Page 27 of Hansel and Gerhardt (The GriMM Tales #3)
“Stop!” cried Hansel. He slammed a hand on the table, making every dish jump.
“What is happening? Gerhardt, listen to me. You do not want that. And…” His eyes flickered between the two as Gerhardt’s hand stilled again, millimetres from the dessert, shaking.
“Why can’t we leave? Why won’t you let us leave? ”
“What are you talking about, you ridiculous boy?” asked Herr Candy, not even hiding his dislike for Hansel, speaking as though he wasn’t fit to clean his boots, let alone sit at his table. But though his eyes remained fixed on Hansel, his next shouted word was for Gerhardt alone. “Eat!”
Gerhardt’s head smashed forward, burying his face in the towering cake, where he began to gorge himself.
Hansel’s chair smashed to the floor as he leapt up, running around the table. He wrenched Gerhardt up by the shoulder, then was shocked to find himself flung back against the wall by his powerful hands smacking into the centre of his chest. “Get off me, Hansel!”
“Oh dear,” sighed Herr Candy, sitting back with his wine in hand.
“What’s wrong with you?” cried Hansel, starting forward, taking a hand to Gerhardt’s cheek.
Gerhardt smashed it away. “Not a thing! I could ask the same of you, only we all know the answer to that, don’t we? You enormous fucking oaf!”
Hansel was struck mute. Gone was the searching spark in Gerhardt’s eye. No more did his fingers turn pale with whatever odd impulse had made him take Hansel’s hand earlier. He was all anger, but a dismissive, cruel anger.
He turned away, dug a hand deep into the cake, then shoved a huge piece into his mouth even as he spoke, crumbs dropping all over his green velvet vest and to the floor. “Why are you still here? Why can’t you just leave me to eat my dinner in peace?”
Again Hansel started forward, grasping Gerhardt’s arm to pull the cake away from him.
Gerhardt slapped the food down on his chest as he shoved him off. Then he stepped forward, fronted up to him, chest to chest. He raised his chin. “What are you going to do? Are you going to hit me?”
In perfect shock, Hansel could barely manage the words. “What? No. Gerhardt, no. Why would you say that?”
Gerhardt shoved him back again, hard, a drift of white sugar sweeping over Hansel’s shoulder as he hit the wall. “You’re just like him. You think you can come over here and put your hands on me?”
“I don’t. I would never do that.” Every muscle in Hansel’s body yearned for him. His arms flung out of their own accord, needing that head against his chest, but they were repulsed with a violence that begged for a fight.
Gerhardt turned, swiping up more of the cake, but this time he held it in the hand he flung out long, pointing his finger at Hansel. “I’m better than that. I’m better than you.”
“Oh, Gerhardt,” said Herr Candy, even as he ran a steady stream of fresh wine into his glass. “Don’t let him upset you so, dearest.”
“I’m not upset,” he said, shoving more cake into his mouth. That same blissful shudder shook his shoulders, and a small groan broke free, but his following words remained angry. “He’s nothing to me.”
“That’s not true,” said Hansel, tears fast at his eyes. “I know it’s not. In the forest…”
“Pure survival,” Gerhardt threw at him. And not a flash of his former tenderness was discernible. Nothing but clenching hands and cake crumbs and hatred. “I did what I had to do. Just as I’ve always done.”
To hear those words was the worst of all the terrors that had struck Hansel since they’d arrived in that cursed house. To see no sign in Gerhardt that it was a lie. “You didn’t need to do any of that and you know it.”
“Would you have saved me from that tree if I hadn’t?”
“Of course I would have!”
“No. Not you. You’re a coward, Hansel. How many beatings did you let me take to save your own skin?”
“It wasn’t like that.” His voice breaking with the pain of the memories, with the guilt, “Please, Gerhardt. Please don’t say that to me. You know it wasn’t like that.”
“Look, dearest, you made him cry,” said Herr Candy. “Have some wine.”
Chest rising and falling violently, Hansel pointed at Herr Candy, well aware any attempt to strangle him, to stab him through the heart with his knife, would fall flat.
“It’s him. He’s the one coming between us.
This isn’t you. I know you. I know you from the stream and the mountain, and I know this isn’t you.
I’ve seen you.” He raised a hand to his chest. “I know you in here.”
Gerhardt leaned his head back, a cruel sneer unlike any Hansel has seen on him before staining his adored face.
“You don’t know me. You know some boy who was taken and stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere with a psychopath.
Just to be starved. To be beaten and abused.
You don’t know who I am without you, outside of that house.
You don’t know how quickly I’d dump you just as soon as I get the chance.
” One step, two, closer, and right in front of Hansel, Gerhardt looked deep into his eyes.
“When I look at you, he’s all I see. Your eyes, your hair, your voice.
You are him. You are every awful thing I want to leave behind.
And the way you’re acting tonight just proves it. ”
It may as well have been Hansel’s heart that Gerhardt bit into then. He turned away, pacing the floor, eating, always eating, leaving a trail of crumbs as he walked.
“Hansel, you don’t look well,” said Herr Candy. “You look delirious. Hungry. Maybe if you ate something, you’d feel better.”
But Hansel barely heard him. He wanted so much to take Gerhardt’s hands, to wrap them around himself once again. Just to feel him close, to feel his heart beating against his own.
But those things he’d said… Hansel believed they were true.
Somewhere, deep inside, they were all his worst fears.
That he hadn’t escaped. That he would never escape, no matter where he went.
That he, if he started a life and a family of his own, would bring the same horrors to his own table, the poison that was his father.
Had he laid his hands on Gerhardt in violence just now?
Had he hurt him?
Had he really scared him?
He meant only to stop him from eating the enchanted food. At least that’s what he thought he’d meant to do…
“Sit,” came the voice from the head of the table. A voice he knew well. Too well.
Hansel stumbled back, sliding along the wall to the corner of the room, where he shrank, even as Gerhardt returned to his seat obediently, head low, shoulders stooped, as if awaiting the whip. For there he was. Their father, red faced, red eyed, all unholy and unrestrained hatred.
“Sit!” he shouted.
Hansel’s two shaking hands covered his mouth, and he ripped his eyes from the angry face, searching the room. Candy, lollies, everywhere, on every surface, bright and cheerful. He was in the candy house. He had escaped. He had!
He looked again, but it was only Herr Candy, watching him now with even more pronounced disgust written in his wrinkled mouth. “Is he always like this?”
Gerhardt, chewing, chewing, “Always. A coward and an oaf.”
Herr Candy crawled a hand across to take Gerhardt’s. “Now, now. Do you think we should be kind? He is, after all, rather simple.”
Gerhardt gave a heavy sigh and nodded his head, as if conceding a hard-won point.
“You there, in the corner,” called Herr Candy. “Why don’t you stand up and come join us?”
“No,” whispered Hansel. “No. Please, just let us leave.”
Herr Candy’s head fell to the side, and he tsked his tongue. “Why, you can leave any time you like. The door’s right behind you.”
Slowly, pulse screaming, neck throbbing, Hansel turned his head, and there, clear as day, was the back door of the cottage. He could see straight through the glass and into the moonlit night.
“But,” said Herr Candy, “I don’t think your brother wants to leave just yet. And I don’t think you should try to make him.”
Hansel’s broken heart wrung itself. The way Gerhardt had attacked him just now.
Not just physically. His words hurt so much more, and they bound him.
He didn’t dare reach for him, try to drag him through that doorway.
Not least because Hansel didn’t believe for a second the doorway would really remain if he tried to.
It was all part of the same sick hallucination that had brought his father before them, that Gerhardt was somehow lost in.
“These things you’re seeing, thinking…” Herr Candy said softly, as though reading his mind. “Perhaps they are all just figments of a starved imagination. Eat, and I promise, you’ll feel better.”
“Eat,” said Gerhardt, glaring over his shoulder. “Eat. Then maybe I’ll forgive you for being such an uncivilised brute.”
“Just eat,” said Herr Candy, pouring thick cream over Gerhardt’s cake.
Hansel made no sound.
No movement.
He only sat on the floor and waited for the excruciating meal to be over.