by Dame Darcy
Copyright © 2013 by Dame Darcy
All rights reserved.
First printing, 2002.
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-9825625-2-9
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without special permission from the publisher.
In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Dame Darcy Ink
Cover and Interior Design by Toni Tajima, Melanie Bentley.
For further inquiries concerning the title, contact:
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This book is dedicated to my mother, Lila,
who read me fairy tales every night of my childhood.
Also to my father, Mike Stanger–
poet, musician, and artist extraordinaire.
Thanks go out to Brandan Kearney, for helping me with a lot of the earlier stories; Alexander G. Haseltine, for helping with the transcribing and inspiration; Stephanie Rubin. Katherine Gates, and Simon Henwood, for believing in this project in its early stages; Melanie Bently, Tony R. Boies, and ultimatejenn for epub formatting; and last but not least, all the bats out there reading this, who know ghosts, fairies, witches, and true love.
CONTENTS
Persimmion
The Damsel in the Well
The Black River
The Siren Ship
The Queen of Spades
The Gambler’s Lesson
BONUS:
The Salt Maiden
The Tumultuous Life of Rapunzel’s Parents
Red
PERSIMMION
Once there was a miller by trade who was actually an evil wicked witch. She lived in a semi-translucent, crystallized sugar-shell, syrup sap shack, near a babbling brook and a waterfall. Her mill wheel churned the water and rhythmically whined and shrieked, for the power that drove it came not from the water but from the souls of slaughtered children.
This evil witch was named Matilda--Millie for short, which she thought was clever, being a miller and all. If you ever saw her, you would think she looked like a hideously beautiful man. Her hair, teeth, and fingernails were long and ended in points. Her skin was as white as ivory, but it glowed underneath and luminesced in the darkness like a lily by the light of the crescent moon. Like the moon, it was marred with craters and scars, for her diet (as you will later see) was very poor. She took little regard in the living (except as specimens for her scientific experiments), and because she had always been old herself, she particularly hated the frivolity of youth.
Millie was an alchemist and genetics engineer, finding sources of never-ending amusement in combining two non-complementary gene pools. For instance, she once combined the genes of a tick with those of a goat, producing a horrible thing that could jump from several miles away to suck its chosen victim’s blood. Seeing the Goattick in action, Millie laughed so hard she turned blue and fainted, landing on a rock and suffering a severe (and well-deserved) concussion in the process.
Although Millie enjoyed creating freaks of nature that defied God, her favorite activity was murdering children. She lured them to her shack with the sound of the old mill’s paddle wheel, which made curious keening noises, almost like a dirge. Anyone who had things on their mind-taxes and laundry, money and love-could not hear the sound. Only those with a clear conscience and an innocent mind and soul could hear it. Thus only children responded to the wheel’s call and were lured to Millie’s house and their doom.
The witch welcomed the children warmly, fed them pancakes and syrup poisoned with deadly nightshade, which she grew in her atrium along with Venus flytraps, poison ivy, and wormwood. Once the children were weakened by the drug, she bound their hands and feet and hung them from the kitchen ceiling, where they flapped like screeching fish while she slit their throats and licked the blood from their cheeks and chins. She then used the mill to grind their bones to a fine powder and disposed of the evidence.
Eventually, the witch decided she wanted a child of her own, someone to do the housework and errands, someone who could not escape, someone bound to her by blood. Her own womb was infertile, so she dragged the prettiest, most recently diseased six-year-old girl to her genetics lab. There she removed the child’s ovaries and placed them in a beaker with a tablespoon of quicksilver, a dash of sugar, and a sprinkle of cinnamon (if she was making a boy, she would have used a puppy dog’s tail). The witch heated this mixture until it simmered nicely. In no time she had created a daughter of her own. The infant had delicate, pale skin with the texture of a tulip stem. Her eyes and her hair were bright yellow, mimicking the young girl Millie had murdered to create her. Millie named her Persimmion.
Persimmion hated her mother and had a strong aversion to eating meat. As a child, the sight of the constantly murdered children hanging from the kitchen ceiling and her mother’s fondness for blood warped and disgusted her. All Persimmion wanted was air, warmth, water, and sunlight-simple things other people seemed to obtain so easily and in such abundance, things she couldn’t have or if she could have one, she couldn’t have the other. It was a constant source of frustration and fury to poor Persimmion.
For these reasons, and many others of her own, Persimmion spent her childhood trying to escape from the mill and from Millie. First, as a young child of six, then at nine, and then at eleven. She dreamt a loving mother and father waited somewhere for her, out there, just beyond her reach, out of the woods, with a beautiful house, peach trees growing in the yard, and a puppy to pet, not a bloodsucking, jumping Goattick. In later years Persimmion ran away hoping to find a true love, her husband, whose sweet character and body were stronger than her mother’s evil and would protect and care for her.
Millie hated these constant excursions, of course. Her love for Persimmion was of the selfish kind--and she could not stand disobedience. So whenever the girl disappeared, the witch stamped the floorboards three times and chanted:
Come on home.
Do not roam.
Going away
Means hell to pay.
Immediately, Persimmion’s feet turned around and walked the poor girl back home against her will.
Poor Persimmion! Her only sunlight was an anemic trickle of rays through a tight weave of branches. Her only companions were the ghosts of Millie’s innocent victims, who lingered around the area, continually crying and complaining, driving Persimmion mad with their constant juvenile dirge-like tirade.
And there Persimmion stood and watched intently years later as Millie finally met her demise. The neighboring village had grown almost to the edge of the forest by then, and lumberjacks were forced to explore deeper in the woods. Soon Millie’s mill was discovered and her grisly secrets revealed. One night the entire village stormed the mill, catching the witch in her sleep before she could utter a spell or escape. They burned the shack and mill wheel to the ground, as well as many trees, forming a clearing in the woods. They tried to move Persimmion’s statue, but it was firmly rooted in the earth, as if anchored to the center of the world. So the villagers decided to use the statue as a memorial for all the slaughtered children. Into the folds of her clothing they carved the names of their missing offspring, whose ghosts could now rest in peace. Pla
cated, the crowd returned to the village. The woods were now known as an evil place, forbidden to all except on the anniversary of the witch’s death, when the villagers came to Persimmion’s statue, crowned her with wreaths of flowers, and prayed for the souls of their lost children. So it was that Persimmion was left alone for most of the year.
Generations passed and no one came to mourn the dead children any longer. The only visitors Persimmion received were young lovers who needed a place to meet in private where their parents would never seek them. She watched them kiss in the natural bowers, framed by trees while proclaiming their love.
They approached the statue with curiosity and touched her cold limbs. This was the first touch from a human being that Persimmion had ever had. If her heart had not been made of stone, it would have broken from longing. The lovers marveled at her sad expression and at the mysterious water that trailed down the long, dark stains under her eyes. Some wondered at the names carved into her, and carved their own names enclosed by hearts into the stone.
A century passed and Persimmion’s stood alone in the forest, gathering so much moss and lichen on her cold form that she was indiscernible from her surroundings. Her eyes wept ceaselessly. Through them, she watched animals return to the once-haunted place. She observed as small trout and watercress flowed in the stream that ran past her, as dragonflies and other insects buzzed around her. She marveled at all the beauty she had missed while she was alive.
The villagers had by now forgotten the legends surrounding the woods. Hunters frequented the forest searching for pheasant and other game. A careless young hunter, aiming at a stag, unknowingly shot off the first two fingers of Persimmion’s left hand.
Soon after that Persimmion saw this same young hunter bring his new wife to the clearing for a romantic stroll. The woman looked at the stream’s crystalline water and commented that it was the perfect place for the mill they wanted to build as their new home. Within a week the couple returned to begin building a new house for the family they hoped to raise there. Persimmion watched as they sadly buried one little coffin after the other, which she assumed were stillborn babies. She was happy to see their young daughter grow to the age of four but was almost as distraught as they as she helplessly watched the girl drown in the stream.
Years passed and the millers became prosperous. They finally bore a son, whom Persimmion observed through the thicket that had grown around her. As he played she heard his parents call him Gabriel. She loved him from the first moment she saw him, and she decided then and there that she would be his guardian angel. Once, at the age of five, Gabriel climbed an old tree above the brambles in which Persimmion hid. When the branch snapped, the thick undergrowth surrounding the statue broke Gabriel’s fall. As he got up, his young eyes caught hers, still weeping, but now with joy. Curious, Gabriel pulled a bit of moss away to reveal Persimmion’s beautiful face. He was instantly entranced. Just then his mother called him in for dinner, and he ran back to the house with a secret smile.
Gabriel frequented Persimmion’s thicket often as he grew. It became his hideaway. Over the years he completely cleared the statue of debris and polished it until it shone. Despite his scrubbing, he could never rid the statue’s eyes of the black stain left by the centuries of water that had run from them, water that still flowed as he worked. Gabriel wondered at Persimmion’s mysterious beauty, the sunlight caressing her cheek and breasts, and her eternal stone expression of compassion and sadness. If he stared at her long enough, her face and form wavered and seemed to have a life of its own. He always wondered how the statue came to be there and whose names had been carved into her. He had a suspicion she wasn’t a stone wrought in the shape of a woman by human hands; it seemed she had been born somehow. She seemed like an angel.
When Gabriel became a young man, he helped his father with his work and he planned to get married himself eventually and take over the mill. At night he tossed in his bed, his dreams plagued with visions of a beautiful, seductive woman at the end of a long hallway, her flowing golden hair shrouding her face like a veil. When Gabriel approached the dream figure, she pulled back her pale locks to reveal the cold face of the statue with its black trail of tears. In other dreams, she appeared to him as an angel, floating through his balcony window, kissing him and stroking his hair, bending to whisper in his ear and sing soothing songs to him.
I’ve waited for you a hundred years
I’ve watched you grow handsome through my tears.
My deepest desire is to be your wife,
To have you has my own for the rest of your life.
When he awakened, the balcony window that had previously been bolted shut was open, and the statue had resumed her position by the brook once more. He arose to begin work with his father and continued through the day listless and dazed.
This happened repeatedly for over a month, Gabriel waking from his passionate dreams in a feverish state. Finally, the miller questioned his son’s unwillingness to court any maidens of the village. But Gabriel had no interest in them and no answer for his father. After one particularly heated argument, Gabriel could stand it no longer and went to Persimmion for an answer. He fell on his knees and cried, pleadingly, “Stop taunting me. I am enamored of a statue who can never love me and become my wife. Let me free of my obsession, or 1 must leave this place and you forever.” He stared up at her beautiful face as if he expected a response. Hearing none, he arose from his knees, touched her hip, and leaned close, saying, “Good-bye, my darling angel.” With that, he softly kissed her. To his great surprise, his hand no longer felt a cold, stone hip but live, smooth flesh tinged with green. The mouth pressed against his was that of a living woman. The kiss, meant to be one of farewell, changed to one of salutation. After centuries of sadness and loneliness, Persimmion’s tears finally stopped flowing.
With a voice hoarse from years of disuse, she said to him, “My beloved Gabriel, you broke the evil spell my mother cast to bind me so many years ago. My name is Persimmion, and I have loved you all your life.”
Hand in hand, they walked to the house. Gabriel called to his father, “Come, meet the woman I love.” The father was shocked to see a beautiful young lady with long pale hair cascading over her shoulders and a wise look about her eyes. Most disturbing were the deep scars of many people’s names emblazoned on her skin, some with hearts around them, and her delicate hand missing two fingers. Gabriel’s mother could tell that Persimmion truly cared for her son and sensibly accepted Persimmion into her family.
Thus, after much rejoicing, Gabriel and his guardian angel married. They continued to live at the mill and eventually cleared away much of the woods around the house so peach trees could grow in the yard. For as Persimmion had stood there dreaming all those years of a place far beyond the wood, the world around her had changed, and her dreams had come to her.
THE DAMSEL IN THE WELL
High in the hills on a beautiful farm, surrounded by an idyllic landscape populated with a cornucopia of flora and fauna, lived the Sorrel family. Ma and Pa Sorrel were the third generation to work this land, and their hard work and prudence kept hunger and cold from their cabin door. They did well for themselves with only their small wooden farmhouse, their barn, and a couple of plow horses and chickens. The only thing missing from their life was children.
So it came to be that twin girls were born to the Sorrel family. They were christened Dulcet and Dorret. Dulcet was appropriately named, for she was sweet-tempered and quiet. Dorret was named after her grandmother, the strong woman who had settled the land they now worked.
When the girls lay in their bassinet, only two days old, their Aunt Gracie--who happened to be a witch--bestowed upon each of the girls a beautiful platinum charm necklace. Dulcet, the eldest by one hour, received a charm shaped like a W for wisdom. Dorret’s charm was shaped like an I for intelligence. Now it would be easy to tell them apart. Gwendolyn Sorrel, the proud mother of the twins, profusely thanked her sister for the lockets and sent the witch
home with a dozen jars of preserves.
As the girls grew older, they began to explore the meadows and woods around the farm. When they were four, they discovered an abandoned well hidden in the underbrush near the house. The well was overgrown with weeds, and the pulley had completely rusted to a dried-blood color. Crudely nailed boards covered the opening, and moss and ivy grew around it; it made the twins think of old, dead things. As they got close to it, they heard rustling noises and water dripping far, far away. At lunch that day, Dorret asked her father, “Pa, what is that hole in the ground with strange sounds inside?”
“It is your grandfather’s old well,” he replied, “and you must be careful to go nowhere near it. It only takes a teaspoon of water to drown little girls like you, and the well is many fathoms deep.” He continued sadly. “Right after I was born, your grandmother disappeared near that well and was never seen again. She never received a proper burial, and your grandfather was so distressed that he boarded it up and could not bear to look at it again. I suppose he made that well her sepulcher.”
After that, the twins avoided this “nasty, wicked well that wants to drown us.” But one night when the girls were eleven, Dorret had a very strange dream. In this vision, Dorret watched out of the small window in the attic that stood for the twins’ bedroom as a beautiful damsel rose out of the old abandoned well like a vapor. The damsel drifted through the tall grass toward the Sorrels’ home. As the figure floated closer to the house, she moved out of Dorret’s sight. Moments later a beautiful woman’s face with entrancing pale blue eyes appeared on the other side of the glass. In the light of the full moon, the woman’s expression looked blank, her eyes yearning, her colorless fingertips touching the glass inches from Dorret’s face.