Old Kingdom 04: Across the Wall (27 page)

‘It is a shop,’ she said. ‘A Sony PlayStation shop. That’s what’s in the windows. Lots of games.’

‘Weird,’ said Hansel. ‘I mean, there’s nothing here. No one to buy anything.’

Gretel frowned. Somehow the shop frightened her, but the more she tried not to think of that, the more scared she got.

‘Maybe it got left by accident,’ added Hansel. ‘You know, when they just fenced the whole area off after the fires.’

‘Maybe …’ said Gretel.

‘Let’s check it out,’ said Hansel. He could sense Gretel’s uneasiness, but to him the shop seemed like a good sign.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Gretel, shaking her head.

‘Well, I’m going,’ said Hansel. After he’d gone six or seven steps, Gretel caught up with him. Hansel smiled to himself. Gretel could never stay behind.

The shop was strange. The windows were so clear that you could see all the way inside to the rows of PlayStations all set up ready to go, connected to really big television screens. There was even a Coke machine and a snack machine at the back.

Hansel touched the door with one finger, a bit hesitantly. Half of him wanted it to be locked, and half of him wanted it to give a little under his hand. But it did more than that. It slid open automatically, and a cool breeze of air-conditioned air blew across his face.

He stepped inside. Gretel reluctantly followed. The door shut behind them, and instantly all the screens came on and were running games. Then the Coke machine clunked out a couple of cans of Coke, and the snack machine whirred and hummed and a whole bunch of chocolate bars and lollies piled up outside the slot.

‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Hansel happily, and he went over and picked up a Coke. Gretel put out her hand to stop him, but it was too late.

‘Hansel, I don’t like this,’ said Gretel, moving back to the door. There was something strange about all this—the flicker of the television screens reaching out to her, beckoning her to play, trying to draw them both in …

Hansel ignored her, as if she had ceased to exist. He swigged from the can and started playing a game. Gretel ran over and tugged at his arm, but his eyes never left the screen.

‘Hansel!’ Gretel screamed. ‘We have to get out of here!’

‘Why?’ asked a soft voice.

Gretel shivered. The voice sounded human enough, but it instantly gave her the mental picture of a spider, welcoming flies. Flies it meant to suck dry and hang like trophies in its web.

She turned around slowly, telling herself it couldn’t really be a spider, trying to blank out the image of a hideous eight-legged, fat-bellied, fanged monstrosity.

When she saw it was only a woman, she didn’t feel any better. A woman in her mid-forties, maybe, in a plain black dress, showing her bare arms. Long, sinewy arms that ended in narrow hands and long, grasping fingers. Gretel couldn’t look directly at her face, just glimpsing bright-red lipstick, a hungry mouth, and the darkest of sunglasses.

‘So you don’t want to play the games like your brother, Hansel,’ said the woman. ‘But you can feel their power, can’t you, Gretel?’

Gretel couldn’t move. Her whole body was filled up with fear, because this woman was a spider, Gretel thought, a hunting spider in human shape, and she and Hansel were well and truly caught. Without thinking, she blurted out, ‘Spider!’

‘A spider?’ laughed the woman, her red mouth spreading wide, lips peeling back to reveal nicotine-stained teeth. ‘I’m not a spider, Gretel. I’m a shadow against the moon, a dark shape in the night doorway, a catch-as-catch-can … witch!’

‘A witch,’ whispered Gretel. ‘What are you going to do with us?’

‘I’m going to give you a choice that I have never given before,’ whispered the witch. ‘You have some smattering of power, Gretel. You dream true, and strong enough that my machines cannot catch you in their dreaming. The seed of a witch lies in your heart, and I will tend it and make it grow. You will be my apprentice and learn the secrets of my power, the secrets of the night and the moon, of the twilight and the dawn. Magic, Gretel, magic! Power and freedom and dominion over beasts and men!

‘Or you can take the other path,’ she continued, leaning in close till her breath washed into Gretel’s nose, foul breath that smelled of cigarettes and whiskey. ‘The path that ends in the end of Gretel. Pulled apart for your heart and lungs and liver and kidneys. Transplant organs are so in demand, particularly for sick little children with very rich parents! Strange—they never ask me where the organs come from.’

‘And Hansel?’ whispered Gretel, without thinking of her own danger, or the seed in her heart that begged to be made a witch. ‘What about Hansel?’

‘Ah, Hansel,’ cried the witch. She clicked her fingers, and Hansel walked over to them like a zombie, his fingers still twitching from the game.

‘I have a particular plan for Hansel,’ crooned the witch. ‘Hansel with the beautiful, beautiful blue eyes.’

She tilted Hansel’s head back so his eyes caught the light, glimmering blue. Then she took off her sunglasses, and Gretel saw that the witch’s own eyes were shriveled like raisins and thick with fat white lines like webs.

‘Hansel’s eyes go to a very special customer,’ whispered the witch. ‘And the rest of him? That depends on Gretel. If she’s a good apprentice, the boy shall live. Better blind than dead, don’t you think?’ She snapped out her arm on the last word and grabbed Gretel, stopping her movement toward the door.

‘You can’t go without my leave, Gretel,’ said the witch. ‘Not when there’s so much still for you to see. Ah, to see again, all crisp and clean, with eyes so blue and bright. Lazarus!’

An animal padded out from the rear of the shop and came up to the witch’s hand. It was a cat, of sorts. It stood almost to the witch’s waist, and it was multicoloured, and terribly scarred, lines of bare skin running between patches of different-coloured fur like a horrible jigsaw. Even its ears were different colours, and its tail seemed to be made of seven quite distinct rings of fur. Gretel felt sick as she realised it was a patchwork beast, sewn together from many different cats and given life by the witch’s magic.

Then Gretel noticed that whenever the witch turned her head, so did Lazarus. If she looked up, the cat looked up. If she turned her head left, it turned left. Clearly, the witch saw the world through the cat’s eyes.

With the cat at her side, the witch pushed Gretel ahead of her and whistled for Hansel to follow. They went through the back of the shop, then down a long stairway, deep into the earth. At the bottom, the witch unlocked the door with a key of polished bone.

Beyond the door was a huge cave, ill lit by seven soot-darkened lanterns. One side of the cave was lined with empty cages, each just big enough to house a standing child.

There was also an industrial cold room—a shed-size refrigerator that had a row of toothy icicles hanging from the gutters of its sloping roof—that dominated the other side of the cave. Next to the cold room was a slab of marble that served as a table. Behind it, hanging from hooks in the damp stone of the cave wall, were a dozen knives and cruel-looking instruments of steel.

‘Into the cage, young Hansel,’ commanded the witch, and Hansel did as he was told, without a word. The patchwork cat slunk after him and shot the bolt home with a slap of its paw.

‘Now, Gretel,’ said the witch. ‘Will you become a witch or be broken into bits?’

Gretel looked at Hansel in his cage, and then at the marble slab and the knives. There seemed to be no choice. At least if she chose the path of witchery, Hansel would only … only … lose his eyes. And perhaps they would get a chance to escape. ‘I will learn to be a witch,’ she said finally. ‘If you promise to take no more of Hansel than his eyes.’

The witch laughed and took Gretel’s hands in a bony grip, ignoring the girl’s shudder. Then she started to dance, swinging Gretel around and around, with Lazarus leaping and screeching between them.

As she danced, the witch sang:

‘Gretel’s chosen the witch’s way, And Hansel
will be the one to pay. Sister sees more and
brother, less— Hansel and Gretel, what a mess!’

Then she suddenly stopped and let go. Gretel spun across the cave and crashed into the door of one of the cages.

‘You’ll live down here,’ said the witch. ‘There’s food in the cold room, and a bathroom in the last cage. I will instruct you on your duties each morning. If you try to escape, you will be punished.’

Gretel nodded, but she couldn’t help looking across at the knives sparkling on the wall. The witch and Lazarus looked, too, and the witch laughed again. ‘No steel can cut me, or rod mark my back,’ she said. ‘But if you wish to test that, it is Hansel I will punish.’

Then the witch left, with Lazarus padding alongside her.

Gretel immediately went to Hansel, but he was still in the grip of the PlayStation spell, eyes and fingers locked in some phantom game.

Next she tried the door, but sparks flew up and burned her when she stuck a knife in the lock. The door to the cold room opened easily enough, though, frosted air and bright fluorescent light spilling out. It was much colder inside than a normal refrigerator. One side of the room was stacked high with chiller boxes, each labeled with a red cross and a bright sticker that said URGENT: HUMAN TRANSPLANT. Gretel tried not to look at them, or think about what they contained. The other side was stacked with all kinds of frozen food. Gretel took some spinach. She hated it, but spinach was the most opposite food to meat she could imagine. She didn’t even want to think about eating meat.

The next day marked the first of many in the cave. The witch gave Gretel chores to do, mostly cleaning or packing up boxes from the cold room in special messenger bags the witch brought down. Then the witch would teach Gretel magic, such as the spell that would keep herself and Hansel warm.

Always, Gretel lived with the fear that the witch would choose that day to bring down another child to be cut up on the marble slab, or to take Hansel’s eyes. But the witch always came alone, and merely looked at Hansel through Lazarus’s eyes and muttered, ‘Not ready.’

So Gretel worked and learned, fed Hansel and whispered to him. She constantly told him not to get better, to pretend that he was still under the spell. Either Hansel listened and pretended, even to her, or he really was still entranced.

Days went by, then weeks, and Gretel realised that she enjoyed learning magic too much. She looked forward to her lessons, and sometimes she would forget about Hansel for hours, forget that he would soon lose his eyes.

When she realised that she might forget Hansel altogether, Gretel decided that she had to kill the witch. She told Hansel that night, whispering her fears to him and trying to think of a plan. But nothing came to her, for now Gretel had learned enough to know the witch really couldn’t be cut by metal or struck down by a blow.

The next morning, Hansel spoke in his sleep while the witch was in the cave. Gretel cried out from where she was scrubbing the floor, to try and cover it up, but it was too late. The witch came over and glared through the bars.

‘So you’ve been shamming,’ she said. ‘But now I shall take your left eye, for the spell to graft it to my own socket must be fueled by your fear. And your sister will help me.’

‘No, I won’t!’ cried Gretel. But the witch just laughed and blew on Gretel’s chest. The breath sank into her heart, and the ember of witchcraft that was there blazed up and grew, spreading through her body. Higher and higher it rose, till Gretel grew small inside her own head and could feel herself move around only at the witch’s whim.

Then the witch took Hansel from the cage and bound him with red rope. She laid him on the marble slab, and Lazarus jumped up so she could see. Gretel brought her herbs, and the wand of ivory, the wand of jet, and the wand of horn. Finally, the witch chanted her spell. Gretel’s mind went away completely then. When she came back to herself, Hansel was in his cage, one eye bandaged with a thick pad of cobwebs. He looked at Gretel through his other, tear-filled eye.

‘She’s going to take the other one tomorrow,’ he whispered.

‘No,’ said Gretel, sobbing. ‘No.’

‘I know it isn’t really you helping her,’ said Hansel. ‘But what can you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Gretel. ‘We have to kill her—but she’ll punish you if we try and we fail.’ ‘I wish it was a dream,’ said Hansel. ‘Dreams end, and you wake up. But I’m not asleep, am I? It’s too cold, and my eye … it hurts.’

Gretel opened the cage to hug him and cast the spell that would warm them. But she was thinking about cold—and the witch. ‘If we could trap the witch and Lazarus in the cold room somehow, they might freeze to death,’ she said slowly. ‘But we’d have to make it much colder, so she wouldn’t have time to cast a spell.’

They went to look at the cold room and found that it was set as cold as it would go. But Hansel found a barrel of liquid nitrogen at the back, and that gave him an idea.

An hour later, they’d rigged their instant witch-freezing trap. Using one of the knives, Hansel unscrewed the inside handle of the door so there was no way to get out. Then they balanced the barrel on top of a pile of boxes, just past the door. Finally, they poured water everywhere to completely ice up the floor.

Then they took turns sleeping, till Gretel heard the click of the witch’s key in the door. She sprang up and went to the cold room. Leaving the door ajar, she carefully stood on the ice and took the lid off the liquid nitrogen. Then she stepped back outside, pinching her nose and gasping. ‘Something’s wrong, Mistress!’ she exclaimed. ‘Everything’s gone rotten.’

‘What!’ cried the witch, dashing across the cave, her one blue eye glittering. Lazarus ran at her heels from habit, though she no longer needed his sight.

Gretel stood aside as she ran past, then gave her a hefty push. The witch skidded on the ice, crashed into the boxes, and fell flat on her back just as the barrel toppled over. An instant later, her final scream was smothered in a cloud of freezing vapor.

But Lazarus, quicker than any normal cat, did a backflip in midair, even as Gretel slammed the door. Ancient stitches gave way, and the cat started coming apart, accompanied by an explosion of the magical silver dust that filled it and gave it life.