Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [71]
Now take away the keyhole to the front door and replace it with a mouth full of teeth even a shark would be proud of.
Now, while the hut squats on the ground like a broody hen, surround it with a fence made of bones.
Describe it, and it sounds comical. But view it, and it is utterly terrifying. You shouldn’t graft something that is living to something that is not. You shouldn’t have a fence made of bones, with skulls as the decorations on the fence posts. Above all, you shouldn’t have a house that exudes so much malevolence that you expect it to stand up, chase you down, and devour you. How much magic would it take to create a hut, a living thing, with giant chicken legs? What sort of demented soul would imagine it in the first place?
And then…the fence of bones. Plenty of them were human. Baba Yaga’s victims were so common she made a fence out of their bones. The eye holes of the skulls glowed red, and they all turned to look at him as the mortar circled the house.
The hut had its back to the front gate. Baba Yaga waved her hand at it. “Turn your back to the forest, your front to me,” she called out.
The hut rose up on its legs and began to spin, emitting blood-curdling shrieks as it did so. It spun around thirty-three times before settling back down, with the door facing them.
He shivered. Baba Yaga noticed. And with a casual air that was as macabre as her hut, she patted him on the head like a dog. “You just be a good lad,” she said absently, as she steered her mortar down for a landing in front of the hut. “You just be a good lad, do as you’re told, and you won’t end up in my fence.”
He shuddered again. He had to remember that he wasn’t supposed to be able to hear. He looked up at her, letting the fear in his eyes show in an exaggerated manner, and cringing. Again she patted his head, pointed to the fence and shook her head.
With a flexibility and spryness at odds with her apparent age, Baba Yaga sprang out of the mortar, leaving Sasha to follow. He clambered out, and followed her when she crooked her finger at him. “I’m calling you Ivan,” she told him, as they went around the bone fence to a stable and yard behind the hut. “All my menservants are called Ivan. It saves time, I don’t have to try remember their names.”
Sasha could only grin foolishly; as a deaf-mute, it wouldn’t matter to him what she called him. She waved him over as she flung open the stable doors, then pointed at him and into the stable. “Here’re your charges, and they haven’t had their stalls clean in a long time.” Before Sasha could look into the shadows there and make out what “they” were, she continued with mime, making shoveling motions, pointing at him, then into the stable, then making eating motions. “Muck out the stalls first, eat second.”
He nodded his understanding vigorously, until his hair flopped into his eyes and he had to push it back with both hands.
She trotted away toward her chicken-legged hut, chortling. The hut stood up and a ladder dropped down from underneath. The witch scrambled up it as nimbly as a ferret; the ladder was pulled up and the hut remained standing. But it turned so that the door was facing him.
It didn’t have eyes…but it felt as if it was staring at him.
With a shudder, he turned and went quickly into the stable.
Out of “sight” of the malevolent hut, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the stable. His nose, however, told him that the witch had not been exaggerating. It had been a long time since these stalls were last cleaned out. The smell of dung and urine was thick enough to gag a fly. Quickly, he walked across the stable to the opposite door and flung it open, and a stiff breeze blew through as if conjured, carrying the worst of the stench away.
And not everything in here was a horse. The sharp smell of predator droppings added a pungency to the overriding stink that was quite unmistakable.
He pitied the poor animals closed up in here without