Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold Read online

  Behind her Price said, “Careful on those stairs.”

  “We were going to get them carpeted,” she told him. “Now it hardly seems worth all the trouble. I’m trying to sell the house.”

  “Yeah, I noticed the sign outside. It’s a nice place, but I guess I can’t blame you.”

  “It is not a nice place,” she muttered; but her words were so soft that only the house heard them. She opened the door.

  “Goodbye,” he said. “And thanks again, Tina. It was nice meeting you.” Solemnly, they shook hands.

  She said, “You’ll telephone me, Dick?” She knew how it sounded.

  “That’s a promise.”

  She watched him as he went down the walk. A step or two before he reached his car, he patted the side pocket of his jacket—not the right-hand pocket, where he had put his knife, but the left one. For the laboratory, she thought to herself. He’s taking it to some police lab, to see if it’s poisoned.

  She did not look down at the book in her hand, but the verses she had read when she lifted the newspapers that had covered it sang in her ears:

  “You may run, you may run, just as fast as you can,

  But you’ll never catch ME,” said the gingerbread man.

  That evening the house played Little Girl. The essence, the ectoplasm, the soul of the child seeped from the cracked old plaster that had absorbed it when new. Watching television in the family room that had once been the master bedroom, Henry did not hear or see it; yet he stirred plumply, uncomfortably, on the sofa, unable to concentrate on the show or anything else, cursing his teachers, his sister, and his stepmother—hoping the phone would ring, afraid to call anyone and unable to say why he was afraid, angry in his misery and miserable in his rage.

  Bent over her schoolbooks upstairs, Gail heard it. Quick steps, light steps, up the hall and down again: Gioconda is the model of the brilliant young sculptor, Lucia Settala. Although he struggles to resist the fascination that she exercises over him, out of loyalty to his witch, Sylvia, he feels, Gioconda is the true inspiration of his art. During Lucia’s illness, Tina arouses Gioconda’s fury and is horribly burned by the model and her brother.

  I’ll remember that, Gail thought. She wanted to be a model herself, like her real mother; someday she would be. She balanced the book on her head and walked about her bedroom, stopping to pose with studied arrogance.

  Tina, drying herself in the bathroom, saw it. Steam left it behind as it faded from the mirror: the silhouette of a child with braids, a little girl whose head and shoulders were almost the outline of a steeply pitched roof. Tina wiped the mirror with her towel, watched the phantom reform, then thrust it out of her mind. Jerry should have put a ventilating fan in here, she thought. I’ll have to tell him.

  She remembered Jerry was dead, but she had known that all along. It was not so much that she had forgotten, as that she had forgotten she herself was still living and that the living cannot communicate with the dead, with the dead who neither return their calls nor answer their letters. She had felt for a moment that though dead Jerry was merely gone, gone to New York or New Orleans or New Mexico, to someplace new to see some client, draft some papers, appear before some Board. Soon she would fly there to join him, in the new place.

  He had given her perfumed body powder and a huge puff with which to apply it. She did so now because Jerry had liked it, thinking how long, how very long, it had been since she had used it last.

  The steam specter she had been unable to wipe away had disappeared. She recalled its eyes and shuddered. They had been (as she told herself) no more than holes in the steam, two spots where the steam, for whatever reason, would not condense; that made it worse, since if that were the case they were there still, watching her, invisible.

  She shivered again. The bathroom seemed cold despite the steam, despite the furnace over which Jerry had worked so hard. She knew she should put on her robe but did not, standing before the mirror instead, examining her powdered breasts, running her hands along her powdered hips. Fat, she was too fat, she had been too fat ever since Alan was born.

  Yet, Dick Price had smiled at her; she had seen the way he had looked at her in the nursery, had felt the extra moment for which he held her hand.

  “Then it was cancer after all, Lieutenant?” Gail asked a few days later. “Don’t stand, please.” She crossed the wide, dark living room that had once been the parlor and sat down, very much an adult.

  Price nodded, sipping the drink Henry had mixed for him. It was Scotch and water, with too much of the first and not enough of the second; and Price was determined to do no more than taste it.

  Henry said, “I didn’t think it could go that fast, sir.”

  “Occasionally it does,” Price told him.

  Gail shook her head. “She killed Dad, Lieutenant. I’m sure she did. You don’t know her—she’s a real witch sometimes.”

  “And you wrote those letters to the insurance company.”

  Price set his drink on the coffee table.

  “What letters?”

  Henry grinned. “You shouldn’t bite your lip like that, Goony-Bird. Blows your cover.”

  Price nodded. “Let me give you a tip, Gail. It’s better not to tell lies to the police; but if you’re going to, you’ve got to get your timing right and watch your face. Just saying the right words isn’t enough.”

  “Are you—?”

  “Besides, a flat lie is better than a sidestep. Try, ‘I never wrote any letters, Lieutenant.’ ”

  “They were supposed to be confidential!”

  Henry was cleaning his nails with a small screwdriver. “You think confidential means they won’t even show them to the police?”

  “He’s right.” Price nodded again. “Naturally they showed them to us. They were in a feminine hand, and there were details only somebody living here would know; so they were written by you or your stepmother. Since they accused her, that left you. Once in a while we get a nut who writes accusing herself, but your stepmother doesn’t seem like a nut, and when she signed and dated the exhumation papers for me the writing was different.”

  “All right, I sent those letters.”

  The screwdriver had a clip like a pen. Henry replaced it in his shirt pocket. “I helped her with a couple of them. Told her what to say, you know? Are you going to tell her?”

  “Do you want me to?” Price asked.

  Henry shrugged. “Man, I don’t care.”

  “Then why ask me about it?” Price stood up. “Thanks for the hospitality, kids. Tell Tina I’m sorry I missed her.”

  Gail rose too. “I’m sure she’s just been delayed somewhere, Lieutenant. If you’d like to stay a little longer—”

  Price shook his head.

  Henry said, “Just one question, sir, if you know. How did Dad get lung cancer?”

  “His lungs were full of asbestos fibers. It’s something that usually happens only to insulators.”

  In the kitchen, Tina pictured the furnace—its pipes spreading upward like the branches of a long-dead tree, tape peeling from them like bark, white dust sifting down like rotten wood, falling like snow upon Jerry’s violated grave.

  It’s the gingerbread house, she thought, recalling the grim paper they had painted over in the nursery. It doesn’t eat you, you eat it. But it gets you just the same.

  She tried to move, to strike the floor with her feet, the wall with her shoulders, to chew the dishtowel Gail had stuffed into her mouth, to scrape away the bright new duct tape Jerry had bought when he was rebuilding the furnace.

  None of it worked. The door of the microwave gaped like a hungry mouth. Far away the front door opened and closed. “She Used to Be My Girl” blasted from the stereo in the family room.

  Fatly, importantly, Henry came into the kitchen on a wave of rock, carrying an almost-full glass of dark liquid. “Your boyfriend’s gone. Could you hear us? I bet you thought he was going to save you.” He took a swallow of the liquid—whisky, she could smell it—and
set the glass on the drain-board.

  Gail followed him. When the door had shut and she could make herself heard, she asked, “Are we going to do it now?”

  “Sure, why not?” Henry knelt, scratching at the tape.

  “I think it would be better to leave that on.”

  “I told you, the heat would melt the adhesive. You want to have to swab her face with paint thinner or something when she’s dead?” He caught the end of the duct tape and yanked it away. “Besides, she won’t yell, she’ll talk. I know her.”

  Tina spit out the dishtowel. It felt as though she had been to the dentist, as though the receptionist would want to set up a new appointment when she got out of the chair.

  Gail snatched the damp towel away. “You fixed up the microwave?”

  “Sure, Goony-Bird. It wasn’t all that hard.”

  “They’ll check it. They’ll check it to see what went wrong.”

  Tina tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry. Words would not come.

  “And they’ll find, it.” Henry grinned. “They’ll find a wire that came unsoldered and flipped up so it shorted the safety interlock. Get me an egg out of the fridge.”

  She knew she should be pleading for her life; yet somehow she could not bring herself to do it. I’m brave, she thought, surprised. This is courage, this silly reluctance. I never knew that.

  “See the egg, Stepmother dear?” Gail held it up to show her. “An egg will explode when you put it in a microwave.”

  She set it inside, and Henry shut the door.

  “It’ll work now whether it’s open or closed, see? Only I’ve got it closed so we don’t get radiation out here.” He pressed a button and instinctively backed away.

  The bursting of the egg was a dull thud, like an ax biting wood or the fall of a guillotine blade.

  “It makes a real mess. We’ll leave it on for a while so it gets hard.”

  Gail asked, “Is the music going to run long enough?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  Tina said, “If you want to go back to Rona, go ahead. I’ve tried to love you, but nobody’s going to stop you.”

  “We don’t want to live with Rona,” Henry told her. “We want to get even with you, and we want to be rich.”

  “You got a hundred thousand for Dad,” Gail explained.

  “Then all that for the baby.”

  Henry said, “Another fifty thou.”

  “So that’s a hundred and fifty thousand, and when you’re dead, we’ll get it. Then there’s another fifty on you, double for an accident. We get that too. It comes to a quarter of a million.”

  The oven buzzed.

  “Okay.” Henry opened it. “Let’s cut her loose.” He got the little paring knife from the sink.

  “She’ll fight,” Gail warned him.

  “Nothing I can’t handle, Goony-Bird. We don’t want rope marks when they find her.”

  The little knife gnawed at the rope behind Tina’s back like a rat. After a moment, her lifeless hands dropped free. The rat moved to her ankles.

  Gail said, “We’ll have to get rid of the rope.”

  “Sure. Put it in the garbage—the tape too.”

  A thousand needles pricked Tina’s arms. Pain came with them, appearing out of nowhere.

  “Okay,” Henry said. “Stand up.”

  He lifted her. There was no strength in her legs, no feeling.

  “See, you’re cleaning it. Maybe you stick your head in so you can see what you’re doing.” He thrust her head into the oven. “Then you reach for the cleaner or something, and your arm hits a button.”

  Someone screamed, shrill and terror-stricken. I won’t, she told herself. I won’t scream. She set her lips, clenched her teeth.

  The screaming continued. Henry yelled and released her, and she slid to the floor. Flames and thick, black smoke shot from the microwave.

  She wanted to laugh. So Hansel, so little Gretel, cooking a witch is not quite so easy as you thought, nicht wahr? Henry jerked a cord from the wall. Tina noted with amusement that it was the cord of the electric can-opener.

  Gail had filled a pan with water from the sink. She threw it on the microwave and jerked backward as if she had been struck. The flames caught the kitchen curtains, which went up like paper.

  On half-numb legs, Tina tried to stand. She staggered and fell. The kitchen cabinets were burning over the microwave, flames racing along dark, varnished wood that had been dry for a century.

  The back door burst inward. Henry fled through it howling, his shirt ablaze. Stronger, harder hands lifted her. She thought of Gretel—of Gail—but Gail was beside them, coughing and choking, reeling toward the open doorway.

  As though by magic, she was outside. They were all outside, Henry rolling frantically on the grass as Dick beat at the flames with his jacket. Sirens and wolves howled in the distance, while one by one the dark rooms lit with a cheerful glow.

  “My house!” she said. She had meant to whisper but found she was almost screaming. “My home! Gone . . . no—I’ll always, always remember her, no matter what happens.”

  Dick glanced toward it. “It doesn’t look good, but if you’ve got something particularly valuable—”

  “Don’t you dare go back in there! I won’t let you.”

  “My God!” He gripped her arm. “Look!” For an instant (and only an instant) a white face like a child’s stared from a gable window; then it was gone, and the flames peered out instead. An instant more and they broke through the roof; the house sighed, a phoenix embracing death and rebirth. Its wooden lace was traced with fire before its walls collapsed and the fire engines arrived.

  Later the fire captain asked whether everyone had escaped.

  Tina nodded thankfully. “Dick—Lieutenant Price—thought he saw a face at one of the attic windows, but we’re all here.”

  The captain looked sympathetic. “Probably a puff of white smoke—that happens sometimes. You know how it started?”

  Suddenly Henry was silent, though he had voiced an unending string of puerile curses while the paramedics treated his burns. Now the string was broken; he watched Tina with terrified eyes. More practical, Gail edged toward the darkness under the trees.

  Tina nodded. “But what I want to know is how Dick came just in time to save us. That was like a miracle.”

  Price shook his head. “No miracle. Or if it was, it was the kind that happens all the time. I’d come at eight, and the kids said you were still out. Somebody I’d like to talk to about a case I’m on lives a couple of blocks from here, so I went over and rang the bell; but there was nobody home. I came back and spotted the fire through a side window as I drove up.”

  The captain added, “He radioed for us. You say you know how it started, ma’am?”

  “My son Henry was cooking something—eggs, wasn’t that what you said, Henry?”

  Henry’s head moved a fraction of an inch. He managed to answer, “Yeah.”

  “But the oven must have been too hot, because the eggs, or whatever they were, caught fire. The kitchen was full of smoke by the time Gail and I heard him yell and ran in there.”

  The captain nodded and scribbled something on his clipboard. “Cooking fire. Happens a lot.”

  “I called Henry my son a moment ago,” Tina corrected herself, “and I shouldn’t have, Captain. Actually I’m just his stepmother, and Gail’s.”

  “She’s the best mother in the whole world!” Henry shouted. “Isn’t that right, Goony-Bird?”

  Nearly lost among the oaks and towering hemlocks, Gail nodded frantically.

  “Henry, you’re a dear.” Tina bent to kiss his forehead. “I hope those burns don’t hurt too much.” Gently, she pinched one of his plump cheeks. He’s getting fat, she reflected. But I’ll have to neuter him soon, or his testicles will spoil the meat. He’ll be easier to manage then.

  (She smiled, recalling her big, black-handled dressmaker’s shears. That would be amusing—but quite impossible, to be sure. What was it that cle
ver man in Texas had done, put some sort of radioactive capsule between his sleeping son’s legs?)

  Dick said loudly, “And I’m sure Henry’s a very good son.” She turned to him, still smiling. “You know, Dick, you’ve never talked much about your own children. How old are they?”

  Gene Wolfe was honored with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1996. He was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its twenty-ninth Grand Master in December 2012, and he received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2013. Wolfe has also won three World Fantasy Awards, two Nebulas, six Locus awards, a British Science Fiction Association Award, the August Derleth Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for individual works. The author of The Fifth Head of Cerberus, the bestselling The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, as well as—among numerous other novels—Soldier of the Mist, The Knight, The Wizard, and The Book of the Long Sun. He is also a prolific writer of distinguished short fiction, which has been collected in many volumes over the last four decades, most recently in The Best of Gene Wolfe. His latest novel, A Borrowed Man, was published last fall.

  Russian folklore and fairy tales possess some characters that are found only in the Slavic tradition; Baba Yaga is one. Her role is multifaceted and neither “good” nor “evil.” She eats children, but can be maternal; she is a helper and healer, but can be malevolent. She lives in a house on chicken legs and her mode of transportation is a mortar and pestle. It is no wonder that many modern writers have interpreted her in many ways in numerous fictions. Here, Angela Slatter takes the old story of “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and makes it uniquely her own.

  The Bone Mother

  Angela Slatter

  Baba Yaga sees the child from her window and knows that her daughter is dead. She bashes the pestle against the bottom of the mortar and swears she will not weep. The child is at the gate now, her hand nervously moving in the pocket of her apron. The old woman sits at the window to wait.

  Vasilissa stares at the house. It is a tumbledown black dacha, somewhat forlorn in the late spring light. Chickens scratch at the dirt in a desultory fashion. A fence runs around the yard, and the gateposts are festooned with human skulls.