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. (13 page)

“Then one of us has to sacrifice him or herself for the others,” Wendy said.

“Look who’s talking,” I replied.

“One of you has to pull out one of your teeth so we can use it right now. We have no time.”

“Who do you think we are?” Gretel snapped at her. “How can a person pull their own tooth?”

I wondered how she dared ask the question when we knew her father did so. The answer came faster, and swifter, and more shocking, than I had anticipated. It was like a lighting strike that buzzed you while were standing in the rain thinking about a brighter future—you wanted bright, you got bright, too bright; you got the lightning bright that turned you into ashes.

“Like this,” Wendy said as her fisted hand smashed Gretel’s jaw in a blink of an eye. It was a true championship knock out, as they say these days.

We were all paralyzed, listening to Gretel’s aching moan and watching her single baby tooth fly above our heads in the air. It felt like slow motion. The tooth rolled in the air, somersaulting forever, spattering blood on everyone before it landed on the floor. It was good tooth, demon free.

We were staring at it as if we’d just witnessed the rare happening of a fallen star with a trickle of blood following it in the air. It was an intense scene that I never forgot; every time I watch a boxing match on TV in the real world these days, I remember this moment when Wendy knocked out Gretel’s baby tooth on the floor.

When I looked back at Gretel, blood was drooling from her lips and she had a wicked smile on her face, staring at her single tooth as if it were her newborn child. Although she wanted to kill Wendy, she was eager to start the incantation, now that she had provided her own tooth as sacrifice. When I talked to Gretel a hundred years later and asked why she looked so happy, she said that the incident had given her both the privilege of becoming the provider and the witch at the same time, which was more attention than she had ever received before. If we survived this night, she’d practically be a hero in school in the morning… minus a tooth.

Talk to me about flawed logic of adolescence, and I’ll tell you that you have seen nothing yet.

As the tooth lay on the floor, I dashed to the bathroom where Sweeny Todd was and jammed the door from outside. It did buy us some time to summon the Tooth Fairy and get done with all the craziness.

“She’s feisty,” Yakkity Tak said about Wendy. “She surly will get what she wants in life.”

“Are you all right?” Hansel asked his sister, but Gretel wasn’t listening. Her ambition to experiment with her first incantation and become the witch she’d always dreamed of was overwhelming—Gretel’s mother, who’d died giving birth to her, had been known to be the worst witch in Sorrow, so Gretel had something big to prove here; that she could do better than her mother.

We followed Gretel as she entered the maid’s room, which was what you’d call a storage room in the world we live in now. She put the tooth underneath the pillow, arranged the bed a little, and started reading from A Midnight’s Summer Scream.

“Is this really going to work?” Wendy started fidgeting.

“If it does, then I definitely regret the four baby teeth I threw in the river last year,” I said, unable to hide my excitement. Gosh, if Gretel really summoned the Tooth Fairy, this would feel as good as stealing from goblins. “I had even made a wish that I wasn’t granted.”

“It’s not working,” Gretel said after she had read the spell. “Something’s wrong.”

“Damn,” Hansel said.

“Why isn’t this working?” Gretel tapped her feet on the ground. “This has to work.”

“Like mother like daughter,” Wendy mused behind her.

I could feel Gretel’s anger near me. Her face was blushing red. The fact that the spell didn’t work hurt her more than Wendy’s insult.

“This can’t be. It has to work,” she flipped through the page madly then suddenly stopped. “Here it is!”

“What?” I said.

“Someone has to sleep in the bed with the tooth,” Gretel said, looking at me.

“I slept well last night. I don’t feel like napping,” I said.

Hansel had already took some steps back so Wendy wouldn’t push him in the bed, but Wendy was gone.

I looked for her but she wasn’t there. We stared at each other, wondering if she had just panicked, knowing that we might want to punish her for knocking Gretel’s tooth out.

Well, the biggest mistake you could make with Wendy is think that she could feel fear or empathy. I saw her coming back through the corridor, pulling a sedated Cinderella from the office back to the storage room. She drug her by one hand like a sack.

“For God’s sake,” Gretel yelled. “She’s been through a lot, and she’s unconscious. Don’t do this to her.”

“I’m not going to wait all night for that golden coin,” Wendy said, pulling poor ashen-faced Cinderella to the maid’s room. “It’s her room anyways. If she has to sleep then she should sleep in her own bed,” Wendy grinned and that red flash in her yes shone back again. It really freaked me out, and although I felt it was my responsibility to save Cinderella from her arms, I knew I didn’t have time when I heard Sweeny shouting from the bathroom, cursing who ever had jammed him inside.

It was only seconds, I told myself. All Cinderella had to do was sleep in her bed until we got the tooth and then I was going to make sure she woke up in her real home—although her home was as horrible as the school she cleaned for extra money.

Wendy dropped Cinderella on the bed, got out, and closed the door behind her. “Are you ready now?” she sneered at Gretel who was more than able, already reading her incantations.

Although Sweeny was growling behind the bathroom door, his voice soon faded within the lightning that struck outside, and the walls that started shaking inside the school. Everything was flying around us and we had to dodge to survive flying tables and chairs. Only Gretel, the successful witch, although tiny, held her heavy book and stood firm against the spiraling wind inside the school, repeating the incantation aloud. She looked so happy doing it.

“When is this going to stop?” Wendy screamed against the wind, which actually sank into silence by the end of her sentence as if someone had just pulled its plug.

All of us were staring at each other. Silence was even scarier than the screams from before. Yakkity Tak broke the silence with his chattering teeth. I have to say I was happy to see him afraid.

“What now?” I asked Gretel, panting. She was sweating all over.

“The Tooth Fairy should possess Cinderella’s soul, take the tooth and give us a golden coin for it,” Gretel said, staring at the closed door with eyes almost bulging out like yoyos.

“You never said anything about the Tooth Fairy possessing Cinderella,” Wendy grinned at Gretel.

“I just read it now. It’s not like I do this everyday!” Gretel burst out at Wendy in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Wendy fisted her hand, her knuckles whitening, her teeth gritted, but didn’t dare hit Gretel. Witches were dangerous when they were angry, and Wendy sensed it.

“I think all we have to do is wait,” Hansel said, also staring at the door.

“What in the world have you done?” a growling voice scared us from behind.

We turned back. It was Sweeny Todd.

The man was huge, and scary, standing in his white coat and hammer in his hand like a serial killer. He wasn’t looking at us, though. He was staring at the closed door.

That’s when I knew that something was terribly wrong. If that big man was scared of whatever was behind the door, then we had messed things up.

“It’s alright,” Gretel talked bravely to him with her bright, proud eyes. She wanted to say, ‘look what I have done. I am some witch!’

“Nothing’s alright,” Sweeny mumbled.

“We just summoned the Tooth Fairy, Gretel said. “She should place a golden coin under the pillow now. We only used Cinderella as a vessel.”

Sweeny Todd should have been mad at us for stealing his patient and wanting to escape the detention, but he wasn’t. He shrugged, still watching the door.

“I am going to ask you one question, you little annoying children,” Sweeny said; a silver tooth shone in his mouth, and I was curious to ask about it but knew that it wasn’t the right time. “One question, that’s all. If you answer it correctly, I will let you go tonight. If you give me the wrong answer, none of us will go home unless one of you is sacrificed to the Tooth Fairy.”

“What are you talking about?” Gretel asked.

“Here is my question,” Sweeny asked while something was about to open the door from inside. “Did you clean the tooth you put under the pillow, or did you leave blood on it?”

Gretel shrieked, flipping through the pages of the book as if she had remembered she’d committed a crucial mistake.

The door creaked open slowly… all of us were frozen in place by our fears to the floor by our fears. Wendy was the closest to the door.

“Before you put the tooth make sure you clean it from the blood,” Gretel was reading from the book. “Because there are two kinds of Tooth Fairies, the benevolent: and the malevolent. If you don’t clean the blood, the dark one is the one you summon,” Gretel was about to faint. Hansel was already on the floor.

The door was half-open… creaking slowly. The sound was killing us as if we’d been tied to the bed watching the Boogeyman exit the closet and come for us.

“It’s forbidden to summon the Dark Tooth Fairy under any circumstances,” Gretel kept reading while I saw Sweeny lift the hammer high at the door. “If she is summoned by any mistake, she will kill everyone who is present,” Gretel was sweating, and Hansel was officially unconscious. “The only way out of this is to sacrifice one of the attendants. The Dark Fairy likes to kidnap children, and it can’t be the one she is possessing. You have to sacrifice one of you for her, and never ask about her again.”

The door sprang open. I closed my eyes. I had never felt so stupid and afraid before. I mean I could have just run out to the arms of the goblins, telling them how much I loved and missed them, but I was paralyzed with fear.

With my eyes closed, I heard a scream, a painful one, and then the sound of someone being snatched, followed by a short swoosh, then the door slammed closed again and the world went silent.

I knew that when I opened my eyes, one of us wasn’t going to be there. It wasn’t me for sure because no Tooth Fairy touched me, and I wondered who it did grab.

It would have been great if the Dark Tooth Fairy had taken Sweeny Todd; Yakkity Tak was alright with me, too.

When I opened my eyes, Sweeny Todd was gone, and a smile curved my lips. I moved my stiffened neck slowly to the left, and I saw Gretel as panicked and shocked as I was. I was glad she was there. Then I looked down and saw Hansel was still unconscious, Yakkity Tak squeezed underneath his weight. Then I looked to…

She wasn’t there. Wendy wasn’t there.

“Sweeny Todd ran,” Gretel said, “So did the goblins outside.”

“So the Tooth Fairy took…” I wondered as the door to Cinderella’s room opened.

Standing on the threshold was Cinderella herself, a little drowsy, not knowing what had happened. She looked at us with appalled eyes then ran her hand out over the empty space the missing tooth once filled.

“This really hurts,” she told us. “I hope you never have to enter that room.”

Cinderella thought she’d just come out of Sweeny Todd’s office. It would be moments before she realized she was in her room.

As for me and Gretel, we exchanged looks of guilt and shock.

“She took Wendy, Jack,” Gretel was about to cry. “It’s my fault.”

Even though the world would be a better place without Wendy, it didn’t feel right that the Tooth Fairy took her. Who knows what she would do to her?

We woke up Hansel, told the story to Cinderella and walked out of the abandoned school with no goblins nearby. I wondered what the Tooth Fairy must have looked like to make the goblins and Sweeny run away, but at the same time I was glad I closed my eyes and didn’t know, so her image wouldn’t end up haunting me.

Now that I have told you this freaky memory from my messed up childhood, you can understand why I am still staring at the sack full of teeth I stole from Bluebeard’s castle.

I tucked the sack in a corner without even bothering to check if the teeth where clean or had blood on them. Nothing would have happened to me if I did—I had to place them under a pillow and recite a spell. But I just didn’t want to come near it, although the mystery of teeth in Sorrow intrigued me.

Why did Bluebeard have a sack full of teeth in his castle? What was its purpose?

I still remember one more thing about that day. I asked Gretel to tell me what the Tooth Fairy that possessed Cinderella’s body looked like.

Gretel sighed and said, “I am not going to tell you, Jack, because I don’t want you to live with the nightmares I will live with every time I rest my head on a pillow.”

Wendy disappeared that day. When she appeared again years later, she was definitely not the Wendy I remembered. She had become the real Sleeping Beauty, and her story with vampires in London was another whole mystery I don’t want to talk about now.

To this day I still wonder what the Tooth Fairy did to her.

End of Prequel no# 12

Author’s Note:

1)
           
Like I said, I’d like to write many prequels like this one. Actually, I have about eight pages of imagined Tooth Fairy mythology linking it to mad dentists, more demon worms, and everything teeth. I hope the main series will have enough space to get this mythology into its plot. I for one always dentist are the most evil people in the world when I was a kid—with all due respect to the profession that keeps our teeth safe from the demon worms.

2)
           
Wendy’s story is not over. This is only the beginning. She is Sleeping Beauty; her story is grander and crazier.