“Prince Charming wanted to take her away in her glass coffin, back to his castle,” Axel said. “It didn’t even cross his mind to kiss her. When her coffin slipped off the carriage, the chunk of poisonous apple in her throat, which she had been poisoned with by the Wicked Stepmother, popped out and she woke up, back to life.”
“Really,” Loki said. “So there was no true love’s kiss?”
“Not even a peck on the cheek,” Axel assured them. “Or a blown kiss from a hand.”
“So the apple wasn’t poisoned? She was choking and they thought she was dead?” Loki said.
“That’s what is written in the original text. In my opinion, the chunk of apple is a metaphor for saying she was staked. It strikes me like something you would pull out of an undead, it wakes them up and brings them back to life. Remember that in 1812, when the story was first published, the world was horrified by what they called the Vampire Craze. You know what that is, right?” Axel said.
“Yes,” Loki nodded. “It was the first time people reported seeing vampires, and they were hunting them viciously all over Europe.”
“See?” Axel said. “So it makes sense to try to hide that Snow White was a vampire, and write the tales in riddles that only the open-eyed, like me of course, can figure out.”
“You’re a horrible liar, Axel,” Fable stomped her feet again. “There must have been a kiss.”
“I’m not. Look for yourself,” Axel handed her the book, and pointed at the paragraph in the story where the kiss should have happened. Loki and Fable read it. Axel was right.
“So why did the prince want to take her away from the forest? Did he know her from before?” Loki said.
“Yes, when she was younger,” Fable said. “He talked to her at the well because she was beautiful, but she ran away because she was shy. Didn’t you ever watch the movie?”
“Again, this was the Disney version. This was never mentioned in the original story,” Axel said. “Neither did they explain why he wanted to take her away with him. You know the deal with charming princes in fairy tales. They never do anything to deserve the girl but they get her anyway.”
“Easy on the prince, don’t hold grudges because he got the girl,” Loki smiled. “So Snow White was just a vampire asleep in a glass coffin?”
Axel nodded.
“Wow. That’s not the story my mother told me,” Loki said. He hadn’t told them about his ghost mother, but it was true. Sometimes, when he was asleep in his car, she crept in and read fairy tales to him when he was asleep before she pulled the blanket tighter around him. Small things like these let him know that she cared about him. He never told her that he knew because he thought it was embarrassing that his mother still read bedtime stories to him when he was fifteen.
“I know, it’s very different from the tale we were told as kids,” Axel said. “For some unknown reason, someone sold the world different fairy tales.”
“I still can’t see how this could help me kill her?” Loki said.
“Because that’s not all I have to say; I have tons of surprises for you, guys.”
“What else?” Fable folded her arms. She was devastated. Axel had just shattered her entire childhood into pieces of a puzzle she didn’t have a clue how to put back together. Loki looked at her and wondered what it was like having childhood memories. He didn’t mind Axel messing his up as long as he actually remembered them someday.
“In the Brothers Grimm version, the reason why Snow White slept in the coffin was because of the apple, of course. But it was never implied that she was dead. Instead, the Brothers Grimm had a name for what happened to her after she’d taken a bite from the apple. They called it the Sleeping Death.”
“What?” Loki’s face knotted. The Sleeping Death sounded like it had to do something with vampires more than fairy tales.
“This is actually written in the text, the Sleeping Death, which is another strange expression,” Axel said, “It implies that she wasn’t dead, but sleeping like she was dead. This stuff is mind boggling.”
Loki found himself feeling the Dreamhunters notebook Charmwill had given him. He remembered reading that some scholars in the Dreamworld Arts called the state of a staked demon The Sleeping Death. In fact, the only way to enter a demon’s dream was when it was in a state of Sleeping Death. The name was derived from the fact that the demons could still be awakened by removing the stake, so it wasn’t considered dead, but sleeping like the dead.
“So there was blood, gore, glass coffins, and the Sleeping Death,” Loki counted on his fingers, giving it a thought—he wasn’t going to discuss anything about Dreamhunting with them now.
“What about the wicked witch who gave her the apple?” Loki asked.
“It wasn’t a wicked witch who gave her the apple,” Fable explained. “It was her stepmother, using witchcraft to appear like a peddler or a hag and give her the poisoned apple.”