The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  When she wakes, Bea can’t remember a single image but is left with an echo of the feelings evoked: courage, certainty, self-possession. She has ripped off her feminine casing. She’s free to be fierce, to rage, to act exactly as she wants.

  8:33 a.m.—Scarlet

  When she unlocks the café door, Scarlet steps over the envelopes on the mat without stopping to pick them up. But, catching sight of a letter addressed by hand, she bends down—thinking of the anonymous storyteller, wondering, hoping, that it might be another story. She could certainly do with the uplift to her spirits.

  26th Oct.

  Scarlet,

  Hark at me, sending you an actual bona fide love letter—impressive, eh? Bet you didn’t think I had it in me. Yeah, well, neither did I. First time I’ve written one, in fact. Letter that is, love or otherwise. I’ve sent a few love texts in my time; strictly speaking, they were more about sex now I think about it . . . Anyway, I digress. Sorry I haven’t called etc. since we set fire to that hotel bedspread. How the hell did that happen? I was a little distracted at the time. It wasn’t cheap—they charged my card—but worth every penny. Look at that, digressing again. Did you think I’d done a runner, had my wicked way with you then buggered off back to the Big Smoke? I haven’t. I’m in London, but only because—since you welched on our deal—my boss called me back. I’ll be here a few weeks before I can get away again. Visit me? I promise I’ll make it very much worth your while . . .

  Eli x

  Scarlet reads the letter twice. Anger, desire, and fear swirl in her body until her hands are hot and her fingertips sparking. One spark ignites the letter.

  “Shit!” Scarlet drops the paper as it burns. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  She stamps it out, looking down at the scattering of ashes across the floorboards. It’s an omen. She must call him. Now. She can’t put it off any longer.

  11:49 p.m.—Goldie & Liyana

  I never thought that love and hate could be so fiercely entwined. I certainly never imagined that I could hate Leo like this. Or I thought it would only be if I didn’t love him anymore. By rights I shouldn’t love him now, I should erase all emotion, rip it out, flush my heart of every soft feeling. But I can’t. No matter how I try to will myself free, I’m still tied to him as tight as I ever was.

  Perhaps it’ll simply take time for hate to set in and burn out love. I hope it doesn’t take too long. I can’t bear this alchemy of love and hate eroding me, as if my heart were spitting acid into my blood. All I want is to escape myself. And since I don’t drink or take drugs (now would be a good time to start), my only option is unconsciousness. Except that I can’t fucking sleep. So I call Liyana.

  She picks up on the second ring.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I know you’re at work, I just—”

  “It’s fine,” Liyana interrupts, sounding a little breathless. “I don’t start for ten minutes. What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “I—I . . . I . . .”

  “It’s okay. It’s all right. No rush, I’m here, I’ll wait, I’m not going anywhere.”

  And my sister waits, simply listening, holding the phone as she might hold me if she were here. Knowing this uncorks me. Having her there, I feel safe enough to let myself sink into despair because she won’t let me drown.

  My cries are long and keening, my breaths shallow and sharp, my pain pulled up from the depths of the earth. My cries are distended fingers of sound, trying to snatch back what they cannot reach.

  Eventually, I start to calm, to float up to the surface. With each new breath my sobs subside.

  “I’m here,” Liyana says. “I’m still here.”

  I nod, though I know she can’t see. I can’t move my dry tongue yet, can’t find any words I want to say.

  “Is it Leo?” she asks, tentative. “Did he do something?”

  I nod again. “H-he . . . he k-killed my ma.”

  “But . . .” Liyana’s voice is soft. “But I thought she died a long time ago.”

  “She did,” I say, deeply grateful that she didn’t detonate. Right now, I need Liyana to be my life raft.

  “I don’t understand,” Liyana says, still unruffled. “Isn’t he our age? Wouldn’t he have been a kid back then?”

  “Yes. But”—I take a deep breath—“And this is going to sound deluded, but . . . he’s not—he’s not exactly or entirely . . . human.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you think I’m deluded?”

  “No.”

  I’m torn between relief and surprise. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Lately I’m starting to wonder if I am, if we are . . . At least, I’m seeing things, knowing things, doing things, that I can’t explain. Not rationally, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”

  Somehow, admitting this aloud and having her say it too lightens the weight of my sorrow a little.

  “I mean,” Liyana says, “the way we met. How can you explain that?”

  “Yes. And he’d been telling me about this place. It sounds—the dreams I’ve been having . . . It’s the same place, Ana. And how would he know?”

  Liyana waits, saying nothing.

  “I never told him, I never told him any of the details. But I—I’m thinking all kinds of things, like maybe he drugged me, or hypnotized me, or—”

  “But if he was trying to trick you, or seduce you, or something, why would he tell about . . . what he did?”

  “I know,” I say. “Exactly. He knew it’d make me—he knew I’d hate him for it. He knew I couldn’t love him anymore, not after that.”

  Liyana’s silent. I know what she’s going to say before she says it.

  “But you do love him, don’t you? You don’t want to, but you do.”

  29th October

  Three days . . .

  12:01 a.m.—Goldie & Liyana

  We fall into silence again. Since what is there to say? My sister is wise enough to know she doesn’t have the words, that there aren’t words. She understands that all she can do is be there and, for now, that is enough.

  “I’ve been thinking about your dreams,” Liyana says at last. “About our other sisters. I think we should try to find them.”

  I say nothing.

  “I mean, you even know where one of them works,” she persists. “If we don’t—Anyway, I’m sure the two of us together can convince her. Don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  I know she’s right. And I want to find them too. But, right now, I barely have energy to breathe, let alone face another confrontation.

  4:01 a.m.—Bea

  “Where are you, Val? Where the hell did you go?”

  Bea wipes her eyes, then slaps herself sharply across the cheek. The sting of the strike gives her a moment’s relief, but it’s not enough. It’s only when the physical pain is deep and raw enough to eclipse the emotional that Bea can breathe again. She picks at a scab on her thigh, wincing as she draws it from her skin, the flesh beneath fresh and pink.

  “I’m scared, Val.” She closes her eyes, imagining he’s beside her. “I’m so fucking angry all the time. I don’t know what I might . . .”

  To calm herself, Bea thinks of Dr. Finch, of their last encounter. She thinks of his skinny body beneath her, his chest almost concave as he panted. But then the memory of Vali’s plump naked body rises. Her baby owl. Bea pushes it down. She brings herself back to Dr. Finch’s weak-featured face, scruffy hair, and stubble. All affectation. What a prick. She’d never found him remotely attractive. At first the sex, after gaining admission to the Royal Aeronautical Society, had been a desire to know him more deeply—every idea, every spark of inspiration, in his supposedly magnificent mind. Until it’d soon become clear that he was more of a cuckoo than a hawk and driven by only one desire. Unlike her dear Vali, who was, in all things, a lovelier human being than any she’d ever met. Her eyes fill again.

  “Help me, Val,” Bea begs. “Please, I can’t bear it anymore.”


  5:04 a.m.—Scarlet

  Scarlet dreams. Shifting, jolting, quivering, sliding in and out of sleep, clutching snippets of images when she wakes. It’s a dream she has often, of a place she knows but has never been to. A place of forests and rivers, stones and moss, hazy with mists and fog. It might be the Lake District, except that everything is white, as if dusted with snow. Only it isn’t snowing. Instead leaves are falling, always falling, not from the trees but from the sky. And it’s never day, only night, lit by the light of an unwavering moon.

  There Scarlet is a child again, strolling along a path, hopping from stone to stone, thinking that perhaps she’ll set light to some leaves tonight, or some sticks, or . . . Then she isn’t alone anymore. Scarlet stands very still, peering into the shadows. A girl steps out of the darkness and into the moonlight.

  “Hey, sis,” Bea says with a smile.

  Scarlet wakes.

  Who was that girl? How does she know her? Even as she’s thinking, the girl’s face is dissolving and Scarlet is slipping into sleep again.

  Now she sits in a clearing with her legs crossed, picking daisies from the mossy ground. Except that the flowers don’t grow here, they grew in her mother’s garden, and she picked them before the fire. Scarlet sets each daisy in her palm, then incinerates it. Pursing her lips, she blows ash into the air, before beginning again. They shouldn’t be here, these flowers. They don’t belong. And it’s her job to eradicate them.

  All at once, Scarlet senses she’s being watched.

  Her mother sits at the edge of the clearing, perched on a large white stone. She is here. But she is never here, not in this place.

  “Hello.”

  Her mother says nothing, as distant in the dream as she was in life. Then, in an unprecedented move, she stands and walks slowly over to Scarlet, her feet bare, like Scarlet’s own, on the moss and stone. She stops, reaches down, and plucks a daisy from the earth. Taking the stalk between finger and thumb, she places it in Scarlet’s open hand.

  “Take care of it. I couldn’t, but you can.”

  Then, in those strange slipping shifts that so often happen in dreams, Scarlet is running, stepping over the stones, leaping over fallen tree trunks, legs stretched and then lifting into the air. Then she’s standing in the lower branches of a tree, looking up for a foothold, intent on clambering all the way to the top. Scarlet doesn’t know why but the urge is insistent. Then she’s at the top of the tree, looking down.

  Someone below is shouting, telling her to jump, telling her to fly.

  “Oh-kay,” Scarlet shouts back. How did she get there? She’d wanted only to run; everything afterwards was like being plucked from the ground and set atop the tree by the hand of God. Perhaps she’ll fall and smash on the ground like the Christmas fairy she broke a decade ago. She can still see the fragments of her china face scattered across the floorboards. But no, she won’t die.

  Scarlet reaches out her arms like wings and jumps.

  Scarlet wakes but doesn’t open her eyes. She presses her head into the pillow, trying to hold on to the tendrils of the dream. But the mists and fog are evaporating, rolling back out of her reach. Sighing, she brushes her hair out of her eyes. Her finger snags on something caught in a curl and she pulls it out.

  A white twig.

  Twenty minutes later, finally dragging herself out of bed, Scarlet steps onto the carpet and sees that the soles of her feet are smeared with mud.

  11:59 p.m.—Bea

  “Welcome back. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Bea looks up to see the man with the golden eyes swoop down through the mists like her book-eagles, parting the fog with a single sweep of his outstretched arms. Her father.

  Bea steps back, feeling his voice slice thin strips from her skin, pricking the scars on her thighs. She presses her hands to her sides.

  “Oh, you’re not still upset?” Wilhelm Grimm reaches out his hand. “I thought I’d explained myself. I thought you understood.”

  Bea looks at him, torn between the desire to seize hold of him and the desire to run.

  He wiggles his fingertips. “Bygones?”

  Bea doesn’t speak, doesn’t move.

  “Oh, sweetheart, don’t hold a grudge.” He smiles. “You’re my best girl, don’t you know that? I’m so very proud of you.”

  Bea hesitates. She wants to resist him, wants to hate him. She refuses to succumb to feeling what she’s been fighting all her life: a longing to be loved by him.

  “Oh, come on,” he says. “You can’t tell me you feel at home in that other world.” His hand hangs in the air, waiting. “Tell me you feel seen there. Tell me you have someone who knows you as you truly are, who’s glimpsed inside your heart and accepted you just as you are.” He pauses. “If you have that, go back and enjoy it, for I’ve nothing more than that to offer you here.”

  Bea meets her father’s eyes, then reaches for his hand.

  They walk together awhile, hand in hand, along the moss-stone paths, the white leaves falling on and all around them, until they come to a valley where the trees part.

  “I’ve brought you a gift,” he says, letting go of her hand. “To welcome you home.”

  “Oh? What—”

  Her father holds a finger to his lips; his voice drops to a whisper. “Just wait. He’s on his way.”

  Bea holds her breath, scanning the valley. Has her father brought her a man? If so, for what purpose? It seems a strange gift from father to daughter. But he’s no conventional father. She sees the stream that runs through the valley, its waters shimmering as the moon shines out from behind the clouds, the eddy and swirl of the currents flicking up droplets like tiny silver fish. Then, as she watches the water, he appears. A stag, his antlers bone white in the moonlight, crests the hill, parting the fog like curtains of smoke, and lopes down to the river and bends to drink.

  “He’s . . . magnificent,” Bea whispers. “I’ve never seen—I never knew they were so . . . beautiful.” This word seems inadequate to describe him, but it’s the only one she has. “Majestic” followed soon after, but it too falls short and doesn’t seem worth further breaking the silence to say.

  The stag’s ears twitch when Bea speaks and he raises his head from the river, looking straight at her, large brown eyes unblinking. As Bea observes him, she feels the distance between them fall away, as if she’s standing beside him, her hand pressed to his flank, the muscle firm beneath the smooth, thick coat. The sensation is so vivid that she can feel the heat of his skin under her palm, the deep, soft fur of his mane at the edge of her fingertips. She wants to reach up, to have him nuzzle her with his dark, wet snout. She wants to bury her face in his mane and breathe him in.

  “Thank you,” Bea says. “I love—”

  Her father shakes his head. “He’s not for you to love,” he says. “He’s for you to kill.”

  Bea looks up, eyes wide with shock. “What? No—why? I can’t—”

  “You eat steak,” her father interrupts.

  “Yes,” Bea admits. “But . . .”

  “And what did you get for it? Apart from extra iron in your blood and a succulent taste on your tongue. When you kill him you’ll get his life force: his strength, his stamina, his stature, his dominance and power.”

  Bea shakes her head. “No, I can’t. It wouldn’t be—it wouldn’t—”

  “You want to feel what it’s like, don’t you?” her father continues. “You want to gallop through these forests, to have his huge heart beating in your chest, his wild blood rushing through your veins, his hooves pounding the ground in your feet.”

  Despite herself, Bea nods.

  “So do it.”

  “How?” Bea asks, hearing her own voice as if she were eavesdropping on someone else. “But how can I?”

  “Oh, my dear, what a ridiculous question.” He laughs. “Such a thing is child’s play. When you were younger I even had to step in, curb your zeal, stop you from slaughtering my entire herd.”

  “I
can’t remember,” Bea says. “I can’t . . .”

  “You had great skill, great dexterity. You favoured the spears of the hawthorn tree as your weapon of choice.”

  “I did?” Bea says, startled, even as she feels the desire to do it now. She’s thinking that she couldn’t identify this tree at ten paces when her gaze falls upon one’s lethal spikes. About to ask how it’s possible to extract the thorns and turn them into arrows, Bea remembers. She knows what to do.

  Focusing on a single branch, Bea strips it of every thorn with a twitch of her fingers, as if her fingernails were knives. The thorns hover in the air before Bea brings together forefinger and thumb, shifting the twelve thorns into a line and pressing them together. The thorns fuse, tip to tip, into an arrow.

  As she lets the arrow fly, as she watches it pierce the stag’s heart, as she feels the thud of his body falling on the ground, the tremors echoing under the soles of her feet, Bea feels the force of his life seeping from his veins and into her own.

  In the echo of his death, Bea finds that she doesn’t feel fear, only relief. The killing of this stag has finally turned her into who she truly is: a killer, a hunter, a soldier.

  30th October

  Two days . . .

  3:03 a.m.—Leo

  Since he cannot yet die, and since he can think of nothing else but trying to save Goldie’s life, Leo is trying to shape her dreams. He could find her, track her down, speak face to face. But since she hasn’t been turning up to work since he told her, clearly seeing him is the last thing Goldie wants. Instead, he’ll visit her dreams. She won’t like him much for that either, but what choice does he have?

  Goldie can reach Everwhere simply by dreaming, while Leo must wait for an open gate, must walk through at an exact time and date. But he knows that it’s possible for a soldier—if he’s imprinted himself upon a Grimm girl’s spirit—to travel on the coattails of her dreams, just as their mothers can. Many times. Leo shakes his head, unable to think of those moments without a surge of longing and loss leaching all his strength and leaving him weak.