by Cameron Jace
“Again, what exactly do you mean by original?”
“Since you’re not a superhuman nerd like me, and you hate comics and fairy tales, I assume I have to repeat myself and tell you that all the fairy tales we read about today were forged,” Axel ranted, wiping his face clean.
“Well, I always hated that true love’s kiss that solved everything in the end,” Loki said. Charmwill had been feeding his brain with fairy tales from the Book of Beautiful Lies; stories that didn’t interest Loki.
“You will like the real fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm un-published version. They are full of blood spattering, eye-shattering gore, and unhappily ever after’s.”
“Sounds awesome.”
“And you think I am weird,” Axel chewed on the words. “Anyway, here is what you need to know. Whoever created this secret library did it to preserve some of the town’s many secrets—it should be obvious by now that this isn’t a regular town.”
“I noticed.”
“Fable only knew about this secret library because she’s into witchcraft, and read about how to get to it through secret scriptures in books. It means we don’t know who we’re dealing with here. What matters is what I discovered reading some of these books.”
“And?” Loki was getting impatient.
“There’s also another original edition of a Brothers Grimm book called ‘Children’s and Household Tales.’ It’s handwritten, and it contains original versions of the tales before the book was published. After the crazy night we had at the castle yesterday, I had no doubt this tiny girl that kicked your butt and killed Big Bad and Cricketkiller was Snow White herself. I mean, did you take a good look at her? Like really take a good look? In spite all of the blood and gore, I have no doubt who she is. She fits the profile exactly; lips red as blood, skin pale as snow, and hair black as night. So I asked myself one single question: how come she is a vampire? “
Axel’s long speech was interrupted by someone outside the secret door. Moments later, Fable came crawling inside.
12
The Brothers Grimm
“Miss me?” she said with that irresistible smile on her face.
“What are you doing here?” Axel’s face knotted. “Didn’t I tell you that Loki and I are on a secret mission, and that it’s dangerous?”
“I love danger,” she said. “And I’m the one who told you about the secret library. I deserve to get involved. I finished my homework—and yours. I washed the dishes, fed the spiders, and now I’m bored. You have no idea what a girl can contribute to your quest. Try me.”
“She has a point,” Loki said, even if he wasn’t comfortable with too many people getting involved.
“Alright,” Axel muttered. “As long as you don’t do anything stupid, and listen to what your bigger bro has to say.”
“Alrighty, bro,” Fable stomped her feet on the floor and raised her hand sharply, saluting him like a soldier. “He thinks because he is older than me, that he’s smarter,” she winked at Loki. “So I have to pay my respects.”
“So,” Axel coughed, pretending he didn’t hear her, now posing as if he were a professor in a lecturing room. “Like I said, all you need to know about the real Snow White is here,” he rapped his knuckles upon the book, and dust flew in his face again.
“Come on, spit it out, Axel,” Loki mocked him. It was fun having Fable around.
“Yeah,” Fable giggled. “Spit. It. Out.”
“Stop swearing in front of my sister. She is only fifteen.”
“’Spit it out’ is swearing?” Loki said.
“I am fifteen and a half,” Fable ranted, hands on her waist.
Loki disliked that Axel thought his sister needed to be treated like a retard. She was smart, cute and had great energy oozing out of her.
“One day, all of you will know what kind of genius I am,” Axel said. “Here is why I think that the vampire princess is really Snow White. First of all, you have to know that the real story of Snow White in the un-forged books was considerably different than the famous story we all know. Snow White was not portrayed as innocent, shallow, giddy, and useless.”
“Snow White isn’t useless,” Fable insisted. “She is awesome, and Prince Charming is possum,” Axel stuck his tongue out like an annoyed lizard.
Loki couldn’t escape the feeling that he was in kindergarten all over again—although he didn’t remember one, but it wasn’t hard to imagine it. Axel and Fable’s childish behavior showed how little interaction they had with others their own age, and why they had no friends. Loki shrugged, reminding himself that when it came to loneliness, he wasn’t that different from them. He just owned a car, traveled around, and met a lot of Minkins. Even though Axel and Fable acted younger than their age, it puzzled him why he liked them so much, even when they were Minikins. He felt good around them. It was a great feeling that his inner voice resisted, because he was going to leave this town in the end.
“After reading the original stories and commentaries on the history of fairy tales,” Axel elaborated, “I found that certain aspects of the original story, written by the Brothers Grimm, hinted to the fact that Snow White could have been a vampire. It’s all in the original texts, if you read between the lines. It’s as if the story was some kind of a hidden message, or as if they wanted to hide the truth, making it sound fairy tailish and suitable for children.”
“She wasn’t a vampire!” Fable protested.
Loki advised her they should give Axel a chance and listen to what he had to say.
“Before you claim she wasn’t a vampire, you’d need to ask yourself some questions. For instance, why would a fairy tale for children start with a mother pricking her finger and dropping blood on the snow?” Axel wondered, “Gory stuff, right?”
“I once heard students in Snoring saying that the tales by the Brothers Grimm weren’t actually meant for children in the beginning,” Loki said.
“That’s right,” Axel said. “When they first collected the tales, they didn’t have children in mind. But later, when they noticed that elders liked to recite them as bedtime stories, they toned them down and made them suitable for children. Still, mentioning blood in the beginning of the Snow White story, strikes me as weird. It’s so strange that the story starts with a mother seeing blood on the snow and fantasizing about having a baby with red lips—“
“Red as blood,” Fable interrupted as if she felt the need to defend Snow White, “hair black as the window-frame, skin white as snow.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Axel said. “See?” he turned back to Loki. “I can’t think of a single mother in this world who would relate seeing blood to wanting to have a girl with lips as red as blood. What kind of wish is that? Besides, two of these descriptions perfectly fit the attributes of a vampire: lips red as blood and skin white as snow. All vampires have pale skin and their lips are covered with the blood of their victims they have bitten,” Axel dropped the book and picked another one to show it to them. “And look at this pretty picture,” Axel mused, pointing at the picture of a man with white fangs, wearing a black and red cloak.
“Dracula?” Loki furrowed his brows.
“Count Dracula himself,” Axel pointed a forefinger in the air. “A man whose name has always been synonymous with the same three colors Snow White’s mother wished her daughter’s looks to replicate. He wears a black cloak that is red from the inside, and his skin is always as pale as snow. Red, Black, and White.”
“That’s absurd,” Loki said.
“Look who’s talking,” Axel remarked. “You’re a vampire hunter, aren’t you? Half of the people in the world don’t believe in vampires.”
“Yes, but I never said fairy tale characters were vampires,” Loki shrugged his shoulder.
“Fairy tale characters aren’t supposed to be real,” Fable said.
“Yeah, and when I asked my history teacher about vampires, she told me they weren’t real either,” Axel shot Loki a cruel eye. “And I’m sure I saw one yesterday.”
Loki shrugged. If Charmwill were here, he would have argued otherwise.
“Look,” Loki started. “I understand that the earlier versions of fairy tales were full of gore, blood, and twisted morals; nothing new here. The fact that there are common color motifs between Dracula and Snow White doesn’t prove anything, so where is this going?”
“Alright, let’s skip the color part,” Axel said. “Here is something else you should consider. In the end of Snow White’s story, the dwarves preserve her in a coffin—“
“A glass coffin,” Fable corrected him. “Because she was so beautiful, and they couldn’t imagine not looking at her when she died.”
Axel ignored her and turned to Loki.
“I see what you’re getting at,” Loki said. ”Vampires sleep in coffins, so it’s reasonable to question why the authors wrote that Snow White ended up sleeping in a coffin. I get it. Still, this sounds coincidental to me. It’s not solid evidence.”
“Don’t you get it?” Axel said. “She was kept in a coffin until the prince came and woke her up after the dwarves thought she was dead, which means that when he kissed her she became undead,” he stopped for the effect and looked at Loki and Fable. “The same thing that happens to the vampires you kill. They’re not dead but they’re not alive either after you stake them. You put them in a coffin, but if someone else pulls the stake out, they wake up again. It’s almost the same scenario, only told in riddles for those who can read between the lines. To me, this means that the kiss in the fairy tale equals pulling the stake from a vampire’s heart. And I’m not even questioning why Prince Charming was there in the first place, or how he knew about her whereabouts, or why he kissed a dead girl. Yuck.”
“So what? The prince kissed her awake from a long sleep that was induced by her being poisoned with an apple,” Fable said, acting as if she were Snow White’s lawyer.
“Aha,” Axel seemed to have an Einstein moment, his eyes shone with victory. “You only say this because it’s what you’ve been told in school. The truth is that the magic kiss never happened. It’s not even true,” Axel explained.
“What do you mean it’s not true,” Fable said. “Everyone knows that Prince Charming kissed Snow White awake.”
“Total nonsense,” Axel said proudly. “In the original Brothers Grimm text written in 1812 and then republished in 1857, the prince never kissed her. It’s a Walt Disney fabrication.”
“He didn’t?” Loki wondered.
“Prince Charming wanted to take her away in her glass coffin, back to his castle,” Axel said. “It didn’t even cross his mind to kiss her. When her coffin slipped off the carriage, the chunk of poisonous apple in her throat, which she had been poisoned with by the Wicked Stepmother, popped out and she woke up, back to life.”
“Really,” Loki said. “So there was no true love’s kiss?”
“Not even a peck on the cheek,” Axel assured them. “Or a blown kiss from a hand.”
“So the apple wasn’t poisoned? She was choking and they thought she was dead?” Loki said.
“That’s what is written in the original text. In my opinion, the chunk of apple is a metaphor for saying she was staked. It strikes me like something you would pull out of an undead, it wakes them up and brings them back to life. Remember that in 1812, when the story was first published, the world was horrified by what they called the Vampire Craze. You know what that is, right?” Axel said.
“Yes,” Loki nodded. “It was the first time people reported seeing vampires, and they were hunting them viciously all over Europe.”
“See?” Axel said. “So it makes sense to try to hide that Snow White was a vampire, and write the tales in riddles that only the open-eyed, like me of course, can figure out.”
“You’re a horrible liar, Axel,” Fable stomped her feet again. “There must have been a kiss.”
“I’m not. Look for yourself,” Axel handed her the book, and pointed at the paragraph in the story where the kiss should have happened. Loki and Fable read it. Axel was right.
“So why did the prince want to take her away from the forest? Did he know her from before?” Loki said.
“Yes, when she was younger,” Fable said. “He talked to her at the well because she was beautiful, but she ran away because she was shy. Didn’t you ever watch the movie?”
“Again, this was the Disney version. This was never mentioned in the original story,” Axel said. “Neither did they explain why he wanted to take her away with him. You know the deal with charming princes in fairy tales. They never do anything to deserve the girl but they get her anyway.”
“Easy on the prince, don’t hold grudges because he got the girl,” Loki smiled. “So Snow White was just a vampire asleep in a glass coffin?”
Axel nodded.
“Wow. That’s not the story my mother told me,” Loki said. He hadn’t told them about his ghost mother, but it was true. Sometimes, when he was asleep in his car, she crept in and read fairy tales to him when he was asleep before she pulled the blanket tighter around him. Small things like these let him know that she cared about him. He never told her that he knew because he thought it was embarrassing that his mother still read bedtime stories to him when he was fifteen.
“I know, it’s very different from the tale we were told as kids,” Axel said. “For some unknown reason, someone sold the world different fairy tales.”
“I still can’t see how this could help me kill her?” Loki said.
“Because that’s not all I have to say; I have tons of surprises for you, guys.”
“What else?” Fable folded her arms. She was devastated. Axel had just shattered her entire childhood into pieces of a puzzle she didn’t have a clue how to put back together. Loki looked at her and wondered what it was like having childhood memories. He didn’t mind Axel messing his up as long as he actually remembered them someday.
“In the Brothers Grimm version, the reason why Snow White slept in the coffin was because of the apple, of course. But it was never implied that she was dead. Instead, the Brothers Grimm had a name for what happened to her after she’d taken a bite from the apple. They called it the Sleeping Death.”
“What?” Loki’s face knotted. The Sleeping Death sounded like it had to do something with vampires more than fairy tales.
“This is actually written in the text, the Sleeping Death, which is another strange expression,” Axel said, “It implies that she wasn’t dead, but sleeping like she was dead. This stuff is mind boggling.”
Loki found himself feeling the Dreamhunters notebook Charmwill had given him. He remembered reading that some scholars in the Dreamworld Arts called the state of a staked demon The Sleeping Death. In fact, the only way to enter a demon’s dream was when it was in a state of Sleeping Death. The name was derived from the fact that the demons could still be awakened by removing the stake, so it wasn’t considered dead, but sleeping like the dead.
“So there was blood, gore, glass coffins, and the Sleeping Death,” Loki counted on his fingers, giving it a thought—he wasn’t going to discuss anything about Dreamhunting with them now.
“What about the wicked witch who gave her the apple?” Loki asked.
“It wasn’t a wicked witch who gave her the apple,” Fable explained. “It was her stepmother, using witchcraft to appear like a peddler or a hag and give her the poisoned apple.”
“Which brings us to the scariest part of Snow White’s story,” Axel said. Loki sighed impatiently, exchanging looks with Fable. “We all know that the wicked stepmother sent her huntsman after Snow White to kill her, right?”
“The huntsman couldn’t kill her,” Fable said. “Because she was beautiful and he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”
Axel looked like he wanted to hit Fable with feathers; many feathers. Loki almost laughed, thinking it was a good thing Fable was the wanna-be-witch, and not Axel, or this could’ve been how the world ended in sixty seconds.
“Now, listen to me because this will
blow your mind,” Axel said. “In the original story, the wicked stepmother asked the huntsman to bring her Snow White’s heart and liver after he killed her.“
“Interesting,” Loki said.
“Are you serious?” Fable leaned forward. The poor girl had given up after everything she knew about fairy tales had been shattered in a span of minutes.
“Not just that. Although it’s true that the huntsman didn’t kill Snow White, he brought the stepmother a boar’s heart and liver to convince her he’d killed her,” Axel said.
“Gross,” Fable said. “Is this really written in the original Brothers Grimm text? Why didn’t they just turn fairy tales into cheap penny dreadfuls?”
“I’m beginning to wonder why I haven’t read those awesome fairy tales long ago,” Loki grinned. It made him wonder if what Charmwill had said about the darkness inside him was true.
“Are you guys starting to get my point?” Axel said. “I don’t know how much more proof you need to see that she was a vampire.”
“I’m still skeptical about if she is the real Snow White,” Loki said. “Tell me, why did the evil stepmother want Snow White’s heart and liver?” Loki asked.
“She thought that by consuming Snow White’s heart she could be the fairest of them all,” Fable answered voluntarily.
“I don’t think so,” Axel objected. “In my opinion, the heart was evidence that the huntsman had actually staked Snow White, the vampire. Or why would she ask for the heart. She could’ve simply asked for the princess’ blood-spattered dress as evidence.”
Loki scratched his head. He liked that explanation. “In a very weird way, all this makes sense,” he said. “As far as I know, people believed staking a vampire in the heart killed it once and for all in the older days. It makes sense if I ask you to bring me the heart of a vampire as proof for killing it. It was a plausible way for the huntsman to prove he killed her. Even nowadays, it still applies. So this explains the heart, but why the liver?”
