Baba Yaga Whispers through the Trees by Jennifer Weigel
The first harvester and forwarder arrived as if on cue, despite the horde of protesters. The gas pipeline was going through. Both sides had played politics and the bureaucratic duel had spanned months into years but eventually the commercial interests won out. The resource was just too valuable and too badly needed by the growing urban populace. After finalizing the path the pipeline would take to make as many people as happy as possible (because let’s face it, this was more about minimizing complaints and gaining political leverage than about the environmental impacts or honoring Indigenous Peoples), plans were in action to bring the project to fruition.
As the deforestation crew descended upon the scene, the well positioned riot-gear-outfitted guardsman made sure they were as unhindered as possible, breaking up the crowd as they moved through. The protesters stepped or were shoved aside, still continuing to chant and brandish signs. All except for one – she was an elderly woman, with long white hair flowing in wispy tendrils about her gaunt frame in a sort of ethereal otherworldly manner. She wore loose fitting peasant’s clothes that bespoke a long-gone era and leaned against her solid wooden walking staff, her moss green eyes steeled on the oncoming procession. How she had managed to evade the wall of guardsmen was anyone’s guess. The monster machines were forced to stop.
“C’mon Grandma,” the crewman called out from the harvester. The name on his pale blue shirt simply read Bill. “We have a restraining order against you folks. This is happening whether you like it or not. You don’t want to get dragged off to jail, do you?” One of the riot-gear guardsmen took a step forward.
The woman smiled knowingly and cackled loudly, her shrill voice echoing through the crowd and the path and the earth and the sky like a primordial spirit unleashed. The world around her fell deathly quiet. She raised a gnarled hand and extended a crooked finger to point at the crewman named Bill. She spoke slowly and gleefully, “To Hell with you.”
Bill rolled his eyes and revved the engine of the mechanical behemoth in response, perhaps to persuade the old woman to move along. He’d listened to too many slurs today already; he was just trying to do his job. It may not have been pretty, but it was progress, and everyone just needed to step out of the way so he could get on with it. As the riot-gear-outfitted guardsman closed in to escort the old woman from the path, she mysteriously vanished in a cloud of pale green smoke.
***
Bill woke with a start. He had been amazed that the crew was able to get to the site so uneventfully. There hadn’t been any protesters and the few stragglers that had remained had stayed remarkably out of the way, chanting, singing and brandishing signs from afar. The site itself was well guarded from the perimeter, perhaps more so than was necessary since everything was just quietly waiting for the demolition to start. Bill had expected more backlash, as was evidenced by his recurring nightmares from before the job had even started. But the protesters never entered the woods. It had all been too easy.
It was 2 AM and the world was still enveloped in thick, heavy darkness. Bill knew he should try to get another couple hours of sleep before the grueling day ahead of him, but something wasn’t quite right. That old woman, her icy gaze seemed to bore a hole straight into his soul. He couldn’t seem to get her out of his head.
Suddenly and without any warning, a piercing shriek rang through the forest like a throaty impish laugh.
Bill was on his feet before he even realized he had leapt out of bed. He warily stared at the trailer door. The wind howled through the trees in the distance. A familiar voice behind him called out, “What was that?”
“I dunno Sid,” Bill answered, “maybe an owl.”
Sid was sitting up in his bunk, rubbing his eyes. “Not like any owl I’ve ever heard…” He turned to Bill, “Can’t sleep, eh?”
“It’s nothing.” Bill returned to his bunk. “Let’s try to get some more rest. Big day tomorrow.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Sid murmured as he rolled over.
Bill lay in bed staring at the trailer ceiling. As he drifted back to sleep he heard an unnerving cackle float through the wilderness. To Hell with you, he thought to himself as he succumbed to slumber.
***
The next day, after coffee, the crew went to work. They began work on the deforestation of the first swatch of trees bearing spray painted X marks from the survey team who had demarcated their route. All they needed to do now was follow the signs and clear the debris.
As Bill began to down a nearby pine with the harvester, cutting through the trunk effortlessly to topple the tree to the side, he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He caught a glimpse of what appeared to be an old woman in peasant’s clothes as she darted unnaturally in and out of the trees to his left, disappearing behind and betwixt trunks. It couldn’t be, surely he was imagining things… He paused and turned the key in the ignition.
Sid’s voice echoed over the radio from the forwarder, “Something wrong, boss?”
“Nothing,” Bill replied. “I’ve just got to see what that was…”
The rest of the team was working on another ridge nearby where they continued what they were doing. There was no call for help, no need for follow up; Bill was on top of it.
Bill got out of the machine and traversed the muddy broken path up the hill to the stand of trees where he had beheld the vision. He peered behind the evergreen where he had last seen the old woman and was greeted by a skull on a pike. He leapt backwards, slipping on some moss and falling to the ground. As he rose, he looked up at the skull pike again: it was nothing more than a fallen branch. He stood and fingered the drying needles, scattering them to the breeze. The wind mocked him, whispering in an ancient and shrill sigh, “To Hell with you.”
Bill turned to return to the harvester and was immediately confronted by the old woman from his dream, standing between him and the sleeping mechanical monster. She stared through him, her icy green gaze penetrating his very soul. Her wild white hair whisked to and fro about her shoulders as she stepped toward him. She smiled, “How nice of you to come, just in time for dinner.” She ran her tongue along her razor-sharp teeth, filed to dagger-like points.
Bill turned to run and slipped on the muddy moss-encrusted mound. He slid down the hill and into a small previously unseen ravine off to the side of their work site. A hidden pocket in the earth engulfed him. He found himself sprawled in a muddy pit with his head reeling, roots trailing the edges of the earthen walls of his prison. A cackle greeted him from the darkness just behind his field of vision.
Bill pivoted to find another skull on a pike. He backpeddled into the other wall of the pit, skinning his hand on a rock, and blinked. Not a skull, but a root wrapped around a smooth stone embedded in the dirt, greeted him. He shook his head and called out, “This isn’t funny… Whoever you are, we have a restraining order. You aren’t to set foot on these premises.”
The hoarse giggle resounded through the pit and the earth in response. “No, you are mistaken,” it laughed. “It is I who have the restraining order against you. Only a fool enters a witch’s wood and expects to leave alive.”
“Who… Who are you?” Bill called out to the empty tomb.
“You may call me Babushka Ježibaba,” the old woman trilled, reappearing out of the shadows right before him. Her nostrils flared wide as she sniffed him up and down and smiled through her serrated grimace, “We feast tonight, my sisters…”
The old woman grappled Bill by the throat and pulled him towards her in a sweeping motion, effortlessly overpowering him. She leapt from the pit into the gaping door of a house on stilted chicken legs, which took off into the deep woods away from the mechanized mayhem of the construction zone. “Welcome to Hell,” she crowed as they bounded out of sight…
***
“Bill,” Sid called out as he came upon the abandoned harvester. “Where are you?”
No answer. The crew was packing it in for the day and Bill had scarcely even touched his section. His radio stretched idly on its cord, dangling above his empty seat. Sid glanced to the left and saw what appeared to be an old woman weaving in and out of the trees off to the side. “To Hell with you,” the wind whispered as he left the harvester cab and squinted at the vision.
“Bill, you over there?” Sid shouted as he hurriedly followed the elusive presence into the woods…
Read X Marks the Spot, another eco-horror tale by Jennifer Weigel, here on Haunted MTL.
Check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s writing here at Jennifer Weigel Words.
So I’ve decided to revisit some of my bereaved Gothic celebrity drawings and resurrect The Mourners, since we’re in the thick of spooky season… And I’m not talking pumpkin spice, though it is nice. Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s the despairing existential angst, but lately I’ve been feeling a bit haunted so I thought I’d take a trip down memory lane with you by posting a bunch of art here. So without further ado…
I wanted to focus on more of the details of the sculptures this time. The craftsmanship of these works still astounds me. When royalty commissioned such works, the artists may have devoted much of their lives to realizing these pieces to fruition. They were very time involved processes.
Here are some more details of hands and clothing that I found interesting. Remember that these sculptures are less than 12 inches tall for the whole of the human form. So they are very intricate for their size.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
The gorse bush seemed taken aback. It bristled and exclaimed, “A bush!”
“I am so very sorry, my Lord, I can explain,” the goblin cleric bowed in reverence, eyes glued to the ground. Everything about his body language was submissive and nervous.
“Of all the useless… How is it that I got reincarnated as a bush?!” The shrubbery prickled, growing more and more agitated. “I should have come back as a great King, or an Angel, or a Demon, or a dragon, or something even grander… Hell, I’d have settled for returning as the undead Lich King Tyrant Boss-Man you all came to know and love and revere. But no, that wasn’t in the dice. And now here I am, A Bush!” The spiky leaves trembled and rustled as they spoke, both emphasizing and decrying their verdant stature.
“Well, we were in a rush to revive you, after that run in with the goody-two-shoes 20th level adventurers and the awkward retreat,” the goblin knelt before the bramble-vine. “All of our best clerics, necromancers, and acolytes were tapped for spells or had perished in the great battle. Those of us who got out of the caves were lucky to escape with our lives and make it to this little clearing on the mountainside. And we desperately needed your guidance. We still do…”
“That doesn’t explain why I’m a bush now,” the gorse stretched to its full height, about two-and-a-half feet of thorny rage. “And a Gorse Bush at that! Before too long I’ll have a stand of satyrs piping along with a centaur drum circle, all strumming up some fertility ritual at my feet… er, roots…”
“Well, I’m multi-disciplinary you know.” The goblin spell-caster muttered and meekly shifted to his other foot, bracing for the inevitable, “Sometimes I get the cleric and druid magics confused a little.”
“Confused a little?” the bush growled, “Confused A Little?!” The bush’s rage turned to magic as it burst into flames. “I’m A BUSH!!! That’s not just some modest little cleric-druid spell translation issue!”
The goblin shrunk from the blaze, “But my Lord, you are a mighty bush. The greatest bush, really terrific… The gorsiest, bushiest bush in all of shrub-dom… Other bushes? Losers! We all agree, your Lordship.” The trembling goblin horde in the scrubland shadows at the edge of the small clearing nodded emphatically in response, fearing their bushy leader’s wrath. And rightfully so…
A tongue of flame erupted like a lightning bolt from the gorse and zapped the goblin cleric-druid where he stood, leaving nothing but a smattering of ashes drifting towards the ground. The flame erupted through the goblin horde in a huge explosion that engulfed everything in its wake, leaving a circle of scorched earth covered in a fine layer of sooty ash, smelling a bit like cordite.
The bush sighed and took note of its surroundings, sulking. It waited for some would-be adventurer to wander up the mountainside to find it there, where they could revel in its awkward awesomeness. Seasons came and went, and time seemed to stand still for nigh eternity as the gorse bush seethed beneath its crown of thorny brambles. Perhaps it should have convinced the goblin cleric to transplant it to a more trafficked location first.
If you enjoyed that bit of snarky fantasy, check out Ppppffffttt my previous Poised Potion Poison Potential story.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
You’ve almost made it to the end of the finger spiders here at Haunted MTL! Because I made A LOT of unfulfilled requests for a spider out of fingers, I will continue this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva through the month of September… In case you missed out, here are the other parts of this series:
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: hand that is a spider; spider legs as fingers; fingers becoming spider; spider all fingers.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Keep Trying! Yeah, I’m sure you don’t remember being bitten. Because of the ways they warp time and space, and the natural chemical reactions involved, the AI art generated finger spiders’ bite isn’t typically felt. They are still attached to you, feeding… You have to get them off… Keep trying!
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: spider leg fingers; spider made out of hand fingers; hand spider picking banjo; fingers as spider playing banjo.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders That’s All Folks! Well, I guess that’s that then. It’s been nice knowing you. Enjoy your new form. Nothing left for it but to play the banjo…
All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
