Joy Preble - Haunted

Baba Yaga

Through the skull in my fireplace, I watch her. Does she know, I wonder? Does she sense my presence? It is hard to say. But I suppose it does not really matter. We are connected in ways she does not yet understandways that even I find curious. I am Baba Yaga, and she is Anne, and our destinies have mingled, twisted tightly together even before she found her way to my forest. Anne Michaelsonthe ordinary girl who wasnt ordinary at all. The one who brought Anastasia out from my hut and captured the heart of a foolish man named Ethan. The one who weeps quietly, night after night, because she saved a girl who chose to die, and this does not sit easily on her heart. I would help her, I think, if I were not what I am. But as that cannot change, at least for now, I watch. I offer no balm. No words of comfort.

I am the glorious Baba Yaga. And while this is not a simple thing, it is what it is. I am the one who changes others. The Bone Mother. The Crone. For ever and ever, I have flown the skies in my mortar. Stirred the air with my pestle. Ground my enemies to dust or chewed them whole with my iron teeth and placed their heads on pikes outside my hut. I have come and gone as I pleased. Danced barefoot in my forest. Felt the sting of icy rain on my skin. Ridden fast through the woods with my horsemen. Taken lovers when I pleased. Reveled in the summer air. Laughed with glee as autumn approached. My season. The time of change. The wonderful approach of death.

But now there is something else. Something unexpected. Or rather, something I had forgotten to expect. It lurks in the water and watches my girl just as I watch her. Just as I watch it.

Water is not my true element. I am of the earth and the sky. I am of the fire. But in the seas and oceans, the rivers and streams, I am not at ease. I soar through the skies in my mortar. Nothing passes through my forest unchangednot even this creature that floats below the surface of things, the one that has been haunting my girl. Honed to the bone, as I am. Skin pale as alabaster. Eyes dark with a hunger that verges on madness. Hair tangled and wild as her heart. Like me, she is not what she once was. But she is not what she wants to be either.

Then again, who really is? Even I have desires beyond my reach. At least for now. So she floats and waits, and so do I. Like all good stories, this one cannot begin until it is ready. However we come to our rolesair, water, earth, firewe will fly, float, crawl, burn. It is, after all, our destiny.

And so I study the creature that watches Anne. A picture within a picture within the glowing eyes of the skull, licked by the flames of my fireplace. I stretch out my hands, brown and gnarled, etched with lines of my past, my present, my future. My cat, my koshka, his feline fur black as night, eyes yellow as bile, nips at my ankles. His sharp pink tongue flicks at a stray crumb on my hard wooden floorthe same floor that Anastasia used to sweep for me until it gleamed. Now the cup of hot, sweet tea that I drinkthe one she used to bring meis tinged with bitterness at her absence.

Does the woman in the water know that I am not so far away? Would she change her course if she did? I smile at the thought of it and see the glint of my iron teeth reflected in the eyes of the skull. If she wandered into my forest, I might grind her bones with my pestle. Crush what she is and reform it to my will. But she cannot cross over. She never could. She can only swim and hope and wait.

So I watch them. I stare into my fire. And realize that for all of us, there is no going back. We have all traveled too far, too deep.