Gretel (9 page)

Nothing. She felt not the slightest movement from the anchor or wood boards.

Defeated, she leaned her head back gently to the bed which was now behind her and closed her eyes, fighting back the tears. The woman would be in soon, would see the bed in the center of the room and the exposed eye bolt, and she would know Anika was trying to escape. Perhaps she already assumed that, but this would be the proof. Maybe the woman would kill Anika right there on the floor, or maybe she would explain everything first, and then kill her. Or let her leave. Either way Anika would know her fate soon.

As if her thoughts had been screamed aloud, Anika heard the chopping sounds outside her window suddenly stop. She waited in fear, breathless, hoping for the sickening thump of metal on wood to resume, having not calculated exactly what the next step in her plan would be.

Other than to survive.

She wasn’t ready to die. She thought of her children again, this time less abstractly, conjuring their faces in her mind. Hansel was only a baby, he wouldn’t understand. And Gretel. All of the obligations that were Anika’s, formed by decisions that she had made willingly since she had left home at seventeen, and that had ultimately shaped her life to this point, would fall to Gretel. It wouldn’t just be unfair, it would be an atrocity. Her daughter’s future promised value, significance; it wasn’t to serve her elderly grandfather in the Back Country, or to spend the remainder of her youth as a surrogate mother to her brother and servant to her father.

This old woman seemed reasonable and lucid, Anika thought, though she was obviously a little askew. If she could maybe evoke some more information from her, possibly find some common ground with the woman to build on, she could buy a little time and figure an escape. Maybe convince the woman to let her go. Anika again thought of the accent. There was something familiar in it, the way the woman cut off the ‘Rs’, rolling them slightly. It wasn’t a sound heard often in this country, but Anika was sure she recognized it, from her childhood perhaps. The memory, however, was faint and seemed to dissolve before she could approach it.

The cabin door thundered closed and the sound rang through Anika’s room like a gunshot. She needed to arrange the room back to normal. She wasn’t ready to die. Not yet. If she hurried she could pull the bed back to the wall and the woman would never know she was up, scheming.

The usual sounds of clanging pots and plates that seemed never to stop for long rattled outside Anika’s door. The woman was cooking again, probably Anika’s breakfast. There was still time. From her knees, Anika stretched her left arm toward the right rear post of the bed, and was able to grab it, wrapping her fingers around the adorning iron bulb. The chain on her ankle limited her reach, but Anika was able to use it for leverage to pull the bed back in. The bed was heavy on its return, but she was able to slide it slowly on the wooden floor, being careful not to make too much noise.

The sounds in the kitchen stopped, and the ensuing silence unnerved Anika, as if someone was waiting, listening. She had five or so more planks to navigate before the bed would be back to its original place, though even if she had all day she wouldn’t have the leverage to get it flush against the wall again. She would have to leave a gap to get out and back on the mattress, and she certainly couldn’t push the bed while on top of it. That was fine, it would be close enough.

The lull from the kitchen suddenly erupted into one last
Clang!
, as if a dozen dishes were dumped in a heap into a basin, and then the now familiar footsteps began to click quickly down the hall. Anika didn’t have the bed repositioned yet, it was still slightly diagonal, and there were more planks to go; if the woman walked in now, the crookedness would be obvious to her.

Ignoring the noise it would make, and with her full effort, Anika yanked the top of the post, pulling the bed toward her like a rower on a Viking ship. It slid with less resistance than Anika had anticipated, leaving her off balance, and making it impossible for her to offset the effect of the clawed foot at the bottom of the right post catching on a slightly raised floor plank.

The bed almost turned entirely over on top of Anika, but instead rocked back to its side, forming a trench-like barrier in front of her, as if she had taken cover in preparation for a bomb blast.

Anika felt a fearful laughter well up inside of her, but resisted it, pushing the bed back on all fours, and missing by only inches the woman who now stood in front of her.

Anika screamed and recoiled, her back slamming forcefully against the solid wall.

The woman stood staring at Anika for a moment, expressionless, as if watching fish in an aquarium. There was no detectable sense of anger in her face, and Anika stared back at her, keeping eye contact and trying to gauge her next move.

The woman smiled slightly at Anika, and then made a peek over the bed, making sure Anika was still bound and hadn’t somehow escaped the shackles. The look was warm and playful, and Anika felt a compulsion to smile back, but resisted. Instead she said, “I have to go. My children are—”

“What are their ages?” she interrupted. “Your children, what are their ages?”

Anika paused, weighing the consequences of revealing this seemingly benign fact. “Fourteen and eight,” she replied. “My daughter is fourteen and my son is eight.”

“Only two?” The woman looked away as if annoyed at this answer, and then rhetorically asked, “When did women stop having children?”

Anika was well past feeling insulted, and instead experienced a twinge of encouragement from the common ground they seemed to have found. “How many do you have?” she asked.

The woman’s eyes seemed to flicker at the question, and Anika noticed the slightest downturn at the edges of her mouth.

“Certainly you have children?” Anika was almost challenging in her tone and knew it was a gamble; but the woman showed interest in
her
children, and whatever wound Anika may have opened on the matter she figured she could sew up on the back end. She wanted to keep the woman talking.

“I don’t,” the woman responded, clearly not interested in telling her own story.

“Really? When did women stop having children?” Anika forced a laugh, hoping to convey a sense of camaraderie and not insolence.

The woman turned back toward Anika, her eyes wide and focused, a slight smile forming at the edges of her mouth as if amused at Anika’s boldness. “At one time I had six,” she said. “They’ve all been dead many years.”

Anika felt the blood rush to her face, a reaction indicative of both fear and embarrassment. Her stomach convulsed and she felt like vomiting.”I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean…” Wide-eyed, Anika watched the woman’s face, hoping she would say something—anything—to fill the empty space where Anika’s words should have been, thereby letting her off the mat.

But there was only silence, and the woman continued her cold stare, forcing Anika to drop her gaze to the floor.

Finally Anika looked up and said, “Are you going to kill me?”

The woman considered the question for a moment, seeming to give it sincere thought, and then said, “Why are you here?”

Somewhat relieved, Anika digested the question, took a deep breath, and replied, “I was attacked…you attacked me and…”

“No!” the woman yelled.

The word was shrill and reflexive, causing Anika to flinch, and for the first time since she had been here, Anika saw in the woman the first real evidence of derangement. She’d assumed from the beginning it was there, of course, waiting restlessly underneath all the properness and hospitality, waiting for any imbalance to release it. And now here it was surfacing, from little more than a wrong answer.

“Why am I here?” Anika asked.

“No! No! I asked you, ‘Why are you here?’ Answer the question!” The woman was screaming now, enraged, her lips curling back from her teeth with every word, revealing the huge, dirty gray and brown triangles that clustered in her gums.

Anika coughed nervously and began to cry softly. She could feel the nausea again rising in her throat. What were those teeth? she thought. Oh my God, they were inhuman!

She felt hysteria coming on and realized she had to get control. Panic would just feed into the woman’s outrage and that might just wrap things up for good. Anika thought again of her children. What answer was the woman looking for?

Anika took another deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them and said, “I was in a car accident.”

She said the words stoically, looking directly into the woman’s eyes, as if she had known all along this was the answer the woman wanted. She felt empowered on some level, though she couldn’t have said why.

“My car went off the road,” she continued, “and I went for help. I got lost in the forest.”

Anika measured each word, each syllable, as if writing a sonnet, careful not to get the meter wrong. It was working. The woman was riveted, as if she were a child listening to a knight’s tale. But there wasn’t much more to tell without getting into the details, and somehow Anika didn’t think the woman was interested in her muddy shoes.

What else? Just give the facts, she thought, and then said, “So I screamed for help.”

The woman’s eyebrows perked up at this last bit of the story, and a broad smile curved up her cheeks. Anika again shuddered and stopped talking. She felt lucky to have said this much without upsetting her captor. She didn’t want to push it.

The woman’s eyes softened on Anika, and she tilted her chin down slightly, cocking her head to the side, as if sympathizing with a petulant child who needed only to sleep to be right again. “You need more rest…” she began and then paused, “Angela?”

“Anika. How…how did you know my name?”

“Evidently I didn’t.”

“Yes, but…you were very close. How did you know?”

“I’ll be in shortly with your breakfast. If you displace your furniture again, I will cut off your hands.”

Anika felt a chill from the threat, but realized she had little to lose now. “You never answered my question. Are you going to kill me?”

“The proper word is ‘Slaughter,’ Anika,” the woman replied. “One does not ‘kill’ an animal, one slaughters it.”

Gretel finally exhaled, and then began to hyperventilate. She knew instinctively the car was not headed toward any fire this time: that car was headed for her.

“Oh my God,” Gretel managed to whisper, and her eyes shifted desperately from the approaching red machine to her brother. “Oh my God! Hansel!” she screamed, “Hansel come in now!”

Hansel jerked up quickly, and Gretel could tell by his posture that he recognized immediately the panic in her voice. She regretted frightening him, but if she had been casual in her summons, she would have surely wasted time arguing with her brother about staying out for just a few more minutes.

Gretel wasn’t quite sure why she was so afraid for her brother—after all, it was the police that were heading toward them, not a herd of buffalo—or why she wanted him to come home to begin with; if the approaching System officer was a real threat, Hansel would have been safer staying in the fields. But Gretel wanted her brother with her, instinctively, as a mother would her child.

Hansel watched in awe as the speeding blaze of metal passed him, barely slowing as it turned toward the house. He heard his sister’s voice again and the spell was broken; he was now running with frenzy toward Gretel, leaving the homemade toys behind him in the field.

Gretel watched as the car pulled to a stop about twenty yards from the front of the house where it sat idling for several minutes. She realized she had never seen a System car from the front before, or from such a close distance, and she was mesmerized by it. It seemed massive to her. Not in its length or height, necessarily, but in its bulk, the way a cow doesn’t look very large from the road—it’s only when one stands next to it that its size is appreciated. And the headlights were like nothing she had ever seen, they were huge and elliptical, with the organic quality of staring eyes that Gretel guessed must have been the intention of the engineer. The grill was cased in solid black with silver plates running vertically along the front where, again, the resemblance to teeth on a living face was undeniable. The car reminded Gretel of a squinting dragon.

She stood motionless on the porch staring wide-eyed at the hulking red machine, only raising her arm slightly to take in her brother as he finally lumbered up beside her. The size of the car and the deep rumbling of the idling engine made Gretel think of a bull sizing up a bullfighter, only instead of the confidence of a matador, Gretel was frozen with fear. The System was there to help—to find her mother—that was their job; but it all felt wrong, and Gretel couldn’t help feeling terrified.

“Who is that, Gretel?” Hansel asked, not taking his eyes off the car.

Her brother was fairly composed, Gretel thought, given the menacing mass of metal that loomed in his front yard.

“Is it The System?”

Gretel cleared her throat. “Yes,” she replied with a feeble attempt at confidence.

“We should get Father. Is he awake?”

“He’s gone. He went to look for Mother.”

Hansel glanced toward his sister, who intercepted his look before he could draw some horrible conclusion.

“He’ll be back soon. He just wanted to search again in the daylight. You saw how impossible it was last night.”

This seemed to assuage whatever worry was brewing in Hansel, and he focused again on the current circumstances. After a moment he said, “Maybe they know something about Mother.”

Gretel knew The System had come there about her mother, obviously, but she assumed it was to get information. A photograph, a description of what her mother was wearing, who her friends were, things like that. Information to help them in their search. Admittedly, Gretel even had a thought while she stood gawking at the car that they had come to question Father about his role in her mother’s disappearance, though his alibi was indisputable. What she hadn’t considered, however, was that they had come with news. “Yes. Maybe.”