The Grimm Diaries Prequels Volume 11- 14: Children of Hamlin, Jar of Hearts, Tooth & Nail & Fairy Tale, Ember in the Wind, Welcome to Sorrow, and Happy Valentine's Slay. (6 page)

When Ladle’s anger subsided, she had no place to rest her head but in her mother’s arms, because she hadn’t known any other arms that could comfort her.

The kiddos next to me were starting to sob, too.

“Man up. I mean Devil up, all of you,” I snapped. “Did I teach you to sympathize this way? What’s wrong with you?”

“She is just a young girl growing up,” an almost toothless girl said to me. “That’s not fair. Why does she have to be Death?”

“Shut up!” I puffed fire from my ears. How were those going to be the future devils of the world? Damn, I needed to minimize the fun in this place and infuse some discipline.

“It’s alright,” Ladle’s mother patted her daughter. “Growing up is a bitch. It’s alright, Ladle.”

“Don’t swear, mom,” Ladle hit her mother with a sweet and weakened fist. “You’re not supposed to swear in front of me.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Ladle’s mother brushed her hair. “Let me cook you some Donkeyskin soup, your favorite, and then I’ll tell you all you need to know.”

Sobbing, Ladle lifted her head up and faced her mother, then uttered words that broke the kiddos’ hearts to pieces, “I am sorry I messed up my job by not killing this boy.” she said.

It amazed me that she still wanted to do it right. Was that the real reason why Ladle was upset, because she didn’t do it right? Was she concerned about being blamed more that the adversity she’d experienced?

“It’s fine, Ladle,” her mother wiped one last teardrop from her cheek. “You don’t have to do everything right. You’re still learning.”

“But I’m Death,” she said in a way that implied she wasn’t really believing in herself, yet. “And I’m supposed to make sure everyone’s equal.”

Before the kiddos burst into uncontrollable tears, I had to pull the crystal ball away, yelling at all of them. This, or I would be changing the sign on Hell’s door tomorrow, and switch it with one that said
kindergarten.
That was why I prohibited reading romance novels in Hell. Such books made their heart go soft, and that wasn’t helping in our line of work.

“But why did you pull the crystal ball away?” a kiddo cried. “We want to know who the Piper is.”

“If that’s all you want to know,” I sighed. “I can tell you about it, without all of these clichéd and emotional chick moments. Gather around me. I’ll tell you the Piper’s story.”

“But you suck at telling stories,” a kiddo commented.

“Really?” I wondered. “Don’t I read you deadtime stories every night?”

“Which give us nightmares!”

“That’s the point of telling them,” I snapped. How did I fail raising these children? “Well, if you want to know about the Piper and are expecting to sleep without nightmares, then you’re mistaken,” I took a deep breath. “So do you want to know the Piper’s story or?”

All the kiddos lowered their heads and gathered around the ice—we had a lot of fire; when we camped, we gathered around ice.

Everyone was ready for me to tell the story. I liked it when I was in control. Stupid kids. Who wanted to raise kids?

“Let’s just agree on some things first,” I told them. “Everything you ever knew about the Piper is wrong, and almost everything you read in those history books is even double wrong. I will tell you the Piper’s truth; who he is, what he has done, why he came to be what he is, his relationship to Ladle Rat and the Black Death. I will even back the story up with evidence from famous books, poems, and nursery rhymes, but if you get nightmares, don’t blame me.”

“Go on,” a kiddo said. “We’re not scared of anyone. We have to deal with you all day!”

I scratched my head. I needed to find a way to increase my popularity among my students, but I knew I was going to deal with it later.

“Well, let’s start,” I said. “Are you ready?”

“You talk too much. Tell us the Piper’s story!”

And I did, starting with every kiddo’s annoying, yet beloved, first line…

***

Once upon a time, in the small town of Hamlin in Westfalia, centuries before the Kingdom of Sorrow existed, lived a small peaceful tribe. They were regular people; peasants, carpenters, blacksmiths, and more. They worked all the kinds of struggling professions, barely bringing food on the table at night, counting on their sweet dreams to give them reason to wake up the day after.

The sun was proud of the people of Hamlin and it loved them dearly. It smiled upon them each morning and regretfully said goodbye at night. Then the moon—when it still was a beautiful girl, and not an imposter—made sure their nights were safe from the creatures in the shadows. Historians claimed that the sun, the moon, and the earth were all on Hamlin’s side and wished it the best. All but fate, which had its spiders weave a darker future for Hamlin. Fate’s web was chokingly strong. Very few people argued with fate—most of them ended up with a loss for words.

Hamlin had been a Monastery in the beginning. Priests and nuns inhabited it as a refuge, an Eden of their own, escaping the evil that roamed the earth to a small terrain that no one had set foot on before. It was as if they wished they were Robinson Crusoe, settling on the shores of an unexplored island after having been lost in the sea of madness, now starting a new life while keeping the demons at bay.

It was in the beginning of the thirteenth century when the priests and nuns found solitude and salvation in Hamlin. Years later, they wished to create families, but they weren’t allowed to get married for ancient religious traditions. They needed outsiders to join the peaceful town, preferably married men and women who were kind at heart, and hadn’t been stained by the evil that infested the world outside.

But how was it possible to see evil or good in a person from a first impression? Even the priests and the nuns didn’t know how to answer that.

The priests and nuns, who called themselves
the founders
, were also poor. Most of them didn’t work and couldn’t afford traveling away to explore the world to see if it had become a better place where man didn’t kill his brother to marry his wife.

Sometimes, travelers came passing through town and fed their hunger with the little food the people of Hamlin provided, spending the night before getting back on the road. The town was boring and nothing tempted anyone to stay. Still, most of the travelers asked a strange question before they left, “Do you know some good old bedtime stories to tell?”

The founders of Hamlin were puzzled by the question, wondering why travelers assumed they should know good stories when they didn’t.

“You’re priests and nuns, eh,” a mouthful traveler asked. “You must know of a lot of stories of bravery and wisdom from ancient times.”

It was a reasonable assumption, but the biblical stories they knew didn’t entertain because the traveler already knew them.

“It’s sad that you don’t know stories,” the traveler said. “If you had, I wouldn’t mind paying you to listen to some.”

It amazed the founders of Hamlin that a man would pay for a story—some historians would argue that this was the moment that inspired the idea of selling books. Was storytelling so precious and important to the human psyche that a man would actually pay to hear one?

It was a hard question to answer for the founders who hadn’t communicated or traveled because they believed the world outside was evil. They didn’t understand that evil was the only thing that let man know what was truly good, and that stories studied the idea repeatedly.

Luckily, there was one man in Hamlin who did know of stories about dragons, princesses, and noble knights. He was an ordinary man who cleaned the monastery—the priests and nuns didn’t do that kind of work themselves. They were devoted to prayer and wishful thinking.

The man’s stories were intriguing; full of dragons, castles, far away kingdoms, kings and queens, enchanted princesses, and true love’s kisses.

“But how do you know such stories?” one of the founders asked the humble man.

“I dream them,” the poor man with the silver tooth said. He had been an orphan, adopted by the founders a long time ago, and he had been with them since.

The truth was that the man lied. He didn’t dream the stories. He made them up, for this is how stories are made.

The man only made sure that his stories appealed to the listener and had lovable characters they could relate to. The poor man was practically a liar—a skilled one—and he secretly called himself the teller of beautiful lies.

Eventually, the stories brought money to Hamlin, and it attracted outsiders to live around the town. The Monastery expanded to a village, then to a small town where people lived happily every after.

Although there was no way for the priests to make sure the newcomers were good people, they had learned one thing they had never thought of before: those stories had the power to gather people around the fire and make everyone feel good.

It was a unique feeling when the boundaries between good and evil, right or wrong, us or them, came tumbling down because of stories; those little fantasies and wonders that connected people from different ethnicities and points-of-view. Those tales that made one fly to Persia, the Arctic, and to the desert sands of the Middle East each night. Even better, some stories let them travel to places no one had ever seen before. All this magic happened without leaving one’s place, without leaving Hamlin, and sometimes without having any money.

The founders of Hamlin found peace, not through preaching religious views, but through silly stories that started with one man and his little white lie.

Generations passed and families grew. The town of Hamlin, although small and primitive, felt like the largest realm in the world because of all the imaginative tales that filled its citizens’ heads.

The only drawback was that the new law of Hamlin prohibited anyone from traveling away, and if they did, they weren’t allowed to return. The founders were satisfied with the new citizens, and were afraid that traveling to the outside world would return with evil in his heart.

Once in Hamlin, always in Hamlin.

The locals were alright with the law. They had become quite a number, and their families were growing with children who were the sunshine of each day and the moonlight of every night. They played and cheered, feeding on stories that had never been. Their imagination was limitless that they joked that someday they’d wake up to find a castle built in the sky.

There was a sign on Hamlin’s entrance that said they were doing absolutely fine, and didn’t need any newcomers, thank you very much. But as you know, when things are fine there is no story to tell. That’s why in every happy town something bad has to happen in order for listeners to think of it as a good story. That bad thing happened on the day a child from Hamlin found a small creature skittering on the ground…

It was a scruffy creature, running fast on all fours as if it had wheels for legs, and it kept squeaking in a funny way as if it was speaking a mysterious language. All in all, it was a cute little creature with a tail.

The child chased the small creature, damaging the kitchen and cheering that it had found a new toy. His mother was mad at him for the chaos he’d caused, but the child caught the creature in the end. He couldn’t stop staring at the little funny creature with the curious sniffing nose and a cube of cheese in its palms.

“Mother!” the child called, holding the creature from its tail as it swung like pendulum. “Look what I’ve caught! What a cute animal. I will call it Nosy because it has a cute nose!”

The child hadn’t expected his mother to run away screaming in the streets once she saw little Mr. Nosy. He thought Nosy looked devilishly cute and would make a great friend, and maybe would fit in the world of imaginative stories they told.

But no. His mother was screaming in the middle of the narrow streets of Hamlin, “Rats! Rats! Rats!”

That was when the boy suddenly noticed that Mr. Nosy wasn’t cute and friendly after all. More importantly, he wasn’t alone. In fact, all of his other friends stuck their noses out from the inside of frying pans, from the small crooks in the wall, from under the beds, from the inside of cheese cubes, and even from his father’s trouser’s pocket.

The boy did like his mother and started screaming, “Invasion of Hamlin! Yikes.”

Historians would argue that this was the first time the word, ‘Yikes’ had been invented, but no one could prove it. After all, history was full of lies and some
yikes
.

Mr. Nosy’s friends were black and big. They made eerie sounds like a muttering army of small things. The muttering grew to a grumbling, the grumbling grew to mighty rumbling, and out of the houses they came crumbling. They also squeaked a deafening note that sent chills to the spine.

Hamlin was being invaded.

The rats bit the dogs, ate the cats, shook the babies in their cradle, and ate the cheese—people used to scream, ‘cheese’ too, but no one had claimed it was the first time the word had a different, scary meaning.

Three days later, the founders had a big meeting in the town hall. They admitted that they needed to go outside for the first time to get help.

None of the residents of Hamlin knew how to deal with the plague-carrying and contagious rats. When it came to things like doctors, caretaker, teachers, Hamlin had one or a pair of those, and none of them had a clue how to deal with the catastrophe. The doctor said that rats were infectiously dangerous, and that the longer the rats stayed the faster a disease would spread—a couple of children had already caught it, suffering from a fever and showing rosy colored rashes on their skin. The awful smell of rats spread, and a rumor said that gathering pockets of flowers equalized the smell in the air and prevented one from catching the disease—perfume hadn’t been invented in Hamlin, yet. Three days later, one of the children had already died from the infection.

Help from outside was a must, or the plague would have killed them all and buried them in the grave along with the fabulous stories they knew.

But because the founders of Hamlin were stubborn about their rules, they thought they’d try one last thing before they sent one of them out there to the world. They prayed the way they begged for rain when the earth was dry. Only they didn’t have a scripted prayer for rats because they didn’t know what rats were. Were they a work of evil, demons, or were they sinners? They just didn’t know.