Mary Mary Quite Contrary ( A Grimm Diaries Prequel #5 )

This
edition included Author’s Note and references at the end. It explains where
some of the incidents and imagery were inspired from.

“This
is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are
imaginary, except only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to
offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.”
Neil Gaiman

Prologue

Two hundred years ago, the Brothers
Grimm altered the true fairy tales, hiding that fact its characters were
immortals, secretly living among us.

They placed a curse upon the
immortals, burying them in their own dreams, so they won’t ever wake up again.
The immortals’ bodies would appear as if in a coma in the real world while
their minds created a world of their own imagination in a realm called the
Dreamworld. The Brothers Grimm once mentioned this curse in the Snow White
story when she was sleeping in her glass coffin. In the original scripts, they
called it the Sleeping Death.

However, the immortals broke the curse
by intertwining their dreams, and were able to wake up for a brief time every
one hundred years. The good ones wished to tell the truth about fairy tales.
The bad ones planned to bring wrath upon our world.

Since immortals did not die,
descendants of the Brothers Grimm summoned the Dreamhunters, a breed of angels
that kills immortals in their dreams. The confrontations didn’t end very well.

Everything that happened in that
period was documented in a Book of Sand, or what mortals call: the Grimm
Diaries. Different fairy tale characters wrote each diary, telling part of the
story.

My name is Sandman Grimm, and my job
is to seal the final edition of the Grimm Diaries every one hundred years,
using a magic wand that writes on pages made of sand. After I seal the diaries,
they will dissolve into sand that I throw into children’s eyes every night to
create their dreams.

What follows are mini diaries I call
the Grimm Prequels, scattered and buried pages that didn't make it to the main
volumes of the Grimm Diaries. There are seven of them, each told by a famous
character. You might want to read them before the first full-length diary
called Snow White Sorrow. It will give you an idea of what this world is like.

The prequels don’t necessary hold the
truth. Some characters might want to manipulate the truth in their favor. And
since the prequels don’t give away much of the story, some matters could seem
confusing at times.

It’s better to think of the prequels
like snap shots of a magical land you're about to visit soon. I like to think
of them as poisoned apples. Once you taste them, you will never see fairy tales
in the same light again.

Mary Mary Quite
Contrary

as Dr Feelgood Aka
the Devil

Dear Diary,

People always ask me if I knew the
Queen of Sorrow. I always answer, ‘Do you know about a little girl named Mary?”

Anyway, I’d like to start my diary
with my favorite line of all time:

Once upon a time…
in Hell
, I was
pretty bored.

Things around me weren’t burning hot
enough like they usually did. I liked my Hell cooked well. A medium-rare cooked
Hell wasn’t my thing. It might be the French’s. Hell was missing a certain
sparkle to it that day. The stars in the sky were shimmering a tad too bright
for my eyes, instead of dimming, dying, or turning into Meteors hitting the
earth and putting an end to the whole mess. I could even feel a cold breeze
swooshing through the coal and fire in Hell. I felt like I was on a freakin’
summer beach. What kind of Hell was that? We could use our reputation like
that.

Then I found a horrible blooming
flower growing through the coals, unaffected by all the heat and cinder
surrounding it. What the
hell
was going on? I just couldn’t believe it.
It was such an awful day in Hell. Should I put the closed sign outside? ‘Sorry
we’re closed today. Maintenance. Come back later. A sin or two too late won’t
kill ya.”

I imagined that the next thing I’d
hear would be birds humming around me, fluttering and singing like cartoons –
which would be the end of me. Didn’t I feed the coal enough people today? Was
Hell suddenly out of sinners and killers? I had been working hard all year. So hard
that I thought I should get the medal of honor. But it looks like it was all in
vain. Or maybe it was just a temporarily thing today. You know those days when
you wake up in the morning and in the middle of the night at the same time?

I checked my schedule, seeing if I had
left any misery or mayhem behind that I had not inflicted upon humans. But I
was right on schedule, fulfilling all my deadlines. I had even finished some
jobs earlier than expected. For instance, the number of people dying in war,
and of poverty and illness, was a lot more that what I had longed for. Like I
said, someone should have awarded me a medal. But nah, no one congratulates the
devil for doing his work right.

Looking down from my throne full of
thorns, I glanced at the people on Earth. Oh, man. I despised them. It wasn’t
like they were becoming better humans or anything, Devil forbid. In fact, they
all roasted in their sin, mayonnaised in their stupidity, tomato-sauced in
their envy and anger toward each other – the heat around me is getting me
hungry I think. My problem with humans was that they had become too easy for
me. Whatever I threw at them, they took it. Seducing them, tempting them, or
turning them into killing each other wasn’t that hard anymore. I had studied
them for thousands of years after all, while they didn’t know anything about
me. Except for their silly movies and books about me where I am holding a
pitchfork and wiggled a red tail. Silly superficial humans. I was right to get
out of Heaven, for not wanting to take care of them and honor them. I’d rather
honor a squirrel. Why not a squirrel instead of a human? It’s good looking,
adorable, and funny. And it doesn’t freakin’ talk!

Duh. I was really bored that day.

And it bothered me. It made me
reconsider my choices. Maybe I shouldn’t have seduced almost everyone I had a
chance to. I should have left a great portion of good people in the world as
naïve and good-hearted as they come – well, that’s a lie, they are all
bastards. All I do is ignite that malicious factor inside them, and they run
like an angry rollercoaster from there.

Washing the thought away, I looked
through my telescope, peeking over at Heaven. People seemed really happy there.
Teens were running in the pink poppy fields, throwing dandelions at each other,
laughing with their eyes, and drinking white wine from the vines of the
greenest trees. Some sailed in chocolate rivers and bathed in fresh milk. Some
leaned back in their hammocks over looking Eden while reading Harry
Potter book twenty-three – you don’t have those on earth, I know.
You have to have a membership in Heaven to read those. 

What is wrong with these guys? What are
they so happy about? So clichéd, I pursed my lips. Every hour, they celebrated
someone’s birthday or a wedding.

I hate Heaven. WTF? ( yes, I am the
one who invented that abbreviation. I am awesome, ain’t I? ) No more
Halloweens? No more nightmares before Christmas?

The heat, which I loved, was starting
to bother me, and my breathing had tightened. I needed to amuse myself on this
horribly slow and unproductive day.

Finally, I summoned the boys and the
girls in Hell. Teens in hell were amusing. Not having been assigned missions
before the age of sixteen, they spent a good time in Hell singing, playing,
burning things. I asked them to entertain me, to show me something that would
be fun, but would still be evil enough to be
super
fun.

One of them showed me a mirror.

A mirror? I wondered. What the heck
was that?
It was
ancient times so even I hadn’t seen a
glass
mirror before – mirrors were
mostly copper or obsidian at the time, even in Hell.

“You can see your reflection in it.” A
Pippi Longstocking
look-alike girl told me, chewing on a
piece of gummy coal. I wondered if the pimples on her face were cigarette
burns.

“See my reflections?” I rubbed my
chin, saying it slowly, squinting my eyes, mastering the Evil Knievel face and
parodying the way humans thought I talked.

The children laughed; that squeaky
clownish laugh that usually scared humans, like the ones that the clowns
uttered behind your back in the dark while you were sleeping in your room. I
never knew why humans hated that sound so much. I loved it, the way I loved the
creak of a door at night and the faint drops of water from a faucet in a hunted
house. Cool stuff. It strengthened my horns and mad them shine. You knew I had
horns, didn’t you? I just don’t show off with them all the time. I am a pretty
humble dude. That’s actually my greatest trick.

“Look!” A boy said, inviting me to see
my reflection in the mirror. The boy’s name was Peter. He was considered a
young leader among the children. They loved him immensely. I didn’t. His
problem was that he wanted to stay a boy forever, which was so absurd. I needed
my boys and girls to grow up so they start helping me in my line of work when
they turned sixteen – I was a democratic dude. I let children play while they
were still children, and do wrong and evil deeds
when
they grew up. See? I am not like humans on earth who send their children to
fight in war.

I am a good man. I just do bad things.
It’s a job.

Stepping toward the mirror, I clapped
my hands twice to change my grotesque features into that of the loveliest
blonde-haired young man. I didn’t want to scare the bedevil out of myself
when I looked in the mirror. I look proudly awful.

“There is no need to turn yourself
into a good looking man,” Peter, who was awfully beautiful, said. I tried to
remember who his mother was but my endless memory failed me. All I remembered
was that his mother was Scottish. I loved that place on earth, loved wearing
the skirts, and drinking beer – and I loved to fool around with his mother,
whoever she was.

“This mirror doesn’t show the truth,”
Peter elaborated. “It makes everything look awful anyway. That’s the
beauty
of it.” I liked this boy’s dark sarcasm.
The ugliness showed in the mirror
was its real beauty.
Awesome. Too bad he was a stubborn fella.
Years
later, I regretted banishing him out of Hell, back onto
Earth for not wanting to grow up. I turned him into a fallen devil
– fallen angels were pretty outdated.

But what could I have done? What was
the use of a boy who didn’t want to grow up? His friends called him Peter Pan
because he wanted to act like a God in my kingdom of Hell. You know that Pan
means God, don’t ya?

So I listened to Peter and looked in
the mirror. Oh, boy. What I saw made my day – or night, or whatever. In the
red, hot Hell it was hard to tell which was which.