Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga

by Christina Henry, Lindy Ryan

Genres: Fantasy Anthologies & Collections; Anthologies; Horror

Synopsis

A collection of new and exclusive short stories inspired by the Baba Yaga. Featuring Gwendolyn Kiste, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Mercedes M. Yardley, Monique Snyman, Donna Lynch, Lisa Quigley, and R. J. Joseph, with an introduction by Christina Henry.

Deep in the dark forest, in a cottage that spins on birds' legs behind a fence topped with human skulls, lives the Baba Yaga. A guardian of the water of life, she lives with her sisters and takes to the skies in a giant mortar and pestle, creating tempests as she goes. Those who come across the Baba Baga may find help, or hinderance, or horror. She is wild, she is woman, she is witch— and these are her tales.

Edited by Lindy Ryan, this collection brings together some of today' s leading voices of women-in-horror as they pay tribute to the Baba Yaga, and go Into the Forest.

"Perfect for horror fans who can't get enough of folklore and fairy-tale retellings that veer in unexpected directions." — Booklist Starred Review

 

"Fans of folklore retellings will find plenty to enjoy." — Publishers Weekly

 

"The stories in Into the Forest collect the guts and bones of some of the world' s oldest witch tales and refashion them into something new, beautiful, and gruesome." — Foreword Reviews

 

"A powerful literary reflection... Outstanding in its diversity and interpretations, Into the Forest is very highly recommended not just for horror collections, but for libraries strong in women's literature, as well as for reader's book groups who would study the legend and realities of the Baba Yaga folktale as it journeys into the heart and soul of women's experiences and psychology." — Midwest Book Review

 

 

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Release date: November 8, 2022

Publisher: Black Spot Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

FOREWORD

by Christina Henry

Baba Yaga is a character who almost needs no introduction. The broad strokes of her are there, embedded in our collective memory—the long-nosed crone with her walking house and iron teeth and penchant for cannibalism. We know her comic forms of locomotion—her house has chicken feet; her flight is powered by a mortar pushed along by a sweeping broom. This whimsy should make her more accessible and less opaque, yet it somehow increases her menace, makes Baba Yaga’s cruelty sting more.

In the traditional stories, Baba Yaga is always ugly, always old. She has no need of the male gaze, nor the beauty standards that come with it. This is no Snow White’s stepmother, admiring her beauty in the mirror. Her ugliness is, too, not necessarily a descriptor for the personality within. In folktales, being physically unattractive is often a shorthand for villainy—the beautiful are virtuous, and the ugly are not. While Baba Yaga is rarely virtuous in the traditional sense, she is often fair and sometimes even kind, though these qualities are not easy to predict.

She lives on the borders of places, in the margins far from a safe and civilized society. Her house will appear at the edge of a wood, or sometimes deep in a forest but on the thin line between kingdoms. Sometimes it is on a seashore, where the safety of land becomes the uncertainty of the ocean. She is a wild thing, tied to the earth. She can be a friendly hand to a passerby or a monstrous one—a snake that can choose to strike or turn its fanged head away in mercy or indifference.

Even her name, Baba Yaga, is a reflection of the uncertainty of her identity, of her core character. Baba is, depending on the Eastern Slavic language and the time period it is spoken, either “grandmother” or “old woman” or “fortune teller” or “midwife” or perhaps “foolish woman” (though only a true fool would think Baba Yaga foolish).

Yaga is a term of even more mysterious provenance. According to Andreas Johns, author of Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale, the word Yaga might be sourced from the Serbo-Croatian jeza (“horror,” “shudder,” or “chill”) or perhaps from the Polish jędza (“witch,” “evil woman,” or “fury”). It might be, according to Sibelan Forrester’s essay Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East, “that yaga originally meant ‘horrible,’ ‘horrifying’… if Baba Yaga originally played a role in the secret corpus of myths or initiation rituals, a taboo might have discouraged people from saying her name in other contexts.” The scholarly speculation on the source and meaning of Baba Yaga’s name is vast and deep, probing the roots of languages that have been traditionally tied to her stories, searching for one clear and defined answer. But, ambiguity remains. Her name might mean nothing, and it might mean everything. Baba Yaga’s name remains as shrouded in mystery as her true nature.

The vast body of folktales around Baba Yaga reflects these many natures. Baba Yaga isn’t always, strictly speaking, the same woman from story to story. She is not always even one woman. Sometimes she is three sisters, each more crafty and cruel than the last. Sometimes she is a single benevolent wise woman, assisting fair maidens and lost princes. Sometimes she is a trickster, offering weary travelers comfort while waiting for her victims to fall asleep before murdering them. Sometimes she is both mother and daughter, crone and maiden in the same tale. She often longs for the sustenance of “Russian blood,” which she could sniff out even if she were blind. She frequently asks the rather loaded question, “Are you doing a deed, or are you fleeing a deed?”

In one story, a nameless lovely maiden is pressed into Baba Yaga’s servitude by her cruel stepmother. Baba Yaga assigns the maiden several tasks and leaves the chicken-stilt house. Several friendly mice offer the maiden help, and because she is a good and kind girl, she listens to them and completes her tasks. Baba Yaga showers the girl with riches, for Baba Yaga rewards those who do their duty, and eventually, the girl makes her way home to her sour-faced stepmother. However, upon seeing such wealth, the stepmother greedily sends her own daughter to Baba Yaga, expecting the same end. Of course, since blood daughters of stepmothers are often as foolish and cruel as their parents (see Cinderella, which coincidentally may or may not also feature helpful mice), this particular maiden screams and beats the mice that try to assist her. The mice, now dead, cannot help her complete the difficult tasks assigned. She does not perform as Baba Yaga expects.

When Baba Yaga returns, she discovers the girl has not done her duty. There is no opportunity for pleading and crying on the part of the maiden, no arguments before the court. Baba Yaga immediately breaks this unfortunate into pieces and puts the girl’s bones in a box. This is not a woman to be trifled with.

She is not always cruel, though—perhaps we might call her capricious. In the tale of Finist, the bright falcon, and the maiden who loves him, Baba Yaga appears three times in the form of three progressively older sisters. Rather than hinder the maid on her quest to find her beloved, the sisters inexplicably assist her, providing precious gifts to aid her and ask for nothing in return.

In her trinity form, Baba Yaga functions not as the terrifying antagonist of the tale (that is left to the maiden’s rival for Finist’s affections) but rather as the kindly wise woman of the wood bestowing favors upon the good-hearted. The less optimistic among us wonder, though, if Baba Yaga would not demand some price had the maiden failed in her quest and wandered in the witch’s path again. Baba Yaga will give presents when it suits her. But it also suits her to punish the foolish and the failed, to carve girls into pieces small enough to fit into a box.

Baba Yaga’s status as a type rather than a fixed character allows both the reader and the teller to interpret her freely, to make her benignant or malignant as needed. She has served the purpose of storytellers throughout lands and cultures for more than two hundred years. Her story is told and told again, as she is interpreted as a cruel hag or benevolent old woman. But certain emblems are always there—the flying mortar, the iron teeth, that funny little house with chicken feet. No matter what she is or who is telling her, she always fascinates.

LAST TOUR INTO THE HUNGERING MOONLIGHT

BY GWENDOLYN KISTE

Greetings, and welcome to our perfect little neighborhood! We’re so very happy to have you here. You’ll be a lovely addition to our community.

Follow us now, and please come see our beautiful homes. Matching shutters, matching cars, matching families at neatly-set dinner tables. Everything’s absolutely flawless, don’t you think?

(Pay no attention to the clogged gutters or the cracks in the foundation or the mortgage bills piling up in the kitchen corner. This tour should have a little fantasy, shouldn’t it?)

One home after another, we want to show them all to you. Our vaulted ceilings, our vaulted lives. This is our little pocket of paradise, you might say. After all, we have everything we could ever want. Our gleaming white walls as plain and straightforward as each new day in our lives. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, nothing calling to us from just beyond the property line.

Where are you, my girls? And who’s the new face among you?

Please keep up now. We’ve got one last place to show you. At the end of the cul-de-sac, past all the pretty little houses and the pretty little families locked up within, there’s a final sight you should see. It’s easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for. And why would you know? You’re new here, the same way we were all new once.

Look there among the dense patch of pine trees, and you’ll spot it. A dirt path, the kind that could be no more than an access road. And as it turns out, it does access something. Or someone.

We never say her name, but that’s because we don’t have to. We could recognize her in an instant, even though we’ve never seen her up close. She’s always with us, a whisper on the wind, a shadow passing over our eyes when we’re looking away. Something so near it makes the hairs on the backs of our necks stand on end.

(They say her house in the deep, lonely woods is propped up on chicken legs and filled with a thousand bones. Late at night, we sometimes lie awake and wonder if those bones make her home stronger than ours. We also wonder if maybe we should find some bones of our own.)

Tucked there in the gloomy forest, she’s our unlikely den mother, the creature of the green, the enchantress you’ll never tame. And why would you want to tame her anyhow? She’s better wild.

(Everything’s better when it’s left to run wild.)

It’s getting dark now, so we should get a move on. But this isn’t the last time you’ll come here, is it? You might settle in for a while, unpacking all your porcelain and linens, and pretend you don’t care about this secret place. But it will needle you, just like it needles us.

When you go jogging in the evening or take the stroller out at noon, you might want to creep a little closer to the path. Just for a moment, just to get a better look. That’s when you’ll see how terribly overgrown it is, all clotted with brambles and darkness. It doesn’t look very welcoming. It doesn’t look like home.

(Yet it feels like home, doesn’t it? Somewhere you thought you’d dreamed up, somewhere you’d always longed for.)

So now that you’re part of our neighborhood, the important thing to remember is to never take that path. If you’re smart, you won’t even stand at the mouth of it, the heady scent of pine and promise filling your lungs. You especially won’t stare down its winding turns into the eager darkness looming there.

In fact, it’s best to pretend the path doesn’t exist at all. Please won’t you forget we mentioned it to you? That would be safer for you. And for us.

Where are you, my girls? What are you waiting for?

We tell ourselves we’re satisfied here. Our hands aching and raw, we scrub the filthy dishes and spritz Windex on all the windows, and pick out a new Whirlpool refrigerator as all the dreams we’ve surrendered whirlpool down the drain.

Still, not every evening is quite so bad. Sometimes, there’s a strange shift within us. That’s when we find ourselves restless at midnight, standing in murky hallways, a mortar and pestle gripped tightly in our hands. We didn’t even know we owned a mortar and pestle, yet here we are, like the witches of yore, conjuring magic when we don’t mean to.

We wander to our front windows and stare up at the dark clouds. Our breath twists in our chests as a shadow passes over the moon, and we know she’s so near to us. She can emerge from the forest anytime she wants. Only she rarely does. That’s because she wants us to come to her. She’ll answer any question we ask, fulfill any wish we desire. Of course, it might come at a price. But then again, what doesn’t have a price?

What are you willing to surrender, my darlings? What parts of yourselves are you eager to slough off like thin skin?

Despite ourselves, she sees us for what we are. Obscure power tingling in our fingertips, rage boiling in our bellies. All the things we could have been. All the things denied to us. This fear we share, these tired bodies the world battles over. Our bodies, even though we’re told they don’t belong to us at all. They belong to men with gavels, men in suits, men without souls. Without decency, either. The kind of men who would mock us like we’re silly schoolgirls, men who would hold us down on a bed and guffaw while we thrash and scream and cry.

Men that aren’t so different from the ones sitting across from us at the breakfast table each morning. Faces that we used to know. Faces that are no more than strangers to us now.

Come to me, my darlings. Come to me and be free.

But we’ve got to make the best of things. We’ve got to keep pretending not to hear her. On warm summer days, we sit together in sun rooms and sip fresh iced tea and smile at each other for hours, the corners of our mouths twitching from the weight of our make-believe mirth. We compliment each other’s decorating schemes and act like we honestly give a fuck about things like crown molding and matching dinnerware and how to choose the best duvet.

At last, when the sun is dipping in the sky, and none of us can stomach the charade any longer, we each walk home alone, the neighborhood deteriorating around us. Our front steps cracking in two, the frosted sconces on our porch lights shattered to dust. This once-perfect neighborhood, turning to cinders at our feet.

We’ll make the best of things, though, we’ll make the best of it, we will, we will, we will.

Yet all day and all night, we find our gazes set on that dirt road that extends beyond the cul-de-sac and into the hungry trees.

The men do their best to distract us. They coax us back to them, tying the apron strings so tight we can’t catch our breath. We tell ourselves we should stay. But the world’s crumbling around us, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Not unless we run.

Not unless we take the path that’s calling to us.

We could wait until midnight. Listen for the screech owl serenading the moon as we slip out the back door and disappear into the dark toward the verboten path.

Or we could do it in broad daylight. In front of the passersby and the postal workers diligently delivering little brown boxes from Amazon. Everything so nice and normal until we do the one thing we know isn’t allowed—make a choice of our own.

Or we could be polite about it. Fix a nice dinner first. Maybe a pot roast or a honey-baked ham. Sit down together as a family for once. Do the dishes afterward, since nobody else will help us. Fold the laundry. Make sure the children have done their homework. Check all their math problems. Check all their spelling, too. It’s potato without the ‘e’ at the end, darling. Please remember.

But even as we do our best impression of ourselves, the men sense it in us, they sense our resolve, and they’re suddenly hovering nearer.

“You’ll stay right here,” they whisper, their eyes darker than every sin they project on us. “You’re ours.”

But this time, we can’t help but laugh because they’re wrong. After all, these bodies do belong to us, and we’ll do with them what we please.

For so long, we were told we needed to be perfect. But all we ever really needed was to be wild.

Still smiling, we turn away and march out our front doors toward the end of the cul-de-sac. The path is open to us now. The brambles have cleared, and there’s a faint light ahead in the woods, ready to guide us.

Somewhere back in the lonely houses, strangers are calling our names. They screech and weep and beg and bargain, but that’s no matter now. That’s all in the past, and we have no need for it. Our hands entwined, we drift down the dirt path, the brambles and thorns closing in behind us like thick blood filling a wound.

Welcome, my girls. I’ve been waiting a long time.

Together, we’ll rush into her arms, the moon slicing through the sky, and we’ll dance on a floor of a thousand bones. And with our wild hearts gleaming and new, the forest will sing dirges around us, and our dreams will burn so bright and furious they’ll sear everything and everyone we’ve ever known to ash.