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The Gingerbread House

by Jenny Hart

The air has only just begun to smell of autumn as I head for Gingerbread Cottage, where I am to house sit two cats for the winter. I have packed warm clothes and antihistamines, and the emailed instructions are both simple and strange. Feed the cats and clean up after them and yourself. But don’t let them out, no matter how much they ask.

It’s easy work and easy money. It’s also a chance to hide from my sins, and those who would hold me accountable for them.

Gingerbread Cottage is just over a mile from the nearest bus stop. I walk briskly beside high hedges, all prickle green and berry red, that border empty fields and, later, thin forest. A bicycle lies rusting in the shallow ditch that runs alongside the path, its front wheel bent. Beyond it, I see a scarf caught in the brambles, its colours muted by a summer in the sun. A little further ahead, at a fork in the road, someone has abandoned their newspaper delivery. The papers are a faded, stained beige, made a solid log by the rain. There is a dead rabbit in the middle of the road, its insides open like a book. I am careful to step around it. I don’t want to leave a bloody trail.

When I reach the open gate and see Gingerbread Cottage for the first time, I think of the kind of picture that a young child would draw. Two square windows hang evenly either side of a too-big door the colour of molasses. The roof is a sharp triangle with a chimney stack that puffs curls of gruel-grey smoke into the darkening sky.

To the left is an apple tree almost as big as the house. Thinning waves of green and yellow and mud-brown leaves writhe in the capricious wind. They whisper loudly, but I can’t make out their secrets. Over ripe red apples, like fat drops of blood, burden the boughs. I walk past the tree and gag at the sweet rot of the windfalls around its roots. They look like swollen brown slugs that need to be salted.

Ms Willis, my employer, is tall and not as I had expected. She wears polka dot culottes and a lambswool sweater in baby pink and has a bow in her hair that matches her skirt. She smells of soap and honey and cinnamon. She grasps my hands and I battle the urge to recoil from cold bones fleshed in loose, freckled tissue. She squints at my discomfort through tortoiseshell glasses as thick as grief.

Inside, she offers a cup of tea and a plate of perfect gingerbread men with black raisin eyes. I reluctantly take one and chew off its head. The warm flavour lingers as she sweeps me through a brief tour. The Wi-fi password. A huge Aga that seems quite complex. A fireplace and a stack of logs, with more outside should I need them. My room up in the eaves. It’s there that I find the cats, Hans and Greta, sleeping paw to paw on the bed. Hans yawns at me, mouth pink, teeth sharp. Greta, a small ginger tabby with a white flash from forehead to belly, stretches. Each claw on each paw is extended fully as the crimson sunset kaleidoscopes off the rhinestones in her collar.

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Back in the entrance hall, Ms Willis readies to leave. She snatches up her handbag and a heavy black raincoat, and is half out of the door when she stops to look back at me. I smile, willing her to leave so I can be alone. Her mouth hangs open, red lipstick bleeding a little into the fine lines around her mouth.

“You won’t let them out, will you?” she reminds me. Then, in a whisper, “Especially not after dark?”

I reassure her that I’ll take good care of Hans and Greta; I won’t let them escape. The sun has almost set as I walk her to her car, an old-fashioned box already packed with her cases, letting the front door swing closed behind me. I watch as she flies down the drive, disappearing through the gate, the shadow of the house chasing her all the way.

But when I return, I find the door ajar. I had thought I’d heard it latch shut. Old houses often came with quirks, but Ms Willis might have warned me that the front door didn’t sit tight in its frame. I had also thought that indoor cats as slothful as those upon my bed would prefer to stay indoors, but I cannot find Hans and Greta anywhere. I serve their tenderest cuts of prime meat in a tasty jus, but they remain at large. I call their names at the front door. They do not return. As darkness falls, I order a veggie delight pizza and log into Netflix.

My phone chimes that the pizza is on its way, and then that it has arrived. There is no knock, no headlamp, no engine sounds. I open the front door to cold moonlight spilling over the garden, and the hint of a frost. I call out for the delivery-guy. Silence. I call the cats, and think I hear a meow from far over the lawns, over the hedge, in the woods. Probably having the time of their lives, I think, before messaging the pizza place to see what has happened to my delivery. They are as clueless as I am.

Hunger has me rummaging through the kitchen cupboards when at last I hear a rat-a-tat-tat at the front door.

Dinner, finally.

I see the pizza box. It’s a little bent. A little battered.

And I see him holding it out to me, nails long and sharp and black with dirt. I see her curling into his side.

I crane my neck and see the green eyes, the broad nose. The sharp teeth gleaming in a wide grin. He has a mane of wavy brown hair and is bare chested and barefooted. His trousers seem too tight at the waist and too short in the leg. He has a diamante choker at his throat.

There is blood on his mouth.

Her hair glows orange and gold in the moonlight. She is wearing a heavy black raincoat that is much too big for her, sliding from bare shoulders as she plays with a polka dot bow. Her collar matches his.

“What tasty treats you get us, New Mummy,” he purrs. “Old Mummy wouldn’t let us eat the delivery drivers.”

“She wouldn’t let us out at all,” the redhead says. “And now she’s… gone away. So you must stay.”

I try to shut the door, but they are liquid lightning, and now they are inside.

“You shouldn’t have let us out, silly Mummy. Old Mummy did warn you.”

“Don’t you like my new clothes new mummy? I got them from the delivery man.”

“We hid his nasty bike out in the gully in the forest. There was a camper, too! We hid his tent as well.”

“And his body.”

“What was left. We weren’t hungry anymore, New Mummy. So, we came home.”

“We came home for you!”

“We always find our way home.”

I push away the food they offer and press myself against the wall as they coil around me and purr. Greta drags sharp fingernails down my arm, pinching me lightly.

“We love you Mummy. Eat all of your Pizza. You feel a little bony.”