“Aha! The old fool!” said the Devil. “All he has to do is hand his paddle off to someone else, and he’ll be free, and they’ll be stuck there for the rest of time. But he doesn’t know that, of course.” He chuckled at the agony he had caused, and said, “Now don’t wake me again, or you’ll be sorry.”
He was just settling into a nice, peaceful sleep, with Hansell holding the three golden hairs in his hand and shaking like a leaf, when a scream pierced the house. The Devil sat up. “What in Hell was that?” he shouted.
“It sounds like someone in the attic!” Hansel said. “Has one of the sinners escaped?”
“We’ll soon find out!” the Devil cried, and he leaped to his feet and ran up the stairs. As soon as he was out of sight, Hansel jumped up, threw the wig and dress off, and banged out of the door of the house. He turned for the doors of Hell and broke into a run, gripping the three golden hairs tightly.
After a while he glanced briefly over his shoulder. To his surprise, he discovered that the fire and the pits and the demons with the pitchforks had disappeared. All he saw now were poor sinners, writhing on the floor of a great cave, screaming in sorrow and remorse for all the pain they had caused. Holding the three golden hairs, he knew that he was seeing the truth—Hell as it really was.
He arrived at the great black doors. As he laid his hands on them they swung open, and he stood blinking in the daylight.
The old man, who had been sitting on the ground just outside all this time, leaped to his feet. “You’re out!” he cried. “Hallelujah!” And then he said, “Why are you wearing makeup?”
But just at that moment, a terrible cry echoed from the depths of Hell—the unmistakable, blood-chilling, hair-raising, stomach-turning cry of the Devil.
“Run!” Hansel cried. And they did. They sprinted over the dusty ground away from the black doors of Hell. Glancing over his shoulder, Hansel saw the furious Devil, galloping across the turf behind them. For, you see, outside of Hell the Devil has no power over those who are not already damned, and so he had to chase them on foot.
Still, he was faster than the young boy and the old man. He wasn’t far behind them when they arrived at the river. They jumped in the ferryman’s boat and shoved it off from shore.
“Did you discover how to free me?” the ferryman said.
“I did,” Hansel replied, “but take us across first! Look! The Devil’s after us!”
So the ferryman rowed with all of his might. When Hansel and the old man got out of the boat, Hansel told the ferryman what to do.
The ferryman returned to the other shore, where the Devil was waiting impatiently. “After those two! Now!” the Devil commanded, hopping in. So the ferryman started off. But he paddled as slowly as he possibly could. “Hurry!” screamed the Devil. “They’re getting away!”
But the ferryman said, “I can’t go any faster. The current’s too strong for me.”
“Oh, to Hell with that!” the Devil cried, and grabbed the paddle from the ferryman’s hands. He paddled them across the river in the blink of an eye, but when they reached the other shore, the ferryman hopped out, and the Devil found that he was stuck fast. He bellowed and hollered and screamed and cried, but no amount of protest would set him free.
The ferryman then set about making a little sign with some clay and a piece of slate to explain the situation to all who came by so that no one would accidentally free the Devil. He adorned it with flowers and smiling angels. The Devil fumed. But he was stuck in that boat for many years to come.
The old man laughed and laughed to see the Devil in the little ferryboat, struggling to get out, and Hansel laughed, too, and wiped the grandmother’s makeup from his face. And they began to walk back toward the walled cities to tell the people how to break the Devil’s curses.
But after walking just a little way, the old man stumbled. Hansel caught him, and they began to walk again. But a little while on he stumbled a second time, and this time he fell to the ground.
Hansel tried to help him to his feet, but the old man was breathing hard. “Let me lie here a moment,” he said. The race with the Devil had taken its toll on his ancient body. So Hansel sat beside the man and, because the old man asked him to, told him all about his time in Hell, and what he had done to escape.
The old man laughed when Hansel told him of dressing up like the Devil’s grandmother, and laughed some more when Hansel described singing the Devil to sleep. But soon the old man’s laughter became a fit of coughing. He put his head back in the grass and tried to breathe calmly. After a while, he took Hansel’s hand.
“I can go no farther,” he said. Making the words was an effort for him. “Stay beside me, Hansel. Don’t run from me now.”
“Why would I run from you?” Hansel asked.
“You ran from your parents because of me,” the old man said.
Hansel didn’t know what he was talking about. “I ran away because my father cut off my head,” he said. “And how did you know I ran away?”
“Who told him to cut off your head?” The old man’s voice was weak.
“A statu—” Hansel began. He stopped. He gazed at the man’s ancient, wrinkled face. Then, after a moment, he said, “You did.”
“I did,” said Faithful Johannes. He tried to raise himself to sit, but his face twisted with pain and he gave up. “I’ve been seeking you and your sister all these years. Now I’ve found you, and I’m dying.”
They sat there, the old man and the young boy, on a patch of grass by the side of the road. The clouds passed overhead, the late autumn sun dipped low in the western sky, and the crickets took up their song.
And then, because he thought about it every morning when he woke up and every evening when he lay down, Hansel said, “Tell me about my parents.”
Johannes smiled sadly. “They cursed themselves, Hansel, for what they did to you two. They were foolish—foolish!” He coughed angrily. “They see their foolishness now. And so do I. Faithfulness is important. Under-standing is important. But nothing is as precious as children. Nothing.”
The cricket-song enveloped them once again. A flock of swallows swooped overhead, their little brown bodies framed by the pink sky. Hansel thought of the seven brothers.
“I don’t want to go home,” he said. “Don’t make me.” He suddenly felt like a very little child again.
“I understand,” Johannes said.
“No, you don’t.”
Johannes sighed. “Hansel, I do.” And then he began to tell the boy a story. It started with a dying king and a young prince and a beautiful princess who lived across the sea. The prince became a king, and he convinced the beautiful princess to be his wife (Johannes left out the whole stealing thing, for his strength was low; and besides, it was pretty embarrassing). Then he told of three ravens and three prophecies. And a faithful servant, who risked his very life.
“I loved this young king and his bride,” Johannes said. “And I thought, perhaps, that they would keep their faith with me. That they would under-stand.” And he told Hansel of the chestnut stallion and the golden dress and the wedding dance. And of carrying the new queen to the highest turret. And of what he did there. And of the pyre, and all the rest.
Hansel stared at the grass as the shadows grew and the sky turned from pale blue to orange and pink. Locusts hummed. “Can you ever forgive them?” Hansel asked softly.
“I did better than forgive them,” Johannes said. “I understood them.”
“I understand too, but—”
“Not in the new sense of the word,” Johannes interrupted. “In the old sense. The ancient sense. I under-stood.” He paused and collected his breath. “I planted my feet beneath them and took upon my shoulders their burden—their choice, their mistake, and their pain. Yes, I understood them; but I also under-stood them.
“In the last moment, before I turned to stone, your parents understood what I had done for them. But only on that terrible day, when they cut off your heads, did they under-stand me;
only on that day were they willing to stand beneath me and take on my burden. It was that that brought me back to life.
“So I understand you, Hansel. And I under-stand you. But that, unfortunately, isn’t good enough. It’s not from me that you need under-standing.”
Suddenly, a terrible fit of coughing took the ancient man. He doubled up, and Hansel held him by the shoulders. After a while, he was able to lie back down. There was blood on his lips, and on his face.
“Listen to me now, Hansel. Listen well.” Johannes’s voice was low and hard to hear. Hansel put his head right up by Johannes’s mouth—much as Johannes had done for Hansel’s grandfather, many years before. “There is an evil thing,” Johannes said. “An evil thing in the kingdom. Because of their weakness, and their sadness, a dragon has come has come to the Kingdom of Grimm.”
Hansel tried to sit up, but the old man’s grip was iron on his sleeve. “Listen to me. The dragon has taken possession of one of the people. It lives inside him, like a disease.”
“Who?”
But Johannes motioned for him to be quiet. Speaking was now a great struggle. “You must kill it. You and Gretel.”
“Why us?”
“Because there is a time when a kingdom needs its children,” Johannes said.
Hansel sat quietly under the pink and purpling sky. He thought of the kingdom, and his parents, and of the years that had passed. He thought of the pain he felt, the heavy burden of pain. He thought of what Johannes had said about under-standing.
“We’ll go to them,” Hansel said. “I’ll find Gretel, and we will save our parents and their kingdom.”
The old man smiled. He reached out and took Hansel’s hand. They sat together as the light faded, and the sky went from blue to deep purple to black. Hansel stared up at the stars as they winked into being—one, two, three, four ...
He turned back to Johannes. The old man’s eyes stared upward, but he was not seeing. Hansel waved a hand before his face, and then touched his neck. Johannes was dead.
HANSEL AND GRETEL and the Broken Kingdom
Once upon a time, a little girl stopped into a tavern that stood along the side of a road. She shook her traveling cloak as she stood in the doorway, and wet slush fell from it to the rough wooden floor. Outside, the last gasps of winter tossed the branches of the trees, and the road was a mess of water and ice.
Gretel sat down near the fireplace, and the tavern owner brought her warm milk in a pewter mug. She paid for it from the pouch the villagers had given her when she’d left them. Then she sat and stared gloomily at the logs in the hearth, their ashy gray outsides spreading, deadening the fire inside. She knew just what that felt like.
Months. Months on the road as the leaves had turned from red to brown and then had fallen. As the snow had begun to drift down from the gray sky—softly at first, and then heavily, piling onto the frozen road in front of Gretel in white, shifting mounds. She had wrapped her cloak around her tightly, but still the cold seeped into her skin, down to her bones. From time to time her feet would slide out from beneath her as she walked, sending her sprawling into a mound of fluffy snow—or worse, a deep puddle of icy water. She walked without knowing where she was going, and, more and more every day, without caring where she was going, either.
She had lived with parents and without. In homes and in the wild. Nothing was good.
Oh, yes. And Hansel was dead.
She laid her little golden head beside the pewter mug on the worn tavern table. The table was sticky from spilled drinks. Gretel didn’t care. She closed her eyes.
There was a bang, and the door of the inn swung open. Gretel raised her head. A man stood in the doorway. “It’s back!” he cried, his voice cracking with fear. “It’s back ...”
The people of the tavern all rose to their feet at once.
“Kindheitburg is gone!” the man wailed.
Cries rose up from all around. A few people pushed past the man out the tavern door and onto the slushy road, and began to run.
“What do you mean, gone?” someone demanded.
“It’s all gone,” the man in the doorway said. “The houses, Meister Beck’s, the bakery, Frau Hopper’s ...”
“The people?”
“I don’t know. But there were bodies.” He shook his head. “Many bodies.”
The room seemed to groan all together. Some people sat down. Others covered their faces.
“I was out on the hill above town,” the man said. “I saw it circling, circling over the village. I would have run back to warn them, but there wasn’t time. Besides, I had to stay with this one.” From behind the man’s leg, a tiny girl peeked out. She was hiding her face in her hands, but you could tell that her cheeks were stained with dirt and the lines of dried tears.
The man went on. “It circled three or four times. I could hear people shouting. Then it banked and began to descend. It swept in on Frau Hopper’s house—the big stone one. Tore half the building off. I saw somebody—maybe Frau Hopper—fly through the air about a hundred yards. And then crash to the ground.” The man shuddered.
“And after that?” someone asked.
The man shuddered again but said no more. An elderly man nearby guided him to a seat and brought him a drink. He put his head in his hands. A large, heavyset woman came from behind the bar and lifted the little girl up and cradled her and took her up some stairs in the back.
When the door was closed behind the woman with the little girl, the somber tavern suddenly erupted with anxious voices. Gretel tried to make sense of it, but they spoke all together, and too loudly. What were they talking about? What had done this thing? Then, gradually, she was able to pick up one word that was being repeated over and over in the din: dragon.
Gretel was standing near three people—two men, a tall one and a bearded one, and a woman whose back was toward Gretel.
“They say it’s human,” said the bearded man.
“Half-human,” replied the tall one. “And half-dragon, of ” course.
“My priest said it was once a man, but now he’s possessed by a dragon-spirit,” said the woman.
“It would have to be a devil-man, to be possessed by a dragon.”
“No,” the woman replied. “The priest said no. He said a sad soul. A desperate soul. That’s what he said.”
“Yes, I heard that, too,” the bearded man agreed.
The tall one rubbed his stubbly chin. “They killed that man over in Walden. They thought he was the dragon.”
“Guess he wasn’t, then.”
“Guess not. He had children, too.”
“They killed six brothers over in Hamelstatt,” said the woman.
“No, that’s a rumor.”
“It isn’t. My cousin saw it happen.”
“Terrible,” said the man with the beard.
“Terrible,” said the tall man.
“Terrible,” said the woman.
“Excuse me,” said Gretel. She was standing at the woman’s elbow. The woman didn’t seem to hear her. Gretel tugged at the woman’s sleeve. “Excuse me,” she said again. The woman turned around. Her face was pale, her hair hung loose and limp, and her light eyes were circled with black.
“What is it?” the woman said.
“What kingdom is this?” Gretel asked.
“Grimm,” the woman said. “The Kingdom of Grimm.”
“Or it was,” the bearded man said ruefully. “Now it’s the ruins of Grimm.”
“Where are you looking for?” said the tall man.
Gretel’s throat felt thick. “Do the king and queen have any children?” she asked quietly.
The woman looked at the men, and then back at her. “Did once. Twins. A boy and a girl. But they were lost, poor darlings. Disappeared in the night.”
“Just before the dragon came,” the man with the beard added.
“That’s right. Just before,” agreed the tall one. “But where are you trying to get to?”
Gretel hesitated. “I ...
I’m not sure,” she replied. She thanked the group and walked to the door of the inn. Two men were standing beside it, arguing about the dragon. She stood behind them, half waiting, half thinking. At length, one noticed her, nudged the other, and they both turned to her.
“Can I help you, dearie?”
She bit her bottom lip. After a moment, she asked, “Which way is the castle?” She said it as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
The men pointed with blunt workmen’s fingers.
Gretel nodded silently and stepped out the door of the tavern onto the road. She looked in the direction they had pointed.
Even the road looked rough, painful.
She looked the other way.
Hansel traveled down the wet, icy roads, a solitary boy with charcoal eyes and curly black hair laden with flakes of snow. Behind him followed two obedient oxen, pulling two positively enormous carts.
The first cart was filled with golden apples—a thousand of them—round and firm and cool. Golden as in made of gold, of course. Not Golden Delicious. Golden Expensive. The second cart was filled with barrels of wine—barrels stacked so high that they tottered and creaked with every turning in the road. There was enough wine in those barrels to keep a whole village in drink for a whole year.
The apples and the wine and the carts and the oxen were all gifts from the two villages, of course. You see, after burying Johannes and making a little headstone for him—Faitful was all it said—Hansel had gone on to the village of the golden apples, where he told them of the mouse gnawing at the roots of their tree. They killed it, and the apples began to grow immediately, and so they gave him as a gift the thousand golden apples and the cart and the quiet, obedient, incredibly large ox. Next he had gone to the village of the wine, where he told them of the frog stopping up their fountain. Once they had killed it, the wine began to flow again, and they gave Hansel as a gift the barrels of wine, the cart, and another quiet, obedient, incredibly large ox.