Helga embraced Sally and Lavinia when they came sheepishly to breakfast.

She looked like she wanted to tease Lavinia about not having changed in twenty years but said nothing. Sally realized (and wondered why it had taken her this long) that there must have been more between them than just that one threesome with “Poky.”

Sally dawdled over the breakfast of farm greens with soy sauce and sesame oil. This was the last slim wedge of time left between them and what waited in that forest.

Helga raised eyebrows when Lavinia again ate nothing (she hadn’t noticed it last night apparently) and Sally realized with a start that they’d never explicitly told her Lavinia was a vampire. Shyly she said it now and was not surprised when Helga embraced them both again.

And then they were bundling into Helga’s old car. As they clanked and rattled down the highway, Helga told them everything she knew about the place she was taking them, including the horrible experience she’d had there as a young woman. Sally shuddered, but not until later would the full significance of Helga’s story come to her.

***

On a bright summer day in 1972, seventeen-year-old Helga Amundsen was training for a marathon when she found the disused trailhead.

Helga was one of those people who sail through the world without obstacles. She spoke her parent’s native Norwegian, as well as German, English and Dutch. She was skilled with her hands and had already started to study Chinese medicine. For her very first sexual encounter she’d just had a marvelous threesome with a handsome couple in their twenties who were staying at one of the overpriced inns in town. Locked in her desk at home was a grainy polaroid the wife had taken of Helga climaxing so hard that her eyes rolled in her head.

She jogged beside the main highway and turned down a dirt road that seemed perfect for running. Her parents Torvald and Solveig (who claimed that they had to marry because they both had names of characters in Ibsen plays) had moved to Germany when Helga was just two. They hadn’t grown up with the local taboo about this road and so Helga did not have it either.

The disused trailhead caught her eye only because her Nike Cortez running shoe picked up a sharp little pebble. Wincing, she sat down by thick trees and took it off.

She shook it and out dropped a glittering crumb of glass.

She looked at her heel but her foot was not cut. Shaking her head, she put her shoe back on and laced it up. As she stood, she saw the rotting trail sign behind tangled branches.

“Mmmh,” she said, lifting her chin. She ducked and pushed through overgrowth for a few hundred feet before emerging at the foot of a grassy hill. “Ah, perfekt” she said, and sprinted up the delightfully challenging decrepit path.

Why had nobody told her about this place?

Up the tempting hill in the bright July sun she danced like a deer and a half hour later swept carelessly under the shade of heavy trees.

It was so cold under these dark trees. And the path seemed determined to trip her, so many roots and loose patches did it thrust under her feet.

At last, more tired than she should have been, she stopped and panted. Slowly she sat against a rotten old trunk pungent with wet moss. She closed her eyes to get a feel of the place.

She saw her mother die.

In her vision, Solveig (Helga had called her parents by their first names from a very early age) dropped to the floor in her massage studio, her golden frill of hair sprayed in a starburst around her head, her bright eyes closed, her wiry arms jerking and her hands clutching at nothing.

Helga felt chill hands clutch her young and vibrant heart. She ripped her eyes open and looked around, disoriented. Which way had she come? She staggered to her feet, picked the direction which seemed a little brighter and pushed frantically at branches which suddenly blocked her exit.

Something caught the neck of her athletic shirt from behind and held her, choking.

Her parents had read her the original versions of the Grimm fairy tales, not the watered down, sweetened up pretty little things. The witch in Hansel and Gretel had been very real to Helga. She was not an imaginative teen but she knew something in that moment with cold certainty.

The witch stood behind her, breath cold and silent.

She did not look. She tore her shirt, broke back into the sunlight and fled down the hill, stumbling once and sprawling in a heap. Scrambling up before anything could catch her, she ran on and reached the dim tunnel and was back on the lonely road. Bleeding from a throbbing gashed elbow, she ran gasping to the main road.

An eternity later, wild and disheveled, Helga burst into her mother’s massage studio, grit from the bottom of her shoes scraping on the hard wood floor.

And Solveig was fine.

She was working on Herr Dietrich Casselberger, a heavyset man with a greying moustache, who usually wore comic ties and looked cranky but was really a sweetheart. He started up and clutched for a towel (it was 1972, Solveig was a hippy and she massaged her clients totally nude without a drape) and Solveig jumped. “What happened, darling?”

Red as a beet but nearly sobbing with relief, Helga hugged her mother, realizing for the first time that she was now taller. She had always been straightforward with her parents and so she immediately told her everything. Herr Casselberger wrapped a towel around himself and said, “Liebchen, why would you go there? My brother would have specifically warned you if he had known. You must tell him what has happened to you.”

Herr Casselberger’s brother was a tall, grim-looking ledermacher who had lost an eye in the war (World War I or World War II, they were the same to a 17-year-old Helga to whom anyone over 30 was ancient).

Helga nodded politely, heart still hammering as she fetched a broom to sweep up the powdering of dirt and the crumb of broken glass she had tracked in. She had no intention of talking to a half crazy old man who sold leather jackets with emblems of ravens and fire on them.