At noon the same day, Gracie descends the attic stairs. Her legs are sore and the stairway is steep and her irons are heavy, so it’s slowgoing.
She coughs and sneezes, too. The attic was indeed a plague of dust, and as she worked, much of it found her nose and throat and lungs.
But Gracie would like to stay in the attic forever, because she knows what the witch has planned for her now.
The witch is waiting for her, sitting on the edge of the loveseat, the one with the wooden legs that Gracie had polished for an hour only a few mornings ago. She’s smiling a tiny, cruel sort of smile.
“All done?” the witch says.
Gracie doesn’t answer her. She just stands there, her wrists bound together in front of her, a few dirty brown rags dangling from one hand that is just as dirty.
“Go to the kitchen, then,” the witch says. She keeps her eyes cast downward as she brushes lint from her lap. “I’m having trouble with the oven.”
Gracie shuffles past the witch, her irons clanking and the wet rags in her hand slapping against her thigh. The witch grabs her wrist to stop her.
“Take the long matches out from the cupboard,” the witch says, and her voice doesn’t tinkle like it sometimes does. Instead it crackles like a fire. It doesn’t bubble like a cool stream. It sizzles like a juicy slice of meat dropped into a hot frying pan.
The witch lets go of Gracie’s wrist and stands up. She follows Gracie down the main staircase and into the kitchen.
The witch leans on the counter as Gracie pulls the box of long matches from the cupboard, eyeing her carefully.
“Do you know how to light it?” the witch says, a little too eagerly. “Do you know where the pilot light is?”
Gracie pulls a single long match from the box and closes the box again.
The witch tugs on the heavy oven door. It creaks and groans as it falls open.
“It’s in the back of the oven,” the witch says. “You’ll have to lean all the way in.”
This is it, we think.
Don’t lean in, Hansen thinks. She’s lying. The pilot is lit.
Gracie strikes the match against the box and reaches her rope-bound arms along the wall of the oven, straining and stretching to get her hands into the depths of the huge contraption while staying steady on her feet.
“No,” the witch snarls. “You’ll never reach it like that. Climb inside.”
Gracie grunts and stretches farther. “I can reach it,” she says.
“Just climb in!”
Gracie sighs and stands. “I don’t know what you mean,” she says. “And I can’t find the pilot light anyway.”
“It’s right there!” the witch snaps. “You have to climb in.”
“Show me,” Gracie says.
Hansen laughs.
Shh, Gracie says, barely able to hold in her own laughter.
The witch narrows her eyes at Gracie.
We hate her.
The witch brings up her fist, tight and hot, and it begins to glow.
It’s evil magic, we think.
She shines her magic light toward the back of the dark oven.
“I can’t see it,” Gracie says. “It’s in the back?”
The witch ducks her head and leans into the oven, reaching her glowing hand toward the far corner. “It’s right there,” she says, frustrated.
“Oh,” Gracie says. She quietly moves around behind the witch.
Do it, thinks Hansen. Do it now.
Gracie leans down. She takes a step back and charges, shoulder down, into the witch’s backside.
The witch loses her footing and falls face-first into the oven.
“What are you doing?!” she shrieks. Her voice is now a fiery rage that seems to tear at her throat as she pushes it through, and it echoes off the oven’s steel walls.
We’re laughing now, both of us. We’re laughing loudly and madly.
Gracie reaches her bound hands to the door and shoves it up, sending the witch deeper into the huge oven. She slams the door closed and throws the lock.
How hot does it go? Hansen thinks.
Gracie scans the control panel and turns the oven knob as high as it will go—550 degrees Fahrenheit. Then she sees the “broil” setting, and turns the knob there.
She grins then, and Hansen grins in his cage in the basement, and she turns the knob to “clean.”
The witch bangs on the walls of the oven as it begins to heat up. “Let me out of here!” she screams.
It’s her truest voice, her most vile voice. It’s the voice of a demon. It’s the voice of the devil himself.
The witch slams her body into the oven’s door. Her voice is more like a growl now, like the violent rage of a wild animal, of a monster.
The oven shakes. The kitchen shakes. The witch is trying to break through the oven door.
Don’t let her out! Hansen screams through our minds.
Gracie pushes her body against the door. With all her strength she holds the door closed, the witch’s screams piercing Gracie’s ears till they’ve nearly deafened her.
She can feel the heat pressing through the door, and the witch’s screams grow still louder. The kitchen is filling with smoke and the acrid smell of the broiling witch.
“Is it almost done?!” Gracie screams over the din.
“Yes!” Hansen screams back from his cage in the basement. He’s on his feet now, his hands gripping the bars of his cage in anticipation. “Hold on a little longer!”
The screams begin to waver and dry, like they’re turning to dust, turning to ash. They soften. They begin to plead. They are no longer screams.
Instead, Gracie hears the woman’s false voice—the one she used to welcome Hansen and Gracie into her house, with apple on her breath and love in her arms.