Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  Jonquil met her with a momentary frown. “Has everything been all right?” Doreen blurted.

  “We’ve all been having fun. Maybe some of us a bit more than others. He’s got a funny notion of hide-and-seek, hasn’t he?”

  “How funny?” Doreen said without expecting any mirth.

  “He kept telling Daisy somebody was doing it. She wasn’t too fond, to tell you the truth.”

  “You mustn’t upset Daisy if you want her for your friend.” Doreen waited until Benjamin was in the child seat, which she’d vigorously wiped, before she added “Who was hiding, Benjamin?”

  “Mr. Toothy.”

  Doreen did her best to withhold a shiver. “Is that his name?”

  “I call him it.”

  She oughtn’t to have bothered asking. It was pointless to expect Benjamin to give her the real name, supposing one even existed—and then, with a jerk of her whole body that made her stall the engine, she knew what she’d been struggling to realize. “Benjamin,” she said, “what are those things you’ve been saying when you wake up?”

  “Can’t remember.” Somewhat indignantly he said “Asleep.”

  “I mean,” Doreen said, praying that she would be able to bring them to mind, “where did you hear them?”

  “Don’t know. Asleep.”

  She was almost sure, and she sped the car home. Nobody was waiting in the high chair, and even Benjamin’s toys seemed not to have been touched. She played with him and watched him dine and cleared up the remains while her head swarmed with words that tumbled over one another to adopt new shapes. They hadn’t revealed anything she would call a secret by the time Hubert phoned. “What are you doing with yourself tonight?” he said.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Try not to miss anyone too much, yes? I’ll be with you tomorrow as soon as I can.”

  “What will you be doing in the meantime?”

  “I may take the chance to relax.” He sounded apologetic. “I’ll see to it you can soon,” he said, and when she switched on the loudspeaker: “You take special care of our favorite lady till I’m home, Benjamin.”

  There was no sign of an intruder in the bathroom, and the wardrobe was still locked. Doreen’s mind was chattering with words and unmanageable fragments of words, and she read Benjamin the shortest story in the book, about the emperor who didn’t know he was exposed. He looked solemn when she’d finished, even while she gave him a good night kiss and another. As she watched him fall reluctantly asleep she thought of staying upstairs—and then she realized how the clamor in her brain had prevented her from thinking. She fetched the monitor and hurried down to the computer.

  Had her inspiration given her false hope? The websites that created anagrams didn’t deal with groups of words as long as the ones she was desperate to reshape. Eventually she found a site that did, and typed in one of the sets of words she remembered overhearing. In a few seconds she was shown a rearrangement that made her feel both sickened and triumphant. “That’s it,” she whispered. “There’s still magic somewhere.” She tried some of the other bunches of words to be certain, and then she got ready for bed.

  She didn’t expect to sleep, but in case she did she set the alarm and hid the clock under her pillow. She was wakened by activity that felt as if someone was groping for her face. It was the vibration of the alarm. As she fumbled to turn it off a voice came out of the dark. “Are you ready for me?”

  She didn’t answer until she had quelled the alarm. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Who else but the woman that thinks she knows.”

  “It could be Benjamin, couldn’t it? When you said nobody else could hear, you didn’t mean only I could.”

  “Clever woman. You all think you are.”

  “It’s you that thinks he is,” Doreen retorted so fiercely she almost forgot to keep her voice down. “You’re worse than a child. You thought you could tease Benjamin—you’ve got so much contempt for us—but you didn’t think he could let me know even if he didn’t realize.”

  “Do you even know what you’re talking about? Just listen to yourself. Your mind’s gone, Doreen.”

  “Not while I know my own name. Shall I tell you why nobody knows yours?”

  “Amaze me. I’m in no hurry now he’s mine.”

  “Because you haven’t got one.”

  She heard a shrill giggle mixed with a grinding of teeth. “Then you can’t tell me and save him.”

  “I can tell you what you’re called, though.”

  “I’m waiting. I’m all ears except for a mouth.”

  “Is it hurt for reversion of debt?”

  “That’s not even a name,” the voice said, sounding as sharp as bared teeth.

  “I said you’ve never had one. Do they call you furtive horror? Often beds?”

  “You’re raving, woman. You’re as mad as your daughter.”

  “Because you and Denny made her.” Doreen’s grief came close to robbing her of control, but it mustn’t while she was protecting Benjamin. “Trove of birth ensured for,” she murmured.

  “Not even a sentence,” the voice scoffed, but it was growing ragged. “I’ve had enough of you. It’s time.”

  “Yes,” Doreen said. “It’s my time and my family’s.” She was tired of taunting him with words the computer had shown her. “They call you devourer of the firstborn,” she said.

  A shape reared up beside the cot, howling like a beast of prey. While it wasn’t much taller than Benjamin, it was as squat as a toad. In the dimness she couldn’t distinguish much more, especially about its face, perhaps because it had so little of one. She saw a gaping mouth and the glimmer of far too many teeth, and then the jaws yawned more enormously still. The head split wide as though it was being engulfed by the mouth, and another convulsive gulp made short work of the body. The howl was cut off as though it had imploded, and Benjamin wakened with a cry. As he started whimpering Doreen hurried across the deserted room to hug him. “Happy birthday, Benjamin,” she said.

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool and still lives on Merseyside with his wife, Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964; his subsequent novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane. His short fiction has been widely collected and he has edited a number of anthologies. Now well in to his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers’ Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award.

  The Singing Bone

  In a certain country there was once great lamentation over a wild boar that laid waste the farmers’ fields, killed the cattle, and ripped up people’s bodies with his tusks.

  The king promised a large reward to anyone who would free the land from this plague, but the beast was so big and strong that no one dared to go near the forest in which it lived. At last the king gave notice that whosoever should capture or kill the wild boar should have his only daughter to wife.

  Now, there lived in the country two brothers, sons of a poor man, who declared themselves willing to undertake the hazardous enterprise—the elder, who was crafty and shrewd, out of pride; the younger, who was innocent and simple, from a kind heart.

  The king said, “In order that you may be the more sure of finding the beast, you must go into the forest from opposite sides.”

  So the elder went in on the west
side, and the younger on the east. When the younger had gone a short way, a little man stepped up to him. He held in his hand a black spear and said, “I give you this spear because your heart is pure and good. With this you can boldly attack the wild boar, and it will do you no harm.”

  He thanked the little man, shouldered the spear, and went on fearlessly.

  Before long he saw the beast, which rushed at him, but he held the spear toward it, and in its blind fury it ran so swiftly against it that its heart was cloven in twain. Then he took the monster on his back and went homewards with it to the king.

  As he came out at the other side of the wood, there stood at the entrance a house where people were making merry with wine and dancing. His elder brother had gone in there, and, thinking that after all the boar would not run away from him, was going to drink until he felt brave.

  But when he saw his young brother coming out of the wood laden with his booty, his envious, evil heart gave him no peace.

  He called out to him, “Come in, dear brother—rest and refresh yourself with a cup of wine.”

  The youth, who suspected no evil, went in and told him about the good little man who had given him the spear wherewith he had slain the boar.

  The elder brother kept him there until the evening, and then they went away together. And when in the darkness they came to a bridge over a brook, the elder brother let the other go first; and when he was halfway across he gave him such a blow from behind that he fell down dead.

  He buried him beneath the bridge, took the boar, and carried it to the king, pretending that he had killed it, whereupon he obtained the king’s daughter in marriage.

  And when his younger brother did not come back he said, “The boar must have ripped up his body,” and everyone believed it.

  But as nothing remains hidden from God, so this black deed also was to come to light.

  Years afterward a shepherd was driving his herd across the bridge and saw, lying in the sand beneath, a snow-white little bone. He thought that it would make a good mouthpiece, so he clambered down, picked it up, and cut out of it a mouthpiece for his horn. But when he blew through it for the first time, to his great astonishment, the bone began of its own accord to sing:

  “Ah, friend thou blowest upon my bone.

  Long have I lain beside the water,

  my brother slew me for the boar,

  and took for his wife the king’s young daughter.”

  “What a wonderful horn,” said the shepherd, “it sings by itself. I must take it to my lord the king.”

  And when he came with it to the king, the horn again began to sing its little song. The king understood it all, and caused the ground below the bridge to be dug-up, and then the whole skeleton of the murdered man came to light.

  The wicked brother could not deny the deed, and was sewn up in a sack and drowned. But the bones of the murdered man were laid to rest in a beautiful tomb in the churchyard.

  Down to a Sunless Sea

  NEIL GAIMAN

  The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.

  It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.

  Nobody drinks it, neither the rainwater nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not true. There are mudlarks who will dive deep for thrown pennies, then come up again, spout the river water, shiver and hold up their coins. They do not die, of course, or not of that, although there are no mudlarks over fifteen years of age.

  The woman does not appear to care about the rain.

  She walks the Rotherhithe docks, as she has done for years, for decades: nobody knows how many years, because nobody cares. She walks the docks, or she stares out to sea. She examines the ships as they bob at anchor. She must do something to keep body and soul from dissolving their partnership, but none of the folk of the dock have the foggiest idea what this could be.

  You take refuge from the deluge beneath a canvas awning put up by a sailmaker. You believe yourself to be alone under there, at first, for she is like a statue—still and staring out across the water, even though there is nothing to be seen through the curtain of rain. The far side of the Thames has vanished.

  And then she sees you. She sees you and she begins to talk, not to you, oh no, but to the gray water that falls from the gray sky into the gray river. She says, “My son wanted to be a sailor,” and you do not know what to reply, or how to reply. You would have to shout to make yourself heard over the roar of the rain, but she talks, and you listen. You discover yourself craning and straining to catch her words.

  “My son wanted to be a sailor.

  “I told him not to go to sea. ‘I’m your mother,’ I said. ‘The sea won’t love you like I love you; she’s cruel.’ But he said, ‘Oh, Mother, I need to see the world. I need to see the sun rise in the tropics, and watch the Northern Lights dance in the Arctic sky, and most of all I need to make my fortune and then, when it’s made, I will come back to you, and build you a house, and you will have servants, and we will dance, Mother, oh, how we will dance …’

  “‘And what would I do in a fancy house?’ I asked him. ‘You’re a fool with your fine talk.’ I told him of his father, who never came back from the sea—some said he was dead and lost overboard, while some swore blind they’d seen him running a whorehouse in Amsterdam.

  “It’s all the same. The sea took him.

  “When he was twelve years old, my boy ran away, down to the docks, and he shipped on the first ship he found, to Flores in the Azores, they told me.

  “There’s ships of ill omen. Bad ships. They give them a lick of paint after each disaster, and a new name, to fool the unwary.

  “Sailors are superstitious. The word gets around. This ship was run aground by its captain, on orders of the owners, to defraud the insurers; and then, all mended and as good as new, it gets taken by pirates; and then it takes a shipment of blankets and becomes a plague ship crewed by the dead, and only three men bring it into port in Harwich …

  “My son had shipped on a stormcrow ship. It was on the homeward leg of the journey, with him bringing me his wages—for he was too young to have spent them on women and on grog, like his father—that the storm hit.

  “He was the smallest one in the lifeboat.

  “They said they drew lots fairly, but I do not believe it. He was smaller than them. After eight days adrift in the boat, they were so hungry. And if they did draw lots, they cheated.

  “They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a word. She’s cruel.

  “Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.

  “They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate—who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought he did, if truth were told—he kept a bone, as a keepsake.

  “When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.

  “I said, ‘You’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.’

  “The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to swim.

  “And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean w
aves and tumbles them onto the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.”

  The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you and appears to be about to say something. She has pulled something from around her neck and now she is reaching it out to you.

  “Here,” she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. “Would you like to touch it?”

  You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.

  NEIL GAIMAN has coscripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while both Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were based on his novels. Next up, his Newbery Medal–winning children’s novel The Graveyard Book is being adapted for the movies, with Gaiman on board as one of the producers. The ever-busy author also has out a book of poems, Blueberry Girl, illustrated by Charles Vess; Crazy Hair, a new picture book with regular collaborator Dave McKean; and the graphic novel compilation Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (with art by Andy Kubert). The Tales of Odd is a follow-up to the 2008 children’s book Odd and the Frost Giants, while The Absolute Death and The Complete Death from DC/Vertigo feature the character from Gaiman’s Sandman comic. The author is also working on a nonfiction volume about China, following his visit to that country in 2007.

  Rapunzel

  There were once a man and a woman who had long in vain wished for a child. At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire.