Chapter 1
There once was a girl who lived in a small town near the Red Water Glades. Anastasia walked through those woods daily to get to and from school. All her life she’s been lectured to never take the short path home. There was a monster who lived on the eastern side of that path and he grabbed little girls just like her. These girls were never seen again.
One morning her mother left early to walk to town and do some chores. Anastasia was told this the night before and wouldn’t be able to rely on her mother to wake her for school. Anastasia jumped awake like something had pulled her pinky toe and she noticed the sun’s angle shining through her window.
“I’m late!” The only response from the quiet house was her cat Boris. His skinny gray body slinked around the wall like he was using it for support, and he watched her run around the room to get ready.
“You should have woken me, Boris!”
He meowed in response. Moments later it sounded like he said “I was busy finding you a present.”
Anastasia rushed out the front door, the dead mouse at the doorstep, and Boris chasing after her like it was a game. Boris was not an outside cat, but in the middle of the night when Anastasia woke up for a glass of milk she could never find him. She assumed he escaped and found mice to eat in the woods.
As she was getting near the mouth of the woods she could hear her mother say, “Promise me, darling. Promise you will never go down that path. For any reason.”
Anastasia hesitated. If she was late one more time she wouldn’t be able to play with her friends during break. She stepped onto the path and then stopped and listened. It sounded different then the other one. Anastasia shrugged. This was a different part of the forest after all. The further she walked the less she heard. There were no birds, there were no rustling little creatures on the forest floor. And the air was colder. Goosebumps rose on her arms, and Anastasia ignored that first warning.
“Promise me, darling,” she heard her mother whisper again.
As she became aware of the absence of nature around her, Anastasia heard the flap of wings above her. She turned to the eastern side of the trail and almost sighed with relief. There was another living thing here. In a way she felt protected. Until the raven said, “Turn back. Danger ahead.”
“I can’t. I’m late for school and this is the only way.”
The raven blinked once, clicked it’s beak three times and said, “ Another way.”
Anastasia walked on. “I can’t go that way.”
The raven’s vocal cords tightened and it made a rawwr sound.
Anastasia kept walking.
Minutes later she heard footsteps a few yards away. Anastasia picked up her pace, above her the raven made its rawwring sound and called, “Danger-rawwr, Danger, rawwr-Danger.”
Then something hit Anasasia’s head and she fell with a solid thunk to the ground. Before her eyelids sealed shut, she could have sworn she saw Boris, sneaking around in the wild grass.
The next morning the raven pecked on the outside of a window, waking Anastasia. It made a clicking sound and stated, “Told you.”
Anastasia was now locked in a wood cabin, her limbs spread to the four corners of the bed and tied with a rope.
Her blurry vision finally focused on the obsidian bird and listened to it click and purr on the other side of the window. In a low voice she said, “Please, go find Boris.”
Rawwr, click, click, click, Rawwr.
“Boris. Do you know who that is?”
The raven blinked and turned it’s head to the side as if thinking. “Told you.” Then it flew off.
The next three days were flashes of the hunter stalking in and out of Anastasia’s prison. A dark mood clung to him like the smell of sulfuric acid. He always came close and smelled of herbs. Seven days in he started talking to her. He would tell her of his childhood and why he lived so far away from society. He was an outcast, unloved, unwanted. He shared that no one understood his lifestyle and so that’s why he made a life out in the woods all for himself. But sometimes he gets lonely and finds wandering little girls to keep him company. He tried to get her to tell him stories. At first she didn’t say much, afraid to share and accidentally give information that the hunter could use. But then she started to tell tales of far away lands that she’s only read about in books, stories Anastasia knew by heart.
Anastasia should have listened to her mother. After the first night there was a part of her that grew numb.
Fourteen days in he let her roam the house. The house only. It was still a prison, but he gave her a longer leash.
Every once in a while she saw the raven out a window in the trees as if he was waiting for something to happen. Some days she felt protected by it’s gaze. All this time Anastasia didn’t let on that the raven was watching the hunter.
Three days later she couldn’t take it any more. “Please sir. I haven’t felt the sun’s warmth on my skin in a long time. I just want to sit outside.” Deep down even before this moment Anastasia had been planning an escape.
“It’s raining.” the hunter rumbled from the large seat in front of the fire. When he spoke his voice was always thick, like he was speaking past something in his throat.
“I love the rain too. The forest smells so new when it rains.” Anastasia tried to even out her tone.
The hunter scrunched up his nose and glanced sideways at the girl. Anastasia couldn’t read his tense body. He was always tense, and this is what put her on edge. He always looked like a cornered animal. Like he was the one caged. “It smells like wet soil and fungus on damp wood.”
It wasn’t going to be today. “Tomorrow there will be sun. You can show me your vegetable and herb garden then.”
The hunter’s eyes lit up just the slightest like there was a fire inside his pupils. “Yes, and then you will cook one of your family recipes.”
Anastasia nodded, already planning how she would add to the soup she would make.
The next day she was tied to the fence by a rope just long enough that she could walk the perimeter of the garden. Her ankles had finally begun to heal from the rope burn and he tied her up again. There were juicy red tomatoes, zucchini, lettuce, carrots and red and green peppers. There was plenty here for her to use, but nothing she was looking for.
Anastasia’s eyes roamed the outer edges of the garden and her eyes caught on purple spiky flowers. Pennyroyal. Behind her on the side of the house she listened for the continued rhythmic thwacking of the ax cutting the wood. The hunters boots crunched what was underfoot every time he repositioned himself for the next hit. Anastasia studied the purple weed and the way it had crawled up to the edges of the garden and stopped. Then she felt familiar eyes on her and saw Boris peaking around the side of a thick tree trunk. He was as unmoving as the tree next to him. She was being protected from afar. The raven was in a branch above the cat.
Boris’s eyes blinked three times before he spoke. “Use the carrots in the soup.”
Anastasia nodded and started pulling carrots from the ground. After the seventh carrot there was something sharp that caught her eye. She gasped and then looked up at the cat. “Those are the bones of the girls before you.”
The raven chimed in, “magic, magic, magic.”
The wood being splintered in half and then in fourths stopped then the hunter was suddenly at the garden. At the very last second Anastasia shifted her weight and shoved dirt over the bones.
“Who are you talking to?” his gruff tone was choppy from his labored breath.
“No one, I was singing an old tune my mother used to sing to me.”
He grunted and turned towards the tied off rope. “Time to go inside.”
“But the soup.”
“Forget it.”
Then as the hunter pulled Anastasia inside, she made the connection.
Magic bones.
In the end, Anastasia used those spiky purple flowers that grew from the magic bones in a later soup. It caused the hunter to slump out of his recliner by the fireplace thirty minutes later, like all his bones turned to mush. With the help of the raven and the pussycat she escaped and found her mother at home working her hands furiously into bread dough.
When their eyes met, both filled with tears. Her mother whispered. “I knew you’d come back to me. I knew it.”
Anastasia was a hero for all girls her age and the town lived in peace from then on.
