There was once a traveling peddler who got lost in a vast forest on his way to a market town. He ran out of food, and was faint with hunger and thirst when he finally spotted a little cottage nestled in an open glade. It had a steeply-pitched roof, a single chimney at one end from which a tendril of smoke twined upward, and two small, glowing windows to either side of its round-topped door that looked like eyes framing a mouth. When he reached the door, he could smell meat cooking, and his stomach rumbled.
He lifted a hand to knock, but the door opened before his knuckles touched it. A short, plump middle-aged woman in a stained, faded red woolen bodice and a green skirt, both of which were too tight for her, stood in the entrance. She gave him a broad smile.
“Come in, stranger, and welcome! My brother and I were about to sup, and there’s ample food for you.”
An equally chubby man joined her. He was also in red and green, and his tunic and knee-length trews fitted him as tightly as the garb of his sister– his twin, Ned realized. He flashed a double row of brilliant white teeth. “I’m sorry we can’t offer you cakes and sweetmeats,” he said, “but they’ve all been nibbled by little mousekins.” He giggled.
“Brother,” the woman said, in a warning tone. The man caught himself. “Ah, but we always have something in the oven, in case a wandering stranger drops by. I do hope you will share our humble meal.”
“Willingly, and many thanks,” said Ned. “I was near perishing of hunger.”
He entered, and the man closed the door behind him. Ned heard the snick of a key turning in a lock, and turned, startled.
The fat man grinned again as he pocketed the key. “Not all strangers are as kindly as you seem to be, good sir,” he said. “We’ve had a few unwelcome visitors in times past. We give them short shrift, believe me! May I ask your name?”
“I’m Ned Bryn,” said the peddler.
“My name is Margret,” the woman said, “and my brother is Johan.”
“But why be so formal?” the man said, with another broad smile. “Call us Han and Gret.” He showed Ned to a table in the middle of the room, and bade him take off his pack and sit, while his sister checked whatever was roasting in the oven.
“Thanks again, kind friends,” said Ned. But something about the genial pair raised his hackles. They seemed a little too glad to see him. So after shrugging out of his pack and setting it on the floor, he leaned his staff against the wall behind him, near to hand, and checked that his dagger was loose in its scabbard.
The cottage was warm and cozy, if sparsely furnished. It consisted of a single room furnished with a wide bed neatly made up with a blanket and a bolster in one corner, the table, set with three stools, and a cupboard containing various rough wooden plates, cups, and bowls. But on a separate shelf were a silver goblet, a plate, a long knife, a fork, and a spoon. They were burnished to a high luster; if they’d ever been used, there were no signs of it. Next to the stove was a stack of firewood and a hatchet. Oddly, there was a large straw besom mounted on the wall above the stove. An awkward place, he thought, to keep something that must see daily use, for the puncheon floor was spotless. But then he saw a smaller broom, showing considerable wear, casually propped in another corner.
“Done to a turn!” said Gret. She used a long fork and a carving knife to transfer the roast from its pan to a wooden trencher on the counter next to the oven, and the aroma of the meat made the hinges of Ned’s jaws sting as his mouth began to water. A leg of lamb, from the aroma, cooked to perfection and swimming in its own juices. Han fetched a fresh-looking loaf of bread from a hinged box at the end of the counter and put it on the table.
“The only ale we have is Adam’s,” Gret said, “but our well is deep, and its water is wholesome.” She took three wooden cups out of the cupboard, set them down, and brought over a porcelain pitcher, pouring Ned’s cup full. He was still very thirsty, and took a deep drink. The cool water tasted slightly sweet, and he wondered if Gret had added some dried mint to it. But his instinct for wariness stirred again, and he kept himself from draining the cup, in case what he thought was mint might be something less benign.
Meantime, Han had brought the trencher to the table. He cut a thick slice and slapped it down on Ned’s plate. “Eat hearty!” he said. “You’re much too skinny, Master Ned! We have to get some meat on your bones!”
Ned used his dagger to cut a bite out of the slice. But it tasted more like pork than lamb, and he looked at the meat again. It ended, not in a pig’s trotter or a lamb’s hoof, but in a human foot, complete with five toes. They even had toenails.
He gagged and spat the mouthful onto the floor. Leaping to his feet, he kicked over his stool, and whirled around. Gert stood there with the hatchet in both hands, ready to bring it down onto his head.
She shrieked as he swiped at her hand with his dagger, nicking it slightly, and dropped the hatchet. Ned stooped to pick it up with his left hand as he slipped the dagger back into its sheath. He transferred the hatchet to his right hand and said, his voice shaking with shock and disgust, “I have heard tell of ogres that eat human flesh, but I always thought they were monsters, not people. Was I supposed to be your next meal?”
Han turned on his sister. “You forgot to cut the feet off! How could you have been so careless?”
“Don’t blame me!” she snarled back. “You should have noticed this one’s wicked dagger the moment he came in!”
“Silence, both of you!” Ned barked. He waved the hatchet at them. “Give me one good reason not to kill you!”
All the fight went out of Gert. “Oh, please, sir, no!” she wailed. “It’s all because of the witch! We were abandoned in this forest by our parents when we were little. They had four other children, too many mouths to feed. We were the last, and we were too young to work. We came upon the witch’s cottage….”
Her twin took up the tale in a trembling voice. “It was all covered with candies and little cakes. We were starving, and we plucked some of them from the walls and ate them. The witch pounced on us and dragged us in…. ”
“She stripped us naked and put us in a cage to fatten us up,” Gert went on. “She fed us on what we thought were pieces of roast chicken, tossing the meat into our cage. But she was very old, and nearly blind, so every morning she made Han stick his finger out so she could feel it and find out if he’d gotten fat enough to eat.“
“But I would stick out a chicken bone instead, and she’d grumble and curse and go on feeding us.”
“It wasn’t a chicken bone, either,” Gert added. “It was a finger bone, which is why it fooled the witch.“
“Aye,” Han said. “We weren’t the first children who had fallen into her clutches. There was a whole pile of little bones in a pot next to the stove. She used them to make soup. Some still had meat on them.”
“Yes, and well, one day the witch caught Han using a bone instead of his finger,” said Gret. “She flew into a rage and yanked us out of the cage The oven was hot, and she turned her back on us to open its door.”
“But we’d gotten bigger and stronger on all the meat she’d fed us,” Han said, “and we pushed her in, instead. Oh, how she squalled! But we closed the door on her and held it shut until she quit her yelling.”
The two stopped talking and put their arms around each other, beginning to cry. Their sobs sounded like the grunting of pigs.
“Did you… did you eat her?” Ned asked finally.
“Not all of her,” said Gret, swiping her dirty sleeve across her dripping eyes and snotty nose. “She was stringy, and she tasted horrible, because of course we didn’t have time to take off her filthy clothes. Not even her nasty pointed hat.”
“But we ate enough to keep from starving,” Han went on. “And then, well, we made soup… “
“From the bones. Including hers,” said Ned. It wasn’t a question, and he had to take a deep breath to keep from gagging again.
“What else could we do?” Gert asked plaintively. “ We were just two poor, hungry children, lost in the woods.”
“That must have been many years ago.” Ned said. “You’re certainly not children any more. How did you survive for so long?”
The two released each other and exchanged a sly look. Han shrugged. “Well, other travelers get lost in this forest, don’t they?”
“They do indeed.” Ned paused. He wanted to kill the ghastly pair on the spot and burn their cottage down around them, but he was still fiercely hungry.
“Do you have any other kind of food in the house?” he asked. “I’ll spare you if you give some of it to me. Oh, and I need to fill my water-skin. Without whatever drowsy potion you put in it.”
“Of course, of course, good master!” Han said. “There’s the rest of the bread, and the last traveler left a round of cheese. It shouldn’t be too stale. A moment, while I fetch it!”
Gret said, “Thank you for sparing us.” Her voice trembled. “We’ll never do anything bad again, I promise! It was the witch’s fault that we wound up this way. Please, if you would, take her shiny things with you, and her magic broom. We want no trace of her in here any more.”
“What’s magic about the broom?” Ned asked.
“It flies!” said Gret. “She’d mount it and and swoop above the forest, looking for more lost children to lure in.”
“Have either of you ever tried to ride it?”
“It doesn’t work for us,” Gret said. “Maybe the magic went out of it when we… when the witch died.”
Ned recalled the strange, ungainly creature he’d see soaring above the forest before he entered it. Another lie.
She brought him the cheese, its rind still intact, and Ned stowed it in his wallet with the bread. He put on his pack and picked up his staff. Turning his back deliberately on them, he started for the door. There were footsteps behind him. Ned was expecting the attack, and he spun around, swinging his staff with both hands, as hard as he could, as Han lunged at him with the witch’s long silver knife. The staff caught Han squarely in the forehead. He dropped the knife and fell heavily, face down. Gret screamed and ran to him, going to her knees. She rolled him onto his back. His forehead was pulped in, his bulging eyes were crossed, and blood streamed from his mouth and nostrils. She looked up at Ned and howled, “You killed him!
“He tried to kill me first,” Ned said flatly.
“But what will become of me without my only love?” Her voice rose to a shrill keen, and Ned remembered the single bed. More than brother and sister, then, it seemed. He wondered whether the two had spawned a child at some point. If so, more than likely it hadn’t lived long. Right into the oven, yum, yum. A delicacy, like suckling pig.
“You can always eat him,” he said. “There’s a lot more meat on his bones than on mine. After you’ve polished off what’s left of the last poor traveler, your brother will keep you going for quite awhile.”
She shrieked with rage and flew at him, long nails out to claw at his eyes. He pushed her away, but she stooped to the floor, grabbing the silver knife. He backed away, but she kept on coming, still screaming, her eyes wild and flecks of spittle foaming in the corners of her mouth. Her fury aroused his own, and he brought his staff down hard on her wrist. There was a distinct crack as her wristbone broke. She gave a yowl as she dropped the knife to cradle her wrist in her other hand.
He hesitated only a moment before ramming the butt of the staff into her fat face, smashing her pig’s snout even flatter. She fell over backwards, and the back of her head hit the floor with a dull clunk. Her eyes rolled up until only the whites showed. Unconscious, but probably not dead, he thought, catching his breath. If she came to, and her brains weren’t permanently addled, he knew she’d eat Han, salting her “humble meal” with tears of mourning, and go right back to luring travelers into the cottage, Doing it by herself would prove difficult, but he remembered the funny taste of the water she’d given him. Her next victims might not possess his own suspicious cast of mind. Few people did.
No, better to finish her off once and for all. But still he hesitated. He’d never killed a woman before, and even though Gert was a monster, and probably not fully human any more, she was still female.
“Right, Ned Bryn,” he told himself, “and where is it written that women can’t be as vicious as men?”
The hatchet was dull, and it took two strokes to sever her head. Then he opened the oven door, used the poker to drag out the smoldering logs, and spread them on the floor. They burst back into flame immediately, and he added fresh firewood from the pile and opened the cottage door. The draft fanned the fire until it began to lick at the ceiling and race across the floor. He grabbed his pack by its straps, took up his staff, and scrambled outside, just a step or two ahead of the flames. He shouldered his pack in mid-stride and kept on running until he judged he was a safe distance away, before stopping to catch his breath and look back. The wind had stopped, and the flames of the cottage rose straight up into the sky above the glade. A good thing, since they wouldn’t set the entire forest on fire. There were good creatures living in it as well as evil ones.
It took a long time before the flames completely consumed the cottage, and he took advantage of its warmth to rest and eat his bread and cheese. Once he thought he heard screaming. But the voice might have been a trick of his own guilty conscience.
