The Grimm Chronicles, Vol.1 (22 page)

He stared at me. The curtains were drawn over the windows, but the overhead light was bright. Whatever little decorative fixture had been affixed to the ceiling was long gone, leaving only a bare bulb remaining. He could probably see the beads of sweat gathering at my forehead. “You’re not going to do anything.”

I exhaled a nervous breath.

“Lordy, he’s onto us!” Briar exclaimed.

Below my feet, I could feel something. A dull vibration.

“Henry,” Cinderella said. “You … you must …”

“Save him!” I shouted at her. I knew exactly what was coming. “Save him! Call them off!”

Cinderella turned, looking at me through bloodshot eyes. “They don’t listen to me. They’re simply drawn to me.”

“What?” the man named Henry asked. “I don’t understand. Who’s drawn to you?”

The closet door began to rattle. We all turned and looked at it.

“They protect me,” Cinderella whispered.

Briar stepped closer to me. “I have a bad feeling about this …”

“I can’t control them,” Cinderella said. The closet door began rattling more. We could hear them, right on the other side, squeaking and crying out.

Henry held out a hand to Cinderella. “Cindy, whatever this is …”

“Run!” I told Henry, waving my sword at the door. “Hurry! Get out!”

The big dummy still dallied, glancing again at Cinderella. “But …”

Suddenly the door burst open. Dozens and dozens of rats scurried out, toppling over one another in a mad race to Henry.

“Get out of here, you fool!” I shouted, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and throwing him toward the open doorway. I slammed the door shut and locked it, against all of my instincts. The rats had begun swarming across the floor like a living brown carpet, each one squeaking furiously. One of them bit my foot and I cried out, kicking it halfway across the room.

Cinderella just sat and stared.

Briar, for his part, had jumped on the little kitchen table.

“Briar!” I said, kicking the rats away. I swung my sword once, then nearly gagged when I saw the blood. “These rats are
real!
They’re not Corrupted!”

“Well, duh!” Briar said, kicking at the rats that had begun piling up next to the table.

I sidled away from the door; the rats followed me to the other side of the room, squeaking and snarling at me, piling over one another in a mad attempt to nip at my feet. I glanced toward Cinderella: now they were crawling all over her, and she was just sitting there, staring out like a zombie!

“Briar!” I said. “We have to get out of here!”

“Right-o!” He hopped off the table like a long-jumper, landing on the little tube television right beside me. He hopped again and dove right through the open closet doorway.

“Wait for me at least!” I called out, kicking aside the rats and swiping at them with my saber. I charged through the opening, into the darkness. My feet fell out from under me, and I landed on my butt, sliding through the opening, down the pile of garbage and into the sewer.

“A mound of garbage,” Briar said, helping me up. “They couldn’t just gather some dirt, could they?”

“They’re rats,” I said, pulling him down the long, narrow tunnel. I could hear them above us, gathering near the doorway. “I remember this sewer from my dreams. Come on!”

“But where are we going?” he asked, running with me down the narrow dimly lit tunnel. Our feet splashed in puddles of slimy sewer water. We turned right at the first intersection, walking blindly in the darkness until we reached the end of the tunnel where a single little maintenance light hung right next to a closed steel grate with thin bars.

“It’s a dead end,” Briar said. He turned at the sound of squeaks echoing down the tunnel. “We’re doomed! We’ll be rat food soon enough!”

“Jeez, have a little faith in me, you butthead.” I set down the saber—no use for it here—and stood on my tiptoes so I could draw directly above the steel grate. I used the fountain pen to draw a little hinge for the grate. Above it, I drew a tightened spring.

“What are you drawing?” Briar asked.

“A spring-loaded joint. Remember when we were talking about animal traps? Well, I have an idea.”

The squeaking grew louder. They were there, in the darkness, getting closer. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. All of them hungry for our blood.

When I was finished with the design, I grabbed my saber and swung it at the lock holding the steel grate in place. Sparks flew and the lock’s thin clamp broke in half. I lifted the grate up as far as it would go, using all my strength to press it against the wall, where it was held in place by the little spring-loaded joint I’d drawn.

“Now get in,” I said.

“Where does it go?” Briar asked timidly.

“To a place where we won’t be eaten. Keep going,” I said, ducking down and using my pen to continue drawing on the ceiling of the little drainage tunnel. The rats were getting closer now, the collective sound of their whiny cries sending my heart racing. I drew a coil that ran from the entrance all the way to the very end, where the tunnel widened into a little opening with a ladder and another small maintenance light that cast a dim yellow light over us. The floor of the tunnel was dry, just like it had been in my dreams. I drew a large trip bar, the kind that a mouse might press down on when grabbing a piece of cheese from a mousetrap.

“Just like a giant spring-loaded trap,” I said, stepping over the bar. Briar was already climbing up the ladder above me. “You don’t even know where that goes!” I called up.

“Anything is better than down there!” he called down.

I grabbed the iron bar of the ladder and peered into the darkness. The rats were getting closer. I could see them, emerging from the darkness beyond the little tunnel like a flood of brown fur. The maintenance light caught their eyes, making each of the dozens of little orbs glow a sickening yellow.

“OK, brain,” I muttered, clutching the ladder tightly. “Here’s to hoping you got Hooke’s Law right.” Torsion. The mechanical energy is stored in the spring. The spring is connected to the trip bar. On the other end of the tunnel, when the spring releases its stored-up energy, it should slam the steel grate over the opening, trapping them all inside this little room with no way to escape.

The only question was just how many rats could fit in here.

“Alice!” Briar called down. “Do be careful now!”

“I’m coming,” I said, gritting my teeth. The rats had begun slipping into the narrow tunnel, scurrying closer to the trip bar. “I just want them to see the whites of my eyes. Come on!” I shouted. “I’m right here!”

More and more poured through. As the first few reached me, I climbed up the ladder out of their reach. They began piling one upon the other, nipping hungrily at my heels. I climbed a few rungs higher. More yet came, flooding the chamber further.

Suddenly: a snap! I heard the grate slam shut on the other end of the tunnel.

“Huzzah!” Briar cried.

“OK!” I called up. “Open the manhole slowly … we’re probably going to come out in the middle of the street.”

Above me, Briar pushed open the manhole cover at the top of the ladder. He held his ears back with one paw and carefully peered out. “It’s clear!” he said.

I followed him out of the manhole. We were a block away from the apartment building. The street was empty, lined with parked cars with lots of Chicago Cubs bumper stickers. From the manhole came the echo of rat cries.

“The game is probably almost over,” I said, helping him put the manhole cover back on. “We need to finish this quick.”

“I second that objective,” Briar said.

We jogged back to the apartment building. The man named Henry was nowhere in sight. Who knew if he was calling the police or simply running as far away as possible?

We walked into the foyer.

“How do we get in again?” Briar asked.

I reached out and pressed the “call” button for apartment 101.

“Oh, that will never work,” Briar said.

The door buzzed. I grabbed it and held it open. “Rabbits first.”

The door was unlocked. I walked in, not surprised to find Cinderella standing in front of the closet door.

“It’s been so long,” she said. “I almost feel like they’re a part of me. I never understood why they were drawn to me … but they cared so much about my happiness that I couldn’t leave them. They understood what I was searching for.”

I pulled out the fountain pen, uncapping it. Behind me, Briar shut the door. “What were you searching for?” I asked.

She smiled, turning to me. She’d aged, but her eyes were still a beautiful dark green. “I was always searching for my
ending
,” she answered. “My
ending
. I was supposed to live happily ever after.”

I stepped closer. Cinderella held out her palm.

“Princes … they could be so cruel. He offered me everything. And then we tried having children. We couldn’t.”

“No Corrupted can,” Briar murmured. “Unless it’s written in their story.”

“And so I was useless,” Cinderella said. She smiled, staring down at the tip of the fountain pen as I brought it to her palm. “That’s all princesses were back in those days: bargaining chips or baby carriers. But I thought my happy ending was out there somewhere. I thought my real prince was always the next one.”

I pricked her hand with the pen. She sighed, watching as the black hole burned its way up her arm. It spread across her body and just like that, she was gone.

“Come on,” I said to Briar, walking back toward the closet.

“Wait! We’re going
back
into the sewer?” Briar exclaimed. “Whatever for?”

I turned and smiled. “To rescue the rats, of course.”

Chapter 11

They didn’t bite. They didn’t eat us. In fact, when I pulled open the metal grate, the rats seemed downright terrified of me. Whatever power Cinderella had had over them was gone now. They were just ugly, smelly rats once again.

Speaking of smelly …

Well, needless to say, the ride home wasn’t pleasant for my parents. The windows were kept down and I had to promise never to step in another puddle again.

“I’m pretty sure she peed on her shoes,” Dad kept muttering. His hands clenched the steering wheel. “
Someone
peed on her shoes. Or she stepped in someone’s pee. It’s the only explanation for this stench.”

“Oh honey,” Mom said, pointing to the next exit. “Let’s make a pit stop. All this talk …”

Which of course was totally the type of thing Mom would do. But you know what? All in all, it wasn’t such a bad trip.

“They’re not bad parents,” Briar said the next morning. I had the day off from the library. It was a hot and sunny Monday and deep inside the forest behind my house, Briar and I were back to training.

“You’re right,” I said, chasing him between a cluster of bushes.

“Perhaps they could start a marketing campaign against the Grayle brothers,” he offered, bouncing off the side of a tree before I could tag him. “Something that will drive them out of business.”

“I wish it were that easy,” I said, gasping for air. “But I’d rather not drag my parents into this mess.”

“Then what
should
we do about Grayle brothers?” Briar asked, hopping between two pine trees with prickly low-hanging branches. Briar had told me all about his spy mission inside Grayle Incorporated. I wasn’t sure exactly how we were going to get to him or his brothers … yet.

“Maybe we could …” The thought flitted away. I glanced around, suddenly dizzy. I reached out and grabbed the trunk of the nearest tree, clutching it to keep from falling. My strength felt like it was being sapped from my muscles.

“Alice!” Briar exclaimed, pointing. “Your arm!”

I glanced down at my arm. The cuts. From the Frog Prince. They’d begun bleeding again and the area around each cut throbbed. My vision blurred.

Everything went black.

January 15, 1935

It has been a cold, cold winter. The government has been putting those without jobs to work, but still people suffer. Still the lines at the local soup kitchen are long. Richard says the people are to blame and could work if they truly wanted. He yells at me when the house is not clean when he returns from classes each day. But there is nothing to clean! Our house is small and immaculate. I’ve dusted. I’ve washed the hardwood floors. I’ve swept snow from the path leading to our front door.

Still he expects me to do more. Briar has suggested more than once that I mention the particularly terrifying man-eating cat I killed on my visit to my aunt and uncle’s house the previous month. Surely this would impress Richard. Briar’s humor has grown on me, and we enjoyed a good laugh over our impressions of Richard seeing a Corrupted.

He has forbidden me from volunteering at the soup kitchen. So I do it when he’s at class. Should he come home early one day, I will lie again and tell him that I was taking a walk. He will most likely respond in a fit of anger, ordering me to stay seated during the day so that I can retain my strength. He seems to think that a woman is more likely to get pregnant if she rests constantly.

Or perhaps he wants me to gain weight.

Briar suggested this morning that I try to tolerate him more. Easy enough coming from a man—or, at the very least, a male rabbit—but quite frankly I don’t want to tolerate Richard. I don’t like him. I don’t like the way he talks to me, and if I can find a job somewhere in the city that will allow me to survive on my own, then I have every intention of leaving him.

This was a horrible mistake. And in my nightmares, I see only tunnels …

January 18, 1935

The weather has grown colder. I’m wearing two socks on each foot and wool knickers underneath my dress. Sometimes, when I follow one of the dwarfs, I steal a pair of Richard’s comfortable pants and roll up the legs a bit so they don’t drag on the ground. I get a fair amount of looks as I walk down the street but I don’t care. If any of them knew just how difficult it was to fight monsters in a dress … well, I do say they might understand.

I’m following one dwarf in particular. He goes by the name of Vincent Stewart. According to Briar, he used to run an underground bootlegging business and a legitimate tailor shop on the south side of Chicago. He’s no doubt connected to the other dwarfs, but keeps his distance from them because of the … particulars of his operations.

Alcohol sale is no longer illegal, but it appears the dwarf is still using Chicago’s underground tunnels to transport something.

The question is: what?

January 25, 1935

Richard chastised me again this morning for volunteering at the soup kitchen.

“Let the poor wretches starve to death,” he told me. “Then a lot of our problems will be solved.”

“Will they?” I asked him. “I was once one of those wretches.”

He had no response. He rarely does when I challenge his idiotic comments. I sat down and cried at the kitchen table after he left. This house is feeling more and more like a prison each day. I am a princess—not the kind you find in fairy tales but the kind that existed in real life. The kind that were given away by their fathers to princes and kings who cared about nothing more than using their daughters to seal land deals.

But I am more. I’m the
hero
.

I steeled myself and returned to the soup kitchen, unwilling to take my dear husband’s advice. The people there inspire me. There are men and women, yes, but also children. The children have hope that things were getting better. They have hope that, despite the terribly cold weather, summer will come again. They have a twinkle in their eyes and as they eat hungrily from their bowls of vegetable soup, I can feel my dedication returning to me.

Kill the Corrupted. Kill them all and bring summer back.

February 5, 1935

It took Briar a full week to figure out where the dwarf named Vincent was going each day as he disappeared underground. Once I knew where to look, I needed to only follow the golden trail left behind. Getting inside the tunnel system was easy enough. It wasn’t guarded because no one wanted to draw attention to it.

Also, many of the tunnels were technically sewers. The smell alone was enough to ward off most curious thrill-seekers. Then, inside the narrow sewers, a number of openings led into the deeper tunnels carved out of the earth and held up with thick wooden support beams. I chose not to arm myself and kept my fountain pen hidden inside the pocket of my wool overcoat. I expected any men down here to have guns and seeing a woman armed with a spear would most likely give them reason enough to shoot.

But an unarmed woman? I think not. Especially not one who had just days ago went to the hair stylist and received a beautiful Greta Gabo cut. Why, I was just a defenseless pretty woman! I was lost down there in the horrible sewers after chasing my cat through an open grate. Surely someone would be kind enough to escort me back to the surface?

Men!

I needn’t have feared. Corrupted have a tendency to work alone whenever possible, as Briar has pointed out many times. When I once asked why, Briar simply shrugged and said many Corrupted seemed to have an intense desire to either kill or eat human beings. The smart ones try to avoid giving in to those temptations so that they don’t draw attention to themselves.

Well then. Still, I didn’t expect the dwarf to be wandering through the tunnels all alone, but that was exactly what he was doing, whistling to himself as he walked into the darkness, then screwing in a small dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling, then walking farther to where it was dark, screwing in another light bulb and illuminating another patch of tunnel.

Could it be this easy? I wondered as I bent down, drawing a long spear into the bricks that made up a crude floor. The whistling had stopped but I paid no mind, finishing the drawing and pulling the finished spear from the ground.

I looked up. The dwarf was standing right in front of me. He had a long, gray beard and gray skin that looked as if it had been rotting away for some time. His eyes were wide and pitch-black. He snarled, grabbing my spear before I could swing. He was strong, pushing me on my heels and refusing to let go of my weapon. I tightened my grip and tried to push back, succeeding for only a moment before my feet went sliding back on the bricks once again.

Vincent screamed. His voice seemed to echo in my head, ringing my ears so painfully that I felt my grip on the spear weaken. He pushed me farther back, then threw me down a narrow side tunnel. I flew through the air so violently that my left shoe broke one of the overhead light bulbs before I landed hard and slid through a doorway into another room.

I got up quickly, reaching back into my pocket for the fountain pen.

Then I stopped.

The room was full of dead bodies. They hung from the ceiling like slabs of meat. Men and women both, each with a look of utter horror frozen on their faces. On the far end of the room was a bloody butcher’s block and a cleaver sticking in the edge, waiting to be used again.

“All right then,” said the dwarf as he stepped into the room. He had  long ears that came to a point at the end. He threw the spear on the ground.

“All right?” I asked. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

He shrugged. “It may be that I have a bit of a human-eating problem. I’ve hidden it as best I can, but you know how these things go. We are suffering from a Depression right now … you could say I’m doing the world a favor, picking off a few destitute street rats here and there.”

The words sent a chill down my body. “Is that how you see human beings? As mere food?”

“It is now,” said the dwarf. “I’m changing, you see. Gone are the days where I could go about my business in this world. Now, I’ve developed the most peculiar taste for human flesh. It happened about twenty years ago and has only gotten worse.” He waved a hand around. “Hence this crude storeroom. The last thing I need is for my brothers to find out. They make a point of fitting in.”

I stepped back, bumping into one of the bodies. Instinct brought my hands up and I pushed at the man’s chest. The body swung back and forth. Vincent the dwarf walked around it, glancing up with a look of intense hunger.

“The hunger will consume my brothers, too,” Vincent said. His dark eyes narrowed. “Maybe they won’t hunger for human flesh … but they will all hunger for
something
. There will come a time when all of them turn into monsters. That’s our curse. Do you despise me for being what I am?”

“Yes,” I said.

He seemed taken aback. “Oh. Well, nuts to you. I have no intention of stopping simply because a hero says so.”

I stepped back again, weaving around another hanging body, this one a woman who was still wearing her best blue Sunday dress. She swung back and forth. Vincent walked around her. The hunger in his eyes was focused on me now.

“I do believe I’ll start with your liver,” he said, licking his lips with a long, reptilian tongue. “Then I’ll devour your arms. I could feel your strength when you tried to run me through with your spear. I just love muscles.”

I bumped into another body. When I saw his face at first, I didn’t recognize him. But as he swung, his eyes opened, revealing two dull green orbs. I gasped. Richard! His normally stiff, combed hair was tussled and hanging from his scalp. His ironed black suit coat had been slashed open and the breast pocket was dangling by a thread, as if he’d been mauled by a great cat.

“Ah, so you
do
know him.” Vincent the dwarf looked up, touching the sleeve of Richard’s expensive coat. “My brother was correct in his hypothesis, then. He’s got such a weak stomach, my brother. Not a fan of the murder and all. But we’re all capable of horrible things when we’re pushed back against a wall.” He stalked closer. Richard’s shadow danced across his face. “And your successes with the Corrupted have pushed us
all
back against a wall.”

My hands reached out behind me, fumbling along the wooden chopping block. I found the cleaver, pulling it free.

The dwarf used one hand to stop Richard’s pendulum-like swaying, continuing, “I suppose what I’m trying to say is that …”

I lunged forward, swinging the cleaver at Vincent’s head. The blade stuck in the top of his skull just as it had in the butcher’s block.

“Ouch,” he murmured. “That really hurt.”

I brushed past the body of Richard, pushing him toward the dwarf, knocking the dwarf over. There was no way I could fight him in this room full of corpses. I needed to draw another spear. I needed a plan.

I needed …

February 6, 1935

I fell asleep the previous night while still writing. This morning, I woke up inside an empty house. Too tired to finish writing about my fight with the dwarf. The wound on my leg has gotten worse. Briar has gone in search of medicine, although I have no idea where he plans on finding some. I only pray that he hurries.

The pain is excruciating.

February 8, 1935

Feeling somewhat better. I rang for a policeman and asked him about my husband. The policeman recorded Richard as a missing person and asked me to notify his family, which I promised to do.

The tunnels! Briar has just reminded me to finish my story. He’s also been reminding me on a regular basis to clean my wound and apply the ointment regularly to prevent infection. He’s saved my life once again.

If only he’d been in the tunnels with me …

I escaped the room full of bodies, while Vincent the dwarf struggled with the cleaver in his head. It wouldn’t kill him. In fact, in a few days he would be no worse for wear, with not even a scar to show for it. Only the powers of the fountain pen could kill him.

I needed a plan, but before I could do that, I needed to figure out where I was. I’d escaped the room full of bodies and now I was lost in the narrow tunnels. They stretched out in every direction, twisting and turning deep underneath the city of Chicago. The old bootleggers had built them to transport illegal liquor undetected and hadn’t worried much about comfort: the walls were made of brick and the dim bulbs hanging from the ceiling seemed incapable of providing more than a few feet of illumination in any direction.

From somewhere farther behind me, I heard the dwarf call out, “Where are you, my dear?”

I drew another spear on the brick wall, this time making is shorter so I could wield it more easily in the cramped space. I grabbed it, then headed deeper into the tunnels, into the darkness.