Excerpt: The House of the Grey Circle

Chapter 7
February 7th, 1935

They were up early, awakened by Janos shaking their tent. The morning air was cold, and the sun shone without warmth in the icy blue sky. They carried few supplies, just a single satchel containing a pair of electric torches and the means to record whatever observations they might have. They had donned or pocketed whatever talismans of protection or power they possessed, and considered themselves as ready as they could possibly be.
Janos accompanied them most of the way to the woods, but stopped short of walking under the shadow of the trees. He looked at them gravely, in a manner they all suspected he reserved for the dead. It was less than reassuring.
“We will offer what magic we can to keep the hag from seeing you,” he said, “but I do not expect that it will be enough.”
“Thank you, all the same,” Daniel said with a smile he certainly didn’t feel.
“You’re all mad,” Janos whispered roughly.
“Yes, you’ve made that clear,” Arthur replied. “Shall we get this over with?”
To look at them from outside, the woods were forbidding and unwelcome. When they crossed the threshold of twisted black trees, the sense of unpleasantness only grew worse. The trees looked dead, their trunks gnarled and twisted into a mockery of natural shape, their bark as black as coal. Not a single leaf could be seen, nor any blade of grass. The ground was grey and bare, nothing but hard packed dirt and stones. There was no sound. No birds, no tree-dwelling animals, not even a breeze. The forest was dead silent.
Warren shuddered visibly. “There’s no life here. This place is devoid of spirit. It’s as if it was drained of all things that make the world alive. It’s all cold, and evil.”
Evelyn placed a reassuring hand on Warren’s arm. His magic dealt in contact with the spirits of the natural world and beyond. To be in a place where he felt no spiritual presence was like losing one of his senses.
There was no obvious path to the cave Malachi had spoken of. The trees were thinner in some places, making the forest passable, but there was nothing to even tell them where they were going. The canopy grew thick above them, despite the absence of leaves. The network of gnarled branches allowed no clear view of the sky, letting only the most minimal sunlight through.
No one spoke. In the unnatural silence, even their breathing seemed too loud. The nervous glances that passed among them suggested a shared suspicion: that where the trees grew thick and impassable or sparse and navigable was not random. They remembered Janos’ words of warning, of Baba Yaga’s power over the woods. If they were being herded, then where to?
As they walked, time and distance began to lose meaning. Were they inclined to speak, none of them would be able to say how long they had been in the forest, nor how far they had walked. Every time Daniel checked his watch, the time it read made no sense in relation to the last time he had checked. Once, he was sure it had gone backward. As they became less and less certain of where they were, the eerie foreboding of the forest settled more heavily on them.
Finally, a break in the trees opened to a small clearing. Here, they could see the daylight sky, though the sun was still out of their view, which suggested that it had sunk disturbingly low in the sky. At the other end of the clearing was a squat hill, the side facing them marred by a round black hole. As they drew closer to the hill, they saw that the opening was neither natural nor accidental. The sides were smooth, made of dark grey stone. Carved into the stone around the doorway were rune-like symbols, similar to the ones on the circle in Scotland, but somehow warped. Without knowing what the symbols meant, everyone sensed that they were twisted, and somehow wrong.
Daniel drew the two torches from the satchel, passing one to Abigail. He proceeded first, lighting his torch before he entered. Before he set foot in the cave, they were all started by the first sound they had heard since they entered the woods: the harsh call of a crow. The bird was perched over the doorway, staring down at them. It spread its wings and let out another rasping caw, which sounded more like a horrid cackle than the call of a bird.
No one present was ignorant of omens. Whether the crow was a warning or a threat depended only on who had sent it. Regardless of intent, they all drew the same meaning from its presence: time was short. Forcing his hand to stop shaking, Daniel stepped into the cave, and the others followed close behind.
The cave was pitch black. The weak light of day was unable or unwilling to pass over the threshold, and so the torches provided the only illumination. The floor was scattered with dark stains, and the beams of electric light passed over a myriad of bones. Many were the bones of animals. Some were clearly not. Daniel stepped gingerly over what could only be a human skull, and directed his torch toward the far wall.
The wall was scrawled with crude pictograms, engraved in the rough stone, along with more of the strangely unpleasant symbols that had lined the entrance. Daniel passed his torch to Warren and drew from the satchel a piece of charcoal and a roll of paper. Carefully, section by section, he took rubbings of the engraved images and symbols.
The pictograms seemed to depict a scene of worship. Rudimentary stick figures were bent in apparent supplication, all faced the same way. What else remained of the etching appeared to depict water, but the rest of it, whatever image the figures were meant to worship, was lost. The stone from that point on was broken away. Not worn by time but cracked and crumbled as though struck by a great, and very precise force.
Daniel finished his charcoal rubbing just as Abigail trained her torch further along the wall. No one was quite able to suppress a gasp at what her light revealed. If the fossil was somehow faked, then it was a very convincing facsimile. The skeleton was clearly human, at least from the waist up. As Abigail and Warren played their torches lower, the torso narrowed. There was no sign that legs had ever been present. Instead, the skeleton tapered away, and the spine continued on down to form a long, serpentine tail.
“Selena,” Abigail could barely do more than whisper, “do you recognise this?”
“It’s not like anything I’ve read about,” Selena said just as quietly, “but I barely had a chance to get beyond the basics.”
“How much charcoal do you have, Daniel?” Abigail asked.
“Not enough to get that,” Daniel shook his head, “and it would take too long besides. We’re running out of time.”
“We’re past running out,” Arthur said from near the entrance. “We are out of time.”
It couldn’t have been that late when they came in here. They certainly couldn’t have been in the cave long enough for the sun to set. But outside, no light remained. There was only ominous shadow and the growing whistle of a wind that had been absent all day. Daniel hurried to pack away his charcoal and paper, and reclaimed his torch from Warren, stowing it in the satchel as well. The air was charged with a growing sense of panic as they ventured out of the cave.
The deep purple sky was scattered with clouds, obscuring the moon and leaving the entourage in shadow. The path by which they had come into the clearing was gone; the trees had gathered close, sealing them in with a wall of gnarled black trunks and evilly rattling branches. The trap was closed.
They felt it before they heard it. A force of gleeful malice bore down on them, and they all sensed the intense hatred and deep hunger that drove it. They heard it next: a rough scraping thunder, like a great boulder being dragged across the earth with the speed of a roadster. Even over that rolling, crashing cacophony they could hear her laughter. It was a rasping, broken cackle with nothing of humanity in it. It was the shrieking, gleeful mirth of a child’s worst nightmare made flesh. Old fears of the dark were remembered in that voice, which came closer with each passing second.
Directly ahead, the groaning of ancient trunks and the snapping of countless dead limbs signalled the parting of the forest. The trees drew aside like grass bending in the wind, clearing a path not for the lost young magicians, but for the one who approached. The clouds passed from the face of the moon, and its cold white light finally fell on the forest. In that light they saw her, the ancient spirit of a ruined forest, the rancid harbinger of corruption. Baba Yaga.
She was shrivelled and old, like an ancient crone who kept on ageing, but never died. Her skin had the look of old parchment stretched over ill-fitting bones. Her hair was a white mass tangled with twigs. Her clothes were tattered scraps of skin, their origin not fit for speculation. Her eyes were burning coals in sunken pits, and her nose was an unsightly, hook-like thing. Her half-toothed grin all but split her face in two.
She road in a giant mortar across the forest floor, its rough passage the source of the thunderous noise. The pestle was in her right hand, steering her course, and her left hand disappeared behind her. She was not yet close, as much as they could judge distance in this warped place, but even if they had time to escape, there was nowhere they could go. The only path lay on the other side of the old witch. They could not go around her, only through her.
They retreated back into the mouth of the cave, their hushed voices piercing the inky blackness within as they tried to form a hasty plan.
“We can’t fight her,” Warren whispered, his voice clearly shaking, “I can feel her power from here. She’s too much for us.”
“We don’t have to fight her,” Abigail hissed, “only get past her.”
“How do we do that?” Arthur asked sarcastically. “Jump?”
“Shut up,” Abigail snapped, “I’m trying to think.”
Baba Yaga’s laughter taunted them as they sat in terrified silence. She was coming closer with each second that they waited.
“All right,” Abigail said at last, “I think I have an idea. Evelyn, I remember you were learning your family’s water craft when we were young. Do you still remember it?”
“I remember some,” Evelyn hedged, “I didn’t have time to learn much, I was more interested in healing.”
“Can you make ice?”
“Yes,” Evelyn said hesitantly, “yes, I think I can.”
“Good,” Abigail’s voice grew stronger as the plan formed, but still she spoke quickly. “Daniel, Selena, the rest will be up to you. Everyone else be ready to run.”
The whole conversation had taken only seconds, but now it seemed Baba Yaga was nearly on top of them. She was less than a hundred metres from the clearing when the plan took action. Evelyn closed her eyes and grasped in both hands a bluish white crystal she wore around her neck. Her lips barely moving, she whispered something too quiet for anyone else to hear. With the bottom end of Abigail’s torch, Selena scraped a circle around herself in the hard dirt at her feet, and knelt, closing her eyes and bowing her head, repeating the same three words over and over. Daniel simply stared hard at Baba Yaga, speaking softly to himself in Latin. Seventy metres. Sixty. Fifty.
Abigail screamed: “Now!”
Evelyn’s voice grew no louder, but she continued to speak as she opened her hands toward the opening in the trees. Power, gathered in the crystal, flowed away from her, directed at the ground in Baba Yaga’s path. The earth took on a sudden shine as a smooth sheet of ice formed directly in front of the speeding mortar. Baba Yaga hit the ice and spun out of control, her mortar careening toward the trees beside her.
Daniel’s voice grew louder, the last phrase of Latin coming out in an almost gutteral shout, punctuated by an open hand thrust in Baba Yaga’s direction. Again, power burst forth tangibly from the young man, given speed and purpose by his words and thoughts. The trees toward which the hag’s mortar spun exploded into flames, the power of Daniel’s spell meeting with the bone-dry wood to create an instant inferno. Baba Yaga struggled with her pestle to regain control before she hit the flames.
Selena’s mantra came to an end, and she raised her head to let fly a wordless banshee wail. The wind that had blown aimlessly above them gathered itself around her voice and slammed into Baba Yaga, pushing her violently off of the path and into the burning trees. The old hag’s shriek as she fell into the flames was as horrifying as her laughter.
“Go!” Abigail shouted, and they all burst into a desperate run, sprinting down the path Baba Yaga had left. With a breathless shout, Evelyn dispelled the conjured ice before they reached it. They ran past the growing inferno, following the straight path that they hoped fervently would lead to uncorrupted land.
They couldn’t say how far they had run. Daniel’s fire was a distant blurry light behind them, and Baba Yaga’s shrieks could no longer be heard. Ahead of them, they saw open snow at last. Relief washing over them, they slowed to a breathless jog, freedom only a few metres away.
The cackling laughter echoed through the woods around them, and the trees cracked and groaned as they closed in front of the exhausted party, leaving only a rough dark wall, through which only hints of moonlight could be seen.
“No!” Abigail screamed, dragging herself to a halt before she hit the barrier.
They all stopped, an aching dread growing among them, save for Daniel, who slowed only to a stalking stride. There was determination on his face, and anger. He raised his hands as he advanced on the line of trees, and threw them out before him, his hoarse voice shouting one last Latin incantation. The trees burst into flames, nothing so dramatic as the mad blaze into which they had thrown the hag, but still they burned.
No one was sure, but they thought they heard Baba Yaga’s approaching laughter falter as the barrier of trees was consumed by fire. They went up quickly, with no moisture to resist the heat. As the trees started to visible buckle, Warren took a running start and rammed his shoulder into the middle of the burning wall. He continued on through, smashing the tortured wood and falling to the ground beyond, rolling across the snow to extinguish the flames that had caught his coat.
One by one, they scrambled through, Daniel going last. They emerged to open snow and open sky, no trees save the ones they left behind them. The woods shook with a horrible scream of rage that chilled them to their bones, even now that they had escaped from Baba Yaga’s grasp.
Not terribly far away, they could see the camp, exactly where they had left it. From the same direction, they saw Janos approaching, flanked by two other men. They appeared unarmed. As they drew nearer, the three of them could be seen to be wearing a variety of exotic talismans, and each held a string of beads in his left hand. Janos looked dumbfounded.
“You have done the impossible,” he exclaimed, “faced the witch in her own domain and lived to speak of it!”
“Teamwork,” Daniel said wearily, “I told you we were prepared.”
“Your survival is a good omen,” Janos declared, “we must celebrate it! Come, you will eat and dance with us tonight. Even your women!”
Selena and Evelyn glared at his back as he turned with his companions and led them all back toward the camp. Abigail nudged Daniel in the ribs with her elbow as they walked.
“You knew it wasn’t going to be that easy,” she accused with a small smile.
Daniel shrugged. “I had more power stored up than I needed. I figured it would be smart to keep it handy, just in case.”
“Thank god for that,” Abigail said sincerely. “When we get home, I’m buying you a drink.”
“You do know that I own a bar, right?”