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"Thank you so much for your visit, but I'm fine, really, in perfect health, ready to make every necessary sacrifice, including being on one of those stupid diets to lower my cholesterol levels, because I want to go on living for a long while yet."
Berta got up and opened the door. The two women said goodbye to her. The meeting in the square had still not finished.
"I'm so pleased you came. I'm going to stop my crocheting now and go to bed. And to tell you the truth, I believe in the rogue wolf. Now since you two are so much younger than I, would you mind hanging around until the meeting finishes and make quite sure that the wolf doesn't come to my door?"
The two women agreed, bade her goodnight, and Berta went in.
"She knows!" the hotel landlady whispered. "Someone has told her! Didn't you notice the ironic tone in her voice? She knows we're here to keep an eye on her."
The mayor's wife was confused.
"But how can she know? No one would be so crazy as to tell her. Unless..."
"Unless she really is a witch. Do you remember the hot wind that suddenly blew into the sacristy while we were talking?"
"Even though the windows were shut."
The hearts of the two women contracted and centuries of superstitions rose to the surface. If Berta really was a witch, then her death, far from saving the village, would destroy it completely.
Or so the legends said.
Berta switched off the light and stood watching the two women in the street out of a corner of her window. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry, or simply to accept her fate. She was sure of one thing, though, she had been marked out to die.
Her husband had appeared earlier that evening, and to her surprise, he was accompanied by Miss Prym's grandmother. Berta's first reaction was one of jealousy: what was he doing with that woman? But then she saw the worried look on both of their faces, and became even more troubled when she heard what they had to say about what had gone on in the sacristy.
The two of them told her to run away at once.
"You must be joking," Berta replied. "How am I supposed to run away? My legs can barely carry me the hundred yards to church, so how could I possibly walk all the way down the road and out of the village? Please, sort this problem out up in heaven and do something to protect me! After all, why else do I spend my time praying to all the saints?"
It was a much more complicated situation than Berta could imagine, they explained: Good and Evil were locked in combat, and no one could interfere. Angels and devils were in the midst of one of the periodic battles that decide whether whole regions of the earth are to be condemned for a while or saved.
"I'm not interested; I have no way of defending myself, this isn't my fight, I didn't ask to be caught up in it."
Nobody had. It had all begun two years earlier with a mistake made by a guardian angel. During a kidnapping, two women were marked out to die, but a little three-year-old girl was supposed to be saved. This girl, it was said, would be a consolation to her father and help him to maintain some hope in life and overcome the tremendous suffering he would undergo. He was a good man, and although he would have to endure terrible suffering (no one knew why, that was all part of God's plan, which had never been fully explained), he would recover in the end. The girl would grow up marked by the tragedy and, when she was twenty, would use her own suffering to help alleviate that of others. She would eventually do work of such vital importance that it would have an impact all over the world.
That had been the original plan. And everything was going well: the police stormed the hideout, shots started flying and the people chosen to die began to fall. At that moment, the child's guardian angel--as Berta knew, all three-year-olds can see and talk to their guardian angels all the time--signaled to her to crouch down by the wall. But the child did not understand and ran towards him so that she could hear better.
She moved barely a matter of inches, just enough to be struck by a fatal bullet. From then on, the story took a new twist. What was meant to become an edifying story of redemption turned into a merciless struggle. The devil made his appearance, claiming that the man's soul should be his, being as it was full of hatred, impotence and a desire for vengeance. The angels could not accept this; he was a good man and had been chosen to help his daughter make great changes in the world, even though his profession was hardly ideal.
But the angels' arguments no longer rang true to him. Bit by bit, the devil took over his soul, until now he controlled him almost completely.
"Almost completely," Berta repeated. "You said 'almost.'"
They agreed. There was still a tiny chink of light left, because one of the angels had refused to give up the fight. But he had never been listened to until the previous night, when he had managed briefly to speak out. And his instrument had been none other than Miss Prym.
Chantal's grandmother explained that this was why she was there; because if anyone could change the situation, it was her granddaughter. Even so, the struggle was more ferocious than ever, and the stranger's angel had again been silenced by the presence of t
he devil.
Berta tried to calm them down, because they both seemed very upset. They, after all, were already dead; she was the one who should be worried. Couldn't they help Chantal change the course of things?
Chantal's devil was also winning the battle, they replied. When Chantal was in the forest, her grandmother had sent the rogue wolf to find her--the wolf did, in fact, exist, and the blacksmith had been telling the truth. She had wanted to awaken the stranger's good side and had done so. But apparently the argument between the two of them had got them nowhere; they were both too stubborn. There was only one hope left: that Chantal had seen what they wanted her to see. Or rather, they knew she had seen it, but what they wanted was for her to understand what she had seen.
"What's that?" Berta asked.
They refused to say. Their contact with human beings had its limits, there were devils listening in to their conversation who could spoil everything if they knew of the plan in advance. But they insisted it was something very simple, and if Chantal was as intelligent as her grandmother said she was, she would know how to deal with the situation.
Berta accepted this answer; the last thing she wanted was an indiscretion that might cost her her life, even though she loved hearing secrets. But there was something she still wanted explained and so she turned to her husband:
