Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (3 page)

“You just can’t. Girls should be obedient
and follow the rules… without asking why.”

“But I want more.” She stomped her feet
stubbornly. That tinge of gold gleamed in her eyes again. She didn’t understand
the darkness she possessed inside her. It was spontaneous and natural to her.
She reminded me of myself when I was young and wild, doing whatever I wanted
to, only because some inner childish voice told me to.

What was I to do with her? If she were
just a monster, possessed by evil spirits, I might have brought myself to kill
her – may be let one of my husband’s older huntsmen do it.

But she wasn’t that kind of demon or dark
entity. She was a beautiful monster, the hardest to kill, yet the hardest to
outlive.

How long would she stay that way? How long
before the beautiful cocoon that wrapped around her would split open, and give
in to the darkness inside?

“More. More. More.” She repeated.

“Stop it.” Finally, I lost control and
screamed at her in her face.

That’s when the light in her face dimmed…

She jerked her head down, looking at the
floor beneath her feet. I could feel her body heating up in my hands. I think I
heard a growl from somewhere inside of her, but I wasn’t sure. I kept watching
her forehead wrinkling behind strands of black hair, the color of her skin
dying slowly into the palest white. Letting go of her hands, I swallowed my
shriek, not wanting to sense my fear. I didn’t want to lose control and sovereignty
over her. I was her mother, the Queen of Sorrow. No demon, not even my
daughter, stands in my way.

It was a legendary incident for me, and
for her. Instantly, I realized that we had become rivals, and only one of us
was destined to win.

“I know what this is all about.” She
sighed in that awful, colorless tone.

I feared that when she raised her head, I would
see those golden, scary eyes of her again. Would they be
infected with sorrow like her grandfather?

Alone with her, I felt that I should have
stayed closer to the crowd.

What would become of her now? What would
become of me? I doubted that she would only want to suck the blood from my
thumb this time.

“Did you hear me, mother?” She repeated.

“I did, darling.” I said reluctantly.
“Wh-h-at is it about?”

Eventually, she raised her head…

“I think the prince doesn’t like me.” She
said, her blue eyes filled with unborn tears.

I didn’t see any fangs or golden pupils in
her face. She was just a seven-year-old girl with blood dripping from her lips,
experiencing rejection for the first time in her short life. I was too confused
to explain to her that the prince, almost dying from her bite, wasn’t rejecting
her. I wanted to teach her that she can’t bite some yummy boy and expect him to
giggle and jump rope for her.

“It’s not that he didn’t like you,” I
said, hugging her, letting her smear my royal black dress with blood. “It’s—“

“What then?” She sobbed. Her skin was cold
as ice. “It’s just that you don’t bite someone you like so soon. Things don’t
happen that way, Shew. You need to spend a lot of time together first. Get to
know each other, and make sure that he wants you to bite him by then.”

“Really?” She gazed happily into my eyes.
“Can I try again, then? I promise I’ll let him spend all the time he wants with
me first.”

That night, I washed her and tucked her in
bed, reciting that story about the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty back to life.
As she closed her eyes, I wondered whether Sleeping Beauty bit the prince after
he kissed her. Maybe the prince’s kiss wasn’t a kiss. Was it a bite?

In the following years, we managed to keep
her away from other children while my husband sent for doctors from all over
the world. They sailed from Germany, Transylvania, and Italy, crossing the oceans to solve the mystery and cure her disease. None of them proposed a
solution, not even the famous Dutch doctor Frederich Van Helsing. And of
course, she bit a couple of them yummy ones.

Then it was the end of the eighteenth
century. Snow White’s curse seemed to spread everywhere. People were turning into
what the locals called vampires, which they hunted and killed. The low-life
peasants killed any vampire. It didn’t matter if it was a child or an old
woman. They ripped out their hearts after staking them and pulling out their
livers. It was said that the heart and the liver were the center of the
disease. Historians would later describe this era as ‘The Vampire Craze’, a
historical event the Brothers Grimm failed to forge – it always bothered me
that no one noticed that the Brothers Grimm wrote the fairytale fifteen almost
in the middle the notorious vampire craze.

A gypsy healer told us that my daughter
would heal when her soul weighs exactly twenty-one grams, the weight of which
malevolent spirits could not bear, and were forced to leave the body. It turned
out that the weight of the soul was measured in mysterious ways that I didn’t
know of. The soul’s weight was part of the heart’s weight, and could be only
measured by weighing the heart with some ancient instrument that I had never
heard of before. No heart could be cured before it grew big enough to hold a
soul that weighed twenty-one grams inside.

We were waiting for Snow White’s heart
until she became sixteen years old, but even then, things went terribly wrong.

I remember one night when she was eight.
She came to my room while my husband was out in the battlefields.

“Shew?” I wondered with sleepy eyes.

She didn’t reply,
approaching me in the dark as if sleepwalking. She stopped by my bed as her
face shimmered in the candle light. I saw that tinge of gold in her eyes again
like fireflies in the dark.

She didn’t talk, but pulled my hand from
under the sheets and sucked on my thumb after pricking it with the edge of her
fangs. She smiled at me after sucking a couple of drops, her cheeks curving
happily, looking more beautiful than she ever did before. I let her sleep in my
bed, reminding myself that she was a beautiful monster.

She didn’t want to hurt me– not yet. She
loved me as much as I loved her – only then.

“Mother?” she wondered as she tucked herself
under the sheets and hugged me. ( To tell you the truth, she didn’t say
mother
.
She called me by my real name, which I prefer to keep to myself for now. I
don’t think you are ready for knowing my real name, and who I really am. ) “Do
you remember the day I was born?” She asked.

I wondered why she brought it up. It was a
very strange day. I remembered it clearly, like looking into a pure crystal
ball, but remembering the past instead of telling the future.

“Do
you
?” I wondered, running my
hand through her hair.

“No. But I have these dreams where I am
someone really important in this world like my father, a fearless warrior. In
the dream, I have to choose between saving the world,” She stopped for a
breath, closing her eyes. “or destroying it.”

Then she went to sleep.

***

By the time I finished my story, Jacob was
dead.

“That’s enough for a Deadtime story,” I
whispered to him. I placed two mirror coins onto his eyes them to block them
from looking back into our world from the afterlife. “Still you’d wonder about
me, right?” I asked a dead man. “If I was so tender, and she was such a
monster, how did I end this way?” I let out a painful laugh. “Well, that’s a
long story, Jacob.”

I made sure I placed the mirror coins on
his eyes so everyone knew I was here when Jacob died. This was my trademark.
The mirror coins were exclusively mine. I conjured them from the shards of a
shattered mirror that had witnessed death. A mirror that witnessed death was as
dear to me as a poisoned apple that steals breath.

Turning around to leave the cottage, I
stopped for a moment. I saw something. There were seven items on a round table
beside the door: a fork, a plate, a cup, breadcrumbs, a chair, a knife, and
some magical beans.

Each item belonged to one of the Lost
Seven.

“Ha. So you
did
know who they are,
Jacob,” I sighed, fiddling with the items. “I swear I will find them and make
them remember. And when I do,” I said as I opened a small box with a dead heart
inside. “This heart’s soul will weigh exactly twenty one grams. And this heart
will be mine.” I closed the box, and tucked it in my pocket.

I pursed my heart-shaped lips and killed
the candlelight with the cherry scent of my breath. As the darkness came down
slowly upon the room, I pulled out my copper hand-mirror, and gazed at my
beauty. I looked at myself in the dark because this was the only way I could
see my beauty. But soon, when I find the Lost Seven and kill her, I would
change this and be able to see my reflection in daylight once again.

“Mirror mirror in my hand,” I hissed in
the dark. “Who is fairest in the Dreamland?” I said as the mirror started
reflecting my beautiful face, glinting with pearls. I smiled in the dark, not
expecting an answer. The mirror rippled like water. The glittering was enough
of an answer from to me..

Looking closer, I noticed that my skin was
a little paler underneath the eyes, just a little. “All right,” I mumbled.
“Time for a mix of blood, milk, and dark chocolate to fix that.”

But I had one other important question for
my copper mirror. “Mirror mirror of hell and heaven,” I hissed again. “Who else
knows about the Lost Seven?”

Even though the girl in the mirror scared
me, I needed to hear an answer this time.

The girl in the mirror was a girl you
might know of, Wilhelm, but tasting her name on one’s tongue was deadly ever
after. I preferred not to call her by her true name. When the mirror began to
ripple again, I preferred not to look at her scary face.

“The lost seven. They must die,” The girl
in the mirror said in her squeaky voice. “One who could help you is a boy who
can fly.” She explained and then disappeared.

“Thank you, M—“ I was about say her name.
“Thank you.” I tucked the hand mirror in, pulled my chin up, preparing to
leave.

“Peter Pan,” I murmured. “How I hate to
see you again.” I sighed. I had no choice but look for him. He knew about the
Lost Seven, and I needed every clue to find them.

Once I opened the door of the cottage,
heading out into the snowy night. A shriek curled my lips into a bitter smile,
for what I saw, I didn’t expect. Not tonight.

As I stepped outside, snow fell upon me,
splashing onto my face and my cheeks, tasting of cherry, apples, and every
other red fruit or vegetable. This snow wasn’t white. It was red snow, and I
knew what it meant.

I knew it was a trick,
her
trick. Soon, the red
falling snow would taste of blood.

Ashes to Ashes &

Cinder to Cinder

A Grimm Diaries Prequel

A teaser story for the
upcoming release of

The Grimm Diaries Series

by Cameron Jace

Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin
Farouk Ali Shebl

All rights are reserved. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
from the author.

This book is a work of fiction. The names,
characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or
have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations
is entirely coincidental.

All facts concerning fairy tales
publication dates, scripts, and historical events mentioned in this book are
true. The interpretations and fantasy elements aren’t. They are the author’s
imagination.

Ashes to Ashes &

Cinder to Cinder

as told by Alice Grimm

Dear Diary,

The remains of the dead witch’s skeleton were found in a small
town near
Venice
in Italy. To inspect it, I fooled my
teachers in California and told them that my German grandma died, and that I
had to fly overseas to attend her funeral. No one even requested my parents
calling the school to confirm my claim. I was a descendant of Brothers Grimm,
and everybody treated me like a modern-day Cinderella.

Ironically,
I was flying over to Venice to find the real Cinderella.

As I
traveled from Germany to Venice, I was curious to see the corpse: an
800-year-old Italian witch, found by archeologists with seven nails driven to
her jaw. Gruesome stuff. My perfect taste.

“Why
seven nails?” I asked Bella, the Italian archeologist’s assistance. Bella was
about twenty-four years old, seven years older than me, I was sure her name
wasn’t Bella. Some of the investigators around the world preferred not to conceal
their names form others. “No one really knows,” She said. “Nailing them in the
jaw was what they used to do to European witches in that era.”