The Witch with the Stone Hand
Some stories don’t have happy endings...or endings at all. They just keep going sadly on, a tragedy of living without the decency to finish the tale and tell something happier. It happened years ago, when a boy named Bran was very nearly seventeen. There were only three days until his birthday, and he was nearly bursting with the excitement and anticipation of it, so much so that his stomach had started to ache. But he didn’t mind, for his mother had promised that it would be a day to remember for years to come. Bran’s twin brother Than, who was his closest friend in the whole of the world, gave him a set of colored pencils. It was three days early, but Than said he couldn’t wait to see what Bran would make with them and that Bran would get plenty of other presents when the day came.
There were a lot of drawings, at first. A sketch of the forest edge that could be seen from the upstairs window between their two beds, the old rusty weather vane shaped like a hedgehog that their grandpa had made years before when he built the house, and the image of their mother from behind as she played the piano in the parlor downstairs. Despite only having had the colored pencils for less than a day, Bran had always liked drawing and painting, so the pictures he made now were beautiful, almost lifelike. And when their mother saw them she gasped in delight and praised them mightily. She asked if there was a story that connected all of them together, because she knew that Than liked to tell stories like that, stories that connected people and places, connected things in unexpected ways. So he told a story. He told of how when the wind came from the North and blew just enough to turn the old hedgehog weather vane towards the South, and the sky was overcast with thunderous gray clouds, a path would appear that led deep into the old pine forest beyond the house. If you went that way, past the woman who played Tiersen’s “Comptine d’Un Autre Été“ on the piano, down the lawn, and towards the towering pines of the woods, you would find a road through the trees that hadn’t been there yesterday. It led to a little house in the darkest part of the forest, built into the base of the oldest and biggest tree in the whole wood. There lived an old Witch who could grant wishes to in exchange for a light from a lantern, which she could never obtain because she had been cursed by the North Wind. Whenever she tried to light a lantern herself or gather the light from one she found, the breeze would snuff it out before she could get close. It was a whimsical tale, but a delightful one, and everyone thought it was wonderful. Bran was so impressed that he drew a picture of the Witch with his pencils, making her old but kind looking, and giving her a hand of stone. When Than asked why, Bran could only say that it felt right. The second day was when Than disappeared. A storm had come in the night and blown part of the roof down, so in the morning, nobody thought to check and see where Than had gone. He was already gone when Bran got up, so his brother simply assumed he had already gone downstairs, and their mother assumed he was still abed. It wasn’t until the debris had been cleared away to make room for breakfast that anyone noticed that one person wasn’t around. All day they searched and found no sign of him. The police came, but they couldn’t help much. They took a description of him down and a smiling picture that had been hastily snapped by their Aunt Emma just before the school dance earlier that year. For the first time in all his life, Bran was alone in the room he shared with his brother, and it was a long time before he could sleep. When he did at last drift away, his dreams were uncomfortable and frightening. Filled with dark paths beneath towering trees and a cottage deep in the woods where a witch lived. When morning came again, the sky was grey and overcast and the wind blew in from the North. Bran looked out his window that morning to see that the weather vane had been blown to point towards the South, the rusted old hedgehog almost seemed to be looking out at something, at the old forest. Remembering his brother’s tale, Bran looked for a path, and there it was. So he borrowed an old lantern from the attic, an oil one that hadn’t been used since his grandfather was a little boy, and snuck past his mother who was playing the piano. It was the same song she always played, but today it was agitated, anxious. She was thinking about Than, and was only playing to keep herself occupied, to stave off her worries. Bran followed the path into the trees, and sure enough it was exactly as his brother had told. A winding dark road beneath the trees, and built into the base of the oldest and biggest tree was a cottage. When he knocked, the door was answered by an old woman who looked exactly as he had drawn the day before yesterday, right down to her left hand which was made of stone. “What is it you wish, child?” she asked him. And he explained about his missing brother. So she drew him in and laid out a spell for seeing things from afar. Her eyes traveled back to the night of the storm. She saw Than as he got out of bed and climbed out onto the roof where he liked to sit and write whenever he couldn’t sleep. The wind picked up and he did not go in. Thunder rumbled in the distance and he glanced worriedly up, but did not go inside. It wasn’t until the first droplets of heavy rain splattered down onto his notebook that he got up to go back in. But the storm had been growing for quite some time, and it struck. He wrestled against winds, pushing his way to the window. He never made it. The wind took part of the roof, and he fell. You may have wondered, as the old Witch did, why they didn’t find his body when they all went looking for him later on. Well when he fell, he went through the old cellar window hidden by the brambles and the bushes. That cellar hadn’t been opened since their great grandmother had died nearly seventy years ago. Bran’s mother hadn’t even remembered there was a cellar at all. She would recall it later on when police search parties in the woods would turn up no sign of Than, and she would break the lock on the heavy wooden door that someone had put a shelf full of cans in front of years before. She would find the body of her son, and she would hold him close. She would not cry. No tears could ever reveal the depths of despair a mother feels at losing her child. She would simply hug his body tightly and feel like the entire world had come to an end in a single moment. All this the Witch saw, and her face must have shown something, for Bran knew that she could not return his brother to him, not even with a wish. But the Witch was not about to let him go home with nothing. She offered him a chance at a different story. A story where he could explore wondrous places and meet all kinds of people who could never die and might even become close friends. A story where he did not have to return home to a mother whose heart was slowly breaking, to a twin brother who lay dead in a forgotten cellar, to a birthday which would never again be happy. And Bran? He said yes. He offered her the glimmer of light from the lantern, but she told him to keep it, and tucked it deep away into his heart for safekeeping. Then she transformed him into the shape of a bird, a crow to match his name, and gave him a body of stone and blurred his memory so that he could never be hurt by what had happened. Then as the distant sun was setting beyond the trees she sent him on his way, deeper into the forest and cross an ancient divide that few humans ever returned from. Midnight came, and Bran was seventeen. And Bran was no more.
