Straying out of Sanity

"Can we please do something?" Laurel whined, sitting on the bed next to me.

"Find something to do in this room," Mitch said monotonously, staring at the news on the TV on our wall.

"There's nothing to do in this room!" Laurel told Mitch impatiently.

"Well we can't just get up and leave," Mitch said, annoyed with my little sister.

"Why not? We could for breakfast!"

"You know we probably could," I said and Laurel bounced off the bed, suddenly happy.

"Let's go then!" she shouted skipping to the door.

"He's gonna kill you!" Jay said as I stood up to join my sister.

"That's a bit inevitable, don't you think?" I asked him.

"What?" Jay and my sister asked in unison.

"You really think he'd keep us alive this long if he was going to kill us?" Mitch asked, the only one with enough education to understand what I said.

"Why would he even take us in the first place?" I asked.

"I'm totally fucking lost," Jay said, stopping Mitch's little argument with me.

"Well maybe you shouldn't've dropped out of school," I stuck my tongue out at him and opened the door to let myself and my little sister out of the room.

"What are we gonna do?" Laurel asked as we walked down the hall.

"I dunno, this house isn't meant for kids," I told her.

"Well do you think there's anything to read in that book room place?" she asked.

"You like reading?" I asked giving her a weird look.

"Yeah, its fun," she answered.

"You're weird," I teased and she quickly retorted.

"Am not!"

"Are too!"

"Am not!"

"Are too!"

"Emmalee!"

"Laurel!" I mocked and laughed. Little sisters are so amazingly funny to annoy.

By that time we were in 'the book room'. "Go find a book to read," I told her and she wandered off without another word. I walked to one of the brown leather couches in the middle of the room and fell onto my back. I glanced around at one of the walls of books and noticed that most of them were books I've never heard of before that couldn't have possibly been published before the twentieth century.

"Emma, get this book for me," Laurel called from the other side of the room.

"Which one?" I asked and got up from my perch on the couch.

"That one," she pointed at a thick black book that had the word 'Fairy tales' printed on the spine in faded silver old English letters. It was about a foot away from her reach so I grabbed the quite heavy book and brought it back to the couch and sat down with my sister on the brown leather couch.

I opened the book and immediately the smell of old paper filled my nose.

"You had to pick the old stinky book didn't you?" I teased.

"There all gonna be old and stinky," she replied and took the book from me, placing it in her lap. The table of contents told me that there were at least eight hundred pages and forty different fairy tales like Rapunzel and Cinderella and a few that I've never heard of like The Lost Children and The Juniper Tree.

"Which one?" I asked her.

"How about... That one," she said and pointed to The Lost Children, which was on page 256. It ended up being a sort of French version of Hansel and Gretel with a sort of torture chamber twist. You see two children, Jean and his sister Jeanette were left in a forest by their mother, Toinon. They tried to find their way out and Jean climbed a tree and saw a white house and a red house not far from where they were in the forest and they headed for the red one.

The woman there let them in, but told them to be quiet or her husband would eat them, yes eat them. She hid them, but her husband ended up to be The Devil and could smell them. Sounds a bit Marilyn Manson right?

Well he beat his wife, because he's 'The Devil' and does that shit, and then put Jean into the barn to fatten him up before eating him, making Jeanette bring him food because The Devil was too fat to get into the barn, which is slightly disturbing seeing as it’s a fucking barn.

He made a sawhorse to lay Jean on to bleed him out, and then went for a walk, which is a miracle because he can't fit into a barn but he can walk? Well I guess, like I said before, he's 'The Devil' and can do what he wants.

So anyways Jeanette has Jean pretend not to understand how he was to be put on the sawhorse and get The Devil's wife to demonstrate for them. Jean ends up tying her down on it and slitting her throat. Yes, they kill the only person who tried to help them in this whole story, some grateful French kids these are.

They then took all of The Devil's money and fled in his carriage (oh surprise, surprise they're super greedy too). The Devil came back to find out what they did and he chased them. On the way, he met various people (a laborer, a shepherd, a beadle, and some laundresses) and asked whether they had seen the children. None admitted to seeing the children, except for the laundresses, who told him they crossed the river. The Devil could not cross it, (holy crap so The Devil can't do something?!) so one laundress offered to cut her hair to let him cross on it. Yeah like hair floats on water, I mean what the fuck? But anyways when he was in the middle, the laundresses dropped the hair and he drowned. Hooray no more Devil.

When I finished reading her the so called 'Fairytale' I looked over at her and we both exchanged 'what the fuck was that?' looks.

"What the hell are you two reading?" someone asked from behind us and Laurel and I both jumped.

"Don't do that!" I whined and looked over at the other couch across from us and there were three of The Joker's clowns sitting there. "How long have you been here?" I demanded after my heart rate returned to normal somewhat.

"Since 'The Devil' couldn't fit into the barn because he was too fat or some shit," the middle one said and I realized that he was actually a chick.

"Yeah I mean, like seriously, wtf?" the one on her right asked and I immediately realized he was gay. You have no idea how happy I was to see two people in this house that wouldn't rape me or molest my little sister.