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

  Mary Mary Quite Contrary

  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.

  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 ha
te 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.

  “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 w
as 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.