Twisted Tales

Erik had somehow found a slightly grimy looking wrap bandage among the clutter on the table, and was tending to my sore ribs in terse silence. I was in no position to complain, especially since I had gone a little woozy when I first lifted my torn and stained shirt to expose the already ugly, purpling bruises that were spreading across my ribs and back.

“Alright,” he finally grunted, knotting the bandage in place. “That will have to do for now. You'll have to go to town if you want proper care.” He gave me a hard look, narrowing his eyes. “You're not from town, are you?” he asked, in an almost accusing tone. “I don't recognize you. Where are you from? And what were you doing out here? Especially with a pack of mongrels on your heels like that?”

I shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. “I, uh... no, I'm not from around here,” I began slowly. True enough. As for what I had been doing out in the middle of the forest, running for my life from hungry wolves? That was going to be a little harder to explain. “Well... it's kind of a long story,” I said, lamely.

Erik gazed back at me impassively. “We've got plenty of time,” he replied.

I squirmed uncomfortably under his icy stare. “Well, I was... I mean, I guess...” I floundered for an excuse. The truth wouldn't do; at least, not the whole truth. “I got lost while traveling; managed to lose the path, you know? I was wandering around the woods, calling out and stuff, which in hindsight was a pretty stupid thing to do, but I was hoping at the time someone would hear me and come help. Instead, I managed to get some much less welcome attention. The wolves, I mean. And they started coming after me, so I ran, and ended up falling through your roof,” I finished, a little proud of how well I handled Erik's scrutiny: completely honest, and utterly vague.

“Mm hm,” he said, clearly not believing a word. “And where is it you were traveling to before you got lost?”

“Uh... west?” I tried.

“West. Of course.” Erik wasn't convinced in the slightest, but to my relief, for some reason he didn't press me any further.

“Look,” I said, changing tack. “I need to go... that is, I need to find... well, I'm not entirely sure. Where are we, exactly?”

Erik raised an eyebrow at me. “My house,” he replied.

“Yes, I got that, but I mean... where is your house located?”

“In the Forest.”

“Yes, alright. Duly noted. But in what territory does this forest fall into?”

“...The Kingdom. I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this.”

This clearly wasn't working.

“That town you mentioned; how soon can I get there?” I asked instead. Maybe I could find a witch or a fortune teller or something in the town. Did witches live in towns? Or would I have to go searching around enchanted groves until I stumbled upon a tiny cottage? Surely some witches had to prefer city life.

“It's only about a half a day's walk from here,” Erik said. “Since you seem to have such a difficult time staying on paths,” he went on, shooting me an accusing look, “I can show you the way. After, of course, you repair my roof.”

“Oh. You were serious about that.”

“Of course I was. I rarely kid.”

“See, the thing is,” I replied, trying to look as pitiful as I possibly could, “I can barely make a birdhouse that doesn't collapse in a strong wind. I don't really think I'll be of much help; I'll probably do more harm than good if I try.”

It wasn't that I didn't feel bad for causing such a problem in this young man's life. I just didn't much relish the thought of having to stay alone in the house of a man I didn’t know, while doing a carpentry job that I didn’t know how to do, all while I didn’t actually know where I was or how I got there, or how I was going to get back home.

“How about you let me be the judge of that?” Erik suggested, obviously not about to let me worm my way out of this. “Unless you happen to have pockets full of gold on you and can pay for me to have it repaired, of course.”

It was obvious from my expression that this was not the case.

“I don’t have time to spend the next week fixing the roof, I’ve got too many jobs as it is. So it’s either pay up, or get to work.” He glared unwaveringly at me, despite my most pathetic and imploring expression.

I glanced up at the hole. It was pretty big. I glanced down at my feet. It was mostly thatch, which didn’t seem like it would be too hard…

I let my shoulders slump. I didn’t really have much of a choice, did I? I wouldn’t be able to find my way to town on my own, and even if I thought that maybe I could, I wasn’t willing to try now that I knew what sort of things were out there. “Okay, fine. Deal.”

Erik grunted with what I assume was approval. He crossed the room and from under a pile of what appeared to be dirty clothes, he pulled out a handmade broom and tossed it to me. I barely caught it, it was difficult to raise my arms very high without my chest and ribs singing with pain.

“What’s--?” I started to ask, but the words died on my lips as Erik gestured to the pile of thatch at me feet.

“You can start by sweeping all of that up,” he said.

I was almost furious, given the fact that he was putting me to work almost immediately after I’d fallen through his freaking roof, but some of my anger faded when I realized that he wasn’t going to just laze about, gleefully watching me toil for him.

While I did my best to sweep the worst of the straw and wood out the front door, Erik went outside and around the back of the cottage, returning with what looked like heavy canvases. He very carefully climbed up the side of the small house and, standing on the edge of the roof so he wouldn’t follow my example and fall through it, he covered the hole with the canvas and used medium sized stones to weight it down. That done, he headed back inside and started rifling through the piles of papers and other crap on the long table, evidently searching for something.

I swept out the last bit of straw and leaf debris over the threshold, and sort of pushed the entire pile to the side of the front path with the broom. Erik could deal with it himself if he wanted it somewhere else, I thought grumpily. My shoulders ached painfully after even that meager amount of effort, and I figured I must have bruised my shoulders and lower neck pretty badly too when I hit the ground.

Dragging the broom behind me, I went back inside and closed the door behind me. Night had definitely fallen by now, and despite it still being warm for late summer, there was the slightest hint of a chill in the evening breeze that made me shiver.

Erik was still intently searching for something on the cluttered table, somehow making even more of a mess than there already was. “What are you doing?” I asked, curious despite myself, as I walked up beside him.

“None of your business,” he snapped almost automatically, but before I had time to feel offended, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he grunted. “I’m looking for a contract. It’s a parchment rolled into a scroll, with a red wax seal with the mayor’s stamp. Seal’s been broken, obviously. I think it’s in this general direction…” He waved a hand vaguely over what appeared to me to be the entirety of the table.

I didn’t exactly have anything else to do. “I’ll help,” I offered. I picked a spot at random and began gingerly picking through Erik’s accumulated crap, some identifiable, some… not so much.

“Is this it?” I said after perhaps five or ten minutes, holding up a slightly wet piece of parchment, the ink smeared and bleeding from a liberal application of what smelled like beer.

Erik snatched it out of my hands and inspected it closely for a few seconds but then tossed it to side, letting it fall onto the floor with a frustrated expression. “No, that was an old one, for the giants I routed out last month. The one I need right now is the bounty for those wolves.”

“For… for the ones that were chasing me? The ones you…?” I trailed off. I hadn’t, after all, actually seen what had happened out there.

“The ones I killed? Yes,” Erik replied, returning to his search.

“What do you mean exactly by contract, and bounty?” I asked, suddenly worried that I had gotten myself involved with a fairy tale hitman or something.

“I’m the resident exterminator,” said Erik, his tone laced with a healthy dose of cynicism. “The mayor puts out bounties for small, general problems, but the big stuff he brings to me personally. The wolves around here has been worse than usual lately. It’s always been a problem--the occasional little girl or grandma getting eaten, livestock terrorized—but recently… those out there, chasing you, weren’t the normal wolves we get around these parts. From what I’ve heard, things are coming down from the north. Not just wolves, either. Things that are bigger, and meaner, than the garden variety we get around here.”

I was glad his attention was focused on the cluttered table, because I couldn’t repress the shudder that ran through me.

“The mayor put a bounty out on that wolf pack, but they were cleverer than what local hunters were used too. Eventually the problem got bad enough that he came directly to be with it.”

“So, I guess you were lucky that I came crashing through your roof after all. I practically led them right to your door,” I pointed out.

He shot me a dark look. “I prefer to be prepared when I take care of a job, with preset traps, a torch, and proper weapons, rather than just a rusty old axe.”

Ah. Well.

“Well, you’re never going to find it like this,” I said grumpily, waving at the mess on the table. “And you’re just making it even worse.” I glared pointedly at the old parchment he had just thrown onto the ground. “You have to sort of clean as you go, otherwise you’ll never be able to find anything.”

Erik looked doubtful, as if I was suggesting we used witchcraft to magic the contract out of its hiding place, but we spent the next two hours sorting papers and dishes and spilled ink pots into semi-organized piles. Most of the garbage was thrown into the fire of the huge iron stove, which crackled happily and filled the small room with almost uncomfortable warmth.

It couldn’t really be considered “clean” by the time we found the right contract, but it no longer looked as thought it needed to be condemned.

“Ah ha!” Erik cried triumphantly, holding the unrolled parchment up so he could read it. “Fifteen silvers a head, and there were six of them. Plus I can sell the pelts after I claim the bounty for nearly as much.” He seemed almost giddy at the thought of that much money. He re-rolled the parchment and tossed it haphazardly back onto the table before heading over to the stove and peering into the contents of a cast iron pot heating on top.

I grabbed the parchment, unrolled it, and left it in an obvious place, weighted down by the cleanest cup I could find so it wouldn’t get lost again.

“Hungry?” Erik grunted, ladling something suspiciously grey and chunky into the first bowl that was within his arm’s reach. I was, extremely hungry, but the contents of that pot and what I had seen in half of the bowls I’d come across so far made me seriously reconsider how hungry.

“Uh, give me a minute.” I searched for the cleanest bowl I could find, which took more than a minute. Eventually I passed an acceptable specimen over to Erik, and he sloppily spooned a serving into it and handed it back. I peered into its lumpy depths. “What… is this, exactly?”

“Pease porridge,” he replied.

“…Huh.” That sounded familiar, at least. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old. “Is it usually that color?”

Erik glanced into his bowl, as if he hadn’t really looked at the contents before. “Well, it’s the end of the week,” he said.

I blanched, but I wasn’t in much of a position to be picky. I brought a similarly clean-ish spoonful of the stuff up to my mouth and took a tentative sip.

It wasn’t… terrible, but I definitely got the sense that Erik spent about the same amount of effort in cooking that he did in cleaning. I gave him a weak smile of appreciation, but he didn’t seem to be looking for praise. He wolfed his own meal down in record time, and tossed the bowl back where he had found it.

Then he disappeared through a door at the back of the cottage while I did my best to scarf down the rest of my measly dinner. I placed my bowl on top of his, with the mental note that if I was going to have to spend and indeterminate amount of time here fixing the roof, I would have to try to teach Erik a thing or two about hygiene if I didn’t want to be eating out of my own leftovers.

Erik returned, and waved me over to the door he had come through. “Come on then. It’s late, and I’m tired.”

“I… what?”

“I’m going to bed, come on.”

I spluttered. “I am not going to bed with you!”

Erik rolled his eyes, as if he had never heard such a ridiculous statement. “Obviously. I was going to sleep on the armchair out here and let you have the bed, since you’re pretty badly banged up, but if you just keep standing there with your mouth hanging open-”

I felt my cheeks flush crimson. “Oh. Right. Yeah, of course. Um, thank you.” Trying to hide the worst of my humiliation, I hurried past him into the small room on the other side of the door.

It was a very small bedroom, almost cramped, but unlike the main room of the cottage it was fairly clean. Some clothes thrown haphazardly around the floor—obviously just recently tossed there from where they had lain on the bed in Erik’s weak attempt at getting the bed ready for me—but not much else, apart from the bed itself, and a bedside table with a jug of water and an empty basin on top. It was clear that Erik was only ever in this room to sleep, so there was little opportunity for it to get as filthy as the rest of the cottage.

I shuffled over to the bed and set my backpack down, turning back to Erik.

“Thanks,” I said again rather awkwardly. He just shrugged.

“I end up sleeping in the armchair half the time anyway, it doesn’t matter to me. You can use the basin to wash up if you want, you’re an absolute mess.”

“Thanks,” I repeated, sourly.

Silence passed between us, long and awkward as we both mentally searched for a polite way out of this conversation.

“Well, get a good night’s sleep. You’ll be needing it, since you’re going to start repairing the roof first thing in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” I said firmly, and he left, pulling the door closed behind him.

I stood in the middle of the room for a few long moments, until I was sure that he wasn’t coming back. I used the basin to wash the worst of the blood and dirt off my face, and tried to comb through my thick, unruly curls with my fingers, loosening the worst of the tangles and dislodging enough twigs and leaves to make a bird’s nest.

My clothes were filthy and sweat stained, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. All I had in my backpack was my wallet—and I doubted my library card or the $8 of modern American money I had in there would be of any use to me now—a notebook and pen, a beat up and dog eared novel, and… The Book. With a capital "T" and a capital “B”, at least in my head.

I sat on the bed and pulled The Book out, running my hand over the embossed leather cover. The damn thing weight nearly ten pounds, or at least it felt like it did when it was weighing me down as I ran for my life with canine carnivores snapping at my heels. I let it fall open somewhere in the middle of the book, and began scanning the pages.

“The Frog King...The Twelve Brothers... Rapunzel... Hansel and Gretel... The White Snake... Little Red-Cape..." I muttered as I flipped through pages at random. Then I went back to the table of contents and inspected each title one by one, occasionally turning to the story itself and giving it a glance over if I didn’t remember it clearly. I got all the way through the list, to the final story in the collection, The Golden Key. It was one of the shortest in the book, and was left on a cliffhanger, which felt strange from what I had come to expect in a fairy tale. It didn’t matter though, it wasn’t what I was looking for.

Nothing in The Book seemed to be what I was looking for. I’d grown up with these stories, I knew most of them back to front. And Erik just didn’t fit into any of them.

Well, maybe it was too much to expect that I would run into a main character this early on. Surely the fairy tale world was fully populated by people who never appeared in any stories, or only as unnamed background characters, bodies to fill the world, to give the important people a backdrop against which the stories of their lives unfolded.

I glanced down at the torn red cloak draped around my shoulders. Actually, I guess I did meet a main character almost immediately. And look how that turned out for me. I guessed I should count my lucky stars that Erik’s name hadn’t appeared in any of the fairy tales in The Book after all.

I shut The Book and shoved it back into my backpack, leaning back onto the pillows and staring up at the ceiling, my mind wandering. The past day and a half had passed in a bizarre, dream-like blur. Perhaps this was all only a dream. I didn’t see how it could be anything else, these sort of things just didn’t happen in real life.

But as I laid in Erik’s bed, feeling the coarse woolen blankets that itched the bare flesh of my arms, feeling the weight of the pease porridge nine days old in my stomach and the dull, throbbing ache in my ribs and back, I very much doubted that this was a dream.

I yawned, rolled over. There was no way I would be able to sleep tonight. Too much had happened, my thoughts were racing and so many questions were unanswered. I’ll never fall asleep at this rate, I thought, as my leaden eyelids drooped closed, and I slipped into dreamless darkness.