TAUNUS

“It’s okay, sweetie, you’re with us now. The Witch will not be back for a while.”

Cold.

It was the first in a flood of sensations as I regained consciousness. My cheek pressed against packed earth. The dampness of the ground had soaked into my side and ribs, as if it wanted to keep me with its icy fingers.

I moaned.

Something constricted my throat. My wrists burned, chafed by a rope that had been pulled a bit too tightly. My stomach felt sloshy, and there was a weird smell—of must and rot, of cinnamon and copper.

Everything was dark. Somewhere off in the distance I heard the rhythmic pluck, pluck, pluck of water drops on metal. My mouth tasted like bile and sugar. Vomit rose to my throat. I swallowed it back down.

I racked my brain for memories, but it was muddied with thick gray fog. All I could retrieve were snippets:

My bike, left behind in a parking lot. Tree trunks and rotting leaves on raw earth. Clawed chicken feet. A door made out of birchwood. Sophia—my name. A bony hand pressing over my mouth—smelling of rosemary and thyme—long nails digging into my skin.

And then agony, excruciating, soul-shattering, coming from the very center of my being.

A scream broke from deep inside my guts, ripping my parched throat open.

“Shh, it’s okay.”

There was that soft voice again, and warm hands on my forehead, patting away the sweat. My heart hammered.

Somebody pulled my blindfold off. I blinked straight up into the face of a young woman—or more accurately, a girl with her round features and youthful appearance. Her cheeks and dress were stained with dirt, but her long blond hair gleamed like a halo in the flickering twilight of…were they candles or torches? She kept caressing my head, and so much sadness lay in her green eyes that it stunned me.

I closed my lids and moaned again. Then, finally, I dared to look around.

More people. An entire group of girls, all wearing dirty beige shifts and a strange collar made of coarse rope—like a noose at the gallows. A couple of them crouched down at my side, giving me that same sad look as the blond girl. Were there ten of them? Twelve? The room spun. I tried to count again, but their legs, bare feet, and huddled bodies obstructed my view. They were all around my own age, or maybe a little younger—late teens to mid-twenties.

Wincing, I pushed up on my smarting wrists, trying to get into a sitting position. The effort felt like lifting a small-sized car. A bout of nausea took hold of me. I retched, but nothing came out.

Somebody handed me a ladle with water. The silver-colored metal was chafed and dented in places, and the back of the handle strangely worn down at the corners. But at least it looked clean. I took a careful swig and then another. It tasted fresh with a faint hint of herbs—like a forest spring. As the cool liquid ran down my burning throat, I could feel my strength returning, and the fog in my head seemed to thin just so slightly.

“Where are we?” I asked, startling myself with how raspy my voice was.

My eyes wandered up to the cobwebbed brown bricks of the ceiling. There was silence; some girls gave each other tired looks. Others just kept looking nervously over their shoulders.

“We’re in the Witch’s basement,” the blond girl said after a moment. “She keeps us here until—”

Her voice trailed off. And her fingers wandered subconsciously up her neck, digging into the cord she wore around it. I sat up, lifting my hand to my own throat—and was unsurprised when I felt coarse fibers.

My head started spinning again. Terrified that reality might slip out of my grasp, I clung to reason with all my might and was able to distill some usable information out of the nonsense I had just heard.

“Somebody has kidnapped us?”

“Not somebody—the Witch.” The blond girl’s voice was low, soft as if she were talking to a child.

“Okay, sorry. A witch has kidnapped us.” I was beginning to get slightly frustrated—I took this as a good sign that my mind was slowly returning to its natural state.

“The Witch,” she corrected. “The Witch at the center of the woods.”

A creeping suspicion began to dawn on me—the suspicion that this girl might just not be all there, mentally, that whoever kept us here had broken her, and that this same destiny awaited me as well. I shook my head, not knowing what to say to that, and gave her a desperate look.

“She who lives where the forest is deepest.” The blond girl’s eyes drifted to a spot somewhere in the distance behind my back. “Where wanderers arrive when they have strayed from their path. In the center of the woods, where the trees stop being trees and become legend. The capturer of Hänsel and Gretel. The Ba—.”

“But how did I get here?” I interrupted her. I knew it was rude, but the fairy tale had reminded me of my little sister, and there was only so much of this I could take right now. “All I remember is that I went for a little walk because I wanted to—” I interrupted myself. “I mean, I went on a mental health stroll, and after a while everything suddenly gets all… muddy.” I looked at the dejected faces around me, then pressed my eyes shut for a second as I fought another bout of nausea.

“I’m just surprised that so many were kidnapped—sorry, taken by the witch.”

It was probably not a good idea to feed into the blonde’s delusions, but I didn’t want her to get hung up on that witch-thing again.

“One would think there should have been something on the news or at least some kind of warning that girls keep vanishing in the Taunus mountains,” I said angrily.

She huffed, and others snickered as well; there was no joy in the sound. “I have no clue where that is.”

It was only then that I realized we would hardly be talking English with each other if they were all German like myself.

“I know it’s hard to believe.” She lowered her voice as if I were a frightened deer she was trying to calm down—it seemed almost comical considering her youth. “But if you get lost in the forest—like really lost, more profoundly than just forgetting your whereabouts—you come to the clearing. To her house. It doesn’t matter which forest you were in. I’m from Brazil; Vaska and Marya are from Russia.” She made a gesture towards two delicate-looking girls. They were almost identical, except for one having black hair and the other flaxen. The dark one waved, still holding the water ladle.

“And you are…?” She gave me an encouraging smile.

“German—from Frankfurt,” I grunted. Then I had to close my eyes again, as the faces in front of me began to sway.

Somebody was holding me in their… basement? And my fellow captives had lost their minds.

I inhaled, pulling the murky air deep into my lungs. Somehow, the lingering fog in my brain was keeping the panic at bay—but just barely.

I needed to lean against something, or else I was going to faint. Ignoring my protesting wrists, I half crawled, half dragged myself until my shoulders hit a cold wall. My head sank back, knocking too hard against the stone.

I groaned. When the spinning behind my lids had somewhat stabilized, I opened my eyes. The girls had stepped aside. For the first time I had an unobstructed view of the place and the dread sank in deeper as I looked around.

We were in a kind of underground prison cell, scarcely illuminated by a flickering light above me. The floor was nothing but compact earth, hardened like cement under many footsteps. Except for the brick wall at my back, the rest of the cell was iron bars, anchored into the ground and reaching all the way to the ceiling—closing us in on the left, on the right, and in front. Whatever lay behind them was hidden, untouched by the dim light. I tried to see past the darkness, but all I was able to glimpse were the blurry shadows of even more bars.

A cage.

I was trapped in a cage like livestock waiting to get slaughtered. An old song played in my head about a calf tied down on the back of a wagon.

Dona, Dona, Dona…

With a brusque movement, I wiped the tears from my eyes and the sad tune from my mind.

I pulled my knees close to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. Our captor had apparently not provided me with underwear, so I was flashing the other girls with a full view of my ass and private parts. I doubted they even noticed—and I was too cold and too occupied with my abused mind and body to care.

The moldy, damp odor only made my nausea worse, and I tried to take shallow breaths through my mouth instead.‘In. Out. In. Ou—’

A metallic jangle of keys in the darkness beyond our cell made me jolt upright. Then there was a click and the faint creak of a door.

The girls around me stiffened, and the panic that had been clawing at the edges of my fuzzy mind gained some ground as I listened to the approaching steps.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

A dark shape approached, solidifying more and more the closer it got to the light: A person—a man.

His loose, white-mottled pants were the first thing that caught my eye. Then his feet—his hooves, cloven, dark gray, and polished. And as he came nearer, I realized that those weren’t pants at all, but his legs covered in thick, shaggy fur.

At this point my mind snapped. My whole body clenched in panic. I turned my head away, pressing my cheek against the stone, and shut my eyes like a toddler, pretending that what I couldn’t see didn’t exist.

Clack. Clack. He was close now.