INTRODUCTION
BY MARIE O’REGAN AND PAUL KANE
Curses.
You’ve gotta love ’em.
That staple of any fairy tale, the core of the morality stories we’ve all grown up with – stories that teach us lessons, feed our belief that guilt should be punished, keep us on the straight and narrow path, hopefully… The classic examples draw from folklore across the world, and in this anthology you’ll find stories drawing inspiration from the tales of Norway, Denmark, France and more. They include tales by the likes of Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm (the originals written by the latter being much, much darker than a lot of people realise). Sleeping Beauty, for instance, pricking her finger and dropping to sleep for all that time. And look at Little Red Riding Hood, whose family was certainly cursed by that wolf – a curse in itself, if you believe some of the takes on it. Snow White as well, cursed by that witch of a queen and her poison apple. But, without the bad, how would we recognise the good?
Our aim in this book was simple. To use the idea of being cursed as a jumping-off point, offering writers the chance to rework some of the classics – as Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple do in “Little Red”, Neil Gaiman does in “Troll Bridge”, Lilith Saintcrow in “Haza and Ghani”, and Christina Henry in “As Red As Blood, As White As Snow” – making them their own and presenting very different spins on the familiar. At the same time we wanted to include new, modern “cursed” stories – morality tales from the likes of Christopher Fowler (“Hated”), James Brogden (“Skin”), Catriona Ward (“At That Age”), and Margo Lanagan (“The Girl From The Hell”). Not all of these stories fit the traditional fairy tale style, but all of them share the dark heart at such stories’ core.
Authors were encouraged to think outside of the box – or even inside it, literally, as you’ll see in M.R. Carey’s darkly comic “Henry and the Snakewood Box” and Michael Marshall Smith’s “Look Inside” – whilst drawing inspiration from sources such as Peter Pan (Christopher Golden’s “Wendy, Darling”) or the Bluebeard legend (Angela Slatter’s “New Wine”). Not to mention creating their own mythologies (Jen Williams’ “Listen”), drawing inspiration from or blending others (Alison Littlewood’s “The Merrie Dancers”), creating curses complete with their own rules (Tim Lebbon’s “Again” and Maura McHugh’s “Faith & Fred”), or even bringing in horror staples (Charlie Jane Anders’ riotous “Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie”).
By the time you’ve finished reading all the amazing stories from these outstanding authors, all at the top of their game, you’ll realise that curses come in all shapes and sizes and are hidden in the most unlikely of places – as if you needed any more incentive to beware.
Why, they might even come in the form of words in an anthology… You just never know.
Curses.
You’ve gotta love ’em.
MARIE O’REGAN AND PAUL KANE
Derbyshire, July 2019.
CASTLE CURSED
Jane Yolen
The curse crawled silent as a serpent
Through the roots of the hedge.
Wallflowers wilted, though the garden
Remained as if painted onto the ground.
A hawk in a deep stoop falls
Bill-first onto the loam,
The moat serpent floats.
Horses stop between one whinny and the next.
Three guards, still on duty, draw no pay
For a hundred years, but still keep
Most of the castle safe,
Though not the tower room where the princess sleeps.
She is caught between one sigh and the next,
Lips pursed as if inviting a kiss,
Or tasting the sourness of age,
Or regretting everything except the needle in her palm.
AS RED AS BLOOD, AS WHITE AS SNOW
CHRISTINA HENRY
“It would please me more than anything in the wide world to see this ring upon your finger, for it would mean your consent to be my wife,” he said, and knelt before her.
A murmur went around the room – a rush of approval from the courtiers – for what more could their princess want than this prince? He was wealthy and handsome and came from a fair land, or so it was said, for his land was so distant that none among them had ever seen it.
His manners were so delightful that he had immediately been dubbed “Prince Charming”, though of course no one would show such disrespect by calling him this within his earshot.
Snow did not find him charming. When she looked into his dark, dark eyes she saw not the fizzy delight of charm but the flicker of a tongue through sharp teeth.
He held the ring before her, his smile white and easy and expectant. Charming had chosen his moment well. She could hardly refuse him before the whole court, however much she wished to throw the ring in his face and flee.
Snow’s eyes flickered to the King and Queen. Her stepmother’s mouth was flat, the corners of her eyes tight with fear. Snow’s father nodded and smiled like an old dotard, like he was enchanted – which he was.
The Prince waited, for he had all the time in the world to wait, and he knew what her answer must be. She saw all of this in his face, in the unworried curve of lips, in his eyes where the snake coiled.
“Of course I will,” she said, and she was proud that her voice was clear and ringing and that no one in the court would hear the terror boiling inside her.
She wished she had the courage to run, but a princess is raised to be polite above all else, and if she refused him there would be Consequences – and Consequences always meant war, particularly when a man’s pricked honor was involved. Snow loved her country and her people. She did not wish for them to suffer. So she had to take the ring, even though she knew it was a trap.
Snow saw, as if from a distance, her hand moving slowly toward Charming’s, saw the fine trembling of her blood underneath her white skin, saw the triumph slither across his fair face as he took her fingers.
Her body quailed as he touched her. The shudder seemed to please him all the more. His grip tightened until it was hard enough to bruise, and she thought he might be testing her, to see how much she would take before she cried out.
I will not, she thought, and her teeth ground together. I will not give him the pleasure.
The moment the ring slid over her knuckle and into place, it clamped down cruelly and bound to her skin with small sharp teeth. The ruby shifted in its setting, seeming to watch her like a bloodied eye.
His arm wound through hers, looking for all the world like a lover’s clasp, as they turned to face the court. Only Snow knew he held her in place, her butterfly wings flapping uselessly under his pin.
He kept her close for many hours, and she felt her smile straining but it did not falter. Snow would not show him weakness, though she knew he felt her revulsion and seemed to secretly delight in it.
As soon as she was able she slipped out of his arm.
“It is very close in here, my prince,” she said. “I must go and take some air.”
“Of course, my princess,” he said. “But hurry back to me, for I find I cannot abide a single moment without you.”
Several of the young ladies (and even some of the older ones, who ought to have known better) clucked happily at this, murmuring about how fortunate their princess was to have received the love of such a devoted prince.