The Color of Fear

by Billy Phillips

  “Step back,” Cindy said. “I’ll suck the poison out of her.”

  “No!” Rapunzel shouted. “With your uncontrollable appetite, you’re liable to eat it. Then you’ll slip into a coma.”

  “Such a pessimistic princess. How about little certitude in moi?”

  Cindy elbowed the girls back. She then leaned over the deep gash on Snow’s ankle. Just as she was about to lower her lips onto the open wound, Natalie shouted, “Wait!”

  Cindy glanced up. “What?”

  “Germs.”

  Cindy rolled her eyes. “I don’t care about a few germs.”

  Natalie stood firm. “There are hundreds of different species of bacteria in your mouth. And about twenty billion microbes. You could infect her.”

  Rapunzel threw her hands up. “Now what? We’re running out of time.”

  Suddenly Natalie’s brow brightened. “Wait a sec!” She ran over to one of the bamboo plants and carefully broke off a shoot. She dashed back to Cindy, who took it from her with a grin.

  “Bamboo shoot straw—good thinking, chili pepper.”

  Cindy carefully inserted the bottom end of the shoot into the wound on Snow’s leg. Caitlin winced as blood-tinged mucus bubbled around its edges.

  Cindy flung her hair back and hunched over the ankle. She wrapped her lips around the tip of the shoot and drew a deep breath to create suction flow. She opened her mouth, exhaled, then drew a second bountiful breath.

  This time her face crinkled like a dried prune as liquid poison poured into her mouth. She leaped to her feet and stood on her tippy toes, arms jettisoned behind her. She then spit out a wad of neon-green, venomous blood. It sailed a good five feet through the air.

  “Girl’s got lungs,” Natalie quipped.

  Caitlin suppressed a gag as Cindy went back for a second sip of poison. After filling her mouth, she jumped up and spurted another mouthful of venom into the air before it splattered on the ground. She went two more rounds before Rapunzel put a stop to it.

  “That’ll do it. It’s pure blood you’re spitting now.”

  Rapunzel rolled Snow White onto her back. She put her hands on her cheeks and patted. “Wake up, girl.”

  “C’mon, Snow,” Cindy said as she leaned close and gave her a hearty jostle by the shoulders.

  Snow White opened her long-lashed eyelids. She was groggy. She sat up slowly. Then she gave Rapunzel a steely glare.

  “I told you not to electrify those flowers!”

  Rapunzel smiled and kissed Snow on the forehead. “You are truly unconditional. Now let’s get Beauty and get out of here.”

  Caitlin quickly realized that she hadn’t seen Beauty anywhere. No one had.

  “Wake up, Beauty!” Rapunzel screamed as her eyes swiftly scanned the meadow. There was no response.

  “The Devil’s Tree … ” Natalie muttered under breath. She screamed: “Hurry, over to the cannibal tree!”

  Rapunzel’s face went a shade paler. The girls dashed toward the grotesque, wooden carnivore. Rapunzel spread her arms to stop them about twenty feet in front of the tree. Their collective mouths fell open.

  Beauty was pinned to the tree trunk, roped and gagged with oily, green tendrils. She was unconscious.

  When they tried to approach, the tendril that was laced around her neck tightened viciously, as if in warning. Beauty was suffocating.

  Caitlin also couldn’t breathe. She began to step backward ever so slowly … she turned discreetly … and then she cut loose.

  Caitlin raced back to the flower patch. She fetched the bamboo shoot from the ground, the one Cinderella had used to suck venom out of Snow. Caitlin dipped the shoot into the toxic blood still pooled on the ground. She sucked. When the venomous liquid filled the shoot, Caitlin plugged both ends using her forefinger and thumb. Then she gave a hearty spit.

  Caitlin ran back to the tree, but this time she cut a wide arc, sidestepping pitcher plants and accidentally running through a patch of stinking corpse flowers. The stench of death was profoundly awful. Nausea rose in her throat. She plugged her nose as she sprinted. It didn’t help. Caitlin turned her head left and projectile vomited.

  Splat!

  She weaved out of that wretched flower patch and breathed in fresh air to clear out the stench from her nostrils.

  Natalie saw her coming from a distance.

  Caitlin swung far around the cannibal tree and then slowly snuck up behind it. One of its many tendrils swayed lazily in the air—slowly enough for Caitlin to be able to grab hold of it.

  She exhaled.

  Fears are crazily irrational.

  Nameless monsters in the night never caused Caitlin Fletcher much anxiety. Dancing in front of others, the fear and feeling of not being able to breathe, or worrying about a possible panic attack at school—all these scared the devil out of her. The grim fact that the Devil Tree was now suffocating Sleeping Beauty dared Caitlin to come to her aid.

  She closed in on the swaying tendril, moving as quietly as a drifting feather.

  She snatched at the tendril with both hands. It went rigid. Then it slithered violently like a serpent wriggling to break free. Caitlin stabbed the bamboo shoot into its slimy flesh. She blew on the shoot. Then she let it go, turned and ran.

  Caitlin tripped. She hit the ground hard. Another tendril had snagged her by the ankle, coiling around her shin and pulling her foot out from under her.

  With her other heel, she frantically tried to scrape it off her leg. It squeezed tighter, cutting off her circulation. Another tendril crept toward Caitlin. It slid up her torso and twisted around her neck. It tightened. Again. And again.

  Just as it began to cut off Caitlin’s air supply, the tendril loosened its grip. And then, just like that, it went limp as a wet glove. All the tendrils on the Devil Tree, in fact, suddenly drooped into slumber. The poison had taken effect.

  The girls were clamoring with relief on the other side of the tree. Caitlin uncoiled the tendrils from her neck and ankle. She scurried around the thick trunk to where Rapunzel and Cindy were now holding Beauty by her underarms and trying to wake her.

  “Nice work, fearless sibling,” Natalie said proudly. “You just saved the life of the authentic Sleeping Beauty.” Caitlin was delighted for the simple reason that Beauty was finally breathing normally again.

  Beauty opened her eyes. She stared blankly at her friends. A vacant look remained in her eyes.

  “I had another dream.”

  Sleeping Beauty, her eyes hazy, stared straight ahead as if in a trance.

  Rapunzel took her hand and patted it. “What did you dream?”

  Beauty raised her glassy eyes to the sun. “I saw what has already happened. The Queen of Hearts. How the affliction began. The death and decay.” Then she raised her hand, her palm pressed to her mouth as her face registered a profound horror.

  “It was him.” Her voice barely registered a whisper. Beauty rocked gently as she began to reveal the queen’s tale.

  The Queen of Hearts had summoned him to her castle. The kingdoms had still been a place of goodness and honor and benevolence, and the Queen had still been lovely and gentle-hearted.

  The man—if she dare call him a man—dressed and moved like a shadow. Attired in a sinuous ebony robe, he swayed like windblown curtains in the night as he walked.

  He was known as the Enchanter. The Queen of Hearts feared him, but the Enchanter possessed hidden knowledge of their universe, so she had no choice but to summon him. She believed that surely such an enigmatic being could halt her degenerative blindness and failing memory. She became frightened when she realized she was confused and alone.

  A lone crow cawed, announcing his arrival. The queen met him in the throne room.

  His eyes held her like quicksand, and the more she tried to turn away from him, the deeper she sank under the influence of his commanding gaze. The Enchanter held up his gnarled hands so that his bone-white palms faced the queen. He moved his fingers in a circular motion, as if strumming a
n ancient, dark space.

  “Your blind fury brings on your physical blindness and inner distraction,” the Enchanter said.

  His woeful prognosis kindled desperation in the queen. She had never experienced blind fury before; what was he talking about? Nonetheless, she humbly beseeched him to devise a cure and promised him a great reward if he could deliver one.

  He did.

  The Enchanter presented her with a peculiar pair of eyeglasses. She was awed by their opulence. The lenses were oversized and as darkly shaded as the Enchanter himself. They were cut in the shape of two hearts—a perfect match for the queen’s heart-shaped bouffant hairdo.

  After a moment, her head began to spin. The glasses brought on a dizziness that made her queasy and faint. It took a few moments for her to adjust to it and for her strength and balance to return.

  When they did, the blurriness vanished.

  But her world went black.

  She was now blind as a spotted bat.

  For the first time in her life, the Queen of Hearts felt a raging fury. She flung the glasses from her face, and threw them across the throne room.

  “What have you done?” she shrieked. She frantically waved her arms about, trying to find his scrawny neck so she could wring it. “You diabolically deceitful cretin!”

  The Enchanter seized her by the wrists. He hung on tight as her arms flailed. “Your Royal Majesty, you are fine. Calm down. I have given you something far more powerful than physical sight.”

  “What have you given me, Enchanter?”

  She flapped her arms wildly, trying to break free of his grip. “Tell me before I send you to the gallows, and off with your head!”

  “I have given you what you asked for.”

  She jerked her arms in zigzags, but the Enchanter kept his firm grip on them.

  “Blindness?” she yelped.

  “Vision,” he replied in a seductive tone.

  She flicked her wrists, frustrated at remaining caught in his clutches. “I’m blind, you fool.”

  “I speak not of ordinary sight but of something far greater.”

  She swung her arms up and down. “And what is that?”

  The Enchanter paused. Then he said, “Clairvoyance.”

  The queen stopped flailing. The Enchanter released her wrists. She exhaled a long breath.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “You will learn to see through the mind’s eye,” the Enchanter said. “Your vision will reach across the kindgoms and into the minds of every one of its creatures. You will know their innermost thoughts and the deepest secrets of their hearts.”

  The queen settled down. Her breathing slowed.

  “Fetch me the glasses again,” she said.

  The throne room floor creaked as footsteps crossed it. A moment later, frigid fingers turned her hand upright. The glasses were set in her open palm.

  She slowly raised the spectacles to her face. But before she could set them on her head, the cold, spindly fingers stopped her.

  “Before you proceed,” the Enchanter said, “know that once Your Royal Highness masters the use of these glasses, they must never leave your face. If they do, your clairvoyance will be lost forever.”

  The queen nodded. Gently and methodically, she slid the arms of the glasses over her ears and set the frame down on the bridge of her nose.

  She glanced around the room. She saw only a long expanse of nothingness.

  “Do not look, Your Highness. Feel.”

  She closed her eyes. The explosion of colors was immediate—a celestial fountain of incandescent light. Amid the blaze of fireworks, a whirlpool emerged. The colors twisted and swirled into a vortex, leaving in its wake an eerie darkness, a horrid gloom blacker than death.

  “Now I see you, Enchanter,” the queen said.

  His chuckle was grim. “It’s not me you sense, Your Royal Highness.”

  “What, then, is this wretched blackness?”

  “An impending rebellion against the throne. You sense the individual who will lead it. A young girl. And the others, of royal blood, will aid her. Together they will plot to turn the collective kingdoms against you.”

  She dug her fingernails into her palms, seething. “Off with their heads,” the queen declared.

  That icy hand seized her wrist again. This brazen sorcerer desperately needed warm blood, she thought.

  “Open,” said the Enchanter.

  She unclenched her fingers. He pressed a cold, metallic staff into her palm. She wrapped her fingers around it.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “A scepter.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Behead everyone in the kingdom, and there’ll be no subjects to rule, no kingdom to rule over. Instead, use the scepter to control their minds and, in turn, the world.”

  This Enchanter was dangerous and too clever. The queen couldn’t wait to be rid of his foul presence.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “There is a realm beyond this realm. A mysterious and primordial place known as the Red Spectrum.”

  “Sounds forbidding—why tell me of it?”

  “It is the source and font of all fear.”

  “Where is this ghastly place?”

  “That knowledge was revealed to me on the promise that I take it to the grave, Your Royal Highness.”

  “Then I shall impale your head on a spike, and you may keep your promise.”

  The Enchanter grabbed hold of her hand. He pressed it against his jugular vein. “If it be your wish.”

  She hissed. Then she snapped her hand away from his scrawny throat. “I admire your conviction.”

  I’ll take his head some other time, she told herself.

  The queen took her seat on the throne. “Kneel.”

  The Enchanter knelt.

  “Tell me,” she said, “why should I concern myself with fear?”

  “Fear is a potent weapon with which to rule.”

  Her pinky finger tinkered with her earring as she swallowed his words. “Tell me more.”

  “We do not choose fear. It comes to us freely.”

  The queen grinned. “Like hunger?”

  The Enchanter smiled, revealing crooked and rotting teeth. “Magnify fear and your rebellious subjects will fight to survive! They’ll turn on one another instead of turning on the throne.”

  A glint appeared in the queen’s eye.

  “You’re devilishly shrewd, Enchanter,” she said.

  “Only in service to the throne, Your Grace.”

  She wagged her finger in front of her shaded eyes. “As I said … shrewd. Now tell me how to accomplish this.”

  “You control the multitude by manipulating the Red Spectrum and afflicting the kingdoms with unrelenting fear.”

  “But how?”

  He laid his cold, gaunt hand atop hers again suddenly.

  He squeezed.

  In turn, her hand squeezed.

  Cold, hard electrum alloy pressed against her palm.

  A buzzing tickled her fingers.

  The scepter!

  Back in the toylike miniature village, the walls of the tiny barn shook with the thud of another tremendous impact inside. The doors swung open. Out stepped a dusty and very flushed Jack, wide-eyed and cautious—and still clad in his Arthurian Knight armor.

  He was covered in mud and hay.

  He stepped into the sunny town square and glanced around at the squalid village, grimacing at its dilapidated condition.

  “Caitlin! Hello? Caitlin? Anybody?”

  “I’d certainly call myself more than ‘anybody,’” came a man’s deep voice from below. “And by not being anybody, I’d say I was most certainly ‘somebody.’”

  “Who said that?” asked Jack, looking around warily.

  “It is I, Alfonzo Thadius Bertram the Second. Prince of Farmlandia, at your service.”

  Jack looked down. In the tall weeds at his feet was a frog. He had a feathered cap in his hand and was bowing wi
th a flourish. On his arm, he wore a fabric band embellished with a family crest. His skin was pale and his eyes darkly shaded.

  Jack rubbed his eyes and looked again. “You’re a damn toad? How weird is this?”

  “I’ve been called many things, amigo, but toad is not one of them. I am a frog. And if you do not wish for my help, so be it.”

  Alfonzo began to hop away.

  “No, please, Your Highness. I didn’t mean to be rude; I was just surprised, and I—”

  Alfonzo hopped onto Jack’s shoulder with one mighty leap. “It would be an honor to be of assistance, as I am starved for noble action.”

  “I need help rescuing a damsel.”

  Alfonzo eyed Jack’s knightly attire. “You’re certainty dressed for that mission.”

  “Can you assist?”

  “Absolutely, amigo. My specialties lie in the art of love.”

  “No love arts for now. I just need to find my friend. Any chance you’ve seen a girl named Caitlin around here, with a little sister tagging along?”

  “Indeed I have, amigo. She left a while ago with some others. A curious bunch. I will tell you all about it on the way. It should be very easy for me to follow their tracks.” Alfonzo gestured in one direction with his arm. “Let the quest commence.” And with that, he hopped out of sight.

  “Wait!” called Jack.

  Alfonzo was back in a flash.

  “I’ll never be able to keep up with you. You’re too fast.”

  The frog sat for a moment, as if in thought. Then its amphibian eye winked. “Come,” the frog instructed as he skittered off.

  Jack followed him past a run-down miniature schoolhouse and up some broken boards that served as steps into the town sheriff’s office. Floorboards creaked under his feet.

  “Now, where is it?” said Alfonzo, hopping around.

  A huge spider descended from the ceiling on a long, silky thread. It settled on a drawer handle on the sheriff’s desk. Alfonzo zapped the spider with his tongue. As he retracted it, the drawer also stuck to it and slid open. Inside sat a small blue bottle labeled “drink me.”

  “Mmm, that’s it,” said Alfonzo, munching down the spider. “Have a sip.”

  Jack took off his chain-mail cowl. He held the bottle up to a beam of light that was streaming through the cracks in the boarded-up window. He grinned from ear to ear, like a Cheshire Cat.