“Tell that to …” To whom? Briar? No. Don’t think about him right now. Take another step. Make sure he can’t slip by you. This ends now. Kill him. Cut him to pieces with your blade, consequences be damned. “You … you were working with the Malevolence from the start.”
“I was hedging my bets, as I always have,” he answered. “But when I saw it escape the prince’s body, I knew it would go for Sanda. I wonder what might have happened if I’d killed Sanda instead and it had tried taking over Seth. Would I have killed him, too, if it had meant destroying my creator? I’d like to say no. But I knew the moment I felt nothing that the Corruption had me. It will never let go.” To my surprise, he stepped closer. Anguish twisted his face, then just as quickly it disappeared. “Your friend deserved life. I admired him, as I’ve come to admire you.” He lifted his hand, holding his palm out toward me. “Now do it, damn you. Before I lose my nerve and beg.”
KILL HIM KILL HIM NOW GIVE IN TO YOUR ANGER!
I licked my lips. The gladius shook in my head. “No.”
He looked up at me, one eyebrow slightly raised.
I dropped the gladius and pulled the vial necklace from under my shirt. I uncapped it, holding it between us, trying to steady my nerves. “Did you mean what you said? About Seth?”
“I did,” he said, warily eyeing the vial. “What do you have in mind?”
“Redemption.” I held it out. To my surprise, he lifted one shaky hand, grabbing it. He stared at the clear liquid a moment, no doubt remembering what had happened to his brother.
“Seth isn’t gone yet. He’s … somewhere else. In danger,” I said. “And I’m rescuing him.”
“Then …” Grayle licked his lips, exhaling deeply. “Then cheers, hero.” He brought the vial to his lips, downing it and coughing fiercely. I took the vial from his hand, watching as the liquid magically refilled. I brought it to my lips and drank.
Water. It tasted like ice-cold water, numbing the back of my throat as it went down.
A wind coursed through the room. The overhead lights flickered, then went out. A black shadow appeared in the doorway, crawling across the bookcase. Grayle stepped back, bumping into me. “I do hope you’re right about this.”
“Me too,” I said, watching in terror as the shadow slowly drew itself up from the floor.
Death. He hovered closer, his tattered brown robe fluttering, his hood drawn back just enough to reveal his terrifying bleached-white skull. In one bony hand was his scythe, its long nicked and rusted blade beckoning us.
I grabbed Sam Grayle’s hand. We stepped forward. Into the darkness underneath Death’s robe.
Into the absolute darkness.
And then: light.
The Lost diary of Juliette Rosa Ramirez
A miller, who was so poor that he had nothing more than his mill and a large apple tree which stood behind it, went into the forest to gather wood. There he was approached by an old man, who said, “Why do you torment yourself so? I will make you rich if you will sign over to me that which is standing behind your mill. I will come and claim it in three years.”[iii]
March 15
Hurt. Dying. Can’t go to a hospital because every hospital in this area is owned by Grayle Incorporated. Not worried about the chairman … worried about his brothers. The sickly one’s found me before.
Shouldn’t have ignored the dreams. Shouldn’t have thought I could do this alone. Shouldn’t have sent Briar off on a wild goose chase to distract him. Maybe if he’d been with me, the two of us could have destroyed Death. Estúpido.
But the dreams have gotten so strange, I don’t know what to believe anymore.
March 16
Texas. The wound is infected, maybe beyond help, but the creature in my dream promised a cure in exchange for help.
He thinks he’s been chosen to save us all.
March 17
Driving north. I broke one of Briar’s cardinal rules and drew a block of gold, bribing the truck rental associate for the biggest moving truck he had. The creature in the back of the truck is a statue with moving parts. Multiple parts. Multiple heads and multiple arms and legs, all of them controlled by some unseen force so that he can change how he looks at will.
But I know his secret. I sniffed it out the moment I saw him.
He’s hollow. Vacío.
And I could have killed him after he helped me. Wouldn’t have been the first time I haven’t kept my word.
March 18
Still driving. Got into contact with Briar, let him know that I killed another Corrupted hiding out in Texas.
But I haven’t. He’s still in the back of the truck, biding his time. He has a thirst for oil, he says. He says he can drain the entire world of oil and save my species from itself. It’s pretty thinking.
He’s collected things. Magical objects from Grimms’ Fairy Tales that would help me in my struggle against other Corrupted. But … I can’t explain it. I feel as if those objects hold some other importance. Not the first time I’ve felt it, either.
He used a blanket on me. A magic blanket that healed my wounds. Dios mío, why did I think I could destroy Death? I thought I could overpower him. I thought I could use brunt force and he nearly killed me. I was so afraid. The moment that scythe blade cut my stomach, I thought of my family. I wanted so badly to see them again that I nearly gave up.
But instead, I dove into a sewer. Soaking with rain runoff, bleeding, I found my hiding place: a little nook—a broken chunk of concrete inside a sewer tunnel that was the home of a homeless man. I bought his place for twenty dollars. He asked no questions, just packed his bag and left, happy for the money.
I tucked myself into the nook. A moment later, I heard the homeless man’s terrified scream.
March 19
Found a place for the statue: the basement office beside an oil derrick. He’s pleased.
March 21
Bought a plane ticket to Germany. Briar will meet me there in a week, weather permitting. I haven’t told him about my adventure with Death. That’s a lecture I can do without for the time being.
I used to lecture my daughter. She was only two years old but I lectured her anyway. I think I just liked hearing my voice.
“Rosa,” I would say, “do not speak to strangers. And when you are older, I will give you a password that only you and I know. If a stranger tries to talk to you, ask for the password.”
Strangers. The moment she was born, I feared that someone would try to take her from me.
March 22
More reminders of my old life. On the plane to Germany, a little girl sat in front of me playing with a doll and a race car. She’d come up with a story that merged the two toys together and in her mind, it made perfect sense. The race car had a mind of its own and wanted the doll to go home and set the table because they were going to have company over later but the doll responded by calmly explaining that the car could move much faster and besides, it was the car’s turn to set the table.
Then she looked back at me and smiled.
Rosa.
She’s in my mind again. I can’t get her out. She was only two years old.
March 29
Seven days of waiting. Briar’s ship is a day late due to storms—I checked out of worry. He is my friend. He tries so hard to pull me out of the dark cloud that has a hold of me, and sometimes I feel it working. Sometimes I feel the old Juliette coming back. Then, a bony hand wrenches me back into the darkness.
I’ve been having strange dreams lately. There’s a sphinx and there’s something else.
The sphinx was once a girl. The daughter of a man and a woman from a strange fairy tale about a singing lark. The sphinx now hides away in a cave but I can’t quite place where it is. Looks somewhere farther east, judging by the languages spoken in my dreams. Briar’s given me a rundown of different dialects for this exact purpose. He says that not every hero sees Corrupted all over the world like me.
Lucky me. Afortunado.
He says
some heroes only have dream of Corrupted nearby. Those heroes don’t last too long.
There’s something else in my dreams, too, something that I don’t share with Briar. Visions. Visions of a new hero. The visions are difficult to see, as if they’re hiding behind a foggy window. I try to get closer, to see what’s happening on the other side of that window but I can’t break through the glass. I can hear murmurs. I can hear screams.
I have to confess, at first it was jarring—after all, it meant I wouldn’t be the last. It meant I would die. But then I think about my daughter and my husband and my parents, all of whom I have already lost and I think to myself, maybe I’m ready.
March 30
This month’s tally:
1 step-mother
3 children
1 full-grown rat
Found:
2 Pearl Jam cassettes
April 1
April Fool’s Day. Doesn’t mean much in Germany. Everything here is tense. There’s been so much happening lately as the county tries to heal from its identity crisis. Eastern Germany used to be a Communist state with its own rules and a massive wall dividing it from Western Germany. Then the wall fell and now everyone is trying to reconcile with history.
Tense times mean lots and lots of rumors, but Briar and I have learned to keep our ears open for something that sounds all too real. Strange stories are spreading of a child that steals other children’s dreams. A child with wide, bulbous eyes and ragged hair who makes sucking sounds with her lips as she slips from house to house.
Briar tells me to stay focused. Find the sphinx. He’s obsessed with the sphinx. I’ve overruled him on this one. We’re going to find out if the rumors are true. Children need their dreams.
We all need to dream once in a while. Even protagonistas.
Normally, I kill the Corrupted as fast as possible so the nightmares end. Sometimes, I can dream of Rosa and Howard for a few nights. Rosa, my daughter. Howard, my husband. Sometimes, they’re waiting for me in a golden field of wheat. Sometimes, they’re sitting in our old house and the table is set and I can smell refried beans cooking in the kitchen.
I cherish those moments. I wake up crying, sometimes, and Briar puts a paw on my back and stays with me.
April 2
Closer now to finding the child. It’s a Corrupted, I’m sure of it. No dreams of it, though. Just more dreams of this sphinx. The sphinx is hiding somewhere east. Men arrive. Adventurers seeking treasure. They’ve been guided to this place with promises of wealth.
Instead, they get riddles. So far, no one has answered the riddles correctly. The sphinx emerges from the shadows and repeats her riddles. The adventurers answer incorrectly again.
And then the sphinx eats them.
April 3
This evening, I made my way through the mostly empty streets of eastern Berlin, a section of the city in transition. The roads are in disrepair. The buildings are crumbling like stale gingerbread houses.
The cool night air seemed to penetrate my bones. I pushed the discomfort into a dark hole in the corner of my mind. There was no room for pain. There are only two kinds of heroes: survivors and everyone else. Only you can’t stay a survivor. It’s a temporary label, one you can wear proudly like a pin after you’ve survived your first encounter. But eventually, you end up like all the others. Muerto.
There were rumors in the air of a Communist invasion. Russia might invade Germany and start World War III any day. People spoke of it as they passed me on the street, stumbling over the cracks. The people spoke of World War III as if it was inevitable.
“It’s been too long since the last,” said a man to his wife as they hurried past me. They spoke a halting German, as if their very language had been repressed by the Communists.
“There is always another war,” said a woman to her elderly mother. They unlocked their hands to walk around me. I stopped to watch them, wondering what they might have thought of me: a Latina, wearing torn blue jeans and a black leather jacket that hid knives. Hair pulled back. Small silver earrings. I wondered what my mother might have looked like in old age. Probably still beautiful, with broad laugh lines and soft eyes.
She was the one who named me Juliette. She loved Shakespeare’s plays. She loved the bard’s humor. She was the one who taught me Spanish and German and some French when I was young. She made me work so hard at my schooling. She thought I would go on to do amazing things. She was so disappointed when I got pregnant so young. She thought she had failed me.
At midnight, rain began to fall. A gentle drizzle that stuck to the windows of squat, industrial-looking red-brick buildings. I saw footprints on the street. Glowing, tiny footprints with little toes. A barefoot Corrupted child. I followed the footprints farther east, into a little neighborhood full of thin houses two stories tall that were squeezed together. Each one had a little yard out front but the yard had been replaced with concrete at some point. Now, little weeds sprouted from the cracks and welcomed the fat raindrops with leaves spread like arms.
A punishment. Some of the people who’d lived in this neighborhood when Germany was divided had led a musical resistance. Rock music whose lyrics frightened the Communist regime. They were just a bunch of neighborhood kids who’d cobbled together a few guitars and drum kits from attics. Stuff that weird uncles and rebellious parents had purchased before the Wall went up in 1961, rediscovered on accident. Vintage guitars that could do nothing but screech. Drum kits with damaged snares that growled.
My kind of music, in other words. It wasn’t long before the kids got the wild idea of putting out a record. This was in 1985 … the wall was still up back then, and just about every record company in East Berlin had been shut down long ago. But there was still a music scene, and it wasn’t long before records started appearing. Not much longer before a few got smuggled out of East Berlin and transferred to cassette.
The authorities found out who the kids were—they had spies everywhere before the Berlin Wall fell—and as punishment removed all the trees and grass. They stole the color green from the entire neighborhood.
Robbed of a color. It sounds like something a Corrupted might attempt.
The footsteps led me underneath an old chain-link fence and into a factory big enough to house an airplane. But inside the factory were only a few fat metal stamping machines, good for nothing except pressing steel sheets into various shapes. Lying in a pile were sheets of metal stamped into the shape of a Volkwagon hood. Los coches.
Sleeping atop the pile was a girl. Sleeping. She wore a polka-dot dress that was lined with mud at the bottom. Her belly bulged out, fat on the dreams she’d stolen. Her hair glowed gold. When each breath she drew in, her pursed lips made a horrifying sucking sound.
Slowly, I unzipped my leather jacket, pulling a dagger out from the inner pocket.
Every breath she drew in, I could feel a part of me pulled toward her. Maybe, if I’d let her, she could have sucked out all of the bad dreams. All of the nightmares. Maybe, if it was possible, I’d give up my dreams of my daughter and husband. The dreams of them were comforting, almost addictive, but each morning when I woke up, the pain of loss was worse.
But I didn’t hesitate. I never hesitate anymore.
April 4
Most heroes who survive their first encounter watch the Corrupted burn away like paper. Not me. My first dreams were of a handsome-looking little boy with pale skin, a little German-looking niño who played in a little playground at night. Every night, I met him next to the monkey bars. He would hop up and swing from them, then slide down the slide and start all over again. He drew little pictures of stick figures in the sand. He hummed a strange song to himself, occasionally adding the words “Juniper Tree.”
A snowstorm hit Chicago. That night, the boy wore no mittens and no hat, just a fluffy red jacket and black snow pants. He wiped snow off the teeter-totter, then sat down. Then went up. Then went back down. The other side of the teeter-totter was empty.
The next night,
he was hiding underneath the little rusted metal merry-go-round, watching a group of teenagers play on the swing set. Their breath came out in clouds of steam as they laughed to one another. Slowly, the boy got out from underneath the merry-go-round. When the teenagers saw him, they laughed.
“Who are you?” a girl asked.
“What are you doing here?” her boyfriend added.
The boy didn’t answer. He stood in front of the swing sets, watching them. There were only two lights in the little park, each shining rusted, dull yellow light over the swing set. No clouds of steam escaped from the boy’s mouth.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Where are you parents, kid?”
The boy’s eyes grew wide. They were giant, so grande that they squeezed his skin. He looked like an alien. His tongue snapped out like a whip. The teenagers screamed and tried to run but something was moving underneath the snow. Somethings. Little gray tentacles that wrapped around their legs. The boy watched with a look of satisfaction on his distorted face.
I woke in a cold sweat.
The next night, unable to sleep, I stayed up late with a cup of strong black coffee. Howard put Rosa to bed and then passed out on the couch. He always worked so late on Thursdays and Fridays, making any last-minute phone calls that needed to be made with angry City Hall officials who were wondering when the next road construction job would be complete. I took off his tie and unbuttoned the first few buttons of his nice black-striped shirt—a Christmas present from me, to help him with his awful style. He needed to look nice when he was summoned to City Hall.
I went outside, ready to go for a run. That was when I met the rabbit.
He was sitting on a park bench on Madison Avenue, watching me approach. I slowed when I realized what he was. There were others out, either exercising or traveling from restaurants to bars. Some were simply tourists enjoying Chicago’s bustling nightlife and enraptured by the tall buildings..
The Grimm Chronicles, Vol. 4 Page 12