The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  Once, Bea thinks. That happened once.

  “Come on,” Cleo says. “¿Y por qué no?”

  Her mamá won’t stop asking, she knows. And Bea no longer has the energy to fight.

  “All right,” she says. “Why not?”

  11:33 p.m.—Goldie & Liyana

  “I’ve written you a story,” Liyana says.

  “You have?” I say, trying not to sound too excited.

  We call each other often. Usually in the early hours of the morning when we can’t sleep. I’ve still not mentioned Leo. I suppose I’m savouring him like a sweet I’m not yet ready to share. I’ve never been very good at sharing.

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve drawn pictures too. I’m making you the star of your own graphic novel.”

  “Really? That’s amazing, Ana. Thank you.” I wonder if anyone has ever given me anything so generous before. Teddy gives me a fair few of his drawings, but never an entire story.

  “I’ll show you the comic strip when I visit,” Liyana says. “But I’ll read you the story now.”

  “Great.” I sit back on the sofa. “I’m listening.” I close my eyes. “A bedtime story. Maybe it’ll send me back to sleep.”

  Liyana laughs. “It won’t be much of a story if it can’t keep you awake.”

  “It will,” I say. “You won’t hear me snoring, I promise.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Liyana says. “All right then: ‘Once upon a time there was a little girl as good as she was pretty. She had big blue eyes, long golden hair, and a smile so lovely that it brought joy to everyone she met. The girl reared baby birds fallen from their nests, rescued worms that’d veered onto paths, enticed wilting flowers back into bloom . . .’”

  When Liyana finishes the story and falls silent, I find I can’t speak. I should say something, should thank her again, but I’m so shocked that my sister could know my life and my heart so exactly that I’m lost for words.

  11:59 p.m.—Scarlet

  That night, Scarlet dreams of a fire and a flood. It’s a flood that started a month ago with a leak unseen and spread by stealth. A flood that destroys the only home she’s ever known. It’s a fire from a decade ago. A fire stoked by feelings, by fear and fury. The feelings build until sparks snap at the tips of her fingers. One spark falls onto the rug on which eight-year-old Scarlet is standing. She watches it glow, white hot. She watches as it burns itself a tiny hole, singeing the wool, then is extinguished.

  Another spark lands on the sofa cushion. This time it eats into the cotton, beginning to burn more brightly. Suddenly, it flares, a flame that’s quickly engulfing the cushion, the sofa, the curtains, licking up the walls to the ceiling.

  Scarlet wakes with the scream in her throat and sparks on her fingertips. She started it. The fire, the fire that burned down their house, the fire that killed her mother. She started it. How can she not have known this? How can she have forgotten something so seminal? As her screams fall into silence, as her heart slows and the sparks cease, Scarlet understands. Her mind wasn’t backfiring like her grandmother’s; it was an act of protection, of defence. And she’s grateful for one thing: that although she has at last remembered this dreadful thing, her grandma has, if she ever knew the truth, now forgotten it.

  Less than a decade ago

  Everwhere

  Memories of Everwhere mix with the random everyday images thrown up in your dreams, tainting them with a silver moonlit edge and a pale sepia sheen. Sometimes you find yourself awake just past three a.m., especially on nights when the moon is at its first quarter. Sometimes you can’t get back to sleep, the question of whether you’ll ever return keeping you awake until morning. For a while, you become nocturnal.

  Bea

  “In a few years we won’t remember each other anymore,” Bea said, suddenly and apropos of nothing.

  We were sitting in the glade half-heartedly playing games: Scarlet was setting light to twigs before blowing them out, Liyana juggled three dense balls of fog, Bea floated leaves above open palms, and I coaxed tight-curled shoots of ivy from the earth. Bea sat slightly apart, breaking the circle, watching us surreptitiously through her leaves. It was our third night in a row in Everwhere, and we were all more exhausted than we’d admit. But I did love it when we were together like this, and our affection for one another always seemed stronger during our silences.

  “What?” Liyana looked up, dropping her balls of fog, which evaporated into the mists as they fell to the ground. “Why wouldn’t we remember? Anyway, I thought we agreed that, when we’re eighteen, we’ll do what our father wants so we can—”

  “Speak for yourself.” Scarlet’s flaming twig flared. “I’m going to fight him.”

  Liyana ignored this terrifying notion. “But until he—I’m not going to stop coming here, are you?”

  “We’ll all stop coming.” Bea smiled that smile she had when revealing an unexpected and unpleasant secret. She let the leaves waft to the ground.

  “I won’t,” Scarlet said. “I’ll come here every night for the rest of my life.”

  Bea’s smile deepened. “Only till you’re thirteen. Then you won’t be able to anymore.”

  The flames on Scarlet’s twig spat fire and sparks. “That’s rubbish,” she said, sweeping the stick in a half-circle. We all pulled back from the flames, even Bea. “Why won’t we be able to come back?”

  Bea shrugged. “Because that’s the way it is. Mamá told me how it works. When we’re young we can come here, but by the time we’re teenagers we’ll be—our thoughts will be too tied to that world, our feelings too attached to the people there, we’ll forget—”

  “No.” Scarlet stood. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

  Bea shook her head. And for some reason, perhaps because I could see that now she was as distressed at imparting this twist of information as Scarlet was at receiving it, I knew she was telling the truth.

  “We’ll stop dreaming so often. We’ll stop believing in anything else, except what we can see, what we can touch on Earth. We’ll start to think Everwhere was just a childish dream.”

  “No,” Liyana pleaded. “That’s not true.”

  Bea said nothing, and in her silence my sisters finally saw she wasn’t teasing, wasn’t saying something to shock or disturb us. Otherwise she’d goad and gloat, but Bea’s smile had gone as she realized she valued this place, and her sisters, as much as we all did.

  In that moment I saw Bea’s beating heart, the one she pretended she didn’t have, the one she tried to make us believe was impenetrable but was actually no different from our own exposed and tender eight-year-old hearts. In the next moment, Bea reclaimed her sly smile and seemed to be sucking on her next sentence like sweets she wouldn’t share, not until we begged. No surprises for guessing who did.

  “What?” Liyana asked. “What is it?”

  Bea licked her lips—an especially delicious sweet. “We will come back,” she said, stretching the gaps between each word for dramatic effect. “When we turn eighteen.”

  “Eighteen?” We all echoed this word, even me.

  “But why? Why so long?” Liyana said, as if further begging could get Bea to change the facts, to reduce the wait.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Scarlet snapped. “That’s forever.”

  Bea was silent. We all were.

  “Are you sure?” Scarlet broke the silence, a note of desperation in her voice I’d not heard before. “Are you sure it’s eighteen?”

  This was so far from being tomorrow, or next week, that it seemed an eternity.

  “I don’t know,” Bea admitted, this now seeming the most painful admission of all. “It’s a coming-of-age thing.”

  “A what?” Liyana said.

  “It’s . . .” Bea trailed off, unwilling to reveal the limits of her omniscience. “Mamá explained, I can’t exactly remember right now. Anyway, that’s not the point—”

  “Then what is the point?”
Scarlet spat, clearly still grasping at the dwindling possibility that Bea was lying.

  “The point is that we’ll see each other again.”

  “But how do you know? You said”—Liyana was accusing—“You said this place was infinite. So how will we find each other again after five years? It was only luck we found each other in the first place.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” Bea laughed, delighted to have regained her superior position. “Did you really think that?” She looked to Scarlet and me. “Did you all think so too?”

  Not one of us—Scarlet, Ana, or I—either confirmed or denied it. But Bea could tell.

  “Oh, that’s hilarious,” she said, still giggling. “I can’t believe you all thought that. How utterly—”

  “Stop it.” Scarlet waved her fire stick for emphasis. “Just explain.”

  Bea sat up a little straighter. “I bet I can guess your birthdays.”

  “All of us?” Liyana asked.

  Bea nodded.

  “Go on then,” Scarlet said.

  Bea gave a slight sniff. “Halloween.”

  I glanced at my sisters to see them staring at her open-mouthed, just as I was.

  Bea waited like an actor taking her third bow, expecting another round of applause. But we were too shocked even for interrogation.

  “We were born on the same day,” she explained, as if we were babies like Teddy, “at the same hour, the same minute.”

  Liyana frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Even I don’t know the exact minute I was born,” Scarlet said. “So, how can you?”

  Bea shrugged. “It’s true. Ask your mamás, if you don’t believe me. That’s why we found each other. There are hundreds of Sisters Grimm here right now, maybe thousands—”

  “Sisters Grimm?” I echoed, struck by the words. It sounded so concrete, so real. An inescapable fate.

  “Yeah,” Bea said, dismissing my interruption. “But we’re drawn to the ones born the same time as us. That’s why we met now and that’s how we’ll find each other again.”

  We stared at her, still sceptical. Bea folded her arms, sat back, and regarded us with a triumphant grin. She had outdone herself.

  Goldie

  Bea might know a lot, but she didn’t know everything. True, I was born on Halloween, but that wasn’t the whole truth. I was born on the bridge across two days—my feet emerging a moment before midnight on the thirty-first of October and my head a moment after, just as the clock ticked into November. Two diametrical days: All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day. The first day shaped by darkness and demons, the second by light and saints.

  However, Halloween was when we celebrated—if a small gift and single cupcake could be called celebrating—since that was the date the midwife officially recorded, being forced by convention to pick.

  Secretly, I observed my birthday on both days. I sang to myself both mornings and gave myself extra treats in the afternoons: more pudding at lunchtime, then purloining two chocolate bars from Mrs. Patel’s on the way home. Each evening, I munched my contraband, ignored my homework, and wondered, once I started reading the Bible and the Greek myths, if my birthdays meant that I was a half demon, half saint.

  Leo

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Christopher asked.

  “I thought we were going to be soldiers.”

  Christopher laughed. “Only once a month. Anyway, you won’t get paid for that. You’ll have to be something else too.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, what will you be?”

  “Dunno,” Leo said, since he’d not given it a moment’s thought. They lay on the forbidden grass of the headmaster’s garden, an after-midnight summer ritual. “Do you?”

  Christopher nodded. “Prime minister.”

  Leo laughed, until he realized that his friend wasn’t laughing with him. “Seriously?”

  “Sure.” Christopher shrugged. “Why not?”

  As the moon slid behind the clouds, Leo cast a covert glance at his friend. In the darkness, he felt a surge of feeling he couldn’t understand or explain: admiration, adoration, gratitude . . . In that moment, if someone had asked, Leo would’ve said he was happier than he’d ever been. He’d found a friend who believed in Everwhere (their great and glorious secret) and also that anything on Earth was possible too. And, in his presence, Leo believed that too.

  23rd October

  Nine days . . .

  9:28 a.m.—Goldie

  “There’s something else I need to tell you,” Leo says, after we’ve been walking for a while, turning down streets at random, emerging onto the banks of the river behind Trinity College.

  “O-kay.”

  I wonder if this something is good or bad. I’m not sure I can handle much more of the latter. The fact of Everwhere, or, hopefully, the fantasy of it, sits between us like an elephant made of mists and moonlight.

  “So, what is it?” I ask, since Leo’s fallen silent. “Tell me. You’re making me nervous.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “it’s just hard for me to . . .”

  He sits on a bench by the river. I sit beside him.

  Suddenly, something awful occurs to me. “Is it that you don’t . . . you don’t . . .”

  “What?”

  I shake my head, unable to get the words out.

  Leo takes my hand. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble. “Is it that you don’t”—I drop the words into my lap—“Love me anymore.”

  “No, no.” Leo laughs. “I love you, of course I love you. I can’t remember a time I didn’t love you, even despite myself.” He reaches up to wipe his finger under my eyes. “Don’t cry—why are you crying?”

  “I—I d-didn’t . . .” I shake my head. “I—I’m fine.”

  “It’s not that,” Leo says, brushing his hand along my cheek. “I mean, it’s a lot of things.”

  I smile, flushed with relief. If he’s not leaving me then I don’t care. He can tell me what he likes. I’m getting used to it now. Another world beyond a gate. Levitating leaves. Sisters. Mists and fog and moonlight. Bring it on.

  Leo takes a deep breath. “I . . . I’m not entirely normal.”

  I laugh. “No kidding.”

  “Hey,” he says. “That’s hardly—nor are you.”

  I know I’m not, I could say, except I’m not quite yet ready to admit this out loud. Instead, I give him a wry smile. “So you say.” I think of the dreams, of the flowers, of Liyana. I want to talk about it and I don’t. “So we’re both abnormal. But we weren’t talking about me, you were going to tell me about you.”

  I see Leo steel himself. “I’m, well, not entirely . . . human.”

  “Oh, God,” I say, dearly hoping he’s not about to tell me he’s a vampire. I’m starting to suspect that Everwhere might be real, and I know that I’m able to do inexplicable things. But a delusional persona is a step too far. Please don’t let the man I love be a lunatic.

  Leo exhales. “Well, technically, I am, or at least I was, a . . . star.”

  I frown. As revelations go, this is an improvement on vampire. “A star? As in the ones who shine onstage or hang in the sky?”

  He glances down at the ground. “The sky.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He nods. “I know I sound crazy and I know you won’t be able to believe me, not yet. But I . . . In a few nights we’ll go to Everwhere and then I’ll be able to show you.”

  I look at him. I don’t believe what he’s saying. But, strangely, I see that he does. My joy, my relief, evaporates. Leo loves me, yes. But he’s also, quite clearly, delusional.

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Right, well, I’ll take that under consideration,” I say. “So, is that everything? Any more revelations? If so, please tell me now—it’s like ripping off a plaster, best done all in one go.”

  I catch Leo’s eyes just before he glances away.

  “No, that’s all,” he says, then gives me a weak smile. “I pr
omise.”

  And that’s when I’m suddenly certain that he’s been telling the truth—at least his truth—about all this, because right now I know that he’s lying.

  8:39 p.m.—Scarlet

  Scarlet has stumbled through the day, blackening crumpets and scalding coffee, giving customers too much change or too little, asking questions then instantly forgetting the answers. She’s functioned, but she’s been crumbling, her thoughts always returning to the fire. The shock of this belated memory has even replaced her fears over the flood. It’s exhausting, working around the damage, cleaning the dust and debris that collect during the day, but when, at last, she’s tucked her grandmother in, Scarlet doesn’t want to go to bed herself. She wants to sleep but doesn’t want to dream.

  So she returns to the kitchen, flicks on the kettle, and roots about in the biscuit tins for a midnight feast. The café kitchen always provides comfort, even in its current state—so long as she doesn’t look up. It’s warm and womblike, filled with sweet smells, even if nothing’s baking, as if the walls have soaked up the scent of every cinnamon bun, every cake, baked over the past fifty years.

  Tearing a bite out of a cinnamon bun, Scarlet tidies the counter while waiting for the water to boil. A clutch of letters slides out from behind a chopping board where she’d stuffed it earlier. Today’s post. She shuffles through the bills. She opens a letter from the insurance company informing her—though it’s already done so by email—that the surveyor will arrive to assess the property on the twenty-fourth of October at 10:30 a.m. Tomorrow. Scarlet’s still thinking how she’ll keep her grandmother safely upstairs during this visit, when she sees a handwritten letter, her name and address in inky script swirling across the envelope.

  Reaching for a breadknife, she slices it open and pulls out a single page. It is not a letter; there is no “Dear,” no “Sincerely,” only a title. Scarlet scans the sentences. It’s a story.