The woman’s name wasn’t Broomhilda or Griselda or Minerva. She never revealed her real name to strangers, but a long time ago, they used to call her the Collector because she collected moths in jars and kept them in her room. She still thought of herself that way when she was alone: a Collector of precious things, of transient beauty. Over the years, the Collector had become almost entirely self-sufficient. She’d learned to hunt and garden and make her own clothes. She visited town rarely——once every few months for tools, salt, soap, and all the bird feed she could buy. The pet-store teller had once asked her what she did with all that feed, but the Collector, now eighty years old, pretended not to hear. Bird feed is for birds, she’d wanted to say. She started her day in the attic of her house, which stood alone in the center of the forest. It used to be a one-room cabin, abandoned and full of muck, but with the help of her magic, she’d conjured a castle, just like the castles she’d always dreamed of when she was a girl. She ran a wet sponge across the planks. Using a brush she’d made from pine needles, she scrubbed clean the blotches of white that looked like spilled paint. While she waited for the floors to dry, she went downstairs to examine the cages she’d piled into a spare room. She’d constructed them by attaching twigs and vine to wooden circles sawed from the trunks of trees. Though the cages were empty now, it wouldn’t be long before new birds arrived to fill them. They always came: sad, desperate, selfish, careless beauties destined to transform. The Collector knew that only powerless witches set traps, working tirelessly to ensnare their prey. A witch adroit like herself drew them to her through stillness and patience, possessing what they wanted most——safety, security, inertia——and allowing them to arrive. She found a cage with a branch snapped in the middle and lifted it from the stack. As she worked on the cage, memories from her first catch materialized: A girl of fourteen, cropped red hair, hazel eyes, lost in the forest, crying when the Collector found her; they were always crying. She hadn’t planned on catching a girl——but some caregiver had been careless, and so there the girl stood. Still, it hadn’t been an easy decision, necessarily, and she’d felt sorry when she’d transformed the girl into a blue jay. The bird had been sapphire with navy-checkered wings and a crown of black feathers that stood atop her head——a large and aggressive bird for such a small girl, but that was what thrilled her about this line of work. She liked to think that the bird represented the weight of the loss each woman carried. If the Collector were a bird, she’d be a peacock, fierce and arcane. The spell hadn’t quite worked, and the bird was lifeless, not dead but suspended between worlds. It would take her days to revive it. With practice, she’d learn to do better. Metal pliers in hand, the Collector removed the broken branch and inserted a new one. She twisted a vine around it, admiring her craftsmanship when the cage was complete.
Jorinda opened the door. Captain Whitby kicked the snow from her shoes and removed her stocking cap, revealing a tight bun that looked to Jorinda as though it would cause a headache. Her own hair had grown out long, past her waist, and frazzled, like the feathers of a pheasant. “Come in,” Jorinda said. “Can I make you some tea?” The Captain declined, and they sat awkwardly together——Jorinda, her husband, Joringel, and the Captain——at the dining table. “Just start from the beginning,” the Captain said, pressing the record button on her phone and angling the microphone toward Jorinda. “What do you remember?” “I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell,” Jorinda said. Her voice sounded foreign to her, as if she hadn’t spoken out loud in years. “I remember seeing the road glistening in the dark. It was cold, and there was snow on the ground. Women were all around me, over a hundred of them, of all ages. Some were dressed for warmer weather. I had on a long-sleeved t-shirt, the shoes I usually wore for hiking. Everyone seemed to follow me and Joringel.” She reached for his hand. A trickle of fear climbed down her spine. Even though he hadn’t been missing and was a respected firefighter in the town, Jorinda knew how it looked: the only man among 108 missing women, suddenly returned. That night, he, too, had inexplicably lost his recent memory. “Was there anything else unusual that you can remember?” Captain Whitby asked. “Any details that stand out?” “Well, it was nighttime, so it was difficult to see, but I do remember that Joringel carried a strange flower.” “Here,” Joringel said, rising. “I’ll get it for you.” He returned with a wilted red flower, its petals thick and rubbery. A white pearl encased in a small green claw gleamed in the center. He placed it on the table, where Captain Whitby gave it a cursory exam. “I don’t recall ever seeing anything like it,” Jorinda said. She smoothed down her flyaway hairs. The Captain asked her more questions about that night and how she’d gotten to town——they’d walked, arriving at dawn, splitting off as people recognized their streets and homes. Those who no longer had homes went to the police station where it was discovered that some of the women had been missing for as long as thirty years. Jorinda was one of the lucky ones, missing for a relatively short time, three-and-a-half years, with a home and a spouse to which to return. She was only thirty-seven, whereas others had returned old women, their youth stricken from their memories. “Is there anything else you can tell me?” she asked. Jorinda could see from the Captain’s stare that she was searching for something about Jorinda’s experience that would be difficult to verbalize. Suddenly, tears washed lines down Jorinda’s cheeks. “It doesn’t feel like three years have passed,” she said. “It feels like three days, like it just happened.” “Her mother had just died in the Ials Fire,” Joringel said, “when Jorinda went missing.” He ran his fingers through his hair, which though it had been blonde when Jorinda left, was now a silvery white that reminded Jorinda of tinsel. “How many more fires have there been since I went missing?” Jorinda asked. Joringel hesitated. “Since you’ve been, uhm, away, there have only been two fires,” Captain Whitby said. “And no casualties.” Jorinda’s eyebrows lifted and mouth opened. “But before I disappeared, there were dozens of fires every year, and hundreds of people died. Almost 200 died in the Ials Fire alone, and that wasn’t even the only fire that year.” “I know,” Joringel said. “It’s why I became a firefighter. No other women have gone missing since you disappeared either. I can’t explain it.” “Do you think there’s a connection?” Jorinda asked the Captain. “Between the fire and my disappearance?” “There’s hardly anyone in the town who wasn’t affected by the fires,” the Captain said. “It doesn’t mean there’s a connection.” “But did you ever find the cause of the fire?” Jorinda asked. Joringel shook his head. “You have to reopen the case,” Jorinda said. “You want us to reopen a cold case because you think the arsonist kidnapped over a hundred women in the past thirty years?” Jorinda heard the unspoken. An impossible occurrence couldn’t be explained by the unexplainable. The police department wouldn’t be made a mockery of by the presence of a kidnapper and an arsonist, a criminal of astronomical scale, living under their noses. So they didn’t want the truth. “I think the best thing for you to do would be to leave the case to the professionals.” The Captain left. Some things hadn’t changed, Jorinda thought. She couldn’t help but feel as though the Captain blamed her for her own disappearance, perhaps blamed all the women. Maybe that was the real reason the cases in the town were never solved.
A bell rang throughout the castle, beckoning the Collector to it. The room’s walls were papered in a map of the forest, as were the floors and ceiling. She located the offending bell, which gave her the precise location of the intruders. She’d finished the cage’s repair just in time.
Once outside, she said a spell: Felis aurora, noctis vis, muta corpus ad felinis.
Her body shrank down, her ears and face repositioned themselves, her feet became paws, and a long tail stretched out behind her. She stepped out of the pile of clothes that fell around her. As a black cat, she could move through the forest without fear of being seen or heard.
The intruding woman stood beside a beech tree, her eyes red and puffy. She was just the age the Collector liked, early twenties, an unusual occurrence since the fires had stopped. Only women who’d experienced a terrible loss were drawn to the castle, an unfortunate limitation of the spell that the Collector had never found a way around.
A man stood beside the woman, about the same age, wearing a puffy red vest to shield him from the cold. The Collector hissed, and the pair turned toward her, but she leapt behind a shrub before they could catch sight of her.
“Are we lost?” the woman asked. “I can’t remember why I wanted to come here. I just had a feeling that my sister would’ve loved this forest.” The woman buried her face in the man’s vest.
The Collector climbed into the beech tree and stared down at them. “You needn’t worry,” she said. “Come with me and I’ll take away the pain.”
The man opened his mouth as if to yell, but the Collector had already cast her spell. The man transformed into a green-tinted statue and the woman into a seagull with black eyes and a grey-feathered head. When the moonlight fell on the stone, the man would turn back to human with no memory of the events that had transpired.
The Collector pounced, landing with the gull between her paws. She dragged it screeching by its neck back to her castle.
As soon as the Collector’s paws touched her clothes, she became herself again. She shoved the gull into the cage she’d recently repaired and placed it in the attic. Behind the bars of the cage, the gull bemoaned, huoah-huoah. The Collector covered her ears, frowning, and went downstairs.
All her years of collecting, and she’d never encountered a seagull. It reminded her of the time she’d gone to see her birth-mother. Even then, the Collector knew it was a bad idea to confront the woman who’d left her on the steps of the church when she was less than a year old. But she’d needed answers.
She found her mother on the beach, collecting speckled stones. Wearing a long-sleeved black dress embroidered with white daisies, she looked too fashionable for the beach. The Collector remembered thinking that the dress must’ve been expensive. Her grey hair was cropped to her shoulders, and dark sunglasses covered half of her face even though there was no sign of the sun behind the tapestry of clouds overhead. Gulls bobbed along the wooly sea, their malignant shrieks piercing the silence.
The Collector no longer remembered what she’d said, but the words her mother spoke would always be with her.
“I don’t want a relationship with you,” she’d said. “I never have.”
The Collector hadn’t wanted a relationship either, didn’t know what one would look like. She’d just wanted a presence, her existence, acknowledged. But her mother wasn’t a mother. According to her, she was just a woman who’d had a child. She couldn’t——or wouldn’t——give the Collector a shred of her time.
After that day, the Collector made it her priority to study women, to try to understand them. What led them to create life? Why did they wield their power of procreation? She discovered that women were driven by grief more than anything. They were carried away by their sorrow and ignored the cost-benefit analyses that were widely available. They didn’t think ahead, about the world’s dwindling resources, for example. They let themselves believe their antiquated views of family would obliterate their aching souls.
Bouncing around from home to home as a child, the Collector had never had the luxury of controlling her own life. Now, she wanted to decide the future and prevent anyone from experiencing the pain of being unwanted.
So she’d learned spells that would attract grieving women to her like iron to a magnet. She’d learned how to set the dominoes to yield her the most troubled souls when they fell. All she had to do was wait.
On Thursdays, Jorinda attended a support group for “the returned.” That’s what the town called the women. It was better than “the survivors,” which implied that some women had died, and as far as Jorinda knew, they hadn’t. Many of the women had left town, calling upon distant relatives, but still dozens remained. Jorinda was glad for the community——it made her feel part of something important. Already about thirty women milled around the metal folding chairs. Jorinda studied their name tags, searching for a spark of recognition. No one looked familiar. There must be a reason why they were chosen, she thought, some commonality that linked their disappearance, but it wasn’t apparent to Jorinda. “We’re going to start simple,” said Heather, their group leader, once the women were seated. “I want you to write your life story in ten sentences. You can start and end wherever you like, but only write ten sentences.” Heather had piercings in her nose and bottom lip, and her long black braid fell over her shoulder. “You have twenty minutes,” she said. Jorinda wrote quickly, balancing her notepad on her knees. Heather called time before she could finish. She ran her sharp nails across the pads of her fingers as she reviewed what she’d written. Heather asked for volunteers to read their stories in the order she requested. The exercise was meant to show the women how they controlled their own narratives and the stories they told about themselves. “We all choose what to include and what to leave out,” Heather said. Jorinda didn’t think it was very appropriate for a group of women who shared a forced gap in their lives over which they’d had no say. For the older women, those who’d been missing the longest, she imagined the exercise was especially painful. But the stories had another side-effect. When the fifth woman mentioned a fire, Jorinda started keeping track. She totaled twenty-six women. Surely, that was too many to be a coincidence. After the session, Joringel met Jorinda in the parking lot. He insisted on picking her up, though she thought he was being overprotective. “Am I misremembering, or did women always seem to go missing after a fire?” she asked. “They did,” Joringel confirmed. “About twelve women went missing, in addition to you, after the Ials Fire.” “Don’t you think that’s strange?” Jorinda asked. The DJ’s voice came through the radio. “Belle Briggs, twenty-four, went missing yesterday in Moon Creek Forest. The incident has left law enforcement stunned, as it’s been only a week since 108 missing women mysteriously returned in the same forest. It seems there’s no end in sight to the town’s sordid reputation for disappearing young women.” “Joringel,” she cried, turning up the volume. “What is it?” Joringel asked, lost in his own thoughts. “Another woman went missing.” “I thought they’d blocked off the forest,” Joringel said. “That didn’t keep us out,” Jorinda said. The broadcast cut to another reporter. “I’m with Henry Santiago, who says his partner went missing after she insisted they come to the forest yesterday morning. He has no memory of her disappearance, and Belle Briggs hasn’t been seen in over thirty-six hours.” “Belle wanted to walk in the forest,” Santiago said. “She was sure the trail was still there. I thought it might help to get her out of the house. She’d just lost her sister, and she wasn’t herself. Please help me find her.” A search party would meet the following evening, the reporter said. “We have to go to this,” Jorinda said. “We have to help find her.” “Are you sure you want to go back there?” Joringel asked. They watched through the window as snow began to fall. It gave Jorinda an eerie feeling, like being trapped inside a snow globe that had just been shaken.
Joringel was amazed by his wife’s desire to return to Moon Creek. He had to choke back panic just thinking about it, but he admired her fearlessness, her impulse to help others. Besides, the town held these searches every time a woman disappeared, and nobody had ever vanished during one of them. “Did you have other prophesy dreams while I was away?” Jorinda asked. They sat in their parked car in the lot outside the old trailhead. Jorinda stared at the flower on the dashboard. The petals had darkened and shriveled, but the white pearl still glimmered from its center. “I don’t remember having any other dreams,” Joringel said. If he did dream, which he doubted since he was such a light sleeper, he didn’t recall them in the morning. But the dream that led him to the flower, and to Jorinda, had been different, as if he was seeing something that had already happened played back to him. “It’s so strange that my grandfather was in your dream,” Jorinda said. “You never even met him.” More cars started to arrive. Jorinda and Joringel got out and headed toward the thickening crowd. Deja vu twinged in Joringel’s gut as he recalled the search party they’d held for Jorinda. He squeezed her hand. “Don’t leave my sight,” he told her. “And don’t let go.” “Why don’t you put a leash on me?” she asked, joking. “That’s a great idea,” Joringel said. “We could get you a bell.” The police officers leading the search walked ahead, followed by the volunteers who formed a horizontal line. “Belle,” they shouted and “Ms. Briggs.” Their boots crunched through piles of snow encased in layers of ice. Twenty minutes into their search, Joringel spotted something in the distance. “Over there,” Joringel said. “It looks like a castle spire.” They broke off from the group and headed toward it. “I don’t see anything,” Jorinda said, still clutching Joringel’s hand. “You don’t see that?” he asked. As they approached, the castle came into full view. It was small, made from grey stone with two brick turrets on either side. A black iron fence enclosed the property. Again, his stomach sparkled. “It’s incredible,” Joringel said. “Where? I don’t see anything.” Joringel placed his hand on the gate, and it creaked open. As they walked through, a scene from his dream unfolded. “The flower,” he said, opening his backpack. He cupped the flower, so both of their fingers grazed its petals. “Oh!” Jorinda said as the castle materialized before her. “This can’t be possible.” They walked along the stone pathway until they reached the front door. “Hold up the flower,” Joringel said, but when they did, nothing happened. “That’s weird,” he said. He tried the doorknob, but it was locked. “Should we knock?” Jorinda asked. “That’s probably not the best idea,” Joringel said, but Jorinda had already taken hold of the iron knocker. She pounded three times. “We’re so sorry to disturb you,” Joringel said as the door opened. An elderly woman appeared on the other side. She had gleaming silver hair cut short to frame her face, and she wore a long black dress with a silver belt circling her waist. Her weather-inappropriate attire and red-veined, round nose reminded Joringel of the omas that had lived on the top floors of apartment buildings in his neighborhood as a child. “We’re looking for a woman named Belle Briggs,” he said. “Not too many people come through these parts,” the woman replied. “I didn’t know anyone still lived out here,” Jorinda said. “What’s your name?” After a pause, the woman said, “I don’t give my name to strangers, but I’ll tell you what. You tell me where you got that beautiful flower, and I’ll tell you my name. Deal?” “Okay,” Joringel said, eyeing the woman suspiciously. He told her about the dream and how it had led him to the Forest Grunewald where he’d plucked the flower from a shrub. “Your turn,” he said. “I was once called Olana Webb,” the woman said. “It’s such a beautiful flower.” She leaned closer. “Can I touch it?” Joringel was about to say no, but she’d already stretched out her arm and caressed the red petals. At her touch, the flower disintegrated, even the pearl turning to dust, and with it, the woman vanished, and her castle as well. Standing in a clearing, pine trees surrounding them, the distant ha-ha-ha of a seagull echoing faintly, Jorinda and Joringel were as still as statues as the shock of the encounter washed over them.
The white-haired man had powerful magic. Never before had a search party penetrated her defenses, and now this man and his flower had twice arrived at her doorstep. The woman, too, the Collector recognized. A nightingale who’d refused to sing, the last bird she’d needed to complete her collection. She dug a hole outside the gate and placed inside the ingredients for her spell: blue moss, a young pinecone, the horn of a doe, the cocoon of a luna moth, feathers from an ancient crow. She covered them with soil and began her chant, summoning the spirits of the forest to quicken her magic and fortify her castle. The castle flickered in and out of existence, the version she’d conjured as a girl of seventeen alternating with the forgotten cabin that had been there before. Weakened now by the flower’s magic, the castle faded, dissolving into the forest. All that remained was the gull, sitting atop a pile of dirt. The Collector gasped, stopped her spell and ran toward the bird, but a gust of wind knocked over the cage, releasing the latch and setting the gull free. It flapped its wings and launched into the sky, circling the Collector overhead before disappearing. The Collector’s body filled with needles of pain and heavy, hot sand. The spirits hadn’t helped her, and with all the birds gone, she couldn’t sustain the spell. It was happening again: everything taken from her. She would have to start over with one woman, then another, harnessing their spirits as she had done the first time. She spoke a conjuring spell before casting a small bone to the ground. A shed appeared on the south side of the property. It was no castle, but it would have to suffice until she could enact her plan. She sat on a bench inside the shed and felt seized by a familiar sensation: loneliness. She missed the mother she’d never had, like missing a limb that had been severed at birth. Using a white oil pencil, the Collector drew a rudimentary map of the forest on the shed’s ceiling. The pencil caught between the planks of wood, snapping in half. “Damn,” she said, staring at the pieces. She tried a simple mending spell, but her hands shook, and the pencil fell to the ground. Why had she touched that cursed flower? It had drained her magic and left her vulnerable.
“What I don’t understand,” Joringel said, “is why we remember the castle, the woman inside, when before, our memories had been cleaned out. I had the flower with me both times.” Back home, they were on a video call with Jorinda’s father, Jacob. They’d just finished making arrangements for him to visit the following week.
“I was thinking about that,” Jorinda said. “I thought maybe it was because we didn’t go inside the house. If your dream was true, then you would’ve had to come inside the house where we were being kept in order to set us free.”
“Kept as birds,” Jacob added.
Joringel hoped he didn’t think they’d lost their marbles.
“It reminds me of an old fairy tale,” Jacob said. “And who’s to say whether or not those tales contain the truth?”
“What kind of person tries to burn down a nursing home?” Jorinda asked, her voice thick with disgust. She’d researched Olana Webb——gone missing from her foster home at age seventeen, suspected arsonist——and became convinced that she was the source. It had been Olana who started the Ials Fire, which had claimed the nursing home where her mother lived, she thought, and maybe all the fires that came before.
“One who needs to be caught,” Jacob said. “When I’m trying to catch someone who’s skipped out on bail——someone who’s as desperate as it sounds like this woman is——I set a trap they can’t resist.”
“What kind of a trap?” Joringel asked.
“Something that they want more than their freedom.”
“Women like me and Belle,” Jorinda said with a shudder. “But it can’t just be the fires that connect us. There hadn’t been a fire when Belle went missing.”
“Is it where you’re from?” Jacob asked. Jorinda shook her head.
“Remember on TV, Belle’s partner said she’d just lost her sister,” Joringel said.
“And you’d just lost your mother, god rest her soul,” Jacob said.
“It’s grief,” Jorinda said with a raise of her eyebrows. “All the women had just lost a loved one. That’s probably why she targeted the nursing home, to create more grieving women who’d be drawn to her.”
“Well, then we know what our bait needs to be,” Jacob said.
“But where are we going to find a grieving woman?” Joringel asked.
Jorinda made her thinking face. “Finding one who’s willing to serve as bait is the problem.”
The tinkling of a bell, ever so soft, drew the Collector back into the shed. It came from the midwest section of her unfinished map. So a woman had come, unbidden. The Collector cast her spell, shrank down, shivered her skin to fur, arched her back. Then she was off, leaping in the direction of the intruders.
Within minutes, she was in sight of the girl, perhaps a child, hunched over in the meadow, her face in her hands, tears leaking between her fingers and wetting the earth. The Collector waited, circling, but the girl appeared to be alone. A moment of hesitation: Was the girl too young? Her youngest had been fourteen. Should she let the girl go and correct her original sin? She still remembered the weight in her hands, the body of the juvenile blue jay that the girl had become.
But then the girl’s sobs grew louder, and the Collector thought maybe she was mistaken——it wasn’t a child after all. She sauntered into the meadow until she was just a few feet away. The Collector’s spell came out as a whisper; the girl’s dress fell in a heap; a parrot unfolded its multicolored wings; the Collector pounced.
“Now!” a yell came from overhead. The Collector, confused, felt the stiff feathers beneath her paws, the parrot’s hard body, but then a net snapped closed around them, and they were yanked into the air. Up close, the Collector saw that the parrot wasn’t a bird at all but a wooden puppet.
The net swung from the tree branch, and three people emerged from the forest.
“I can’t believe that worked,” the white-haired man said. His nightingale-wife squealed and stared into the net.
“How do we know it’s her?” the white-haired man asked. “We can’t exactly turn a cat in to the police.”
The net lowered and kissed the ground. The woman seized it.
“It’s her,” the woman said. “Olana Webb.” A pause. “When women stop disappearing in this forest, we’ll know for sure.”
Jorinda and Joringel took the Collector home with them in her cat form, watching her closely to ensure she didn’t escape. They called her by her name, Olana, casting a powerful spell over her that diluted her magic. For weeks, she hid in closets and under the bed, hissing whenever Jorinda came near, taunting her with her shape-shifting puppets, small wooden women who turned into birds, like the one they’d used to trick her.
“You killed my mother,” Jorinda would make the puppet say. “You stole her from me.”
“Hssss, hsss,” Olana replied.
Just as Olana’s anger began to overtake the couple’s disdain, Jorinda did something unexpected. She revealed her latest puppets: an elderly woman who turned into a cat. Groups of children began to visit the home, and even from beneath the bed, Olana could hear Jorinda and Joringel retelling Olana’s story, beginning with the fires she’d set and ending with her capture. Slowly, she crept out of the bedroom and sat in the hallway, watching with wide-eyed wonder as the children’s laughter filled her with the unfamiliar sensation of being seen.
When the trees began to bud and the grass to green, Olana did, however, escape. One evening she crept through a window that had been left ajar.
At the site of her former castle, a puddle of melted snow trembled softly in the moonlight. When she peered into it, she saw the ghost of her castle, shadows of her birds circling their stony prison. She turned to the water’s reflection and dipped in her paw, releasing every spark of magic that had accumulated within her. The puddle exhaled a cloud of fog and revealed a flat stone, atop which the Collector sat, surrounded by vast, open space.
Laura I. Miller is a Denver-based writer and editor. Her fiction straddles literary and speculative genres and is strongly influenced by fairy tales and science fiction. Stories appear in Joyland, Passages North, Denver Quarterly, Psychopomp, Cosmonauts Avenue, Mid-American Review, Specter, and elsewhere. Articles and reviews appear in DARIA Art Magazine, LitHub, Electric Literature, Bustle, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. She adores Shirley Jackson’s short novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is about a young girl’s revenge on her family and the town’s hostility toward the surviving members.
