“Yes, something is wrong. She’s not who she was before all of this happened. Before Marlene and father. Of course not. You couldn’t have expected that.”
Gretel stayed quiet, shaking off my logic.
“And besides, what was I to do? What am I to do? She doesn’t want me to go. I’m just a kid, Gretel. And...” I broke off the rest of the sentence.
“And what?”
“And I’m not you. I don’t have what you have. And I’m not just talking about your power, or intuition or whatever. I don’t have the fight that you have. It’s not something I love about myself—I hate it about myself actually—but it’s the way it is. The way I was born. I accept that now.”
Gretel stood directly in front of me and lowered her head, and stared at me just below her brow the way a stern teacher might to a mischievous pupil. She pointed a finger at me, directly between my eyes. “You’re so wrong about that, Hansel. I know that you’ve always thought about yourself that way, but you’re wrong. So wrong. And if I see it, it’s there. You have so much fight in you. And you’re going to need it one day.” Gretel smiles. “And probably a lot more days than that.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” I responded. It was almost a reflex—a reaction to the torrent of love I suddenly felt for my sister—and I scrunched my face into an incongruous grin, hoping to look brave while attempting to tighten my tear ducts.
“If you had any idea how hard this is for me Hansel, to leave you here, you would feel very sorry for me. But I want you to know that this isn’t just for me, leaving early—leaving at all—it’s for you too.” Gretel put a crooked finger beneath my chin and lifted it so my eyes met hers. “You can’t stay here much longer, brother. I’m leaving now to give you a little more time, but the change is coming again. You have to stay with Mrs. Klahr. Pack some things, whatever you absolutely need, and keep it at the Klahr’s. And start staying there as often as you can.”
“Gretel, I...”
“Hansel!” Gretel stood firm for a few seconds, imparting the seriousness of all she’d said before, and then she pulled away, showing me her hands in a gesture of apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to leave it like this.”
We stood staring at each other, neither of us having the words to change the mood of the moment. But it lasted only seconds before it was destroyed by the sound of Petr Stenson’s car turning onto the dirt road that led to our cabin. Gretel’s white knight had arrived to rescue her. Rescue her from the Land of the Witch. The Land of Marlene. And her wake of destruction.
Chapter 23
The first day of our hike up the Western Koudeheuvals is proceeding as routinely as anyone could have expected, particularly considering all of the things that are festering in the group. Thus far, Emre has obeyed the track of the mountain road, as well as the pace we’ve set for him, and Oskar has managed to keep his distance from the boy. Just in case, either Noah or I are never far away.
Maja, who has been caught in the maelstrom of my personal mission for the bulk of this adventure, has suddenly found her stride. She’s become durable, developing mental and emotional calluses, going from eager guide, to scared hostage, to willing follower among this coterie of travelers.
I watch her as she takes long, decisive steps up the slope, noting that although she is a follower, most of her following occurs at the front of the pack. Despite the cool temperatures, the sweat drips from her cheeks, and there is no lag in her pace as she reaches a small stone step and leaps deftly to the flat top. She has a smile on her face, and I know that, despite the gravity and danger of our quest, not to mention the frequent sexual innuendos from Oskar, there is no place in the world she would rather be. This is where she always knew she belonged, surrounded by the land at large, not stacking cans in a broken-down cantina in Stedwick Village.
One by one, the rest of us follow Maja up the low stone step, bunny hopping the two-foot riser. Once on top, we’re immediately met by several more large stones, boulders really, stacked neatly in step formation. Each stone is larger than the next, and each step is higher than the last. We’ll be able to scale the first two alone, I note, but by the time we reach the top stone, we’re going to have to work as a team to get everyone up, hoisting and hauling until the last person gets pulled up by the others.
“Is this right, Noah? This path? There’s no other option?”
“You are tired, Mr. Hansel?” Oskar asks.
I am tired. “Yes.”
Oskar frowns at my unwillingness to engage.
“All right, we should be able to get to that last boulder alone, except maybe for Emre. Once we’re all there we’ll figure it out.”
“We did no problem with Anika,” Oskar says.
“Good for you, Oskar. But we’re a bit of a different troop today. You can see that, right?”
Oskar shrugs, unconvinced.
“I’ll tell you what. You be the sergeant for this mission. We’ll follow your lead.”
Each of us climbs the boulder, Emre needing a little assistance on the second to last stone, until we reach the face of the final boulder, which seems more ominous from this distance. I stare up and gauge it to be about eight feet high. “The stage is yours, Oskar. How do you want to solve this little puzzle?”
“Is easy. We push the small ones first. Then go in order like that. Noah to be the last. We all pull him at the end.”
It was a method that would work, all things equal, but in this scenario, Emre was the smallest person, and if he was to go first, that would leave him alone at the top. It would only be for a few moments, but it bothered me still. This wouldn’t have been my strategy, but it was I who insisted Oskar take the reins, and now I have little choice but to follow his lead.
“Come here you boy.”
Emre stands in place and swallows nervously. It’s one of the first times I’ve seen trepidation in the boy since we left Zanpie.
“I not kill you right now. I push you up. But still to kill you later.”
With little choice, Emre assents, and Oskar, Noah, and I push him up easily, giving him a small thrust at the end to clear the edge, making up for his lack of height.
Maja is next, and I hurry her along, not wanting Emre to be alone for too long. “Let’s go, Maja. Up.”
Noah, Oskar, and I hoist Maja up to the top stone, and as she reaches the lip and pulls herself topside, she says, “Shit!”
“Dammit!” I say immediately. “I knew it.”
“What it is?” Oskar asks.
“He’s gone, Oskar. That’s what it is. Emre, he ran. He shouldn’t have gone first.” I turn my voice up toward Maja, who’s staring down at us listening. “Go, Maja. Go get him.”
Maja nods and turns, and Oskar, Noah, and I work out getting ourselves up the stone. With urgency now upon us, we scale the boulder fairly easily, with Oskar and I pulling Noah up a few minutes after Emre’s escape.
“Lead the way, commander,” I say to Oskar, making sure my sarcasm is clearly detected.
“Is my fault?” he replies. “How I know?”
I again avoid taking the road that leads to Oskar’s land of excuses, and instead continue up the less-beaten dirt path that snakes up the mountain.
I sprint for the first quarter mile or so, and then, as my stamina wanes, I drop into a steady jog. I don’t stop to look back for Oskar and Noah; Emre is my only concern at the moment.
I hop up another rock and follow the mountain path around a giant clump of bushes until I reach a small clearing.
And then I see her.
About a mile from where Emre escaped on the top rock step, I see Maja sitting on a fallen log. Her face is calm, serene even, and her elbow is perched on her knee. She looks exhausted. In her hand is a gun pointed directly at Emre’s head. The only thing more relaxed than the look on Maja’s face is the one on Emre’s.
“Hi, Maja,” I say gently. “I see you got him.”
Maja nods. “I did. He is a little bastard.” She coughs and spits, still tryi
ng to get her lungs back to steady. “I sprinted the whole way from the rock and then found him just sitting here. I don’t know what he’s doing. Maybe he just got tired. Or realized he’d be on his own up here. Nobody would want that. Especially when night falls.”
I nod in agreement, and then my eyes shift to her hand. I tip my chin toward the weapon. “And I see you have a gun too.”
“Yes, I do.” There’s no apology in her voice, just acknowledgement of the fact.
“That would have been something I would have liked to have known about.”
Maja shrugs. “You thought my father would send me off without protection?”
“I don’t know, but I feel like there were times along the way when a gun would have come in handy.”
“Never had it handy at those times.”
I think about the times when the gun would have been handy and realize she’s right.
“But today I did.”
“You caught him,” Noah says, jogging up beside me, appearing completely replenished despite the mile or so run. He studies the scene, similarly to the way I did, and also takes note of the gun that Maja had in her backpack all along. “Did he fight you?”
Maja shakes her head. “Like I told Hansel, he was just sitting here. Like he was waiting for me. But I can’t run anymore, and if he decided to take off...anyway, the gun.” She waves the weapon casually and then, realizing it’s no longer necessary, secures it back in her sack.
A few moments later Oskar stumbles onto the scene. In complete contrast to Noah, Oskar appears on the verge of having a heart attack. He doubles over, hands on knees, and then finds a spot on the log next to Maja. Almost at once, he stands again, something seeming to catch his eye behind Noah and me. He begins a careful scan of the area, and then walks quickly past us to the tree line. He peers in for a moment and then pushes aside a large, bushy branch. Behind the branch, as if Oskar has just performed an amazing act of magic, is a large stone arch.
The structure is about six feet high, perhaps eight feet in width, and each stone looks to be the size of a car engine. From where we now stand, the arch is completely camouflaged by the lush foliage.
“Is here,” Oskar says barely above a whisper.
“What is that?” I ask to no one specifically, mesmerized by the exposed stone bridge. I stand and crane my neck, trying to get a better look.
Oskar turns and faces us. “Noah know what is. You know it, right, Noah?”
“Let’s go. We’re wasting time sitting here.” Noah nudges Emre with his knee, prodding him to stand.
I walk over to the arch and run my hand across one of the stones, staring through the passageway that leads into the woods. The area beyond it has been cleared of trees, and a long stone path, which begins about twenty feet in, leads straight from the arch into the forest. It meanders slightly before being swallowed by the woodland, disappearing down an embankment.
“Where does this go?” I ask.
Maja has joined me now, and we both turn toward Noah. He drops his head in resignation, having clearly lost the battle to keep moving. “It’s Lyria.”
Maja looks at me and then back at Noah. “What is Lyria?”
“We go see it, Noah. Is your pretend village, yes?” Oskar turns and looks at Maja and me. “I the only one that know,” he says proudly. “Noah don’t take them to the elders.”
“He told me too,” I say quickly, feeling obligated to defend Noah’s honor. “But now that we know what it is, where this leads, I think Noah’s right. We should go.”
“What you mean ‘Go?’ Is night soon. We stopping anyway at dark. We stay here. In Lyria.” Oskar draws out the name of the town, pronouncing it ‘Leeee-ria.’
“It’s not a ‘pretend’ town,” Noah replies, “and this is not the arrangement I have with the people here. I bring them thrill-seekers, people who have come to spend their wealth, contributors, not devil-hunting passersby.”
“We contribute. The girl she will help with the meal.”
Maja rolls her eyes.
“I said we’re leaving. We are not welcome here under these conditions.”
Oskar digs in. “We just ask, Noah. Ask to stay for one dinner. One drinks. Is all.”
“No.”
Oskar looks around at the group and then back to Noah. “Is five people. We vote, yes? Agree? Is fair. We all walking, Noah. Is not only you.”
Noah holds his glare on Oskar, but seems to understand the issue won’t be resolved without a proper vote, and maybe not even then. “It’s up to Hansel. If he agrees to a vote, then we’ll vote.”
My instinct is to parrot Noah, and that is obviously what he wants me to do, but my impression of Oskar to this point is one of instability. He may not respond well to dictators, and I certainly don’t need a mutiny. “We’ll do a vote, Oskar, but you have to accept the results, even if you don’t like them.”
Oskar smiles and claps once. “And you will too?”
I nod to the terms.
“Okay. Who say we go to see Lyria?”
Oskar’s hand goes up enthusiastically, and at first he looks to be the lone vote.
And then Maja sheepishly raises her hand. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I just...I’m very tired. And I could use a proper meal. Besides, it looks like it could be amazing down there.”
Noah frowns out Maja, disappointed, and says, “It doesn’t matter. Two votes doesn’t win it. We go.”
“Wait,” Oskar says. “Have to ask the other way too. Proper vote, yes?
Noah shrugs in resignation.
“Who want to keep going and no see Lyria?”
Noah and I wave our hands at shoulder height, performing the formality for the sake of Oskar’s deal.
“Aha! You see it. Is the boy. He don’t vote for either one.”
I walk over to Emre, who is sitting like granite on the ground in front of the log, eyes closed, a smile on his face. “Emre?”
Emre opens his eyes and stares at me, the smile growing slightly as he does.
“Did you hear what we were doing?”
The boy looks toward the trees where the arch stands receptively. “I can’t wait to see Lyria,” he says. “I’m sure it will be lovely.”
Chapter 24
It turned out Gretel was wrong, at least about the last thing she told me before she left to the Urbanlands. She told me her leaving would give me more time.
She was so wrong.
It was Gretel’s belief, I suppose, that somehow her presence in the house was disrupting the balance and causing some type of disturbance, an irritant to our mother. It was true that they didn’t get along—in fact, by the time Gretel left, they had virtually no relationship at all—but in other ways, far more important ways, I now know that Gretel was the force keeping everything together. I had always suspected it was so, I knew her leaving would be a mistake, but as usual, I was a victim to the force that was Gretel’s personality.
Mother did, in fact, start to regress, just as Gretel predicted, and I discovered the disturbing regression only six days after the new year—less than a month after Gretel departed for the Urbanlands.
Mother had continued her daily routine of travelling down to the lakeside, ostensibly to meditate and stretch her mind and muscles, trying to keep both healed and on the proper path. She understood better than anyone that the windows to the evils of the world were easily opened within her, and she had spent the better part of a year and a mountain of energy trying to keep them closed. By the winter, she was up to four or five sessions a day, each of which averaged maybe ten or fifteen minutes. A ‘reset’ she started to call these sessions, and I liked the word. Some days, sessions lasted longer, depending on the hurt, I presume, but never more than thirty minutes from what I could tell, which, from my vantage at the house, wasn’t much.
But then Gretel left, and less than a week later, even when the weather turned cold and biting, gray and dark, mother started spending an hour or more on her reset sessions, with one lasting
almost three. I started to check on her more often, walk to the porch and try to decipher what was happening through the spruces and twilight, and though I could never quite see exactly what was happening down by the lakeside, with the leaves now gone from the other trees and bushes, I could at least see the top of her head when she was sitting, and down to her waist when she stood. She was alive, at least, and, as long as she was working on herself, that’s all I cared about.
But I knew deep inside things were wrong. There was too much movement down there. Whatever was happening seemed quite the opposite of meditation. The opposite of quiet.
And the evidence grew each time Anika returned to the house, always seeming to come back less relaxed than the last time. She wasn’t mean exactly, just distant, agitated and distracted, and she rarely wanted to spend any time talking, even if I engaged her and prompted a conversation. Whatever routine she had recently adopted down by the lake, it was no longer healing her. The tics were returning, the lack of care to her personal appearance. And the tunnel-vision focus. Her aim may not have been on the potion like it was a year ago, but that same maniacal focus had returned.
And then she began taking things down in duffels. Things from the kitchen and shed, items and tools that I hadn’t seen since I was much younger, back when father was still alive.
My suspicion began to metastasize into fear one afternoon when, after a particularly long reset session by the lake, I stood on the back porch and watched in horror as Anika Morgan bathed herself using the hose at the rear of the house. She was laughing the whole time, gleeful as she let the water flow over her neck and face, ruffling her hair furiously all the time. She scrubbed her hands and arms and then pulled down her pants and moved to her lower half. I turned away, not embarrassed by my mother’s nudity, but appalled at the speed and mannerisms of the whole display. It was awful.
But something else chilled me to my core. I didn’t see it clearly, the thick dark fluid that was coming off of her body, but I knew in my heart it was blood.
The Gretel Series: Books 1-3 (Gretel #1-3) Page 74
