by Cameron Jace
“If they are of no use, why did you tell me about them?” I asked.
“Was just messing with you, cute boy,” Gretel said and left me again for her witchcraft studies. She had turned her brother into gingerbread and was trying to get him back to normal. This kingdom’s quirkiness was starting to get on my nerves.
The day after, I was standing before the tower, far enough from the Rapunzel plants, still trying to figure out what to do.
“I heard you’re looking for me,” A voice said from behind. When I turned around, I saw a scruffy boy with shoulder-length brown hair. He was wearing a hat with a white feather in it.
“You’re Jack?” I suggested.
“It depends on who’s asking.” He said, leaning to a tree and cutting a golden apple with a knife.
“I am prince of—“
“That’s good enough,” He raised his knife in the air and lifted his head up, showing his eyes from under his green hat. “Prince means you could pay for my services.”
“Services?” I asked. “You’re a—“
“A thief?” He laughed and bit a chunk of the apple. “It’s a job like any other. If we don’t have thieves, then what’s the authority for? If you want to have people to infuse discipline in the kingdom, you better have those who create chaos first. And we wouldn’t want to put them out of their jobs. They need someone to catch, right?”
“Nevermind…”
“I like that word, ‘Nevermind’. If only everyone would mind their own business—which reminds me of business. Let’s do some of that. I want a chicken that provides golden eggs.”
“You mean a goose, right?”
“Chicken, goose, elephant. It’s doesn’t matter as long as it lays golden eggs. Besides, an elephant egg would be too big to carry.”
“Why golden eggs?” I was always puzzled by that. Also, I didn’t bother telling him that elephants didn’t lay eggs. “I could just give you a ridiculous amount of gold.”
“You ask too many questions,” He said, throwing the apple away and staring high at the dark tower. “Did anyone tell you that before?”
“A girl named Grete—“
“Shh,” Jack said, walking closer to the tower, and I followed him “You want to go up there, don’t you?” He whispered.
“Yes. Why are you whispering?”
“Dame Gothel, the keeper of the tower,” Jack still whispered. “Not really a nice lady. She could curse us if she hears us.”
“You know her?”
“Of course,” Jack nods, looking up at the small window with the yellow light shining from it. “You’ve heard about Rumpelstiltskin?”
“Heard of him.”
“So here is the thing. Rumpy steals kids and sends them to the Devil, who has a school that graduates other nasty little devils like him. Sometimes, the Devil decides he wants to get rid of a couple of kids so he throws them back down here for Dame Gothel to do whatever she wants with them. I had a dear friend named Peter Pan whom she caught, too, but Peter gave her one hell of a lesson and freed the kids, sending them back to Neverland, somewhere far away. Such an awesome boy. It’s sad that he fell in love with a monster girl.”
“Oh,” I scratched my temples, remembering that I was in love with a monster, too.
“You’re not in love with a monster girl, too?” Jack said, picking up boulders from the ground.
“Actually, I am,” I tried not to blush. “That’s why I asked for you.”
“Love is such a terrible thing,” Jack fiddled with the boulders in his hands. “A sweet terrible thing. So the rumors are true, eh? You’re the prince Snow White bit when she was seven. Am I right or am I right?”
“You know?”
“You’ll be surprised what I know,” Jack smirked. “I don’t just go into people’s houses stealing jewelry. I steal secrets too. Too bad you can’t sell those for a price.”
“Why can’t you? I know people like stories a lot,” I said, even though I didn’t know Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug at the time.
“People like fairy tales, which are stories sewn into lies. That’s different. No one ever likes the truth. Ironically, I am a thief but all I know about people is the truth. The ugly truth,” He said and threw a couple of boulders at the tower.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“I was trying to get that girl out,” Jack said casually.
“You mean Rapunzel?”
“I forgot witches have names,” He laughed. “What was it that the boy used to tell her to come out?”
“Which boy?”
“You don’t know? The boy who is in love with her. Another foolish boy like you and Peter who is in love with Rapunzel, and wants her to climb down when her hair grows long enough.”
“Is everyone in love with a monster here?” I mumbled.
“Don’t think because she is a monster, you’re not as well. You just don’t know it yet.”
“And how about you,” I had to ask. “Are you in love?”
“With gold? Yes, of course,” Jack said, then he started to whistle for Rapunzel to come out of the window but she didn’t. “Oh, I remembered the words,” He said suddenly. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair. That’s what her loverboy used to say.”
Rapunzel snarled out of the window, but she was so high I couldn’t see her face. I just saw her long, long hair reach half-way down the tower.
“It’s just a matter of time until her hair grows long enough and she could escape the tower. Would you like to wait until then to get Snow White out?” Jack offered.
“How long will that be?” I asked.
“About two years. You could go fall in love with someone else until then. I’d do it if I were you.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Of course, I am,” Jack laughed at me again. “I can really see why a nice boy like you is in love with a monster like Snow. She lures you with her beauty and you’re so naïve,” He sighed.
“So will you be able to fly me up there?” I neglected his sarcasm. It seemed every one was making fun of me for being in love with a monster.
“I am sorry I can’t. You will need a dragon to fly you up there,” Jack said.
“A dragon? But I was told you could help me.”
“I can,” Jack showed me a handful of beans, “with these.”
“You eat beans and fly?” I wondered.
“You’re the most helpless prince I’ve ever seen. I always knew princes are good for nothing but kissing the beauty awake, without even doing anything to deserve it,” Jack puffed. “So no. We don’t eat the magic beans. I seed the earth with them, and a beanstalk grows tall enough to reach for the tower.”
“Does that really work?”
“It does. I’m surprised no one wrote about me in books until now. I am pretty awesome,” He winked. “Why do you think no one ever caught me stealing? It’s because I hide the things I steal in the clouds. I also sleep in the clouds. Thanks to the beans and the beanstalk.”
“That’s why you’re Jack and the Beanstalk!” I figured it out.
“You’re must be the smartest of your brothers,” He smirked.
“I don’t have brothers.”
“Could you please shut up for a moment?” Jack seemed upset with me, checking out the soil in the earth. “The problem is we could plant the beanstalk and reach the top of the tower, but then how are we going to get your lovely monster girl out? Rapunzel won’t let us. She is under a spell, too. She’ll starve if she gives up on Snow White.”
“I could kill her,” I suggested. “I am a master sword fighter.”
“She won’t let you. We have to find a way to get Rapunzel out, and another way to sedate her or something,” Jack said.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
Jack fumbles through his thievery bag. His eyes suddenly glittered as the white feather on his green hat bends to a rustle of wind from the forest.
“What
’s wrong?” I wondered.
“Nothing,” Jack smirked, pulling his hand out of his bag. “In fact, I think I found out what we’re going to sedate Rapunzel with,” Jack held a golden apple in his hand, but one that looked so tempting and inviting that I suddenly felt hungry. What a beautiful apple.
Even though it didn’t look different than the other golden apples in Sorrow, this one had a magical feeling to it, as if I got hypnotized when I saw it. All my senses sharpened, and my lust for things surfaced. I suddenly wanted to be with Snow White. I wanted to taste the apple’s sweetness on my tongue so bad I had to blink to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. These accurate and euphoric feelings only accompanied me in dreams.
“That’s an… apple,” I said, swallowing, then licking my lips. My hands almost betrayed me and reached for the apple against my will. Why did I suddenly feel like a werewolf, unable to think of anything but my prey?
“As I told you,” Jack rubbed the apple clean as if it was a bottle with a genie inside it. “You must be the smartest of your family.”
I didn’t pay attention to Jack mocking me because crows started fluttering above our heads, owls rested on the nearby trees, and a white dove flew through the crows for a moment then disappeared. The apple attracted them. The tree branches started bending slightly in its direction like plants bending toward the sun. The Rapunzel plants on the ground started waving slowly like cautious snakes, examining the fruit of life in Jack’s hands. They curled like spiral smoke before the storm with eyes showing through the leaves, and petals taking the shapes of open mouths with teeth.
Whenever Jack waved his hand to the East or to the West, everything in the forest danced with it, slowly, with drooling mouths and curious eyes.
“Shhhh,” Jack hissed at the plants and animals. I watched them reluctantly obey their master, the keeper of the most amazing apple, and retreat back. “See what canthis apple do?” Jack told me.
“What is it about it that’s so different?” I was curious, forgetting about why I was here.
“That’s not an ordinary apple,” Jack rubbed again carefully with his hand, looking at it as if it were a crystal ball. “It’s a poisonous one.”
“Poisonous?” I furrowed my brows. “How so? It’s so beautiful.”
“Ever heard the saying, ‘Not all that glitters is gold’?” Jack said. “I’d say, ‘Not all that is gold isn’t poisonous.’”
I hated Jack being cryptic in his explanation, and against my better judgment, I found myself reaching for the apple.
“Nah!” Jack slapped my hand away, and held up his knife in front of the apple as if to protect it. “I know you want to touch, like everyone else does, but that’s the trick of this special apple. It makes you want it above everything else. It makes you want to sell your soul to the Devil to get it, thinking it’s all you need, but it isn’t. It’s pure poison. No wonder it got Adam and Eve out of the Heavens.”
“Adam and Eve?” I asked for I didn’t know who they were. Unlike most of the Kingdom of Sorrow’s citizens, Jack knew a lot – looking back at that conversation, I now understand why we were kept from knowing of Adam and Eve and the beginning of life, but that’s another long story.
So I guess it was the advantage of being a thief, stealing things from others and learning more about the world, that made Jack so knowledgeable.
“Don’t bother about them,” Jack said casually. “They’re just a boy and girl who made the world pay for a mistake they did.”
Again, Jack was being cryptic, but I needed to know more about the apple, “So you’re sure that is poisonous? I am asking because Pomona, the Goddess of Harvest and Fruit wouldn’t allow poisonous fruits to grow in here, the same way she prohibited red fruits.”
“This apple is so not under Pomona’s control. It’s not a fruit that came out of an earthly womb. It’s under a spell and created with dark arts. It sure looks like Pomona’s fruits but it was created but someone else.”
“Who?”
“This apple is property of the Queen of Sorrow herself,” Jack said proudly, bragging about the precious item he stole from the queen of the land. “I told you, I am not an ordinary thief.”
“The Queen of Sorrow has the power to create apples?”
“Let’s say she is friendly with the dark side,” Jack said. I got the feeling he knew a lot more about her. Even though I detested him as a thief, I wondered what it would be like to sneak into other’s houses and get your hands on the most darkened secrets of their souls. How many secrets did people keep where they lived? “She has a lot of these apples. I don’t know what use she has for them though. Let me show you what you’ve never seen before.” Jack sliced the apple in two with his knife horizontally. The flesh of its insides looked extremely juicy, but that wasn’t what Jack was trying to show me. He pointed at the core of the apple, which looked like a five-pointed star. “As lovely as apples are, they can be used to do some dark magic. When an apple is being cut in half for magickal purposes, it should always be cut in this way, horizontally, in order to take full advantage of the secret magickal sign you see in front of you.”
“Are all apples like that when you cut them horizontally?”
“Yes, but not all of them act like that. People don’t tend to notice it though. What’s inside the apple is the main points of a five star symbol that belongs to the rather dark arts. No one knows about it yet. It’s called Wicca. Only a few have learned about it,” Jack said as he pulled out one of the five seeds in its core. What happened blew my mind. The apple’s inside flesh starting seeping red juice while the five-star symbol glowed. I felt like I had never seen a apple before. At first I thought it was blood that was leaking, but it was only good smelling juice from inside. “That’s the poison itself inside,” Jack explained. “Although Wicca, like everything else in the world, is always used for good things as much as bad, the Queen of Sorrow admires the bad.”
“You have to hide this now,” I freaked out, looking around me. “It’s the forbidden color, Jack. You have to hide it.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack clapped the apple slices back together, and it turned back into one piece again.
“So what does this evil apple have to do with Rapunzel?”
“It’s how we’re going to sedate her,” Jack said. “Maybe kill her. I don’t know how strong the poison is. Haven’t tasted it myself.”
“So you’re going to use your magic beans to let us climb the beanstalk, and then sedate Rapunzel with the apple? How are we going to get her to peek out of the window?”
“That’s the easy part,” Jack pulled a small harp from his bag. When he strummed the string once, it played a whole tune by itself, and stardust filled the air. “You can’t say I am not a resourceful boy,” Jack smirked. “You know I do this for the gold, right?”
“Of course,” I said. “So let’s do it.”
“Not tonight,” Jack said. “Tomorrow, a day before Hallow’s Eve, the Harvest of Apples celebration, because I have a lot of stealing to do that night so I won’t be free and you can’t use my services. That’s when we save your monster.”
“She is not a monster,” I insisted.
“Seriously?” Jack furrowed his eyebrows.
“Well, she is, but I love her.”
“Now, that makes perfect sense. Doesn’t it? Meet me here tomorrow, midnight, and we’ll save the blood-sucking princess. Don’t forget the hen with the golden eggs.”
“I said I am going to give you pure gold,” I grit my teeth. “Forget about the hen, the chicken, and the goose.”
“You forgot to mention the elephant,” Jack bit on a white plant in his mouth. “Take it easy, Prince Charming. You don’t really look charming when you grit your teeth. I am glad you remember what you owe me though.”
The night after, I met Jack at the base of the Rudaba Tower. I snuck away into the dark of the forest and stopped at the base of the tower before the Rapunzel plants. Jack wasn’t alone. He had a beautiful girl with him.
“Who is she?” I wondered, feeling uncomfortable in a third person’s presence.
“Meet Marmalade,” Jack said. “At least that’s why I call her,” He said as she engaged his arm. The shocking, yet mesmerizing, thing about Marmalade was that she wore almost nothing, leafs covered the lower part of her body, and her own hair covered her breasts. Her hair seemed fixated though, not affected by the now and then breeze coming from the forest.
“Why is she here? And why is she naked?” I frowned.
“It’s a bad habit of hers,” Jack waved a hand in the air. “Can’t change her. She’s inherited it from her ancestors,” Jack said as she kissed him on his cheeks. “Besides, she is not naked. Can’t you see she covers her breast with her hair? Can you do that?”
“What—“ I stopped myself from even considering his silly question. It occurred to me that Jack might not be taking this mission seriously. “Nevermind.” I mumbled.
“I like you when you say that,” Jack adjusted his hat after Marmalade had messed with it playfully. “Relax. I like to relax before stealing something. It gives you more confidence. And believe me, Marmalade will be very useful.”
“Nice to meet you,” Marmalade said to me, winking and chewing on something. I was used to girls flirting with me. I couldn’t deny I had been spoiled as a prince, but this situation felt awkward.
“So she is your monster?” I asked, not even replying to her.
“Monster?” Marmalade frowned.
“He doesn’t mean it that way, darling,” Jack said, staring at me as if he was going to kill me. “Prince Charming loves to joke.”
“Aha,” Marmalade winked again. “It wasn’t funny,” She pursed her lips at me, fiddling with her hair. “I guess you’re used to that because your lover is a monster.”
I wasn’t going to reply to this. It was true.
“You know what Adage means?” She asked me.
I shook my head no.
“It’s a beautiful word,” She said. “People will tell you it means the purest love in the world, or love that consumes you, but I know what it really means. It means ‘love beyond reason’, and that is best love in the world.”