Yet another old story, this time from 2008. This time, a completely unpublished one: I never managed to find this one a fitting forever-home. Hopefully it’ll find some love here at last…
This one came from a writing exercise my old writers’ group, Creative Minds Collective, did. The assignment came from a presentation I did on the horror genre, and the elements that make a story a horror story. The exercise was simple: take an existing story you love, something of any genre except for horror, and change a single element that transforms it into a horror story.
I love Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you’re not familiar with the play, and would like to be, you can read it here. But a quick summary of the storyline I choose to adapt is this: Oberon, the faerie king, has, yet again, enraged his wife, Titania, with his wandering eye. He decides to pay her back for berating him by having Puck, a very mischievous sprite, sneak up on her while she sleeps and drop a nectar into her eyes that will make her fall in love with whomever she sees first upon waking.
As it happens, there’s other magic afoot in the forest as well that night, and Bottom the Weaver, who’d been playing an ass in the town play, has been transformed into a real ass, his costume coming to life. It’s him, in his ass form, that Titania first sees, and she makes an ass of herself pursuing him.
So, how to make that a horror story? One very small tweak made all the difference. These shadows have most definitely offended, and nothing shall be mended at all…
A Midsummer’s Nightmare
Once upon a time, Oberon, the Faerie King, and his Queen Titania came to the woods outside of a mortal city, where they stayed for some time. They lived apart from the mortals, but they did find themselves entangled in mortal affairs on more than one occasion, so unable were they to resist meddling. One evening, the King returned very late to the grove of fig trees they occupied from a visit to the city. He was singing songs with a drunken swagger, and carrying his pipes in one hand, ready to drop them at any minute. There was wine staining his dark beard, and a red smudge, like the color a lady might use to blush her lips, on one of his cheeks. He arrived home to find Titania waiting for him in a high temper. Her lovely face, with its smooth skin like porcelain and cheeks as pink as summer roses, was twisted in anger. Her long silky hair curled wildly, and her small hands were clenched into fists.
“What did I do to deserve such spite?” Oberon asked, feigning ignorance.
“You know quite well,” Titania snapped. “You were out with her again.”
He stammered, seeking a lie or an excuse, whichever found his tongue first. He had no doubt that the Queen knew all about Phillida, but that wouldn’t stop him trying to wriggle out of the mess. Before he’d spoken a word in his defense, however, Titania was shouting again.
“You go out there playing your pipes, wooing her. I know what you do.” She kept one tiny fist resting on her hip whilst the other waved wildly, at times pointing, at others threatening to hit her philandering King.
“You have no room to cast about accusations,” he countered, finding his courage at last. “I know about you and the Duke, Theseus.”
“That was ages ago,” she said. She rolled her eyes and tossed her hair back but, the King noticed, didn’t deny his accusations. “Get out.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go. But you’ll regret putting me out.”
“I doubt that truly,” she said, watching him leave the grove.
—
“Robin Goodfellow,” shouted Oberon as he entered the clearing. “Great Puck, I know you are here. Show yourself!”
“Tis I,” said Puck, popping up behind the King. “What is it Your Highness requests of Robin Goodfellow, known as Puck the Sprite?”
“I have a very special bit of work for you,” Oberon said. “You know of the weed that grows near the oxlips and the violets?”
“Indeed I do, my lord, I know the very one.”
“And you know that when the juice of this weed is dropped on the eyelids in sleep, that the drop-ee shall awake with a desperate hunger for whatever his or her eyes find first?”
“Aye, Highness,” agreed Puck. “What shall I do with this magical weed, dare I inquire?”
“Titania, the Queen, sleeps now beside the poisonberry bush where we make our bed. Go to her and drop the juice on her closed lids. Do this now, I bid you.”
“But, Your Highness,” said Puck, his eyes growing wide. “Upon awakening, she shall surely first see the bush and its deadly berries. She will eat of them until she perishes.”
“Yes,” said Oberon. “Indeed she shall.”
Never one to contradict his King, nor to refuse any bit of mischief, regardless how grave, Puck agreed readily to the dubious assignment and was off to his work. “Now, my jealous Queen,” Oberon muttered when he was again alone. “You shall pay for your suspicion and your hypocrisy.”
—
Puck approached the sleeping Queen delicately, so as not to awaken her before his work was done. He’d collected some of the wide, flat leaves of the special weed, and had several of them clutched in one hand. Standing over Titania’s peaceful, slumbering form, he twisted the leaves at their center until a single drop of thick green juice fell upon each pale eyelid. The job done, he stole away to seek further mischief in the wood.
—
“Tell me I’m a poor actor will they!” muttered Bottom to himself as he stomped away. “Tell me I should go back to weaving at my loom and leave the stage to those more qualified, that my I’m not fit to perform in the Duke’s wedding play. I could have played all the parts myself! Fie!” He kicked at a rock on the ground, but it was larger than he’d estimated and refused to move. He hopped in pain, dropping the mask he’d been carrying as he reached down to hold his painful toe.
After he’d recovered, he picked up the mask, an ass-head that was his costume for the play, and regarded its visage. “What say you, Ass? I portrayed you well, did I not? I was a perfect ass, I am sure of it!”
Bottom put the ass-head back on and took off across the field at a gallop. “Hee-haw, hee-haw!” he shouted as he sped over the grass. He passed by the Old Oak Tree at a distance of about ten strides, but old oak trees have roots that spread far and wide. One such root had unearthed itself, and protruded from the ground directly in unaware Bottom’s path. Unable to see properly through the mask, and not paying a whit of attention anyway, his clumsy weaver’s foot caught the branch and fly he did across the field, ass-over-head, ass-head still in place. He fell in a sprawl, his splayed body landing in a prickly bush.
“What? Who?” breathed a soft voice beside Bottom. He looked before him, and to his shock his gaze fell on Titania, the Faerie Queen, sleeping beside the bush in which he’d landed. Bottom stood, transfixed, unsure of what he should do.
The Queen opened her eyes slowly, seeming to have difficulty bringing the world into focus. At last her expression cleared, and then deepened. She looked upon Bottom with all the lust of the courtesans he’d seen when visiting a faraway city the previous year. The Faerie Queen desires me, Bottom thought to himself. What shall I do?
“Come here,” said the Queen, rising into a crouch. “Don’t run away.” She arched her back like a stretching cat, smiling at him as though he were the mouse.
“Mistress,” Bottom said, unaware he was still wearing the ass-head. “What mean you by this?”
“What mean I?” she mimicked. “What mean I? Why, I mean to eat you, of course.”
This was not what the sometime actor had expected to hear. Was there some symbol in her words, some subtle seduction he was too much the rube to comprehend? “What mean you, good Mistress? How mean you to ‘eat’ me?”
“Well,” said the Queen, considering. She remained crouched on the ground in her catlike position that suggested she might soon pounce. “I would much love to see you roasted with garlic and potatoes, or simmered long in a savory stew. I would even appreciate a well-made pie. But, seeing as how we’re so very far from my palace in the Faerie Realm, and I have neither butcher nor cook to attend to the preparing of so fine an ass as yourself, I suppose I shall just have to eat you as you are.” And with that, indeed she did pounce, jaws wide and ready.
Bottom the weaver tried to scream, but the sound was muffled beneath the ass-head. By the time he’d worked it off, the ravenous queen had rent his garments from him and had torn a great gash in the skin beneath with her long fingernails. It was a cool morning, and a thin steam rose from his freshly exposed insides as the Faerie Queen bent low for a first bite.
The weaver was still partly conscious when again Titania looked up, her face covered in his gore from nose to chin, bright red and shining. Her teeth bit down in the middle of a small brown lump of flesh they’d retrieved, and the weaver saw half of his own kidney drop back into the soup of his insides before his eyes closed forever.
—
“Robin Goodfellow, what have you done?” asked Oberon, watching the scene of horror in his magic glass.
“I did just as you asked, Sire,” said Puck. “Have you changed your mind about murdering your wife, then?”
“No,” said the King, pale with disgust.
“Then I understand not, sir,” said Puck, who could not see the pictures in the King’s glass. “What has taken place?”
“Another has perished instead, at the Queen’s hand. She has eaten him.”
“Eaten, my lord?” asked the sprite.
“Aye,” said Oberon. “Eaten. Eaten raw and left dead. My Queen has become a monster.”
“I see,” said Puck. “And this is not to your liking?”
“No,” said the King. “It is not. I cannot bear the knowledge that I have caused such an abominable thing to come to pass.”
“What shall I do, your Highness, to correct it?” asked Robin Goodfellow.
“Tonight, when the lady again sleeps,” said the King. “I would that you anoint her eyes once more.”
“But sir,” said Puck. “What purpose shall that serve? Upon what next do you intend her gaze to fall? The berries of your original scheme?”
“No, sprite,” said the King gravely. “Tonight, I shall watch my Queen sleeping peacefully. I shall watch her until the sun reappears in the Eastern sky.”
“But good King,” argued Puck. “When she awakes, it shall be you which she sees before anything else.”
“Aye,” agreed the King. “That she shall. And my last sight with be of my love, and then no more shall I face this world in which I have done such a great wrong.” “As you wish,” agreed Puck. And then the sprite was off, seeking new mischief to keep himself occupied until the night fell.
