The Grimm Curse (Once Upon A Time Is Now)

  THE GRIMM CURSE

  Once Upon A Time Is Now

  By

  Stephen Carpenter

  For Cameron

  Cover design by Lauren Polizzi

  Copyright © 2010 Stephen Carpenter

  All Rights Reserved

  WARNING

  If you’re the kind of person who thinks that “fairy tales” are sweet, fun little stories for little kids, this book isn’t for you.

  If you think that big bad wolves, evil stepmothers, and witches aren’t really real, then you’re in the wrong section of the store, my friend. Go search somewhere else. I recommend the Children’s section. Because this book is about bad stuff—really bad stuff that happens to real people. This book is about evil.

  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to ignore the kind of evil I’m talking about. I used to be that way and believe me, ignorance is bliss.

  Well, it wasn’t really bliss for me. Actually, I had a pretty crappy life before all of this stuff started happening to me, almost a year ago, around my fifteenth birthday. I had lousy parents, who turned out not to be my parents at all. I was an “at risk” kid—that’s a laugh—if they thought I was “at risk” before, they should have seen the kind of night I had last week, fighting a Gorgon with only a mirror, a Vow of Initiation (which didn’t work), and a friend, who is in the hospital as I’m telling you this. That’s risk.

  But before we get into all of that, I just wanted to warn you first. Because if you think that the words “Once upon a time” mean that the story happened a long time ago and so it never really happened, I’ve got news for you.

  Once upon a time is now.

  CHAPTER ONE

  My Grimm Life

  My name is Jake Grimm, and I am a direct descendant of the Brothers Grimm, who wrote the Grimm Fairy Tales. Actually, the brothers didn’t so much write the stories as write them down. The brothers went around collecting folk tales in Germany in the early 1800’s; they heard stories from peasants, gypsies, their own servants, as well as some not-so-nice people from the German aristocracy. Then the brothers published the tales and became rich and famous. But there was a price to be paid for their fame and fortune—a price I am paying to this day. For example, I am typing this with one hand. What happened to my other hand? Don’t ask. You’ll find out soon enough.

  I didn’t know I was a Grimm when I was a little kid. I thought my name was Cruise Crubbel. I swear, I am not making this up. What kind of person would make up a name like that? My foster mother, that’s who. She was a big fan of Tom Cruise. And my foster father’s last name was Crubbel, so these two geniuses are responsible for that casserole of stupidity they called a name. They might as well have hung a sign around my neck that said KICK THE CRAP OUT OF ME ALL OF THE TIME.

  So I went through grade school and half of middle school with that messed-up name. Can you believe that? I no longer go by that name, for the obvious reason that it’s idiotic. And it’s not my real name, anyway. The worst part about that stupid name was that it provoked a lot of fights with other kids—one fight in particular which had serious consequences. So, for the purposes of this story, you will never hear the name Cruise Crubbel again. It is the Name That Shall Not Be Spoken. I am Jake Grimm, and I will never be anything else. If you need to know more about Tom Cruise, you and I have nothing in common. Go watch TMZ.

  I found out that my real name was Jacob Grimm when I was thirteen. My foster mother, Heather, and my foster father, Gerald, were arguing about money, as usual. Whenever they drank, they argued about money. And they drank a lot—especially Gerald. Really, the less said about Heather and Gerald the better. To tell you the truth, I was terribly ashamed of them, which is a sorry situation for a kid. But I’ll tell you enough to give you the basic idea, and I’ll tell it quickly because it’s boring.

  Heather was forty-five and she dressed like a teenager. She had dyed her hair blonde so many times it was a traffic-light yellow color, and thin and brittle, like the straw in an old broom. She worked as a stylist at a ratty hair salon in a strip mall on Van Nuys Boulevard, near the apartment where we lived, in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a big important job, but at least she had a job.

  Gerald, to the best of my recollection, never had a job in the nine years I lived with him and Heather. Gerald was bald and fat and had skinny arms and hairy shoulders. He called himself “self-employed,” but the reality was that Gerald sat around the apartment all day, drinking beer and gambling on poker and blackjack online. But on the fifteenth day of each month, Gerald would sober up, put some clothes on, and leave for the day. He would come back late, his face angry—and sunburned if he had been to the horse track—his breath reeking of beer. Then he and Heather would argue. It would go something like this:

  Heather: “Did you go to the track?”

  Gerald: (muttering something).

  Heather: “Where’s the check from County?”

  Gerald: (grunting sound).

  Heather: “You couldn’t even wait one day to go gamble with that check, could you? That’s not what that money’s for, Gerald…”

  And so on. It was excruciatingly boring to hear every month. But as I got older, I grew more and more curious about this monthly “check from County.” Heather always lowered her voice when she talked about it, which only made me more curious. What was this mysterious check? Gerald didn’t have a job, and Heather kept her own paychecks away from him.

  So one night, at the age of thirteen, on the fifteenth of October, I slipped out of bed just before midnight—after Heather and Gerald had passed out—and I started sorting through the mess of papers on Gerald’s “desk,” which was actually just a sad little card table. I found a ripped-open envelope with the Los Angeles County seal on the outside, and inside I found a check stub—the part of the check you’re supposed to keep for your records. The check was for $841 dollars and payable to Gerald Crubbel. At the bottom it said “Los Angeles County Dept. of Child Services.” And at the very bottom of the stub was a long series of numbers, followed by some odd-looking characters that I recognized as computer code.

  How would a thirteen year-old who didn’t have a computer recognize computer code? My friend Mike Wong had shown me. I use the term “friend” loosely, because neither Mike or I had any real friends. Mike was painfully shy, and I’m fairly certain he was a genius. Both of his parents were software engineers with some big company, and Mike had access to the most awesome computer you could imagine, right in his house, with an insanely fast internet connection. Mike lived down the street from me, and as we passed his house on the way home from school, he would get a gleam in his eye and say, “Want to do some hacking?” And then we would go to his house and Mike would zip around online, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

  We never did anything you could really call “hacking.” We just liked calling it that because it sounded cooler than what it really was—a couple of kids fooling around on a fancy computer. The worst thing we ever did was break into the school’s lame data system and find out what the other kids’ grades were. But Mike had shown me about source code, so I took the check stub and settled in at Gerald’s crappy laptop and started a little hacking of my own.

  By noon the next day, on a sunny Sunday, October sixteenth, while Gerald and Heather slept off the booze, I discovered that I had been adopted at the age of four, and that my real name was Jacob Grimm.

  You’d think that kind of revelation would be upsetting to a thirteen year-old. But I wasn’t upset at all.

  I was relieved.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Grimmer and Grimmer

  I didn’t know at the age of thirteen that I was a descen
dent of the Grimm family. I just knew I wasn’t Cruise Crubbel (whoops—FORGET that I mentioned that name). The main thing was, I knew then that I wasn’t related to Heather and Gerald, and that made me feel just great. For the rest of my thirteenth year, I felt like a painful splinter had been removed from deep under my skin. Some itch had been scratched. Some answer to a question I had never really understood had been given. I’d always had a weird feeling that I didn’t belong in Van Nuys with Heather and Gerald, but I had no idea where else I might belong. The news that I wasn’t really their child gave me hope for an answer to that question.

  But the next year, when I turned fourteen and began the eighth grade, that’s when the trouble started. That’s when I became at risk.

  It started with the book—The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Stories—which I found in the middle school’s pathetic library. Like I said, I didn’t know back then that I was one of those Grimm’s, but I didn’t know anyone else with that name, so I was curious. I checked the book out and read every story—all 211 of them—in the two weeks I was allowed the book. Then I checked it out again and read them all again. I read some of them more than once, more than twice, more than three times…Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin... I was fascinated with them. I would even go online, after Gerald was asleep, and read articles and reviews and papers about the famous stories.

  It was all new to me. Heather and Gerald didn’t read me any bedtime stories as a kid. Gerald once let me look at a racing form until I fell asleep. That’s about as close as I ever came to being “read to sleep.” So the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Stories was my first real encounter with the tales that most kids grow up knowing by heart.

  I wound up checking out “The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Stories” so many times that the school librarian said I couldn’t check it out again. This seemed so outrageously stupid and unfair that I stole the book from the school library. I know stealing is wrong, but c’mon. A librarian forbidding a student from checking out a book? A librarian? This, by the way, is the same librarian who came up with the library’s slogan: Give a hoot—read a book!

  She is The Librarian Who Shall Remain Nameless. What a jerk.

  Anyway, they caught me with the book one day during study hall, and I got in trouble. By that time my grades had been slipping for a while—I was spending all of my time studying the Grimm stories. I couldn’t have cared less about my grades, which is not an approach to school that I recommend. Everybody started coming down on me, hard. Heather, my teachers, Gerald, and, after one particularly bad day, the County of Los Angeles.

  L.A. County. Talk about jerks. A parade of jerks.

  The final straw broke when Skip Jergen and I had a fight. It wasn’t really a fight at all. Here’s what happened: Skip Jergen was bigger than all of the other eighth graders. He had really short blonde hair—so short he almost looked bald—and he wore the same black leather jacket every day, even if it was a hundred degrees. Skip was the kind of person who could sense what made you mad, or afraid, or upset, and then he would grind down on that thing until you ran off crying or moved to the other side of the hall when he passed. And Skip, you could tell, liked that. He had cold blue eyes and a cruel mouth that curled up in a smile whenever he was taunting or tormenting someone.

  Skip had tried on a few occasions to taunt me; about my height (I was tall for my age, but skinny), about the fact that I had no friends, about my clothes, or my hair, or the fact that I was always carrying a book about “fairies.” None of it got to me. I couldn’t care less about Skip Jergen.

  But then one day, in gym class, Skip started in on me about my name. It went like this:

  Skip: “Hey Cruiseee, wanna go cruisin’?”

  Me: ignoring him.

  Skip: “Hey Cruise, why don’t you and me cruuuise up some chicks? Or how about some fairies?”

  Here’s what I was thinking: if you’re going to insult someone, at least be creative about it. But Skip wasn’t creative. He was as dumb as a bag of hair, and he could see his taunting was getting to me. I felt the back of my neck turn hot, and then Skip turned up the heat. He got in my face and started saying, “Why don’t ya cruise on outta here? Take a cruise to planet gay, Cruiser…”

  I don’t know exactly what came over me, but I turned and looked right in his face and said, “Hey, Skip-rope, why don’t you shut your Skippie peanut butter cup hole? In fact, why don’t you do us all a favor and skip right on down to hell, Skip-for-brains.”

  You could tell from the look on Skip’s face that no kid had ever talked to him that way before. He had no idea what to say, so he pushed me. I knew the push was coming, so I had put my right foot behind me for balance, and then I did something that surprised both Skip and me.

  I pushed back.

  Skip was so surprised that he fell right over and the back of his head banged on the gym floor. Then, to the great surprise of the group of boys who had crowded around us, Skip Jergen began to cry. The gym coach came over and helped Skip to his feet. Skip was whimpering and holding the back of his head. When he took his hand away, I saw a drop of blood on his fingers.

  The instant I saw the blood I knew I was in a world of crap. In that instant, I had gone from being an ignored underachiever and had officially become a Big Problem.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I Am Diagnosed As Totally Mental And I Run Away From Home

  The jerk parade blossomed into a full-on, three-ring jerk circus. I saw counselors, shrinks, a “community relations” cop, and a friend of Heather’s who had a “degree” in “spiritual psychology” from Groovy University in Santa Monica (that’s not the real name—frankly, I just can’t bring my one good hand to type the real name of that so-called university). I was diagnosed as having ADD, ADHD, Adolescent Antisocial Disorder, Borderline Transient Sociopathic Tendencies, and Heather’s groovy friend said there was a “dark energy” in my aura. I told her to shove my dark energy up her aura. I got in trouble with Heather and Gerald for telling her that, but I had heard enough crap from jerks. Besides, it shut her up.

  I was “individuating.” I was “thinking independently and acting out.”

  I was nearly puking, is what I was doing. I had pushed a bully who needed pushing more than just about anyone I’ve ever seen—except for the vicious, inhuman creatures you’re about to meet.

  The one good thing that came out of this mess was that I found out I was a genius—sort of. I was sitting in the exam room of one of the counselors and I snuck a look at my file while I was waiting. Turns out I have eleventy-billion mental and emotional “problems” but I also have an IQ of 152. I guess the only thing scarier than a “troubled” adolescent is a troubled adolescent who’s smarter than all of the adults who are supposed to know how to handle a kid like me.

  Anyway, they gave me all kinds of tests. Then they gave me lectures and pills. I never took any of them, to belly or to heart. Bottom line, I got kicked out of school and I was supposed to go to a new school—a “special” school for “adolescents with behavior issues,” but I decided screw that.

  So, to bring this sorry chapter to a close, just after dawn, on the first morning Heather dropped me off at “special” school, I waited until her banged-up Corolla turned the corner, and then I crossed the street to a bus stop. I couldn’t have cared less where the next bus was headed, but I was gonna get on it. I was gone.

  And this is where it gets weird. There was a homeless guy sleeping on the bus stop bench, an empty bottle of something in his hand. He was filthy and he stank worse than Gerald after a day at the track. Loser smell, I thought.

  But that random, ragged old dude changed my whole life with three words. That’s how quickly your life can turn: three words were spoken to me by some drunk I had never seen before, and would never see again, and suddenly everything changed.

  “Come home, Jacob.”

  I had been staring at the special school, which looked like a prison. I was feeling very happy I would never set foot in the
re when I heard the old man’s voice speaking my name. I turned and saw that the filthy old guy was sitting straight up, his watery red eyes staring at me, like he was looking right into my soul.

  “Come home, Jacob!” he shouted fiercely, gobs of spit spewing from his crusty mouth.

  It was weird enough to hear him yelling my name and looking right through me, but the really weird part was the sound of his voice. It’s hard to explain, but the voice didn’t seem to be coming from him. His lips were moving, saying the words, but the voice seemed to be coming from inside my head. All other sounds—traffic, people passing by—all of it went away and the only thing I could hear was that voice in my head. Like I was wearing earbuds, with an iPod playing the “crazy” playlist. It sent a shiver through my whole body—not a shiver, actually…more of a small earthquake. Time seemed to stop, and for a second I thought I was losing it. Maybe I really was mental. Then the bottle rolled off the old guy’s lap and shattered on the concrete, and the sounds from the real world came rushing back and the old man flopped back down on the bench and started snoring again.

  Before I could think another thought, a bus rolled up with the words “Downtown - Union Station” on its electronic destination sign. The bus stopped and the driver opened the door and looked right at me. I looked back at the snoring homeless guy, then got on the bus and paid my fare and found a seat near the back. I looked back at the bus stop as we pulled into traffic and the crusty old guy was gone.

  On the bus ride, I had a long time to think about what had just happened. It takes two hours to reach Union Station from Van Nuys. But once the bus pulled up to the train station downtown I had figured out a couple of things. First, that I wasn’t crazy. I don’t think crazy people worry about being crazy, or even know that they’re crazy. Something had actually happened—something that defied logic, and was not just some weird coincidence. The whole thing had a special feeling. It meant something. This was the first of many times I would hear or see things that I couldn’t possibly have heard or seen, as you’re about to find out.