By KIDANE PAIK
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Red Cap. She lived with her mother and father in a little village on the edge of the Red Forest.
Life was good in that village, but then war came, and all of the food was requisitioned to feed the soldiers. Soon the people in the village began to feel the first pangs of hunger; then they began to starve.
One day, Red Cap’s mother said to her, “Take this and go to your grandmother, for we will starve to death if we do not do something to save ourselves.”
So Red Cap set off into the Red Forest. She hadn’t been to visit her grandmother for quite some time, and her memories had faded.
A forest demon watched her from a hiding place amongst the foliage.
Poor girl.
Soon the trees thinned and Red Cap arrived in the little clearing where her grandmother lived. She walked up to the door and knocked.
“Who is it?” her grandmother called.
“It’s your granddaughter, with a gift for you,” Red Cap replied.
“How lovely!” the old woman said, and swung open the door. “What is it?”
“Death,” replied Red Cap, and shot her in the head.
Lying on the old woman’s bed, exhausted, Red Cap thought to herself, Why should I bring her to my parents? They can fight their neighbours for the old people in our village. but they would give me little of grandmother, so I shall give them none at all.
And so Red Cap locked the door and ate her grandmother by herself.
Three days later –
“Alice!”
Alice tore her gaze away from the carvings and turned to Jonathan, who stood on the opposite side of the chamber, his torch tracing the outlines of a doorway etched into the grey rock.
“Take a look at these inscriptions,” she called back. “Imagine being one of those soldiers: finding her body and confession, understanding the true horrors the war wrought, and honoring her suffering by building her this tomb. How much of the story is true, do you think?”
“We already know the story,” Jonathan replied dismissively. “What we don’t know is whether the soldiers really found and buried an artifact with her.” His eyes flashed avariciously. “If I can find that, I’ll be world-renowned for centuries!”
He shoved on the door and it grated open. “Come on.”
The tunnel inclined sharply upwards, carrying them deeper into the mountain. The crimson wolves on the walls kept pace with them as they walked.
At last the passage leveled out and they entered a long chamber. A rectangular pit swallowed the centre, and a doorway at the opposite end of the hall led into darkness. From the pit arose a heavy metallic stench.
Alice gazed in fascination. “I wonder how far into the mountain we are.”
Her words drowned in silence. She glanced around and saw Jonathan staring into the pit.
She joined him and looked in.
There was silence.
“Now we know why they never found the bodies,” she whispered hoarsely, then glanced up as a vermillion glow began to suffuse the room beyond.
They crossed to the doorway and beheld a stone sarcophagus that seemed grown from the ground, its roots melding crimson into the rock. The light seemed to emanate from beneath its opaque stone lid.
Alice hesitated in the doorway, but Jonathan hurried to the sarcophagus’s side, gazing greedily upon the luminescence. Gingerly, he placed his hands on the lid and pushed. Despite its thickness, it moved easily.
The grating sound woke Alice from her daze and she joined Jonathan as he gazed in.
Before them lay Red Cap. Her hat clung to her withered scalp, her papery skin wrapped around her bones, unchanged by death. Her patched brown dress appeared a corpse sack, too voluminous for the atrophied form it contained.
“Her face,” whispered Alice, “the lines… she looks as old as her grandmother.”
“Pre-mortem,” Jonathan mumbled, barely listening as he stared at the sphere resting above the corpse’s head. Two handspans across, it appeared fashioned from the same rock as the walls and sarcophagus, yet with an inner glow wholly detached from the world.
He reached out his hands to seize it, his flesh translucent in its light.
Alice seized his wrist. “No,” she said firmly.
Jonathan wrenched his hand from her grasp and glared at her. “What do you mean, no? This is what I came for. This will make me the most famous man of the epoch!”
The greedy light had returned, flashing, to his eyes.
“No,” repeated Alice. “I accompanied you here out of love for you, and I would fail in my duty if I didn’t stop you now. Can you not feel the sacredness of this place? Red Cap was laid to rest with this sphere, and it would be a desecration to take it.”
Jonathan stared at her menacingly. “I don’t give a damn what you think,” he snarled. “I came here in search of glory, and I’m as sure as hell going to get it.” He turned and reached to grasp the sphere.
Alice shoved herself in front. She gazed at him sadly.
“No,” she said softly.
Jonathan grabbed his torch from his belt and slammed it across her temple, knocking her to the ground. His blows followed, explosions of rage and spittle escaping from his pressed-white lips, the last flashes of the dying torch like lightning on the carvings of capering wolves.
At last he straightened, chest heaving. He had stopped loving his wife long ago, he told himself.
Dragging her corpse into the main chamber, he heaved it into the pit, then returned with an exhalation to the sphere.
Jonathan stumbled backwards. He stared at his bloodstained hands in horror, then buried in them his head. He thought back to the story of Red Cap.
Then he drew his pocket knife and, standing over the pit, slit his throat.
Three days later, Red Cap killed herself.
Writer | Kidane Paik ’28 | kpincus28@amherst.edu
Editor | Izzy Baird ’27 | ibaird27@amherst.edu