The Asylum For Fairy-Tale Creatures. Sebastian Gregory

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      To Sharon, Katie, Emily, Jake, Wilhelm and Jacob, welcome to the madhouse.

       Contents

       Cover

       Blurb

Book List

       Title Page

       Author Bio

       Dedication

Once Upon a Time

Blood Red Riding Hood

The Thread Bear

Thumbeana

       The Asylum for Fairy Tale Creatures

       Doctor Grimm’s Notebook: Rapunzel

       Doctor Grimm’s Notebook: Cinderella

       Doctor Grimm’s Notebook: Beauty

       A Leech a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

       And There Was Insanity Forever Ever After

       Mostly Contented Ever After

       Extract

       Endpages

       Copyright

Once Upon a Time

      Once upon a forever more, a long time ago in the dark place where imagination and nightmare met, they built the asylum. Surrounded by a forest of dense thorns and crumbling on a precipice falling to an infested monster sea, the asylum held the most insane in the entire fairy tale kingdom.

      To be poor abandoned children in the forest, left to the whims of the nearby witch in her gingerbread house - imagine how frail your mind would become. Imagine the trauma of finding a house inhabited by bears who think they are people. How about being a boy made of wood who can think and talk yet is ridiculed and shunned. Or a girl given to a reclusive beast by her own father. It would be enough to drive a person to madness. And so many of the fairy tale creatures went skipping into the comfort of insanity.

      Their demented wails carried through barred windows and into a rainstorm to haunt the turbulent air. A raven followed the cries to a break in the highest tower roof. The rain dripped from cracks in the slates. On the rafters the raven shook off the rain and cawed to itself, tipping its head this way and that with dark curiosity, before swooping downwards through the rafters and away amongst stone corridors. Flying between the shadows of the gas lamps, the raven passed the padded cells of the asylum’s inhabitants. All and more locked behind deep oak doors for evermore. The raven explored further, gliding along until it came to a spiral staircase. It landed on the stone steps a moment, hopping and pecking before flying off again, downwards. To another corridor and, if it were not a fool bird, the raven would have noticed something different. There was only one door at the end of a dark hallway of stone, bolts and chains and huge padlocks holding it firmly sealed. The raven did not concern itself with this and settled on the bars of the door; it cawed and pecked at the metal with a rat-tat-tat. For a moment something reflected in its onyx eye; from the gap in the bars a bony finger, unexpected and quick, simply brushed the poor creature with all the force of a breath on a nape. The raven cried its last and disappeared, falling within. There was a momentary sound of bones СКАЧАТЬ