The Grimm Prequels Book 5: (Prequels 19-24) Page 11
“But… “ There was too much to comprehend at once. “But I am afraid I can’t take care of her.”
“You will,” she said from afar.
“How about my last name?”
“The prophecy didn’t tell,” the faerie yelled from behind the mist. “How about Peter Piper, as in Ahab’s pipe?”
And that’s the moment when I gave myself a name. “No, it’s Peter Pan,” I said. “Ahab said the pipe belonged to a god named Pan.”
“So you want to be strong as the gods, Peter Pan?” she laughed and said her last words. “Just remember, the gods aren’t all about power, but about love, too.”
The faerie, whom later I knew as Tinker Bell, left. She told me one last thing before she did; that to wake up Wendy I had to kiss her. That was how Sleeping Beauty woke up.
I kissed Wendy, and slowly she opened her eyes. She looked so beautiful in my arms.
Gods are not only about power, but love!
It was an incredible feeling, knowing I had to take care of Wendy. I couldn’t explain. After a long and terrible journey, I was able to give love instead of wanting to take things, like everyone else I met on the journey. No more pipes, mermaids, treasures, hatred, and revenge.
This was me finding the power to give and take care of someone after a series of terribly dark events.
“Where am I?” Wendy said.
“Neverland,” I said.
“Where?”
“An island far away. I will take care of you.”
“Really?” She looked so pale. “I heard your name is Peter Pan?”
“Yes.” I grinned.
“You seem like a nice boy, Peter.”
Now I felt on top of the world.
“Please don’t take this personally,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“This.” Wendy craned up her neck and bit me.
It was my first vampire bite. It has pretty much summed up our relationship in Neverland.
End of Diary
MY NOTES
Written by the Beast
Wow, that ending.
To me the resemblance is almost uncanny. The story of Treasure Island does have a lot in common with Neverland. I admit Long John Silver a.k.a. Captain Ahab is starting to give me goose bumps.
But it’s prequels like these that make me wonder about the lies some characters say. Didn’t Peter Pan save the children and fight the Piper in the Pumpkin Piper? How does this fit with this story about the inception of Neverland? Did it happen after or before?
There is a missing link here.
Or is one of the two prequels marred with lies?
I’m not sure. I need to read more. Still no prequels helping me to know more about my own story.
I picked another up. It’s called Lady Bluebeard. I’ve always been interested to know about Bluebeard. I wonder who he really is.
Grimm Prequel #21
LADY BLUEBEARD
as told by Angel Von Sorrow
Dear diary,
In the year 1845, decades after the incidents in my late kingdom of Sorrow, I was sitting in a cafe in London, waiting to meet a customer and sell him apples. With my hair cut much shorter and the gentleman’s suit I was wearing, no one had the slightest idea of who I was. Just a 19th century apple trader drinking tea like an Englishman, in spite of my terribly-faked English accent.
Of course, I didn’t sell Blood Apples anymore. Just the normal, tasteless Granny Smith ones that English men and women loved. I suppressed the need to tell them their apples tasted like dead worms at the bottom of a whiskey bottle when compared to the delicious Blood Apples. But these were the times when every fairytale character feared for their lives, unable to speak out the truth. These were the times when I preferred people calling me Harry instead of Angel.
Thanks to the Brothers Grimm cursing us forever — a story that I’ll leave for another diary.
All of us had become nothing but… well… fairy tale characters mentioned in children’s books, and no one even believed we existed anymore.
I was wearing my top hat and sipping my tea when I was struck by a ghost from the past. A woman who I hadn’t seen in almost forty years.
She wore a bonnet over a hand-sewn silk jacket and quilted petticoat lined with white linen. She walked with grace as if she were a jewel in this rainy Victorian nightmare.
My hands almost dropped my cup of tea, and a lump grew in my throat. All of my insides longed to call for her and even caress her in my arms. I wanted to rip my clothes, scream from the top of my lungs, and call her by her original name, the one she used to have in the Kingdom of Sorrow.
But I didn’t. The price would have been too high for me to pay.
I struggled, cementing myself to my chair, allowing my defeat to weigh my head lower – pretending I hadn’t ever known her.
Oh, dear lord, what have the Brothers Grimm done to us? Had we justifiably deserved to be cursed? — well maybe we did but I still would have offered my blood and soul to go back to Sorrow as a pauper, not even a king, if it were possible.
“Mr. Harry,” a gentle voice whispered to me. Everyone here believed Harry was my real name.
I raised my head and glanced to my left. It was her, the woman I ignored out of fear. She’d sat down next to me and flung her umbrella open to keep away the drizzling rain that dripped through the cafe’s ramshackle roof.
Still, I couldn’t say a word.
“Angel,” she whispered. “It’s all right. The rain has a heavy noise to its trickles. We can talk for a while. No one will hear us.”
“I’m waiting for a customer,” I shrugged, worried it wasn’t a good idea to talk. What if we were exposed? “I’m afraid I will have to ask you to leave.”
“I am your customer,” she surprised me. “I have to say you’re terrible at disguising yourself. I mean ‘apple trader’? Again? I found you right away.”
“It’s the only job I knew,” I explained.
“I understand,” she let out a silly chuckle. “All the other things you did are mostly considered crimes in London now. A warrior, magician, and king. None of those things pay the bills in this age.”
“You forgot being a vampire,” I said, sensing the bitter shame on the tip of my tongue.
“That not only doesn’t pay the bills, but could get you killed.” She winked.
The rain had distorted the beauty of her face before me, so I dug deep into my memories of Sorrow and made a picture of her in my mind. She hadn’t changed much. Immortals rarely do.
“It’s nice to see you…” I wasn’t about to speak her name.
“Bronte,” she interrupted me, eyes glancing sideways. “Charlotte Bronte.”
It wasn’t her real name. She’d changed it, just like I had, so I called her by it. “What are you doing in London, Ms. Bronte?” I made conversation, like two strangers who might have known each other in another life.
“It’s Mrs. Bronte,” she corrected me. I wasn’t surprised. Every fairy tale character who’d survived the Brothers Grimm curse had remarried or found people they could call friends and relatives. I knew Peter Pan lived in Count Dracula’s castle in Romania, which was not far, but I had never tolerated Peter. I ended up. Somehow, I ended up the loneliest of all. “And to answer your question, I’m a writer.”
I tilted my head, impressed.
“I will publish my first book in about a year,” she gripped her umbrella tighter. “My publisher says it’s going to do well.”
“You always loved books, back in Sorrow.”
“True,” her eyes found mine through a piercing ray of light, invisible to everyone else.
Oh, the memories. The scent of Sorrow. The scent of my past. Our past. All the good things we had enjoyed and all the terrible things I’d done.
“Do you always drink tea now, Angel?” she asked, as if she’d just read my mind.
“Five times a week,” I said. “Blood on weekends.” My lips twitched.
“Your mind is trailing off again,” Charlotte said. “I know that look.”
She said the words but I heard something else. Something like, ‘My condolences, Angel. Sorry that the human person in you died long ago.’
“I only drink blood from people on their last breath,” I felt the need to explain. “Those who have no means to live beyond the hour.”
“How can you be sure it’s their last breath?” she asked. “Talked to God lately?”
Her words didn’t hurt. Her words reminded me of how smart she was. How much I liked her. “No, but I talked to Ladle,” I said. “Death herself.” I rubbed the rim of my cup. “She was kind enough to provide me with a list of the people she was about to kill for each month.”
“You made a deal with Death?” She raised an eyebrow. “A very unusual deal.”
“It’s morbid, I know.” I slightly lowered my head again. Sometimes, I thought I should write an apology on my forehead for all the damage I’d done.
“Not as morbid as my book,” she said, shrugging, her eyes looking outward at the rain.
“You’re writing a horror?”
“It’s debatable,” she said. “You can scare people with the monsters in the sea, and you can scare them with the monsters already inside them.”
“Poetic.” I smirked in a friendly way. It felt good to crack a joke with an old friend. “What’s it called?”
“My first book was supposed to be called The Professor,” she said. “It was basically my twisted version of you — without mentioning any of our secrets, of course.”
“Me?” I said. “Was it good?”
“To me, it was. But my publisher didn’t like it.”
“Any reason why?”
She glanced back, and I could see her looking beyond me, at memories of me back in Sorrow. “The publisher said your story was unbelievable, that it could never happen.”
I smiled. Truth had always been the least appreciated subject in fiction. Lies were the solid roots of a tree called novels. “I assume you wrote another book then, the one you’re about to publish.”
She nodded, the gaze in her eyes proud and worried at the same instance. I’d never seen that look in anyone before, so I couldn’t interpret it.
“Does your new book have a name?”
“Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte told me.
Rest assured, dear reader. You haven’t been surprised yet. And if this unsettles you, stop reading, because what’s coming might shatter your perception of history itself.
“Catchy name,” I said. “Sounds like an interesting woman.”
“She is,” Charlotte’s worries overshadowed her pride now. “I based Jane Eyre on someone both you and I know very well.”
The noisy rain seemed absent now, sucked into a dark river in the back of my mind. I hoped she wasn’t going to mention who I had in mind.
“I based the book on her,” Charlotte said, pointing at her red shoes. I hadn’t noticed them earlier. After all, I’d lived for years in a kingdom where the color red had been forbidden. My senses had developed an uncanny dismissiveness to it when I came across it. Even the blood I sucked from the almost-dying people seemed invisible. Red was the color of pain and its stains burned like a sun inside my cold heart.
“I based the book on her, Angel. Do you remember her?”
I knew Charlotte’s voice was going to haunt me for years — once the novel had become a landmark in the world of literature, except no one had known it was a book feebly based on a fairy tale character. A woman who had given me nightmares since the night of my birth.
A woman who’d given the world nightmares.
And no, we weren’t talking about Death.
“Your publisher liked her story?” I asked.
“Immensely,” she said. “He thinks the story will change the way men and women look at each other for the rest of our lives.”
“But why, Charlotte? Don’t you think readers will recognize who Jane Eyre really was?”
“Not at all. People have the amazing capacity to not notice or connect the dots.” She leaned back. “Besides, I didn’t tell the whole story. I made Jane Eyre the good girl. It’s the man she marries who’s the subject of great interest.”
“Just like the original story.” I closed my eyes, tapping my fingers on the table, still unable to outweigh the noise of the rain. “I like it that you left the darker parts out of the story. No one needs to know.”
“Even so, my publisher thinks it’s the perfect Gothic novel,” she chuckled. “He said it will mesmerize, entice, and also scare the world.”
I let out a painful laugh. With so much time on my hands, I had begun to read a few books — Sherlock Holmes being my favorite. Not because of Sherlock’s mastery in solving the puzzles, but it was his struggle with cocaine and loneliness that had struck me hard.
“Are you angry with me, Angel?” Charlotte asked.
“Angry, why would I be?”
“I know what she meant to you. It occurred to me you might not want me to retell her story.”
“You make it sound like she meant good things to me.” I opened my eyes, the blurriness of grey barely making way through the blackness of my memories.
“It’s hard to tell what she really was,” Charlotte argued. “I mean she went through a lot.”
I waved my hand in the air. “Please, Charlotte. If you want to write the book then do it, but don’t make excuses for her.”
“I see.” She seemed gloomy. In fact, she seemed worried. As if the pages of the book she’d written would haunt her for the rest of her life. “Would you like me to read something to you?”
“From the book?”
She was eager enough that her answer came in the shape of a few sheets of parchment she pulled out and placed on the table.
I stared at them, rain threatening to wipe out the ink if not read soon enough. It reminded me of the Books of Sand, like the one I’m using to write this specific diary.
“Either allow me to read it now or let the rain forever wash the words away,” Charlotte said.
I waited, not sure if I wanted her to read a book that was nothing but the origins of all the pain in my life. When I was a young boy, still living in my father’s castle, I used to wish upon the rain instead of the stars. Stars seemed so far away for a child who’d already been intimidated by the tallness of his elders. The rain was closer, more intimate, and though grey, it looked like it wouldn’t hurt me. I loved grey. I think it’s the color of my heart.
And now I let the rain distort and wipe away at the ink, leaving only a couple of sentences untouched. Just like in my childhood, I let it decide which part Charlotte should read.
Charlotte had always been a bright woman. She understood, picked up the parchment and began reading. “I lingered in the long passage which led to his bloody chambers in the castle…” An excerpt from Jane Eyre, unedited.
It felt like the words were pulling out my precious vampire fangs — although some of the exact words in the text had been altered by editors later.
Charlotte eyed me briefly then continued reading, with passion. “…there was only one little window at the far end of the passage, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.”
Her last and final words worried me. I glanced into her eyes. “You mentioned Bluebeard? Aren’t you afraid it will expose us and the truth about fairy tales?”
She let out a funny laugh, crumpling the parchment in one hand. “You don’t get it, Angel, do you?” she said. “We’re all fairy tales now. Mentioning Bluebeard will never prove he was real. Believ
e me, no one will even notice. We’re nothing but every child’s figment of imagination.”
“If so, then why have you contacted me, Charlotte? I find it hard to believe you came to tell me about a novel you wrote.”
She bit her lip, slightly looking down. It took her a moment to look up again, mustering all the courage she had. “You’re right. I came for something else.”
“I hope it’s not what I have in mind.”
“I think it is, Angel,” she said. “I am struggling with some details in the novel. Some details about Jane Eyre and her mysterious husband. I will not spill out vital information, but I want to understand what she really felt.”
“Jane Eyre or… her?”
“Her?” she said. “I want to ask you to retell the whole story to me.”
This almost pushed me to stand up and leave. But sometimes memories are made of chains of steel. They’re like a horror house; open the door and step in and it’s too late to go back before you see a demon smirking at you from the end of the hallway. Memories, if I could only suck the life out of them and kill them forever.
“I’m sorry to ask you this,” Charlotte said, “but I need your help.”
“I know only the things I’ve been told by my father, Night Von Sorrow, which are the things he’s been told by his grandfather and so on.”
“That’ll do.” She reached out and took my hand in hers. “But I also heard you have her diary in a Book of Sand.” She dared look in my eyes. “One that you have never opened to read.”
Her words made me look away from her, but she wouldn’t let go and reached for my other hand as well.
I only realized how cold my hands were from the rain when she took them into the warmth of hers. I was a vampire after all. Pale, cold, and bloody bitterness were my best friends. Angel Von Sorrow was a man of the past, one who was the strongest of all but torn up from the inside like the weakest of all. I think the trick to scaring people is to pretend you have no scars like them.
“Alright,” my voice was softer than the falling rain. “Here it is.” I pulled out a tiny bottle from my pocket in my coat, one that I had never dared to open. She was right.