Page 6 of Hansel and Gerhardt
Gerhardt dropped the leaf asif Hansel hadn’t said a word. “Hansel! Look!”He verily tripped over a log in his rush, thenscrambled forward onhis kneestothe base of a tree, holding two hands out in the closest expression of holy reverence Hansel had ever seen.
It was a mushroom. Of sorts. It was enormous, bright red on top,emitting the samebrilliantglowofthe strange spores all around them, its long white stem and gillsshiningwith their sunnyluminosity.
Closer, closer,Gerhardt’sfingers edged towards his prize. Only to be struck back by Hansel’s frantichand. Gerhardt responded maturely, by slapping those fingers whichhadslapped his, which Hansel slapped even harder, and the quiet forest became alive with grunts, petty fighting, the crunching of leaves, until Gerhardt finally shoved Hansel onto his bottom andjumped to his feet. “It’s a mushroom, you idiot!”
Hansel was up, furious. “I can see that, you fool!”
“What? Did you want us to starve to death?”
Hansel slapped his own forehead in exasperation. “You don’t eat weird, poisonous mushrooms you just found, Gerhardt. Lord, you’ve been out in the wild for all of five minutes and you’re about to kill yourself.”
“How do you know it’s poisonous?” Gerhardt spat. “Have you ever seen its like?”
“Never once,” said Hansel, “which is reason enough to not eat it.”
Gerhardt’s hands scraped at his empty stomach. “Do you imagine I care if I die? It would be worth it just to have something inside me.” He reached for the plant, but Hansel’s grip was fast and strong.
“Clearly you don’t know how painful death by mushroom poisoning is,” he said.
“Less painful than another five minutes with you!” Gerhardt threw at him. “You and your stupid, scared, pathetic, grovelling ways. I’ll eat, and maybe I’ll die, but I’ll eat.”
Gerhardt’s words cut Hansel to the quick. He was deranged with hungerand fear—that much was clear.But that was what he really thought of him.
His ever-present guilt for Gerhardt’s suffering at his own father’s hands coupled with anger at the affront, and all Hansel could manage was a small, “I saved your life today.”
The eyes of a creature of prey met his. Scared and untrusting. “And I saved yours, too. Even if you do blame me for bringing you here. You’d have had an axe in your skull if I hadn’t acted. What were you thinking, just jumping out in front of him like that?”
“I was thinking he was going to kill you. You or me, as sure as day, and I meant to buy you time to escape. And now look where it’s gotten us.” He cast fearful eyes about the silent trees, a look which Gerhardt followed, his chin raising with a touch of defiance.
“I’d say it’s already a great improvement on what we had.” And again, he reached for the cursed fungus.
And again, Hansel clamped strong hands down on his wrist.“Oh, no. You’ve got me lost in the forest—theDark Forest,I’ll add—and you are not going todie and leave mehere to find my way out alone.”
“Oh, so I’ll starve just to keep you company, shall I?”
With sneering sarcasm, “That would be great actually, thank you.”
“Fuck you, Hansel.”
“Fuck you too, Gerhardt.”
But for all that, Gerhardt didn’t reach for the mushroom again. It might have taken some few moments to sink in, but the agonising, writhing, excoriating death of mushroom poisoning was something all forest dwellers knew of only too well.
Heeyed the mushroom, a touch of fear in hisgazenow. “Fine.I won’t eat it.But I’ll take it as a torch to light the way until we find something better.” Thrown by his words, Hansel tooktoo longto act, and in the blink of an eye,Gerhardthad snapped the stem.
The lights on the mushroom went out immediately, those all around began to pulsate, shifting to orange, then to a ghastly blood-red.
“Oi! What the fuck?” came a shout at their knees.
Both heads snapped downto find a small creature, humanish, pink-skinned, long-eared, and furious.
They stood stock still, having heard and understood its words in full, but unable to process the fact that a creature of the forest had just spoken to them.
But the creature was happy enough tocarry on, regardless. “You think you can just come in here andtrash my things?”
“N-no,” Gerhardt tried.
“Do you know how long that took me to build?”
