A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz Read Free Book Online Page B

hair on his face, on his back.
    She was frightened to be in the wood by herself, particularly at night. She heard howling—howling that she hadn’t heard when they’d first come to the Lebenwald. She wondered if it was Hansel.
    She stayed closer and closer to the hut for fear of seeing him. Then, one day, he wandered into the clearing. Gretel stared. He walked bent now. He had hair all over his body—his arms, his back, his face, his chest. Wordlessly, she offered him a handful of berries and nuts. He snarled at her. She dropped them and hurried into the hut. He growled and stalked around the clearing for a few minutes. Gretel wondered if he would kill her. But he left.
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    There were fewer animals in the forest these days. Gretel heard no birds in song. She saw no small rodents darting in and out of the underbrush. No deer nosed the stands of fern.
    And then, early one morning, a hunting party—a duke and his household—entered the wood. They blew their horns and their hounds bayed and barked. Gretel feared for herself. But more than that, she feared for Hansel. She crept into the hut and stayed there all day, hoping he would come to her.
    The dogs and huntsmen scoured the forest for some sign of animal life. To their surprise, they found none. All day they searched, and all day they found nothing. The duke became angry and impatient. And then, at dusk, he saw a strange, hairy, hunched creature peering out from behind a large tree. “There!” he bellowed, and instantly the dogs were in pursuit.
    Hansel fled through the wood, thrilling at the terror of the chase. The dogs bayed at his heels; the horns sounded all around him. He dodged this way and that, panting, growling, laughing, howling. What fun! he thought. What tremendous, terrifying fun!
    At last, he came to the edge of a brook. Across the way, the duke sat astride his horse, his bowstring pulled tight, an arrow nocked and aimed at Hansel. The animal-boy stared curiously at the sweating, red-faced man holding the strange bent stick. Then there was a snap and a hiss like a snake. An arrow flew through the air—a straight, simple harbinger of death. Hansel watched it all the way to his chest, to exactly where his heart was. It buried itself there. He felt a searing bolt of pain and fell to the forest floor.
    The huntsmen tied the strange, dead animal to a pole and carried him triumphantly back to the duke’s manor.
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    The next morning, Gretel ran through the wood looking for her brother. For a long time she found nothing but broken branches and paw prints. Then, at last, she came to the brook and saw the earth stained a copper red, and the rocks at the water’s edge spattered with blood.
    She ran to the tree with the face in it. “My brother has been killed!” she cried. “He has been killed!” But the tree would not speak to her. Gretel fell to the ground and sobbed and sobbed. She was alone, in a great forest, in a dark tale. Her father had tried to kill her. She’d been nearly eaten by the baker woman, and had cut off her own finger. And now her brother, Hansel, was dead.
    She would not stay in that forest, not now. “I need to go back to people,” she said, wiping tears from her face. “To grown-ups.”
    As she left the Wood of Life, she saw a bird alighting in a tree nearby. Soon she could hear the sound of birdsong again. But it only made it hurt more. They only came back, she knew, because Hansel was dead.
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    We’re at one of those places in the story—and they happen in nearly all stories, of any kind—when things seem to be really, really bad. When it feels like, if things get much worse, you won’t be able to listen anymore.
    When I was little, I used to call this part “the sad part.” I knew it would happen in every story, and I knew it always ended eventually, and I would repeat, “This is the sad part this is the sad part” over and