fic: dead man's bells
Dead Man's Bells
or, Hansel and the Witch - a retelling
Word Count: 2625
before
"Be careful walking home," his girlfriend Gretchen says, "Because people will kill nice boys in a city like this."
He nods, only half listening to her. His apartment is only three blocks away. He's lived here all his life - he isn't afraid. He loves Gretchen, he guesses. But she's just so afraid of everything - 'The City', the lights, the loud noises, the homeless people that ask for change, and the taxis. Constantly afraid that one of them will end up in the gutter.
"I'll be fine. Goodnight." he assures, and he begins to walk home. He goes through an empty alleyway that will cut the walk in half. He hears a sound, like the hum of a machine. Like a siren call.
As it turns out, the alley was not so empty.
A woman was leaning out of a first-floor apartment window. She had the greenest eyes he had ever seen, the kind of eyes that would take your soul, if you let them.
.
She looked to him like a old Hollywood film star - though she couldn't be older than twenty-five. Like a emaciated goddess of heroin and violence. Her face was carried by a pair of sharply cut cheekbones. Her head was much too heavy looking for her bony frame. Her skin had a green cast, like a corpse left in water for too long. Her hair was either blonde, red, or blue. He couldn't tell in this light, though maybe it was all of them.
"I could just eat you up." she grins at him, revealing long pearly incisors.
.
"Come closer, my pet," she murmurs, as he follows her into her apartment. "My soft little milksop, my lamb."
Before he knows what is happens, or even cares to know, she is feeding him. "You are so thin." It should seem strange coming from her skeletal figure, but it doesn't. And little does he know, he is swallowing handfuls of carefully portioned foxglove, coated with sugar and artificial dye. Too much could be fatal, so she encourages him to chew. He deliriously gobbles up the candy-apple globs of confection. (God knows the ingredients, he wonders, former lovers and pets like himself?) And is that a molar peeking out from his plate like a special treat? No no no, she insists. Just a dollop of burnt sugar, precious.
.
It doesn't seem strange when she sinks her teeth into his tender throat.
Not at all.
.
Witchy witch girl.
Gobbles up his willing bones, he is a priority for the moment. Delicious boy, all sweetness and unbroken skin. 'La la la,' she sings to herself, 'your history, feed it to me. It tastes like you, and you must be savored. I'm not a monster. I'm a goddess
Worship my murder.'
.
Days, months, years? Who can tell?
All he knows is that he is tired and sore. But she is with him, and that is good. And when she is with him always, she looks healthy, she is not so awfully thin. When she drinks from him, her hair is shiny and thick, she looks like a real girl. Almost.
His mind is not so warped by the high that he doesn't understand the connection between her sudden health and his new frailty. He understands the sacrifice. It's all for her.
It is worse when she is away - those few times she's disappeared, without a trace for weeks on end. He is left trapped in her apartment aimlessly looking at its eccentricities. Painted wax skulls from Mexico, a lamp made of antlers. Old prayer cards. And so many dolls. So much death made into some sort of cartoon joke.
All that she left in the refrigerator was stacks and stacks of desserts and treats. cakes and jello and pudding-filled éclairs. Flies encircle their sugary carcasses.
Yes, it is worse when she is gone. It is the drain without the high. It is withdrawal.
.
"I'm so hungry," she whispers, in a whimper. "So exhausted."
In the darkness, the utter darkness, she sounds nearly human.
Nearly.
.
The world waits for no man. She coils herself around him, like a blooming rose vine, a snake. And she postions herself against the wound on his neck, her kiss. Her drinking cup.
He doesn't know how she does it, besides the obvious act of her gorging on swallowfuls of his blood. But how does it fill her with his life? How does it vitalize her soul?
She smiles.
She bites down.
That old familiar sting, as she is suctioned against him like a leech. She doesn't need to bite, when she rips him open the blood flows freely, she just uses her teeth for fun. It drains out slowly, this is the point of the dance where there is an instant moment of pure thought, a eureka.
'It must be something with the foxglove in the food.' he thinks, and then, 'aren't foxgloves poisonous?'
And then it is gone. The idea is snatched away as if it were never there. Her face peers up, smeared with bright red cells. Her tongue laps up the residue with malicious glee.
And the moment her face is clean, the demon is gone. She is the same cold stoic goddess that he worships in her loneliness. "You're getting so thin, let's get you something to eat." she says.
.
It is summer now, when did it become summer? The apartment is without air conditioning, she doesn't seem to notice the heat, or how the sweat pours off them - pooling into puddles when they lay. She just lights candles, drapes herself in tacky jewelry, paints his body with bright henna smears, licks the ink off sugar-skulls.
He realizes that this feeling he has had for a while is fear. "I don't feel like a human anymore." he says. She doesn't react. Probably because she isn't a real person, and has never felt like one.
She sits like a blank Egyptian statue, staring.
The stomach pain is back, so strong it makes him dizzy. Like a tightly wound rope inside of him, throbbing with blood. Like a constant miscarriage. He stumbles out of his seat, sweat making his pants stick against the back of his legs. He sees white flashes, black dots in his vision. A Mexican skull stares at him - a masquerade, a gunfight, an opium room - all appears before him.
He screams, and then he crumbles to the floor with in a clatter.
She still looks on with a blank expression.
.
The air is like hummingbirds, like dust and ash. Heartbeats in your mouth, his blood. It is like the cut cords of a marionette, a over taunt viola, gutted and watered down. Needles and pins and fingernails. Patron saints crying.
But there is really no way to describe the day after night-long hallucinations.
.
He's begun to look at her differently, and she can tell.
This is alarming to her. She should be adored. She has been - in the old days, the good days, entire villages would devote days to her. Food, livestock, prayer. Blood spill'd on the alter, just for her. Begging her to bless their crops. A beautiful monster, they understood that. A fearsome creature - as awe inspiring as she is ferocious. They saw her as a lioness, a serpent, a succubus who made the milk run red if she didn't receive patronage.
He looked at her like someone who had betrayed him. The nerve of him, that boy. Treating a goddess like a cheating girlfriend, like someone human. Someone real.
So she feeds him more and more doses of foxglove, the extract baked into the crust of pies and cake fillings. It is getting worse for him, he sometimes screams deliriously about how it feels as if the headaches will kill him. That his head will swell with hairline cracks, and cave into itself. It hurts hurts hurts.
.
'How did this happen?' he wonders - how did it become normal for some siren, some monster, to suck out his soul one mouthful at a time. These things don't exist. Why is he dying for something that doesn't even exist?
She is trying to fatten him with, but it is pointless until she stops drinking from him. She sucks out all the nutrients, the life. He's dying and he doesn't know why.
.
She is worried. All this time and effort she wasted, and the foxglove is going to kill him. That can't happen. She won't let it. She won't let him try to run away either. Not after the set up is comfortable like this. No. She'll kill him first.
.
The day is rainy and grey, the kind of environment that you know something horrible will happen in.
There are no more of the bright joyous hallucinations, only the kind in the form of nightmares and specters. The horror and pain of someone waiting to die.
"I have a present for you," she says.
.
He thinks, "This is how she'll kill me. A knife to my throat? Being thrown in the oven?"
She folds his hand into hers, her sharp nails and long fingers, and holds it as he follows her down the steps. He feels queasy, and like it is the end.
She brings him in the basement, the cold and wet basement where he has never been before. And to the freezer, she opens it. And, sitting inside in separate pieces, is Gretchen - his girlfriend.
.
He can't stop screaming. And it hurts his throat like jagged nails. "You've been eating her," she proclaims, proudly. "In every pie, there was a little piece of her."
He wants to scream until it burns, but his voice keeps failing. "The foxglove was for my sake - to make you prime for drinking- but this, this was for you. To devour her, I've made you like a God."
He manages to cry out, "You're a monster!" but feels faint after doing so. It doesn't feel real, Gretchen isn't dead. Gretchen is too safe, she doesn't even like leaving the house after the sun is down. She isn't dead.
She smiles, "She's inside of you. You are higher on the food chain because of it. Aren't you proud?"
He turns and tries to run away from this, from her, from both of them. But he is weak and he stumbles up the steps. She follows behind him, chattering madly like she never has before. "I may have drank your blood, but you've eaten her flesh - her temple. You consumed an innocent, and I only borrowed the sin from a sinner."
He wants to block out her voice. "Leave me alone!" he cries.
"You are pretty sick," she says, "Be honest - you only like her now that he is dead."
He is a monster too.
.
Look how ungrateful he is - how he runs from her when she has brought him as close to Godliness as he will never be. All carnivores are cannibals at some point. It is survival - a ceremony. The act of eating another carcass is considered a sign of respect in some countries. You spit on your enemies, you consume the ones you love.
Carnivores are always the holy ones, anyway. Bones, sinew, flesh. Just royal garb, just decorations. Ribs encircle your meaty heart like perfect wrappings. Blood is the most personal possession, gifting it is like giving away your soul. That's what he did - gave her his soul.
.
The desserts now make his stomach turns. It feels wrong, all rotten. He vomits - painful, cramping gasps - into the dirty toilet. All he can taste is her death, rancid meat, sickness. Poor Gretchen, he always knew he would break her heart eventually.
He just never expected to eat it, too.
She stands so proud, so full of herself that she could kill a innocent girl and consider this a homage to her own flawless image. Like Gretchen was the blood of a lamb. A gift.
She bangs on the bathroom door, playfully laughing as if it is some game, a inside joke. She laughs, "Come out, come out, our I'll blow your house down!"
She wipes the sick off his sleeve, she notices that something is on the side of the toilet. A hunting knife is stuck down with electrical tape. He slips it under his shirtsleeve and opens the bathroom door.
"Look who it is," she cackles, a odd look on her face. Has she always been this insane, or is he only noticing it now?
She grins and all at once she is - a statuesque woman screaming for help, a skeleton made of charred bones, a woman with a serpent intertwined around her, a crone, a dragon.
The simutanous image and sound of them all makes his head spin. Which is she, really? Who is she? "Whose body have you taken?" He asks, his voice crackling boyishly.
She laughs harshly again. "She doesn't need it anymore, though I suppose it is gallant of you to ask." She continues, "And anyway, you wouldn't have cared for my real face. It would be the death of you, I think. The beauty of it would burn you."
She slinks closer to him, in a way that would have been seductive when he allowed himself to be charmed by her. There was a gluttonous glint of thirst in her eyes.
The knife feels hot concealed against his wrist, and he absently thinks that it must have cut into his skin, but that is no longer important. She smiles greedily at him, as she draws herself closer to the spot on his neck where she drinks. Now the imprint of her mouth remains like a old scar from a dog bite.
Though there is no high left in him, there is still the dizziness. And he has to force himself to keep a steady hand as he takes the knife from his sleeve. He listens for a moment to the syrupy sound of her drinking.
He runs the curved blade deep into her belly. She gasps faintly, and clutches herself as a blackness - not blood, just a substance that is absence of everything, a complete blackness - pours from the wound. He imagines it as the chunks of his life that she has taken from him.
And then - like all brilliant ideas - it simply hits him.
Burn it to the ground. Burn everything.
The small house was so easy to ignite, the walls lined with old books and papers. Once it began, there would be no stopping it. Nothing slowed him as he doused the rooms with gasoline. She lies on the floor in a puddle of her own death, she gasps out: "You can't kill me."
So he takes out a match and says, after a short prayer in his head, faintly.
"I can try."
And the house is swallowed by fire.
.
after
He wanders the street alone now, he takes cabs home. Doesn't have a lot of friends. People see him on the street and can see, in his face, that he is haunted by something, someone. He crosses the street when he sees someone he doesn't know, but never crosses black cats. Bad luck.
No one asks him what happened that screwed with is head. Or what story lead to that patch of ragged scar tissue on his neck that looks like someone took a bite out of him. It is just one of those things that you don't talk about.
And when he hears about young men who are missing, he just looks the other way. Pretends he didn't hear it, because he didn't. He didn't. He didn't.
or, Hansel and the Witch - a retelling
Word Count: 2625
before
"Be careful walking home," his girlfriend Gretchen says, "Because people will kill nice boys in a city like this."
He nods, only half listening to her. His apartment is only three blocks away. He's lived here all his life - he isn't afraid. He loves Gretchen, he guesses. But she's just so afraid of everything - 'The City', the lights, the loud noises, the homeless people that ask for change, and the taxis. Constantly afraid that one of them will end up in the gutter.
"I'll be fine. Goodnight." he assures, and he begins to walk home. He goes through an empty alleyway that will cut the walk in half. He hears a sound, like the hum of a machine. Like a siren call.
As it turns out, the alley was not so empty.
A woman was leaning out of a first-floor apartment window. She had the greenest eyes he had ever seen, the kind of eyes that would take your soul, if you let them.
.
She looked to him like a old Hollywood film star - though she couldn't be older than twenty-five. Like a emaciated goddess of heroin and violence. Her face was carried by a pair of sharply cut cheekbones. Her head was much too heavy looking for her bony frame. Her skin had a green cast, like a corpse left in water for too long. Her hair was either blonde, red, or blue. He couldn't tell in this light, though maybe it was all of them.
"I could just eat you up." she grins at him, revealing long pearly incisors.
.
"Come closer, my pet," she murmurs, as he follows her into her apartment. "My soft little milksop, my lamb."
Before he knows what is happens, or even cares to know, she is feeding him. "You are so thin." It should seem strange coming from her skeletal figure, but it doesn't. And little does he know, he is swallowing handfuls of carefully portioned foxglove, coated with sugar and artificial dye. Too much could be fatal, so she encourages him to chew. He deliriously gobbles up the candy-apple globs of confection. (God knows the ingredients, he wonders, former lovers and pets like himself?) And is that a molar peeking out from his plate like a special treat? No no no, she insists. Just a dollop of burnt sugar, precious.
.
It doesn't seem strange when she sinks her teeth into his tender throat.
Not at all.
.
Witchy witch girl.
Gobbles up his willing bones, he is a priority for the moment. Delicious boy, all sweetness and unbroken skin. 'La la la,' she sings to herself, 'your history, feed it to me. It tastes like you, and you must be savored. I'm not a monster. I'm a goddess
Worship my murder.'
.
Days, months, years? Who can tell?
All he knows is that he is tired and sore. But she is with him, and that is good. And when she is with him always, she looks healthy, she is not so awfully thin. When she drinks from him, her hair is shiny and thick, she looks like a real girl. Almost.
His mind is not so warped by the high that he doesn't understand the connection between her sudden health and his new frailty. He understands the sacrifice. It's all for her.
It is worse when she is away - those few times she's disappeared, without a trace for weeks on end. He is left trapped in her apartment aimlessly looking at its eccentricities. Painted wax skulls from Mexico, a lamp made of antlers. Old prayer cards. And so many dolls. So much death made into some sort of cartoon joke.
All that she left in the refrigerator was stacks and stacks of desserts and treats. cakes and jello and pudding-filled éclairs. Flies encircle their sugary carcasses.
Yes, it is worse when she is gone. It is the drain without the high. It is withdrawal.
.
"I'm so hungry," she whispers, in a whimper. "So exhausted."
In the darkness, the utter darkness, she sounds nearly human.
Nearly.
.
The world waits for no man. She coils herself around him, like a blooming rose vine, a snake. And she postions herself against the wound on his neck, her kiss. Her drinking cup.
He doesn't know how she does it, besides the obvious act of her gorging on swallowfuls of his blood. But how does it fill her with his life? How does it vitalize her soul?
She smiles.
She bites down.
That old familiar sting, as she is suctioned against him like a leech. She doesn't need to bite, when she rips him open the blood flows freely, she just uses her teeth for fun. It drains out slowly, this is the point of the dance where there is an instant moment of pure thought, a eureka.
'It must be something with the foxglove in the food.' he thinks, and then, 'aren't foxgloves poisonous?'
And then it is gone. The idea is snatched away as if it were never there. Her face peers up, smeared with bright red cells. Her tongue laps up the residue with malicious glee.
And the moment her face is clean, the demon is gone. She is the same cold stoic goddess that he worships in her loneliness. "You're getting so thin, let's get you something to eat." she says.
.
It is summer now, when did it become summer? The apartment is without air conditioning, she doesn't seem to notice the heat, or how the sweat pours off them - pooling into puddles when they lay. She just lights candles, drapes herself in tacky jewelry, paints his body with bright henna smears, licks the ink off sugar-skulls.
He realizes that this feeling he has had for a while is fear. "I don't feel like a human anymore." he says. She doesn't react. Probably because she isn't a real person, and has never felt like one.
She sits like a blank Egyptian statue, staring.
The stomach pain is back, so strong it makes him dizzy. Like a tightly wound rope inside of him, throbbing with blood. Like a constant miscarriage. He stumbles out of his seat, sweat making his pants stick against the back of his legs. He sees white flashes, black dots in his vision. A Mexican skull stares at him - a masquerade, a gunfight, an opium room - all appears before him.
He screams, and then he crumbles to the floor with in a clatter.
She still looks on with a blank expression.
.
The air is like hummingbirds, like dust and ash. Heartbeats in your mouth, his blood. It is like the cut cords of a marionette, a over taunt viola, gutted and watered down. Needles and pins and fingernails. Patron saints crying.
But there is really no way to describe the day after night-long hallucinations.
.
He's begun to look at her differently, and she can tell.
This is alarming to her. She should be adored. She has been - in the old days, the good days, entire villages would devote days to her. Food, livestock, prayer. Blood spill'd on the alter, just for her. Begging her to bless their crops. A beautiful monster, they understood that. A fearsome creature - as awe inspiring as she is ferocious. They saw her as a lioness, a serpent, a succubus who made the milk run red if she didn't receive patronage.
He looked at her like someone who had betrayed him. The nerve of him, that boy. Treating a goddess like a cheating girlfriend, like someone human. Someone real.
So she feeds him more and more doses of foxglove, the extract baked into the crust of pies and cake fillings. It is getting worse for him, he sometimes screams deliriously about how it feels as if the headaches will kill him. That his head will swell with hairline cracks, and cave into itself. It hurts hurts hurts.
.
'How did this happen?' he wonders - how did it become normal for some siren, some monster, to suck out his soul one mouthful at a time. These things don't exist. Why is he dying for something that doesn't even exist?
She is trying to fatten him with, but it is pointless until she stops drinking from him. She sucks out all the nutrients, the life. He's dying and he doesn't know why.
.
She is worried. All this time and effort she wasted, and the foxglove is going to kill him. That can't happen. She won't let it. She won't let him try to run away either. Not after the set up is comfortable like this. No. She'll kill him first.
.
The day is rainy and grey, the kind of environment that you know something horrible will happen in.
There are no more of the bright joyous hallucinations, only the kind in the form of nightmares and specters. The horror and pain of someone waiting to die.
"I have a present for you," she says.
.
He thinks, "This is how she'll kill me. A knife to my throat? Being thrown in the oven?"
She folds his hand into hers, her sharp nails and long fingers, and holds it as he follows her down the steps. He feels queasy, and like it is the end.
She brings him in the basement, the cold and wet basement where he has never been before. And to the freezer, she opens it. And, sitting inside in separate pieces, is Gretchen - his girlfriend.
.
He can't stop screaming. And it hurts his throat like jagged nails. "You've been eating her," she proclaims, proudly. "In every pie, there was a little piece of her."
He wants to scream until it burns, but his voice keeps failing. "The foxglove was for my sake - to make you prime for drinking- but this, this was for you. To devour her, I've made you like a God."
He manages to cry out, "You're a monster!" but feels faint after doing so. It doesn't feel real, Gretchen isn't dead. Gretchen is too safe, she doesn't even like leaving the house after the sun is down. She isn't dead.
She smiles, "She's inside of you. You are higher on the food chain because of it. Aren't you proud?"
He turns and tries to run away from this, from her, from both of them. But he is weak and he stumbles up the steps. She follows behind him, chattering madly like she never has before. "I may have drank your blood, but you've eaten her flesh - her temple. You consumed an innocent, and I only borrowed the sin from a sinner."
He wants to block out her voice. "Leave me alone!" he cries.
"You are pretty sick," she says, "Be honest - you only like her now that he is dead."
He is a monster too.
.
Look how ungrateful he is - how he runs from her when she has brought him as close to Godliness as he will never be. All carnivores are cannibals at some point. It is survival - a ceremony. The act of eating another carcass is considered a sign of respect in some countries. You spit on your enemies, you consume the ones you love.
Carnivores are always the holy ones, anyway. Bones, sinew, flesh. Just royal garb, just decorations. Ribs encircle your meaty heart like perfect wrappings. Blood is the most personal possession, gifting it is like giving away your soul. That's what he did - gave her his soul.
.
The desserts now make his stomach turns. It feels wrong, all rotten. He vomits - painful, cramping gasps - into the dirty toilet. All he can taste is her death, rancid meat, sickness. Poor Gretchen, he always knew he would break her heart eventually.
He just never expected to eat it, too.
She stands so proud, so full of herself that she could kill a innocent girl and consider this a homage to her own flawless image. Like Gretchen was the blood of a lamb. A gift.
She bangs on the bathroom door, playfully laughing as if it is some game, a inside joke. She laughs, "Come out, come out, our I'll blow your house down!"
She wipes the sick off his sleeve, she notices that something is on the side of the toilet. A hunting knife is stuck down with electrical tape. He slips it under his shirtsleeve and opens the bathroom door.
"Look who it is," she cackles, a odd look on her face. Has she always been this insane, or is he only noticing it now?
She grins and all at once she is - a statuesque woman screaming for help, a skeleton made of charred bones, a woman with a serpent intertwined around her, a crone, a dragon.
The simutanous image and sound of them all makes his head spin. Which is she, really? Who is she? "Whose body have you taken?" He asks, his voice crackling boyishly.
She laughs harshly again. "She doesn't need it anymore, though I suppose it is gallant of you to ask." She continues, "And anyway, you wouldn't have cared for my real face. It would be the death of you, I think. The beauty of it would burn you."
She slinks closer to him, in a way that would have been seductive when he allowed himself to be charmed by her. There was a gluttonous glint of thirst in her eyes.
The knife feels hot concealed against his wrist, and he absently thinks that it must have cut into his skin, but that is no longer important. She smiles greedily at him, as she draws herself closer to the spot on his neck where she drinks. Now the imprint of her mouth remains like a old scar from a dog bite.
Though there is no high left in him, there is still the dizziness. And he has to force himself to keep a steady hand as he takes the knife from his sleeve. He listens for a moment to the syrupy sound of her drinking.
He runs the curved blade deep into her belly. She gasps faintly, and clutches herself as a blackness - not blood, just a substance that is absence of everything, a complete blackness - pours from the wound. He imagines it as the chunks of his life that she has taken from him.
And then - like all brilliant ideas - it simply hits him.
Burn it to the ground. Burn everything.
The small house was so easy to ignite, the walls lined with old books and papers. Once it began, there would be no stopping it. Nothing slowed him as he doused the rooms with gasoline. She lies on the floor in a puddle of her own death, she gasps out: "You can't kill me."
So he takes out a match and says, after a short prayer in his head, faintly.
"I can try."
And the house is swallowed by fire.
.
after
He wanders the street alone now, he takes cabs home. Doesn't have a lot of friends. People see him on the street and can see, in his face, that he is haunted by something, someone. He crosses the street when he sees someone he doesn't know, but never crosses black cats. Bad luck.
No one asks him what happened that screwed with is head. Or what story lead to that patch of ragged scar tissue on his neck that looks like someone took a bite out of him. It is just one of those things that you don't talk about.
And when he hears about young men who are missing, he just looks the other way. Pretends he didn't hear it, because he didn't. He didn't. He didn't.