When they heard this story, the parents wailed in horror and distress. They ran with sledgehammers and pikes to the mountain, and banged at the rock till darkness, searching for the opening. The Politician, who had lost three little boys and two little girls, clawed at the stone with bloodied hands, but it was all useless. When night fell, the citizens had to return to Hamelin without their children, and only the cold face of the moon was witness to the dreadful sights and sounds of their grief.
The Stolen Childhood
A stepmother lived with her dead husband’s young daughter. The girl was sweet-natured and lovely, but the stepmother had a heart that had soured and shrivelled under her black frock. Her hair had dried and rusted on her head and she took pleasure in nothing.
Day after day, she watched her stepdaughter as she played in the garden and the stepmother’s blood clogged with envy as she saw the young girl chasing butterflies or turning cartwheels or singing to herself in the arms of the apple tree. More than anything, the stepmother yearned and burned to be young again.
One day, a stranger came to the town and took a room at the inn. The stepmother, staring as usual from her window, noticed the stranger walking in the lane. He was tall and dark and as the woman gazed down at him, he glanced up and spied her. With one look he saw into her dark soul and knew what she wanted.
‘Come to me,’ he said, and she heard him and jumped, as though a poker were stirring the burnt coals and ashes of her heart. She hurried outside into the lane to stand beside him.
Close up she could see that there was no kindness in his face and she shivered. He was holding a pair of sharp silver scissors.
‘I can give you what you most want,’ he said. ‘Take these scissors and cut the shadow from the first young person you find asleep. Then you must snip off your own shadow and throw it over the young person without waking them. Their youth will be yours at once and they will be as old as you are now.’
‘What must I pay you for this?’ asked the stepmother, because she knew very well there would be a price.
‘You will be my bride,’ he answered, ‘on the happiest day of your life.’
The stepmother gave a dry laugh and thought that the man was joking, but she agreed to his strange bargain and took the scissors. He walked rapidly away down the lane and quite soon after that he left the town.
The stepmother went into the garden holding the scissors, which glittered in her hand in the sunlight.
Her young stepdaughter was stretched out on the lawn with her straw hat over her face, fast asleep in the warm buttery sun. Her shadow lay on the grass beside her, so cool and dark that already the daisies there had started to close.
The stepmother knelt down, silent as poison, and cut along the whole length of the girl’s shadow. A breeze blew under it and lifted it gently, but the stepmother snatched at it, crumpling it up and stuffing it in her skirt pocket. It felt like the softest silk.
Then the stepmother stood and saw her own long shadow at her feet. She bent down and with a snap! and a snip! she cut it off. She lifted her heavy, leathery shadow and tossed it over the sleeping girl, then turned and ran towards the house to look in the mirror. Her step felt lighter and for the first time in years she noticed all the different smells of the garden as she ran.
The stepdaughter felt something heavy and sour-smelling upon her and opened her eyes in fright. It was dark. She screamed and tried to jump up but her body felt stiff and strange and her back ached.
She sat up and pushed the shadow away from her and it lay in a heap like an old black coat.
‘How horrible!’ cried the girl.
She touched her throat. Her voice was different, deeper and harsher, not like a child’s voice at all. She looked at her hands. They were like a pair of crumpled gloves, several sizes too big, the skin loose and creased over the bones.
She stood up slowly, holding the small of her back, and heard the waxy creak of her knees. Truly scared now, she hurried as fast as she could, a bit out of breath, to look in the mirror.
The mirror was a full-length one and hung in the shadowy hall. The stepmother was standing before it and she turned her head as she heard the sound of her stepdaughter behind her. Both of them stared at each other in disbelief and then the stepmother began to laugh, the light easy laugh of a young girl.
‘Look at yourself!’ she cried and pulled her stepdaughter to the mirror.
A middle-aged face stared back from the glass, grey-haired and lined. The stepdaughter’s teeth felt strange and uncomfortable in her mouth and when she touched them with her tongue she realised that they were false. She began to cough and the bitter taste of tobacco scalded the back of her throat. She turned to her stepmother.
Her stepmother was smaller, with soft hair the colour of a conker and skin as delicate as the petal of a rose. She was jumping up and down and clapping her hands.
‘It worked! It worked!’ she cried. ‘I am young again and you have all my years!’
Then the stepmother spun round and ran back into the sunshine and the poor stepdaughter fell to the floor in the dark hall and sobbed bitterly.
Summer turned, as it has to do, into autumn and autumn soon became winter.
It was the stepdaughter now who stood at the window, a shawl round her cold stiff bones, watching the village children throw snowballs in the field on the other side of the lane.
She wondered why her young stepmother never played with the others, why she never helped to make a snowman – pushing a snowball along till it doubled and trebled and quadrupled in size, creaking under her mittens. And why she never hopped and whistled her way to school with the other children or pressed her nose to the toyshop window or scraped a stick along the green railings of the park. What was the point of her stepmother being young at all?
A fierce headache tightened round her brow, deepening the frowns and creases on her papery skin, and she turned away from the window and went to lie down on the bed in her hushed, dull room. She was always tired now.
She took out her teeth and put them in a glass of water on the bedside table. They grinned away at her as though Death himself had come to call.
But downstairs the stepmother pulled on her boots and went for a walk in the snow, ignoring the shouts of the children playing in the field.
‘Youth,’ she sneered to herself, ‘is wasted on the young.’
She walked for miles, breathing in the clean cold air and not feeling the faintest bit tired, working up a good hunger for dinner.
She grabbed a fistful of snow and sucked at it, gasping at the cold. She was young again! Young! Her skin and her eyes and her hair sparkled in the hard white winter light.
Winter turned to spring then summer then autumn then winter then spring then summer …
The stepmother was taller now and beautiful and many young men came to the house to visit her. They brought flowers and perfume and chocolates and told her that they adored her, and that she was the loveliest young girl in the village, that her lips were rubies and her eyes were sapphires and that each little nail on the tips of her fingers was a pearl.
‘I am in the springtime of my life,’ gloated the stepmother. ‘Again!’
Her stepdaughter watched the young men come and go from her window, but none of them so much as glanced up at the sad old woman with the dull eyes and the yellowing teeth.
One young man, the stepdaughter thought, was handsomer and jollier than all the rest, and her heart, tired as it was, would skip a beat as though it had almost remembered something, whenever she saw him.
At night she would dream that she was dancing and laughing in his arms, a girl once more. But when she woke up she was alone, brittle and aching in the mothbally shroud of her nightgown.
As the summer passed, she noticed that the young man came more and more often to the house to visit her stepmother and that the other boys had drifted away.
On the first day of autumn her stepmother and the young man came before her and told her tha
t they were to be married. Her tired heart sank like a stone in her chest as she looked at the young man and she knew then that she loved him, but she kissed her stepmother and wished her happiness.
‘Oh, I will be happy,’ answered the stepmother. ‘My wedding day will be the happiest day of my life.’
The stepmother had decided to be married at Christmas. The days fell from the calendar like leaves from the trees and, quicker than the snip of scissors, it was the morning of Christmas Eve.
The wedding was to be at noon and already the bellringers were swinging from their ropes, sending the warm bronze voices of the bells across the frozen fields. The bride was to be driven from the house to the church in a white carriage pulled by a chestnut horse. The stepdaughter was to ride behind her in a plain wooden carriage.
As the bells chimed eleven o’clock, the stepdaughter was standing in the lane waiting for the carriages to arrive. The cold bit through her dark winter coat into her bones.
‘Here I am!’ Her stepmother stood at the door of the house in a dress of silver and gold. ‘How do I look?’
‘You look good enough to eat,’ said a harsh voice from the lane.
The stepdaughter saw the shock and surprise on her stepmother’s face and turned to see who had spoken.
A tall man with a mean face and fierce eyes had appeared from nowhere and stood staring intensely at the bride. ‘Our carriage will soon be here.’
‘Our carriage?’ said the stepmother. ‘You must be mistaken!’
All the colour had drained from her face until she was paler than the late white roses that she carried in her hands.
‘Come,’ said the stranger impatiently. ‘You know very well what is to happen today.’
‘Today is to be the happiest day of my life,’ replied the stepmother in a trembling voice. ‘I am to marry the young man who loves me.’
‘You are to marry me, my beauty,’ said the tall man, ‘and you can forget about love. Come!’
‘Marry you?’ said the bride. ‘You?’ She laughed hysterically.
The sound of horses’ hooves clattered suddenly in the lane and the stepmother ran to her stepdaughter and clutched at her arm. She had started to cry and the stepdaughter could see that she was shaking with fear.
‘Who is he?’ she asked the terrified bride.
The carriages had arrived, but one was a closed ebony carriage drawn by four black horses who steamed and snorted in the lane.
‘Get into the carriage!’ said the stranger as he flung open the door.
‘No! No! You can’t make me!’ The stepmother was sobbing now and quite wild with terror and the step - daughter felt real dread, colder than ice, chilling her heart.
‘Who is he? Tell me!’ she said again.
‘For the last time,’ said the man, ‘get into the carriage.’
But the stepmother looked into his eyes and saw all the badness of this world and the next and would not go. She shook her head.
The stranger gave a twisted smile and stared hard at the bride.
‘You have broken your promise,’ he said. ‘Put your hand in the pocket of your dress.’
The stepmother did as she was told and pulled out a small piece of crumpled black silk. She gave a little scream and dropped it, and it floated down to the ground and landed at her stepdaughter’s feet.
Then the tall man pulled off his coat and the stepdaughter saw that it was the old black coat that had nearly suffocated her when she was a child. With a quick movement the stranger threw it over her stepmother, completely covering her lovely gold and silver dress.
‘Don’t!’ she screamed. ‘I’ll come! I’ll come!’
‘Too late,’ said the man, and he climbed into the ebony carriage. The four black horses tossed their heads and neighed and began to move away.
‘Come back!’ screeched the stepmother, but the carriage gathered speed, reached the bend at the top of the lane and vanished. The clatter of hooves faded into the distance.
The stepmother flung away the coat and turned to face her stepdaughter. ‘Help me!’ she said. ‘What am I to do?’
Her stepdaughter was staring at her in horror. The stepmother’s beautiful dress hung in tattered grey rags from her bony shoulders. Her hair had turned white and clumps of it had fallen from her head, leaving some of it bald. Her mouth had shrunk inwards in a small wrinkled O of disappointment, as though her lips were mourning her vanished teeth. Her body shrivelled and stooped till she looked like a question mark asking, Why? Why? Why?
She was five times as old as before and her voice when she spoke was the dusty croak of a crone. ‘Why do you stare at me?’
Then she clutched at her throat and gaped at her stepdaughter. Colour had flooded back into the stepdaughter’s hair, a glowing red-blonde, and the girl was smiling at her with perfect white teeth.
‘What is happening to me?’ she said, and when she heard the light music of her own voice she laughed with delight. ‘Stepmother! I am myself again!’
She felt her young lungs breathing easily and her heart opened like a flower in her breast.
There were running footsteps in the lane and it was the bridegroom, out of breath and looking for the bride. He glanced curiously at the old witch, bent double by the ditch, coughing and cursing, but as soon as he saw the girl he had eyes only for her.
‘Your bride has gone,’ she said to him.
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ he said politely, but his eyes burned with sudden love as he looked at her.
There was a strange noise from the ditch and they both turned to see the old black coat lying in a heap on the road. There was no sign of the stepmother, but a sudden gust of wind blew a handful of ashes, grey and gritty, over the fields.
‘Your bride has gone for ever,’ repeated the girl.
‘My bride was lovely,’ said the young man, ‘but you are truly the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life.’
The girl looked down at her hands and saw the light of youth that glowed under her skin and she felt the force and energy of life itself rise up from the tingling tips of her toes so that all she wanted to do was run!
‘Catch me if you can!’ She laughed at the young man and took to her heels, flinging off her heavy winter coat as she went.
With a shout, laughing himself, he chased her, never quite catching her, his pounding feet landing on her slim fast shadow as she ran before him.
A Little Girl
A Little Girl lived with her little family in a Doll’s House.
There was Little Grandma, who had her own room at the top of the house.
There was Little Grandad, who dozed in a rocking chair in front of the fire all day, even in summer.
There was Little Mother, who spent most of her time in the kitchen, cooking.
And there was Little Twin, the Little Girl’s twin sister, who shared her bedroom and slept above the Little Girl in the top bunk.
Every morning, the little family would eat breakfast together in the kitchen and Little Mother would serve tiny boiled eggs in teeny egg cups and the weeniest glasses of orange juice.
After breakfast, Little Grandma would climb up the stairs to her room, sit on a little chair and stare out of the window.
Little Grandad rocked himself slowly to sleep in front of the orange and crimson fire while Little Mother tidied away the breakfast things; and the Little Girl and her Little Twin went to the drawing room to play on the little upright piano or read wee books or dance together. The afternoons ticked away, the two children throwing a red ball between them, the size of a berry. Every day was the same and, whenever the Little Girl asked to go outside, her mother shushed her or her grandparents tutted or her sister shook her head.
At night, when the house grew dark, tiny lamps came on in the Doll’s House and the little family sat together round the fire until it was time for bed. Then the Little Girl lay in her bottom bunk with her eyes wide open, listening to the thick deep silence of the darkness.
One m
orning, the Little Girl looked across at her Little Twin and noticed that she seemed smaller. The Little Girl thought that perhaps she was imagining this, but her own tiny black shoes no longer fitted and she had to go about the house barefooted since they were her only pair.
When she sat down for breakfast, she found that her chair was too small for her and her knees scraped on the underside of the kitchen table. She was still hungry after she’d eaten her boiled egg and toast and still thirsty after she’d drained her weeny glass of orange juice, but nobody else seemed to notice these things, so the Little Girl said nothing.
Later, when she asked whether she might go outside, her mother shushed her and her grandparents tutted and her sister shook her head. That night, as she lay in her bunk, her feet poked out from under her blankets and her head pressed hard against the wall behind her pillow, so she gathered her bedclothes together and stretched out on the floor till morning came.
When the light from outside arrived, she sat up to discover that her head was at the same height as her Little Twin’s bunk bed.
Little Twin started to cry as she looked at her sister’s large, pale face, a breathing moon, then she ran downstairs to the kitchen, calling for Little Mother.
From then on, the Little Girl grew apart from the rest of her family. They looked at her strangely as she squeezed herself through the little doors of the Doll’s House or stooped and knelt to avoid banging her head on the ceilings.
They complained bitterly when they found that she had eaten the entire contents of their little fridge to satisfy her hunger. They whispered to themselves when she knocked over the furniture as she passed.
Faery Tales Page 6
