Mary Mary Quite Contrary ( A Grimm Diaries Prequel #5 ) (2 page)

“Who invented this?” I asked, feeling
the joy painted on my lips – in my own devilish, malicious way, of course.

The Pippi Longstocking girl raised her
hand, holding the hem of her dress, and swinging her body like a shy
twelve-year-old sucking on a lollipop.

“Oh my. Oh My,” I patted her. She was
one of my most prodigious students in Scholomance, my Devil School, where I
taught little children the knicks and knacks of the job. I didn’t accept
all
 children
in my school though. Only the wicked in
their cradle; those who never stopped crying at night, those who liked chaos,
those who stole their friend’s
toys, those
who spilled food on the table, and those who were capable of charming the
elders with their deceiving innocence. There weren’t many of these children
available in the world. Parents tend to raise their children to respect the law
and obey the gods. But the fewer the better. You wouldn’t want to have all the
population on earth become devils. What was the fun in that?

My most reliable devil-child finder
was Rumpelstiltskin, and oh boy, he had his own magnificent tricks for stealing
children and handing them over to me. He was a natural at spotting the evil
ones too.

Peter held the mirror up to a green
hill and showed me how its reflection became what looked like boiled Spinach.
This mirror was magnificent. It only reflected the bad in people – because you
know there’s
a whole lotta bad things in people,
don’t ya?

And if the person was too good – which
in my dictionary meant boring boring boring –, it distorted his benign nature
and made him look like a beautiful disaster.

“I have an idea,” I said, and grabbed
the huge mirror. “Let’s point it at them.” I gestured at Heaven a couple of
stars away.

“But that would be mean,” Peter said.
Pippy snarled at him. I liked Pippy even more. Peter was always the devil child
who wasn’t really sure he was one, and didn’t really want to be one. In fact,
he didn’t want to be either a devil or angel.
He
wanted to be himself, Peter, a boy forever.

“That’s the whole point of being a
devil. Being mean.” I smiled.

We flew over to Heaven and made the
angels look like beetles and mice in the mirror. The beautiful poppy field
turned into more boiling spinach. In this mirror, Heaven looked
uglier than Hell.

What had started as a boring day,
looked like a very amusing one right now. I was starting to have super fun.

But then the mirror started shaking in
our hands, cracking into a  million pieces – some were no larger than a grain
of sand –, falling down the sky on their
way to earth.

The glass splinters filled the sky and
got into people’s hearts and eyes, freezing their souls, letting them see the
ugly and dark in others and the world.

Even though I had lost the mirror, I
was amused by its power.

What power did this mirror hold? I am
the Prince of Darkness myself. How could this mirror do in seconds what I
worked hard to accomplish in years?

As I sat back in my throne of thorns,
thinking, the boys and girls watched how the splinters had gotten into a cute
boy’s eyes on earth. The boy’s name was Kai, and he was best friends with a
girl named Gerda. Kai and Gerda’s story seemed to entertain the boys and girls
in my school. They were kids after all. Next to mayhem, stories of girls trying
to save their friends still got their attention.

I left my students watching Gerda as
she tried to save Kai, infected with evil from the splintered mirror and
pursued by an evil Snow Queen ( who was a Scholomance graduate but preferred to
work on her own on earth. A story repeatedly told by this Hans Christian
Anderson, another fairy tale liar like the Brothers Grimm )

The Snow Queen’s story behind, I
collected what was left from the shattered mirror and decided to study it. I
had to know where it came from, who designed it, and why it was so powerful.
For this, I summoned Rumpelstiltskin to investigate the matter.

But Rumpelstiltskin came back empty
handed. The mirror was ancient indeed, but untraceable. And the problem was
that mirrors hadn’t even been invented on earth yet. So who was it that
designed it? A demon who had access to the future?

Finally, I turned myself into a
handsome blond young man again, put on my cowboy boots and my hat to go on a
trip down on earth. I buckled up my belt and guns. Even though I could burn
humans with fire from my eyes, I’ve always loved to dress as a cowboy. I am a
John Wayne fan.

When I landed on earth, I discovered
that my outfit was sincerely out of fashion. I landed in the sixteenth century,
in Hungary, where they didn’t know about cowboys yet. I was like an alien from
the future, but I was greatly satisfied when I learned that they had all heard
of the Devil before. Gotta love it when everyone knows your name.

Before arriving in Hungary, my
intentions were to track down those affected by the splinters. I wanted to
study the evil that bestowed itself upon them. Was there a greater evil than
mine? I couldn’t allow that. I’d have been out of business in a couple of
centuries.

For
all
the darkness I have inflicted the earth with, I started hearing of malicious
acts that I had not caused or insinuated. Whenever I traced the stories, I
found the acts caused by someone who had gotten a splinter from
the mirror in their eyes.

But one story grabbed me the most; a
story about a Queen in the sixteenth century, in Hungary. She had splinters
from the mirror in her eyes and her heart from when she was a child.

Her name was Elizabeth Bathory, and I
keenly watched her grow up day by day, trying to solve the mirror’s mystery.

Elizabeth, born in August 1560 in a
place called
Nyírbátor
in
Hungary, was the
daughter of George and Anna Bathory.

As a child, Elizabeth was subject to
seizures accompanied by intense rage and uncontrollable behavior. She was one
of the children I would have made Rumpelstiltskin steal for me. In fact, he was
about to, but I stopped him. What was the use of one more devilish kid if I
couldn’t solve the mystery of the mirror? Observing an evil creature which I
have not created was worth the entertainment of the world.

I watched the darkness in Elizabeth’s
eyes as a child. It was the kind of darkness that
shone
brighter every
day. She was no ordinary girl. Even though she smiled like innocent children,
there were moments when I feared her. So did her parents.

At the age of six, her parents
banished the little child to a tower in the castle where no one could interact
with her. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. She wasn’t walking
around with fangs, biting every prince she met like Snow White did –
Elizabeth’s story happened way before that, but Snow White was always
unforgettable.

As a child, Elizabeth drowned mice in
a bucket of water, watching them die with a grin on her face. She nailed cats
to the wall, letting them dangle like souvenirs. She pasted animals in honey
and sent them out to the bees, and watched them being stung to death. She once
buried one of her pets
that didn’t abide by her rules in the
freezing winter snow.

Elizabeth’s grandfather and uncle were
Voivods of Transylvania
– which was
part of Hungary at the time. Voivods were the highest ranking officials in the
land. Elizabeth’s evil had to be buried with her, or her family would have
faced scandals. It was her mom who refused to kill her and convinced the family
to banish the child to the tower until they found a cure for her by high
warlock or wizard.

None of them knew she was possessed by a splinter
of the mirror. And I wouldn’t tell them. What was the fun in that?

When Elizabeth became fourteen, she started to act
more sane and polite. The progress – and healing – were
sudden but appreciated by her parents. Her father visited her and told
her about a Hungarian nobleman who wanted to marry her. Outside of her family,
people were told that that Elizabeth had been sent to study in Vienna. In
reality, her mother had sent her teachers in her exile so the story would prove
to be true when the day came and Elizabeth was cured.

I couldn’t let such a precious gem of evil turn to
goodness overnight. I had spent so many years observing Elizabeth to know the
secret of the mirror. I thought that the owner of the mirror might come and
collect the splinters, and I could finally know who was behind this genius
evil. Watching Elizabeth, I thought that her darkness could teach me the art of
the mirror. But none of that happened, and she was about to get married,
abandoning the evil inside – there was a possibility that she was just fooling
them to get out of the castle and spread her evil to the world, but I couldn’t
risk that.

One day, I watched one of Elizabeth’s teachers
seduce her. She was too young for that, which made me enjoy the show even
better. Evil is my business and it was looking good. The teacher – who was a
peasant disguised as a teacher – impregnated her, and vanished. At fourteen,
Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter. Her parent wanted to be done with it – just
deliver the baby and send it away or kill it. They still wanted Elizabeth to
marry the Noble Hungarian a year or two later.

But I was happy about the baby daughter. I
believed that Elizabeth would pass the darkness inside her to the baby. Later I
could make
Rumpelstiltskin steal her for me so I can
still get the secret of the mirror one day.

Rumpelstiltskin did a great job,
convincing the family that they wouldn’t want their granddaughter to be a
peasant’s daughter, and he promised them some shiny golden eggs in exchange for
the child. Elizabeth’s parents agreed and gave up on their grandchild. Typical
ruthless and greedy humans.

Humans, in their most common attitude,
can perform the scariest, most unethical, and malicious things, and then insist
on calling
me
the bad guy.

A year later, Elizabeth married the nobleman and
went to live with him in another huge castle where she became a prestigious
countess. She did not care for her child. She did not care for the peasant who
had impregnated her. That was when I was sure that she was still possessed by
the splinter of the  mirror. She only fooled them to get her life back. She
looked like she had a plan to me. A plan to deliver Evil upon the world.

While Elizabeth became a powerful countess,
Rumpelstiltskin
sent Mary, her daughter, to be
raised by another poor family, a caring stepmother and a devious stepfather who
beat her frequently when she grew up. Mary grew to be incredibly beautiful, to
an extent that had me wondering what her mysterious
father
looked like. Elizabeth was beautiful as well, but Mary didn’t have her mother’s
features.

Mary’s beauty was a curse. Her stepfather’s eyes
turned wolfish while she grew into a ripe teenager, and the boys either chased
or bullied her for not submitting to their desires. From my humble experience,
some beautiful girls ended up living an ugly life; ugly as the color and fabric
of the poor, torn dresses she wore on her tender skin. Eventually, Mary fled,
escaping an imminent darker future at the age of sixteen. She ran into the
woods and was never seen by the peasants again.

Somehow, even I couldn’t find her. So I had to go
back, watching the countess.

Elizabeth’s husband was almost always away,
fighting the Ottomans in the battlefields. Exhausted, he buried himself in her
arms when he returned home, not knowing that his wife’s arms dug graves of
those she had been inflicting and torturing while he was away. Elizabeth’s husband’s
absence was a time she just cherished. It allowed her to shine on with the
darkness she possessed. I could see that evil in her silvery eyes; that last
splinter of the mirror, gleaming discreetly in the moonlight.

Every night her husband woke up screaming from the
nightmares he had about the war, about men killing other men, and when hungry,
cannibalizing on their rotten flesh and drinking their blood. War was a feast
for gore, no matter who won in the end. As I said before, I didn’t cause this.
You’d be amazed at the evil
people are capable
of doing by themselves.

Why not kill and steal when you could always blame
it on me in the end?
Devil made me do this. Devil made me do that. Blah bah
blah.

Elizabeth was deviously smart. She confessed to
her husband about her torture sessions, and told him about how she enjoyed them.
She persuaded him that if he shared her hobby with her, he would feel better
and free himself from the guilt about his soldiers dying for nothing in war.

Listening to her from behind the curtain in their
bedroom, I wanted to clap and salute her. I might have danced the Polka with
her. Why wasn’t she working for me? Oh, yes. She was possessed by a mirror that
insinuated evil like I could’ve never dreamed of.

Her husband joined in and they became the perfect
couple. Every time he rode back to war, he had a vicious appetite to kill and
conquer. And every time he came back to her, he enjoyed watching her kidnap and
torture poor peasants from the valley. But as much as Elizabeth liked to pin
needles in her victims’ bodies, burn them alive, and slice them to pieces, her
husband seemed to want more. That was the moment when he leapt out of the
bathtub, and ran naked through the streets of Vienna, shouting that he had
found what he was looking for. It was a genuine
Archimedes
moment – if you don’t know what an
Archimedes
moment is then you really don’t know much about
science or the amount of fun you can have in a bathtub.