Once Upon A Time…
There was an old woman who lived in a ramshackle cottage in the middle of a dense area of woodland with her husband. The elderly couple had, over the years, gone quit mad as a result of the grief they felt over their inability to conceive. The old lady had got on the wrong side of a powerful witch that cursed her to never have children for as long as she lived. However, this particular old woman, now in a state of frenzied madness had hatched an ingenious and incredibly sinister plot to bring a child into the world. She decided to use a combination of her twin passions (baking and occult rituals) to create a son. She made a vessel in the shape of a human boy out of gingerbread and then with the aid of hell bound demons she filled the gingerbread vessel with life. Unfortunately, when enlisting the help of demons she hadn’t realised that the vessel wouldn’t just be filled with life, but with evil too. The Gingerbread Man sat up on his tray as all the dark life-giving magic swirled around inside him.
“Oh my! It worked, I finally have a son of my very own! This is wonderful, I can’t believe my luck!” The old woman cried with delight. She had invested an awful lot in forging a son with the aid of dark magic, because she had had to kill her husband as a sacrifice to the dark forces that she had called on for help. The Gingerbread Man looked up at his pseudo-mother with his emotionless, impassive gumdrop eyes. The Old Woman’s smile faded, those weren’t the gumdrop eyes of a sweet young boy, they were the gumdrop eyes of a killer.
“Mother?” croaked the Gingerbread Man, reaching out and touching the Old Woman’s face with his doughy hands. The Woman smiled, thinking that she had been wrong about the Gingerbread Man, but she hadn’t been wrong she had been right. Dead right. While the old woman turned away to fetch some clothes for her new son, the Gingerbread Man leapt onto the table, scooped up a kitchen knife and jammed it deep into the Old Woman’s back. She cried out in an intriguing mixture of pain and shock. The murderous biscuit laughed maniacally to himself and ran out of the house and into the dark woods. He had places to go, and people to maim.
The Gingerbread Man, despite being a merciless killer was also very naive and therefore didn’t know which woodland animals could be trusted and which ones should be given a very wide berth. As the psychotic baked treat skipped through the woods whistling a merry tune to himself a fox stepped out in front of him, causing him to halt in his tracks. Just behind the fox was a wide stream separating the large forest into two halves. The Fox looked at the Gingerbread Man, then looked at the stream and the redirected his attention to the walking talking biscuit.
“I’m afraid your journey ends here.” Said the Fox in a darkly smooth voice usually possessed my unscrupulous aristocrats.
“I don’t think so, Mr Fox, I have to cross this stream and make my way to the villages beyond to cause some merry havoc.” The Gingerbread Man said, proud of his mischievous and homicidal intentions. The Fox was taken aback, filled from tail to whiskers with fear, the woodlands and the villages beyond was the Fox’s territory. Only he caused havoc in those areas and he wasn’t about to let his reign of terror be upstaged by a biscuit. He would become a laughing stock like that wolf who failed to assassinate a little girl and her grandmother. The Fox needed to hatch a cunning plan to protect his fearsome reputation.
“I understand where you need to go, but your journey cannot go any further. If you attempt to cross this stream you will get wet and break apart.” The Fox said, pretending to feel sorry for The Gingerbread Man. There was a moment of silence as the little biscuit considered his plight and then he had an idea.
“You could carry me across! I shall sit on you and you can swim across.” Said the Gingerbread Man, proud of his ingenious idea. The Fox groaned inwardly and then realised that this idea could help him dispose of the annoying potential usurper. The Fox lay down on the ground and the little biscuit climbed upon his snout, sitting as if he were riding a horse.
“There we go.” Mumbled the Fox.
“See, it works. Wasn’t my idea great?” asked the Gingerbread Man swelling with pride. The Fox chuckled to himself.
“Indubitably.” He said and with a flick of his head the Gingerbread Man was hurled into the air. He screamed loudly at the shock of his newfound predicament, but those screams were shortly cut off when he landed into the Fox’s gaping maw. Powerful teeth bit into the Gingerbread Man, shattering him into pieces and grinding his body out of existence.
The Gingerbread Man was no more.
