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My Betreuer, my sponsors that is, all sat there with their hard, cold, blank faces and wouldn’t say anything.
“I’m supposed to … when you have the power to…”
No answer.
Still no answer.
Finally, “Change it to something else,” one said glibly.
“You will be shown later,” said another.
I wasn’t told or shown anything, but the days seemed to go faster, and I did finally get out of that creepy forest…
The last thing I remember was the Alps in central Austria, hiking up that high valley south of Sankt Anton, getting caught in a freak summer snowstorm, and then falling off a cliff face down into a Kessel, a snow-lined cirque valley far above the treeline. Luckily, the bowl-like wall of snow curved so gradually that I was able to slide to the bottom without tumbling or landing hard.
I stumbled out of the Kessel, picked my way through a Felsensee, a “lake” of glacial till rocks and boulders, then started following a fast-moving river, milky-turquoise from rock dust. The storm had cleared and I could see the Paznaun Valley far, far below. I followed along the river until I came to the edge of a forest. Battered and wasted, I crawled under a downed spruce and fell asleep. But more snow came during the night. Dreaming that I was buried in an avalanche, I woke up in a panic and ran mad into the dark forest.
I don’t know how long I was in that strange forest—it seemed like a very long time—but I eventually got out and followed a trail down to a small village. After many miles the path finally became a proper cobblestone street leading to the town square. Where was everybody? I had a keen desire to be around people. Nothing felt right. I could tell from the light angles that it was no longer summer. The weather was overcast. A cold rain and sleet began to fall.
In the middle of the square stood a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary; a pipe sticking out of the base filled a stone trough with water. I looked up at the Virgin, and she looked down at me with her loving but mournful expression, arms held open, hands palm-up in that Virgin Mary gesture of holy invitation. Hail Mary, full of grace … Blessed art thou among women. I stuck my hands under the running water, but couldn’t feel anything—not the cold, not the water hitting my hands. Odd.
I kept going and found a rustic farmhouse Pension on the edge of town. I reached for the door … but then I was already inside. Weird. At the front table, the Stammtisch, sat the proprietor, his wife, and their two little girls. At a back corner table sat two women. One of the women might have glanced my way, but the family seemed not to have noticed me coming in. “Servus!” I said to the Stammtisch. No response. I went over to the women. “Hello, ladies?” They seemed not to see or hear me, either.
So I was dead. The fall had killed me after all. I sighed. All right then, how much time had passed? Not that it really mattered. I felt strangely outside of time, not in the least interested anymore. But what had happened to my body? This question both terrified and fascinated me. I repressed an urge to run back up the mountain and look for it. No, no, stay put.
The women seemed familiar. Somehow I knew their names: Ulrike Westerle and Helga Kreidler. I don’t know how I knew, I just did. Ulrike, the younger one, was tall, slim, and athletic with long, smooth, dark hair and an imposing air about her. The older woman, Helga, was small and slight, prematurely white-gray, also rather impressive and serious looking. I listened to their conversation. They were talking about some woman named Frau Holle. Ulrike’s German was very good for an American.
Just then the proprietor came over with a bottle of home-brew bitters and shot glasses. He poured shots for the two women and himself. Prosit! all around. The first round was downed quickly, but the guests begged off a second.
And then the man began telling a story about a dead stranger they had found below a mountain that summer. For some reason I couldn’t understand him properly. What was wrong? His Tyrolean accent was thick, but not that thick. He simply wasn’t making sense. It was like he was befuddled or half-witted. Was I not supposed to hear this—or was I messing him up somehow with my ghostly presence? I caught something about a body. My body? Did they recover my body? Such a gruesome thought: my cold and broken corpse lying below the sheer face of Sperrhorn Mountain. Or maybe they found me in the forest. I’m now sure I’d spent a long time in there.
Helga and Ulrike listened politely, but at the same time negotiated the bill, gathered their things, and moved for the door. The stocky man seemed to compare the weather outside with the conditions in his story, but I don’t think he was coming through for them either. Finally, they could only smile at him and he at them. They said goodbye, and he bid them a safe journey.
Again, the Betreuer just stared and wouldn’t answer my questions. When I finally shut up, one pointed and said, “Stick with the women.”
Helga and Ulrike stood under the eaves of the pension, mostly out of the wind-driven sleet. Ulrike seemed ready, but Helga mumbled something about needing a minute or two. Looking up the slope, I could see a dusting of snow on the dark evergreens. The Sperrhorn, however, was totally obscured by the low cloud ceiling.
I noticed the women’s eyes. The older had light-gray eyes, the younger blue eyes, large and intense. Helga was now searching the forested slope, but Ulrike suddenly looked straight at me and hissed Bankert! I was staggered by the assault! She could see me?! Helga glared at me too, and then looked up at the forest again as if she meant to ignore me.
I backed off a bit.
I watched as Helga got a tin of shoe waterproofing grease out of her old-fashioned climber’s rucksack, applied some to her boots, then a liberal coating to Ulrike’s. She rubbed the excess from her hands onto a rag from the pocket of her wool climbing knickers and put away the tin. She straightened up and tightened her dark green Loden cape around her middle with a wide leather belt. Last, she struggled into her rucksack and was set to go. Frauenrituale erledigt.[fn:1]
I was shown some of their past. Earlier that summer, around the time I fell, Helga had been found wandering dazed and starved in the mountains south of Füssen, Bavaria. She was taken to a hospital in Munich and eventually transferred to a mental institution in Regensburg. Then I saw Helga’s niece Gisela who had known Ulrike from a biodynamic farm in Thuringia and had introduced Ulrike to her Aunt Helga. It was Gisela who got a message to Ulrike at her primitivist commune in Wisconsin, asking her to come immediately. When Helga learned Ulrike was coming, she became lucid again and demanded to be released. But the facility would release her only to her parents, Joseph and Barbara Kreidler. Mom and Dad came the next morning and took her back to their summer cottage in the Bavarian Forest village of Schlabach on the Bohemian border.
I saw Ulrike on a plane crossing the Atlantic, then at Gisela’s apartment in Munich, then on a train heading eastward into the Bavarian hinterlands. She looked local wearing Kniebundhose, climbing knickers, and long stockings. Ulrike the American had become Ulrike the Urdeutsche,[fn:2] and I noticed how all the people long confused over their own “Germanity” around her were awed. As the forests became thicker and the terrain hillier, she seemed to get more urdeutsch, looking out the window like a proud, regal medieval /Gräfin/[fn:3] off to some fateful counsel.
I guess you’d call Helga a witch. I saw her wandering in forests during various times of her adult life looking for plants: over the hills of the Bavarian Forest near her parents’ summer home, down south in the Bavarian and Tyrolean Alps, sometimes northeast in the forests of the former East Germany. Often enough she wouldn’t even dig up the plant. She’d just sit next to it for a while, prostrated, mumbling and chanting.
But I could see into the future as well. Seeing forward, I knew the past would start to come back—bit by bit, piece by piece—as the modern world—bit by bit, piece by piece—gave it up. Witches like Helga who knew how to replace some of modern medicine, and, in general, to be there when people needed them, would be in demand again. Ulrike intended to learn plant magic from Helga. She had decided to be with Helga in the German mountains when the clocks started running backwards.
I asked the Betreuer about time. As usual, they only stared at me. Finally, one spoke: “No time. Just distance. There is a center, and moving away gives the illusion of time.”
I asked if the women could really see me. “They shouldn’t!”
Oh, okay. I’ll try to be more careful. Geez…
I saw Ulrike getting off a bus in tiny Schlabach. Helga’s parents met Ulrike at the stop: “Sep” a retired insurance executive, and “Bärbel” a housewife. The tall American shoved her backpack into the back seat of their VW Golf and climbed in beside it, sitting with her long legs angled sideways. The weather was overcast and chilly, chunks of low cloud sitting on top of the high forested ridge straight ahead. Sep drove like a typical psycho German, flying eastward on a narrow, winding road heading right up into the dark woods of the Fluchtberg, the highest point in the Bavarian Forest. Ulrike held onto the sides of the front seat for dear life.
The Kreidlers played it upbeat and friendly. They complimented her German and wanted to know about her family. They sounded nice enough, but Ulrike wasn’t buying it. Gisela had explained how they retained legal guardianship over their forty-three-year-old daughter and, given recent events, would probably not let her out of their sight very soon. I could sense Ulrike’s cold resolve to spring Helga, whatever it took.
Far up the forested mountain they crossed a tiny, single-lane bridge over a rushing mountain stream. Here deep in the forest was a handful of cottages collected around the narrow road’s hairpin turn. Not much further, the Golf pulled into the driveway of a small cottage nestled back in a grove of majestic beech trees. Ulrike spotted Helga standing in the doorway and sprang out of the car almost before Sep had halted. The tall woman bounded up the steps and wrapped the petite woman in a bear hug. Sep and Bärbel gave each other worried glances.
“We should talk,” said Helga to Ulrike in a quiet, deliberate voice, out of earshot of her parents.
“Sure. Where?”
“I want to show you a special spot,” said Helga theatrically for her parents to hear. At that she took Ulrike’s hand and breezed by them. ”Ulrike and I are going to take a little walk,” she shouted back at them.
“Don’t be long, dear,” said Bärbel, showing a toothy smile. “Supper will be soon.”
Sep pulled out his Handy and dialed his lawyer.
And there bounded the two women across the road, over to the bridge, down underneath it, down to a small trail beside the stream. They headed upstream through the forest on the well-worn way, Ulrike drinking in the wild surroundings—greeting the giant spruce and beech.
Torrid Helga finally stopped beside a pool fed by a small cascade. She sat down plumps on an overlooking rock, pulled off her hood, inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. Heavy mists were now moving down the slope, droplets large enough to quickly wet the exposed face. A hint of night had crept into the scene. Ulrike stared out into the forest wide-eyed. Eventually, Helga cleared her throat and spoke: “I’m very grateful you came.”
“Helga, what happened?” said Ulrike turning to face her friend.
The older woman studied the younger up and down. “Come, sit down,” she said.
Ulrike sat down on a nearby log. Helga stared at the coursing water for a long while before she spoke. “The doctors … you disrupted them somehow. I know it was you. They were going to try to destroy me again, but you stopped them.”
“Yes,” said Ulrike softly. Then she told Helga about her bad dream the previous night at Gisela’s place. “How long were you—?”
“Doesn’t matter. But I can’t stay here any longer. I must leave.”
“Yes.”
Helga crossed her arms and looked up into the depth of the mists. She looked over at Ulrike and gave her a wan smile. “Coming?”
“Where to?”
“Austria,” replied Helga in a whisper. “The Paznaun Valley.”
“Sure.”
The drips had become a soft, steady rain. Helga looked up again and laughed gleefully. “Look at all this!” She was like a child in the world’s largest candy store.
The two were quiet for a long while watching the forest, the stream, the mist, the rain. “We should go back,” whispered Helga, standing. “We’ll eat, then go. I’ve got some gear for you so you won’t look so American.”
“I look American?”
“Yeah, but just a bit. Not much, though. No, really, you /project /German.” Smiling big, she leaned back and let the soft rain soak her hair and face. Then like a little cat she was up and bounding back downstream.
I got a brief glimpse of their first meeting two years ago on that very mountain, up at Helga’s squatted forester’s hut. Helga knew immediately her neice had brought her a very special person. Ulrike, in turn, was thrilled by all the dark, smoky, Old World magic swirling about the mountain and the strange little woman.
The rain was really coming down now. I sensed Ulrike’s excitement as she stomped down the soggy trail after the flitting and bounding Helga. She sent greetings from the Northern Wisconsin woods out into the surroundings.
I asked the Betreuer about sending out greetings into the forest. “Elven greetings?” asked one. I didn’t know. But no answer anyway… Sure, I was allowed to ask them anything, anytime, but they hardly ever answered me. All right, if they couldn’t show me any respect or tell me what was going on, I would just keep bothering them with whatever came into my mind.
But I wasn’t totally in the dark. The forest had told me a few things. First, I had a new appreciation for just how anxious forests could be around humans. I now realized how incredibly dominant humans were on the land, the immense physical presence of my former species and how relentlessly they pushed and crowded the wild places, and how that wasn’t good. The forests wanted to be as big and nurturing as possible, but humans just kept cutting them down and pretending it didn’t matter. In the past hundred, hundred-fifty years, the human race had grown to be massive. Now they were mass society, and nothing good was going to come of that. I could see that clearly enough.
Personally, I was doing fine. I felt light and feathery like a spirit should. I remembered Byron’s plea not to be /…a link reluctant in a fleshy chain, classed among creatures … when the soul can flee, and with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain of ocean or the stars mingle and not in vain/. Right. I was no longer part of the fleshy chain, not classed among creatures anymore. That meant I could stay outside forever. And yes, I would mingle with the peaks, forests, the rain, the clouds, the stars, and not in vain. Nope, no mortal coil needing to go back indoors anymore. What a relief!
I imagined breathing in the cold autumn air. I guess I was nostalgic for my lungs. I could now remember how they had both popped and collapsed like toy balloons from the force of hitting the ice floor of that Kessel. I caught a brief glimpse of the intense pain at each gasp. Yes, I did crawl a long way … into that crazy forest where I finally died and then drifted around lost and confused for a long time…
The women were ready, but seemed to hesitate under the pension’s protective overhang. Helga adjusted Ulrike’s cape, binding it like she had her own with a rope around the waist. The beautiful sleet seemed to be falling in slow-motion. Sleet drove most mortals indoors. Heavy, wind-driven sleet always sent humans scurrying—blasts of cold and wet against the doors and windows of factories, offices, houses, trains, planes, automobiles—back into dead, sterile interior spaces where their gadgets and computers ran day and night… But no more for me. I now had the rolling clouds, the streams and rivers. I had all this for myself—this wonderful wetness balanced between cloud and fog, rain and snow. And the dark, the shadows were like a deliciously exciting secret! I would stay out here and revel in it until the world ended, I would! Yes, cloudy, rainy, snowy, anything but bright and sunny. Somehow Mother Nature was her true majestic mysterious most ladylike self in such dark gray garb. But the sun was like a brutish pimp forcing her to wear her gaudy, sexy green for mindless tourists to ogle and leer at her. No thanks. Feminine mystique was something special and wonderful in the universe. And how I could now appreciate that basic fundamental. Truly awesome this afterlife thing.
Two very hardy women wanderers, though. They had faced cold, wet rain for weeks as they hiked across the mountains from Schlabach in the far corner of Lower Bavaria into the Austrian Alps proper. They slept outside mostly. I traced their route from the eastern edge of the Bavarian Forest, down to the Allgäuer Alps, over the Austrian border south of Oberstdorf, across two more Tyrolean valleys, and over the Sperrhorn Pass into the Paznaun Valley.
Where were they going? They couldn’t walk forever—the hiking season was long over, and really bad weather was not far away.
Just then a group of ghost children trooped by. These were Hütekinder, children from the valley’s poorest mountain peasant families returning from Germany where they had been servants and farmhands well over a century ago. They were dressed in their Sunday Tracht finest, bundles of belongings on their backs. Helga and Ulrike set off behind the little spirits. I followed. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, but I wanted to see it through to something. I admired Ulrike’s willpower to block out the voices telling her to abandon Helga and go back home.
I asked the Betreuer where those voices came from—because I could now see they weren’t from the person thinking them. As usual, I got no reply. But this time I stood my ground and glared back at them. I started shouting, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” over and over again. Finally, one waved impatiently for me to stop.
“All right, all right! It’s like with an artificial knee or hip. Germs migrate to it and start growing because there’s no proper circulation. Same thing: There’s too much inanimate, artificial stuff these days. Bad things fester and grow in it. All right? Verstanden?” They all looked at me like I should have known this already.
The women were following alongside the Ochsenwand massif, the north side of the Paznaun, always staying on the wildest forest paths well above the Trisanna River and any of the villages or farmsteads. We were back under the trees again and partially shielded from the wind and sleet. The dense evergreen branches caught the wind-driven precipitation and made it come straight down, setting up a soft, hypnotic plop-plop-plop sound all around us. The mood was serious and somber, but like I’m saying, soft and gentle and enchanting all the same. Nearby deer and other wild things didn’t bother running away from us. The moss and dead ferns were often coated with translucent ice and frost. So lovely. It was like I had new eyes. This was my first darkening season, and, yes, with the right company it was so awesome!
The light was almost gone when we came out of the trees. The day’s sleet had changed to an icy snow, no longer so wet. The witches were still warm and relatively dry, though, even their feet. We were almost to the tiny village of Gruftleben, a hamlet straddling the deep Gruft River gorge flowing madly down into the Trisanna miles below. Time to come out of the forest and deal with people again.
Dusk had come on rather fast. The gorge was like a deep gash on the back side of the town square. The women leaned against a railing and gazed down into the abyss. Layers of polished ice were still just visible on the rocks directly below, but it was too dark to see the thundering waters deeper down. Ulrike looked over at Helga, who shot back a smirk and laughed. Then Ulrike laughed. They grabbed their packs and proceeded across the cobblestone square to a small Gasthaus with exposed timber framing and small windows with thick, distorting glass panes. “Fabulous goulash soup here,” said Helga.
“Are we staying here?”
“No. Up to the old castle ruins to meet the ghost princess.” Helga winked at Ulrike.
“Good.”
The Zur Oberhexe was an inn like from some past fairy mystical age: dull white plaster walls, rough, exposed timbers, candles the only light. The clientèle was exclusively female, all dressed like—witches. Both Ulrike and I gawked. Some of the women glared back, none of them all that friendly-looking. I could feel the wave of unsettledness moving through the place. Helga and Ulrike hung their capes on the rack by the door and took the only available table in the far left corner by the cloudy-paned window.
A gothy young waitress came over. Ulrike ordered mineral water and Helga a dark beer. When the waitress returned with the drinks, Helga made sure to talk in her Lower Bavarian dialect. I could feel the room go softer at hearing her German hillbilly.
“So how’s the Princess?” said Helga in her thickest hick accent.
“Oh, she’s her old self,” said the young woman. She was wearing black lipstick and had black fingernails. “You folks heading up that way?”
“Yeah. Pay our respects.”
“Restock the wood if you burn any.” The strapping young woman acted nonchalant, but stared hard at her guests
Right. It was like she had suspended time and turned the place into an interrogation dungeon. Ulrike noticed how certain women were also staring at them, and she felt herself falling into a gray abyss, horrifying except that she was strangely numbed and lobotomized. Helga shook her arm and the spell glitched.
“Sure thing,” said Helga to the now very menacing waitress, grinning Oberhexe-like.
Helga ordered goulash soup, cheese and bread. Ulrike ordered the same.
“Best goulash soup in the land!” said Helga with a big smile.
“That it is,” said the hulking woman, but now in an offhanded, disinterested voice.
After the waitress had gone, Helga said in a low voice, “Isn’t this a nice place?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Ulrike looking around once more, her eyes big. “Who are these people?”
“Unseresgleichen. Our sort. Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Riiight,” muttered Ulrike, still a bit shaken.
Helga grinned at Ulrike, who finally smiled back. “I think they like us,” she whispered.
Hexenfreude.[fn:4]
Again outside, Helga and Ulrike felt the bite of their coldest night yet, the icy wind driving the fine snow against their faces. It was already three below Celsius and dropping rapidly. I knew the snow would fall fast and furious until early morning. The women bound their capes tight, pulled their hoods down low, and shouldered their packs. They seemed revived. Good, because the night seemed like a death sentence ahead of them.
Again, I could fly out into the vastness, the lovely vastness. The moon was just about full, backlighting the low-hanging snow clouds moving over the Ochsenwand from the northeast. The women retraced their steps out of Gruftleben, turning upstream on the river trail, finally reaching the forest’s edge a kilometer later. They paused and looked back southeastward, down into Gruftleben and the now vast and dark Paznaun Valley. Through the driving snow Ulrike maybe saw a shimmer of the Trisanna River. She asked Helga why the valley was called Paznaun and not Trisanna, and then why the river was called Trisanna and not Paznaun. Helga said she didn’t know but suspected it had something to do with the Austrian Catholic mentality.
The women were only a hundred or so meters inside the forest when suddenly the wind and the snow stopped, the branches of the evergreens froze in mid-sway, and the river went dead silent! They grabbed onto each other, looking all around with big eyes. I had learned from my time in the forest just to go with it, that the whooshing feeling inside your guts would pass… And just as quickly it was over. The wind and snowfall, the swaying, whispering fir trees, the echoing river resumed. The women hugged and cried for a while, then went on.
Another kilometer up through the forest and they were at a footbridge. We crossed the narrower but louder-than-ever gorge very carefully, the wood-and-iron structure slippery with a coating of ice. The trail plunged back into the towering trees, continuing as switchbacks uphill. The echoing river phased in and out with the wind gusts.
By now the much drier, finer snow was getting serious, drifting across the way. The women were making good time, though. They seemed delighted by the world around them: delicate hoarfrost, wavy snowdrifts, white boughs whispering in the wind, everything just slightly silver-tinged by the indomitably bright moon.
The forest trail widened gradually, running level along the slope due east. After another kilometer it forked—the right branch going back down the slope, the left angling further up. Without a pause, Helga charged on to the left. A few steps along and I noticed a subtle change, as if a gentle, fine enchantment (unlike the heavy witch magic back at the inn) had come down again. After a set of switchbacks, the ground leveled and there ahead I could see a small clearing. And there in the middle of the clearing stood a tall keep like a dark sentinel in the night. Kind of spooky, even for me.
As we approached I could feel the electricity. The women definitely felt it too. They entered the former bailey of the castle—the ruined walls never rising more than knee-high—and passed a low pile of snow-covered stones where the hall had once stood. Oh, there was such a vibe here! I saw, sensed, knew this had not been a nice place back in the day; but I was hoping for everyone’s sake it had mellowed with time.
Helga motioned for Ulrike to wait. She crept over to the reconstructed keep and knocked on the heavy wooden door. She knocked again. The door finally cracked open a few centimeters. I could hear Helga identify herself. The door swung open and Helga motioned for Ulrike to come.
Inside, the interior was taken up mainly by a winding staircase, but against the far wall was a small fireplace, wood stacked nearby.
“Who was that?” said Ulrike.
“The Princess. Every night she watches from the top for her lover,” said Helga in a conspiratorial stage whisper, then more cheerily, “Shall we make ourselves at home?”
I immediately felt sorry for this princess. I had my freedom, but apparently many spirits don’t. And so they just wile away the centuries doing some repetitive task right near where they had died. I asked the Betreuer about the princess, and they said, “Sure, go right up and say hello!” But then they all had rather mischievous looks, some of them grinning openly, and that told me right away not to, that it was probably a really bad idea to go up and see this poor woman.
Soon the live women had a good fire going and had made themselves as comfortable as possible on the stone floor. Each had a two-thirds-length sleeping pad and a thick, felted wool horse blanket. They had slept in many strange places in the past month, checking into a Pension only as a last resort. Wearing their extra sweaters and woolens, they would wrap themselves tightly in their blankets and capes and sleep just fine—under an overhang, in a deserted hut.
Helga passed a flask of her special French Elixir Végétal herbal liqueur to Ulrike, who took a swig and passed it back.
“There’s so much to be grateful for,” said Helga as she poked at the flames with a stick, “and I am grateful.”
“Yes, me too,” said Ulrike softly.
The wind whistled through the cracks in the door and the fire popped and hissed. Helga took another hit, grimaced as she swallowed, and frowned. “I’m grateful all right.”
“Yes,” said Ulrike even more softly to the fire.
The older woman poked more forcefully with her stick, making the sparks fly. She grunted and said, “I go into a different world. Like we did back there in the forest. But sometimes I come out hard and I’m like a stone falling out of the sky, like a baby bird that’s jumped out of the nest and can’t really fly. Sometimes there’s a goddamn cat waiting below.”
“Right.”
“Magic, Ulrike, magic.”
“Yes, magic.”
“It’s just in your head—until it can’t be just in your head. And then what do you do?”
Silence. The wind blew bits of ash and sparks out onto the floor.
“So, junge Ulrike, do you think I want to go back?”
Ulrike seemed to start. “No, no,” she hissed-whispered.
Helga laughed, then Ulrike. They each took another hit off the flask. Ulrike waited for Helga to say something, but the smaller woman remained silent. Then at last she spoke: “Yeah, yeah, what do you do? Mostly guesswork since the Romans. All these centuries and centuries of guessing. Everyone pretty much lost and confused. Trying to maintain something. Trying to follow the wild muse, the spirits out in the wild places.”
“Yes, true,” said Ulrike, her voice tight.
“Just imagine, they were hunted, put to death for this.”
Ulrike quickly glanced over at Helga, then quickly back to the fire.
“They were betrayed, murdered—probably to the very last person. . . . Bless them all.” Helga rose and put more wood on the fire, sat down again, and was silent. A tear rolled down her cheek. “And here I am. Here we are. Here we have little Helga and Ulrike the Tall!”
Ulrike grunted, but kept staring into the flames.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ve got here anymore,” mumbled Helga.
Actually, Ulrike was being silent until she was sure that some weird strangeness had drifted through and gone. Then she finally said, “You need time to sort things out.”
“No, Ulrike, the sorting is done. There will be no more Helga sitting up in her cottage on the mountain being a witch. I can’t live like that anymore. I can’t go in and out, back and forth anymore. I won’t let them take me back to Regensburg. Do you understand? Never again. I’d rather face a medieval inquisitor than those doctors.”
Ulrike grunted. She knew about gaslighting. She had faced down her suburban-based family who incessantly pounded away at her nature thing.
Helga sighed. “I was different as a child. Then at puberty I got special sensitivities. Then what? I don’t know. But here I am now. Yeah, here I am. It’s been great, though. Can’t really complain.”
Then I saw Ulrike from her late teen years standing in a forest by the Brule River in Northern Wisconsin on a bright, late summer day. She stood as if in a trance. She stood unmoving, unblinking, staring out into the trees for almost an hour.
Then I saw her in a place I knew was the Silvania Forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with a group of young dreadlocked eco-activists. She was standing in a forest of giant old-growth hemlocks and white pines just staring out into the trees.
Then I saw her in the Northern Wisconsin woods near her commune. It was fall, the colors of the oaks and maples and tamaracks brilliant against the electric blue sky. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground in a trance. I saw a large doe followed by two yearlings come toward her. The doe went right up to her, reared, and lashed out with her front legs. One of the sharp hooves struck Ulrike in the head and blood immediately poured out and all down her face. But then the doe and especially the fawns came to her and nuzzled and licked her face, as if to say they were sorry.
Helga spoke: “So when our money runs out, I’ll wait till it’s dark, take off my clothes, and go as high up in the mountains as I can.” She passed the flask.
“Then you’ll come down and put your clothes back on,” said Ulrike, after a big swig.
“No I won’t!” Helga grabbed the flask away and took a big swig herself.
“Then I’ll come drag you down, girl!” shouted Ulrike, grabbing Helga’s wrist and pulling the flask away.
I saw how dominant-strong Ulrike was just then. And it was strangely clear to me just then what Ulrike’s role was, yep, a settled thing in the universe—Ulrike was some sort of protector, or even parole officer for Helga. Good, because I’d noticed a suicide urge go through Helga’s mind at the Gruftleben abyss. So odd to feel a living someone peering, then reaching a probing hand into my world. I had sensed how her hand, her forearm had ceased to be flesh and blood, instead, ghostly like mine. And when she pulled it back, something of our world went with her.
The women looked at each other with comical, ironic /Possenreißer/[fn:5] expressions and laughed loudly. But just then the trapdoor far above banged and rattled loudly.
“Oops,” whispered Helga, “we’re making too much noise.”
[fn:1] Women’s ritual finished
[fn:2] proto-Germanic
[fn:3] countess
[fn:4] Witch’s delight
[fn:5] buffoonish