by D. Melhoff
Grimm
Woods
D. Melhoff
Copyright © D. Melhoff 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters and incidents in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by Bellwoods Publishing
First paperback edition
Paperback ISBN 9780992133139
E-Book ISBN 978-0-9921331-8-4
ISBN: 0992133130
Cover design by James T. Egan
Grimm, Jacob, 1785–1863.
[Kinder- und Hausmärchen. English. 2015]
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm : the Complete First Edition / [Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm ; translated by] Jack Zipes ; [illustrated by Andrea Dezsö].
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-691-16059-7 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. Fairy tales—Germany. 2. Tales—Germany. 3 Folklore—Germany. I. Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786–1859. II. Zipes, Jack, 1937– III. Dezsö, Andrea.
IV. Title.
GR166.G54313 2015
398.20943—de23
2014004127
Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
For my parents: Craig and Jennifer.
Please forgive the foul language and serial murder.
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
—Charles Dickens
Contents
FACT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BOOKS BY D. MELHOFF
Fact
Fairy tales have not always been considered suitable for children. Many of them originally contained elements of torture, incest, rape, cannibalism, suicide, bestiality, murder, and other horrific acts.
All references to these elements in this novel are accurate.
July 7th, 5:44 a.m.
One hacksaw. One hammer, six boxes of nails. Twelve Mason jars, four hunting knives, two pairs of handcuffs. Fifteen gallons of gasoline divided evenly among three dented jerry cans.
It’s time.
A work glove hovered over the table where the objects were laid out side by side and began ticking the air as though marking off an invisible checklist. The chamber reeked of mildew, and the walls had no windows or electrical sockets—no lamps, no wires, no switch covers. A single red candle provided the only light, its crimson wax dripping down its shaft like blood.
The hand picked up a piece of paper from the table and slipped it into a blank envelope. Below, a beetle scuttled across the floorboards. The insect—its gangly antennae tuned to some foul frequency in the gloom—raced past the sole of a giant boot just as a drop of liquid fell through the air and struck it dead center, engulfing its body in a hot, gelatinous blob that filled its orifices and burned it from the inside out. Another droplet tumbled from the candle, plopping onto the envelope this time, and then a brass stamp came down and pressed the wax into a hardened seal.
Drawing in heavier, raspier breaths, the figure held the envelope up to a corkboard that was bolted to the wall. More than a dozen pictures of young men and women were tacked to the panel by their throats and foreheads, smiling in the shadows.
The figure pinned the envelope to the board and stepped back to take in the room again.
The table and the switchblade.
The book of matches.
The iron rods, the hatchet, the .22 Smith & Wesson.
The smiling faces.
Now, the figure mused, watching the photographs flicker in the bloodred light. Who’s the nicest, who’s the worst, who wants to hear a story first?
1
“Stop it.”
“Dude?”
“Stop it…get out…hurry…”
“Dude, ass up.”
Scott Mamer jolted awake with a sharp sip of breath.
The sound of the bus’s engine registered first—a deep mechanical growl—followed by an intense whiff of sweat.
“Jesus, man,” a voice said. “Bad dream or somethin’?”
Scott lifted his head and squinted around for context. He was huddled at the back of the Greyhound in a malformed fetal position. Feet flat on the seat, legs drawn against his chest. Armpits soaked with perspiration. His damp T-shirt clung to his torso like a wet rag, and a flat-brimmed hat hung halfway over his eyes, its tattered fabric the same shade of gray as the steel plugs that stretched his earlobes to the size of nickels.
“Hello? Everything okay back there?”
Scott looked up and saw a teenager in a black tank top staring through the gap of the headrests in front of him. “Hey,” he mumbled, groggy. “Where are we?”
“Dead,” the guy in the tank top replied. “The bus hit the ditch and everybody went up in flames. Good news is the Muslims were right: you get seventy-two virgins. Bad news is they ran away when they saw your face.”
“Piss off.”
“Gladly.” The stranger snickered and got up, starting for the exit.
Scott wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his leather jacket. Deep breaths, he told himself. He stretched his legs and cracked his neck side to side as the images from his nightmare faded farther and farther into obscurity. How long it would be before they returned to trigger another night terror, he wasn’t sure. Not long, he figured. This episode had been worse than usual, and there would be aftershocks. Guaranteed.
Scott crawled out of his seat, stiffer than hell, and stepped into the bus’s narrow aisle. As he made his way forward—miles behind the group of teenagers emptying out of the vehicle in single file—he slipped his hands in his pockets and clutched a package of Marlboros, pinching the tips of the filters like carcinogenic nipples that he couldn’t wait to suck on as soon as he had the chance. Never in a million years had he thought he’d be able to survive a four-and-a-half-hour road trip without a smoke break, but, for the affordable price of a few bad dreams, he’d managed to sleep the entire way and arrive in one sane piece. Now he needed the nicotine as bad as he needed the nearest toilet.
Scott got to the front, yawning, and plodded down the staircase. As he stepped outside, he scanned his surroundings like a searchlight, sweeping his gaze left to right in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc.
Dammit.
Not a building in sight, let alone a restroom.
The vehicle was parked in the middle of a remote wood
. On both sides of the road, tracts of dense greenery crowded the ditches—from jack pines and birches to goldenrod and creeping juniper. At first, the forest was dead quiet, and then a breeze swished by and ruffled the ground cover, teasing its invisible fingers through the bramble and blowing low notes in the knots of the gnarled branches. A pair of squirrels chased each other across a fallen tree trunk. Mosquitoes droned in the blueberry bushes.
Scott gave the woods as much appreciation as most people give a construction site. When in Rome, he thought, and he unzipped his fly and drained his bladder in the grass beside the Greyhound. The wet splatter killed the forest’s serenity and filled the air with the stink of urine. He finished, shaking off, and shuffled around the front of the bus to where the others had disappeared moments before, abandoning the shade of the vehicle for a pool of sunlight that poured over his face and blinded him temporarily. He took another step forward, reaching up to adjust his hat, when a cloud drifted by and blocked the light instead.
Except it wasn’t a cloud.
“Damn,” Scott muttered, craning his neck at the source of the shadow.
Straight ahead stood the weathered exterior of a full-scale drawbridge, rearing out of the earth like a medieval mirage.
Scott blinked twice to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. Sure enough, the drawbridge was real, complete with parallel lifting arms, reinforcement brackets, and a stone gatehouse dotted with defensive arrow slits. A faded symbol—a red heart nestled inside a five-point crown—occupied the center of the closed door, and a pair of guard towers flanked the gate, twenty feet high, with ramparts jutting out of the sides for more than a quarter of a mile in either direction.
Jesus. Scott plucked a Marlboro out of his pocket and patted his jeans for a lighter. Wonder how much this eyesore cost.
The rest of the arrivals were standing in the shadow of the gate too, some more enthralled by it than others. There were fourteen of them in total—including Scott—and they each looked as out of place in front of the drawbridge with their Converse runners and designer Ray-Bans as the Greyhound idling behind them.
“Circle up, everybody. There’s a lot of ground to cover.”
Scott grunted and returned his cigarette to his pocket as three figures emerged from the tower on the right.
“Hurry up, people. We don’t have all day.”
The voice, Scott recognized, belonged to Charlotte Becker. She looks like she sounds, he thought, surveying the woman who had interviewed him over the phone two weeks ago. Midforties. Hillary Clinton-esque hairdo, maybe less dated. Still mom-ish. Charlotte’s face was chiseled like Hillary’s too, yet something beneath her sculpted features seemed softer and less dour. Kinder, perhaps. The proof was in the wrinkles: a telltale result of turning a smile on and off a thousand times a day.
The women beside Charlotte were polar opposites. On the left stood a white-haired crone with a first-aid badge stitched to her well-ironed blouse, and on the right was a boulder of a black woman—more than three hundred pounds—sporting a checkered apron that was roughly the size of a picnic blanket.
“Good morning,” Charlotte announced, motioning the group closer. “Can everyone hear me? Yes? For those I haven’t met in person yet, I’m Charlotte Becker. This is Norma Bromwell on my left, our camp nurse, and on my right is—”
“Ella!” A redhead girl with a million freckles waved in the air.
The three-hundred-pound woman flashed a grin and pointed back with a finger the size of a bratwurst. “Good to see you too, hon.”
“—Ella Ross, our cook,” Charlotte clipped along. “They’re my eyes and ears, and you’ll treat them better than your own mothers, understood? Any questions?”
When’s the first smoke break? Scott wondered, pinching the tip of a cigarette again.
“No? Fantastic. Then let’s get started.”
Charlotte stuck her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and blew a high-pitched whistle. At first nothing happened, and then the ground shook as the colossal drawbridge shuddered to life. Inch by inch, the barricade fell—sparrows fleeing their roosts in the lofty towers, light flickering through cracks in the planks—until thud! The bridge slammed flush with the gravel, and through the archway appeared a colorful canvas, like Wonderland through an enormous rabbit hole.
“Welcome, counselors,”—Charlotte motioned—“to Camp Crownheart.”
Scott stepped forward at the same time as everyone else (his cynicism vanishing for a rare moment) and crossed the threshold in silence.
Camp Crownheart was less of a summer camp and more of a fourteenth-century township spread across a clearing the size of two football stadiums. In the east, an archery field featured a line of twelve practice stations—beyond that, the outlines of a pasture and a horse corral—and in the west, a campfire ring sat below the long, leafy walls of an emerald hedge maze. As Scott took another step forward, his gaze shifted to a cluster of buildings in the center of the camp. The structures were straight out of the pages of classic fairy tales: beanstalk lampposts, straw huts, a gingerbread house. Cobblestone paths connected the buildings, and behind them, situated atop a low hill, stood a tall castle-like fort, its Lincoln-green flags flapping proudly in the breeze.
“We’ll start with the tour and wrap up before lunch,” Charlotte said. “Don’t worry about your bags—they’ll be brought to your rooms later. All right. Hup, hup.” She started down a dirt road, and the rest of the group followed.
Scott knuckled the remaining flakes of crust out of his eyes.
Wait for it…Waaaaait for it…
The group drew farther away—first ten yards, then twenty.
Go.
He slipped off the path and stepped behind a wall of jack pines, popping a cigarette between his eager lips. His Bic flickered to life, and a second later he drew in the smooth, succulent taste of smoldering tobacco. Every muscle in his body relaxed. He returned the pack of smokes to his pocket and removed his coat—hanging it on a tree branch—before spying the group again and judging their distance at forty, maybe forty-five yards now.
“Hey, man. Bum a dart?”
Scott turned to see the guy in the black tank top rounding the nearest pine tree.
Shit. Can’t get a goddamn minute alone, can I?
Scott gave the guy a quick once-over—recalling the seventy-two-virgins joke from the bus—and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, taking another puff. “Last one.”
“Uh-huh.” The guy snickered and extended his hand. “Let’s, uh, let’s start over, shall we? Hey, man. My name’s Chase.”
Scott ignored the gesture. He tapped his cigarette and watched the ash drift to his feet like snowflakes.
“You know,” Chase said, “you shouldn’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
The sound of flip-flops came clip-clopping over the roots.
Scott didn’t budge. What’s this guy gonna do? he thought. Pick a fight with a total stranger? Then a swish caught his ear, and he looked up to see his leather jacket flying out of the tree where he had hung it a minute ago. “Hey,” he said, tossing his cigarette. “Put it down.”
Chase ignored him and snatched the box of Marlboros out of the jacket’s left pocket. “Two, four, six…” he muttered, counting the darts. “Seven, eight, nine…”
Why that son of a bitch.
Without hesitating, Scott wound up and fired a hard jab into the cigarette thief’s stomach. Chase doubled over, winded, and Scott reached down and retrieved his pack of smokes, checking to make sure that none of them were missing.
“Aw, hell no,” Chase sneered. He wheeled around—seizing Scott by the shoulders—and heaved him onto the ground. The two of them went at it like dogs: thrashing and snarling, kicking up a squall of rocks and twigs and grass. A pair of offended robins flew out of the nearest tree as the first “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers” ascended from the dust cloud.
Their hands clamped together, and for a second they were gripping the box at the same time.
&nb
sp; Let…go…
Scott reefed again, but the cardboard ripped, and the cigarettes erupted from the package like streamers out of a confetti cannon. “Jesus Christ,” he cursed. He shoved Chase aside and fell to his hands and knees, scouring the grass for any Marlboros that weren’t torn or mutilated. A minute later, he had found six—only four of which were intact.
“Here.”
Scott looked up and saw Chase holding out a handful of crooked smokes.
“Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to wreck ’em. Promise you’ll get a new pack at the party tonight—scout’s honor.”
A pause as Scott considered the apology. He appraised Chase head to toe, weighing the sincerity of the offer, and then swiped the cigarettes out of his hand and got to his feet, lighting up for the second time since arriving at camp.
Both of them fell quiet.
A chorus of coffin flies hummed in the forest’s canopy. Higher up, a flock of geese honked in sky, beating their wings as they soared toward Ontario in their signature V-pattern.
“So, uh, so how about a peace offering?” Chase asked.
Scott shook his head—Unbelievable. He took a drag, holding the warm smoke in his lungs for a few seconds…then a few more. Finally, he exhaled. No sense making enemies on day one. He tossed Chase a bent cigarette and returned the others to his jacket.
“Dig the plugs,” Chase said, breaking a smile. He struck a lighter from his own pocket. “Fehlman. Chase Fehlman.”
“Scott Mamer.”
“First time here?”
“Mhmm. You?”
“Third year’s the charm. I’m from Lansing, so it’s close.”
Scott shrugged and took another drag. He wasn’t as concerned with catching the group anymore if one of the vets was with him. “Detroit.”
“Mm. Not so close.” Chase blew out a puff of smoke. “Although, come to think of it, we’ve got a few hockey towners kicking around. Dom, for sure. And Nikki.”
“You guys know each other?”
“About half, maybe less. A lot of people come and go, ’specially around here. CNE are pretty much the only constants.” Then, off Scott’s look: “Charlotte, Norma, Ella. Charlotte owns the place, but I wouldn’t ruffle any of those birds’ feathers, if you know what’s good for you. Ella runs the kitchen, and Norma used to be a nurse in Vietnam. There’s a tough cunt. Heard she came home from the war and begged to go back after meeting her first hippie.” Chase scratched his chin and tapped his cigarette. “By the way, I mean it. I’ll get you a new pack at the party tonight.”