Fractured Fairy Tales (26 page)

Run, Boy, Run

Nicole Daffurn

*This story is written in Uk English*

Hansel watched from the confines of his cage as the old witch took her carving knife from the aged wooden kitchen block and moved slowly towards his sister, Gretel. Gretel was tied up tight to the shining silver island in the middle of the room, and from his vantage point, Hansel could see her struggling. He could see the tears that had gathered in the corner of her eyes, and were teetering on the edge of flowing over the sides of her face.

He closed his eyes, his breathing becoming more and more rapid with each breath. His sister’s screams pierced the air as the witch cut her, and his eyes flew open at the sound. Gretel’s leg had been sliced open, the gaping wound gushed with blood. Hansel watched as the witch slowly but surely brought the piece of missing flesh from Gretel’s thigh directly to her lips. He watched in horror as her warped humanlike face gave way to something that resembled a crow. And he watched, and retched as she devoured the limp piece of his sister’s leg.

“Gretel!” he screamed, agony tearing through his vocal chords and escaping his mouth in a high pitched shriek of his sister’s name.

“Get away from her, you old hag!” he screamed, as he rattled the bars on his cage, determined one way or another to get free—to save his sister.

“Hansel…please.”

The words were all Gretel needed to whisper for his anger to flare into rage. He extended his arms through the bars, almost dislocating his shoulder with the effort. He could see the keys he so desired hanging from the back pocket of the witches robe. The shiny metal bundle of keys was only inches away from his fingertips, if he could just stretch that little bit farther.

There! He had them, but he was too loud, too slow. The witch turned on him, and he was trapped. Hansel fumbled with the keys, trying desperately to get them in the lock before she had a chance to snatch them back from his bony fingers. She had almost starved him to death in that God awful cage, all the while fattening his sister up to satisfy her sadistic, disgusting cravings.

He was out of the cage before the podgy witch had a chance to steal the keys from him. Hansel allowed his rage to take over. He felt himself transform into something that he had never imagined he could have. Something evil.

Fifteen years later.

Gretel wiped the sweat from her palms as she entered the desolate town. The perspiration had nothing to do with the weather, though. As she had walked into the town a cool breeze swept across her body, making her pull her coat in closer to her skin. No, the sweat that she was emitting was a sign that she was in the right place.

She knew with just one look at the town that her brother would be there. For starters, there was no one around. Not a single soul in sight. In the distance, she could see buildings overtaken by nature, a Ferris wheel stationary against a grey sky, wild animal prints in the snow around her feet, and artificial lighting was non-existent. The town had long ago succumbed to the effects of neglect.

She walked up to the old ‘Welcome’ sign that symbolised the entry of the town. It was rusted out, a gaping hole opened up in the middle that she could see straight through. Blood smeared around the edges caused Gretel to swallow a mouth full of bile that had risen from her stomach.

Something had happened to Hansel that day in the woods. She had known it the moment he had escaped his cage. His eyes changed first, the iris’s consumed with darkness. It had been then that she had realised what he was about to do. Strapped to the kitchen island she was useless to do anything but watch her brother carve the old witch into scraps of dog food. She hadn’t stood a chance once he had been set free from his cage—even if he had still been of a tender age.

The sight of the blood upon the sign conjured up some of the deepest memories Gretel had pushed away since that day, but now…now they were beginning to surface again. Shaking her head and wiping the images from her mind, she sighed heavily before setting out once again to enter the town and find her brother.

Unnatural sounds filled Gretel’s ears, and fear filled her entire body as she walked over the soft ground. Upon hearing what she could only describe as a woman screaming, she raised her eyebrows, a feeling of unease settling over her stomach. Her desire to save her brother, of course outweighed the uneasy feeling, and she proceeded forward into the untouched territory.

Gretel reached the first building out of breath, the air escaping her mouth and turning to steam as it mixed with cool air around her. Taking deep breaths she allowed herself to settle before her mind began an agonizing war with her body.

She needed to know what had happened there. What
he
had done, and yet her feet refused to leave the relative safety outside the building.

“Come on, you can do this!” she muttered to herself, trying to convince herself that all was going to be fine. “Just one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.”

Finally her legs began to move, and she pushed the heavy wooden front doors inwards to allow her passage.

The large building, principally made from stone, looked like some sort of community centre, graffiti lined the blistering walls, chairs and tables had been upturned and yellowing, aged papers littered the floors. Gretel picked up a piece that had flown on the breeze to land at her feet—a flyer of some sort.

‘Pyroa Community Centre welcomes Dr. Hed Ballinski. 14/03/1817’ was all that the brochure said.
1817.
The year she had lost track of Hansel.
Could the two events be related?
She furrowed her brow and headed back out the door. There was nothing left to see in the community centre, nothing but death and destruction.

Back in the snow, Gretel once again started down the street. The sky was becoming darker by the second, and she wanted to be gone from the town—or lack thereof—before dusk. This was not a place she wanted to be trapped in for the night.

The next stop came too fast for Gretel’s liking, and she wanted to turn and run immediately upon seeing the large sign over the door.
“Pyroa Mental Asylum. Est. 1812’
A shiver tingled its way up her back at the words that seemed more daunting to her than the abandoned town did.

Their parents had abandoned them, just as the people of this town had abandoned it, left them in the woods to die. Gretel had harboured a grudge against her parents for a long time after that day, and to tell the truth, she still did every time she looked at the wide, purple scar on her left thigh. But no one deserved what had happened to them. Actually, no one really knew what happened to them. Only that Hansel and Gretel had returned home against all odds. They had acted thrilled, of course, but underneath, she could tell they were unhappy. A few days after arriving home, Hansel had asked Gretel to run some errands in town, and by the time she arrived back at her home, her parents blank, lifeless faces were staring at the ceiling.

They weren’t dead. They were shocked, paralysed with fear. Gretel had run back to the town for help, and they were taken to a local mental asylum where they still resided. Their mouths gaped, and their lifeless eyes, hollow and dark, still stared. Still looked on in fear.

After all the years spent at her parents side, constantly watching over her shoulder in case the other patients attacked her, the thought of entering yet another mental asylum didn’t sit well with Gretel at all. With butterflies in her stomach, she started to sweat as her feet took her closer to the entrance.

Walking in through the great double doors at the front of the building, she was greeted with a terrifying sight. Face masks were scattered over the dust covered floors; dolls with no heads joined them. The walls were covered with bloody hand prints and long gouged fingernail marks, and what looked like the remnants of old clothes were strewn about all over the place. Hospital beds equipped with thick straps loitered in the large entry room, silent and abandoned.

Despite the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, Gretel moved off down a side corridor, finding more of the same fingernail marks and blood stained walls. Tears pricked in the corners of her eyes as she made her way through the mess and hell of the past, thinking Hansel couldn’t have done all of the damage himself. There had to be another explanation. There
had
to be.

Somewhere along the corridor Gretel had come across an old elevator. The kind with cast iron barred doors and a lever on the inside to operate it. She peered in wearily at first, worried that the time spent out of action may have caused instability. She tested it, first with one foot lightly placed upon the floor, and then the other. Once inside, she started to feel a little safer, and turned to work out how to operate the elevator that would take her to the lower levels of the large asylum.

The mechanics of it seemed fairly simple. Close the doors, pull the lever to head to the right level. Pulling the lever though, Gretel instantly knew something wasn’t right. The elevator travelled too fast, it wasn’t going to stop on the floor she had selected.

Panic started to creep in then, and she pulled the lever with all her strength. It wouldn’t budge. That was it, she was going to die in a broken down elevator, in a creepy ass mental asylum, in a town that nobody knew about.

Then again, maybe not.

Finally the lever moved from its position with a grinding halt, and not a moment too soon. Gretel looked up to the floor numbers and realized she had stopped at the basement, the last floor before impending death would have taken her.

The smell that hit her face upon stopping was like nothing she had ever smelled in her life. It started her retching and didn’t stop until she had pulled down one of the facemasks which neatly hung along the wall of the elevator.

Gretel stepped out, turned down a corridor to her left and found herself entering a large circular room full of doors. It might have been her overactive imagination, but she was sure she could hear banging in the distance. She wandered around, pushing her ears to the blood-stained doors, then suddenly stopped in her tracks. Someone had appeared at the far side of the room.

A woman, so pale you could see her veins through her skin. Her flesh, eaten away in places, was clad in leather clothing. She looked like a butcher with her leather boots, apron and gloved hands. In one hand, she held a rusty saw, in the other, a severed arm.

Gretel wasn’t fooled though; she knew this was no butcher. This was a witch.
The
witch to be precise. The witch that Hansel had supposedly killed all those years ago in the forest by their home town.

“How?” Gretel managed to get past her lips. She saw a flicker then, the witch’s images
witching to that of her brother’s. Tears erupted from her eyes, her throat swollen with fear and grief. It hadn’t been Hansel at all. All those years, she had believed her own brother to be evil. All those years, she had hunted him down, tracked him across countries and continents in an attempt to save him, and yet, there was no need.

With a wicked grin on her face the witch croaked out three words, “Run boy, run!” Gretel had no idea why she referred to her as a boy, but she wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

Gretel turned to run, but let out a scream when the doors in the circular room started to open. Through them entered…people? Their limbs were skewed and in the wrong spot, the old scars on their body, thick and red and angry. Their mouths open, fanged teeth jutted out in snarls that rendered her legs useless.

Was this what had really happened to the town? Was this what she was to become?





The ‘Welcome’ sign that symbolised the entry to town was rusted out, a gaping hole in the centre that you could see through. Hansel stood, his hand on his hips, shaking away the nerves of what he knew was to come. After all, he had come there for one of two reasons—to kill his sister or to save her. He crouched down next to the welcome sign, closing his eyes at the sight of the old dried blood and hearing, not for the first time, the last words his sister had spoken to him, “Run boy, run!” He stood, a fierce look in his eyes, and as he read the name of the town - ‘Pyroa’ - he heard the scream of a young woman pierce the air from somewhere unbelievably far away.