Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart - By Jesse Bullington Page 0,27
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