Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  “They never stopped to think if maybe it wasn’t their own fault that the clouds were more interesting than they were.”

  Pauline may have looked rather dreamy then. But because she had no eyebrows, it was hard to tell. “Like the flames,” she whispered.

  Caspar sucked a gasp past his gaunt cheeks. “You didn’t tell them that, did you?”

  “I may have let it slip,” Jenny confessed. “It’s why they brought me here the first time. I don’t know why they thought it would do any good. They told me you were dreadful, but you looked plenty normal to me. I thought you were all brilliant! Well … Frederick needs some work. But even he’s not entirely hopeless.”

  This was even stranger than her standing up to Frederick. No one had ever spoken to the rest of them this way, either.

  “Even you, under all that ratty hair,” she told Peter. “But do tell me you speak. It’ll be so much better living across the hall from someone who speaks.”

  “I speak,” Conrad said, more eagerly than he’d perhaps intended.

  “And it’s good you do. Because I don’t think you’ll play catch very well.”

  If this had come from Frederick it would’ve been horrible, but the way Jenny said it, it just made him laugh. Because it was true. He was an inveterate ball-dropper.

  She got settled in then, not a process that took long, pacing her room to get a feel for its limits and bouncing on the bed and sniffing the bar of soap she’d been allotted. The rest drifted away to their rooms because it was night, after all, and they were starting to grow sleepy, and it was good to get away from the place for a while, if only during their dreams.

  Peter, though, lingered in her doorway awhile longer.

  “One thing,” he said. “When they feed us? Save a little aside, if you would. We all do, except for Frederick. Just don’t let them catch you doing it.” He checked the hallway even though he knew no one could be listening. “It’s for Caspar, right? They only feed him enough to barely keep him going. He’s got to have the look, you know?”

  “Consider it done,” Jenny said.

  “And … you don’t mind coming here?” he said. “You really don’t?”

  “Well, I didn’t like ballet and wasn’t much on sports, and I didn’t like being told how and what to sing,” she said. “According to them, I don’t fit in anywhere. So maybe giving it a go here won’t be so bad.”

  “Let’s see if you can say that in a month.” Again Peter checked that this was just between them. “You’re not supposed to like it here. Nothing good can come of it if they think you do.”

  “Then I’ll work on just the right expressions of misery and woe,” she said. “You know, for a kid who can pick his nose without getting his actual finger anywhere near it, you’re really quite nice.”

  Peter had no idea how to answer that, but it sounded like a compliment and he wasn’t used to those.

  Before he left for his room, he noticed that she’d wandered over to one wall and tipped her head toward the ceiling. He watched her watch it, expecting something to happen next, only a peculiar long time passed and nothing ever did.

  Finally he was forced to ask: “What are you looking at?”

  “The stars, of course.”

  “But you’ve got no window.”

  “They’re still there,” she said.

  And now he knew, really knew, why they’d called her Jenny-with-Her-Head-in-the-Clouds, and why they’d feared her. She could see stars where everybody else saw old wallpaper. How were you going to cure that?

  And that was why, one morning a couple of weeks later, Peter didn’t know anything was any different about her at first. There had been some bumbling and fumbling in the halls during the night, and the sound of whimpering, but he’d not thought much about them, because as sounds go, they weren’t unusual, not here, and so he’d rolled over and gone back to sleep.

  It was early yet, long before the first tour of the day, before breakfast even, and Jenny was late in coming from her room, and when she finally did, she had eyes only for the ceiling. Peter watched her grope her way through the doorway and into the hall, and thought, all right, perhaps she was carrying this head-in-the-clouds business just a little too far.

  “What?” he said. “You can’t even look at me to talk to me anymore?” Saying this, yes, but thinking worse, that maybe she’d decided she couldn’t stomach the sight of him either, finally.

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “I’m down here. Just drop your nose toward your chin and you’ll find me.”

  “Really,” she whispered, and now he heard the distress in her voice. “I can’t.” She wiggled a finger over one shoulder. “It’s back there.”

  Peter stepped behind her. Nothing looked any different at a glance, so he used his fingernails to sweep aside the shiny dark fall of her hair—wishing, with a sudden thrill, that his nails were not such talons, and he could feel her hair with his fingers.

  His breath caught in his throat for grimmer reasons. “What have they done to you?”

  “I don’t know.” Now she sounded impatient with him. “You’re the one who can see it, not me.”

  He held her hair aside as he scrutinized. They’d sewn her up where nothing was wrong to begin with. They had yanked her head back so far she could only look straight up, then made sure she stayed that way, with no mobility left at all. A great mass of thick black stitches bunched together the skin at the base of her skull and webbed it to the skin where her neck met her shoulders. It looked excruciatingly uncomfortable, and when he told her what he’d found, she uttered a sob that tore out the heart he wasn’t even sure he had anymore.

  He let her hair fall into place again and promised her that he wasn’t leaving her, even though it might look like it for the moment—that he would be back and that if she needed help eating when breakfast came, he would help her do that too.

  Then he ran, ran down the stairs, fourth floor to third to second to the landing on the first floor, the point beyond which none of them could venture. Here he was stopped by the greatest barred door of all, not just up-and-down bars like the ones that confined them to their rooms during tour hours, but side-to-side bars as well, so close together that even children couldn’t quite reach through them.

  With his nails so long, he couldn’t pull together a true fist, but he made the best one he could and banged on the door, banged and kicked and banged, and hollered a few times on top of that, until a door opened down the hallway and out stormed Mr. Crouch.

  “Here, now, here, now!” he shouted. “What’s all this fuss and racket?”

  “Why’d you do a thing like that to her?” Peter shouted back, another act unheard-of for such a long time he’d forgotten it could be any other way. “She was already herself when she came here! You didn’t need to do that to her!”

  Still wearing a faded purple bathrobe that hung over his pajamas like a sail, Mr. Crouch drew up to the other side of the bars with a squint and a glare, and then a mean little chuckle. “Gone a little sweet on her, have you?”

  “It’s not right!” Peter shouted. “It’s not fair!”

  “You’ll want to watch yourself, boy. Don’t make me call Snip-Snap on you, eh? You don’t want a visit from him,” Mr. Crouch said in a low voice full of menace and threat. “It’s not just thumbs he likes to snip, so you mind that tongue of yours.”

  Peter clamped his mouth shut. He’d never considered such a thing. But backing down felt worse than contemplating the loss of a tongue he hadn’t ever had much need for anyway, because nobody cared what he had to say.

  Until now, perhaps.

  And he thought it a shame that there was so much hair tumbling down over his forehead and face that Mr. Crouch couldn’t see him smirk.

  “What kind of scissors would he use for that?” Peter asked.

  Mr. Crouch rumbled with a growl deep in his wattled throat and finished with a weary sigh. “Ain’t you figured out your place yet? All this time, have you
not noticed where you stand in the grand scheme, boy? You, the rest of your miserable rabble up there? You don’t know what you are?”

  He waited for Peter to think about it.

  “You’re what’s left behind when there’s no more hope. When there’s nothing more for your poor parents to do but throw their hands in the air and give up.” He spat the words, each and every one. “Don’t like it? Too bad. You should’ve thought of that before. So now you’re here. Not fair? Not right? I’ll tell you what’s not fair and right. Decent folks not getting their money’s worth when they bring their own young ones here to show them you lot and scare ’em back to rights again.”

  Mr. Crouch drew himself up straighter, taller, and looked at Peter down his long nose.

  “You’re not boys and girls anymore. You’re just something to look at, and if you need a little adjusting, then so be it. It’s not for no reason.” He rolled his eyes. “Who’s going to learn their lesson from a Jenny-with-Her-Head-in-the-Clouds when she’s not even looking at the silly clouds? When she’s looking right straight at you?”

  Peter began to back away from the bars.

  “So you keep mouthing off, and we’ll arrange a little visit from Snip-Snap. It’s what we do here. We smooth off the rough edges.” He was very full of himself now, leaning against the bars and leering through. “Let me let you in on a little something. I told you there was no more hope? There can be … it just doesn’t happen that way very often. But our Snip-Snap … ? He’s proof that an incorrigible boy like yourself has still got a chance to grow up and make something of himself. Even a boy who liked to run with scissors. So you keep that in mind … and hold your tongue.”

  Tours came and tours went, an endless passage of shuffling feet and pointing fingers and staring eyes, and through it all Peter tried to convince himself that it was not such a bad lot in life. But there was no selling this one anymore. They all seemed to feel it, even Cruel Frederick, who’d rather liked having a captive audience to torment.

  There had to be more than this.

  Early mornings and late nights, and sometimes during the day if he thought he could get away with it, Peter crept down the stairs to the first floor, as far as he could go, until stopped by the great barred door. Not to bang, nor to kick, nor to holler, but only to look, staring at the door at the opposite end of the hallway.

  There was daylight there, and it wasn’t very bright, but still, it spoke of fearless days and open skies. There was rain, too, and it felt cold even from here, but Peter imagined how clean it might feel. There was a street out there, and beyond it, more streets, and beyond them, roads, then fields, and beyond all that … well, who rightly knew?

  Was it his longing that made the next unexpected thing happen? Or had even sour old Mr. Crouch tired of the game? Not likely, that, but perhaps time had made him careless.

  The last tour was not entirely gone yet, the stragglers lingering endlessly in what Mrs. Crouch called the gift shop, buying up picture books and tut-tutting about the sorry state of children today, when Peter, his room door newly opened once more, crept down to stare after them. He’d been there several moments when his gaze dropped, and he could not believe his eyes.

  There, on the other side of the door, the great barred door, lay the key.

  In his haste to sell more picture books, the careless oaf had missed his pocket.

  A chance like this would never come along again.

  Peter squatted and reached, but no matter how he twisted and turned and contorted his hand, it wouldn’t fit through the openings, none of them. There were all the same, all too tight, too small, and he nearly squealed with the frustration of it.

  Until, frantic, he realized he was going about this all wrong. His nails, his long, hideous fingernails—that was sure to do it.

  The longest of them grew from the index finger of his left hand, so he curled the rest back along his palm, then reached through like a wizard with a wand, and no no no no no! It still fell short, the tip of his nail scritch-scratching the tiled floor not half an inch from the key, even as he ground his hand against the door until his knuckles were bloody.

  He pulled back his hand in defeat and licked away the blood.

  In sorrow, in despair, he trudged back upstairs, and was at the third floor before realizing he’d still been going about this the wrong way, and launched himself to take the rest two steps at a time.

  Conrad protested and struggled, as you do when what seems like a crazy boy has seized you to drag you down flight after flight of stairs, and clapped his hand over your mouth to keep you quiet. But it all made sense when they got to the door, the great barred door, and Peter pointed.

  The reach through the bars was not nearly as difficult for a boy whose hands were so unencumbered by thumbs.

  He waited a week. He waited two.

  A thing like this could not be rushed. A thing like this had to be planned. And courage, too, it took, for some matters Peter could only guess at and hope that he was right. As well, Mr. Crouch was on his guard. Undoubtedly he knew he’d lost a key, or more likely blamed the gelatinous Mrs. Crouch for it, yet if he was in any way logical, he had to know he’d lost it on his side of the door. It was bound to turn up eventually, and in any case, there were spares.

  In the meantime it was Peter’s secret, his and Conrad’s alone. What the others didn’t know about they couldn’t look suspicious about, and while Mr. Crouch was by nature a suspicious man, there wasn’t much of Peter’s face that he could even see, the smelly hair like another set of bars between them. As for Conrad, well, what did anyone have to fear from a boy without thumbs?

  And, in time, Mr. Crouch settled back into being his usual petulant self.

  Meaning the time had come.

  Peter had chosen to begin in the evening, for that was when the most hours stretched ahead of them before the daily routine began all over again. He returned to his spot at the great barred door and, as never before, banged and kicked and banged some more. Predictable as gravity, out stormed Mr. Crouch, shirttails flying as he stalked toward the door.

  “Here, now, what’s all this fuss and—” He stopped short with a glare fit to curdle milk. “You again. Didn’t I warn you, boy?”

  “I don’t think there is a Snip-Snap,” Peter said with the greatest confidence. “I think you made him up.”

  Mr. Crouch’s eyes narrowed to a wrathful squint. “You keep at it, you flea-bitten little gutter rat, and you’ll find out what’s real and what isn’t.”

  There was nothing more to say. Peter lifted both hands before him, grubby knuckles out, and fired both his middle fingers at the ceiling.

  Given the length of his nails, the insult cut doubly deep.

  In case this next part went badly, he told the others they might want to hide, especially Conrad. For him, the mere sight of Snip-Snap was bound to bring back memories best unstirred. Peter sat on the end of his bed then, and hadn’t long to wait.

  There sounded a clang of the door from far below. Next came footsteps, up the stairs, floor after floor. This was someone who did not walk like the other grown-ups. He didn’t clomp, he didn’t shuffle. His pace was measured and full of purpose. It never once varied, like the sound of an enormous clock, ticking away each moment until the moment of reckoning.

  His stride took him down the hall, then he filled the doorway and was through it, immensely tall and frightfully thin, his legs in particular, sweeping past each other like … well, like scissors. His top hat gave him scarcely an inch of clearance with the ceiling, and his face was all sharp bone and sallow skin, although he didn’t look to be terribly old.

  It was the glasses he wore that Peter was glad to see—an odd pair, with brass frames and round lenses, one clear and one dark. Yes, Peter thought as he breathed relief. I knew it.

  Snip-Snap studied him a moment, and his hands were elegant as spiders as he peeled open the left side of his frock coat to reveal a gleaming assortment of scissors and shears, all hung just so.
He regarded them but a moment, and chose. He clicked the pair in the air, snipsnipsnip.

  “A middle finger, it’s to be,” he said. “Mr. Crouch was good enough to allow you to choose which one. He finds them equally offensive.”

  Peter offered both hands, splayed wide. “Make it all ten. Just the nails, though.”

  Behind the clear lens, Snip-Snap’s eyebrow lifted nearly to the brim of his hat. “The nails?”

  “And then my hair. And then another last thing, but one at a time, right?”

  Snip-Snap may not have been capable of an entire smile, but he could manage half a one. “You do realize who I am, and why I’m here. Do you not?”

  Peter rested his hands in his lap. “Actually, I’ve thought about that quite a lot. You were one of us once, weren’t you? They put you away here, too, didn’t they? For what—because you wouldn’t stop running with scissors? That’s all?”

  “Ancient history.”

  “Maybe so, but I bet even right this minute you’d still like to have that eye back.”

  Snip-Snap lowered the scissors and held his head at a curious tilt.

  “I’ll bet it wasn’t even an accident, was it? Oh, everyone kept telling you a thing like that was going to happen, only it never did. Because you kept your feet under you and you never fell. But that made them wrong, and they couldn’t have that, could they? They had to be right, and for that, they had to make it look right.” Peter pointed at the dark lens. “They did that to you, didn’t they? They took your eye.”

  Slowly, contemplatively, Snip-Snap slipped the glasses from his head. It was not a pretty sight. True, Peter had no experience with missing eyes, only missing thumbs, but he was expecting that they might have sewn the whole thing shut, stitched the eyelids together like a window shade over the empty socket. Instead, the ruin was still prominent: folds of raw pink over a spongy, dry mass.

  Snip-Snap opened his coat again and replaced the first pair of scissors on their little cloth loop. In their place, he took a dull, stained pair that were lesser in every way—a short pair, a child’s first true scissors after graduating from blunt tips.