ACT 1: SCENE 6
In the dim green sunlight, Gretel reached into her wicker basket and dropped another shiny pebble behind her. She didn't look back at the trail snaking from her heels to home. She didn't even, she had to confess, pay much attention to looking out for her mother's mushrooms. Now that she was out in the relative daylight again her eyes twitched about, marvelling at the oppressive weirdness of it all. Everything was so misshapen. So malformed and dark. As she passed one tree she gazed at it for some time. It looked just like a girl. The lines of the trunk folded like a tattered gown, two branches flew up like arms reaching up in horror or surrender and the knot between them twisted like a screaming face, once beautiful but now gurning in agony. She ran her fingers across the "face" and doing so, was left with a handful of slime.
With the other hand she reached for a pebble and dropped it behind her.
That was another thing that was different. The night before, it had been damp and cold in the woods but this time it had rained. She could feel and smell the lingering moisture everywhere. The trees were covered in a thin slime, the grass and moss were slippery underfoot. And it all seemed to serve to heighten what Gretel felt was, well, the greenness of it all. Not good green, not "40-Love! Owzat? Goal!" green, not lying in the sun with daisies in your hair green, but squashed toad green, green like that pond in the palace grounds that they never got round to cleaning. Green like death. Which was odd for something so alive as a forest.
She reached for a pebble and dropped it behind her.
The birds had been particularly noisy all evening that night, she noticed. There had been no singing in fits and starts, no eerie, sudden silences. She had thought last night that continuous birdsong would have been a soothing alternative to the previous evening's erratic twittering. However, the cacophony this night, what with the birds and the crickets and the... the other things that she couldn't quite put her finger on, was deafening. It made it hard to think. Her brother caught her eye by flashing the lamp at her. He had evidently been saying something.
"What?" she yelled.
"I said," cried Hansel above the din, "I can't find any sign of these blessed mushrooms anywhere, how about you?"
"Me neither" shouted Gretel, realising that she hadn't actually been helping for a good half hour.
"Are you sure Mum said it was the Western Woods we needed?"
"Very," replied Gretel, "she was just positive we'd find them tonight. And that they'd change our lives for the better forever. As if she could see into the future or something."
"Just like she was positive we'd find them last night?"
"I suppose so." Gretel frowned. Her mother had not been herself for a couple of days now. So calm, so assured that she and Hansel would find the mushrooms, she'd feed them to the Mayor, he'd fall desperately in love, forget Bella and marry her, and that they'd all live Happily Ever After. She hadn't seemed to worry at all when her children had clambered over a high fence into an outlawed and dangerous place on her behalf, and she hadn't panicked when they had returned home empty handed and said they'd have to go again the following night. That wasn't like her mum. Not at all.
"Oh well," continued Hansel, "at least she was right that nothing would happen to us." He raised his arms and turned slowly in a kind of half stretch, half triumph signal. "These woods are fine. I mean, they're creepy, yes, we got lost, yes but we found our way back didn't we..."
"Who found our way back?"
But Hansel wasn't listening.
"...and we got back in one piece so I think it's fair to say that if there was anything lurking in these woods they must have gone a long time ago. And taken all the mushrooms with them."
"Hmm" said Gretel. "I just wander who it was in that cottage."
"What?"
"The cottage" shouted Gretel.
"What cottage?"
"The one in the clearing. With all the candles in the windows? You wanted to go there to get help but I..." her voice trailed off and she stood stock still, gazing at a smallish, twisting tree a few feet away. It looked exactly like a screaming woman.
"Gretel?" called her brother, "what is it?"
But they couldn't have started going round in circles. They just couldn't! It was still reasonably light, she knew she had been walking due north, from the way the sunlight fell. It was just another weird looking tree, she thought, and she'd been told so many fairy stories as a little girl about maidens that got lost in the haunted woods and were turned into trees that she'd let it shape what she saw. It was a different tree. It had to be. Slowly she walked up to it for a closer look. She peered at the knotted "face".
"Hansel?"
"Yes?"
"What do you suppose this is?"
"I suppose it's weird looking slimy tree. Because that's what it is. Doesn't it look like a girl?"
Gretel didn't answer. Her face had frozen in despair as she lifted her fingers up to a small patch where the slime had been scraped away. She brought her hand back up to her face and looked at the green grime crusting over her fingertips, then put it back against the perfectly matching clean patch on the tree.
"It's the same tree" she said aloud, but silently she thought "Maybe this is how it starts. Maybe these trees get you lost and you stay out here so long that the forest takes you over. Maybe the green smothers you first and then you turn into a tree. So you can make more people lose themselves. Mermaids of the forests."She looked at her fingers again. Yes, there was more slime on them now than there had been a moment ago. She was sure of it.
"What do you mean, 'the same tree'?" Hansel exclaimed suddenly, snapping Gretel out of her thoughts.
"We passed this tree before," she replied, "not long ago. We've started going round in circles again."
"We seem to do that a lot, don't we?" Hansel put great stress on the 'we's, meaning "by 'we', read 'you'". Gretel barely noticed his sarcasm. She was looking at her hand again.
"We should get out of here," she told him, "it'll be dark soon."
"We've got to go back empty handed again? What'll we do then?"
"Well," smiled Gretel through her fears, "we'll either have to come back here every night of our lives until we find Mum's wretched mushrooms or we just persuade her that the Mayor would be just as happy with a nice scarf or something."
"Will it be a magic scarf?" asked Hansel, swinging his lamp around on their trail looking for the little illuminated path his sister had left.
"What else?" she grinned, "we'll shear a magic sheep and get her some enchanted knitting needles. We'll get Rumplestiltskin to spin the wool.... where's the path?"
"I don't know. You dropped it." Hansel walked a few yards the way they had come, and tried the lantern at a few different angles, but to no avail.
"But I dropped those pebbles every few seconds!" Gretel ran forwards into the lamplight and kneeled down, looking across the ground. "There should be one right here."
Gretel put her head against the ground and tried looking at it sideways. Hansel swung the lantern around some more, and gave standing on tiptoe a whirl.
There was a long pause.
"What do they look like?"
"They're small, round and shiny," snapped Gretel, looking up into the light, "the ones from outside the palace, remember? The ones from last night, remember, Hansel?" In her rage she whipped a handful of pebbles from her basket and showed them to her brother. "These ones!"
Hansel didn't reply. Gretel saw his eyes widen and his giant shoulders heave with a sudden intake of breath. Slowly she followed his astonished gaze to her own clenched fist.
Her hand was full of cake.
The forest went silent.
Shakingly, she continued to close her fist. Oily crumbs and raisins squashed between her fingers. She threw the mangled cake in front of her and fished inside the basket. A sticky bun. She dropped it. Again. A fairy cake. Dropped it. Again. A fruit scone. Again. And again and again until she emptied the whole basket into the lamplight. And with every cake came the stinging sensation left over from a slap in the face. And then there was a noise in the forest, the only one. A low, female moan.
"No..."
She concluded that it had to be her, and pressed her hands together along her nose and mouth, squeezing her index fingers against her tear ducts. The moan stopped and she bit her lip.
"What do you think happened?" Asked the familiar voice on the other end of the lantern light.
"I don't know."
"Could you have done it by accident?"
"No!" Exclaimed Gretel, and thought to herself "I know they were pebbles when I dropped them. I could feel that they were. I would have guessed something was wrong by now if they weren't pebbles when I dropped them. Wouldn't I?"
"Maybe Mum packed us tea, and didn't know what she was doing."
"I told Mum that we only got back last night because of the pebbles. She wouldn't do that."
"No," she thought, "she wouldn't. Even though we eat her out of house and home and even though we're probably too old to live with her any more..."
"Oh well," sighed Hansel, "we'll just have to follow the trail of crumbs."
Right on cue, a plump blackbird landed next to Gretel's knees and began pecking at one of the scones she had thrown to the ground.
"The birds."
"What?"
Gretel picked up the first clump of cake she had crushed and flung it at the trees. "The sodding BIRDS!" she screamed. The blackbird flew off, carrying its scone with him.
"They'll have eaten them all" reasoned Hansel.
"Yes, Hansel."
"No wonder they were so noisy tonight."
"Yes, Hansel."
"So we don't have a path back."
"No, Hansel."
Gretel stared up into the lamplight. A moment passed. Then a large, hairy hand protruded from it and took hers.
"Come on then, love. Let's find a way out of here."
Hansel helped his sister to her feet and turned her around to face the way they had come from.
"What do you think, Gretel? That way?"
"I suppose it's as good as any. We just have to make sure that we keep going in a straight line, and we'll be OK."
They stumbled forwards in the now silent darkness for a good hour, with Gretel pushing ahead, holding aside branches and kicking over logs while Hansel walked a arm's length behind her, lighting the way. They never once broke hands. Each sibling would have claimed that it was to stop the other from getting lost. Slowly, the lamplight began to fade.
"Is that candle fizzing out?" asked Gretel eventually.
"I'm onto it," came the reply, and then she felt his hand let go. Needing to know he was still there, she stopped and turned to look at him while he took out a fresh candle and used the old flame to light the second one. The light doubled. He dribbled wax onto the bottom of the lantern to fix the new light in place before looking at his sister and smiling. And then he looked over her shoulder and stopped smiling. And then he said "Oh Dear."
Gretel looked behind her to see a face, only a few feet away, frozen in a petrified scream, her finger marks slashing a scar of fresh wood along its eyes.
The mermaid of the forest.
For a moment, Gretel's face mirrored it as they stared at one another, her own face twisted open in a silent scream. She pushed her knuckles against her mouth and gurgled back a sob as the first hot tears of frustration made their way down her nose.
"Gretel?"
And then her knuckles were away from her own mouth and pummelling the tree. Screaming in anger she laid into the thing with both fists until the green slime trickled dark blood down her hands and the tree's horrified face.
"Come on, then!" She shouted at it, "It's you or me, sweetheart!"
But her arms couldn't move. They were being held back, by the wrists, and suddenly she had been turned away from the tree and into the broad, muscular chest of her brother. She shut her eyes and pressed her head against him, smelling his old smell of sweat and grass, feeling his beard scratching against her scalp.
"Mummy..."
She let go and shuddered with the onslaught of honest tears, weeping noisily and snottily into his shoulder. His huge arms enveloped her and all of a sudden she was aware of quite how small she was. She was vaguely aware of being carried.
"Ssssssh."
She couldn't shush. She couldn't shake herself out of her brother's arms, and even if she could, she wouldn't be able to walk. She had become a jelly. A quivering, moist blob of uselessness and phlegm. As he carried her away from the Mermaid Tree she heard her brother murmuring to her, calmly, quietly. She couldn't make out any words except the phrase "It'll be all right".