Pandora's Closet

by Martin Harry Greenberg

  But Elsa burst into tears. “It’s not a proper story!” she cried again and rushed from the kitchen.

  All that week, Elsa brooded about the red shoes and about Karen’s story. She would not play with her best doll, Clarissa. She would not eat her supper, and when her father read from the big Bible at night, all she saw were the tears of pain on Karen’s face, and all she heard was the thump, thump, creak, creak, of her crutches and the wooden slats.

  “It is not a proper story,” she told herself over and over again.

  At last, her father grew concerned. He came to sit at the foot of Elsa’s little bed, where she lay in her white nightgown all tucked up under the colorful quilts her mother had made. He asked Elsa what troubled her. Elsa, who was by nature a truthful child, told her father the whole tale. When she ran out of other words, she whispered. “Papa, I wish I could go find the red shoes and bring Karen’s feet back to her!”

  Her father thought on this for a long moment. “You know that it was wrong to ask Karen what became of her feet,” he said. “Your mother has told you so many times.”

  “I know but…”

  “Karen is right. She must wait for God’s mercy. Leave her to God, my child.” He smoothed Elsa’s hair back from her brow.

  At these pious words, Elsa stuck out her little chin and said, “But God is in the church, and her feet cannot go there.”

  Her father scolded her then and told her she should have no dessert tomorrow for her impiety. He left, and Elsa lay in the darkness with the moonbeams shining through the curtains, until she made a decision.

  “I will go find the red shoes,” she said. “I will make them give Karen her feet back. It was not right that they stole them from her.”

  Carefully, so as not to wake the other children, Elsa crept from her bed. She wrapped some bread in a pretty handkerchief her mother had given her, and poured some milk into a silver cup her father had given her, and took her best doll, Clarissa, for company. Then she went out into the darkness to look for the red shoes.

  The night was vast and cold. The houses looked quite unlike themselves, being only velvet shadows beneath the thousand stars. The Moon, however, took pity on the little girl walking alone and spared some of its best silver beams to light the street, making the cobblestones gleam so that she might see her way.

  First, Elsa went to the church, as that was where Karen said she first began to dance and where she had seen the angel. As this was God’s house and her father’s, Elsa knew no fear of the church, even in darkness. The spires and arches rose up stern and hard against the silvered night.

  Elsa climbed the broad, shallow steps and gazed at the closed doors with their knockers held in the mouths of lions. Above them waited the carving of the angel Michael with his wings spread open and his sword held up high.

  “I am looking for the red shoes,” said Elsa to the doors. “Have you seen them?”

  But the lions only shook their heads until the knockers swung as if blown by the wind. The angel above them, though, cried out, “She shall dance! She shall dance from door to door; and where proud and haughty children dwell, she shall knock, that they may hear her and be afraid of her!”

  “I am not afraid of Karen!” cried out Elsa, stamping her foot. “And she cannot dance anymore! All she can do is thump and creak on wooden feet, and it is not right!”

  “Don’t mind him,” mumbled the right-hand lion around his knocker. “It is just his way.”

  “The executioner might know where the red shoes have gone,” said the left-hand lion. “It was he who saw them last.” The left-hand lion gave Elsa directions to the executioner’s house. Elsa said thank you and made her curtsy, even to the angel.

  It was a long way to the executioner’s house. No one wished to have the man who might one day hurry them to the grave living beside them. Elsa walked on. The sun came up to warm her. She ate a little of her bread and drank a little of her milk. As she struggled across the plowed fields and into the tangled fields lying fallow for the year, she hugged Clarissa to her breast and went doggedly on.

  The executioner’s house was small and mean, cramped and crooked. A raven perched on the roof beam and sang a harsh song as she walked beneath the eaves. Holding Clarissa close, Elsa knocked on the door.

  “Who is that!” cried a gruff and terrible voice from within.

  “It is Elsa!” Elsa answered. “I am looking for the red shoes!”

  The door flew open and the executioner came out. He seemed bigger than his house, and his bald head gleamed in the sun. His hands were hard and stained from his work. In one, he held the great, notched axe that had sent so many condemned from the world.

  “Who are you that you ask after the red shoes?” he roared.

  He is trying to scare me, thought Elsa, and she would not be scared. She told him of Karen and her story, and as she did, he seemed to grow smaller and sadder.

  “I remember her,” he said, hunching his shoulders up. “She came to my door. She was only skin and bones. Her legs were scratched and bloody. She could not stop dancing although she could barely breathe and could no longer hold her head up straight. She begged me to strike the shoes from her body, and I could see nothing else to do. I used my axe as best I could, and she bled terribly and fell against me. The red shoes danced away into the woods, carrying her feet with them.” He looked off towards the north, to where the woods loomed dark and green, and the sunlight feared to go. “I have never been afraid of what I do until I did that thing. Nor yet have I ever been able to forget that sight of her feet set free to dance in the red shoes.”

  “The shoes stole her feet,” said Elsa firmly. “And I am going to find them.”

  The executioner looked into her eyes for a long moment. Then he nodded. He took her into his cramped, crooked house. He fed her thin soup and black bread and replenished her milk. He found a comb so that she might straighten her hair and retie her doll’s ribbons. Then he took her to the path that led into the woods.

  “Further I dare not go,” he said. “I have killed too many men. Though I only did as the laws required, they do not know that, and they wait for me in the woods. But you are a good child, and they cannot touch you.”

  Elsa thanked the executioner and walked down the rutted path into the woods. All the while, the executioner watched her go.

  In the deep woods, it quickly became dark as night. The few sunbeams were paler than the moon’s had ever been. The path was pitted with the tracks of deer and the wolves that followed them. The roots of trees crisscrossed the way and caught at Elsa’s toes to trip her up. Overhead, invisible in the branches, the crows called to one another to come see this new thing. They laughed hard and harsh when she stumbled. The wind wormed its way between the tree trunks to make her shiver and tease her hair. The whole world smelled of moss and old graves.

  Elsa walked on. She looked this way and that for some sign of the red shoes in the gloom, but she saw only the white ghosts of the dead men, their heads lolling on their shoulders, waiting for the executioner to come to them. But they did not come onto the path, and they did not touch her.

  Elsa walked on. She ate her bread and drank her milk, and she held her doll. The path grew narrower until it was only a winding thread. Gnarled trees and unkind bracken reached out their crooked twigs to poke and prod her. They tore at Clarissa’s dress and tried to snatch away her ribbons.

  At last, when Elsa was so tired she was afraid she could go no further, she saw a woman sitting on a great, arching tree root. She was as brown, knobby and gnarled as that root, with a great hump over her left shoulder. Indeed, Elsa might have thought she was just another part of the tree if her eyes had not gleamed so brightly in the darkness.

  “Hello, my little maid,” the old woman said in a voice as soft and rich as loam. “Where are you going all alone?”

  “I am going to find the red shoes,” replied Elsa. “Have you seen them?”

  “Well, now.” The old woman tapped her chin. “T
hat is a large question. Let us have some of that bread and milk and think about it.”

  So, Elsa sat beside the old woman and shared out her bread and milk, which the old woman took with great smackings of her lips and slurpings of her tongue. She belched and rubbed at her wagging dew-lap and scratched herself about the body and the head. Elsa did her best to remember her manners and not stare, but it was very difficult.

  “Now then,” said the old woman, when all the food was gone. “You say you are looking for the red shoes? They are here.”

  “I must make them give Karen her feet back.”

  “Ah!” she exclaimed archly. “Well, finding them is one thing, and catching them, that’s another altogether.”

  Elsa stuck her chin out as she had with her father. She did not have to say anything though. The old woman nodded.

  “Very good,” she said. “So. You must follow the path. It will go under a tree and over a stream. On the other side of that stream, you will come to a clearing where a great oak has fallen. There you will find a soldier with a red beard playing on a fiddle. Do not let him see you. After a time, he will call the red shoes and make them dance for him. They will not look as you think they might, and you must not be afraid.”

  “I will not be afraid.”

  Again, the old woman nodded. “Good. The soldier will make the shoes dance until they cry out, “Give us rest! Give us rest!” And the soldier will answer, “You will have no rest until I grow weary, and I never grow weary while I watch you dance!” You must cry ‘Soldier, soldier, give me the red shoes!’ He will answer you, “ ‘Little Elsa, Little Elsa, give me a dance!’ Then he will play his fiddle, and you will dance.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “Ah. Then, my child, you will dance until you give him something he wants as much as the dance.”

  “What is that?”

  But the old woman shook her heavy head and shrugged her humped shoulder. “That is what you must find, Little Elsa.” Then she sprang down from the root and scampered into the forest, and she was gone before Elsa could draw her next breath.

  Elsa sat there for a long time, listening to her own heartbeat and to the laughter of the crows. Then she gathered her empty cup and handkerchief and climbed down off the root. Elsa walked on. The woods grew darker, and the path grew narrower still. There was a place where a tree root arched over it like a doorway, and Elsa walked through. A stream cut it neatly in two with silver water and muted laughter. She jumped over it, landing unsteadily on her tired feet.

  Ahead she saw a place that was gray instead of black. Gradually, her aching eyes saw it was a clearing, and she saw the black corpse of a tree lying like a fallen giant in the middle. Her breath seized up in her throat, and she left the path that was her only guide, and, one hesitant step at a time, she moved toward that gray place. The trees laid their branches on her head and shoulders, cautioning, trying to hold her back and turn her away. She had to push past them as she pushed past her brothers and sisters to see the parades in the streets. As she drew closer, something tickled at her nose, a strange smell she did not expect in such a place. Tobacco.

  Elsa dropped down to her knees. Awkwardly, for she kept hold of Clarissa in one arm, she wriggled forward. The ragged hem of the tree trunk pointed toward her, and past it she could just see a man’s black boots, and a brown hand, and a trickle of white smoke rising toward the gray evening sky.

  Elsa made her decision. She crept carefully into the hollow of the great fallen tree. The worms and beetles paused in their work to see who this new neighbor was. The punk wood turned to powder as she touched it and showered down into her hair and eyes. She rubbed her eyelids, held in her sneezes and peered out through a slit in the bark that allowed her to see just a little slice of the clearing. But that slice held the soldier with his red beard wild and uncombed and his scarlet coat shining with gold braid.

  The soldier sat on a stone, his legs stretched out and his black boots crossed. He puffed contentedly on a long-stemmed white pipe. Thick smoke poured from the bowl and from his mouth as it opened and closed, rising up as if it were what made the clouds that had gathered so thickly overhead.

  After a time, he seemed to weary of smoking. He knocked out his white pipe against his black boot heel and tucked it into his coat. Then, from somewhere Elsa could not see, he took out a little fiddle and curving bow. He drew the bow across the fiddle strings and the music leaped up as merrily as the flames in her home’s hearth. He set to playing at once. The swooping, soaring notes rang through the forest, making the air shiver. The tune he played was strange and sad and merry and frightening all at once. Elsa’s feet itched at the sound of it. They were tired no more and wanted to be up and moving. Her ears strained to hear more. She clutched at Clarissa and bit down on her tongue. She tried hard to remember the other sound, the one that brought her here, the thump, thump, creak, creak of Karen’s crutches and wooden slats on the kitchen floor. As she did, the tune did not call quite so loudly.

  The soldier finished his tune with a flourish of notes, each higher and brighter than the last. He laughed, as if delighted at his own cleverness, and lowered the fiddle from under his chin.

  “It is dull,” he said, tapping the bow against his boot. “To play all alone. It is much better to have someone to dance to the music.” Once more, he touched the bow to the strings and began to play. It was a schottiche he played, merry and sprightly, a song about swinging around and leaping up high and holding hands while you both spun together about the floor. It broke Elsa’s heart to hear it in the wilderness where there was no one to dance to such a pretty thing, but she held herself still.

  The red shoes came.

  They crashed through the bracken, loud and clumsy. Once, they might have been shining leather with embroidered toes and gilded heels, but now they were black with blood. It spilled out of the horrible stumps of Karen’s lost feet, severed so cleanly above the ankle. Elsa had thought Karen’s feet would be worn away to bones by now, but they were not. The blood poured like a flood of tears, running down onto the forest floor so that the shoes and Karen’s feet must dance in her own blood, without stopping and without rest, while the soldier played his merry tune about lovers spinning around the floor. The schottiche finished, and then came a polka, and a waltz tune, a reel from England, and a jig from Ireland. All the dances of the world were drawn down by the soldier and poured out so that the shoes must dance.

  Elsa thought and thought. It was hard, because the soldier’s tune kept pushing into her mind and filling it up so that her thoughts had to crowd around the edges of the music and could not come together to make ideas. She held Clarissa tighter and tighter. She watched the soldier’s fingers fly on his fiddle strings and the bow dart back and forth. She watched the red shoes dance. The soldier laughed louder than the crows even, and there was so much blood.

  You must give him something he wants as much as the dance, the old woman had said. Something he wants as much as the dance.

  Then, an idea came to Elsa. She bent her head and whispered to Clarissa, who listened in silence, as she always did.

  “Give us rest!” cried the shoes, the voice muffled by blood and torn by exhaustion. “Give us rest!”

  The soldier laughed, and Elsa saw that his eyes were as shiny and black as his tall boots. “You shall have no rest until I grow weary, and I never grow weary while I watch you dance!”

  Elsa thrust her doll through the split in the fallen tree trunk and in the high voice she used to make Clarissa speak in all her games, she cried out. “Soldier! Soldier! Give me the red shoes!”

  The soldier turned toward her, and she saw his black eyes shining with a merriment that cut through the air like lightning. He did not hesitate, not for an instant, in his playing. The tune changed seamlessly from one lively reel to the next.

  “Little Clarissa! Little Clarissa!” The soldier called out. “Give me a dance!”

  The doll twitched in Elsa’s hand, and Elsa dropped her s
wiftly. Instead of falling to the ground in a heap as she was used to, Clarissa landed neatly on her own two white cloth feet. She lifted up the hem of her lace dress and skipped as merrily to the center of the clearing as if she were on her way to a birthday party. The doll danced up to the red shoes and back again, bowing politely and circling ’round them, her white feet treading in the fresh blood and soaking it up, becoming red themselves. Elsa wondered whether they ever be clean again.

  But she had no time to mourn her doll. Now she had both hands free, and she could creep from the hollow tree and ease herself around the clearing’s edge. The soldier played faster, and the little doll and the bloody red shoes danced together to his laughter and his music. His bow flashed and his fingers flew. He attended to nothing but the show in front of him as Elsa crept behind.

  Then, quick as a cat, Elsa snatched the bow from the soldier’s hand and ran back to the fallen tree. The soldier stared at his knobby hand for a moment, as if he could not believe what had just happened. In the middle of the meadow, the shoes hesitated, turning this way and that on their toes, and Clarissa stood, smiling, holding her hems in her hand, waiting patiently, as she always did.

  “Soldier! Soldier!” cried Elsa holding the bow high. “Give me the red shoes or I will break this bow over my knee!”

  To her surprise, the soldier threw back his head and laughed so hard it seemed he’d split stone and tree with the noise.

  “You are too late, little Elsa,” he cried when his laughter was done. “Karen has given herself to God, and God has taken her away.” He snapped his bony fingers and pointed to the middle of the air. It seemed as if the world split open, and Elsa saw the streets of her city. She saw a wagon drawn by a single black horse wearing a black plume. All her brothers and sisters walked behind. In the wagon was a coffin. She knew without knowing how that this was a true thing she saw, and her heart broke in two. The hand that clutched the bow trembled a little

  “It was all for nothing, you silly child,” said the soldier while the tears began to run down Elsa’s face. “Give me my bow, and take your doll.” He snapped his fingers again, and Clarissa fell to the ground, nothing more than a doll in a pink dress and ribbons, her feet horribly stained by her naughty mistress who let her go play where she should not. “Go home. Pray on your knees for things that you can understand, and leave the red shoes to me. If you are a good girl, you will never have to see them again.”