Mr. Phatts sweated like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The object of his discomfort was the barrel of the Stranger’s pearl handled six shooter pressed hard up against his forehead. Phatts was a man in his mid forties and a local bondsman who sometimes posted bail for the Dreamer’s minions.

“I swear I don’t know where they are,” he begged.

“Wrong answer,” the Stranger replied in a deadly tone as he cocked his gun.

“Wait - wait,” Phatts cried out, “If I tell you will you let me live?”

The Stranger’s bony face grinned like a macabre skeleton. “That depends on your answer, Phatts.”

We had come to this flea ridden dump of an office at the back of a wrecking yard looking for the criminals Hansel and Gretel. We had been tracking them for two weeks, following their crime spree across three state lines.

“They were here two days ago,” Phatts spilt the beans, “they got into some bother with the local law so I smoothed things over and got them out of town. But I know where they’re going.”

“And where is that?” The Stranger asked him nicely.

“You know it’s going to kill me when it finds out, don’t you” Phatts said in a frightened tone of voice.

“The Dreamer is the least of your problems - now tell me what I want to know before I splatter your brains all over your nice dirty looking walls.”

Mr. Phatts told the Stranger what he wanted to hear. The office began to rattle and shake as a freight train roared by the wrought iron back fence of the wrecking yard. The Stranger kept his word. He didn’t kill Phatts, but he did give him a nasty whack to the forehead as a reminder to get into another line of work.

The night was sultry as we hopped back into the ’67 red mustang and burnt rubber out the front gate of Joe’s Wrecking Yard heading for our next rendezvous with the unnatural. It was turning into a very hot and long summer. It had been eight to nine weeks since I met the Stranger and in all that time I still didn’t know very much about him. Where he came from? How he got started in this business? Or what his real name is? The Stranger was never a very forthcoming person about himself. But he knew his stuff. He knew all the tricks when it came time to edit out a character from a fairy tale. And what a rollercoaster of a ride it had been so far. Since joining him we had already taken out the Talking Cricket, Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - and what a sick and perverted bunch of freaks the latter were. Even now I still cringe at the carnality horrors I witnessed in that cottage by the sea.

As we ate up the white lines of the endless road that July night I still had no idea what I was doing here? I was still some time away from finding out the reason. A dark truth about my past that I had long buried and forgotten in the dark recesses of my mind. But as I said before, it felt right what I was doing, I just didn’t know how right yet.

“When we get there,” the Stranger’s voice encroached on my thoughts, “let me handle them, you just back me up - you understand?”

“Yes,” I readily agreed, I had already learned not to cross this man, besides more often than not my life depended on him.

“These blood thirsty killers are not to be trifled with. I’ve been looking forward to catching up with these two for a long time now. You know they killed my granny.”

“What? How?” I queried. It was so rare for him to open up about his past like this. But as usual - he didn’t.

“Don’t ask,” was all he said.

I kept my thoughts to myself. After all I had been told all about Hansel & Gretel and had seen the death and destruction they left in their wake. The duo was a pair of notorious serial killers of old ladies. They weren’t the poor little sweet children from the fairy tales whose father was a poor woodcutter who couldn’t afford to feed them. Far from it. Hansel and Gretel were more like the Mickey and Mallory of the fairy tale world. Their MO was to find some nice old lady who lived alone, knock on her door begging for food and then once they were invited in they would kill their victim and eat them. They had the outward appearance of children but in reality they were ancient creatures of the elder world that had been doing this for centuries. They had already digested three sweet old ladies in the last couple of weeks alone. But each time we thought we had them they were always one step ahead of us and the law. But not tonight, tonight we would get the jump on them. When the Stranger picked up a scent he was like a hound dog and once he got a hold of his prey he didn’t let go.

We arrived at the old ladies house just after dinner. The street was your average typical small town found all across the country. Nothing out of the ordinary. Sprinklers watered the gardens, crickets chirped; the smell of BBQ ribs filled the air along with the sweet smell of freshly cut grass and the sting of mosquitoes. So you could have been forgiven for thinking nothing was wrong, except that two killers were coming...other than us.

We snuck into the old ladies home and hid in the basement to await her unwelcomed guests. It wasn’t long before the doorbell rang. The old lady greeted the children standing on her doorstep. As innocent as baby lambs - wolves in sheep’s clothing more like it.

“Please lady, my sister and I are hungry, we haven’t eaten in three days,” Hansel bemoaned pitifully to the old lady.

“That’s not true, brother,” Gretel chimed in, “we did have that discarded ice cream cone yesterday.”

“Oh yes, I forgot about that, at least it was better tasting than the grass from the day before,” Hansel added to the falsehood.

“We’re forced to beg for food as our father is so poor and so sick that he can’t work and he promised our now dead mother that he would keep us together no matter what. But father’s health is now declining and it looks as if we’ll be tossed out into the street,” Gretel began to cry.

“Please lady, could you spare a few crumbs, we’d be ever so grateful,” Hansel begged.

The sweet old lady fell for their spiel like a fish embracing the wiggling worm on a hook. She invited them inside to a home cooked meal of corn bread, deep fried crispy chicken and rhubarb pie. I love rhubarb pie. And I’ve got to say that I felt my stomach grumbling as the mouth watering aromas floated down to my nose. But we waited until dessert had been served and then we went up. For Hansel and Gretel always struck after dessert. Nothing like a good meal before killing time.

We crashed into the dining room guns drawn; I had become quite proficient in the last few weeks with two crossbow pistols and a repeater rifle. The Stranger as always relied on his trusty six shooters and his sawn off shotgun. Hansel and Gretel had already gagged and tied the old lady up to the lounge chair and were getting ready to start carving. They looked just like an eight and nine year old, dressed in ragged clothes with matted blonde hair, shiny blue eyes behind dirt ridden faces, all adding to the illusion that they were destitute. But it was all smoke and mirrors as their evil grins and the carving knives in their hands bore testament to the fact.

“Alright little children,” the Stranger announced, “playtime’s over.”

The Stranger began blasting.

But Hansel and Gretel were fast little buggers. No sooner had the Stranger let off a couple of rounds, before Hansel was all over him while Gretel had knocked me to the floor and was clawing at my face and eyes, her little teeth already biting into my wrist. And truth be told I wasn’t sure whether she was attacking me or trying to eat me. I managed to throw her off of me. But only for a moment. For within seconds she had cracked me over the head with a plate that rendered me senseless. As I fell back onto the floor Gretel rushed up to me, looked me in the eyes and said, “I want to lick your face.”

Meanwhile Hansel had wrapped his legs around the Stranger’s waist while his hands clutched at his neck squeezing the life out of him. “Get off me you little shit,” the Stranger roared as he struggled to remove the brat. Their fight to the death took them into the kitchen.

“Man taste good - man taste good,” Hansel said over and over again in a vapid tone of voice.

“Damn you to hell, you ate my granny,” the stranger said, and with that a fury overcame the bounty hunter, an inner strength burst forth from the depths of his anguish. He pulled Hansel off of him, placed his head on the meat slicer and began moving it back and forth, each time cutting more and more flesh off of his face until he reached bone and then brain. “Nothing like ham off the bone as my Granny use to say,” the Stranger shouted gleefully.

As for me, well, with the sound of her brother’s screams, Gretel’s attention was distracted, which allowed me to grab one of my fallen crossbow guns and shoot her through the head. As the bolt passed through her skull and out the other end she gave me a look of regret, but not because I had killed her, but rather because she hadn’t gotten the opportunity to see what I tasted like.

And so concluded the after dinner entertainment.

We removed the bodies, untied the grateful old lady, and then left the scene. We dumped their remains into the water of a nearby quarry, weighing the corpses down before moving on. And that was the end of the story of Hansel and Gretel, two fairy tales that turned to a life of crime and paid the ultimate price. We had sent the Dreamer another message by sending more of its creatures to oblivion, and each death brought us one step closer to it. But little did we know that the Dreamer was about to send us a message.

Pay back as they...is a bitch. 

Peter Jessop © June 2013