Babayaga

The audition had been even more rigorous than she could have imagined. She felt tense and nervous and it all went wrong, her battement frappé was too weak, her déboulés awkward, and every arabesque painfully unsteady. As she finished her final routine she did not even need to see the distracted and bored expressions on the judges’ faces. In fact, she knew she had failed before the music even finished. Stopping there on the empty stage and listening as the piano’s last small high note echoed out into the air, she felt the ancient theater creak, crack, and begin to collapse around her, breaking apart into a hundred thousand splinters that fell at her feet. The walls caved in and the ceiling came down as her entire world tumbled and crashed in around her—her little village, the rolling countryside, waves of sea and ocean, and every atomic element she had ever learned about in her science classes were bursting into smithereens, exploding around her on the stage. When the thunder finally subsided, the judges were still there, staring blankly as they waited for her to exit the stage, while her father and mother, seated near the back, sat grinning, entirely blind to her failure, their eyes aglow with the hollowness of hope.

Her first attempt to kill herself had been a botched and desperate affair: in a hysterical fit, she had gulped down a well of dark pen ink, and immediately vomited it up again like a squid, retching the blackness out all over her father’s well-organized desk.

Next she had slashed her wrists, but they had found her in time, flailing and weeping in the blushed, warm water of her rose-tinted bath. That was what had brought her to the institution. And now here she was, scarred, ugly, and alone.

As she finished her tale, the old woman nodded. “Yes, this is bad. In my time, we would put you to work, slap you into shape, make you wake up from your miseries through the penance of toil. But this place makes you lie down on your cot, or wander the grounds like a stupid park pigeon, waiting for them to fill you with more treats from their pharmacies. They are not here to cure you, you know, they are only here to make the pharmacist’s pockets fat.”

Noelle nodded. She was only waiting for the doctors’ signatures of approval, she said, so that her parents could take her home. There, she confided with a deep breath, she would surely try to kill herself again.

“Bah,” said the old woman. “If you wanted death, you would have death. It’s too easy. Bang your head into that stone wall there until you crush it. Right there.” She pointed at the cold masonry. “Do it now.” Noelle looked at her, wide-eyed and confused. The old woman shrugged. “See? You do not want death. I tell you what, we can give you instead a whole new better life, one more beautiful than any idiot ballerina’s. What are dancers, really, but silly whores without the fucking? You give them money and they twirl around in frilly colored costumes before your eyes. They twirl until they drop. You don’t want that. You want what we can give you.”

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?”

“We? Oh, from now on we is you and me.” Elga patted her hand. “If you want it, we do this. I’ll help you. But it is a great secret. And if you do it, you’ll have to help me too. I will need your help with a very tough job.”

“What job?”

The old woman rubbed Noelle’s shoulder in a soft and reassuring way. “We have to kill a witch.”

VIII

Tuesday morning, Will had risen early and tried calling Oliver; then he had tracked down the address of The Gargoyle Press, and now, having been pointed to an unsteady, uncomfortable chair, he sat waiting among the piles of books and galley proofs in the journal’s “lobby.” The office was merely a large apartment with a few desks and telephones. Papers sat stacked and bundled along its tables, empty chairs, and windowsills. There were five people there, none of them the ones Will had met with Oliver at the bar. One sat at her desk reading, one sat typing in a concentrated hunt-and-peck fashion, and two more were at the far end of the room, apparently having a meeting. The assistant who had greeted him, an attractive, narrow-waisted French girl in a red sweater, had briefly disappeared after letting him in and then returned to her seat, where she slowly, studiously paged through the thick copy of Vogue that sat beside the big black telephone on her desk. He assumed she had told someone to find Oliver, but no one appeared. After a few moments, the phone rang and the girl answered it. For the next quarter hour she stayed on the phone, ignoring Will while she gaily chatted with the caller. Will suspected she was talking with a close friend. He thought of interrupting her but found it almost relaxing watching a pretty girl laugh and gossip as if he were not even there. Finally, one of the other young women who had been busy reading came over. “Je peux vous aider?”