Profoundly humbled, she sat back down. Dried her tears on the hem of her shirt, and peered into the darkness with every drop of clarity she could muster. And what she saw, if she really squinted, was a bed.
Riding high on its four-post frame with a tall, ornate headboard, the bed was maybe five feet away, towering from her perspective on the floor.
Ms. Martin’s bed. It had to be. And the old woman was probably sleeping in it. Nora didn’t know if she should turn around and run or if she should rush toward the one person who could explain what was going on in this house, who could make it stop.
She didn’t know what to do, so she sat there until she felt dizzy, whether from the terror or from the disorientation. And suddenly all she wanted to do was to lie down, but this strange room in this strange house was clearly no place for Nora to take a nap.She needed to get out.This seemed like the most important thing, so she hauled herself back to her feet.
And though it unnerved her, she turned her back on Ms. Martin’s bed, thinking and hoping with all her heart that the door must be somewhere behind her. If she just walked in a straight line, she would eventually find it, or at least find the wall. Any wall. Or just something, anything, to hold on to.
Instead, upon turning, what she found was that all those plants she had passed on the way in were now trees, rooted not in ceramic pots but in earth, carpeted in pine needles and dead leaves. And stretching before her was not the long, narrow bedroom she’d walked into, but an overgrown path through the forest.
When she peered back over her shoulder, it wasn’t a bed she saw anymore, but a grassy mound of dirt and twigs beside the path.
She cradled her head in her hands, let out a low sob. This couldn’t be happening, but there was no denying the cold earth beneath her feet and the starry sky beyond the branches overhead. The cry of an owl echoed through the trees.
She asked herself if there was something she could have missed, if she had somehow wandered out of the house into a forest and had been making her way deeper and deeper into it this whole time, mistaking the path for a hall. “No,” she said, “what’s happening—”
She froze at the sound of a large animal ambling through the underbrush just off the path to her right. It had a hefty, uneven gait, almost a saunter. So much heavier than the little feet of the smaller animal—squirrel? chipmunk?—that skittered out of its way. Then a rush of feathers as a worried bird rustled up from her tree into the night.
The big animal—a deer? a bear?—was getting closer. Nora held her breath, waiting and hoping that it was just passing by. And it did sound that way for a moment, like it would keep going on its way alongside the path, but then, just as it reached her, the uneven steps slowed to a stop.
It was so close that she could have reached out and touched it. So close she could hear its breath. And smell it. Rotting. Dead. Here, finally, was the source of the putridnessbeneath the incense. It was coming from inside this animal’s mouth.
Unable to hold her breath any longer, Nora let it out as quietly as she could, but she knew that the animal could hear her. It was sniffing the air now, sniffing her exhale, its nose less than a foot away at about eye level. And it didn’t sound like a bear, a deer, or anything else with a large animal’s muzzle.
It sounded human.
And all the old stories about Ms. Martin came rushing back, how she would bound through people’s backyards at night on her hands and feet, long white hair trailing behind her as she hunted local dogs and cats.
Nora was suddenly certain that it was her standing there, hidden in shadow. This was her house, after all, and the forest she had conjured inside it. She was behind all this. She had done something, cast a spell, rearranged space itself. Stretched out the halls. Elongated rooms. She had raised a forest from the floorboards (and even now Nora’s terror was mixed with just a touch of awe). It was all some sort of enchantment, it had to be. Because the kids were right. Ms. Martin was a witch.
And any second now she would step from the shadows to punish Nora for her intrusion, perhaps do to her what she’d done to all those animals.
“Please,” Nora whispered. “I’m so sorry, I really am. This will never, never happen again, I promise. Just please ... please let me go.”
The witch was silent.
Nora waited, staring into the darkness.
Then a small, dry chuckle wafted out at her. The witch was laughing, it seemed, and Nora didn’t know if this wasgood or bad, but the smell of her breath brought the dizziness back in full force, and Nora was afraid of passing out.
“Please,” she murmured again. “I just want to go home.”
The witch let out a sigh that nearly did Nora in. Her vision swam. But then, much to her relief, the witch sauntered back off into the trees.
“Oh, thank you,” Nora wept, as she took this to mean she had been forgiven. Or at least spared. She wasn’t going to be eaten and become part of that horrible rot seeping from the witch’s mouth. Poisoning the air.
Alone once more, Nora fought through the dizziness and did her best to figure out what to do next. Which way to turn and walk. If any of this was even real or if she had fallen under a spell and gotten herself lost in an enchanted forest inside a witch’s house. As Nora was thinking about all this, she noticed something shiny in the shadows just off the path. Right where Ms. Martin had been.
Nora crept tentatively toward it, the barbed leaves of a holly bush raking her arm as she stepped into the underbrush. Darkness overtaking her except for that shining thing the witch had left behind.
Nora crouched low, and her mouth fell open when she saw what it was, and she began to shake all over. The silver hand mirror. The one she had failed to steal for Gretel all those years ago. It was lying there on the forest floor, just as polished and shining as it was then.
Shaking her head, Nora backed away. The witch was taunting her. The witch was in her head. The witch was going to torture her before eating her. Because why else would she force Nora to confront that beautiful thing that had sent her down this dangerous road, which led straight to tonight?
“Pick it up,” whispered a voice somewhere behind her. The voice was childlike and unthreatening. (But then wasn’t that just how Ben had described Ms. Martin’s voice after he’d listened in on her phone conversation?)
Nora peered back over her shoulder but saw only trees and the spaces between them. The witch must have been circling her in the dark like a wolf circled its prey.
