A Fairytale Murder

By D. N. Smith

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 D. Norton-Smith

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There was once an old woman called Dympna who lived alone in the middle of a forest. Dympna had not always lived alone and had not always been old. In fact it is probably better to start this story a little earlier in her life and in the traditional manner.

Once upon a time a fair and beautiful baby with a pure soul was born to a peasant couple. They named the baby Dympna and she grew into a clever and generous child then eventually into a beautiful maiden. Dympna had a smile for everyone and was courted by many suitors yet Dympna was chaste and wanted to save her heart for her one true love so that when she did meet him their love would be pure.

Most girls would let the attention of so many suitors go to their head and become vain and unbearable but not Dympna. For as beautiful and enchanting as Dympna was she was also equally kind and loving. It was this side of Dympna’s personality which led her to train as a midwife and helper of the elderly. Dympna soon became an important part of her village community and delivered a new baby almost every month. When not delivering babies Dympna spent her time making medicines and ointments for her neighbours to help them with their minor illnesses and ailments.

One day, as Dympna was visiting the elderly residents of the village to take them her home made biscuits, she saw a man watching her. The man was not as handsome as some of Dympna’s suitors nor as richly dressed, but he had kind eyes and a genuine smile. It was perhaps this which made Dympna, for the first time in her life, accept an offer to venture out for an evening walk.

Dympna and the man, whose name was Sebastian, married and had three children. The eldest was a beautiful and inquisitive girl named Elspeth. The middle child was a quiet and intelligent boy named Francis. The youngest was a gentle and loving girl called Lydia. As the children grew up and had children of their own Dympna and Sebastian grew old together.

As Dympna and Sebastian reached the age of five score years and ten their love grew stronger each day but neither their love nor Dympna’s medicines were enough to save Sebastian when he succumbed to pneumonia. Dympna and her children wept as they sat by Sebastian’s bed but, just as they knew that their love could not save Sebastian, they also knew that their love for each other would help them to grow happy again. Dympna was wrong in this belief.

Once Sebastian had died Dympna soon began to hate living in the village. There was no street, no tree, no dip in the road that did not remind her of Sebastian and make her heart ache all over again. Though she was much loved in the village and her neighbours begged her to stay, Dympna felt that she could no longer bear the pain and so decided to leave the very next day.

Dympna left the village on a sunny autumn day. She walked for several hours until she reached the next village where her sister lived. She had only been in the village for three days when her heart began to ache again. Thinking that this was because she had visited the village on several occasions with her husband Sebastian, Dympna decided to set up home in a village to which she had never been. Yet here her heart began to ache again. Dympna travelled from village to village selling her medicine to earn money and trying to heal her heart but no sooner had she settled than her heart would begin to ache again. It finally ached so acutely that she thought it would shatter into a thousand pieces.

It was then that Dympna realized that the ache was caused, not only by her loss, but also by the love she saw around her. In every village that she had visited in the three years since Sebastian’s death she had seen young couples courting and falling in love, older couples celebrating anniversaries and couples rejoicing at the birth of their first baby. Although Dympna had a soul and spirit too pure and kind to begrudge anyone this happiness, each moment of love made her heart shatter a little bit more until she felt that she could no longer bear the pain. Dympna decided that the only way to heal her heart would to be to become a recluse.

Dympna spent some of her money on supplies and wandered into the forest with just a chicken, a cow and a sack of flour. After wandering for two weeks and two days Dympna had seen not a single person and felt that she was far enough from humanity to allow her heart a chance to heal.

Dympna had been sleeping under the canopy of the trees for two weeks and two days but knew that this was not a home and her heart needed a home to heal. Dympna had no bricks and had no axe with which to cut logs but she did have her cow, her chicken and her flour and so Dympna began to cook the biscuits which she used to cook for the elderly people of her village. Dympna made each biscuit as large as her head and as thick as her arm and used them to build a cottage.

Over time Dympna’s heart began to heal but every night, as she went to bed, she thought of Sebastian and wished that she was with him. In the years that Dympna lived in the forest she saw very few people other than a woodcutter and his wife. They wore shabby clothes and looked unhappy a lot of the time but were happy to buy supplies from the nearest village in exchange for gold coins from Dympna’s savings. Over the years Dympna bought furniture, a stove and more cooking ingredients which she used to make chocolate and sugar decorations for her house. She then made small tiles of gingerbread to lay across the window sills and to build a fence around her garden. This she did to make sure that, even in the dead of winter, there was something for the birds and small animals of the forest to eat as Dympna could not bear to see anyone or anything suffer. Not even the smallest creature of the forest.

One day Dympna was tending to the broken leg of a squirrel which she had found by her door that morning. This was not unusual as many of the animals of the forest came to Dympna when they needed help. As she finished putting a splint on the squirrel’s leg Dympna heard a scritch, scritch, scratch. It was coming from outside the cottage.

Dympna looked out of her window and saw two of the dirtiest most bedraggled children she had ever seen. There stood a boy and a girl who were nothing but skin and bone and they were nibbling at Dympna’s window sills. Well this cannot do thought Dympna. Those poor children look like they haven’t eaten in days and they look so sad. I will invite them in and feed them back to health then give them money and food to continue their journey. Who could do such a thing as to let children wander the forest uncared for?

Little did Dympna know that the children were actually the children of the woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter was a weak and easily led man and his wife, who was actually the children’s step-mother, was cruel and greedy. The woodcutter’s wife had finally grown tired of having no food and no money and had convinced her husband that they would have a much better and more comfortable life without children to clothe and feed. The woodcutter was as good as husband as he was a poor father and so agreed with his wife’s plan to abandon the children deep in the forest in the hope that a kind stranger would take them in (or a wild beast would eat them).

After a failed attempt to find their way home and several days without food the children, whose names were Hansel and Gretel, came upon Dympna’s cottage. As they took small but desperate bites out of the window sills Dympna came out of her cottage.

“Poor children” said Dympna with tears welling in her eyes and her shattered heart just about bursting with pity “How did you come to be in such a state? How far from home you must be”. The children looked at Dympna with wild, wide eyes and did not speak. They must be traumatized thought Dympna they have been struck dumb by a lack of food and a lack of love. I will take care of them and help them to recover. Maybe they will even help my broken heart to love again.

“Come in children” said Dympna “Come sit by the fire and let me make you some food”. The children entered the cottage looking scared and huddled close together. They remained this way throughout the meal of rich, warming, vegetable stew which Dympna made using potatoes, onions, carrots and the leftover bone and marrow from her meal of lamb the day before. As the days passed the children grew fatter and began to look more healthy. As they grew healthier Dympna began to feel her heart warm and swell at the forgotten joy of raising children. She began to hug the children when they looked sad and pinch their cheeks at the happiness that their increasing girth and health made her feel. A picture of joy in a pretty little gingerbread house in the middle of the forest!

Dympna had not felt this way for many years. Little did Dympna know, however, that all was not well in her little house. The children had yet to speak to Dympna but she took this to just be shyness caused by whatever troubles they had suffered at the hands of the parents who had abandoned them. She heard them whispering in their room at night and so knew that they were not mute. Let them talk to me in their own time thought Dympna as long as they are happy and healthy that is all that matters.

The children did have the power of speech but unfortunately they did not have the power of clear thought. Having suffered years of neglect and apathy at the hands of their parents Hansel and Gretel had built their own world in which reality slowly became disjointed and the poor children became paranoid fantasists. They whispered tales of giants and trolls and witches to each other late into the night and began to see threat and intrigue in every shadow. Not long before reaching Dympna’s house they had been so convinced that a squirrel and a tree had been plotting against them that they had hidden in a bush for several hours until they squirrel passed their path again and had leapt upon it and broken it’s leg so that they could escape. There had of course been no plot between the quite simple squirrel and quite inanimate tree however Hansel and Gretel were, by then, so beyond having a normal grasp on reality that no-one could have convinced them of the squirrel’s innocence.

The second that the children had seen Dympna they had known what they were up against. They had never seen a woman so old and that could only mean one thing. A witch! It was with fear and trepidation that they entered the cottage. In reality their nutritionally starved bodies were just drawn in by the smell of stew and the promise of warmth but in the not-so-rational parts of Hansel and Gretel’s minds they were being drawn in by some evil magic spell.

As Hansel and Gretel lay in bed on their first night in the cottage they whispered about the witch. “Did you see the way she looked at us?” said Gretel. “With hunger. Surely she means to eat us” said Hansel. They were not entirely wrong. Dympna had indeed looked at them with a yearning in her eyes but it was a hunger to love and be loved again. “Did you see the stew?” whispered Hansel, quaking in his bed. “It had a bone in it. A bone of a boy I’d wager” and so the conversations continued.

As the children grew fatter and healthier they grew no less delusional. It takes more than a few weeks of kindness to heal the damage of years of neglect. Each medicine that Dympna made was viewed as a “potion”, each hug as an attempt to squeeze the life out of them and each pinch of the cheek as a way to test if they were fat enough to make a stew out of. Unfortunately, for Dympna, as they grew more paranoid they also grew stronger.

It was Christmas Eve when the children finally lost all grip on reality. For Dympna it had been the happiest day of her life since Sebastian had died. She had finally found the courage to begin to live again and her heart was almost healed. She went, for the first time in many years, to the nearest village. There she sat for hours as the winter sun glinted off the icing sugar white snow and watched children peering longingly in the window of the toy shop and young couples in love ice skating on the pond. For the first time since Sebastian’s death she felt happiness at the sight of their love and she smiled. Whilst in the village Dympna wrote a letter to her children to tell them of Hansel and Gretel and her plans to bring them up as her own for Dympna had grown to love the children very much.

Dympna bought fresh meat and root vegetables, baskets of candied fruits and jars of honey wine to take back to the cottage. She smiled all of the way home as she planned her special meal for the evening, at which she was going to tell the beautiful children her plans. As she walked she enjoyed the feeling of the crisp air in her lungs and picked sprigs of holly with which to decorate the cottage. Dympna felt like her life, and her will to live, had been returned to her once more.

On arriving home Dympna sat in the garden to rest awhile. Despite the cold she felt hot and sweaty from her long walk and she soon found herself drifting to sleep. While she slept the children watched her with wariness and cunning. They had seen the many treats in Dympna’s baskets and knew exactly what they were for.

“She is planning a feast” said Gretel, eyeing their patron with fear and loathing. “We have not eaten this way in all of our time here. Why would she treat us like this today?”

“It is obvious is it not?” said Hansel, taking on a superior air (as he was a whole year older than Gretel). “She means to eat us tomorrow on Christmas Day. You know that witches celebrate that by eating children and dancing naked around a fire”.

It was no surprise that Hansel had concocted this scenario in his head. He had recently begun to think about girls more and, although he could not bear to think of the witch Dympna naked he got some thrill and feeling of being a grown up just from saying the word “naked”. Furthermore, in Hansel’s mind, all witches danced around fires at some point. Probably just before eating children!

“Whatever shall we do?” asked Gretel, beginning to cry. “Don’t worry” said Hansel puffing out his chest and enjoying his chance to play at being both a grown up and a hero. “I will think of something. Stay here and watch the witch as I go for a rest to think awhile” and with that Hansel went for a lie down to do some serious, grown up man thinking.

It was at this point that Dympna began to stir. She felt well rested but hungry and decided to begin to prepare her special celebration meal. As she tried to stand up, however, her back ached from her prolonged rest in the blistering cold and it refused to move. As she tried to stand once more she saw her darling, beautiful Gretel peering at her from across the garden. “Come and help me my darling” she said “I can hardly stand”. Gretel watched for a while longer, unable to move for fear but then eventually (out of duty or momentary compassion perhaps) went to help Dympna out of her chair.

“Thank you my sweetheart” said Dympna “Now come and help me to stoke the fire for our evening meal”. She called me sweetheart thought Dympna as her panic began to rise. It is true, Hansel was right. She is planning to cook us and my heart will be the dessert! As Gretel helped Dympna into the cottage she began to panic more and more. Where is Hansel? she thought why won’t he hurry up? Whatever are we to do? At that very moment, however, Hansel was not thinking of a plan. He had been, however thinking of plans was very tiring work, especially when lying on a bed on which the late afternoon sun glinted through the frost covered window and made a pool of warmth right over Hansel’s bed. Hansel had fallen quite asleep and was not going to be any help to the now deliriously terrified Gretel.

Dympna had a large pot bellied stove in her cottage. It was much larger than any stove that Gretel had ever seen. The reason for this was that it was the only source of heat for the cottage and in winter the forest could get quite cold. Gretel, of course, thought that the reason was that it was large enough to cook children. It was for this reason that she panicked and acted so terribly when Dympna asked for her help.

“Oh my darling child” sighed Dympna, who was now in a lot of pain and regretting not taking more rests on her walk back from the village. “Please could you lean into the stove a little and stoke the fire. I cannot even bend”. Gretel looked at Dympna with eyes as wide as saucers and a face as pale as snow. She could not move. This is it thought Gretel she plans to cook me right now. Oh Hansel, where are you? In the bedroom Hansel slept on. “Darling child please lean into the stove and stoke the fire” repeated Dympna a little louder thinking that perhaps Gretel had not heard her. Still Gretel stood still. Her eyes grew bigger and started to well with tears and her heart beat so fast that she could feel it even down to her toes. She could not move or think out of the pure terror which now gripped her body.

Dympna gave one more sigh. She had seen Gretel like this before. At least once a week she would take to this malady. She would tremor and stare and be unable to move. Usually Hansel took her away and when they returned she was well again but today Hansel was nowhere to be seen. Dympna had not yet worked out why Gretel did this. She took it to perhaps be an illness of the brain or heart. What she did know was that when Gretel went into one of her fits it was pointless trying to get her to move or snap out of it. Oh well thought Dympna I shall have to put up with the pain and stoke the fire myself. I must begin to prepare our celebration meal so that these beautiful children can learn how much I love them and want to bring them up as my own. With that thought Dympna leaned slowly down and into the stove, groaning with pain at every movement.

As Dympna disappeared into the stove until only her bottom and legs could be seen, Gretel was struck by inspiration and suddenly found the will to move. She sprung into action and with all of her might gave Dympna an almighty shove. Dympna tumbled into the stove and Gretel locked the door behind her.

Gretel ran to Hansel to wake him up. “We are free” she cried. “I pushed the wicked witch into the stove and she is burnt to a crisp. Let us grab all of the food and money in the cottage and make our escape” and that is, of course, what the poor children did.

They ran away into the forest and travelled for many years from village to village but never found peace of mind as they saw giants and trolls and witches and conspiracies in every doorway and alley. They eventually died, only ten years after leaving the witch, when they came across a lion who they believed would help them to defeat evil with his magical golden mane.

The lion, of course, was not magical. Nor was he in the mood to befriend young humans. He was, in fact, quite hungry having been kept in a circus cage for over 9 months and fed only scraps and so that was the end of Hansel and Gretel, although the lion did look particularly lazy and well fed for his performance the next night. Much to the annoyance of the ring master who had quite a lucrative wager running on whether the lion would eat one of the clowns or just take the leg off one of the acrobats.

Dympna did not burn to a crisp in the stove. The fire had been hardly alight and, as Hansel and Gretel had fled, she had been merely unconscious which, thankfully, led to amnesia about the cause of her fall into the stove so helped her retain her belief of the general goodness of mankind. She remained in the stove for a week and a day until her daughter Elspeth arrived. She had come to visit and to meet the wonderful children that had brought her mother’s heart back to life but all that she found was a now sad and frail woman locked in a stove.

When Dympna had recovered from her shock and malnutrition she began to worry about the children. Thinking only good of the world she thought that the children must surely have been kidnapped and she set about finding them. After wandering the forest for several weeks she finally grew too tired to carry on and returned to her cottage. Dympna had lived a long life and was now very old.

Too tired to continue any longer Dympna set about the business of dying and, knowing that she would soon be reunited with her beloved Sebastian, she put on her best dress, plaited her long white hair and sat by the fire in her rocking chair. It was here that she died with a smile on her face.

***

Author Bio

D.N.Smith has worked as a Feature Writer for website Suite 101 and as a freelance ghostwriter. Dulcinea’s short stories can be found in books from Wyvern Publications, Rebel Books LLP and Bridge House Publishing. She also works as an editor for Wyvern Publications and runs a forum for writers and illustrators called Pen and Palette. Dulcinea can be found at http://www.dulcineanortonsmith.co.uk where you will also find links to her work both online and in print.

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