Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (11 page)

I hesitated for a moment, but then smiled. “I love you too,
Wendy Darling.”

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

A Grimm Diaries Prequel

A teaser story for the
upcoming release of

The Grimm Diaries Series

by Cameron Jace

Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin
Farouk Ali Shebl

All rights are reserved. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
from the author.

This book is a work of fiction. The names,
characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or
have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations
is entirely coincidental.

All facts concerning fairy tales publication dates,
scripts, and historical events mentioned in this book are true. The
interpretations and fantasy elements aren’t. They are the author’s imagination.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

as told by Little Red Riding
Hood

Dear Diary,

Once upon a time, there were wolves outside my bedroom’s window.
It was midnight. They were Knock-knock-knocking, and sniff-sniff-sniffing while
I cringed under my white blanket, my teeth chat-chat-chattering.

Alone in bed in the ramshackle and vulnerable house,
cocooning myself under my blanket, I didn't know how to escape them. I kept trying
to push my head against the bed sheets, wanting to bury it into the mattress like
an Ostrich buries its head in the sand.

The clock kept tick-tick-ticking.

Hiding in the fog outside, the wolves howled in the still
of the night, sending shivers through my spine. I wet my bed with my drool, listening
to them scratching the glass on my window.

Scratch, scrrrratch, scratching.

What an awful noise. It sounded like a slow, long ‘crrrreeeeee’
that would end with the letter P.

The wolves came every night, and they never left.

Not until they heard my mother’s footsteps by the door.
Sometimes, she came back too late from working in the forest.

By then, I didn’t know what my mother did for living. And
if I only knew.

I was only ten. I remember how she woke up every morning,
taking care of the house. Then, she went out to the garden to water the trees:
the Lone Cypress tree, the Oak tree, and above all her favorite Fortune Cookie
tree.

The Fortune Cookie tree was high enough to disappear into
the clouds. I believed it could reach for the heavens, but I wasn’t allowed to
climb up or even touch it. The tree was wide at the base, and it demanded an
incredible amount of watering. However, it wasn’t water that quenched its
thirst. Our tree drank wine. Red wine.

It was a special kind of wine. My mom brought it with her
when she came back every day.

The thing I didn’t know by then was that no such Fortune
Cookie existed elsewhere but in our garden.

Whether it was autumn, winter, spring or summer, our tree
was always thirsty. It didn’t matter if it were a rainy day or a sunny one, if
the wind almost puffed away our house, or if it settled to a lovely summer
breeze allowing the butterflies to flutter around.

It just didn’t matter.

The tree needed wine, and my mother couldn’t live without
the Fortune Cookies. I used to call it the Secret Mysterious Matter of my
Mother and the Tree with the Fortune Cookies Outside the house. I couldn't
think of a shorter name.

Only one fortune cookie fell from the tree everyday.

Smiling, my mother picked it up, and crashed it open with
our kitchen ladle.

My mother read the piece of paper and sighed. Sometimes, she
smiled afterward. Other times, she made irritable faces. Whatever her
expression was, she ended up preparing herself to go out to the forest, doing
what she was meant to do.

She wore her yellow hood, picked up one of her wicker
baskets, warned me of opening the door for strangers while she was out, and
then left. She just walked out in the coldest of winters under the thickest snow
to deliver a basket.

On her way to the forest, she bought wine and cakes, promising
a payment to the seller on her way back from the forest. A promise she always
fulfilled.

Then, she started her dangerous journey into the Black Forest; a place that elders and children avoided for the horrible stories they heard
about it. They said that there were gigantic ants, spiders, and frogs in the
forest. I heard rumors about three-headed  dogs, two-trunk elephants, and an
evil, evil, evil witch that ate little children for breakfast.

But I knew better. Even though I was naive, I wasn’t
that
naïve. Everybody was afraid of the wolves. Not the one-eyed wolves, not three-legged 
wolves, but the hairy and hungry wolves.

When my mother returned home from her journey, the tree
rewarded her with fruits and vegetables, enough for a day or two. The tree blessed
my mother’s successful journey and helped us from starving.

One day, the garden rewarded us with meat: a three-legged goat
that my mother cooked for us in our big oven - one of the few things my granma
left behind before she left many years ago. The meat was delicious, and it satisfied
my hunger for weeks. I loved meat. I preferred it raw, but my mother insisted that
it had to be cooked.

Sometimes, my mother’s journey took longer than expected,
and she ended up coming home after sunset, or almost midnight.

That was when the wolves rose out of the night and
surrounded the house, trying to enter my room while I was all alone.

Whenever I told my mother about them, she told me that I
should be stronger, that soon I will be sixteen, and the wolves would be scared
of me, not the other way around. Until then, I was safe, as long as I stayed
locked in the house.

I laughed. My poor, hard-working mother was so naïve. There
was no way I could scare these wolves away. I was just a lonely girl without
friends who hid under a blanket.

One day, when the sun was up, and I was alone, playing with
my squirrel friends, someone knocked on my door.

Knock-Knock-knock.

My mother had warned me of strangers knocking on my door.
She said it could be the wolves, disguised in the form of humans.

I wasn’t going to open, but when I asked who it was, a girl
responded on the other side. I asked her to bow down and step away so I can see
her through the keyhole.

She did.

I asked her to show me her paws – I meant her hands.

She did.

She
was
a real girl, and she had human hands. Her
voice was sweet, and I had no friends. I couldn’t imagine when another girl
would come knocking on my door again. What if we could play together?

I opened the door.

She asked me if she could rest for a while.

“I can’t,” I said, standing by the door. “My mother told me
not to talk or let strangers inside.”

“Oh,” The pale girl panted. She looked worried, as if
running away from something. She didn’t need to just rest. She wanted to hide from
something. “I am not the Big Bad Wolf, you know.” She said, and her eyes
gleamed with a tinge of gold suddenly.

My eyes widened with horror. It wasn’t just the color of
her eyes that worried me. How did she know about the wolves? I was speechless.

“Look,” She peeked over my shoulder, noticing my mother’s
wine on the kitchen’s table. “Use the wine,” She leaned forward, and whispered
to me. “The red, red, red wine.”

“What?”

“The wine your mother brings home to feed the tree,” The
girl said. “Use it."

“I don’t understand. Who are you?” How did she know about
that?

“My mother calls me Shew,” She said, smiling. She had a
fabulous smile. If only she wasn’t that pale. “I have to go.” She said, and
disappeared behind the bushes. She moved rather quickly. I thought I didn’t
actually see her
walk
away. She just disappeared as I listened to the
sounds of horses and carriages in the distance, probably going after her. I
closed the door, friendless and lonely like always.

Waiting for my mother that night, I tucked the bottle of
wine under the blanket with me.

“
Use the red, red, red wine
,” I whispered to myself,
tapping the bottle thoughtfully. “What the tick-tack-tock did she mean?” I
furrowed my eyebrows, hearing the wolves outside my window.

Tick. Tick. Tinnnnnn.

The clock on the wall stroke midnight, and my mother wasn’t
home yet. What took her so long? What did my mother have to do in the forest?

Fear crawled on my skin. I felt as if trapped inside that
skin, as if I just wanted to rip myself apart and become what I really was.

I peeked from under the blanket, and saw one of the wolves,
scrrraching
at the window.

Crrrinnnnge.

Its yellow, slitted eyes were staring at me. I could see a
smirk on its face as if it were human. It broke the stare, howling under at the
full moon above.

No!

I tucked myself back under the covers, and plucked the
bottle open.

Pong!

I never drank wine before. I was too young for that. I remember
hearing stories about how wine made the mind go whiz and whack, how it turned people
into sleepwalking demons until its effect wore off.

Maybe that was what I needed until my mother came back. I hoped
that she’d register my fear and use one of our many tree-chopping tools in the
garden, chopping their heads off, one by one.

Chop. Chop. Chop. I liked the sound of that.

I gulped down the wine, and the red liquid spread through
my chest. Drinking under the blanket was awkward, but I managed to position my
mouth to the bottle.

I drank and drank, wishing the howling would stop.

Glock. Glock. Glock.

I started feeling dizzy, wondering if I were counting sheep.

Suddenly, the bed moved. It swirled around the room like an
angry flying carpet. The howling didn’t stop, but it sounded muffled and slow
as if the wolves went under water.

Awooooooooo. Awooooooo.

What was happening to me?

My vision blurred, my tongue slurred, and I found myself
smiling with crossed eyes like a fool. Was this the part when the wolves broke
the glass, got into my room, and ate me?

Yum. Yum. Yum.

Then I felt hot, as if the sun woke up at midnight and
broke into my room. The heat bothered me. I couldn’t hide under the blanket on
the flying bed no more.

I straightened up on my knees, spreading my arms while
holding the blanket with the tips of my fingers, roaring nonsense words. I
looked crazy and scary while I was just drunk and bothered.

To my surprise, the bed wasn’t flying. Nothing was moving
in my room. The wine caused me to imagine things.

But something else happened. The howling stopped.

I saw the wolves with their paws against the window, and
their dimmed yellow eyes staring at me in horror.

What?

Even the clock stopped ticking.

Brrrokkk.

The wolves looked like chickens in a barn, afraid it was
their turn for the slaughter. It was as if they turned into chicken, and I
turned into a wolf.

Looking in mirror on the wall, I saw myself with the white blanket
wrapped around my head, looking like a freaking ghost. I winced at my reflection
and gasped. The wolves gasped with me, placing their worried paws on their
mouths.

My eyes were reddened from the wine I drank, and I looked
creepy as if the one in the mirror wasn’t me. I started feeling dizzy and
sleepy. The blanket I wrapped around me was soaked in the red wine that I had
spilled from the bottle. I looked like wearing a red hood, and it scared the
rotten apples out of them. I wondered why they were so afraid of the red hood.

But it didn’t matter. The pale girl was right. The wine
worked. Feeling tired, I fell asleep, unafraid of the wolves for the first time
in my life

That day, when my mother came home, she punished me for
drinking. She must have thought I was some kind of an addict or something. But
I wasn’t sad about it because I didn’t need her to shush the wolves away
anymore. I had my own brilliant method. Thanks to the pale girl.

Still, I didn’t know what was in store for me.

When I turned sixteen, my mother told me that I was now old
enough to help her bring bread to the table. She said that she would tell me
why she was going to the forest every day, and that it was time for me to take
over. I was so excited. It meant that I would go out to the forest myself –
since I wasn’t afraid of wolves anymore.