Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  When she went in and said good-evening, a piece of gold at once fell out of her mouth. Thereupon she related what had happened to her in the wood. But with every word she spoke, gold pieces fell from her mouth, until very soon the whole room was covered with them.

  “Now look at her arrogance!” cried the stepsister, “to throw about gold in that way.” But she was secretly envious of it, and wanted to go into the forest also to seek strawberries.

  The mother said, “No, my dear little daughter, it is too cold. You might freeze to death.” However, as her daughter let her have no peace, the mother at last yielded, made her a magnificent coat of fur, which she was obliged to put on, and gave her bread-and-butter and cake for her journey.

  The girl went into the forest and straight up to the little house. The three little men peeped out again, but she did not greet them. And without looking round at them and without speaking to them, she went awkwardly into the room, seated herself by the stove, and began to eat her bread-and-butter and cake.

  “Give us some of it,” cried the little men.

  But she replied, “There is not enough for myself, so how can I give it away to other people?”

  When she had finished eating, they said, “There is a broom for you, sweep it all clean in front of the back-door.”

  “Sweep for yourselves,” she answered, “I am not your servant.”

  When she saw that they were not going to give her anything, she went out by the door.

  Then the little men said to each other, “What shall we give her as she is so naughty, and has a wicked, envious heart that will never let her do a good turn to anyone?”

  The first said, “I grant that she may grow uglier every day.”

  The second said, “I grant that at every word she says, a toad shall spring out of her mouth.”

  The third said, “I grant that she may die a miserable death.”

  The maiden looked for strawberries outside, but as she found none, she went angrily home.

  And when she opened her mouth, and was about to tell her mother what had happened to her in the wood, with every word she said, a toad sprang out of her mouth, so that everyone was seized with horror of her.

  Then the stepmother was still more enraged, and thought of nothing but how to do every possible injury to the man’s daughter, whose beauty, however, grew daily greater. At length she took a cauldron, set it on the fire, and boiled yarn in it. When it was boiled, she flung it on the poor girl’s shoulder, and gave her an ax in order that she might go on the frozen river, cut a hole in the ice, and rinse the yarn.

  She was obedient, went thither and cut a hole in the ice. And while she was in the midst of her cutting, a splendid carriage came driving up, in which sat the King.

  The carriage stopped, and the King asked, “My child, who are you, and what are you doing here?”

  “I am a poor girl, and I am rinsing yarn.”

  Then the King felt compassion, and when he saw that she was so very beautiful, he said to her, “Will you go away with me?”

  “Ah, yes, with all my heart,” she answered, for she was glad to get away from the mother and sister.

  So she got into the carriage and drove away with the King. And when they arrived at his palace, the wedding was celebrated with great pomp, as the little men had granted to the maiden.

  When a year was over, the young Queen bore a son. And as the stepmother had heard of her great good-fortune, she came with her daughter to the palace and pretended that she wanted to pay her a visit.

  But, when the King had gone out, and no one else was present, the wicked woman seized the Queen by the head, and her daughter seized her by the feet, and they lifted her out of the bed, and threw her out of the window into the stream which flowed by.

  Then the ugly daughter laid herself in the bed, and the old woman covered her up over her head.

  When the King came home again and wanted to speak to his wife, the old woman cried, “Hush, hush. That can’t be now, she is lying in a violent sweat. You must let her rest today.”

  The King suspected no evil, and did not come back again till next morning. And as he talked with his wife and she answered him, with every word a toad leaped out, whereas formerly a piece of gold had fallen.

  Then he asked what that could be, but the old woman said that she had got that from the violent sweat, and would soon lose it again.

  During the night, however, the scullion saw a duck come swimming up the gutter, and it said, “King, what art thou doing now? Sleepest thou, or wakest thou?”

  And as he returned no answer, it said, “And my guests, what may they do?”

  The scullion said, “They are sleeping soundly, too.”

  Then it asked again, “What does little baby mine?”

  He answered, “Sleepeth in her cradle fine.”

  Then she went upstairs in the form of the Queen, nursed the baby, shook up its little bed, covered it over, and then swam away again down the gutter in the shape of a duck.

  She came thus for two nights. On the third, she said to the scullion, “Go and tell the King to take his sword and swing it three times over me on the threshold.”

  Then the scullion ran and told this to the King, who came with his sword and swung it thrice over the spirit, and at the third time, his wife stood before him strong, living, and healthy as she had been before.

  Thereupon the King was full of great joy, but he kept the Queen hidden in a chamber until the Sunday, when the baby was to be christened.

  And when it was christened he said, “What does a person deserve who drags another out of bed and throws him in the water?”

  “The wretch deserves nothing better,” answered the old woman, “than to be taken and put in a barrel stuck full of nails, and rolled downhill into the water.”

  “Then,” said the King, “you have pronounced your own sentence.” And he ordered such a barrel to be brought, and the old woman to be put into it with her daughter. And then the top was hammered on, and the barrel rolled downhill until it went into the river.

  Look Inside

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  I’m going to tell a little fib to start off with. Don’t worry—I’ll let you know what it was, later on. What I leave you with will be the truth. I promise.

  But I’ll tell you the other stuff first.

  And I’m pregnant.

  When it started, I’d been out for the evening. A work dinner, which meant a few hours in an Italian restaurant in Soho while my boss rambled over the challenges facing his company in these tough economic times, and was fairly good about not glancing down my blouse. He’s not a bad guy and he’s married and I know he wants to stay that way, so I let the looks pass. I’m sure that the sisterhood—or the sleek academics and marketable malcontents that pass for it these days—would argue that I should give him a hard time about it, preferably in public and accompanied by a brisk slap upside the head, but I can’t be bothered. Men have been sneaking peeks at women’s bodies (and vice versa, let’s speak true, our waiter had a butt you could have bounced a sugar lump off) since we were covered in a pelt of fur, and I don’t see the practice dying out any day soon. It’s all very well for the sisterhood. They work in free-range all-female collectives where the issue doesn’t arise or else sit preening in universities where the guys are all so weedy and beardy and institutionalized that they don’t dare step out of line. Try pulling that Camille Paglia shit in the real world and you’ll wind up quickly unemployed, not to mention notoriously single.

  It wasn’t a long dinner, and even after tubing back I was still home by half past nine. I own a very small house in an area of North London called Kentish Town, not far from the station and the main road. Kentish Town is basically now an interstice between the nicer and more expensive neighborhoods of Hampstead, Highgate and Camden, but before it was subsumed into urban sprawl it had been a place of slight note, open country enlivened by the attractive river Fleet—sourced in springs up on Hampstead Heath but l
ong-ago so snarled and polluted that it was eventually lost, paved over for its entire length and redirected into an underground sewer.

  My narrow little house stands close to where it once ran, in the middle of a short mid-Victorian terrace, and is three (and a bit) stories high with a scrap of garden out back, halved in size by a galley-kitchen extension put in by the previous owner. Originally, so I was told by said owner, the homes were built to house the families of men working on the railway line, and it’s remarkably unremarkable except for the fact that one side of my garden is bounded by an old stone wall, inset into which is a badly weathered stone plaque mentioning St. John’s College. A little research turned up the fact that hundreds of years before the land that these houses were built on—and a chunk of Kentish Town itself—had belonged to the College, part of Cambridge University. Why a college would have owned a garden a hundred miles away is beyond me, but then, I’ve never understood the appeal of reality television or Colin Firth, either, so it’s possible I’m just a bit dim.

  Here endeth the tour.

  It’s a very small house but I’m lucky to have it at all, given London’s lunatic house prices. Well—not just lucky. Oh, how my friends took the piss when I bought my first apartment and shackled myself with a mortgage straight out of university, but now that I’ve been able to swap up to a place with an actual staircase and they’re still renting crappy two-bed apartments in excessively multicultural neighborhoods, it’s not so damn funny, it appears (except to me, of course).

  Once indoors I hung up my coat, kicked off my shoes and undid the top button of my skirt in an effort to increase my physical comfort in a postpasta universe. Thus civilianized, I wandered through the living room (an epic journey of exactly five paces) and into the kitchen, where I zoned out while waiting for the kettle to boil. I’d drunk only two glasses of wine but I was tired, and the combination put me into a fuzzy trance.

  Then, for no reason I was conscious of, I turned and looked out into the living room.

  The kettle had just finished boiling, sending a cloud of steam up around my face, and yet there was a cold spot on the back of my neck.

  Someone’s been in my house.

  I knew it without doubt. Or felt I did, anyway. I’ve always believed it a romantic notion (in the sense of “sweet, but deluded”) that you would somehow know if someone had been in your house—that the intrusion of a stranger would leave some tangible psychic trace; that your dwelling is your friend and will tattle on an interloper.

  A house is nothing more than walls and a roof and a collection of furnishings and objects—most chosen on the grounds of economy, not with boundless attention or existential rigor—and the only difference between you and every other person on the planet is that you’re entitled by law to be there. And yet I knew it.

  I knew someone had been in my house.

  What if he’s still here?

  The kitchen extension has a side door—my back door, I guess—which leads into the garden. I could open it, slip out that way. I couldn’t get far, though, as the neighbors’ gardens are the other side of high fences (in one case built upon the remains of that old wall). I didn’t like the idea for other reasons, too.

  It was my fucking house and I didn’t want to flee from it, not to mention I’d feel an utter fool if I was discovered trying to shin my way over a fence into a neighbor’s garden on the basis of a “feeling.” That’s exactly the kind of feeble shit that gives us chicks a bad name.

  I reached out to the door, however. I turned the handle, gently, and discovered … it was unlocked.

  I knew the front door had been locked, too—I’d unlocked it on my return from dinner. All the windows in the kitchen were closed and locked, and from where I stood, still frozen in place, I could see the big window at the front of the living room was locked, too.

  There was, in other words, only one possible way in which someone could have got into the house—and that was if I’d left the back door unlocked when I left the house that morning.

  I didn’t know anything about the tactics of housebreaking, but suspected that you’d leave your point of entry open (or at least ajar) while you were on the premises, to make it easier to effect a rapid exit if the householder returned home. You wouldn’t close it.

  My back door had been closed. Which meant hopefully he wasn’t still on the premises.

  I relaxed, just a little.

  I tiptoed back through the living room to the bottom of the stairs and peered up them, listening hard. I couldn’t hear anything, and I know from experience that the wooden floors up there are impossible to traverse without setting off a cavalcade of creaks—that sometimes the damned things will creak in the dead of night even if there’s no one treading on them, especially the ones on the very top floor.

  “Hello?”

  I held my breath, listening for movement from above. Nothing. Absolute silence.

  So I went on a cautious tour of the house. The bathroom and so-called guest room on the first floor; the bedroom and clothes-storage-pit on the next; and finally the minuscule “attic” room at the very top, situated up its own stunted little flight of five stairs. According to the previous owner, this would originally have been intended for a housemaid. She’d have needed to be a tiny fucking housemaid, I’d always thought.

  The space was so small that any normal-sized person would have to sleep curled up in a ball. She wouldn’t have been able to stand up in the space, either, as I’d confirmed only the day before. I’d finally got round to hoicking out and charity-shopping a few old boxes of crap that had been languishing in there since I moved in. During the process I straightened at one point without thinking, banging my head on the dusty old beam hard enough to break the skin, causing a drop or two of blood to fall to the wooden floorboards.

  I could still see where they’d fallen, but at least the tiny room was tidy now.

  And empty, along with all the other rooms.

  The whole house looked exactly as it had when I’d left that morning, i.e., like the lair of a twenty-eight-year-old professional woman who—while not a total slattern—isn’t obsessed with tidiness. Nothing out of place, nothing missing, nothing moved. Nobody there.

  And there never had been, of course. The sense I believed I’d had, the feeling that someone had been inside, was simply wrong.

  That’s all.

  By the time I reached the ground floor again I was wondering whether I was actually going to watch television (my previously intended course of action) or if I should have a bath and go to bed instead. Or maybe just go straight to bed, with a book. Or magazine. I couldn’t quite settle on a plan.

  Then I thought of something else.

  I shook my head, decided it was silly, but wearily tromped toward the kitchen. Might as well check.

  I flicked the kettle back on to make a cuppa for bed (having decided on the way it was now late enough without spending an hour half-watching crap television, and showering tomorrow morning would do just fine, given the emptiness of my bed). Once a teabag was in the cup waiting, I turned my attention to the bread bin.

  My mother gave this to me, a moving-in present when I bought the house. It’s fashioned in an overtly rustic style and would look simply fabulous if placed within easy reach of an AGA in a country kitchen (which my mother has, and would like me to have too, preferably soon and in the company of an only moderately boring young man who would commute from there to a well-paid job in the City while also helping me to start popping out children at a steady clip). In my current abode the bread bin merely looks unfeasibly large.

  I don’t actually eat bread either, or not often, as it gives me the bloat something chronic. I was therefore confident that it should be empty of baked goods but for a few crumbs and maybe a rock-hard croissant.

  Nonetheless this is what I had come to check.

  I lifted the handle on the front, releasing a faint scent of long-ago sliced bread. Then I let out a small shriek, and jumped back.

&nb
sp; The front of the bin dropped with a clatter which sounded very loud. I opened it again and blinked at the interior, then cautiously reached out.

  Inside my bread bin was a note. I took it out.

  It said:

  It’s very pretty. And so are you

  I need to backtrack a little here.

  Years ago, in the summer after I left college, I went on a trip to America. I can’t really describe it as “traveling,” as I rented a car and stayed in motels most of the time—rather than heroically hitchhiking and bunking down in vile hostels or camping in the woods, dodging psycho killers, poison oak and ticks full to bursting with Lyme disease—but it was me out there on my own for two months, and so it qualifies for the word “trip” in my book.

  In the middle of it I lodged for five days with some old friends of my parents, a genteel couple called Brian and Randall who lived in decaying grandeur in an old house in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, the name of which escapes me. It was a pleasant interval, during which I learned that Mozart is not all bad, that my mother had once vomited for two hours after an evening sampling port wines, and that you can perk up cottage cheese no end by stirring some fresh dill into it. Fact.

  I noticed something the first night I was there. Randall had gone upstairs to bed. Brian, by a slender margin the more butch of the two, sat up with me awhile longer, conferring advice on sights in the locale that were worth a detour (almost none, according to him).

  As we said good night in the kitchen, I noticed that he checked the house’s back door was shut (without locking it, however), and hesitated for a moment in front of a small wooden box affixed to the wall immediately opposite it before giving it a little tap.

  The next morning I was up early and as I made myself a cup of tea (Brian and Randall were fierce Anglophiles, having spent several years living in Oxford, and had a bewildering array of hard-core teas to choose from) I drifted over and took a look at the wooden box.

  It was small, about two inches deep, nine inches wide and six inches tall. There was a hinged lid on the top and upon this had been painted the words LOOK INSIDE!