Babayaga

traveled for well over a decade together, by train across Asia to see the herbal doctors of the Far East and taking passage on the White Star steamer to America to visit the indigenous reservations there. We dove into mescaline rituals, sampled fungal teas, and danced with majestic hallucinogenic lizard kings. Then up the Amazon we went, where we both almost died of malarial fever before drinking deeply of the enlightening ayahuasca. Oh, how we suffered. But it was well worth it for all we were able to sample, collect, and categorize. Wait, one second…”
    The little man rose and went over to the metal cabinet on the wall. Inside was a stack of white cardboard boxes. Removing one of the boxes, he opened it and carefully emptied the powdered contents onto an aluminum tray. Next he took a tall brown bottle off a shelf and poured its liquid over the powder, mixing it into a paste as he continued his story. “Some secrets took a little prying, but most were quite easily bought—for instance a bone-crowned Polynesian medicine man traded us what amounted to two volumes’ worth of jellyfish cures for a single bottle of scotch. Bartering was often simple like that, some took gold, others whiskey. There was, however, a singular group who guarded their herbal remedies so obsessively that, in the end, extracting their coveted secrets became our greatest obsession, especially for poor Huss. It was all the more vexing since this band of ancient women, sometimes called the Babayaga, or sorceresses, or Wicca, or, more commonly, simply witches, were all situated right here in our realm, here in Europe, scattered across the east and the north: primarily in Russia, the Balkans, and Poland. I tell you, these pests were everywhere. Despite centuries of persecution, we knew they were still among us, roaming the land, leaching off our society like parasites, doling out their curses and cures wherever they went. Try as we might, though, we could never make contact with them. We hunted and searched tirelessly. More decades passed, and our new medicines began earning us prodigious profits. Huss’s patents alone made him one of the wealthiest men in Zurich, but he never enjoyed his fortune. It bought him a vast mansion, but he stayed buried, locking himself up in its bowels, myopically studying maps, charting their rumored migrations, sending out correspondence to all corners of the continent, obsessed with chasing down their cursed kind. We followed every faint trail, every wisp of scent or clue, putting out ever-increasing offers for rewards, and eventually instructing our budding trade network of small town pharmacists and entrepreneurial suppliers to keep their eyes and ears open for these strange women. It was their shriveling ancient coven versus our prospering new cabal, and I knew we would run them to ground, it was only a matter of time.”
    Bendix opened a drawer and pulled out two separatory funnels. One he filled with water and attached to a hook and a tube, keeping its valve shut tight. The other he spooned a third full with the wet, gray paste from the tray and then hooked it beneath the water funnel, sealing the higher tube to the lower funnel. “Well, finally we caught one. A telegraph arrived in Bern from a Polish apothecary named Zell informing us that his brother, a local farmer, had trapped a bitch of a thief in his barn. The man was superstitious and, sensing she was trying to slip him a spell, he had gagged and bound her. Huss and I were there in twelve hours, a miracle for travel in those days.”
    Bendix tightened both of the funnels into place on the contraption. The water began dripping down into the lower funnel, and the paste started dissolving. Opening a metal drawer, the little scientist removed a long hypodermic needle. He fastened it to the tube at the bottom of the device.
    At this point, Vidot was growing quite concerned for his host. Will was still groggy and seemed only half unconscious, but his arm was thoroughly lashed to the contraption and the scientist clearly planned to stick that hypodermic needle directly into his vein.
    The little man kept talking. “We tortured that Basha for days, a battle of wits and physical endurance I will never forget. She was initially quite recalcitrant, but we conceived of means that, well, I will spare you the details, but eventually we broke the creature, wringing out an immense quantity of valuable information. Huss had been right all along, these creatures