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  Blood Apples

  A Grimm Diaries Prequel #6

  A teaser story for the upcoming release of

  The Grimm Diaries Series

  by Cameron Jace

  edited by Danielle Littig

  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.

  “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.

  Blood Apples

  as told by Prince Charming

  Dear Diary,

  Today, I sat by the fire in my castle, reading a letter made of pages of sand, delivered to me by a white dove guarded by two owls.

  Those damn letters you get to read only once before they start pouring through your fingers like sand in a bottomless hourglass, forever gone, and forever lost like the two seconds that just passed since I started this diary.

  I was staring at the letter with a smile on the corner of my mouth. It wasn’t the magical letter that amused me though. It was the names of its senders: Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug, the two women who were buried behind the Brothers Grimm’s eyes.

  Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug were the source the Brothers Grimm got most of their fairy tales. They lived in Kassel in Germany, and one of their sisters married the Grimm’s third brother later in life. They told fairy tales in exchange for a loaf of bread or a place to stay at night. Sometimes they did it in exchange for a jar of golden fireflies to light up the night, trying to escape the vicious evil that hunted them for the rest of their lives.

  The letter Jeannette and Amalie sent me was short and precise. They only had one question, and they demanded an answer.

  I had known them for many years, but hadn’t been able to answer their previous silly questions. However, this newer question was much easier to answer.

  Feeding wood to the fire, I winced at the flicker of ember, remembering when Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug used to ask me about why I loved Snow White.

  That damned question! Even when asked by your lover, you hardly knew the answer.

  ‘Why do you love me?’ What kind of question was that?

  I love you because… wait… I take a drag from my pipe… I really don’t know. I think that’s the beauty of love, wanting to be with someone, taste their sweetness and their fears, live their lives and be there in their death, share their ups and their downs, and most importantly, love them and grow old with them, even if they were some kind of monsters.

  Have you ever been unable to shake your soul free, wrapped with your lover’s velvet rope around your heart? Have you ever been enchanted with a nameless spell that made pain and pleasure synonymous?

  I never had a logical explanation for my love for Snow White, and yet Jeannette and Amalie kept insisting on one.

  But I knew why they thought I did.

  I learned one thing among the years. It was that stories are beautiful lies told from a person to another, across generations, where each storyteller added his own filler – aka lie – to the pile of previous ones. After many years, you get a totally different story from what really happened, filled with people’s expectations and desires.

  Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug wanted to know the truth about fairy tales from me so they made sure the lies they told weren’t far fetched from the ones they made up in exchange for bread, fireflies, or a place to stay.

  But it didn’t matter. The Brothers Grimm forged it all in the end anyway, and the world loved it.

  So my ‘I don’t know’ answer never quenched Jeannette and Amalie’s thirst. They had to ask me a different question in today’s letter, one that sailed me back to a bittersweet memory of Snow White, the beautiful monster I fell in love with.

  The question was, ‘Can you tell us why apples are red?’

  A smile conjured itself on my face when I read the letter. It made me think of the endless people in this world who didn’t know why apples were red. To them, it was only a fact, and it probably had a scientific explanation. Hardly did anyone know (‘anyone knows’) that apples were once gold – especially in the Kingdom of Sorrow.

  Have you ever seen a golden apple? Unlucky you. Although the ancient Greeks and Romans had always mentioned them, the world still thought it was a myth. How many times did the ancients have to send us clues until we deciphered the messages they wanted us to understand? Or is it we’ll just believe what we want to believe?

  I found myself remembering the old days, walking through the Black Forest in the Kingdom of Sorrow in the darkest, moonless nights, guided by the light of flickering fireflies here and there.

  But it wasn’t only fireflies that were golden and illuminated the night. It was also apples, glowing on trees like candle balls shimmering in the night. Along with the golden fireflies, apples lit the path for the good-hearted when they
walked through the forest, and dimmed it for the black-hearted, leaving them lost in the dark.

  It was a time when people still wondered why this was called the Kingdom of Sorrow when it was a peaceful and magical place with singing birds and gleaming fireflies. I guess the name preceded the truth that was about to be revealed.

  I was a lost and spoiled young prince, searching for the beautiful princess who bit me when I was younger, wandering in the Black Forest of Sorrow. That was when I was first introduced to the golden and glittering apples by a boy and his sister.

  They called themselves Hansel and Gretel, telling me that before the golden apples, they used breadcrumbs to find their way back home when they got lost in the forest. The apples glittered the most on Christmas night, and on Hallow’s Eve, which was the Day of Apple Harvest when everybody in the kingdom celebrated.

  “It’s not just apples that are golden,” Gretel told me with her doe eyes. “It’s everything that was the color of…” She pulled me by my ear like a kiddo, and then whispered, “Red.”

  “Red?” I wondered.

  “Many centuries ago, all fruits and vegetables that were once red were turned into the color of gold,” Gretel said. “Berries, apples, tomatoes, you name it.”

  “Why is that?” I asked. I was a prince of a neighboring kingdom so I

  knew little of the Black Forest.

  “Red is a forbidden color in the Kingdom of Sorrow,” Gretel explained. “Because it’s the color of Death.”

  “Death has a color?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Death’s color is that of blood, and it’s a she,” Gretel whispered again.

  “Death is a person?” I asked, wondering if it was Death we should be afraid of now.

  “We call her Little Red Riding Hood,” Gretel said. “The weird, yet cheerful, girl living by the Tree of Life, outside of the forest.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “That’s better. She is deadly. And it would be good for you if she hasn’t heard of you either,” Gretel put a thoughtful finger on her mouth. “But she is also my friend.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s complicated. I don’t know how to explain it. You ask too many questions,” Gretel said. “Forget about Death. What you need to know is who turned the apples into golden apples.”

  “Who?” I shrugged. “I hope this is not considered too many questions.”

  “Pomona,” Gretel said with a wide smile on her face. “She is the Goddess of Fruits and the Keeper of the Forest. She forbade this forest from using the color red, conspiring with the kingdom to kill Death, who wore a red cloak and held a scythe and walked around killing people.”

  “Death wore red?” I asked. I didn’t want to say that we were talking about Death again, instead of the apples. I assumed there was connection.

  “She is called Red Riding Hood. Isn’t she?” Gretel looked at me as if I were stupid. “Pomona prohibited the color red from the forest, so it would be easier to hunt down Death.”

  “So whenever I get to see a flash of anything red, I should know that it was Death, right?”

  “You’re starting to get it,” She nodded.

  “But I heard that many people in the Kingdom of Sorrow were immortals.” I wondered.

  “They are, but not if killed by Death,” Gretel explained. “Now if you excuse me, I am busy. I have to study, help my brother, and make bread for my parents. I am going to be a witch too, but a good one.” Gretel said and walked away. I didn’t see her again until some time later when things got more complicated. That was three months before Snow White turned sixteen, when her mother, the Queen of Sorrow, decided to ban her outside the castle.

  Whatever disease – or dark spirit – possessed Snow White, I still used to visit her secretly in her castle, unable to stop myself from whatever drew me closer to her. My whole existence was under her spell. I couldn’t sleep, eat, or enjoy my life as a youthful prince if I didn’t see her every now and then.

  Snow White was kept a prisoner by her parents, who tried to conceal her demonic nature from the rest of the kingdom. They had been doing this for years, waiting for their daughter’s sixteenth birthday, the age when she would be cured. It was prophesized, and later we knew that the prophecy was only lies, like all the other lies that surrounded us.

  But Snow White was growing stronger, and controlling her monstrous nature was almost impossible.

  The Queen of Sorrow, who had changed from a warm-hearted Godmother to something more sinister at the time, had to find a way to imprison her daughter until she reached the prophesized age. It was rumored that the Queen of Sorrow – whose real name we shall never say for reasons beyond my knowledge – was into witchcraft and dark arts at the time. The kingdom was chained to a ruthless war with the bloodsucking creatures repeatedly trying to breach the borders to get inside. We called the creatures ‘vampires’ at the time, but they turned out to be a lot more than that – if we only knew.

  It was rumored that the vampires were trying to breach the borders to get to Snow White, who was considered to be one of them in matters of her monstrous nature.

  The Queen used dark arts to fight the vampires. It always puzzled me which side the Queen was on. Was she good or was she evil? I only knew for sure many years later.

  The Kingdom of Sorrow turned into a horrific place to live. There was Death roaming the forest, a devious queen and daughter ruling it, and bloodsucking creatures trying to get in. I shouldn’t have been there, but I was because of my love for Snow White.

  I was in love with a beautiful monster.

  So the Queen consulted Rumpelstiltskin, who usually came up with quirky solutions for everything as long as people provided him with enough children. But Rumpelstiltskin seemed oblivious to solutions this time; so was the Devil, who had developed a habit of avoiding the Queen at all costs. It was rumored that he was scared of the Queen’s mirror, which I thought was absurd. Why would the Devil be scared, and of a mirror?

  It was the Queen’s mirror that came up with the solution, though. It advised her to ban Snow White to the tallest tower in the Kingdom of Sorrow, a tower called Rudaba in the darkest place of the Black Forest, where a girl with golden hair lived.

  The tower’s keeper, a fortuneteller named Dame Gothel, held the golden-haired girl as a prisoner. No one knew why. They said the girl in the tower was just another monster girl like Snow White, only with witchcraft powers. I didn’t know if it was her true name, but they called her Rapunzel, named after a poisonous plant that grew at the base of the tower and protected it from intruders.

  The Queen of Sorrow promised Dame Gothel a goose that laid golden eggs if she managed to imprison Snow White inside the tower until her sixteenth birthday. Snow White was transferred to the tower, and the witchy Rapunzel kept her from escaping in exchange for food from Dame Gothel.

  A week later, my passion for seeing Snow White was unbearable. I had to save her. I had to. I didn’t care for whatever monster she was. Although I might have been only a slave to her bite, I didn’t care. I couldn’t live without her, and I had to free her.

  But the Tower of Rudaba was high in the clouds, penetrating the sky and rising higher than the tallest tree in the forest where the Goddess Pomona lived and ruled the forest.

  There were no doors or stairs in the tower. Only one small window where Rapunzel peeked out occasionally for reasons I didn’t know. I heard she had a heavenly voice that deceived travelers into trying to help her out but the plants ate them alive.

  Another rumor I heard was that Rapunzel tricked Dame Gothel, putting herself under a spell that allowed her hair to grow faster and stronger than any other girl in the world. She was waiting for her hair to grow long enough so she could use it as a rope to climb down the tower, and free herself. That’s why Dame Gothel added black crows, fluttering atop of castle, picking on Rapunzel if she looked out of the window for too long. And even if Rapunzel surpassed the crows, she couldn’t escape the plants she was named af
ter.

  It was impossible to get up there to save Snow White. I had to ask for help, and I knew I could only get help from someone as devious as all of those who lived in the Kingdom of Sorrow.

  It was hard to know who is who in this kingdom. I mean all this time here and I didn’t know whom to root for, who was the enemy and who was the friend. Everyone had a demon inside. I guess it was all about controlling the demon and choosing your destiny. I decided I needed someone who could fly to reach for the tower’s window, and I didn’t care if they were good or evil. All I cared for was saving Snow White.

  In the end, I was advised to look for a young thief who stole gold, jewelry, and all kinds of things from almost everyone in Sorrow. I told myself if that boy could fly, then he was the one I needed. But no one really confirmed that boy could fly. They said that the boy could surely reach for the clouds, though.

  The boy’s name was Jack, and people insisted on adding the phrase, ‘and the beanstalk’ after naming him. I wasn’t told what Jack’s talent was exactly, but I was told it was hard to find him. For one, he was a thief, and thieves were masters of disguise. And two, it was rumored that he slept in the clouds.

  “Wow. The clouds?” I wondered. “That’s my man. If he can get that high, I need him to help save someone. So how can I find him?” I asked Gretel, who seemed irritated with me, trying to work a new spell she had just learned.

  “Jack’s best friends are Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty,” Gretel told me.

  “Sleeping Beauty?” I remarked. “I heard her beauty was heartbreaking. Can she help?”

  “Better not,” Gretel told me. “You look like a nice boy, and you keep asking about the wrong girls,” I hadn’t told her I was a prince of the neighboring kingdom yet. “Sleeping Beauty is a little feisty for you. Let’s say she’s not your type. Peter Pan doesn’t live here anymore, although he is the boy who can really fly.”