• URBAN LEGENDS OF BABI YAGA

    BY Em.Ef. Stiles


    AN INTRODUCTION



    The witch Babi Yaga figures in most Russian Fairy Tales. She is a malevolent old crone with one long, vampiric tooth overhanging her lower lip. She whirls through the air in a magic mortar and pestle, cutting great crop circles into wheat and cornfields whereever she descends. Although Babi Yagi dresses in moon colors--red, white and black--she looks remarkably like any ragged bag lady. She’s far from homeless, however. The witch lives in a unique cottage that stands on chicken legs. This house is also surrounded by twelve poles topped with human skulls. There is always an empty thirteenth pole prepared for the head of the next visitor who blunders into her domain.
    Dangerous as the witch is, visitors do come to ask for favors. Babi Yaga can bestow marvelous, magical gifts and if the visitors behave properly, Babi Yaga will begrudgingly reward them. If they blunder, they’re beheaded and their head is stuck atop the thirteenth pole.
    This old witch, who dispensing curses and blessings, is a metaphor for life itself. If her challenges are successfully met, one leaves richer and wiser. Hers are essential life lessons: compassion must be tempered with discipline, strength is based on humility, and wisdom is derived from understanding.
    Meeting the witch is always a life changing experience, although Babi Yaga herself never changes. Like life, she is immutable. However our reaction to the challenges life offers us is always transformative. Life will either reward or destroy us--the choice is ours. The opportunity will inevitably arrive whether we want it or not.
    It’s only a matter of time before you too meet Babi Yaga. Her house has legs, and it’s always moving. It can settle in a landfill, on an empty lot, or in a wooded park. Babi Yagi may be moving to a neighborhood near you.



    THE FIRST SIGHTING


    No one looked up when the witch Babi Yaga flew through the darkened skies splotched with neon signs and streetlights. They presumed that the whirl of her flying mortar and pestle was the churning blade of a police helicopter.
    No one drew back in horror when they passed the old crone on the street. Dressed in her ragged black coat and dirty white scarf, with her iron streaked hair tied back by a red bandana, Babi Yaga did not look any different than any of the other street people who loitered in alleyways or huddled over grates.
    If anyone did look at her closely, they would just as quickly glance away, discomfited by the icy glint in her steely eye and the sharp, pointed tooth that hung down over her lower lip.
    No one knew that the old witch had left the ancient, shadowed forest that had been her home for centuries. The forest may have been clear-cut, but its most famous denizen could not be so easily destroyed. At first Babi Yaga relocated her home in a landfill. The sprawling wasteland of garbage dunes suited her. Her cottage, standing on its two stout chicken legs, blended so easily into this new milieu that none of the waste disposal workers who offloaded trucks of refuse paid it any attention. The little cottage with its bright red shutters was not so uniquely out of place beside heaps of discarded refrigerators, cabinet television sets and cracked bathtubs. That a small house should be thrown away was no more remarkable than the box mattresses or washer dryer combinations that had become homes for skunks,coyotes and foxes.
    The skunks, who had once been dubbed “Little Children of the Devil” by eighteenth century French trappers, were Babi Yaga’s special pets. She took time to shift through the edible garbage to find them food to eat. The skunks in turn patrolled the perimeter around the witch’s house so no came close enough to notice that it was encircled by thirteen poles and twelve were topped with human skulls.
    On a day much like any other, the skunks waited patiently for Babi Yagi to sort through a choice pile of fresh garbage, separating edible from inedible scraps. The animals knew enough to be wary of the old witch, and understood how dangerously unpredictable she could be. They also had reason to fear human interlopers, and hid behind a broken crate when they heard the rumbling of an engine as a battered blue pick up loaded down with junk approached the landfill. Babi Yaga paid it no attention, and continued picking through a crate of moldy fruit.
    Two young men got out of the pick up and started offloading their garbage. They noticed Babi Yaga, but thought she was an old woman shifting through the garbage for the best of ruined fruit.
    “Poor old woman,” Jed exclaimed. “Imagine having to dig through garbage for to find food!”
    “It ain’t our problem,” his brother Josh reminded him.
    “I guess not,” Jed nodded as he helped offload the broken furniture they had cleaned out of their garage.
    The old witch scowled as she glanced their way. But the two boys kept their distance, so she turned her attention back to the damaged fruit. Just before the pickup lumbered off, Jed ran up to her and handed her a candy bar wrapped in a five-dollar bill.
    “Here,” he said awkwardly as he gave it to her. “Maybe you can buy some lunch or something,” he mumbled as he took a step backwards and almost tripped over a bent frying pan.
    The old woman looked at him sharply over the bulge of her bulbous nose. Her small, glinting eyes were so gray they were almost colorless. She glowered under thickly knit eyebrows.
    “No good deed goes unpunished,” she cackled.
    “Yeah, well..” Jed backed away. He suddenly felt stupid and even embarrassed by his generosity.
    “The old woman with the red headscarf watched him until the truck clattered out of sight.
    “What’d you give her?” Josh asked as the landfill receded in their rear view mirror.
    “Nothing much, just what I had in my pocket: a five-dollar bill and a candy bar,” Jed told him. He didn’t add that the old woman had been rude and ungrateful. The admission would only have prompted Josh to further ridicule.
    They drove in silence down a long stretch of gravel road. Suddenly the truck began to sputter and choke.
    “Oh man! I told you to top off the gas tank!” Josh exclaimed angrily.
    “I checked—we had half a tank of gas,” Jed told him.
    “The gauge stopped working last week! I found that out when I nearly ran out of gas!” Josh told him.
    “Why didn’t you say something?”
    “I did—I told you to top off the tank!”
    The truck sputtered to a halt just before they turned onto the highway. It refused to budge an inch further no matter how hard Josh swore. The two young men finally pushed the pickup to the side of the road and began the long hike to the nearest filling station.
    “This is just great!” Josh grumbled as the sun rose hot and angry in the sky, scorching the asphalt with sizzling heat.
    “Sorry,” Jed murmured. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
    They trudged down the road and reached the filling station at last. Josh was ready to indulge in a tall, cold drink when he realized he didn’t have his wallet.
    “This is just great!” he exclaimed. “You got any money, Jed?”
    Sheepishly Jed dug through his pockets although he knew he’d given his five-dollar bill to the old woman. He eventually found three dollars wadded in his back pocket and a dollar’s worth of change.
    They didn’t have money for both drinks and gas. What was worse, they had to borrow a gas can from the station and leave Josh’s watch as a security deposit until they brought it back. Instead of a cool drink, they gulped lukewarm water from the public drinking fountain.
    “I’m hungry too,” Jed sighed as they trudged wearily back to the pickup.
    “Don’t tell me your problems,” Josh scoffed. “You’re the one who gave his candy bar away.”
    “No good deed goes unpunished,” Jed remembered the old woman’s words as she’d glared at him. The sun inched even higher in the sky, devouring their shadows as it reached its noontime zenith. Tired, thirsty and hungry, they reached the pickup at last and found Jed’s wallet wedged in between the seat cushions.
    “Must’ve fallen out of my pocket,” Jed grumbled. “I never had that happen before.” They had just enough gas to reach the filling station before the pickup died again. This time Josh used his credit card to fill the tank. He returned the gas can and retrieved his watch, then bought sandwiches and jumbo fountain drinks.
    “What a day!” Jed sighed. He wanted nothing more than to veg out in front of the television for the rest of the afternoon. But as they emerged from the dead zone surrounding the landfill, his cell phone played a rhapsody to alert him to a new voice mail. A good friend was desperate for a ride to the airport up north.
    “No good deed goes unpunished,” Jed sighed as he listened to his message.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Josh asked.
    “Just that I’m dog tired and Tom needs a ride. Can I borrow the truck?” Jed asked.
    “You’re crazy,” Josh told him. “That’s a two hour drive up and another two hours to drive back home again.”
    “I know, but I can’t let Tom down,” Jed told him.

    Later, much later, as the silver scythe of the crescent moon rose in the darkened sky, Jed began his long drive home. He had drunk and entire thermos of coffee, but his eyelids were still drooping.
    “I’ll pull over and get some shut eye,” he told himself and remembered there was a rest stop a few miles ahead. “I just need to get there,” he said aloud as he shook his head to ward off the entanglement of sleep. He found himself half dozing again despite his best efforts to stay awake. Jed gritted his teeth and stared hard at the white line in the center of the road.
    A few minutes later, his attention began to waver and the urge to sleep returned with a vengeance. This time he felt as if someone had thrown a net of dreams over his head. Jed’s eyes flicked shut and the truck swerved into the center meridian. He awoke with a start as a horn’s blare shattered his dream. In an instant of terror he found the glaring headlights of a semi-truck bearing down upon him. Desperate, Jed jerked the wheel and the pickup swerved then rolled.
    “I’m a dead man!” Jed thought as time froze to a halt and a barrage of sight and sounds melded into one single sensation. He saw the oncoming headlights and heard the whirl of a police helicopter directly above him. Then he felt the rush of cold wind and imagined he was flying. Finally he heard the crush of soft gravel beneath his tires as the pickup shuddered to a halt. Although it had rolled, it was standing upright. Suddenly Jed caught a glimpse of a withered face with a bulbous nose pressed up against his window.
    “I’m hallucinating,” he thought as the night dissolved into darkness.
    He awoke sometime later to find he had parked on the side of the road. Had he dreamt about the near collision?
    “I guess I did. I must’ve pulled over and fallen asleep,” he told himself. Then he noticed there was a five-dollar bill on the dashboard. It was wrapped around a candy bar.










    THE SECOND SIGHTING



    Karl was numb as he took the elevator down to the skyscraper’s lobby. He barely felt the weight of the cardboard box in his arms. It was packed with personal items and a potted plant in a ceramic jardinière.
    Karl stepped back when the elevator doors opened on the way down and a man in a business suit entered, carrying a briefcase. They avoided each other’s eyes, mutually embarrassed that one man still had a job while the other had just lost his.
    The elevator opened onto the lobby. Karl hesitated a moment to let the businessman exit first. He almost got clipped as the elevator doors closed abruptly.
    “I won’t be coming back,” Karl thought stonily as he went out the revolving doors. The thought was chilling. His investment company had abruptly folded, throwing everyone in his office out of work.
    Karl took no comfort in knowing he was not alone, or that others might be in even more desperate straits than he was.
    “I’ll pare back to the bone,” he thought as he walked to the parking garage. “I’ll make minimum card payments. That’ll buy a few month’s time.”
    He realized he would have to find a cheaper apartment and give up his sports car. He suddenly wished he hadn’t bought an imported leather couch and that he hadn’t gone out to that Chinese restaurant last Friday night. The bar bill alone would have bought a week’s worth of groceries.
    “Worst case scenario, I’ll have to move in with my mother,” Karl thought, then shuddered. “I don’t want to move back home!”
    An old bag lady wearing a ragged black coat, her head muffled by a dirty red scarf, shuffled up to him just then and asked for spare change.
    “Damn it! I’m carrying a box and a potted plant! Do I look like I can spare any change?” he wanted to ask. For a moment Karl glared at the old woman, who glared back over the hump of her large, bulbous nose. Karl suddenly thought of his Grandmother, silently accusing him of tracking mud over her clean linoleum.
    “I guess it’s not your fault I’m having a bad day,” he ruminated as he dug into his pocket. He handed the woman a few quarters and she pocketed them without a word of thanks. Her lack of gratitude irritated Karl. Then he reasoned that he too would be immune to polite amenities if he were reduced to living on the street.
    The thought was disconcerting. Karl drove home and searched the classified ads as he ate Chinese leftovers. The only jobs he found advertised were for newspaper carriers. He also circled ads for several inexpensive apartments, and resolved to look at them first thing in the morning.

    The first apartment Karl inspected the next day was listed as “historic.” The tile in the kitchen and bathroom looked antique, but were stained black with mold. The second apartment promised the renter a view but overlooked a parking lot. Karl drove to the address listed for the third apartment, and found himself on the edge of a woods.
    “This can’t be right!” Karl thought as he checked the GPS on his blackberry. The map showed a path snaking through the forest just large enough to be a bike trail but too small to accommodate even a compact car. Curious, Karl parked on the side of the road and followed the path as it plunged through the trees. The trail ran straight for a while then twisted back. Karl had just decided to give up and retrace his steps when he stumbled onto a white stucco cottage with a black roof and red shutters set in a small clearing.
    “It looks quaint enough. It sure is off the beaten path, but then I won’t be commuting to the city in the immediate future,” Karl thought as he walked up to the house. The windows were shuttered, but the door was unlocked.
    “I bet the rent’s low because this place is so out of the way,” he told himself as he entered an almost empty room. The only furnishings were a pot bellied stove and an ornate wooden armoire.
    “That probably doubles as a closet,” Karl thought. Curiosity led him to open it. A scream curdled in his throat as he found a headless body crammed into one side of the armoire.
    Karl felt his stomach heave into his throat. He suddenly felt as if he was riding an elevator that had accelerated abruptly. Then he realized he hadn’t imagined the sensation. The house had physically lurched upward. He ran back to the door and found the step suspended ten feet above ground! Karl let his eyes slide from the steep drop back to the tree trunks ringing the clearing and up the poles of the trees. He stepped back in horror as he found himself at eye level with sharp poles capped by human skulls. The pole opposite the door held a freshly severed head. Its flesh had just begun to blacken and its staring eyes were sunk deep into their sockets.
    Karl felt the final vestiges of his Chinese dinner heave into his esophagus. Just then he heard a loud, whirring noise that sounded like a giant insect descending on the house. Karl shut the door quickly and looked around for a place to hide. The armoire offered the only possibility. One half of the armoire was already occupied by the headless corpse, but the other side was empty.
    Swallowing his miasma, Karl stepped into the armoire and tried to pull the door shut. However, the edge of his coat caught on the hinge and kept the door slightly ajar. Karl’s stomach churned as the house dropped abruptly to ground level and the front door opened. He gasped again as the old bag lady he had met outside his office building entered the room.
    The old crone’s cold, steely eyes narrowed to slits as she glanced around the room. Then Babi Yagi lifted her wizened head and sniffed as if testing the air. The nostrils of her huge, bulbous nose flared over the creases of her deep, nasal-labial folds. Then her thin lips curled into a frown.
    The witch walked directly to the armoire and threw the door open. Karl quivered inside.
    “What do you want?” the witch asked sharply. Her voice grated like gravel rubbing against rusted metal.
    “I…I…” Karl stammered as he dug in his pocket, desperately hoping to find something he could use for a weapon. His trembling fingers locked around a single quarter.
    “I wanted to give you this,” his voice sank to a hoarse whisper as he held out the coin.
    The witch snatched it and studied it thoughtfully, then turned back to Karl. Her eyes glinted like cold metal.
    “Don’t hurt me!” Karl pleaded. He tried to fall on his knees, but he inadvertently nudged the headless corpse and the body toppled forward. The raw stump of its severed neck pressed against his chest. Karl shuddered and closed his eyes.
    He could hear the witch say, “You lost your job and you don’t want to move in with your mother. You’d be better off dead.”
    “I don’t want to die!” Karl gasped.
    “You’ve got nothing to live for,” the witch argued as she pushed the headless corpse aside.
    “I’ll find something to live for! I want to live! I don’t care how bad things get--I want to go on living!” Karl cried. His eyes flew open, then fluttered wildly as he stared into abject darkness.
    “Help!” he whimpered, thinking that this must be what it was like to be dead and headless. Then he realized that his head was still very much attached to his body. He turned his neck gingerly and saw a streetlight shining outside his picture window.
    He checked his watch. It was midnight. He was back in his own apartment. An empty box of Chinese carry-out lay discarded on the glass topped coffee table next to the classified section of the newspaper.
    Karl reached for the lamp switch, and felt a surge of bile scathe his esophagus.
    “I shouldn’t eat week old Chinese,” he berated himself. Any other evening he would have been vexed. But this evening he was suddenly grateful—more grateful than he thought he ever could be—just to be alive!