The Grimm Prequels Book 5: (Prequels 19-24)

by Cameron Jace

  The key isn’t ‘door’. The key is ‘dore’.

  I swiveled to face Bluebeard’s portrait on the door in the distance, then took a deep breath. This is it. I solved the puzzle, I think.

  After I’d played the do, now I played the re.

  The portrait shook.

  I played the two notes again. Do then Re. Dore

  The portrait shook again. And again. I plucked the note again. It shook once more. The maids shook in awe, staring at the door’s parting, part of it to the left the other to the right.

  Then the mirror’s light shone through like a lightening’s strike again. So strong it reached where I stood. Only this time it shone in red.

  I knew what I had to do. I ran toward it.

  “Hurry,” the maid said, looking behind her. “Bluebeard is in the castle.”

  I ran, my heart heavy in my chest, my feet almost numb, and my mind reeling with possibility. Then I stopped in front of the mirror, standing before it. I could hear Bluebeard’s voice roaring somewhere in the castle.

  “Erza!” he screamed.

  He was too late. I’d already stepped into the mirror. I’d known it all along. This wasn’t just a mirror that reflected images. It kept secrets. Terrible secrets. Bluebeard’s secrets.

  The mirror led down some steps to a basement. A candle-lit, rotten-smelling, evil basement, it turned out.

  I descended down the creaking steps, the smell of decayed bodies overwhelming me. I could have vomited. So easily. But I held back, and cried instead.

  Why?

  I already knew this was the smell of the wives he’d killed — the pregnant wives.

  I descended even more until I reached a landing of unimaginable horrors. There were some kind of tubes hung on the walls. They were filled with liquid. Red liquid.

  I followed their lead.

  And in my journey into hell, I stumbled over something. I stumble forward, my cheek slapping sideways on someone’s corpse. Sticky with mucus and whatever darkness lay in here. In my position, I found myself staring into a pair of eyes. Strung out and frozen with horror. Eyes that pierced through me but without color. The dead eyes of one of his wives piled up in the basement.

  “Erza!” Bluebeard’s voice echoed through the basement. “It’s too soon. Let me explain. Just wait for me. Don’t follow the tubes.”

  I didn’t reply, and I wasn’t going to wait. For one, I had to run away, or I’d have died in here. I ran, struggling with the bodies I stepped upon on my way.

  “They were pregnant for God’s sake!” I cried out.

  The tubes led me to another set of stairs, leading upward. I ascended, the sound of Bluebeard’s steps following me.

  “Don’t do it!” he shouted. “I can’t help you if you open the door. You’re not supposed to. It’s too soon!”

  But there I stood, with the door wide open staring at something I couldn’t comprehend at once. The stairs and tubes had led me back into the bathroom, almost directly to the one shaped like a liver. The one I uncannily loved.

  It wasn’t empty though. It was filled with the mixture of milk and chocolate, the smell of which I hated.

  Then what were the tubes for?

  Before I could inspect it, a flood of water pushed me forward. It came from the tubes, which, by some wicked design, were made to push whoever opened the door into the liver-shaped bathtub.

  I glided without resistance. You can fight a beast, or anything solid, but it’s hard to fight water. It will strike you as harmless and weak, but great amounts of it is a force that—later I learned—would light up a bulb.

  Like in a waterfall, I spiraled into the bathtub, unable to grip its edges. Bluebeard’s voice was gone. He couldn’t catch me.

  When the water stilled, I couldn't move. My limbs were numb and I needed to steady myself out of the dizziness. It was the water’s smell that attacked me, though. It wasn’t water.

  Blood.

  That of tens of Bluebeard’s previous wives.

  Fighting the blurry visions ahead of me, I realized Bluebeard stood watching. This time he’d entered from the other door. The one we used frequently when we bathed together.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I knew it was something terrible. And though my fate was sealed, I was curious to know before I was doomed forever.

  “The ritual is complete,” Bluebeard said, both satisfaction and disappointment gleaming in his eyes. Those eyes I saw in the portrait. Now they were real. I realized why they had confused me before. His stare hadn’t been immersed into just pure evil. It was the kind of evil that was disappointed it couldn’t achieve the optimum of evil it had planned.

  Some evil isn’t a point a view.

  “Ritual?” I said while octopus’s arms slithered out of the tub’s sides and chained me. I was too shocked to resist anymore.

  “The terrible witch had told me I had to marry tens of women, and only kill them when they’re pregnant,” he said. “I can’t bear children,” He chewed on the word, secretly mocking himself. “I mean, the most powerful man in history could not have a child—but that’s beside the point. The witch said I could get the women impregnated through a spell. The spell demanded that the women be weakened by my absence, that I play games with their minds, so that they’d think they were partially in love with me.” He stopped for a moment and said, “Then, when the spell worked and they became pregnant, I had to kill them.”

  “What are you talking about?” I could feel the blood rising to my neck and face. “Why kill them then if they’d granted you a child through that spell?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be my child,” he said. “The women were only part of the ritual. I wasn’t after their children, but their blood, which, if mixed with milk and chocolate, would be used on you, Erza.”

  “Me? All of those women were killed so you could do a ritual on me? Why?”

  “Because only you can bear my children. Some kind of damned prophecy,” he said. “The troubled girl with evil tendencies would bear my children. If the ritual worked on you, it would cure me.”

  “But I am pregnant!”

  “Also a part of the ritual. The child inside you will mean nothing to me. It will be doomed from the day it is born until the world ends. The one I am after is the child you will give me after you lay there in the blood, milk, and chocolate for seven days.”

  “You’re a monster,” I spat out, too short to reach him. “So the women weren’t descendants of the Lost Seven?”

  “I let the maids believe that. I can’t find the Lost Seven. It’s been centuries. That’s why I need a son, in case I wither away and can’t live any longer.”

  The mixture was covering me all over, only giving me a way to breath. I couldn’t believe I would be spending seven days in this rot. I thought I’d die from the horror before that.

  Glancing back at Bluebeard, I didn’t understand why he seemed so disappointed. If his plan worked, and the ritual was taking place, why had he run after me in the basement and tried to stop me?

  I asked him.

  “Because I don’t know if the ritual will work now.” He made a fist with his hand. “You weren’t supposed to enter the bath until the full moon of the next month. I have no idea.” He gritted his teeth. "If you will be able to grant me a son.”

  “Then set me free. I beg you. Set me free.”

  “I can’t.” He turned and walked away. “The maids will feed you while I’m away. Seven day from now I will return. We will make love — if that’s what you want to call it. If you don’t grant me the son I want, I will feed you to my Bluebirds.”

  The End of Grandmother’s Diary

  I stare back at Charlotte, watching her terrified face, knotted with fear and disbelief. She still held onto the wet pages of her book, her mouth agape, staring at me.

  “What happened next?” she asked. “She couldn't have stopped the diary here?”

  I myself needed room to breathe. The answers I was about to provide her with were abo
ut to shock her even more. Slow had always been a virtue of mine.

  “Answer me, Angel. What happened next? Did she give him a child?” Charlotte demanded. “She must have, because she lived long enough to write this diary.”

  “She did survive the horrible incident,” I answered her. “But not for granting him a child. Bluebeard remained childless for a long time.”

  “Then how and why did he let her live?”

  “First, I need to make sure you realize that when I call Erza my grandmother, it’s metaphorical. She’s my great, great, great grandmother, if not four generations earlier.”

  “I get that part,” she said impatiently. “Now tell me why Bluebeard let her live if she failed to grant him a child?”

  “Because, even though the ritual failed, Erza came out someone— or something — else?”

  “Did you just say something?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” I rubbed my chin. “Let’s just say that the Erza who survived the seven days in the tub wasn’t human any longer.”

  “The failed ritual turned her into a beast?”

  “One of it’s kind,” I said. “Or let me rephrase that: The first of her kind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You realize Bluebeard is the Piper, don’t you?”

  “From the very first pages of the diary.”

  “So you must have heard of the legend.”

  “Which one exactly?”

  “The one mentioned in Robert Browning’s famous poem about the Pied Piper.”

  “Of course. It’s a masterpiece that secretly chronicled the real Piper’s life, though most people think it’s just a poem.”

  “Remember the part that reads: And there it stands to this very day. And I must not omit to say that in Transylvania there's a tribe of alien people who ascribe?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It explains how the Piper, after his escape, took the kids he’d kidnapped to Transylvania, where he eventually created the first…” Charlotte let out a strange, squeaky sound, and cupped her mouth with her hands.

  “Say it,” I said.

  “Vampire. The Piper created the first vampire in Transylvania,” she said. “Are you saying this is the town were Erza was from?”

  “Exactly,” I nodded. “Only the poem never said the Piper created the first vampire by accident, through a flawed ritual of drowning his last wife in blood, milk, and chocolate for seven days.”

  “Erza was the first vampire ever created,” she whispers to herself. “That’s why he let her live. He’d created a creature that would assist him in killing the Lost Seven.”

  “There, you’ve got it.”

  “That’s why she is your great-grandmother. Oh, Angel. I’m sorry I let you go through this again. I know how you hate…”

  “My own kind,” I said. “I assume you have enough information to write in your Jane Eyre book now.”

  “More than enough,” she said. “So much more that I can’t bring it to my pen.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you kidding me? Who’d believe me? I’ll stick to a Gothic feel of a story about a wife curious about her husband’s secret and his castle.”

  “Do what you see is right,” I said. “Now, I’d like to have some time alone.”

  “I know.” She nodded, standing up. The rain hadn’t stopped yet. You can’t argue with the rain in London. “Thanks for everything.”

  I watched her leave, her blurry image looking like a jigsaw puzzle in the rain. My chest tightened with every step she took away, because I knew she’d stop and ask me one last thing. Sooner or later, she’d connect the dots and I’d have to answer her. Sooner or later, she’d realize that no matter how we’d like to think of things as good or evil, they’ll always stay a point of view.

  And there, Charlotte stopped in the rain. There, she slowly turned around. There, she approached me with a face flushed red and asked. “Your grandmother’s name was Erza?”

  “Yes.” I nodded, knowing she was close. So close.

  “And Bluebeard’s castle was in Transylvania?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Erza mentioned she was from Hungary, not Romania.”

  “The forest with the sign East of the Sun, West of the Moon could take you anywhere without knowing it,” I said. “In fact, the castle itself, which would later be known as the Schloss, has a life of its own. It can be anywhere, anytime. But you know that already. You’ve lived in it.”

  “I do, but…” Her hands traced her quivering lips.

  “But?”

  “Erza is short for Erzsébet in that region.”

  “You got that right,” I said, a faint smile showing on my face.

  “Erzsébet means Elizabeth.”

  “That’s true.”

  “The only woman that fits this description is…”

  “Yes,” I interrupted. “It’s her. The first vampire in history. The one who bathed in the blood of young girls. She was made by a descendant of the first serial killer in history—that’s if Gilles de Rais wasn’t the Piper, too.”

  Charlotte sat down next to me, mopping her forehead. “I can’t believe it. Ezra is Elizabeth Bathory, the troubled child who sliced rats as a child and ended up swimming in girl’s blood for the rest of her life.”

  End of Diary

  MY NOTES

  Written by the Beast

  According to the many reference books I found in the library, the connection to Jane Eyre is factual and accurate. Author Charlotte Brontë admitted to Bluebeard being an inspiration – like many authors later.

  Gilles de Rais is a real-life character who lived a few centuries back. His name had always been mentioned side by side with Elizabeth Bathory. Both of them are documented as history’s first mass murderers – also called serial killers in some books.

  Gilles de Rais murdered his wives, Bathory killed teenagers and swam in their blood. She was probably the first so-called vampire in history.

  Historian say that Elizabeth did get mysteriously pregnant and lose a child at the age of fifteen before she’d been married to Ferenc Nádasdy, a Hungarian nobleman who travelled a lot, leaving her all alone in the Nádasdy Castle in Sárvár, Hungary.

  Ferenc Nádasdy traveled to Vienna, the city of music, and studied music, was obsessed with pianos, among other things. Was Ferenc Nádasdy also the Piper and Bluebeard?

  I did figure out the piano earlier. Elizabeth’s naivety made me want to scream at the her.

  Something tells me this prequel is going to haunt me for some time. It made me remember my sisters back in my homeland. All of them wanted to get married at such young ages. I fear for them falling for the likes of Bluebeard – though I don’t think they would succumb to marrying a forty-year-old man. Elizabeth was a disturbed child. Who knows what of her true reason behind marrying Bluebeard. Was she escaping a certain evil at home?

  This prequel, though it has no answers about me, cements the idea that the Brothers Grimm mentioned they never meant their fairy tales for children. We just love to think so.

  The next diary is told by Sandman Grimm, who’s written a prequel before. From what I gather, he’d been trusted with collecting the prequels. I wonder if he knows about this library.

  Grimm Prequel #22

  THIRTEEN YEARS OF SNOW

  as told by Sandman Grimm

  Dear diary,

  Some people ask me, “Sandman, we know you’ve collected all the diaries you could among the years. We love them, but is it true that you’ve kept some of them secret and never published?”

  My answer would be, “No, I published everything I came across. The Books of Sand chronicles are all that I know.”

  Except that this a lie.

  In truth, I’ve come across other diaries, sometimes stories I collected from several scattered and unfinished diaries, that I’ve never brought to light. Diaries that made me tremble while reading. Diaries I regret having read.

  Why?

  Because they’re d
arker than the bottom of a whale’s belly. Some things were just not meant to be told – trust me on that.

  “But you’re supposed to expose all fairy tales,” you might say. “Hell, you’re Sandman Grimm, and we already know that these diaries are like poisoned apples. Once we’ve tasted them, we’ll never be the same again.”

  Well, that’s true. I said that, and I have kept my word. Only the diaries I left out are not poisoned apples. They’re rotten ones. I’m not sure you’d still like me after letting you read them.

  But still, so many people ask for those diaries. Those horrific fairy tales in their optimum blackness. Diaries like those make you wonder if fairy tales were written by the source of all darkness itself.

  And yet, here I am, about to tell you one of the most shocking stories I’ve ever read. The kind of story where you end up thanking the Brothers Grimm for never retelling it in their collections.

  “I can’t publish this,” I remember Charmwill telling me once. “I can’t even read it again.” His face was pure disgust and horror.

  “But it concerns some of the most beloved characters,” I had told him, trying to reason it in my own mind.

  “This is exactly one of the reasons we had to curse and bury them in the Dreamworld, Sandman,” Charmwill had said. “Besides, I can’t believe what they have done to my parrot, Pickwick.”

  Then he’d left me stranded by my own.

  Since then, I’ve buried the story in the back of my mind and never even admitted I knew it to myself. But like I said, many people ask me about the darker, I mean the really darker side of Sorrow, and here I am about to tell you about one.

  When I say darker, I don’t mean violent or bloody. I don’t mean scary and devilish. I mean the darker side of humanity — if you’d consider fairy tale characters humans. How come man has taken such a turn in life?

  Enough with my introduction. Prepare yourself for a terrible tale. I feel the need to suggest you stop reading now, or this story will tear your heart apart.

  This is going to be dark. Very, very dark…