u/Chemical-Elk-1299

“Help,” I cried, as my neighbors staggered out of their houses, “witchcraft!”

“Get him”, Brayden screamed up the street, his face magenta with rage.

This was the third time Brayden and his goons had cornered me this week, trying to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Now, all I could do was run.

They were gaining on me as I rounded the bend onto Birch Street. There was only one thing I could do. “Ms Yagarovich,” I shouted, pounding on the last house’s mossy door. “Ms. Yagarovich! Please, I need you!”

But I was too late.

“Gotcha”, a voice said, as a big, fat hand spun me by my shoulders. Tyler (the big one) drove a fist into my stomach, bellowing the air from my lungs. Weston, Brayden’s little hatchet-faced toadie, threw me from the stoop and onto the pavement. “Your parents turned down my father’s offer,” Brayden hissed.

“Maybe this will help them reconsider.”

In a clatter of wood and Slavic obscenities, a tiny old woman in a faded pink shawl burst through the door, swinging her broom like a battle axe.

“SHOO DEBIL, SHOO BLYAT,” she cried, landing a bristly whack across the side of Brayden’s head.

“Just wait until my father hears about this!”, Brayden proclaimed, as they all scrambled back up the street, tails between their legs.

“If you come back here,” Ms. Yagarovich called back, “then I put foot in ass!”

“Are you hurt, moy dorogoy?,” she asked, helping me to my feet.

Irina Yagarovovich had lived on Birch since…forever. Before that, the Soviet Union. Her little wooden house had looked ancient all my life, held up by moss and vine as if the earth itself was trying to take it all back. Once, Ms. Yagarovich had been a pillar of a thriving little community. But that was before Brayden’s family moved here. His father’s company had bought out most of the homeowners on Birch to make way for “luxury” condominiums. Ms. Yagarovich and her little log house were some of the last holdouts.

So Brayden’s gang were allowed to convince us to leave in ways money could not.

Ms. Yagarovich led me into her doily-covered sitting room, pouring me a cup of tea from a steaming silver samovar. “What happened?,” she asked in her motherly Russian yawl. “He wants my parents’ house”, I said, taking a sip, “so I told him to eat shit.”

“Ah,” she chuckled, lighting a long, thin cigarette.

“I’m really worried, Ms. Y,” I said.

“Oh, dorogoy,” she croaked, laying a hand on my cheek, “why?”

“First it was the Millers,” I said, rising to my feet. “Then the Johnsons. And the Smiths. It’s only a matter of time before my folks cave. And after today…”

“What if you’re next?,” I asked. Ms. Yagarovich looked at me for a moment, her eyes somewhere far away.

“Let me tell you story,” she said.

“When I was a girl, men come to my village. Make everyone to leave. You either take money, or they come back with gun. But they failed. Know why?”

“Because home is here,” she said, poking a bony finger into my chest. I thanked her for the tea before setting out past the row of empty houses back home, feeling like something bad was coming.

I was right.

Three days later, I was walking my dog when I saw police at Ms. Yagarovich’s house. She was sobbing on the doorstep. That evening, I went to check on her, where she wordlessly pressed a crumpled city notice into my hands.

“Effective immediately, the premises must be vacated due to zoning irregularities…”

Brayden really had told his father. “Not again,” she kept repeating. “Not again.”

We were rereading the documents for a fifth time when a knock came at the door. Throwing it open, Brayden stood flanked by his goons in the paling light.

“I heard your little friend has to move out,” Brayden said as his cronies snickered. “Shame.”

“YOU,” Ms. Yagarovich howled, as I only barely held her back. “You did this, debil!”

“Don’t be like that,” Brayden said, pushing his way past us into the living room. “I’m sure my father will be happy to give you a nickel for this dump before we burn it down. But he won’t mind if we redecorate first…”

Brayden hopped onto the kitchen table, kicking the papers to the floor. “Stop,” Ms. Yagarovich screamed, “stop, stop, stop!” Tyler yanked the refrigerator from the wall, tipping it over in a crash of rolling beets and shattered jars. Weston snatched a heavy stone mortar from a cabinet, smashing it into dust. I held her tightly in a corner, trying to keep her away from the ransack.

“Alright, boys, let’s go,” Brayden finally said, smiling at the destruction. “Just wait until father hears about this!”

“None of you will live to tell him.”

With bewildering strength, Ms. Yagarovich set me aside like a doll. Her face seemed to wither like the bark of an old oak tree as she raised her arms, the bones within snapping like bowed branches. With a jolt that shook the walls, the house seemed to lurch upwards, throwing Brayden and his friends to the floor. She leapt onto Tyler, wrenching off his head with her bare hands. Weston’s beating heart was plucked from his chest like a rotten apple, as Ms. Yagarovich tore a wet gob of flesh away between iron teeth.

“Oh, God,” Brayden whimpered, as she dragged herself towards him in a trail of blood, “Oh, God…”

“No”, Ms. Yagarovich said, her jaw unhinging like a snake’s, “not God.”

When it was done, I stared dumbly from the corner, the house shaking in lockstep rhythm. Peeking out the window, I saw that it wasn’t just moving — it was walking.

Walking on a pair of gargantuan chicken legs.

“Ms. Yagarovich”, I trembled, as the room righted itself as if by magic, “where are we going?”

“To see Brayden’s papa,” she said, happily pouring me a cup of tea.

“To remind him what old Baba Yaga can do.”

I was pushing a mop through the Hall of Imperial Rome when Pete decided to make another guess.

“I think I got it,” he said, scrubbing at a stubborn smudge on a glass display case full of cracked amphorae. “You used to be a spy.”

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled the mop water.

“What makes you say that?”

“It all fits,” he said. “You speak, like, seven languages. You never eat in the break room. You act all mysterious. Why?”

“Sorry, bud,” I said, pausing for a moment to admire a bust of emperor Diocletian, “I’m just a janitor who likes history.”

Pete chuckled as he loaded more trash onto the roller cart.

“Don’t worry, Jim”, he said. “I’ll figure you out one day.

I laughed, too. Maybe he would.

I’d been the City Museum’s overnight custodian going on twenty years. At only two weeks on the job, Pete was simply the latest among dozens of coworkers who’d came and went, each with their own theory as to who old Jimmy used to be. Not one came close. I guess I couldn’t blame them. It’s true that I had a colorful past. In my youth, my father ensured I was well-traveled. Scholarly. Able to fight. The haughty young man I once was would balk if he could see me sweeping floors and dusting shelves. And I certainly didn’t *need* to work for a living. But I loved it. The older I became, the more I learned to love the simple things in life. I learned to appreciate history, and my own place within it.

And I loved the Hall of Medieval Europe most of all.

Pete and I made pushed our mops past glittering triptychs and crumbling manuscripts, the works of masters long dead. Between rows of rusted axe heads and scraps of chainmail, whispering of old battles behind the glass. As I heaved a sack of garbage onto our cart, Pete paused to admire my favorite artifact.

“The sword of of an English knight…”

Pete rested on his broom handle, reading aloud as his eyes passed over the gleaming steel to the placard on its display case.

“Found at Bosworth Field in 2003, this stunningly-preserved longsword is thought to have belonged to a man-at-arms in the service of the Duke of Norfolk, fighting for King Richard III of the House of York in the final battle of the Wars of the Roses…”

“The end of an era,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

“What do you mean?”, Pete asked.

“Richard was the last English king to die in battle,” I replied. “And Old England died with him. Everything changed after that.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been working here a long time. I’ve read these placards a hundred times.”

Pete narrowed his eyes, curiously.

“But it didn’t say any of that.”

“I told you, I know history,” I said, and resumed my cleaning. For a few minutes, Pete and I worked in silence, until he asked me something that gave me pause.

“But have you ever *touched* history?”

I turned to face him just as the door to the sword’s display swung open.

“How did you even…?”

“Nicked the master key from Chet’s office,” Pete said. “Go on, touch it.”

“Are you fuckin’ insane?!”, I asked. “Close that door and put the key back!”

“C’mon, Jim”, Pete said, placing his hand upon the sword’s rose-petal pommel, “you know the security cameras in here are busted. No one would know.”

“I’m not kidding, Pete,” I said, “knock it off.”

Pete didn’t listen. Before I could stop him, he’d taken the blade from its niche and into his peasant hands.

“Jim, we make fifteen bucks an hour. We could stick this thing under my coat and walk out of here. I’ve even got a buyer lined up. We could live like kings.”

“Last warning, Pete. Put it back or I’ll call the cops.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Pete sighed.

Pete slowly advanced towards me, until the still needle pointed tip of the blade was inches from my neck.

“Sorry, Jim, but I need this,” Pete whispered. “Maybe they’ll even pay me extra for the blood.”

There was no talking him out of it. So I decided to finally give Pete an answer.

I had the sword out of his hands faster than his mind could comprehend, bringing the blade around in Zwerchau to leave a deep gash in the top of his head. As he fell backwards, crimson streaming into his eyes, I looked down at Pete’s blood staining my hands.

None of them ever got it right.

None of them ever guessed that I’d rode at the back of Richard of York, in the year of our Lord 1485.

None of them knew that I was struck down by arrows three, as my King was butchered like a pig.

None of them knew that I lay dying in the mud for three days, until the dark things that prowl the battlefield found me.

“Wh-what are you?,” Pete stammered, crawling away from me in the trail of red.

“I told you,” I said, carefully cleaning the blood from my sword before returning it to its rightful place, “I’m just a janitor.”

I then grabbed Pete by his hair, bringing his face close enough to see my fangs.

“But I used to be a knight.”