Lovestruck - A Bloody Modern Fairy Tale - Part Two

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Read Part I

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Twelve months ago to the day, Lizzie had come down from Princeton for a “girls’ night.” We had made it halfway through our second bottle of Gewürztraminer before I woke up alone on the couch, the first fingers of sun scratching at my window. Lizzie was not there. Her cellphone, purse, keys, and car were. I had no recollection of anything after pouring my fourth glass of wine, which was ludicrous since I regularly plowed through a couple bottles and rarely shared. If I hadn’t been absolutely certain we were the only two there, I’d have thought I was roofied.

The sun was well along the path toward noon when I finally called the police. Much would be made of this in the media and over family meals fresh from the oven and cold as ice. Everyone on earth would have done better. Not one Facebook firebrand would have waited a single moment. No tweeting twit would have spent three hours expecting her sister to walk in the door with bagels and tales of a morning walk.

Much would also be made in interview rooms in the local State Police barracks.

The suspicion was bad, but the raw nakedness was worse.

Were you jealous of Lizzie? I mean, I get it. I see how your parents…well let’s just say it’s clear who the favorite is.

I knew they were only trying to get a reaction. But they were also telling the truth. Plain for all to see. And who would—even could—believe such a fantastical story? No one did. My parents hadn’t believed as most of the world, that I had actually harmed their precious jewel, but they certainly believed I had inadvertently led her to some danger and was hiding it.

I’d like to have believed they had too much faith in my goodness to entertain the notion I had murdered my sister. But more likely they had too little faith in my ability to pull off the perfect crime. And perfect it seemed to have been.

Because in the end, there was nothing. No evidence to hang a charge on. No blood, no signs of a struggle, not even a neighbor to report a shouting match. Just a missing girl like a thousand others. By the time April’s front page disappearance had become September’s occasional mention, I was rarely recognized by strangers any more.

And I certainly wasn’t expecting the bag-lady to speak my name.

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I’m brought up short by the single, flat syllable. My name, crackling through the voice of half a million cigarettes, is followed by three precious words:

“I believe you.”

Perhaps I am imagining the incongruous sense of command that seems to fill the face peeping out from a modified Hefty bag hood. Perhaps I just desperately need to hear those words. But whatever the cause they resonate within me so powerfully I could not now walk away for all the tea in China.

Her bearing is haughty and for the briefest moment I think she is one of the depressingly high percentage of homeless afflicted with mental illness. But this passes as I sense the deeply stable core of this being. Somehow I feel I am looking upon something greater than myself. Greater than anything I have known before. And her next five words confirm this, changing my life forever.

“Do you want to remember?”

I barely stir the air with my near-silent “yes” and she motions me to follow her back into the alley from which she must have appeared.

At her invitation I sit on an orange crate. I am numb and trembling with unreality of the encounter. She pulls another crate up close on my right and sits, the black plastic covering her knees almost touching my thigh.

“This won’t be pretty. Roll up your sleeve.”

I do, the crisp Autumn air not the only chill I feel. Then she reaches out, grasps my arm, and reality flies apart at the seams.

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“So I told Daddy if I couldn’t go to the Sorbonne for this exchange I’d be absolutely humiliated among my peers, but really? I just want to see Paris.”

Lizzie’s laughter is so infectious and her greatest machinations so innocent, I can’t even be irritated at how she wraps “Daddy”—Jesus, did I ever call him that?—around her finger.

“You’re terrible!” The declaration is good-natured and I laugh as well. I know this is what she wants to hear, because being the good daughter, the better daughter, hurts her maybe even more than it does me. She’s just that fucking big-hearted. She’s still giggling as I pour our fourth glass, and the knock sounds.

“I got it!”

My sister, who lives in a world untouched by pain, bounces to the door and throws it wide before I can remind her there are big bad wolves even in suburbia.

I’m confused. No, shocked. The man standing there is a stranger—to me at least—but Lizzie is inviting him in. Even she is not so foolish, surely this is someone she knows. But how did he know to find her here? She would have said if she were bringing…

I’m on my feet and by now it seems clear to me that my sister has absolutely no idea who this is, but he’s making himself at home and she’s offering him wine, and countless generations of polite female progenitors strangle my nascent protest lest I offend for no good cause.

“Liz!” I hiss at her as she passes me heading for the kitchen and—I assume—another bottle of wine. She shrugs, her face glowing and mouths, he’s so cute, as if this explains her opening my home to God-knows-whom. I want to follow her, but I want more to keep an eye on this intruder. I want to ask him to leave, but I don’t really have a good reason to reject him. Do I? He’s been polite. I don’t want to look like some paranoid bitch, but Jesus, really, I mean who does this?

Apparently my sister.

Now she’s back and pays my whispered entreaties no mind as she heads toward the stranger. He grins and I am put in mind of the Disney fox, Honest John, who misleads Pinnocchio. My sister certainly seems to think Pleasure Island is in the cards. She sets the bottle down and slips onto his lap. In profile I see she is enraptured and I think I am as well because I’ve finally determined to speak, to scream, to eject this slick bastard from my house, but I cannot. I am frozen in place. Tears of frustration gather in my eyes. He reaches up to stroke her face. She leans in to it.

And collapses at his touch.

Not like a swoon. Not like a faint. Like a balloon with the air released after being well inflated for a long time. It is as though he has pulled the plug of a blow up doll.

I can move again. And make sound. But all I do is fall to my knees, and the only sound I make is the low, anguished moan of a trapped animal realizing it’s too late even to chew off its own leg.

The monster grins, reaches down to grab the leathery husk that was my sister, and tosses it over his shoulder as he rises. The cashmere sweater slips from the shriveled corpse and he bends down to grab it.

"She'll need this when she's feeling herself again." He winks at me and chuckles and I feel my sanity giving way.

He approaches and I fall back onto my hands scrambling, crab-like, away until my head and shoulders strike the wall. He reaches toward me and I am certain I will soon join my sister as a meat sack in his grasp. But he doesn’t touch me. He only flicks at me like a playful child with wet hands might. I shut my eyes as flecks of black fly toward me from his fingertips. The antithesis of seeing stars, I am seeing the emptiness of pure, soulless evil. It burns cold upon my exposed skin and the black begins to eat into my face, my skull, burrowing into my brain, and the last thing I hear before the blackness becomes my all are his words:

“Don’t worry. She’ll like it.”

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To be continued

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The idea for this came from the Five Minute Freewrite prompt "Sunset," and my mulling over what to enter into @carolkean's contest She Liked It. The original contest link is here. It's inspired by the Grimm Brothers' collected tale Fitcher's Bird, which has been my very favorite Fairy Tale from the time I first read it at age five.

I recently brought this particular story--Fitcher's Bird--up in conversation at The Isle of Write with my dear friend and fellow writer @sandzat, who was looking for scary stories for her daughter. Before an hour had passed she reported reading it to her daughter who also loved it. I was struck by the miraculousness of this event: A story discovered two centuries ago in Germany, read by an American child thirty-six years ago, was shared across oceans with an Indian mother who transmitted it to her own daughter within minutes. It felt...magical. This previously impossible intimacy shared between mothers spanning the planet. Thank you @sandzat for being a part of that moment <3

The story is still grand today, deserving of world-spanning. And I couldn't resist incorporating it here. I hope very much you enjoy this modern retelling, and that you follow the link to the original as well.

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