Gretel (22 page)

“It’s just on the other side of the cannery. From here you can only get there by boat. If you want I could pick you up and we could go there.”

After the suggestion had left her mouth Gretel realized how forward she must have sounded, but she felt comfortable in the offer. “Or, again, the orchard’s fine too. Wherever.”

“No! No, it’s fine. Rifle Field sounds perfect. I’d really like to see it.”

“Okay then, I’ll pick you up at noon.”

Anika’s mind spun as she read the gruesome recipe in front of her, the matter-of-fact tone in which the steps and measurements were explained only adding to the horror.

She frantically began to investigate her incisions and scars more closely, desperately craning her neck over her shoulders, trying to figure out what had been taken already. And what surgeries were still to be performed. Surely she wouldn’t survive these procedures much longer! Specifically the removal of her liver, which, apparently, judging by the bookmark and what she could decipher of the markings, could occur any day. Maybe this day. The woman had said she’d ‘take more tonight,’ and though Anika didn’t get the sense that the ‘more’ she was referring to would be the death blow necessarily, she simply couldn’t risk waiting any longer. Even if the woman ‘only’ tapped her spine for a few driblets of fluid, she could easily sever a nerve or crack a vertebra. And what good would survival be at that point? She had to get out of there today.

As Anika read further, she saw that the book also contained ingredients for the pies she’d been eating.

As she suspected, those pastries indeed seemed critical in making the final product (which is how Anika now thought of herself) and contained a bizarre assortment of things. Some of the ingredients hadn’t been translated, and others Anika had never heard of, but even the sounds of them had a sinister quality. Goose Proventriculus. Aged Lynx Bladder. Baneberry. Not exactly the stuff of Christmas desserts, she thought. And where this crazy old woman even found such things or knew where to look for them, baffled Anika.

But really, what was the difference? The ingredients could have been candy canes and jellybeans for all it mattered. The planned conclusion was for Anika to die, painfully, and if she wanted to thwart those plans, she had to move soon.

Anika closed the huge black book, poured the glass of water into the bedpan, and began on the pie.

As she ate, her thoughts surged with the idea that this was the last pie she would ever eat in her life, whether that life ended today or fifty years from now.

The taste of the thing was horrible, of course, but she took down every shard of crust and sludgy finger scoop of black saucy meat, using all her will to suppress her constant gags. As she finished and wiped her mouth and hands on the bed sheets in long streaks, Anika mentally finalized her plan.

The inside of the bowl was still slick and hard to hold, but she resisted cleaning it—when it dried it would become sticky and create the perfect grip. She placed the heavy ceramic bowl by her hip beneath the sheet and waited. The woman would be home by nightfall, Anika presumed. There was nothing left to do but wait.

The old woman had waited for just such a morning to make the journey. A cool day at the end of a long dry spell. It had been eleven days since the last rainfall, so the floor of the forest was well-parched and navigable. With her strength as it was, long morasses or wide creek beds would have been impassable. But on a day such as this, she felt confident about the trek. As long as she could find what she sought quickly.

Most of the signs that her Source traveled these parts only recently had long since eroded or been covered by leaves. But one clue had endured, miraculously, to quite literally light the way. A food wrapper, small and rectangular, used for enclosing something store-bought and processed. The casing was silver, highly reflective, and like a beacon it flashed just a glint as it caught a renegade ray of sun that had maneuvered past the canopy. It winked at the woman, beckoning. The woman considered it afterward and determined there must have been two hundred feet between her and the small discarded foil, but it had pointed the direction exactly, and without backtracking a step, the haggard woman found the abandoned car.

Life again delivering.

There were no signs that the car had been discovered by anything other than Northland fauna, but the old woman opened the passenger door warily anyway, as if suspecting a trap had been set. But if indeed they were responsible for sending her Source, certainly there’d be no point in trapping her. It was she who made the potion. Not them!

And there was no trap. Instead the door creaked lazily open, and the leaves which had perched between the door and the roof frame fell harmlessly to the ground. The woman stood back from the car and stared inside, searching.

There wasn’t much, other than an empty mug and the balled remains of what appeared to be an old newspaper. Cars had certainly changed quite a bit since her last experience, but the compartment below the dash—the glove box they called it, for storing a driver’s gloves in case the day was cold—remained.

She pulled the lever and dropped open the door of the small box, and was instantly greeted with a stack of papers, along with a set of miniature tools and a near-empty container of what appeared to be some type of lotion. The woman fished out the papers and shuffled through them, tossing those she found useless to the floor until she found what she was looking for: Anika Morgan’s identification card.

Anika Aulwurm Morgan.

The Source had given her first and last name on that first day in the slaughter room, when she still held a small level of trust—and even gratitude—for the old woman. It was a common enough name, Morgan, and not one she could attach to him in any way.

But another name had emerged, six nights ago, in the fever of poison, during the woman’s routine room inspection. The young Source had let slip the name
Aulwurm
. She’d said the name twice, groggily yet distinctly, but had attached it to no other name. The old woman had frozen at the sound of the word, and the tingle in her eardrums had cascaded down her back.

Aulwurm
.

It was a name the old woman knew well: a surname that formed branches not far from her own on her family’s tree.

And beyond just her recognition of the name, Aulwurm was unusually distinct. It was the maiden name of her grandmother and, as the old woman recalled, her Aulwurm uncles and aunts had taken great pride in the rarity of their name, claiming that it was born and existed in only a very segregated section of the Old World.

She’d heard the name only once since she’d been in the New Country—during that one night over a year ago when the men had come. Other than that time, over the centuries now that she’d been alive, the old woman couldn’t remember ever hearing the name outside of her family. And certainly never in the New Country.

But just as the woman suspected, upon hearing the name ring from the lips of her Source only nights ago, Aulwurm was the middle part of Anika Morgan’s full name—as it had been the middle name of her mother, no doubt—having been passed on through generations to all girls born to the family, by parents who wished to keep Old Country traditions and birthrights alive not only in their male offspring, but in the females as well. Certainly young Gretel’s middle name was no different.

The moment she’d heard the name the woman wanted to wake her Source immediately, and use all her means to coerce the girl into revealing her family’s full history. But since learning of her fate, the Source talked very little now and was explicitly silent on the issues of her personal life. She asked and answered only those questions that dealt with her most basic needs, and there was little doubt in the old woman’s mind that her Source would die before exposing her children any further. She had considered torture again, another branding to the face perhaps, but she was too close now and didn’t want to risk an infection so close to the end.

And besides, she wanted to explore for herself the truth of what happened. If indeed this was the Source of her dreams. If the memory was real. If the men had indeed come to her—in the flesh—and not in the dementia of her mind. She wanted to know if they
had
sent the girl—as her imagination dictated. She wanted to know if it was time to for her to pay.

She recalled it all again: it was evening, cold, and the old man had sat relaxed in her kitchen, with the younger one beside him, anxious. The old one had explained how it would happen: there would be an accident, and a woman would be delivered to her. She would need to trust in the powers, allow them to guide her, but the Source would come to her, and she needed only take in the prey.

And then prepare it. Perform the blending which she had mastered.

How they had known of her cabin—or even her own existence—was a mystery to the woman, and she uttered not a word that night, feigning feebleness and madness, as well as a language barrier. It was the first men she had seen in ages, and she was terrified by the intrusion and aggressiveness, particularly of the older one, as well as the overall surprise of their arrival.

But the older one had been undeterred by the woman’s condition, and he had simply laid out his plans—as well as his expectations—as she stood quivering, panicked, hunched by the window which overlooked the cabin porch.

And as quickly as they arrived they were gone; the sound of the departing car engine had roared in her head for days.

But then the weeks passed and the encounter faded, until soon the woman believed it hadn’t happened at all, but was instead a dream, or one of her many fantasies she played out in the absence of intimacy. It was a strange fantasy to be sure, but so were many of them.

But then Aulwurm brought it back to reality.

This strange, surreal meeting
had
taken place, and now, as the old woman stood beneath the huge Northland trees breathing in the warm autumn air, the entire one-sided conversation flooded back to her, and she knew her time was even shorter than she thought.

Gretel was on the lake by eight o’clock the next morning, which was two hours earlier than she’d been awake on a Sunday in as long as she could remember. Her lunch with Petr wasn’t for several hours, and though she’d get some rowing in on her way to Rifle Field, the type of rowing she’d use for that excursion wasn’t the effort Gretel was accustomed to on her day off. Sunday was her day of rigor on the lake, the day she sweated out those frustrations and grievances that couldn’t be expressed through words or work. On some days the brutality of her catharsis was so severe that Gretel imagined any onlooker would think she was in the midst of some desperate escape, fleeing the bonds of slavery or the eager jaws of a crocodile, perhaps.

But to Gretel the feeling was nothing short of wonderful, and once she finally reached exhaustion, usually somewhere just beyond the last scattered stretch of the Klahr orchard, a substitute feeling of peacefulness slipped into her body, as if filling the gap left by her concerns. Gretel would drench herself in the feeling, at once studying and devouring it, always knowing on some level that she was experiencing the sensation of normalcy: the natural state of being where God had intended humans to dwell.

She dipped the blades of the oars into the water and gave a long exaggerated pull, propelling the boat forward down the middle of the narrow lake, closing her eyes to experience the full pleasure of the draft on the back of her neck. She repeated these long, slow strokes, gradually building up speed while stretching the muscles of her chest, shoulders and back. She focused on the strain of each tendon, visualizing as they stretched and contracted, slowly unloading the buildup of anxieties from the previous week.

And then the fury began.

Gretel thrust the shafts of the oars from bow to stern, pivoting them at breakneck speed on their fulcrums, the blades slashing the surface of the water in hypnotic ferocity. She puffed her cheeks with each exhalation, and focused the air back into her lungs with every breath, watching absently as the banks of her property diminished. She was two hundred yards or so when the film of sweat began to form on her cheeks and forehead, and the world of confusion and problems began to drift steadily away. How laughably easy it was, Gretel thought, to simply leave a situation, to simply turn away and run, or row, as the case was here. When she was home, chest-deep in the chaos and responsibility of what her life had become, constantly being forced to decide on this and argue her points on that, she seemed utterly trapped, hopelessly surrounded by walls so tall and thick they could never be scaled or penetrated. But from the distance of only a hundred yards or so, surrounded by the vastness of earth and water, the truth was uncovered. The walls were a mirage. Escaping her world was no more difficult than thrusting a rowboat down a lake and leaving, and then watching with cold detachment as her house and property faded around a bend. She could never
actually
leave it of course, there was too much at home that she loved and needed to see through, but if she really wanted to, if she could ever summon the boldness and courage, she was free to just keep going.

The other part of rowing that Gretel had grown to love was the utter blindness of it—that feeling of never being sure, not entirely, what lie in wait. Of course, after all these weeks, she now knew this lake as well as anyone on earth probably, but there was always that possibility that some unknown log or critter had surfaced just up ahead, or even that another boat, heading just as blindly in the opposite direction, was on course to collide with Gretel and plunge her unconscious into the water. And when those fears didn’t satisfy her adventure, Gretel would create other fantasies: imagining hazarding some exotic river perhaps, all the time being watched by cannibals; or unknowingly bounding toward the shelf of some plunging waterfall.

She watched as the trees in the orchard began to diffuse, signaling the end of the Klahr property, and she summoned what remained of her reserves, ferociously clenching her jaws while ignoring the burn in her triceps and thighs. When her muscles had nothing left to serve, Gretel stopped abruptly and unleashed a scream that started deep in her belly and ended in a fit of hoarse, violent coughing. The burn in her chest was cold and harsh, but it lasted only a second or two, and her breathing steadied quickly.