“Look, Conner!” Alex said, catching her breath. “It’s a gingerbread house, a real gingerbread house! Look how cute it is!”
“Whoa,” Conner said. “I feel like I may get diabetes from just looking at that place.”
“Let’s go inside!” Alex said, and stepped toward the house.
Conner grabbed her arm. “Have you lost your mind? Do the words Hansel and Gretel cannibalism incident mean anything to you?”
“I just want to peek inside for a second, only one second—”
The door of the gingerbread house slowly opened. Alex and Conner froze. A large, hooded figure squeezed out of the door and then raised its head to stare at the twins.
It was, undoubtedly, a witch, and although they had never seen a real witch to make a comparison to, she was more grotesque than they could have imagined. Her skin was wrinkled and pale with a yellowish tint. Her eyes were bloodshot and bulged out of her head. She was hunched over and had an enormous hump on her back.
“Hello, children,” the witch said. Her voice was high-pitched and crackly. “Would you care to join me for a bite to eat?”
It was impossible for the twins to hide their fear; they both stood still staring at her as if she were a rabid Tyrannosaurus rex about to pounce on them at any moment.
“No, thank you,” Alex said. “We’re just passing by. You have a lovely home.”
They slowly backed up, one foot at a time.
“Wouldn’t you like to see the inside?” the witch asked.
“The inside of whom?” Conner said, and Alex elbowed him.
“Don’t be silly, kiddies, come inside,” said the witch, losing her patience. She extended an inviting, shaking hand toward them. They noticed it was covered in burn marks, perhaps from the last time she’d had visitors.
“I thought the witch died at the end of ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” Alex whispered to Conner.
“Maybe she got hold of a fire extinguisher after they left,” Conner whispered back.
They continued backing slowly away from her.
“Thank you so much for the invitation, but we really need to get going,” Alex said.
“We’re on a really tight schedule,” Conner added. “We’re meeting a couple of dwarfs for coffee in a half hour, so we better get a move on!”
They quickly took off in the direction they’d come, but came to a jarring stop when the witch suddenly appeared in front of them with a pop! They tried running back the other way, but the witch just appeared in front of them again with a snap! They were trapped.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” the witch said. She seemed to grow taller, and her eyes bulged bigger as her patience ran out. “Now, be nice little chickies and follow me inside.”
“Alex, this is like one of those bad videos about strangers from the first grade,” Conner whispered to her. “Do you still have your kidnapping whistle?”
“You don’t want to eat us!” Alex told the witch. “We’ve been walking for a while, so we’re really dehydrated! We’re practically just skin and bone.”
The witch was definitely growing. Her hump shrank as her body rose higher.
“Your friend seems to be rather plump,” the witch said, looking at Conner like a praying mantis about to strike. “He has more than enough to spare!” She was practically salivating.
“I beg your pardon?” Conner was so offended, he forgot how terrifying she was. “I’ll have you know I’m on the edge of another growth spurt, and I always get a little pudgy before one!”
“Conner, please don’t—” Alex tried, but was too late.
“Why do you want your victims chubby, anyway? Wouldn’t it be healthier if they were muscular and fit?” Conner said.
The witch looked to the side and raised an eyebrow. She had never considered this. Her consideration must have distracted her from attacking the twins, because she began to shrink back to her normal, humped shape.
“If you ask me,” Conner continued, “you should turn your gingerbread house into a gingerbread gym and health club!”
Alex often couldn’t believe the crazy things that her brother said, but this one took the cake.
“What a delicious idea,” the witch cackled. “I’ll rebuild as soon as I’m finished with you.”
The witch began to grow again. This time her mouth opened wide and a set of jagged teeth grew out of it. She was going in for the attack.
Alex screamed, “Wait!” With her hands covering her face, she said, “You owe him!”
The witch recoiled into her smaller form. “I owe him?” she asked.
“Yes! Isn’t that how it works?” Alex said. “He presented you with an idea, and now you owe him a wish!”
“A wish?” the witch asked.
“A wish?” Conner asked.
Alex nodded convincingly. The witch grunted.
“Yes, the Happily Ever After Assembly just enacted a new law,” Alex said, thinking on the tips of her toes. “Any witch presented with a good idea must return the favor by granting a wish.”
“Um… yeah,” said Conner, going along with it. “Don’t make Mother Goose fly down here. She’ll let her geese loose on you, and some of them lay golden eggs, and that can’t feel good. Who knows how aggressive they’ll be?”
“Fine,” the witch said. “I shall grant you one wish. But only because I don’t want to deal with those fluttering freaks… again.”
Conner leaned close to his sister. “What should I wish for? Should I wish to go home?” he whispered.
“No, she’ll try to trick us with whatever we wish for! It has to be really specific!” Alex said.
“Hurry, child! I’m hungry!” the witch demanded.
“Okay…” said Conner, thinking as fast as he could. It had to be a good one; it had to help them get out of the situation. “I wish you would become a vegetarian!” he said to the witch.
Alex turned her head sharply toward her brother. “That’s what you picked?”
“Very well,” the witch shrieked. The twins weren’t sure if she knew what a vegetarian was. She reached her hands toward the sky and clapped, making a sound as loud as thunder.
The twins ducked, but the wish appeared to have done the trick. The witch’s hump faded away, the yellowish tint of her skin disappeared, and her bloodshot eyes calmed.
“I’ve lost my appetite,” the witch said. She shrugged her shoulders, turned away from Alex and Conner, and walked into the gingerbread house, slamming the door behind her.
Alex and Conner took a deep breath. Their bodies had never been so tense.
“That was a close one!” Alex said.
“You’re welcome!” Conner said.
“How did you think of wishing for her to become a vegetarian?” Alex asked.
Conner scratched his head. “It was the only sure way I knew she wouldn’t eat us.”
Alex smiled at him. She wasn’t given too many moments to be proud of her brother, so when the chance came, she soaked it up for all it was worth.
“Nice job, but let’s get out of here in case your wish wears off.”
The twins hurried back through the forest until they returned to the path. They continued heading south, this time keeping to a faster pace. They had had their first dangerous encounter in the fairy-tale world, and they weren’t in any hurry for the next.
Alex and Conner had been hurrying along the path for a while, when Conner said, “Alex, I’ve got to sit down! I feel like my legs are going to fall off!”
“Conner, we have to keep moving! It’s already after noon, and Froggy said we need to cross into the Corner Kingdom before nightfall!” Alex warned.
“Easy for him to say—he has frog legs!” Conner said through heavy breathing. “Just for a couple of minutes, and then we’ll keep going, I promise!”
“All right, but let’s find someplace safe,” Alex said.
They continued walking a little farther and found a pleasant opening between some trees. Conner found a fallen tree to sit on a
nd catch his breath.
Alex looked around at the trees of the forest, noticing that they were all different shapes and sizes and shades of green. She was still bewildered by everything that had happened.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Alex said. “All of this has been at our fingertips the whole time, and we never knew.”
She took a seat next to her brother, grinning from ear to ear.
“What do you think Dad and Grandma would make of all this?” Alex asked him. “What do you think they would say if they knew all of it was actually real?”
“From the way they always talked about fairy tales, you’d think they did,” Conner said, and couldn’t help but smile at the thought.
“I have a thousand reasons why I wish Dad was still alive,” Alex said. “But now I wish it more than ever, just so we could bring him back and show all of this to him and Grandma.”
“We have to get back first,” Conner reminded her. “And while we’re on the subject, I think we should take a look at that journal. The sooner we read it, the sooner we can get back home.”
“I know,” she told him. “But we should at least see a castle or palace first! Dad and Grandma would have wanted us to!”
Conner grunted. “Alex, we just barely escaped being lunch for a witch. We can’t waste any more time—”
The sounds of a few twigs snapping came from across the clearing, as something approached. Alex and Conner ducked down behind the fallen tree, hidden from view.
A cream-colored horse slowly traveled into the clearing. It picked up its hooves in a peculiar manner, as if it had been trained to tiptoe. A woman was riding the horse, and she looked cautiously around the clearing as they entered it.
She was young and beautiful. Her eyes were big and blue, and her hair was half up and flowed into long, golden curls. She wore a long, maroon knit coat with black leggings and very tall boots.
The woman and her horse moved covertly into the center of the clearing.
“Easy, Porridge,” said the woman, stroking the horse. “That’s a good girl, nice and slow.” She hopped down from the horse and made her way to a tree. Alex could see that some sort of paper was pinned to it and, after taking a closer look, saw it was the Wanted poster for Goldilocks that she had seen the day before.
The woman shook her head after reading it. She ripped it off the tree and crumpled it up.
“Who is that? What is she doing?” Conner whispered to his sister.
“Do I look psychic to you?” Alex whispered back at him.
Suddenly, the woman’s head jerked in their direction. Whoever she was, she had a remarkable sense of hearing. She drew a large sword from inside her coat and raised it high in the air.
Her gaze was stern and determined; she was obviously someone to be reckoned with. She stepped closer to where Alex and Conner were hiding.
A piercing wolf howl boomed through the forest. It was so loud that Alex and Conner covered their ears. The woman spun around and pointed her sword in the opposite direction of the twins.
“Porridge, get ready! We’re about to have company,” she said.
“Who?” Alex and Conner mouthed to each other.
Creeping through the trees toward them were half a dozen wolves. However, these wolves were unlike any the twins had ever seen before. They were four times the size of any normal wolf of their world. Their fur was jet-black and matted. Their eyes were red, and their snouts were wide. These wolves were ready to kill at any minute. Without a doubt, the twins had come face-to-face with the Big Bad Wolf Pack.
Alex and Conner held on to each other, shaking with fear. The woman in the maroon coat never showed a hint of panic; she pointed her sword at the largest of the wolves, standing in the middle of the pack. The wolves growled and gritted their teeth toward her.
“Hello, Malumclaw,” the woman said.
“Hello, Goldilocks,” Malumclaw growled.
The twins were both in silent hysterics.
“Goldilocks! That’s Goldilocks!” Alex mouthed to Conner.
“The wolf talks! It talks!” he mouthed back to her.
“I’m surprised you’re not chained down in some Red Riding Hood Kingdom jail cell yet,” Malumclaw said to Goldilocks.
“I’m surprised you haven’t been turned into a rug for a child’s nursery yet,” Goldilocks said. “What brings you to this part of the forest? There isn’t an innocent village for your pack to torment for miles.”
Goldilocks never lowered her sword. The other wolves in Malumclaw’s pack slowly surrounded her and Porridge.
“My pack is hungry. We’ve stopped for an afternoon snack,” the wolf said.
“Have you really come to eat me?” Goldilocks said. “I thought you’d have learned your lesson by now. I bite back.” She gripped her sword even tighter.
Malumclaw laughed.
“The wolf can laugh! It can laugh!” Conner mouthed to Alex.
“You are far too small a portion,” Malumclaw told her with an evil, wolfish grin. “Your horse, however, has plenty to go around!”
Alex and Conner had never seen a horse look as frightened as Porridge did. Had she not been so light-colored, they would have sworn she had gone pale.
“If you so much as scratch her, I will wear you as a coat, do you understand me?” Goldilocks warned him.
“All people do in this world is eat one another!” Conner whispered to Alex and, as soon as he did, he knew he shouldn’t have.
A wolf turned in the twins’ direction. “Malumclaw, I think I just heard something,” it growled.
Alex covered her mouth so as not to scream.
The wolf began sniffing vigorously in the air. “I smell two children! One boy and one girl.”
Goldilocks seemed as surprised as the rest of the wolves to learn this. So that was who she had heard behind her moments before.
The twins could hear their own heartbeats. What was going to happen next? Was Goldilocks going to rat them out to save her horse? Had they just narrowly escaped being devoured by a witch only to be eaten by a pack of overgrown wolves?
“I’m afraid you just missed them!” Goldilocks said. “I frightened them away just like I frightened you the last time our paths crossed.”
“Then horse it is!” Malumclaw declared.
All the wolves howled together; it was deafening. They began circling Goldilocks and Porridge, getting closer and closer. The wolves snapped at them with their enormous jaws, and Goldilocks swung her sword at them.
One wolf tried to pounce on Porridge, but the horse kicked him away with her hind legs. Another wolf tried to bite Goldilocks, but she struck him with her sword, drawing blood, and he whimpered away.
Goldilocks was the best swordswoman the twins had ever seen. Anytime one of the wolves got so much as a claw close to her or her horse, she was quick to shield them. Porridge wasn’t so bad herself; she wasn’t shy about kicking away any wolf that was too close for comfort.
A wolf leaped and sank his claws into Porridge’s back. The horse bucked to free herself. In one quick slice, Goldilocks chopped one of the wolf ’s paws off. He limped into the forest, howling in pain.
Two wolves teamed up on Goldilocks. One leaped toward her, and she tripped over the other one. Her sword flew into the air and landed close to where the twins were hiding. Goldilocks was on the ground, unarmed.
The wolves were closing in on her and the horse, going in for the kill.
“Catch!” Conner yelled, and tossed the sword straight to her. Goldilocks swung it hard at the wolves closing in on her, leaving large gashes in their muzzles.
“Retreat!” Malumclaw ordered his pack. “No snack is worth all of this trouble!”
The wolves stampeded into the forest, growling and howling in anger, letting the rest of the forest know they were on their way.
“Until we meet again, Goldilocks!” Malumclaw called out, as he disappeared into the trees with the rest of the wolves.
Goldilocks got to her feet and put
her sword away. She was out of breath and, now that the enemy had left, much more vulnerable than she had shown in combat. She petted Porridge’s nose and dabbed the horse’s wounds with the fabric of her coat.
“Good girl, Porridge,” Goldilocks said.
She turned and faced the fallen tree Alex and Conner were hiding behind.
“You can come out now,” Goldilocks said.
The twins were hesitant at first. Then Conner popped up and exclaimed, “That was awesome!”
“Conner!” Alex said, popping up beside him.
“That was one heck of a fight!” Conner continued. “You know, at first I really thought they had you! I never expected a girl and her horse could be any match for six hungry wolves, but you impressed me! Where did you learn to fight like that?”
Goldilocks was not amused by his enthusiasm. “When you’ve been on the run as long as I have, you pick up a few tricks here and there.” She turned around and remounted her horse with a jump.
“So, is it really you?” Alex asked. “Are you really Goldilocks? The woman wanted dead or alive for all her crimes?”
“Don’t believe everything you read,” she said sternly, and then pulled on Porridge’s reins and galloped away. But she only traveled a few feet before she steered Porridge back to the twins.
“Thank you for your assistance,” Goldilocks said.
Conner nodded.
“Here, take this. In case you need it.” Goldilocks reached into the side of her boot and pulled out a silver dagger. She tossed it on the ground.
“Now get as far away from here as possible; those wolves will be back sooner than you expect.” And with that said, Goldilocks and Porridge galloped off into the forest.
Alex and Conner stood motionless watching her ride off out of sight.
“That was amazing!” Conner said. He retrieved the dagger from the ground and put it inside their satchel. “As terrifying as that was, it was kind of nice to see another human for a change.”
“We’d better get out of here,” Alex said. “And this time we aren’t stopping until we know we’re out of the Dwarf Forests!”