A boy named Hansel and his master, an older man named Grinnan, return to a mudwitch’s cottage in the forest. Grinnan attempts to entice the mudwitch with food so that he might sleep with her, and although she is resistant, she finally gives in. The cottage brings back traumatic memories for Hansel, who was imprisoned with his sister Kirtle here and fattened up for eating. She freed him and he managed to escape, but in doing so he tripped her, and the witch caught her.  After escaping the witch, Hansel ran into Grinnan, who took control of him as his master. Grinnan strokes Hansel’s back every night, which reminds him of better times with his birth mother before she died in childbirth. But after soothing him, Grinnan rapes Hansel. In this way, they travel around the countryside with Hansel helpless to escape until they come upon the mudwitch’s cottage. Grinnan and the witch make Hansel leave before they have sex. He hears them from outside and wanders away, looking through the blackberry patch for Kirtle’s bones. He falls asleep eating dirt and looking through bones, and when he wakes up, all he hears is the witch in her hut. He peeks inside her window and sees her eating Grinnan, her back to him. Hansel wants to run, but he sees the perfect opportunity to kill the witch with an axe she has hanging from her doorway.  He makes his way back to his childhood home easily, with none of the confusion from his first venture away. There he finds that his father and half-siblings have died of the black disease, and he goes to bury them outside with Kirtle’s bones.