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

by Christopher Coleman

  “It may not be what you think,” a voice from behind said, grating and hoarse.

  It was the woman; Amanda knew it instantly. She wanted to respond but decided to keep quiet and listen for a moment, thinking that perhaps the words weren’t meant for her and that she was hearing a conversation that had drifted into earshot.

  But that didn’t feel right. The voice was so close.

  “You’re probably thinking I’m going to use your parts for the elixir, yes?”

  She was addressing Amanda—no doubt about that now. “I...” Amanda tried to speak and gagged. Her eyes blossomed wide with agony. The rings of the chain settled perfectly into the crevices of her windpipe, and she panicked as she struggled to force out a breath.

  She managed to release just the slightest puff and then dragged in heavily, gasping for oxygen, but her lungs were still nearly full. Tears streaked down Amanda’s face, and she could feel the heat of blood fill her face. Another thirty seconds, she thought, and she’d be dead. She thought of heaven now, and Georg, and she was suddenly terrified and eager about what lay beyond, wondering whether, in less than a minute, she would see the man she loved.

  Amanda felt the slightest release from her neck, and her whole body lurched in exhalation. She took in another full breath and exhaled. And again. She now felt light-headed and tried to focus again on steadying her breathing, determined not to faint. She knew she was in terrible trouble, obviously, but it didn’t keep her from wanting to stay alive for as long as possible, at least to know the woman’s intentions.

  “What elixir?” Amanda said finally, barely getting the words out in between breaths.

  The woman cackled somewhere in the background. It was a hollow, liquid laugh that nauseated Amanda. If a monitor lizard could laugh, she thought, that was the sound it would make.

  Amanda tried again to lift her hands, desperate this time, but the abrasive fibers binding her wrists held firm.

  “Strange that you haven’t heard the story,” the woman continued, her tone mocking, “about a young mother held prisoner in a cabin in the woods of the Northlands. I would have believed that you, perhaps beyond just about anyone in the world, would have heard that story.”

  The cackling resumed, but for just a moment before the woman continued with her dialogue, more somber this time.

  “Your body does me no good. Even before they were delivered to me, I’d have never spent a day’s worth of light hunting you. Your old organs wouldn’t keep me alive for a day.”

  “Lucky me,” Amanda whispered.

  “No, Mrs. Klahr, I assure you, you are quite unlucky. Though I’ve not brought you here for harvesting nor have I brought you here to work my garden and iron my clothes.”

  Amanda tried to speak again, but the chain seemed to tighten. She felt panicky again and attempted to relax her muscles.

  “Gretel, Mrs. Klahr. As I so pleasantly mentioned to you in your lovely bedroom, I will need you to tell me where I can find Gretel.”

  The silence that followed was a clear indicator that the old woman was giving her the space to spill the information quickly and to avoid any drawn-out threats of torture. To have it all end now.

  Amanda opened her mouth as if to speak, but said nothing.

  “Well, of course, Mrs. Klahr, I would never expect you to give such valuable secrets for nothing. Why would anyone do that? No, no, no. I will give you something first, and then you will tell me. That’s fair, yes?”

  “I don’t...know...where.” The words were tortuous squeaking from her throat.

  “No?”

  The woman approached the chair from the back; Amanda could hear the clicking of the soles of her shoes. The footsteps stopped, and Amanda felt the hot breath again, this time as a putrid wind in her ear canal.

  “I’m not going to kill you yet, for no other reason than I think you do know where my Source and her family have gone. But make no mistake, you are going to die.”

  Amanda felt a merciful loosening of the chain at her throat and then felt it slither off her neck entirely. The relief felt like a bucket of water had been poured on her as she crawled from the desert. She swallowed in the air in long, slow inhalations. “We all die,” she gasped, before sucking in another breath.

  The woman cackled lightly, as if she was torn between fury and humor at the indignation but ultimately decided to go with humor. “That’s true for most, Mrs. Klahr,” the witch responded, stepping back slightly from the chair.

  Amanda cringed at the “Klahr” sound, spoken as if it had become stuck in the woman’s throat, freed only by the woman’s breathy growl.

  “I, as you know by now, am not most.”

  The sound of metal blades now replaced the woman’s breath in Amanda’s ear. Scissors. She was going to cut off an ear. With scissors.

  “Is this your house? Your cabin?” Amanda panicked, speaking quickly, desperate for a delay. “They’ll be looking for you. They know your body is missing. Obviously. You understand that, right? And I’m missing now. And they’ll find Georg. Petr kno—” Amanda could feel the tears well behind the blindfold the instant she spoke Petr’s name.

  “Petr knows? Petr knows what?”

  Amanda was quiet again, determined to stay that way.

  She heard the scissors again and steeled herself for unimaginable pain.

  And then the world filled with light. It was blinding and yellow and came pouring in through a small window near the ceiling. She had cut the blindfold.

  Amanda squinted, trying to shield her eyes from all but a fraction of the rays. She couldn’t tell just yet if she was right about this being the woman’s home, but from the initial clues, the place appeared to be a cabin, rustic and small. And as her pupils adjusted more fully, she became certain. The bed and the chain beside her was a dead giveaway. This was the witch’s home.

  “Petr Stenson, yes? He is your ward now. I know about it all, Mrs. Klahr. I’ve been watching your home for several days. The comings and goings of all of you. He is a rather naughty child, it would seem. Doesn’t come home at night, hmm?”

  “He’s not our ward,” Amanda lied. “He visits sometimes, but we...I...don’t see him often. I don’t even know where he’s living right now. He moved out weeks ago. Staying with friends maybe.”

  The woman was still behind Amanda, so even with her eyes free, she couldn’t look her in the face to judge her reaction. But Amanda could sense the hag was considering how much of what she was hearing was the truth.

  “What does he know, Mrs. Klahr? ‘Petr knows,’ you were on the cusp of explaining.”

  There was no point lying here, Amanda realized. She’d revealed that Petr was on to something, and she wouldn’t be able to back off from this entirely. She decided to go with the truth. “He knows you’re alive. He’s been looking for you. Or at least for the proof that you’re alive. I don’t really know what he does. He never told us very much, other than that he believed the System covered up your death...or at least they covered up the fact that they never found your body. He was convinced of it. You must have suspected this, right? I mean, you’re not dead. They obviously didn’t find your body.”

  “The System is corrupt. That is no news to anyone. We all know that as a matter of fact now. It’s the reason young Petr no longer has a father.”

  The woman’s words reminded Amanda again of Georg, and she forced herself to swallow back the tears that threatened to spill.

  “But they’re also lazy and foolish,” the woman continued, a tinge of anger creeping into her voice. “I watched them trespass all over my land, walking over me time and again like blind giraffes. Stealing my possessions. Stealing my book.”

  “So where would they imagine your body went? If they never found you in the cannery, how could they think you were dead?”

  Amanda heard the woman move behind her and then shuddered at the sight of her black cloaked body as it glided into her periphery. She came further into view, first her torso and then her head, hooded a
lmost entirely by the heavy black cloak.

  The woman stood tall in front of Amanda, staring down at her like some alien being examining its capture. She lowered the hood slowly, revealing a face so hideous it looked as if it had been designed and built in hell. During the battle in her bedroom, Amanda hadn’t really seen the face she stabbed with the toothbrush, so fueled by fury and fear. But now, bound by the curse of captivity, the repugnancy of the woman’s face was forced upon her.

  Amanda screamed and looked away, now relishing the moments when she was blindfolded.

  “This is what she has done to me, your cherished Gretel. This is her damage!” The woman was now in full-throated screams. “She and her cunt of a mother! I’ve lived in pain and starvation, unbearable heat and suffocating air, in hibernation, living in the ground like some kind of rodent!”

  The woman paused, and Amanda looked toward the ground.

  “Look at me, Klahr woman,” the witch hissed.

  Amanda forced herself to lift her head, struggling as if it were being weighed down by an anchor. She opened her eyes and stared at the woman’s ruined face.

  “This is why you’ll tell me where to find her. This is what she owes to me.”

  “Why would I tell you that?” Amanda asked, genuinely confused. “Even if I knew, why would I tell you? You’ve already told me you’ll kill me. Why would I also give Gretel to you?”

  The woman smiled broadly. “Do you know about torture, Mrs. Klahr? Do you know about it intimately?”

  Amanda stared hard into the shattered eye sockets of the woman standing before her, glaring. “If you think torturing me will give you Gretel’s whereabouts, we’re going to be in for some very long nights. I told you, I don’t know where she is.”

  The woman’s smile turned crooked now, her dulled incisors pointing down toward Amanda, threatening her. “Oh no, Mrs. Klahr, it’s not you who will know about torture. It’s young Petr, of course.”

  Chapter 19

  Dodd scrubbed the last of the bloodstains from the grout of the kitchen tiles using one of the dozen washcloths he had found in the back of the Klahr’s linen pantry. He ran the towel over the tiles a few more times for good measure and then stuffed the bloody rag into a large black trash bag along with about ten other towels that had been used for the same purpose. The scene was a massacre, and no matter how much water he poured and how furiously he mopped, he would never get all the blood out.

  He decided that before he left, he would leave the water running and flood the place out. It wouldn’t cover up all the forensic analysis, but it may fool the naked eye of Petr Stenson.

  Dodd opened the sliding door to the back porch and checked on Georg Klahr’s corpse. He had positioned the body in a sitting position with the one remaining arm draped impotently across the body, head bowed to the opposite side. He looked like a drunk who had put up his best fight against the night until finally passing out on a street corner.

  Dodd closed the door and then ascended the stairs to the upper floor, urgent now, taking the steps two at a time. At the top of the staircase, he ducked left into the far bedroom for one last inspection of Petr’s room. Petr was gone, obviously, but there was nothing to suggest he’d been killed or abducted. It wasn’t impossible, but Dodd’s professional detection concluded that the boy wasn’t home when the witch stopped by and unleashed her wrath on the rest of his helpless family. There was no vehicle in the driveway. Dodd deduced that the boy had taken it.

  But he would have to come home at some point, and it was Dodd’s mission now to conceal as much of the evidence as possible.

  The Klahr woman, on the other hand, was a mystery, and Dodd struggled to figure out where her body ended up.

  He walked back to the main bedroom, which was, by all accounts, the primary arena of chaos, and one that had almost certainly involved Amanda Klahr. Dodd had cleaned the few puddles of blood from the floor and disposed of the toothbrush—no doubt Amanda Klahr’s makeshift weapon. And one that had evidently hit its mark.

  Dodd debated about whether he should clean the room entirely—to make the bed and arrange everything just so—or to just leave things as they were. He decided on the latter, figuring a scene of tidiness would be more suspicious to Petr, possibly indicating that a third party was at play. But the blood had to go. You could never leave the blood behind.

  Of course, no matter the scene, Petr would be suspicious. His guardians were mysteriously gone, and the boy’s first thought would obviously turn to the witch. He knew she was alive, he’d said as much, and now there would be no doubt in his mind.

  But that was fine with Dodd. As long as he wasn’t indicted, he didn’t care too much about what the boy believed.

  At first, Dodd considered leaving the entire house as it was, as if he had never been there at all. After all, why put himself at risk? Just leave all the blood and bodies behind and go hunt the witch down. It certainly would have saved him a lot of time and disgust.

  But that simply wouldn’t do. There was a dead body. And another one missing. And Petr, as intrepid and independent as he apparently was, would be forced to report the death. And an army of System agents would follow that report and scour the Klahr orchard. And the carnage at the scene combined with a missing person and Petr’s months-long insistence that the woman was still alive would almost guarantee the re-opening of the case of the Witch of the North.

  And a then a lengthy inquiry about her missing corpse.

  And that simply wouldn’t do. There could be no more suspicion that she was alive. This was Dodd’s secret, and he was determined to keep it his own. It was why he risked his reputation and career by covering up the crime scene, why he spent all those days and nights outside his patrol area, endlessly monitoring the cabin and its surroundings. This was his only chance to find the truth for himself, and he was determined to keep his chance at life-everlasting still intact.

  Dodd glanced toward the upper-level of the house for the last time and then went back to the main level, stepping once more to the back porch. Disposing of the slumped body of Georg Klahr was going to be the trickiest part of this whole cleanup process.

  There were two choices really: drag the body to the lake and dump it in the water or take it with him in the trunk of his cruiser to be disposed of later, possibly out near the witch’s cabin. That was where he was headed next.

  Dodd wasted little time on internal debate and decided to take the corpse with him, fearing that if the body were dumped in the lake, it would show up on the shore of some neighbor’s beach in the next couple of days, the look of fear and regret fossilized on the man’s face. And once that story broke, it would reignite his fear of indictment.

  “Come on, old man,” Dodd grunted, leaning down and ducking his shoulder under the torso of the body so that it fell across his back. He slipped his arm between the man’s leg and the other arm behind his neck. With a lunge, Dodd lifted the body up and was now holding the corpse aloft in a kind of fireman’s carry.

  As quickly as he was able, Dodd made his way down the porch stairs to his cruiser. With a simultaneous duck and a heave, he plopped the body down from his shoulders, neck first, into the waiting trunk space, arranging the flailing limbs so they were tucked neatly inside. With a sigh and quick glance around, Dodd eased the trunk shut.

  He considered taking a walk down to the shoreline to assess whether the woman could have gone back across to the Morgan property, but he’d decided that she wouldn’t have made such a move. She was done here. There was nothing for her to gain by staying. She would go home now. She wouldn’t be able to stay there forever though; the System would come eventually, forcing her to flee somewhere new.

  But not just yet. There was still work for her to do.

  Dodd fired up the cruiser and sped from the Klahr property, turning out toward the Interways to journey back to the Northlands.

  He would never know just how well he’d spent his time, for twenty minutes later, Petr walked down the driveway and fo
und his house empty.

  Chapter 20

  Gretel knew the Klahrs wouldn’t answer the phone before she had dialed their number at the harbor station. She hung up before the third ring ended. The plan, as she and her mother had discussed, was to call the Klahrs when she and Hansel arrived at port. And Gretel had followed the plan, but her instincts told her there would be no celebratory pick up at the dock; she and Hansel would have to find their own way home.

  She knew it was possible that Mrs. Klahr had just been out running errands—to the nursery perhaps or the post office—and that Mr. Klahr was working in the orchard. But it was late in the day when they’d arrived, well past six, and Mrs. Klahr ran her errands in the morning and should have been home preparing supper well before then. Gretel knew almost instantly that something much direr was at play.

  And several hours later, as the taxi pulled in slowly to the driveway of her home, Gretel’s feelings of doom had become almost unbearable.

  “Thank you,” Gretel said absently, suspiciously staring at her house as she handed the taxi driver the amount displayed on the fare monitor.

  “It’s customary to tip, young lady,” the driver urged gently, unloading the bags from the trunk. “This was a long way from the harbor, you know.”

  “What?”

  “A tip. Extra money for my efforts, you get it?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry.” Gretel turned her focus from the house and began rifling in her personal bag as Hansel pulled the luggage toward the house.

  “Are you okay here? Is there someone here to see you in?”

  “Uh, yes, my mother will be home soon. And my, uh, grandparents live just across the lake. Thank you.” Gretel shoved several bills toward the man, not quite sure of the proper amount.

  “This will be fine,” the man said, taking only two of the six or seven bills in front of him. “You have a good night, miss.”