The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart (10 page)

“What are you on bout, then?”

“You’ll keep your hands to yourself?”

“Only if you do the same,” Hegel snorted.

“Fair’s fair. Your word, then?”

After a small pause, “My word.”

The witch began talking and did not stop for what seemed ages. Hegel settled in by the fire, pleased the witch had abandoned
her foul innuendos for the time. The warm, well-fed, and drunk graverobber listened to her tale, perking up at times, at others
nearly dozing. Manfried stirred occasionally, catching enough with his good ear to color his dreams.

The old woman’s shadow appeared distended and ghoulish to Nicolette, but the crone herself possessed a bit of those qualities
to begin with. Turnips, the girl thought, looking at the woman’s knobby fingers bridged in her lap. The fire was warm and
Nicolette was not, however, so she scooted closer to the hearth and its proprietor. The wind blew in through the hovel’s window
without even a scrap of cheesecloth to keep it at bay. Nicolette shivered, but the old woman leaned back in her chair, savoring
the draft.

The hut was small but the door had a slat latching it shut and the window rested just below the ceiling, allowing Nicolette
to feel far securer than she had but minutes before. Few people enjoy being lost in the wood at night, and those who do one
had best avoid. Being out of the dark forest had calmed her heart, although her host unnerved her.

Who would want to spend their days and nights so achingly far from other people? Overwhelmed with joy at spying a dim light
through the trees, the girl had considered the question only in passing. For an instant she had even let herself believe it
was her home despite the older, larger trees and other differences in the nightscape.

The sun had rested squarely over her father’s cabin when their sole pig had jerked forward, pulling the tether from her hands
and rushing off into the forest. The first hour she spent chiding herself for not minding her charge better, the second for
not minding her path better as she attempted to find a familiar marker. Her growing anxiety was given brief respite when she
spotted the errant swine across a patch of frozen bog, but after her quarry again escaped into the underbrush Nicolette became
distraught. Fear overrode her embarrassment, and she began calling out as dusk slunk through the branches.

When the sun fully departed and the forest came alive with noises she valiantly held in her tears. Her father had told her
if she was old enough to wed she was too old to cry, and while no suitors had tramped along the muddy path to their cabin
in pursuit of her hand, she maintained caring for a husband could be no more difficult or desirable than tending a pig or
a father. Nevertheless, the girl sniffled as she groped her way among the cold bark pillars looming around her.

Then the glow in the distance, and Nicolette ran as fast as she could given the abundance of roots and trunks rearing out
of the dark at her calloused feet. Approaching the crooked hut she slowed, relief becoming tinged with her earlier fear of
the dark wood. Her father had cautioned her about charcoal burners—their filthy lifestyles, deceptive charms, and rapacious
hunger for pretty young girls. She paused at the door, uncertainty seizing up her arms and legs, when she felt the sudden
and powerful sensation of being watched. She turned slowly, and saw nothing but night in an unfamiliar part of the vast forest.

A twig snapped in the blackness, and Nicolette was crying and banging on the door with both hands. The old woman let her in,
slipped the board back into place, and brought the girl to her meager firepit. Minutes later the lass had calmed down, gotten
the numbness out of her feet, and taken in both surroundings and savior.

She felt she should explain her predicament, but her host seemed disinterested. Glancing around the cramped interior, she
saw a small table and a few ledges cluttered with drying plants and earthen pots. A large stack of firewood filled one corner
beside the hearth and a bitter-smelling heap of rags occupied the other. A pinestraw mat and the chair were the only other
furnishings. Drawing her arms around her legs, Nicolette sighed in a bid to draw the old woman’s attention away from the smoldering
logs.

In response the woman began to sing quietly, rubbing her chin with her tuberish fingers. Nicolette peered up at her, teeth
on lip. Considering the shadows of the flames, the run-down state of the shack and its owner, and now her rasping unfamiliar
words in a strange melody, the old woman appeared positively witchy.

Something landed on the roof, dust snowing down on them. Nicolette yelped, staring up as the boughs of the ceiling sank down
ominously over the door, then sprang back up as others sank down closer to the small hole where the smoke escaped. The wood
squeaked, the depression moving over their heads. Nicolette remembered to breathe but could not move, entranced by the shifting
ceiling. She shook with such violence her vision blurred, but her eyes snapped back into focus as the old woman leaped at
her. With surprising alacrity the crone snatched a clump of Nicolette’s hair and plucked out a half dozen cinnamon strands.

The old woman grinned at the wincing girl, showing her few remaining blackened teeth. She rose and shuffled to the window,
holding Nicolette’s hair before her like a charm. Raising her hand to the hole into the wilds, the old woman offered up the
hair. With all the slowness of dawn’s arrival on a winter morn, something between a hand and a paw reached down out of the
night and carefully extracted the long wisps, then disappeared back up out of the window.

The song trailed off, the old woman laboriously returning to the fire. Resuming her seat, she looked directly at Nicolette
for the first time. The girl now looked years younger, her face the milky yellow of fresh cream. A small puddle pooled around
her, seeping between the flat hearthstones. She opened and closed her mouth three times as tears mixed with her other fluids
on the floor before she squinted her eyes shut and squeaked, “What is it?”

Had Nicolette opened her eyes she would not have cared one bit for the scowl on the crone’s withered face.

“What it’s become only the wolves and night-birds know,” the old woman croaked, shifting closer in her seat to the petrified
girl, “but it used to be my husband.”

Nicolette nodded in the way she might politely accept a stale bit of cheese she did not actually want, and then was sick all
over herself. She next became conscious of the old woman soothing her blubbering, stubby digits caressing her cheeks and hair.
She recoiled, suddenly aware of her nakedness. The old woman stood and turned, fetching a bowl and a knife from the table.
Taking Nicolette’s soiled woolen dress from beside her chair, she cut into it with disturbing passion. The girl crawled away
toward the corner, but the groaning of the roof stopped her.

“Here now,” the old woman cooed, stooping over her with a dripping scrap of dress. Nicolette gaped upward as the crone wiped
her clean, and while her heart still pounded with such intensity it hurt, she calmed enough to realize the old woman lingered
over her delicate parts. The seemingly decrepit host licked her lips while she dipped the rag back into the bowl, squeezing
Nicolette’s budding chest as she wiped away the bits of mushroom the girl had found in the forest.

Nicolette wanted to spit but dared not move, instead shuddering passively under the old woman’s strokes. The girl’s upper
half clean, the rag dipped below her navel, the aged eyes reflecting firelight. Strange and terrible as the night had grown,
Nicolette refused to consent to its becoming any worse. Having reached her limit, the young woman crossed her legs and backed
away.

The old woman’s yellowish eyes flickered, and with that same disarming quickness she upended the bowl, dousing the girl’s
lap. Water sizzled on the stones and the two women stared at each other, the elder bemused, the younger defiant. The utter
bizarreness of the day and night had sapped Nicolette of her usual resilience and strength, but no longer. Then the old woman
leaned in, again singing that foreign song, and a faint scratching came from above. The girl slumped forward, drawing her
knees up to her chest; the old woman once more clutched Nicolette’s tresses and used the knife to clip a small lock.

Again she went to the window, and again held up her tribute. Again Nicolette stared entranced at the bestial appendage and
again she felt her stomach cramp and her eyes water. Again the crone resumed her seat, trailing off as the thing on the roof
shifted about.

The old woman grinned at Nicolette, motioning her closer. The girl shifted, more to draw nearer the fire than the crone. She
hated the old woman, she hated the miserable, cold shack, she hated the moonless wood outside, she hated her nakedness and
fear, and she especially hated whatever had crept out of her nightmares and onto the roof. She hated her cleverness, which
forbade her from pretending everything was an awful dream from which she would soon awake, thus ending the pain in her stomach
and chest. And she hated that blasted pig.

“He eats children,” the crone hissed, instantly regaining Nicolette’s attention. “Every little shred. Toenails and teeth,
bones and fat, lips and assholes. Gobbles them all up. Does it slow, so they scream while he eats and maybe does other things
to them. In here you can hear them wailing some nights, out there in the dark.”

Drinking in the girl’s bulging eyes and shallow breaths, the old woman adopted a matronly tone. “Don’t you worry, child, I
know his corrupt ways well. The hair’s his favorite, he eats it last, often leaving naught but the scalp for his next night’s
breakfast. He keeps them in the trees but I see them swaying, and when the moon is bright I watch from the window, yes I do,
see him sucking and chewing on them like they was dipped in honey.”

Despite the gentler tone of voice Nicolette’s stomach contracted and she gagged at what the woman described, instantly knowing
it to be true.

“But,” the old woman hurried, whispering, “there are ways to keep him up there instead of in here until morning. Always flees
at cockcrow, slinking back to his lair until shut-in. If we occupy his attentions until dawn, you can steal home before next
gloaming.”

Nicolette forgot her embarrassment and threw herself at the old woman’s plump legs, chest heaving with dry, soundless sobs.
The crone smiled and began her song, gently taking her knife to a thin plait of hair. And this is the story every child knows,
wherein the old woman slowly snips the girl’s hair and slips it to the beast, keeping it sated until the morn. Then the girl
picks her way home through the wood, bald as a babe but none the worse for her ordeal. Her relieved father draws a warm bath
and no longer works her so hard, and perhaps she even finds the errant shoat along the way. The following afternoon a handsome
hunter arrives, having just slain a terrible monster in the forest, and before her hair has grown to her shoulders she is
a happy wife and expectant mother.

Only the most ignorant or optimistic child could believe this is how the tale ends. As to what truly transpired that night
in the wood so heartbreakingly far from home, a reexamination is in order. If Nicolette is to arrive home intact, the old
woman must be true of word and purpose, and even the aforementioned ignorant child may wonder why any good-hearted person
would dwell in the black belly of a monster-ridden forest, listening at night to children being killed and eaten. While the
duller young listeners might be satisfied to hear that the crone had grown too old to make the journey back to civilization,
those shrewd of wit will hasten to counter with examples of the old woman’s unnatural vigor. The truth, which should have
been painfully obvious from the beginning, is that the old woman was an abominable witch who savored the flesh of children
and ate them every chance she got.

Ah, the quick-witted will say, then perhaps the beast is actually kind and innocent but stays on the roof, afraid of the witch.
He has fallen in love with Nicolette, and sniffs her hair longingly, slowly gathering the courage to confront the crone and
rescue the maiden. After he defeats the evil hag Nicolette will love him despite his appearance, so he will be restored to
human shape and everything will be daisies and buttercups for the happy couple.

Such preposterous rot demonstrates that the only thing more foolish than a too-stupid child is a too-smart one. A sharp child
might invent such fallacious fantasies, questioning the motives of a deadly menace, whereas the dullard sees a beast with
jagged maw agape and acknowledges it for the obvious danger it is. The fiend upon the roof surpassed even the witch in its
malevolent hunger for human meat, as the slower children will have known from the start.

Together the two had eaten many children, but more often fed on hunters, charcoal burners, and anyone else unlucky enough
to wander into that accursed part of the wood. Both preferred their meat fresh, although the wife favored her supper cooked
a little bit more than the dripping stuff her husband craved. Nicolette had stumbled into a grimmer predicament than she could
have imagined in her most loathsome fever dream, and worse still, she did not even know it.