Meg was making breakfast like a sleepwalker, disjointed between her home and the astonishing things she had seen and been told about. Two days must have waddled by without being noticed. The black core of the mountain and her brilliantly illuminated comic dreams of Hell’s gate, merged and collided with housework and cooking for her husband. She had seen her friends eating demon shit and had had impossible conversations in her own backyard with things that could not exist, while the sounds of owls stitched all the opposites into a semblance of calm normality.
Cluvmux groaned his way to the table, the sweet smell of bacon fat shepherding his hangover to the plate. He scratched his unshaven face and spoke through his food.
“Another long day’s rehearsal!”
Meg grunted, thinking about what her big day would be. She gazed out the window and saw ten women loitering outside. A conversation about the women being gathered came back to her, and she sidled quietly to the door, behind Cluvmux’s hunched back. The women turned toward her, Willeke Dijkstra in front with her hand on the gate. Meg put her finger to her lips, shooing the women away, in the manner of herding reluctant geese.
“Wait until he is gone and then come into the yard,” she hissed.
Twenty minutes later, Cluvmux left for another serious day’s practice. Meg waited a few minutes and then waved at Willeke to herd the women in. Their reluctance seemed embedded, and they stood in a tight group, without focus or sound. No one spoke of how she knew to come here this day or who had told them to do so, but Meg understood it must have been the work of Gef, Yellow Hat, and the other Filthlings that had been Grietje van der Elzen’s familiars.
It had never occurred to Meg that the accusations of witchcraft brought against Grietje were actually true. Slandered by the Inquisition, so many innocents had died horrible deaths. Yes, Grietje had strange and sometime unfathomable ways, and on her pyre, she did recite the names of demons, but surely that was the last tortured gush of her indomitable spirit? Meg started to allow this new, devastating notion to seep into her resolve.
Gef and his kin really had visited all these women last night, whispering through the down and straw of their pillows, keeping their voices pitched under and between all the husbands’ snores. They had recruited the women to Meg’s unveiled purpose. She looked at them again. They were dressed mostly the same, in long work dresses covered by near-white aprons, thick white material tied into caps about their heads.
All stood in lumpen anticipation of what would happen next. There was something in their drab tableau that was so opposite to her dream that it became a reflection, and she began to form words around it like building bricks, like the Gates of Hell in her vision. Or like what the Wise Women had always said about Das Kagel: that it had been a tower of words where the bricks were damp and smelled like books. There were no books inside the mountain that she had witnessed, but their ghosts and their corpses were everywhere.
She had once touched a book, never daring to open it; instead she had instinctively sniffed it to smell its meaning and nature. But the words growing about her now were her words, and they were climbing into her voice and sounding out to all those who stood dumbfounded, their mouths hanging open like fish. While Meg spoke, she held her arms out like a statue or a saint. The birds in the trees were silent and even the indifferent wind seemed to quiet.
When she finished her sermon, there was the kind of silence that sings in the ears. All the women looked at each other and then burst into a tide of enthusiasm that rang with a great hurrah, their red hands applauding. They mobbed her, putting their hands on her arms and shoulders to give proof of their solidarity, and to make sure of the reality of hers. They left her yard with eyes gleaming, happier and more powerful than they had been in years. The geese had flocked into gulls, homing toward hawks.
Meg stood silent, watching them leave, and then realized she was holding something; a small, scrunched-up yellow hat had found its way into her hand. She brought it up to her face to consult its odor, without the faintest idea of what she had just said.