Twisted Tales

It had taken a while to convince Erik that I had no idea why all the other stories in The Book had disappeared, or why the only one remaining had called me out specifically, by name. He seemed to have the impression that there was something I wasn’t telling him—which was completely true, though that something had nothing to do with whatever had just happened to The Book.

Well, my unexpected transport to this fairy tale world and the magically changing stories in the book that caused it were probably related, but I was damned if I knew how.

Erik seemed less willing than ever to help me with the miller’s daughter fiasco now, expressing a desire to stay as far away as possible from whatever crazy magic I had gotten myself embroiled in. At the moment, he was silent, deep in his own thoughts. Which, unfortunately, left me to mine.

For my part, I was worrying about what I would do if he ducked out entirely, deciding to wash his hands clean of the whole mess and leave me on my own. How I would maneuver in a world I was completely unfamiliar with, one full of wolves and witches to boot, all alone I had no idea. I didn’t have any money, no friends, no knowledge of the economic or political climate, I didn’t know who the king was or what the laws of the land were… There were ten thousand different ways I could end up dead or indisposed before ever even reaching the castle where the miller’s daughter was being kept.

And that wasn’t to mention how the hell I was supposed to turn an entire room full of straw into gold when I got there.

I nearly started hyperventilating as Erik and I trudged at an agonizingly slow pace through the dense woods.

It would be okay, I tried to reassure myself, it would be fine. I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. Let’s just take this one step at a time for now, and right now, the first step is getting out of these damn woods.

But I couldn’t keep my mind from jumping from one worry to another. It slid from my immediate problem of princess-rescuing, to the more distant one of what was happening back in my world, in the real world.

I didn’t have to worry about my family panicking when they noticed I was gone. I never thought I’d be grateful for the car accident that took both my parents two years before, but at least this way they wouldn’t have to deal with the torment of their only daughter suddenly going missing off the face of the earth, for who knew how long.

I had an aunt on my mom’s side who was still living, but I hadn’t seen her since I was three or four, and in all likelihood the knew of my disappearance would affect her emotionally as much as hearing a sad report on the evening news, something unfortunate that happened to someone else, which made your heart heavy but didn’t really impact your life at all.

My friends would be worried of course, but we’d all gone our separate ways and were so busy with life that we often went weeks, even months without hearing from one another. Who knew how long it would be until they even realized I was gone?

My job would notice right away, of course. They would be the ones who alerted the police, who brought attention to the fact that I had vanished. I tried to imagine what the aftermath would be like. The investigation, dead ending because there was no suspicious boyfriend to pin the blame on, no stalkers or enemies to speak of. How long would the police search for me? Would I be declared dead? Did time even move the same here and back home? Was this place like Narnia, where years can pass but in the real world, only seconds have gone by? Or, perhaps, it worked in the opposite direction. Maybe I would find my way home in a few days, only to discover that a hundred years had been lost to time while I was gone, and everyone I knew were long since dead and gone.

I began to feel slightly sick. This hardly seemed real, any of it.

Only that wasn’t true at all. Every bit of what I had been through so far had felt real, terrifyingly, impossibly real. Objectively I knew it just couldn’t be. People don’t just get sucked into fairy tale world all willy nilly, that just doesn’t happen. Yet here I was, and I knew that this was no dream because of the undeniable concrete realness of it all.

It was dark in the woods, only moonlight and starlight to see by, but I studied the side of Erik’s face out of the corner of my eye as well as I could. The expressions of pain he made as he struggled along on his bad ankle, the pores on his skin, each individual eyelash, his dead weight as he hung from my shoulder, the thereness of his arm that was draped around my neck. There was no way I could dream all that up, in that much detail. Erik had to be real, and if he was real, so was everything else. Little Red Riding Hood. The wolves that had chased me. The giant. Rumpelstiltskin.

And somewhere ahead of me, a very real girl was in danger of losing her life if I didn’t do something about it.

Hours passed in tense silence, until neither of us could go on anymore—Erik in too much pain to continue, me too exhausted from supporting his weight. We finally had to stop, separating quickly as soon as I helped Erik take a seat on a mossy stone. It had to be past midnight now, and the thought that the light of dawn was still six hours away made me feel more drained and miserable than ever.

I slept fitfully, exposed and shivering, though the summer’s night never dropped to a temperature that put us in danger of hypothermia. Every time I was roused from uneasy sleep by the sounds of the forest, or by a particularly pointy rock digging into my back, I would half sit up and roll over, only to see Erik still awake, his back against a tree, his bow across his lap, and a single arrow held loosely in his hand, as if ready to notch it and draw it back at a moment’s notice.

Despite Erik’s watchful vigil, my dreams were plagued by wolves and giants, gnarled old gnomes and ill omens. It eventually reached a point that I gave up on sleep entirely only a handful of hours later.

It was still dark when I finally sat up, picking sticks and leaves out of my thick, curly hair—but I though that the darkness of the sky tended less towards black as pitch, and more towards a very dark navy. That gave me a little hope. I knew that dawn wouldn’t actually bring anything with it to make this journey any easier, but I felt as though just the presence of daylight would give me a little more strength.

“You’re finally up then,” Erik grunted, as if he were waking me up at a leisurely eleven in the morning, rather than four.

“I feel worse than I did before getting any sleep,” I groaned regretfully, trying to stretch out the kinks and cramps in my body to no avail.

“You could have been sleeping in a real bed by now if you had just kept going.”

“Uh, you wanted to stop just as much as I did,” I pointed out, rising to my aching feet.

“For a brief rest, not a four hour nap.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not all wolf-killing, giant-fighting, forest-treking terminators, okay? I’m doing the best with what I’ve got.” A stabbing headache was beginning to drill its way right down the middle of my forehead, and standing up just made me realize that I was somehow even more tired than I had been before. Maybe it was because I’d given my bruised and battered feet the chance to rest, but now that they knew what they were missing, they protested aggressively, and I could feel every individual blister I’d gotten so far.

“Ahem? I little help, please?” came a peeved voice at knee level. I glanced down and saw Erik still sitting, his arms expectantly outstretched, like a small child asking to be picked up.

The sudden mental image was just too much on top of my exhaustion and stress, and I collapsed into a fit of laughter.

Down I went, hugging my knees to my chest, laughing my head off. The sound echoed oddly in the silent forest, reverberating off the trees. I sat like that for what seemed like forever, although it was probably only a minute, no more than two, giggling uncontrollably.

When I finally managed to control myself, my guffaw died down to half hearted snorts, and I began to feel utterly ridiculous. Erik was staring at me with an expression very similar to horror, and inside I felt exactly like he looked, even though the occasional chuckled still bubbled up through my protesting lips.

"Are you quite done?" he asked.

I nodded, feeling a fierce flush of embarrassment creep up my cheeks. I thanked my lucky stars the cool, white moonlight drained our surroundings of all color and struggled unsteadily to my feet. I grabbed Erik's wrists and yanked him up off the ground, quickly sliding under his arm to steady him. I cleared my throat. "Which way?" I muttered.

Erik just rolled his eyes skyward and pointed to our left with his good arm. "That way. And if I have to sit in the dirt one more time, I'm cutting off those useless legs of yours," he threatened, sounding all too serious.

We traveled on, the journey feeling harder than ever, but I intently watched the sky through breaks in the canopy of leaves overhead. Every passing minute made it lighter and lighter, and I knew that daybreak wasn’t far off now.

I was so focused on looking up that when Erik suddenly stumbled, I nearly went down hard with the both of us.

“Hey, be careful!” I snapped reflexively, looking over at the young man I was supporting.

His head suddenly snapped up and he quickly blinked a few times in a row, his eyelids dragging as if they were heavy as lead and he had to fight them to keep them open.

“Wha-? Oh, sorry,” he mumbled. A few steps later, and his head started to droop again, his eyelids fluttering closed, and his bad foot tried to take his weight. This time I was paying attention and was able to catch him before he could send both of us sprawling onto our faces.

“Hey, wake up! You can’t sleep yet, you said we were nearly there,” I said loudly, giving him a little shake to rouse him.

“Not asleep,” Erik grunted, despite the fact that his eyes were clearly closed and his chin was resting against his chest.

I groaned in exasperation, suddenly having to take almost all his weight. “You should have just slept when we took a break earlier,” I grunted. “We can’t afford to stop for another four or five hours, not here in the middle of the woods, not while we’re so close to town!”

“Mm-hm,” Erik agreed, clearly with no actual idea what he was agree with. He slid down a little further, and then jolted half awake, “I’m awake, I’m awake,” he quickly insisted, fooling no one. He rubbed at his eyes with the palm of his good hand and then shook his head vigorously in an attempt to shake off the exhaustion that was fast setting upon him.

“What are you just standing there staring at me for?” he demanded, glaring at me through heavy lids that were already in danger of falling closed again. “We’re nearly to town, come on, hurry up.”

To his credit, he really did try. Erik kept passing out for the briefest of seconds, but each time he came alive again as if he’d been poked with a cattle prod, and he frantically hopped alongside me as quickly as he was able to go, until the irresistible tug sleep came to claim him once again. I tried to get us as far as I could as quickly as possible in the meantime, but I knew it was a lost cause. Between his battle with the giant and going on nearly twenty-four hours without sleep, in the cold, with a broken ankle and a sprained wrist, there was just no way he could continue on this way for much longer. Dawn broke somewhere on a horizon that I couldn’t see past all the trees, but my hopes had never been lower.

But then, just ahead, I thought I saw a shaft of bright morning sunlight piercing through the line of tree trunks, and I realize that there was a break in the trees ahead.

“Erik, look! I think that’s the end of the woods, I think we made it!” I cried. At that moment however, Erik lost his battle with consciousness, and both his legs went out from under him completely. I was able to hold him up for one second, two, three—and then I had to let him fall to the ground. He stirred, raised his head, but his eyes were still closed.

“We’re there? Good, time for a nap. Just a little one,” he mumbled, and he was out like a light. I gave him a firm shake a few times, but each time he never roused enough to take more than one or two halting steps. His body was demanding sleep, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I couldn’t even blame him, my own body was crying out for a proper rest, and I knew that if I hadn’t slept earlier, if I continued to push myself rather than take that uncomfortable nap on the forest floor hours before, I’d be curled right up next to him, only a hundred feet from town but too exhausted to continue a single step more.

I sighed and contemplated what to do, whether to leave Erik there and run to the village, get help, then come back with some one who could carry him back; or try to carry him myself, which would slow me down considerably--but then I wouldn't be leaving my unconscious companion to the mercy of whatever animals lurked in the woods.

I opted for the second option, grasping Erik firmly by his waist and hauling him up. I have no idea where I got the strength or the energy, I assume it was out of pure desperation that I even managed to drag him into the sunshine.

I was able to pull Erik for about hundred feet, right to the edge of the forest, where I finally collapsed, barely avoiding landing on top of him. I couldn't drag him any further; I was too tired and he was far too heavy. I panted with my hands on my knees and looked out over the expanse of wide, rolling hills before me, a little valley that cradled a village so close that I could smell the first batch of bread being baked that morning on the air.

I could make it to the first building in only a few minutes if I ran. And if someone ran back, we could get Erik in as little as ten or fifteen. That was all, just ten of fifteen minutes he would be by himself, alone and unprotected, at the mercy of the creatures of the woods.

It would be fine. It would be fine, right? I had spent hours in those woods all alone, and nothing had attacked me.

But then, I had been conscious. Not quite as easy prey as the sleeping man at my feet would be. And those wolves I had met almost immediately on my very first day here…

But there was no other option. I couldn’t drag him anymore, I didn’t have the strength. I would just have to run, and hope.

I sprinted down into the valley, ignoring the burning on my lungs as best I could and making a beeline for the closest house. It took me seven minutes to reach it, which I knew because I counted the seconds out, hoping I could make it in under five.

It was one of the larger buildings, two stories with a big oak door and a weathered sign emblazoned with a naked mermaid and a bottle of booze. Classy joint.

I pounded on door with my fists and called as loudly as I could manage between gasping breaths, winded from my sprint.

"Help! Please, someone, I need help! My friend is out there, someone!" I cried.

The door swung open inward and I fell forward, just barely managing to catch myself before I hit the solid wood floor.

A rather stout woman with very pink cheeks and flyaway hair thrown up in a messy bun stood before me, the emotion in her eyes a curious mixture of worry and nosy interest.

"What was that?" she asked, in a disconcertingly high soprano voice. "Someone needs help? Who? Where?"

“My friend. We got lost in the woods all night and he’s too tired to go on, and I can’t carry him all this way by myself. Please, someone has to go get him, he’s still on the edge of the forest,” I said, my energy spent, pointing to the far away dark mound which was Erik's crumpled body.

The woman's eyes grew wide and she huffed a little Oooh!, then turned back into the house. "Richard! Come quick! Some young ones got lost in the woods, and a boy needs some help!" she called, wringing her spotless apron. There was a thundering overhead as pounding footsteps made their way across the ceiling, then down a flight of dark stairs on the far end of the room.

A man as tall and thin as the woman was short and round came bounding into view, his slightly graying hair askew, his eyes bright and alert. "What? Where? Who needs help?" His gaze fell upon me, and his eyes widened. "You?" he asked, peering closer.

I grimaced. I must have been a sight; bloody, muddy, and sweaty. "No, not me. A boy, on the edge of the forest. He's too exhausted to go on, and I can’t carry him the rest of the way. Please help, I can’t just leave him there," I pleaded, pointing again.

I wished they would just go already, I wasn't comfortable leaving Erik laying there, unconscious and alone.

The man seemed to be thinking along the same lines I was, and he dashed off without another word, his long legs carrying him to my friend's forlorn form twice as fast as I had managed.

"Come in, come in. Oh you poor dear, you look like you need a drink and a nice bath. Just come on in deary, that's it," the woman crooned softly, ushering me into the blissfully dark room. The woman placed a reassuringly steady hand on my back and led me to a long bar-like table, asking me questions as we went. "You poor thing. You must be in a state right now! And your poor friend. I’m sure he will be alright. What did you say his name was?" she asked, slipping behind the bar and pulling out a dusty bottle from underneath.

"His name is-" I began, interrupted by a huge yawn. Now that Ezu was taken care of, at least for the moment, the wear of the past two days was beginning to set in. My eyelids dropped, and my head felt like it was on fire. I sat down on a chair at the bar and rested my forehead on it, enjoying the feeling of the smooth, cool wood against my feverish face. "His name is Erik," I mumbled. At that moment, three things happened simultaneously. The woman gasped, and almost dropped the bottle she held in her hands. At the same moment I felt weariness take me over, and pull me down, down into the dark well of sleep. And finally, just before I closed my eyes and let slumber take me, the oak door burst open, and I saw a dark silhouette framed there, haloed by a blinding white light.

Then my eyelids slid shut, and I thought no more.