The Gretel Series: Books 1-3 (Gretel #1-3)

by Christopher Coleman

  Gretel flipped through the pages, scanning the decorative block lettering and words without reading them. She considered how often she had done this casual page surfing after first taking control of the book, before she could read a word, before she knew of the magic it contained. How the book had comforted her throughout her mother’s disappearance and how it had given her the hope she needed that one day her mother would come home. There was something about the feel of it that was so palliative. To her, it was always more about the physical book than it was the meaning inside, even after she learned of the power in the words.

  She flipped farther into the pages until she reached the first page of the book’s ‘Back.’ That was how she thought of it now, and even that word sounded a bit too ominous. The Back section contained the recipe, and though she and her mother had insisted to the elders that—for obvious reasons—they not fully decrypt the section, they couldn’t bring themselves to destroy it either. Neither Gretel nor her mother had any affection for the Back, but there was an unspoken fear about the consequences of such desecration, even to something as inherently evil as the torturous recipes. Even when the elders had offered to decode it, they had done so reluctantly, and when her mother had refused, they moved on quickly, never questioning why.

  But Gretel and her mother knew the truth: the Rosetta Stone had already been decoded. Gretel could likely decipher anything that hadn’t already been translated.

  Gretel turned toward a noise that sounded like it was coming from the kitchen, which, in the tiny home they had been renting for almost a full year now, meant only steps away. She lowered the book down onto the nightstand and got up from her bed, grabbing her robe and wrapping it tightly against her. She opened the door quietly and stepped into the foyer, where she was met instantly by the ambient light of the overhead lamp that hung above the dining table.

  Her mother was sitting in one of the three chairs surrounding the table, her back to Gretel. It was clear something was wrong, and it wasn’t just the fact that it was late. She was leaning forward, slumped almost, with her elbows jutting as if her hands were folded across the table in prayer. Her shoulders were rising and falling in small jerks. She was crying.

  “Mother?”

  “Gretel...” Anika didn’t turn around, but Gretel saw her throw the backs of her hands to her face in a panicked wiping motion.

  “Mother, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, honey. I’m fine.”

  Gretel walked toward her mother and then around to the other side of the table. She sat in the opposing chair and leaned forward, studying her mother’s face closely.

  Anika smiled weakly at her daughter, the smear of tears comically obvious. “Why are you awake?”

  “Mother, what’s wrong?” This time, Gretel’s voice quivered and was laced with anger.

  Anika Morgan closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands, leaning back in the chair and tilting her head toward the ceiling. She let out an exasperated grunt. It was the sound of frustration, the refrain of someone who couldn’t seem to catch a break. “Oh Gretel. I love you so much. I love you and your brother so much. You know that, right?”

  “What...is...wrong?”

  “I’m sick, Gretel.”

  Gretel sat staring at her mother but said nothing.

  Still gazing at the ceiling, Anika shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe it,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  “Sick? How sick? You seem well to me.” Gretel instantly felt the magnitude of her mother’s statement. Whatever this was, it was beyond a simple case of the common cold.

  “It’s probably bad, Gretel.” Anika now looked deeply into her daughter’s face, the compassion in her eyes teetering on despondency. “It’s probably pretty bad.” The last part of her sentence was a throaty whisper.

  “Probably?”

  “I’ll know for sure in a day or two, but the doctor thinks...he’s pretty sure it’s some kind of cancer.”

  The word smashed against Gretel like a violent wave, and she dropped her mother’s gaze. She wanted to run from the room the way she’d done the day her father told her that her mother hadn’t returned home from Deda’s. That she was hours late and no word had come in from the road. Gretel had known instantly that day that something was wrong. She had known that day that what her instincts told her was accurate, and she was equally certain now as she sat across from her mother.

  But Gretel didn’t run. Instead she said, “You saw a doctor. Here? When did you see a doctor?”

  “Three days ago. I—”

  “Three days?” Gretel shouted. She instinctively looked toward the room where Hansel still lay sleeping. She lowered her voice slightly. “Three days? Why are you telling me this now?”

  Anika shook her head in quick, epileptic movements, the expressions on her face morphing, attempting to hold back tears. She mouthed, “I’m sorry,” but no sound came out.

  “And what ‘doctor’ did you see? Was he wearing a grass skirt and carrying a staff with a skull screwed to the top of it?”

  Anika chuckled. “No, Gretel. I went to the city. I saw a real doctor.”

  Gretel started to argue again but stopped short. It was wasted effort. Her mother was the strongest person in the world, and she would fight cancer or tuberculosis or any other sickness with every gram of strength left in her cells and with every resource available. If she had reached this point in the cycle of tragedy, this place of despair and sadness, she hadn’t arrived without knowing all the odds and options. There was nothing Gretel could offer to make either of those things more favorable. This was the new reality of her family, unfolding as she spoke, and Gretel had to accept and deal with the facts as they were. There was no space for wishes or fantasies. Or even lingering hope.

  “The doctor knew in minutes, but he ran tests to be sure. I’ll know how long I...I’ll know soon.”

  Gretel stayed silent, letting her new existence set in and take hold. All that mattered now was what she could do, either to help her mother get better or ease her dying. There was no time for self-pity or delusion. And Hansel, she had him to consider too. “What do you want to do about Hansel?”

  “I’ll tell him when I know for sure.” Anika grabbed Gretel’s hand and squeezed it lightly. “We’ll tell him together.”

  Gretel thought about how this news would play out with her brother. Obviously, he’d be devastated, but it wouldn’t be as bad as before. Nothing could be as bad as the uncertainty and mystery during the time their mother was missing. The discord and turmoil in the house with their father and Odalinde had been unbearable at times. There had always been hope, of course, especially in the beginning, but the trauma of that experience to Hansel could never be equaled. Even if there was no hope this time, at least they would all be together. And if their mother was dying, that was a normal part of life that children often had to accept. They could love each other until the end. Besides, Gretel knew, there was always hope with cancer, even if sometimes it was only a sliver. People recovered sometimes. Not always, and the odds changed depending on the type and stage, but sometimes cancer disappeared forever. There were miracles.

  Gretel thought of Odalinde, and the dull ache of loneliness and yearning set in. Even though they had only known each other for a short time, Gretel missed the woman badly, and this revelation from her mother now brought that feeling closer to the surface.

  “There’s another thing, Gretel.” Anika squeezed her daughter’s hands, encouraging her to look in her eyes.

  Gretel took in her mother’s stare again.

  “I want you to contact the Klahrs.” She paused, and then, “And I want you to go home. You and Hansel. I want you to go back to the Back Country.”

  “What?”

  “It’s time, Gretel. I can’t imagine how sick with worry those sweet people are. God knows I’m worried about them. I can’t imagine what they’re going through. I had planned to contact them months ago, but...”

  “Okay, w
e’ll go. I was going to talk to you tomorrow about leaving. I’ve been having...dreams. More than dreams, really. About going home. So, let’s leave. All of us. Now. Tomorrow. We’ll set sail back home, check on the Klahrs, and then go directly to the Urbanlands where you can see better doctors. We can—”

  “No, Gretel. Just you and Hansel. I’m not going.”

  Gretel’s mouth hung open in midsentence. She blinked twice in disbelief. “What? Why? What do you mean?”

  “You remember why I didn’t want to contact the Klahrs, right?”

  Gretel remembered. She had wanted to write them the day they had arrived in the Old World and finished setting up in the apartment. The letter she had given the Klahrs on the day they left gave strict instructions for the couple not to contact them except in the case of an extreme emergency.

  Her mother was still skittish, for obvious reasons, that there were others connected to the terror that she and her family had been subjected to. If there were others in the community, or the System, or even her own extended family who were involved with the ‘Gretel and Anika Morgan Ordeal,’ those individuals would have feared having their names surface and the risk of being dragged down to a System barracks where they would be forced to answer questions in a small room with a bright, unshaded light. Anika and Gretel didn’t specifically know of, or even suspect, anyone else was involved, but if there were indeed others, those folks wouldn’t have known which person knew what, and nefarious individuals like that didn’t often take chances if it meant the difference between freedom and spending their lives in prison. So, Anika had held fast to her insistence that communication be dark. At least for a while.

  The Morgans had traveled well. The trek—first by car to the coast and then by ship across the ocean to the Old World—had been mostly tranquil. At times, even fun. Neither Hansel nor Gretel had ever seen a body of water larger than the Back Country River, so for most of the first two days, and periodically throughout the rest of the two-week voyage, the two children stared spellbound at the never-ending sea. Gretel would never have believed the world was big enough to hold so much water.

  During the remainder of the trip, with not much else to do, the Morgan family spent most of their time in conversation, most of which began with Anika Morgan inquiring about how everyone was feeling. Gretel knew her mother’s fears: that her children had suffered some irreversible spiritual collision and would spend the rest of their long lives floundering. This concern was reasonable to Gretel, and frankly, Gretel had the same worries about her mother, but Gretel wasn’t quite ready for therapy. That day would come, but not yet. She was still exhausted from the upheaval and madness of the past several months, and she hadn’t come close to formulating any of it into coherence, at least not any she could verbalize. Instead, she held back, listening uncomfortably as Hansel and her mother recounted their experiences. Her mother’s forays into stories of her imprisonment were particularly hard for Gretel, and she would find herself leaving their cabin to find air on the ship’s deck. How she wished she could live there, traveling on the water constantly, never again being moored to the earth where evil and pain lurked. Perhaps it lurked here on the ocean too, but whatever lay in wait, beneath the waves or above, she hadn’t encountered it yet. And that was enough for her.

  Eventually the family’s dialogue would swerve from counseling sessions to reminiscences of an earlier life. Of fonder memories and better times. And about their father. It was during one of these remembrances that Gretel spoke, finally telling her mother through a barrage of tears that she’d forgiven him. She forgave him even before he died. Hansel had too, but had been afraid to say so, fearing his sister would hate him for it.

  Anika hadn’t quite reached the point of forgiving her husband, but she was trying.

  In the end, all the bonding had been effective, and by the time the Morgans reached the coast at the far end of the ocean, Gretel, Hansel, and Anika were energized about what lay ahead. They were ready to put the past year behind them and study a whole new chapter in their family’s story, one that had been lost and buried over the centuries. And finding the source for this data hadn’t taken long. The few clues Gretel had learned from Odalinde, as well as those her mother had gotten from Deda, were effective enough to set them on the path to discovery.

  By their second day in the Old World, Gretel and her family located the first of the Aulwurms—the surname of her mother’s family—living as merchants and fisherman just a few miles from where their ship had docked. And by the end of the first week, they had found a translator and were actively decoding Orphism into English. It was almost unbelievable how fast everything moved. At the rate they had been going, Gretel expected they would stay no more than a month, two at the most.

  But that was not to be.

  As the last words of the ancient script were deciphered and the mysteries of Orphism steadily unraveled, Anika began stalling their return, making excuses that her children’s schooling would be interrupted, or that so much movement in such a short time would unbalance them.

  The delays were fine with Gretel at first, and she looked forward to a few more months in the Old World. She had fallen in love with the charms of the architecture and language of the myriad cultures that had emerged as clusters in the tight geographies of the Old World. And the warmth and love their ancient relatives had shown them touched Gretel deeply, and the thought of leaving them so quickly made her melancholy. And then there was the food. She would have stayed in this place another year just for the food.

  What Gretel had not handled well was the order from her mother to not communicate with the Klahrs. It was torture. Mr. and Mrs. Klahr were her family too, and she loved them as much as she did Hansel and her mother. They had given her a life when Gretel was desperate and all seemed lost. When her family was starving and her father had lain physically and emotionally useless in his bed, it was the Klahrs who gave Gretel a job and food and purpose. They had helped her find freedom, not just in her work and responsibility, but in the form of rowing, the hobby that had seen her through the days when her emotions had reached their breaking point. When she was forlorn about her father and Odalinde and their ill-fated marriage, the Klahrs had given Gretel hope and friendship and advice.

  Those were three things she needed now, as she sat in a rented Old World apartment listening to her mother reveal her malignant fate.

  “Do you remember what I said, Gretel?”

  “Of course I remember. I think about it every day. You told me not to contact the Klahrs. You said you didn’t want to put them in danger.” Gretel recited these lines as if bored from the repetition, and then added with spooky sarcasm, “Conspiracies were afoot.”

  “That’s right.” Anika stared with cold seriousness at her daughter. “You can mock it, but that is true.”

  “And what if they were in danger? How would you know? Are they in danger now? What if it is true and someone else was involved in what happened? What if they’ve come for them? How could we help them if we never knew about it?”

  Anika dropped her eyes in a gesture of remorse. “We couldn’t.” She met her daughter’s eyes once again. “But you and Hansel were all I cared about. Protecting you is the only thing that mattered.”

  Gretel wanted to argue further but couldn’t. “I know,” is all she said.

  “But it’s time now. It’s been long enough. I want you to go back and make sure the Klahrs are okay. I really am worried about them.”

  Gretel nodded in agreement, and then her expression turned from a look of understanding to a look of pleading. “But why can’t we all go? Why aren’t you coming with us?”

  Anika raised her hands up as if fending off a person who has accidently stumbled toward her. “Okay, I know. There is something I’ve been keeping from you.”

  Gretel gave a bemused look. “You mean other than that you have cancer?”

  This time Anika let out a laugh, which devolved quickly into a look of disbelief and sadness and then q
uiet weeping. She beckoned her daughter from her chair, and Gretel got up and walked over to her with tears streaming down her face. She hugged her mother and both cried softly into each other.

  “I’m sorry, Gretel. I’m sorry this is happening. I promise I’ll fight it. I promise I won’t quit on you and your brother. That’s why I’m staying.”

  “But how can I go?” Gretel whispered. “How can I leave you now if you’re sick? How can I leave you to take care of yourself?”

  “I’ll be okay for a while.” Anika paused for a moment, as if considering whether to say the next line. “And maybe longer.”

  Gretel pulled back from the embrace, confused. “What does that mean?” she asked, searching her mother’s face for an answer.

  “I know what the doctors will say. I know the treatments they’ll offer. Sometimes those treatments work, but often they don’t. I have a feeling, though, that with the conventional treatments, for me, there’s even less of a chance than most. And I think that will be true no matter which doctors I see. Here or at home.”

  “So why not come then? Why don’t we all go home?”

  “Because here, in this place, there are other possibilities. You know this well. It’s why we came here. For answers. Maybe not to this particular problem but...almost in a way... this is what we were seeking when we left.”

  Gretel’s eyes widened and her throat tightened. Her voice crackled as she said, “You mean...?”

  Anika looked at her daughter, confused for a moment, and then, finally understanding the implication scolded, “Gretel, no! Not that! I would never...” Anika took a breath and smiled. “I’m sorry. I don’t blame you for thinking that. Especially since your father... But I would never hurt you Gretel. Either of you. Ever. I would die this second to keep either of you from suffering a single day of pain.”