Frightful Fairy Tales

Copyright © 2013 by Dame Darcy

All rights reserved. 

First printing, 2002. 

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-9825625-2-9

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without special permission from the publisher. 

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Dame Darcy Ink

Cover and Interior Design by Toni Tajima, Melanie Bentley.

For further inquiries concerning the title, contact:

Book Hub Inc.

903 Pacific Avenue, Suite 207-A

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

[email protected]

This book is dedicated to my mother, Lila,

who read me fairy tales every night of my childhood.

Also to my father, Mike Stanger–

poet, musician, and artist extraordinaire.

Thanks go out to Brandan Kearney, for helping me with a lot of the earlier stories; Alexander G. Haseltine, for helping with the transcribing and inspiration; Stephanie Rubin. Katherine Gates, and Simon Henwood, for believing in this project in its early stages; Melanie Bently, Tony R. Boies, and ultimatejenn for epub formatting; and last but not least, all the bats out there reading this, who know ghosts, fairies, witches, and true love.

CONTENTS

Persimmion

The Damsel in the Well

The Black River

The Siren Ship

The Queen of Spades

The Gambler’s Lesson

BONUS:

The Salt Maiden

The Tumultuous Life of Rapunzel’s Parents

Red

PERSIMMION

Once there was a miller by trade who was actually an evil wicked witch. She lived in a semi-translucent, crystallized sugar-shell, syrup sap shack, near a babbling brook and a waterfall. Her mill wheel churned the water and rhythmically whined and shrieked, for the power that drove it came not from the water but from the souls of slaughtered children.

This evil witch was named Matilda--Millie for short, which she thought was clever, being a miller and all. If you ever saw her, you would think she looked like a hideously beautiful man. Her hair, teeth, and fingernails were long and ended in points. Her skin was as white as ivory, but it glowed underneath and luminesced in the darkness like a lily by the light of the crescent moon. Like the moon, it was marred with craters and scars, for her diet (as you will later see) was very poor. She took little regard in the living (except as specimens for her scientific experiments), and because she had always been old herself, she particularly hated the frivolity of youth.

Millie was an alchemist and genetics engineer, finding sources of never-ending amusement in combining two non-complementary gene pools. For instance, she once combined the genes of a tick with those of a goat, producing a horrible thing that could jump from several miles away to suck its chosen victim’s blood. Seeing the Goattick in action, Millie laughed so hard she turned blue and fainted, landing on a rock and suffering a severe (and well-deserved) concussion in the process.

Although Millie enjoyed creating freaks of nature that defied God, her favorite activity was murdering children. She lured them to her shack with the sound of the old mill’s paddle wheel, which made curious keening noises, almost like a dirge. Anyone who had things on their mind-taxes and laundry, money and love-could not hear the sound. Only those with a clear conscience and an innocent mind and soul could hear it. Thus only children responded to the wheel’s call and were lured to Millie’s house and their doom.

The witch welcomed the children warmly, fed them pancakes and syrup poisoned with deadly nightshade, which she grew in her atrium along with Venus flytraps, poison ivy, and wormwood.  Once the children were weakened by the drug, she bound their hands and feet and hung them from the kitchen ceiling, where they flapped like screeching fish while she slit their throats and licked the blood from their cheeks and chins. She then used the mill to grind their bones to a fine powder and disposed of the evidence.

Eventually, the witch decided she wanted a child of her own, someone to do the housework and errands, someone who could not escape, someone bound to her by blood. Her own womb was infertile, so she dragged the prettiest, most recently diseased six-year-old girl to her genetics lab. There she removed the child’s ovaries and placed them in a beaker with a tablespoon of quicksilver, a dash of sugar, and a sprinkle of cinnamon (if she was making a boy, she would have used a puppy dog’s tail). The witch heated this mixture until it simmered nicely. In no time she had created a daughter of her own. The infant had delicate, pale skin with the texture of a tulip stem. Her eyes and her hair were bright yellow, mimicking the young girl Millie had murdered to create her. Millie named her Persimmion.

Persimmion hated her mother and had a strong aversion to eating meat. As a child, the sight of the constantly murdered children hanging from the kitchen ceiling and her mother’s fondness for blood warped and disgusted her. All Persimmion wanted was air, warmth, water, and sunlight-simple things other people seemed to obtain so easily and in such abundance, things she couldn’t have or if she could have one, she couldn’t have the other. It was a constant source of frustration and fury to poor Persimmion.

For these reasons, and many others of her own, Persimmion spent her childhood trying to escape from the mill and from Millie. First, as a young child of six, then at nine, and then at eleven. She dreamt a loving mother and father waited somewhere for her, out there, just beyond her reach, out of the woods, with a beautiful house, peach trees growing in the yard, and a puppy to pet, not a bloodsucking, jumping Goattick. In later years Persimmion ran away hoping to find a true love, her husband, whose sweet character and body were stronger than her mother’s evil and would protect and care for her.

Millie hated these constant excursions, of course. Her love for Persimmion was of the selfish kind--and she could not stand disobedience. So whenever the girl disappeared, the witch stamped the floorboards three times and chanted:

Come on home.

Do not roam.

Going away

Means hell to pay.

Immediately, Persimmion’s feet turned around and walked the poor girl back home against her will.

Poor Persimmion! Her only sunlight was an anemic trickle of rays through a tight weave of branches. Her only companions were the ghosts of Millie’s innocent victims, who lingered around the area, continually crying and complaining, driving Persimmion mad with their constant juvenile dirge-like tirade.

And there Persimmion stood and watched intently years later as Millie finally met her demise. The neighboring village had grown almost to the edge of the forest by then, and lumberjacks were forced to explore deeper in the woods. Soon Millie’s mill was discovered and her grisly secrets revealed. One night the entire village stormed the mill, catching the witch in her sleep before she could utter a spell or escape. They burned the shack and mill wheel to the ground, as well as many trees, forming a clearing in the woods. They tried to move Persimmion’s statue, but it was firmly rooted in the earth, as if anchored to the center of the world. So the villagers decided to use the statue as a memorial for all the slaughtered children. Into the folds of her clothing they carved the names of their missing offspring, whose ghosts could now rest in peace. Placated, the crowd returned to the village. The woods were now known as an evil place, forbidden to all except on the anniversary of the witch’s death, when the villagers came to Persimmion’s statue, crowned her with wreaths of flowers, and prayed for the souls of their lost children. So it was that Persimmion was left alone for most of the year.