just couldn’t. If Hell exists I will burn there for what I’ve done. But it has been done. And I can’t undo it. All I can do is try to help you and Hansel. And your mother.”

  The fury in Gretel was rising, and she clenched her teeth, struggling not to leap at the murderer standing in her kitchen.

  “So if you made this decision, why did you wait so long? Why did you not help us right away! My mother could have been saved!”

  “I didn’t know your mother’s disappearance had to do with any of this. At least…I wasn’t sure. I truly wasn’t. My reason for coming here wasn’t to protect you from your father, it was just to take care of you because of a promise I made to your grandmother. A promise that I would take care of your mother—or her unborn children—if they were ever in need.”

  “But you’re not making sense. You said you were here to protect us from our father,” Gretel said, quick with her challenge.

  “Protecting you from your father was not the reason I came here, it was the reason I stayed.”

  Gretel closed her eyes and spread her hands across her face, and then quivered her head back and forth in a short, vibratory twitch, trying to shake the mountain of puzzle pieces in her head into something flat and orderly. “None of this makes sense,” she said, “what does my father have to do with this?”

  “I didn’t think anything at first. But then…” Odalinde paused and looked away.

  “What?”

  “On your bed, soon after I got here, I saw the book, the copy of Orphism your grandfather gave you. I didn’t know if your father could read it—I still don’t actually—but if he could, he was a danger to both of you. A sick man, in the last quarter of his life, that is the most dangerous man of all to know this secret. So I’ve kept him as he is, just sick enough to…make him weak.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this? You knew I had this magic book the whole time and you never told me? Didn’t you think everything was connected? My mother’s disappearance? All of it?”

  “No, I didn’t. Not necessarily. Your grandmother had a copy of the book, I knew that, so it wasn’t impossible to think your grandfather had simply handed down her copy to you or your mother as a keepsake.”

  Gretel was quiet, considering the possibility there may be logic in this reasoning.

  “And I don’t know if any of this is connected, Gretel, it may not be.”

  “It is,” Gretel replied without hesitation, “I know it is.”

  Odalinde frowned and nodded, offering no challenge to the teenager’s intuition.

  “I handled all of this badly. I’m sorry to both of you. I didn’t know what I was doing. I haven’t raised a child or nursed a man in…I don’t know how long. A very long time.”

  “You’re not good at it.” The words had left Gretel’s mouth before she had a chance to consider them.

  Odalinde smiled. “I know I was hard on you, Gretel, and neglectful to both of you, but I didn’t want either of you to grow fond of me. When I left, I wanted you to be glad for my riddance. Plus it was how I was raised, and how I was taught to raise children, building them for survival. If your father were to…” She
stopped suddenly, rethinking her words. “If he were not able to care for you, if he didn’t get better, you would have to grow up quickly, on your own.”

  A lump grew in Hansel’s throat, and the first tear bubbled in the bottom of his eye. “So you’re not staying?” he asked. “You weren’t going to stay?”

  “No Hansel, I can’t stay.”

  “So you never planned to marry him?” Gretel asked, the sadness in her voice conveying sympathy for her father and not sorrow at the news that she was losing a stepmother.

  “No, Gretel. I have another life, other commitments. People I care for. That is where I would go in the evenings on…”

  “Thursdays,” Gretel finished for her.

  Odalinde smiled again. “Yes, on Thursdays. But when your father asked me to marry him it was a very awkward situation. If I had said ‘no’ I would have had to leave immediately. It would have been too uncomfortable. And even though I never really knew if your father had to do with this, I believed something was wrong. And I was right, something is wrong.”

  Gretel sat quietly for a moment, and then she rose slowly, locking eyes with Odalinde, her chest burning at the question she was about to ask. “And how do you know Officer Stenson? How do you really know him?”

  The confusion on Odalinde’s face was instant, and Gretel trusted it.

  “Who is..? You mean that System officer that came to check on you? I don’t know him, Gretel. As I said the other day, he came by to check on you and you weren’t here.”

  Gretel stared coldly into the woman’s face, searching for the tell, the flicker or swallow or shift of the eyes. “Hansel saw his name in your book,” she said finally. “And I saw it too.”

  Odalinde glanced toward Hansel and frowned and then looked back to Gretel.

  “I told you, he gave me his name and number and told me to give it to you. I wrote it in my book where I keep all of my other numbers. I didn’t give it to you because I didn’t trust him. There was something insincere about him. I still believe that to be true.”

  “You told me father wouldn’t allow it. You said that was why you didn’t tell me.”

  “That was a lie. Your father never knew he was here.”

  “So you never told Officer Stenson about your engagement to Father?”

  “Of course not! Why would you think that?”

  Gretel dismissed the question with a quick head shake.

  “He was here only a few minutes, we barely spoke at all, let alone that I would disclose anything like that. Particularly that topic. I just wanted him gone.”

  Odalinde’s answers were coming to Gretel quickly, logically, in a way that only the truth could. She sat back down and took a deep breath, and the buzz of nature filled the otherwise silent kitchen.

  “So do you think he knows where my mother is?” she said finally, wearily. “If she is alive, do you think he knows where she is?”

  Odalinde opened her mouth as if to answer, but instead took a deep breath and then pressed her lips into a thin, sad smile. “Honestly? Yes, I think he knows something about what’s happened. But if Officer Stenson is part of this, he’s only one part.”

  “So who else then,” Hansel asked before Odalinde could get to it.

  “You’re not going to like my answer. Neither of you.”

  Hansel’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped in a short gasp. “Father?” he said.

  “No Hansel,” Gretel said, her voice deep and controlled, “she means Deda.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Oliver Stenson’s red System cruiser turned sharply down the hidden path leading to the old woman’s cabin and then abruptly stopped, its tires skidding across the dirt driveway, leaving a haze of dust that hovered effervescently for a moment, and then deflated to the ground. It had been months since he’d come here, as a skeptical neophyte on the subjects of witchcraft and magic potions, terms for which he was always chided by Marcel for using. This wasn’t wizardry or spell-casting he was told, this elixir was natural, accessible to everyone.

  In the beginning, of course, at the very center of his beliefs, he doubted nearly all of what he’d been told about the bizarre brew; and the fulfillment of the promises that were made to him for his part in the scheme he accepted with equal doubt. But if it was true, even in part, even if it was something akin to a vitamin that allowed him twenty years beyond his natural life—or fifteen—his investment in the plan seemed worth it, especially if those years proved strong and healthy. After all, his role would be minimal: to monitor the case of a missing Back Country woman who would vanish along the Interways one spring morning; and then to make sure any leads in the case were steered in a direction away from certain sections of the Interways and this cabin. It sounded simple. It was simple. With his System experience and knowledge of the area, his part required little more than rigging a few clues here and there, and maybe leaving off a few more off the reports. Simple.

  And in fact, as it turned out, it had been rather simple. Stenson wasn’t even needed for the actual crime. Marcel had told him exactly how it all would happen: that Anika Morgan’s car would drift off the road, and she, in a foolish search for help, would stumble directly into the clutches of the old woman. And it had happened just that way!

  The poor woman, Anika, had somehow—impossibly—disappeared from the Interways and ended up in this time-forgotten, wooden shack in the bleakest part of the Northlands. Untraced. Unwitnessed. And he, Stenson, hadn’t needed to do a thing! Even the car was virtually invisible, almost perfectly camouflaged at the bottom of that embankment. Only the most basic of additional cover had been necessary to keep it from being seen by anyone walking along at more than eight or ten feet away. And when the day came that it was finally discovered—if that day ever came—the obvious assumption would be that Anika Morgan had simply wandered into the woods after an accident looking for help and then died, her body overcome by the elements before being ravaged by some hungry animal (and in a way, Stenson thought, that is what happened), her clothes rotted and buried forever beneath countless layers of mud and leaf litter. Yes, finding that car now would do no good; it was far too late to find the connection between Anika Morgan and this cabin.

  But there was a problem now: Anika Morgan was still alive. Recaptured, thank God, but still alive.

  Marcel had known immediately that she’d escaped—had felt it—and within hours Stenson was rumbling his cruiser up to a defeated Anika Morgan lying prostrate in the middle of the road. It was magic. It was the only explanation. If anyone else had found her, the whole plan would have collapsed. She would have been taken to a hospital or barracks, or perhaps even home, and the whole story of her nightmare would have been unfurled. And by this time, instead of standing quietly outside the door of his cruiser, debating whether to walk to the front of the cabin door ahead of him and knock, or to investigate around back to keep the element of surprise intact, he and the rest of the Northlands unit would be ransacking the old shack for clues, of which there would be plenty. Perhaps even enough to connect him to the case.

  But it hadn’t happened that way. He had found Anika Morgan, just one more of an increasing number of fortuitous events that fell in his favor, and another example of why Oliver Stenson had steadily grown to become a believer in the potion. Devout. He’d yet to see any actual proof of the elixir’s life-giving effects, but still, all of what Marcel had told him would happen had, from the accident, to the capture, to the hiring of the woman’s daughter at the orchard. He hadn’t predicted the escape, of course, but even magic contained some degree of variability, Stenson supposed. Yes, Stenson was a true believer now, and over the past few months he had become vigilant in his role of protecting the secret.

  But he was also ready for the payoff. He was ready for that feeling that had been described to him by Marcel as described to him by his wife. And he was ready to bring Petr home from that school and, more importantly, to get him out of that orchard for good. ‘We need to watch her,’ Marcel had told him
, referring to his own granddaughter. ‘Gretel knows more than she knows.’ Stenson had no idea what Marcel was talking about at the time, and after his visit with the girl he understood even less. Gretel seemed like a typical teenage girl to him—mature certainly, but typical—naturally distrustful of authority, and devastated that her mother had gone missing. But ultimately Stenson had deferred and agreed to position Petr at the Klahr orchard to act as their unknowing spy.

  But it was time for all of this to be over. It was time to become untangled from all of this villainy.

  Stenson exited his cruiser and stood tall, surveying the surroundings, squinting for any sign of the old woman. “Hello,” he called out. He wanted to follow with the woman’s name but realized he didn’t know it. He wondered if even she knew it at this point. “Hello,” he called again and closed the cruiser door, deciding to take the direct route to the front of the cabin.

  Stenson imagined a flurry of scenarios as he approached the front door—an exercise that, as a System officer, was automatic to him. He didn’t conjure any images that were particularly dangerous, especially since the escaped prisoner had already been caught, but the quietness made him wary. The most likely scene, he thought, was that the woman was dead, or else severely wounded. The prisoner had escaped after all, and Stenson could only believe that she’d done so using force. Perhaps the story was even known by now, revealed to Marcel by his daughter in some gleeful rage. He suddenly wished there was a way to contact the warehouse.

  But what did it really matter? Stenson’s only real concern—besides keeping his own freedom—was the potion. The beautiful potion. He realized now that he was addicted to it without ever tasting a drop! Ha! That was madness, of course, but it was true. It was the first and last thing he thought about each day. Every day. He’d risked his career, farmed out his son, and been an accomplice to kidnapping, torture and attempted murder. What more evidence was needed to show he was a slave to it? And the more he thought of it, the worse the addiction grew.