by Cameron Jace
“I will not give up my daughter,” I held her even tighter now, brushing my cheek against hers.
The Queen leaned back on the unicorn, and sighed impatiently. “Why do you have to make me kill you, Rumpelstiltskin?”
“You can kill me, but let my daughter live,” I said firmly.
“Your wish is my command,” she clicked her fingers, rolling her eyes, not even considering her words twice. I never saw the headless huntsman raise his sword and chop my head off with a single stroke.
It was swift and, surprisingly, painless. I didn’t even time to ask the headless horseman who’d cut off his head? Or was he just envious people had head and he didn’t?
I had never thought death would knock on my door so unexpectedly, and without any notice. No ‘Make your last wish before death’ or ‘If you have anything to regret, that would be the right time’?
I couldn’t even feel my body thudding against the ground and giving up on my daughter. Everything faded into grey before my eyes, I felt as if my life was worthless in this world. Being a good man didn’t help a bit.
With my last breath, I saw an image from another world. I saw a girl, but it wasn’t my daughter. It was a girl in a red hood, running toward something, holding a scythe in her hand.
At first, I thought she was the angel of Death, but then I realized she was running toward a black shadow.
“Stop!” The girl in the red hood screamed at the shadow. “It’s not fair. He’s a good man, and it’s not his time yet.”
The shadow seemed stronger though, pushing her away, and closing in on me.
Closer and closer until everything faded to black…
You might expect stories to end when the storyteller dies, but think twice, for that is not the case in fairy tales. I don’t know what happened after I died. All I remember is the first time my eyes fluttered open once again…
I was lying on my back in a chamber, dim light illuminated my surroundings. My eyes hurt and my vision was blurry. I couldn’t feel the rest of my body, either.
Something ruffled next to me. I thought it was an animal moving, but it wasn’t. What animal wore a black cloak, held a gas lamp, and chuckled like a goblin?
It was a short, pudgy man. He was standing on a bench so I could see him. He was a hunchman and he was ugly. A golden tooth twinkled in the dark, his maw stunk and his teeth were rotten; whereas his left eye was covered with a black patch, his beady right eye inspected my face. He was so ugly, trying to fit into any other mold than what he really was.
“Stay put,” He told me, and chuckled once again. I seemed to amuse him. Is this what afterlife is like? Because if it is, I didn’t want to be part of it. “You’ll be functioning soon. You’re the first. You’re a miracle,” He grunted, sounding envious. “Master!” He summoned.
My head ached, and I wanted to feel my legs, but I couldn’t, neither could I feel my hands.
“Stop calling me, Master. You call everyone you work for that,” Another man said to Hunchy, and then came to see me. He was young and looked a lot like the European intruders, although he didn’t look as evil. He had grown a beard, wore a white coat like a doctor’s, and held vellum in one hand.
“How do you feel?” He asked me, showing concerned as if I were his own child. He was genuine in a weird way. Was I in Hell?
“Where am I?” I noticed my voice sounded differently.
“You’re… alive,” The man said, and wrote something in his vellum, before taking a long drag on his pipe.
“It’s a miracle, Master,” the hunchman said behind the flickering of his gas lamp. “You did it. It worked,” the hunchmen began to cheer in his own ugly way, walking around with his gas lamp, saying, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
“Shut up, Hunchy,” The Master said.
“I hate that name, Master. You know that. Pete was the one who invented it,” said Hunchy. “I like to be called Igor. Eee-gor. I like the ‘gore’ in Igor.” Hunchy cackled annoyingly.
“Rest for now,” the Master told me, ignoring the annoying Hunchy. “It will take a while until you connect to your body parts,” He said, closing my eyelids with his hands and I fainted again. “You’ve been connected to electricity for nine months now, like a newborn. You’ll be fully alive soon, recreated like a new character in a timeless book; you’re born out of the writer’s imagination.” I heard him mumble as I drifted off again.
In the course of the following days, I started regaining sensation of my body, but I still couldn’t move. It puzzled me that I hadn’t been feeling hungry or thirsty. I was too tired to carry out a conversation, and my head throbbed with pain.
Then one day the Master told me what really happened to me. I was dead, and he performed a scientific procedure on me called Galvanism, an experiment never practiced on a living being before, to revive me. He had found my head—after the Queen’s huntsman had chopped it off– and gave me somebody else’s body parts, and created a new me. He said he found me a heart that wasn’t mine. It was a strong heart, although it hadn’t responded to the rest of my body, yet.
None of this made sense, but all that mattered was that I was back from the dead. This man played God on me, and although it left me oblivious to who I was at the moment, I couldn’t refuse the gift of life – even if it was cursed.
“Once your heart accepts the new body, you’ll be able to dream and remember things, and you’ll be able to walk and see your reflection in a mirror,” the Master said. “Until then, rest some more,” he smiled at me. “You’re destined for great things, Rumpelstein. Great things. A character like you will live on forever, and your name will be mentioned in famous books.”
“Is that my name, Rumpelstein?” I moaned.
“Part of it, yes,” he nodded. “But I like this one better. Rumpelstein,” He clenched his teeth and made a fist with his hand. “A powerful name for a powerful creature—I mean, man. You’ll be strong, and your enemies will fear you. No one will be able to stand in your way. Rest now. Once you begin to dream again and retain memories, you’ll hopefully remember who you are now, not who you were.”
I had memories? I thought I was just born? I didn’t know that this was my second life. Have you ever remembered things that didn’t happen to you? Then you might have been born where I lay helpless that day.
That night, my heart finally responded to my new body and I started dreaming.
I dreamt of a little girl with long hair, spinning on a wheel. My apparition brought a smile to her face, and her pink lips uttered a familiar sound, “I told you, Rumpelstiltskin, I weaved amazing dreams for you.”
“Who are you?” I asked, still unable to fish memories out of my fuzzy brain.
“I’m Rapunzel. I’m your daughter, and you’re alive again. You’ll avenge me, father.”
I woke up in a rage, kicking and destroying everything in sight, remembering my daughter, and thirsting for revenge. I knew who I was then, and what had happened to me. Hunchy hid under a table, avoiding eye contact with me. The Master stood in a far corner with a pipe in his mouth, writing in his vellum, observing his new creation.
That’s when I accidentally caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: Ugly, scary, and deformed—a half living, half dead being. I was a patchwork of body parts, an evil-looking creature.
“I will fix that,” The Master assured me. “I first needed to make sure it would work. I will soon give you a comely, improved body. Rumplestein.”
“Don’t call me that!” I shouted. “I want to see my daughter.”
“So you remember?” He asked, revealing childish curiosity. “That’s good. You’ll be free to do whatever you want to once you get better.”
Suddenly, the room echoed with shouts and thundering feet. Taken aback, I neared the small window and gazed out into the garden: A multitude had gathered outside the tower, carrying torches, and cursing my new name and existence. These people constituted the local villagers of the Kingdom of Sorrow, and they wanted me dead. The Que
en, kidnapper of my daughter and destroyer of lives, had sent its locals after me to put an end to my being.
What kind of life-after-death was that? I was a good man before, and I died on my knees – but still a good man. I didn’t want to be resurrected into a monster. I didn’t want to be hated. All I wanted was to save my daughter, and I had, once again, failed.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” The Master said. “They’ll leave soon enough. They can’t enter the windmill, and they don’t understand your greatness,” He approached me and held me by the shoulder. “You’re beautiful, Rumplestein. Do you understand that? They just can’t see it, yet.”
Night descended upon us, and the men began to tire, parting for their humble abodes, but swearing they’d come back the next day, and the day after, until my body lay dead on the ground.
Soon after, I succumbed to sleep, and the same vision of my daughter manifested itself in my dreams, which made me long for her company even more. She took my hand in hers and led me to a steep hill. On top of the hill, I saw the Kingdom of Sorrow from a bird’s point of view, surrounded by water on the South, West and East side. The North side was the icy village I came from.
“Can you see how small the kingdom looks from up here?” Rapunzel told me in the dream, the last dream she’d woven before she was kidnapped, the dream that I thought I’d end up dreaming forever.
She was right about the kingdom. All the grandeur and power of the kingdom seemed small compared to the world extending beyond the ocean, visible from the summit.
“Don’t let evil change you, Rumpelstiltskin.” She said, patting my hand. “Be strong. Don’t let them turn you into a Rumpelstein. Believe in your real name, and it will grant you great powers. Be patient, for all that you’ve suffered will be paid off,” My Rapunzel seemed to have grown wiser beyond her years. “I sense war is imminent, Rumpelstiltskin, and only one side will triumph.” She turned and walked away.
“Wait!” I yelled. Her small figure, now only a faint spot in the horizon of her woven dream, was quickly dissipating. “I don’t care about wars. I don’t care about the kingdom. I just want my daughter back. How can I find you?” I asked desperately, not knowing if she were real or just a mere pigment of my imagination.
“There’s a hard way to find me,” She said over her shoulder, her long hair fluttering in the swirling wind, spinning like a spindle, weaving and adorning the skies with stars and a silver moon. “Kidnap as many children as you can. They have to be first-borns. Some of then carry the secret location of my prison in their dreams. If you’re able to interpret the children’s dreams, you’ll know where I am.”
“That seems unlikely,” I said. “There must be an easier way.” I wondered why she couldn’t cut to the chase and tell me if there were easy way. Or perhaps that was not her in my dream?
Her stare pierced into my soul.
“Is there an easy way, Rapunzel?”
“You might call it an easier way, while it’s the harder for most people. But I will tell you about it,” She considered. “When you find yourself, you’ll find me.” She said before fading into black.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, I wondered how she had seen me in the dream. Did she see my repulsive, soulless figure?
I tried to walk and explore the tower that night, reflecting deeply on Rapuzel’s words. Before I could decipher her message of how to find myself, smoke invaded my nostrils. I ran toward the window and found myself facing an ugly sight: the peasants of Sorrow were burning the tower down.
They had caught the Master already, and there was no sign of Hunchy. I was going to die in here – ironically, I was going to die for the second time in my life.
Standing helpless in the middle of the fire, I met a man I’d never seen before in my life. He was blonde and wore fancy clothes, and to my surprise, fire didn’t seem to burn him.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I hate when someone asks me that question, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Do you come here often?’ You don’t want to sleep with me, do you? It’s not so much who I am as to what I can do,” He answered theatrically.
“Can you help me get out of here?”
“You just stole the words out of my mouth,” He chuckled and snapped his fingers. “Everything comes with a price, hmm… except one thing, and I’m not telling you what it is, considering I’d be letting go of a potential sinner.”
“I don’t have any money.” I said.
“Money is overrated, my friend. It’s easier to burn money than is it to burn people,” His laugh was bittersweet; it almost sounded as though he remembered an old memory. “People,” he uttered as if talking to himself for a second. “Those awful creatures. Unlike me, they were created to kill and do bad things, and yet get away with it,” He sighed.
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s nothing,” he waved a gloved hand in the air. I noticed he was richly dressed too. “People pay with other things, more precious than money, and I’m worth the payment. What I can do is usually beyond words.” He added.
“What does that mean? What are you doing here? And what is it that you do?”
“Don’t worry about why I’m standing in the middle of a blazing fire. To me, it feels kind of like bathing, and I’m very keen of getting showered all day long. Let’s say I’m in the business of catching people… fallen people, if that rings a bell?”
“I’m not falling.” I said, ignoring his comment about fire.
“Sure you are, Rumpelstein. I know all about you, your daughter, the Queen of Sorrow, and those nasty people wanting to kill you because you’re different. And if I were you – having been resurrected and such by a mad Master – I’d take my revenge on the world. Revenge is good by the way. It really feels good.”
“I’m a good man,” I insisted.
“Not a very good-looking one, though,” He raised an eyebrow and sneered at me. “But we can always fix that. Looks are overrated, you too. In fact, everything is overrated except one’s soul.”
“I’m not the kind who takes revenge, and if you can’t save me then leave me alone,” I was about to be burned alive and there was no way out.
“Well,” The man leaned forward and winked at me. “We both know you suck at being good. I mean, you really suck. You’re like a rat that refuses to eat cheese, a squirrel swearing not to ever eat nuts, and a werewolf who claims he turns into a cat under a full moon -- awful metaphors, I know. I’m not a poetic person. So you couldn’t protect your family with all that hocus-pocus goodness, could you?”
I lowered my head, ashamed. I was afraid it would fall off, as it felt a bit loose.
“No need to feel ashamed,” He waved his theatrical hands in the air like a magician. “We’ve all tried to be good and failed. There’s nothing new to that; it happens every day. Blame it on Mama and Papa, who insisted the world was good when we were kids. But you’d be a fool if you don’t try to be bad for a change. Who knows? You could be good at being bad, and it could be your destiny,” He laughed.
“Who are you?”
“Asking the same question, again and again, are we? I’m the one who could help you, and I can’t go on telling you all my names. Besides, what matters is how I can help you. I can help you have a real body, infuse a soul into the soulless thing you are. Take care of that arm. It looks like it’s falling off, by the way. You haven’t been stitched well, my friend. Tortured? Yes. Stitched? No. Stitching reminds me of your funny name. What was it? Rumpelstitchkin?” He wiggled a forefinger in front of me. “Let me give you a Faustian makeover, and don’t ask me what a makeover is.”
“I don’t want any of that. All I need is to find my daughter.” I said.
“You can’t find anything that the Queen of Sorrow has taken if you keep playing good. Just look at you.”
“I know, I look awful,” I lowered my head, then raised it up again, reminding myself that I didn’t want to risk it to fall.
The man started circling around himself and dancing with his loose hands in the air. He was singing a song with a bad tune, “You’re so awful to be true. I can’t take my eyes off of you,” then he suddenly stopped on his own, as if he had forgotten I was watching him but then suddenly remembered, feeling a bit embarrassed. He stopped and adjusted his tie, “Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. You were not supposed to see that.”
“My daughter told me that I will find her if I find myself.” I said, neglecting whatever this man was doing. We were in the middle of a fire, and he was dancing. How should I have commented on that?
“Oh,” He pretended to rummage in his front pockets for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry I don’t have you in here. You’re not here, not there. You’re missing, my friend.”
The man had an uncanny way of making me feel bad. Suddenly, the idea of revenge started to make sense. I was going to die in the fire, and I was fed up with pretending – or insisting on being good and waiting for divine interventions. I had to bargain for my life – well, my second one – before I died.
“If I were you,” he said. “I’d feed them the same rubbish they fed me: An eye for an eye, and all that crap. Didn’t your daughter tell you that if you steal enough children you might find her whereabouts in their dreams?”
“What do you mean? And how do you know about the dream?”
“I mean they stole your daughter, and it’s not going to be easy to find her. Until you do, how about you steal their firstborns? What if I gave you the magic to be able to afford things for a certain price? What if I taught you how to fool people into giving you their firstborns? All those people in the Kingdom of Sorrow who humiliated you, and all those who stand outside the tower now, waiting for your death? None of them has ever been good to you. I don’t see the reason why you should be good to them.”
“I’m a good—“
“I know, I know. I heard it a million times. You’re a good and weak man. Why am I even bothering? You think those people downstairs will let you live unless you have a normal body, so they see you’re just like them? Be smart and apply my wisdom in your life.”