The Grimm Prequels Book 5: (Prequels 19-24)

by Cameron Jace

  I lived with my mother in a high castle, the only one on the island, called Camelot. Some will tell you Camelot doesn’t exist, that it’s a fictional Castle that only served as a setting in 18th century romance novels.

  They’re wrong.

  It’d be fair to describe my childhood as happy. Unlike other kids, the sense of doom didn’t stain my soul. Most probably because I loved to sing.

  Not only sing. I loved to tell stories.

  And not just that. I loved to write. A lot.

  With a sharpened stone from the shore, I’d write and scribble on the walls of the castle all day long. What did I write? I think I was too young to know. But it was my imagination spilled out to the world.

  I loved it.

  You may ask why I used a stone, and your inquiry is sound. I had a reason to write with a stone on the wall. In fact, doing this was breaking the law in Astolat.

  You see, writing was prohibited on our island. Storytelling too, but writing was the big issue. Recently they had burned all books and thrown the ashes into the sea. Any writing tool was considered a weapon, so much so that some of those who broke the rules were hanged.

  Why?

  I’m not really sure, not until this day writing this diary. Some said it being a fate-less island with a dead whale meant that we shouldn’t learn and expand our minds — because the act would urge us to leave the island.

  The islanders thought we were destined to die. A fate we had been given by the Gods. We had to respect and accept it. Basically, they were sentencing us all to die while still being alive.

  The other theory I heard was almost the same. With a twist.

  Astolat had always been surrounded with that thing we called The Between. A strange phenomenon where you’d wake up one day and look outside your window and see the sea had frozen, which meant you were able to walk over to the nearest island.

  The Between had always proven to be a lie. No one ever came back. And then for thirteen years we’d keep listening to their screams at night.

  Writing opened up minds and urged a person to explore, which basically meant to leave the island. The elders of Astolat feared for our few inhabitants — and frankly, some of us were terrified by the night screams; there was no point in adding more.

  And this is how I ended up living in a world where the written word was prohibited.

  But what was a curious little girl like me supposed to do?

  Those words and images wanted to splash out of my mind. They wanted to express themselves. They wanted me to enjoy the beauty of words, and the astonishment of putting them side by side, like bricks building the highest of castles in the skies.

  Slowly. Bit by Bit. My childhood was darkening like all the other children.

  Days bored me to death and nights drove me crazy, because I kept dreaming about words. The best times were when I spent some hours alone by the shore. There, in the cold weather, staring at the illusion called The Between, I discovered a secret way to write and never get caught.

  The mist.

  First, I used to breath letters into the cold. Twitching and curling my lips and mouth, straining my neck, to produce a letter ‘o.’ Then ‘i’ which was the easiest. ‘X’ was another one that didn’t take much time. But then it was getting harder and harder to do.

  So I delved into the darker spots of the mist, places my mother had warned me from venturing, and instead of breathing letters, I’d shape them with my finger through the thick mist.

  After three weeks, the first word I’d completed was ‘Elaine’. My real name. Elaine of Astolat, later known as Lady Shallot of the Tower of Tales.

  But the mist didn’t hold. It would shift and wave and soon, I’d lose my writing.

  Another loss in my quest for releasing my imagination.

  I remember feeling defeated. Going back home that night, I slumped on my bed and ended up dreaming of letters for another two years.

  Letters that shaped my imagination, my inner world, the things I needed to express. The things I was destined to create.

  Until my ninth birthday…

  We woke up in the middle of the night to another screaming voice. A new one.

  Sweating, I awoke in my bed, clamping my hands on my ears and squeezing my eyes shut. Never had the screaming bothered me like that. I mean, it wasn’t a new thing that someone decided to leave the island and cross The Between.

  Except that this screaming voice was unlike anyone else. It was my mother’s.

  I mourned my mother for seven years, unable to grow, to meet people, or live an adolescent life. I locked myself up in Camelot, cooked for myself, washed my few clothes, and shut myself from the world.

  My mother had been my everything, and there was simply nothing left to live for. The curse that had been bestowed upon Astolat had finally crept up my bones. I was just another islander destined to wither away.

  Sluggishness painted my soul by day, insomnia (we hadn’t discovered that word then, but I lived long enough to learn) by night. It was my mother’s screams that awoke me at night. So disturbing, so personal. I believed she sometimes talked me.

  “Don’t do it, Elaine,” she’d whisper. “Don’t cross The Between. Ever.”

  It was as if she had read my mind, and I had no idea what to do. Every day I stared at the expanse of ice entirely surrounding our isolated island and wondered: could it possibly be an illusion? What kind of magic could do this? And if so, why did my mother scream? Was she stuck in The Between? Did she drown in the water that was actually The Between?

  At sixteen, it was hard to make up my mind. If I decided to cross The Between, would I be looking for my mother or my freedom from the island?

  It’s important that I mention we hadn’t the slightest notion about the world outside. Only those who’ve read books knew. The rest of us lived a less than ordinary peasant life on an island where we couldn’t even fish, afraid of The Between — we survived by farming and raising livestock; we took great care of them, almost worshiped them, because if they’d ever gone extinct, so would we.

  I had also spent those seven years inspecting my mother’s obsession with rugs, knitting, and straw. We had all kinds of them. Threads everywhere, though I was oblivious as to where she’d gotten them.

  Red threads were her most beloved.

  In her life she had sold beautiful rugs to the peasants. She’d woven clothes, hats, and other garments. Everything thread. She was a master at it. I never loved the threads, but they put food on the table.

  The castle of Camelot itself was useless. It was a castle, but ancient and full of rats. I lived with my mother in a couple of rooms up in the tower to stay away from them. I’d spend hours staring at The Between from above. It seemed to never end — and stared back at me.

  “Why are we living in a castle, mother?” I had asked her once.

  “We inherited it.”

  “From whom?”

  “You’ll understand when you grow up.”

  “Why is it so old, mother?”

  “It’s pretty old. Older than I’d like to think.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s older than the years themselves.”

  I scratched my head.

  “You see this castle holds the secret to the universe,” she said.

  I was seven, so this was too much to comprehend, but it had my imagination sparkling. I loved that. It was the reason why I loved letters later.

  But I had one more question.

  “If it holds such a big secret, why are we destined to die on the back of this dead whale? I’m confused.”

  My mother’s face dimmed, she stopped knitting, resting the red fleece at her side and pulling me up on her lap. “Because a dark man, a really evil man wants it,” she explained. “And I’d rather die with the secret than hand it to him.”

  Remembering this conversation at the age of sixteen, I sat on the window’s edge, staring at The Between. The wind swirled my hair that day, I almost lost my b
alance and risked the fall from the tower, down into a pool of rats on the ground. Rain began to trickle as I began to understand what The Between was all about.

  And just before I uttered the words to myself, I heard the voice. His voice. Not the screams of the islanders who’d crossed over, but the dark man my mother had warned me of.

  “Elaine,” his voice seeped like poison into a sick body. “Cross over, Elaine.”

  I stumbled back, fell on the floor and gripped to a pole nearby. Never had I been so scared. The rain fell heavier, thankfully distorting his call.

  “Oh, my!” I banged my forehead on the pole “That’s why the islanders had been crossing over. “It wasn’t a choice or their curiosity. It was him. The dark man called for them.”

  Standing up, I made sure I’d never forget that day. The day I understood The Between was there to save us from him. Because on the other side of The Between, he thought it was all ice and thus, could never find us — or the castle.

  Day and night, I searched the castle. I tolerated the nasty rats and insects, as well as the endless tunnels where I risked getting lost forever. I discovered rooms, fully furnished and never touched. Hallways that suggested parties and events had occurred here. But none of them made sense. None of them had pictures or showed what year they were from.

  But I couldn’t discover all of it, and when I was out of breadcrumbs, I used to tag my way back to the tower.

  I spent my nights drawing maps of the castle. This place here, that place there. This tunnel leads to this chamber, which has a secret corridor that leads to the spiral stairs. What was this? This castle was a maze.

  And at night, I’d sit knitting like my mother, learning the craft. If she’d known such a secret, could it be that knitting wasn’t coincidental? Not just a mere attempt to put food on the table?

  I had to learn, stupidly warping an accidental weaving of threads. Tipping it all over, winding it in my hands, and producing the worst of rugs.

  “Damn it!” I’d scream at my art. “What is the point of all this? I hate these threads!”

  Then one day, resting on a rock outside the castle, I drew more of the map. Whatever I did, the drawings seemed disjointed, as if the things I’d seen never existed. There was no logical way to connect the rooms, thus I couldn’t estimate the greatness of the castle. I couldn’t find the secret it was holding.

  So I took a walk around the outside of the castle.

  And there it happened. One detail that suggested the madness of it all.

  Walking next to the window of an abandoned kitchen in the ground floor, I counted twenty-one strides, the length of the kitchen’s outer wall. Considering the castle was built of heavy and thick bricks, it meant the inner space of the kitchen couldn’t exceed that. Normally, the length of the kitchen wall from inside would be a little less than the twenty-one steps outside.

  It wasn’t.

  I shrieked and ran around the castle, entered from the main door, and hurtled toward the kitchen and calculated the length of the wall inside.

  Oh, my. Twenty-seven steps.

  How could a room be larger on the inside than its dimensions outside?

  A shiver crept up my back and I had to run up to the tower and hide there for several days.

  I was so scared to descend again, thinking that if I did, I’d lose my mind. This was too much, and without my mother I had no idea what was going on. I hugged my lonely self in a corner in the tower and pretended the dark man’s calling across The Between was a figment of my imagination.

  For three days, I couldn’t move. All I did was thread in front of the mirror my mother loved so much. I thought that imitating her every move would lead to a conclusion.

  This time it did.

  Placing the mirror to face the window behind me, then facing the mirror myself, I could see The Between reflected in the mirror — later I learned this was one of the first mirrors ever made in the world.

  But The Between looked different from here. The mirror had the power to expose the truth. The mirror showed me what the world really looked like. A vast abandoned sea, running forever with no hope for redemption.

  It could have been a relatively unsurprising ending for this chapter in my life if I hadn’t seen him standing there, at the other side of the water. The dark man, playing his tune, one I could never remember, one that scared the hell out of me, and one that made the rats all over the castle squeak with mirth, as if celebrating the Piper’s coming.

  I hadn’t known he was the Pied Piper of Hamelin then. I hadn’t even heard of the story before. How could I when I was denied any reading as a child?

  All I knew was that the Piper would not stop at anything to cross over to the castle.

  Clueless as to whether to tell the islanders or not — I wasn’t even sure if they didn’t know, maybe they did and I was some kind of scapegoat — I continued knitting. I was getting so good at it that I began selling clothes like my mother. At least I saved myself from starving at this point.

  Then, one day I accidentally knitted something the wrong way. Instead of a semi-circle, I knitted something that looked like a letter ‘e’.

  My threads and pins dropped to the floor, as I stood with my jaw dropped staring at the letter.

  Letters!

  Words!

  Stories!

  Could this have been the solution I had looked for as a child? Could this have been what my mother had been secretly doing? Writing in colorful threads?

  I dashed out of the castle and walked among the islanders in our small market, pretending to be buying tomatoes and salt while I was secretly staring at their clothes that my mother had woven for them.

  I couldn’t believe it. My heart both dropped to my feet and fluttered with amazement. Here was Jared Black, the island’s pastor, wearing a cassock my mother had knitted for him. And there, if you looked hard, were small letters knitted on it. A word you could not make out among the design and many colors (he loved colorful cassocks; we had our own rules anyways on the island.)

  The word said: imposter.

  I blinked twice to make sure I read it right.

  Then there was Jane Earnest, the most beloved seller of groceries. She wore a fine skirt my mother had made for her. Colorful, mostly pink and yellow, patterned in the oddest of ways. If you looked closer, you’d read the word my mother knitted: thief.

  Oh, my. And you kept it all for yourself mother?

  William Barnes, the island’s major: cheater. Emily Three-Eyes, the island’s judge: bribed.

  And so it went. My mother had spoken and expressed herself and told the truth she could not utter through the secretly knitted words. She exposed this little peaceful island for what it really was. A band of unethical people pretending to be good, mostly.

  I rushed back to the tower and spent my days and nights knitting words. I sold the biggest of canvases and rugs with my words secretly knitted through.

  No one ever noticed.

  It’s hard to explain how much joy this gave me. I was good at it. I just found the one thing I was good at. And it had been my calling since I was a child. It brought me joy and killed the hours of day. I loved it so much, I forgot to eat sometimes.

  Most importantly, when I knitted the letters I could no longer hear the Piper’s calling. His demonic powers were imprisoned by the power of threads.

  Don’t ever underestimate a word or a thread. It’s thin and weak, sometimes so thin it’s invisible. But woven together, pin by pin, it grows and it can create things stronger than swords.

  What I’ve just written is actually an understatement, because what I could do with the thread was much more than just words.

  I used to thread while walking, while inspecting the rest of the endless castle. It killed time and shoved my fears of the rats to the back of my head. With a torch attached to the armor I had found in one of the rooms, my hands were free to thread — and explore.

  Month after month, I didn’t give up. My assumption was that
one of the many rooms held the secret to the castle. I just needed to find it.

  And then one day, I did.

  But it wasn’t a room in the sense of how we’d think a room should be. It didn’t seem to have a door. A room that could only be reached by walking through, what seemed like, an endless dark hallway until it suddenly showed up. The discovery was nothing but coincidence when my torch blew out and I had to trudge my way through the dark, feeling the walls for a way out. Suddenly, a door made of light appeared in the distance and I entered.

  It turned out that you can only find this room — the immense light — through darkness. Use the torch which you think will guide you and you will be lost in our man-made-reasoning forever.

  You may wonder what the room was like. That secret hidden in the castle of Camelot. Crossing the immense light, I found a library. One that was endless and intimidating. I realized it was some kind of holy place when I entered. I could feel it. The secret my mother had been talking about lay somewhere between the shelves of a million books or so.

  The shelves themselves were a maze, one where they’d appear to you, but then disappear on your way back. Some shelves were labeled with words like: the right book for you will appear at the right time.

  And: If you miss the right book at the right time, you miss the right knowledge for the right man.

  And: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was just a character in a book.

  The quotes went on and on, but I was eager to get my hand on any book. Can you imagine how I felt? All this knowledge I’d been seeking was now available for me!

  Reaching for a book, I tiptoed and pulled it down. I swiped the dust away and opened it. To my surprise, the pages were empty. And then the pages turned into sand seeping through my hands, and the book just disappeared.

  The same happened to a number of other books I picked up as well.

  The right book for you will appear at the right time.