text: In the year before Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed and just about everybody lost their jobs - including my daddy - we lived in an old stone house on Orchard road. It sat on about seventy acres of backyard and came dirt cheap, or so I’ve been told, because most of the land was unusable and we were a good drive from the nearest town. The bus ride to school was forty-five minutes and Jack and I were the farthest stop on the route. Our property sloped down from the house, across a stretch of lawn, then into a winding creek that used to sparkle in the sunlight. Across the creek was a tangle of brambles, and a forest of birch trees beyond that. Those brambles looked so thick and thorny that we had lived in the stone house a full year before me and my brother plucked up the courage to go through em’ and we were just boys then. Jack was nine and I was seven, so you understand it took an awful lot of thorns to dissuade us from a good game of pretend. On a day like any other, I was fetching myself a snack from the kitchen cupboard when Jack comes stomping into the room and says to me, “Benny Boy, come down to the creek. I want to show you something really cool.” “I don’t wanna,” I said. “Why not?” “There’s a snapping turtle there. Mom says it’s grumpy and it’ll bite off my toes.” This was probably true. There was an old she-snapper down there with a shell as big as a dinner plate, and she was likely to bite off whatever part of you she could manage if you got near her eggs. Jack wasn’t interested in the creek. “We won’t go in the water,” he said. “A tree blew over in the storm and we can walk across it like a bridge.” “Into the brambles?” To this day, I do not know where our parents were when we were hatching our scheme. Probably just in the other room, not too far, but for some reason they didn’t hear us. I think maybe *she* had something to do with it, maybe *she* had already hatched her plans by the time I put a Chips Ahoy cookie in my mouth. “I know a way through the brambles,” Jack assured me. “I’ll show you.” There had been a vicious lightning storm the night before and a great number of trees and powerlines had been pushed down. One of the trunks was lying across the creek, a perfect bridge. It just so happened that the tree had fallen in the right spot so that you couldn’t see it from the kitchen window. All that my mom saw, if she saw anything, were her two boys walking beside the creek. “This way. Don’t be nervous,” Jack said, and he started across the trunk with his arms stretched out like a trapeze artist. For a moment he slipped and almost fell, but he regained his balance and made the crossing. I went after him. I remember being scared that the trunk would roll and send me splashing and gulping into the creek. Ms. Snapper would surely have my toes, or worse my privates, but the trunk didn’t budge. It should have rolled, in fact the thing was so thin it should’ve broken in two when Jack stepped in the middle, but it held on. “This way,” Jack said again when we were across. He was pretending to be Peter Pan and I was the Lost Boys or Captain Hook or some other thing, it doesn’t matter. He went down on his hands and knees and crawled backwards into the brambles. “Why’re you doing that?” I asked. “You have to go backwards. Some of the thorns swing in when you go by or poke in, but if you go backwards they just hit your butt.” I giggled. “I’ll hold onto your ankle,” he said. “I know the way.” “Okay Jack.” “Are you scared?” “No,” I lied. It was not quite pitch black inside the twisting vines, but it was dark and filled with bugs, and I didn’t want to get pricked or tangled up or bit. “Don’t worry Benny Boy. If you want you can close your eyes. I know the way.” *I know the way*. I still hear him saying that sometimes, and I wonder just how he knew the way. Had the witch lured him to her hovel once before, then sent him back when he spilled the beans about the plump little brother back at home? Or was she speaking through him, sticking her hand in his back and picking at his brain with long yellow fingernails like some long-distance puppeteer? I still don’t know, I don’t want to. The thicket of vines and thorns was only twenty or thirty yards long, but it took us at least fifteen minutes to crawl through. I closed my eyes the whole way. Jack pulled me left and right, then back towards the house, then further away. I remember the thorns picking at my t-shirt and skin, hunting for my eyes, but save for a few scratches I came out just fine. “You can stand up,” Jack said, releasing my ankle. “Look around. This place is cool.” It wasn’t cool. I’d swear on a bible that those birch trees had been tall and thick with green leaves aplenty, but once we were standing in the forest with them, the white bark just made the trees look like leg bones sticking out of the earth, picked clean by vultures. There wasn’t a bit of green on any of them. Even the brambles on this side were just brown and grey. The nearest green was the backyard we had left behind, and I think that was when I realized mom wouldn’t be able to find us. If I jumped up and down screaming my head off, she might be able to hear something if the window was open. I didn’t jump and scream, not in front of my big brother. I got scared then. “Let’s go back,” I said. “No way. I want to explore. Look over here! It’s like in the Wizard of Oz!” Even at the age of seven, I thought it was weird for Jack to be into girly crap like the Wizard of Oz movie, but turning around to see where he was pointing I felt a little better about it. He had found a path, but it was a far cry from the yellow brick road. A cracked wood arrow was nailed into one of the birch trees, and that arrow pointed farther into the depths of the forest. The forest floor was just dirt and more dirt, but it was a little lighter along the path we were meant to follow, and there were small white rocks scattered along the sides to guide us. It wasn’t much of a path, and if Jack hadn’t seen the arrow I don’t think we would’ve noticed it, but he did, and I followed my big brother loyally into danger. I can’t say how long we were in those woods because time was different there. It crumpled up like a failed spelling bee before it’s flight to the garbage bin. I felt like we had been walking a half hour, we’d left the house around two in the afternoon, but before I knew it the sun was headed down and the sky was streaked orange and red. To our backs, the world had gone as dark as the bottom of the ocean. We never heard any birds flapping their wings, or squirrels running home through the trees. The night crept up on as quiet as a ghost. “Can we go back?” I said. “I’m scared.” “What are you scared of fraidy cat? This is an adventure. Like Bilbo and Gandalf, I’ll be Gandalf and -” “I don’t want to play pretend,” I said, and I remember crying a little. “There’s bones everywhere. I want to go home!” The little white rocks speckled on the path weren’t rocks after all, they were little skulls of birds and mice. There was a big one beside me that belonged to a fox or a cat. The drooping eye holes made it look sad, like the poor thing had died crying. Jack’s eyebrows met. “Fine,” he said, getting short with me. “You can go back if you’re a little chicken, but *I’m* going ahead. It’s not dark yet and I want to see what’s making the light ahead. There was indeed a flickering yellow spot of light down the path, I guessed it might be a fire behind a window, maybe one of our neighbours. When we got to the light, and discovered the witches hovel it turned out I was nearly right. The fire was coming through a hole in the shack that served for a window, but there was no glass to it. It was like a nostril. We had come to a circular stone hut with a smoking chimney. It stood blamelessly in the middle of a clearing, totally unexceptional except for the smoke coming from the chimney. It was going up from the house in lazy spirals that alternated between purple and emerald green. “Please Jack, I want to go home.” “Then go.” “Come with me,” I begged. “It’s scary.” The orange light of the fire lapped merrily against the night. By now the sky was completely black, the absurd smoke blotting out the stars and the moon. “I just want to see who lives here, and then we can go,” Jack said. “I want to ask why she lives out in the woods by herself.” I did not ask how Jack knew these things about the owner of the house, that she was alone and that she was a she. I just wanted to go home. It was the middle of summer and I was starting to shiver from the cold. The cold was pushing me inside. I think the witch knew just what buttons she needed to press to get my frightened ass up her laneway and through her front door. I followed my brother up the path, which was now lined with a solid trail of animal skeletons on both sides. Eyeless and tongueless squirrels, rabbits, foxes, and cats guided us up to the aged front door. Jack knocked three times. The dull thwack was so loud and sudden I almost wet myself. “Hello!” Jack called. “Maybe nobody’s home.” “There’s a fire going. Someone has to be home.” “But -” “Hello!” The door glided open with an obnoxious whine. There was no one standing there to have opened it, and when I saw that the door had opened itself I nearly scarpered off. I’m ashamed to say it, but I would’ve left my brother to die and hauled by ass back into the woods. I probably would’ve gotten lost and starved to death, but Jack grabbed my shoulder and pulled me inside. Once we got inside the light changed. Lively orange yellow waned into the colour of worn piano keys, then the yellow of old teeth, then white. It bounced off of mossy wet stone walls that reminded me of Skeletor’s castle. I whimpered but Jack did not let me go. The fireplace was in a room that we could not see, down the pale lit hallway and around the first corner. It seemed to me the moon must have fallen out of the sky, down the stranger’s chimney, and into her fireplace. “Hello!” said Jack. “I heard you shouting for us to come play! I’m Jack Mayfield and this is my little brother Benny Boy.” Jack was ahead of me, pulling me into the den by my hand. He was around the corner, able to see someone or something that I couldn’t. When it was my turn to enter the room, I caught a face full of purple and green smoke and I breathed in a cloud of the stuff. It made the room double, then triple before my eyes, and I felt my thoughts getting hazy. “Hey Jack,” I said. My voice sounded like Darth Vader, like I was in slow motion. I could make out the fuzzy shape of our host across the room but no more. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t feel so good.” “Nonsense,” the witch said, with a voice like nails on a gravestone. “You’ll come sit with me. Jack Mayfield, Benny Boy, I have waited up all night for you and it would be terribly rude to leave so early.” “A-all night?” I asked, but I was ignored. I heard Jack say, “Yes.” He was ahead of me somewhere in the fog but the stuff was so thick that I couldn’t even see his outline. “Rude,” he said “Don’t want to be rude.” The witch cackled. It sounded like glass breaking. “Besides,” she said. “It’s too dark for you to go now. You would wander and wander until the sun came up. There are dreadful monsters in these woods, you could count yourself lucky if a bear got you. Please come have a seat with me.” My vision was settling. The witch sat in a white dining chair made of animal bones. What might have been glue or wax was frozen in dribs and globs where it had dried holding the smaller bones together. She twirled a hand with skin so pale that it was a bit green, and two plastic blue chairs appeared out of thin air. I recognized them. I sat in an identical chair from Monday to Friday, nine in the morning ‘til three in the afternoon. “Sit,” she said, not unkindly. Jack hopped into his chair, pleased as punch, but I took a little longer getting into mine. Some part of me, the part that the purple clouds had not choked out, was screaming for me not to sit, to pull Jack and run in any direction, as long as it was not here. “What’s wrong Benny Boy?” she asked. “I... I don’t feel so good.” “Have a seat,” she said, “You’ll feel better. Your journey has been long and your faces are longer still.” What could I do? I was seven years old, and had been conditioned every day of my life to obey the command of grown-ups. I sat. I half expected the chair to turn into spiders but it stayed a chair. I started to feel better too, and I was just about to tell her so, when I got my first real look at her face. Her lips were peelings of ash and dead bark. Her skin was covered in warts, and the outline of a worm with a hundred legs crawled below the skin of her face. Her eyes were black. She was the sort of creature who knows what’s really waiting in the closet and underneath your bed when the lights go out. The worm under her face moved restlessly. It *squirmed*. I’ve had my share of visits to the psychologist since the last adventure with Jack, and that bug squirming under her face is the part I still don’t tell anybody. I can barely stand to think about it. She placed her hands on her knees and leaned forward in a poor impression of a kindergarten teacher. “Who likes games?” she asked, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I do!” Jack shouted, and both of his hands shot up in the air. I rose a tentative hand. I imagine I wore a face like I was about to hurl because that’s what I felt like doing. The clenching pain was in my head though, not my belly. “I know the best game,” she said. “It is called the crystal ball game. You have never had more fun in your lives.” “How do we play?” Jack was rocking in his chair, his eyes bulging in excitement. The witch snapped her fingers and a crystal ball filled the space between us. It popped into existence without a sound, out of nowhere. It was huge, as big around as a dinner table, and filled with thick pink and purple swirling clouds. She began to move her hands in swooping circles in the air above the ball, and the clouds inside of it gathered to follow her movements. “The crystal ball game goes like this,” she whispered. The fire was dying behind her, but the orb was giving off its own pink waving light, like the shimmering reflection of a pool of water. “You may ask the ball for anything, or to know anything, and then I will ask the crystal ball if it wants to give that thing to you. It will say yes or no. If it says yes, it will also name a price, and if you drop the payment onto the ball, you will have whatever you ask for.” “What if it says no?” Jack asked. “Then, my sweet boy, you have gotten greedy. If the ball says ‘no’ you have asked for too much or too great a thing, and must try again.” “I don’t have any money,” I mumbled. The witch laughed again. “It will not ask you for money, don’t worry. Would you like to go first Benny Boy?” “My name is Benjamin,” I said. “Only Jack calls me Benny Boy.” “I like your real name much better. It’s a big boy name. Would you like to go first Benjamin?” I was about to say yes, but Jack shouted beside me, “I wanna go first!” The witch swapped her focus like a shark turning in the water at the scent of blood. “What would you like to ask for?” I thought Jack was going to ask for a robot, one that he could go on adventures with that wouldn’t whine about wanting to go home early, but Jack said, “I wish mom and dad didn’t fight anymore.” I remember thinking that was a weird thing to ask for. I had never seen mom and dad fighting. Of course, there was a lot seven-year-old me didn’t notice that nine-year old Jack had picked up on, but there was even more we had both missed. Bruises hidden behind makeup, nights that dad spent working and not coming home, mom slipping out of the house to god knows where when everyone else was fast asleep. “Let me ask the ball,” the witch said. She leaned over the crystal ball until her lips were an inch away from the glass, and then she whispered so quietly that I couldn’t hear what she was saying. “Did it work?” Jack asked. “Hush child,” she snapped. A little bit of warmth had gone out of her voice. “Don’t spoil the game. I am listening.” The worm in her face twitched greedily, and moved from under her check to a spot above her ear that was covered with hair. I thought I could hear it making a clicking sound, but if it had mouth parts I could not see them. “I hear it,” she said after a moment. “Listen. You will too.” At first I didn’t hear anything, but when I went totally silent, going as far as to hold my breath, I did hear something. A deep old voice, the voice of a mountain, was thrumming from inside of the crystal ball. I had no idea what it was saying, but it rose and fell in what must have been words of some other language, because when it stopped the witch was beaming. “It can be done,” she said. “Are you ready to hear the payment?” I wasn’t, not anymore. The smoke in my brain had been mostly cleared out, enough that I could see we were in deep trouble. I wanted to run, but my legs would not move. I couldn’t even shift in my chair. “I’m ready,” Jack said, but for the first time he sounded a bit scared too. “It will cost you one ear,” and to my eternal horror she pulled a black carving knife from behind her back. The blade was curved and at least a foot long. The edges were worn over with rust. “An ear?” said Jack. “An ear, either one. Take this knife, and place your ear on the crystal.” Jack made to lean forward onto the ball, but the witch screeched, “No! Stupid boy, cut it off. I would do it for you, but that’s one of the rules of the game. *You* have to give the ear.” Jack frowned, as if she were asking him to solve a difficult math problem. “Will it work?” But that was a stupid question. All three of us, somehow, knew it would work. That was part of the game too. If the witch wanted his ear she could’ve just taken it off at her leisure, she was thin but she was much taller than Jack, and she had held the knife. No. She wanted, for some reason, to please whatever lived inside of the crystal, whatever was making those pink clouds and speaking in a language I had never heard before or since. The thing in the crystal wanted Jack’s ear, and was willing to perform what magic it needed to in order to get his flesh. “It will work,” she said. “Forever?” “Forever. There will be no more fighting. There might be disagreements, over what to eat for dinner or what movie to watch, but the fighting will cease.” Then he asked, “Do you have a band aid?” She waved her hand, a blue box appeared with Band-Aid printed on the front in bold red letters. It shone like the paint was still wet, like the box was bleeding. “Don’t do it Jack,” I mumbled. Without looking at me, the witch snapped her fingers and my teeth mashed together so hard it doubled my headache. When I next tried to speak, I couldn’t open my mouth. There was cement holding my jaw together. Jack made the cut. There was no magic in the blade to make the job quicker or slower, and there was no magic in the smoke wafting in the room to dull the pain. He screamed, and I think he would have given up, but maybe the demon behind the pink clouds was forcing him onwards. Maybe he had seen a fight between mom and dad bad enough to keep him cutting. He held it out in his right hand while his left clamped over the gaping wound on his head. The ear was almost unrecognizable. Jack was no surgeon and the pathetic flap was drowning in a pool of his blood. The concrete in my jaw let go. “Let me bandage him,” I said, and the witch handed me the box. I opened it, expecting snakes or centipedes to leap out and bite me, but there were only band aids. I applied one to Jack and it soaked at once, rendered completely useless. Eventually I had stuck every single bandage to him. The blood was still trickling down but he wasn’t going to bleed out. At least I didn’t think so, remember I was seven. “The ear Jack,” the witch whispered, and now all of the motherly layers she had applied to her voice were stripped away. “Place it on the ball. Do not let your fingers touch the glass. When the ear touched the ball, the pink clouds sped up, circling the orb faster and faster like they were in a blender, and soon it was happening so fast that there was no telling one cloud from another. The crystal ball was solid pink. The crystal ball began to bubble around the ear, the glass itself rising and falling as if it were made of nothing but boiling water, and then instead of bursting and settling back into the sphere, one of the bubbles just kept growing. It lengthened into a glass tentacle, and flopped over my brother’s ear. Then another glass tentacle fell onto the ear, and another. Then they sank. Jack’s ear was being pulled into the glass, to be eaten by whatever lived in there. After a few seconds the ear was gone, and the crystal ball was the same smooth orb as before. The spiraling clouds slowed, then stopped. “It is done,” the witch breathed. Jack was whimpering, but when the witch turned to me, the world around us seemed to disappear. “Benjamin,” she said. “You’re next, what is it that you want? More than anything?” I told her, “I want to go home.” The witch smiled. \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* When we appeared in front of my parents, popped into their living room out of thin air - blood seeping from my brother’s head - the light was pouring in through the front window. We had been gone for less than three hours, and the sun was just starting to tip towards the horizon. Jack never told anyone what really happened to him that day. He told my parents, then the doctor, then everyone he ever met, that his ear got snagged by the thorns. I think as the years passed by he started to believe that’s what really happened. My parents stopped fighting too, for what it’s worth. They’re still together, ninety years old, and the happiest couple I know. In my secret heart, I think the price Jack paid was worth it. Therapy has helped me. It feels good to talk about what happened to Jack and I, even if I have to start every session with *I know this didn’t really happen* and end with *Like I said, I know it didn’t happen*. The sessions always end with the therapist asking what I gave up in the dream in exchange for a safe trip home, and I have to look them dead in the face and tell ‘em, because there’s no use lying about a story that didn’t happen. They know what I’m going to tell them, the answer is obvious, but they ask anyways. If I want to keep on going, I have to tell myself sometimes that Jack’s ear really did get pulled off in those brambles. I know it’s not true, and that somewhere in the birch forest, a witch is waiting for Hansel and Gretel or Jack and Ben to come wandering by. I think Jack got off easy because he got to keep one ear. He can hear you just fine as long as he’s tilting his head at you when you talk, or you’re on the side with the remaining ear. I got it worse. The thing in the crystal wanted *both* of my eyes.