Page 56 of Hansel and Gerhardt
“Shh.” Again Hansel listened, while Gerhardt stilled in front of him, all quiet concern and searching eyes. Hansel scanned the door, waiting for a movement, a flicker of light across the crack.
Nothing.
He took Gerhardt’s two hands and placed them on the edge of the dresser. “I need you to hold this in place. Use all your strength. Be ready for it to move.”
Leaving Gerhardt to look curiously after him, though he held his position, Hansel made for the small window, assessing the chance of their escape through it. The window was small, chocolate-framed, stretched across with transparent sheets of sugar. The grass below was shimmering green, bucolic in the night. The forest was black all around, but only metres away. A quick run, and they could lose themselves there, with all the other quiet and cowering animals that shrank from their hunters.
Hansel’s two strong hands came down on the frame, determined to shove it out, to smash it to pieces, nothing but flaked chocolate as it appeared to be. But it didn’t budge. Again, he slammed against it, twice as hard. Not the slightest movement.
Shaking all over at the impossibility of the thing, at the imminence of their death, he formed a hard fist and rammed it into the sugar-glass. The thing resisted him, throwing back a sharp shock of agony that jarred through his knuckles and his fist, right up his arm, so that he cried out hopelessly.
“Hansel, please talk to me. What’s wrong?” Gerhardt took up his injured hand, took it to his heart and held it there, running his fingers over his forearm.
“There’s something in the hall,” Hansel whispered, eyeing the door. “It attacked me. It’s coming for you, I’m sure of it.”
But Gerhardt did not run back to brace the dresser against the door. He didn’t try to loosen the window from its binds. He only took a cool hand to Hansel’s forehead. “I don’t think you’re feeling well.”
Hansel grabbed his hand, took it to his own heart. “Don’t you hear me? There is a thing out there. It attacked me. It licked my blood.”
“What blood? Where?” Gerhardt’s other hand roamed through Hansel’s hair now, sweeping it back from his temple, trying to calm him with every stroke. “I think you have had a bad dream. Sit with me.”
“No!” Hansel pushed his hand away. “Does this look like I dreamed it?” He turned his face to the light for Gerhardt to see the cut.
But Gerhardt’s eyes searched his cheek, his forehead, his lips. All over. “Dear brother, you are deathly pale. It pains me to see you like this.”
“No, no! Here. See where it has sliced my skin open with its tongue.” He brought Gerhardt’s fingers to his cheekbone, where they caressed him, smooth and painless.
“There’s nothing there.”
“But there must be!” Hansel ran his own fingers over the unbroken skin, his brow etched with deep lines as he tried to process it.
“You are dreaming. Are you still dreaming?” Again, that cool hand on his forehead, the backs of four long and beautiful fingers, and the face he adored downcast with worry.
Hansel didn’t know what to tell him. He’d seen it. He’dfeltit. Had that been another hallucination? Had his arm turned to biscuit earlier? Had he seen his father at the table?
Or was he really going mad?
“You are not well,” Gerhardt said again, only this time with more conviction. “You will sit with me.”
He brought Hansel to the bedside, forced him to sit. And Hansel, dazed, did as commanded, as if under Gerhardt’s hypnotic control.
Gerhardt turned towards him, one knee up on the bed. “You have such vivid dreams, Hansel. You always have. And you’ve been under a lot of stress.”
“I know what I saw.” Even faced with the appalling truth, evidenced by the missing injury, Hansel scanned the door for any sign of movement.
Gerhardt brought his attention back with that caressing hand on his cheek. “You’re exhausted. You’ve barely eaten in days. You’re seeing things, half asleep, half awake. Hansel, it’s a waking nightmare and nothing more.”
How could it be true? How could that visceral horror be nothing more than his own twisted imagination? “It was there. In the hall. Didn’t you hear me calling for you?”
“I heard not a thing. Not a thing until just now, when you tried my handle. And I immediately let you in.”
“Perhaps you slept through it.”
“I haven’t slept. Not a wink.” He grasped Hansel’s two hands and, clasping them in his own, brought them to the bedspreadbetween them. “I felt terrible. For everything I said tonight. I didn’t mean it.”
Low eyes, ashamed behind long lashes.
How Hansel wanted to look into them, free and clear. “Why did you say it?”
