Horrific Thoughts of a Baby Snatcher.

Tales have been told of valiant hero’s and of sinners. More often than not the stories that you have heard have been full of redeeming love and salvation. Stories where the hero always wins, and the damsel in distress gets her happily ever after. But how often have you wondered about the other side of the story? Why is the villain the way they are, and what could possibly push them there? And yes there have been stores of the other side, but when have you ever gotten to hear from poor forgotten Rumplestiltskin?

I have here for your reading delight today, the never before told exclusive of his life. Why did he want to steal a baby? Did he really fail, or was it covered up that he succeeded? Could there have been a love in his past that drove him to the breaking point? Was there another baby? All of the scandal and secrets kept hidden for years lay waiting in these pages.

It took me a long time to track Rumplestiltskin down. He’s as slippery in the real world as he is in his story. Once I did catch up to him however, he made it clear he wanted nothing to do with me. But I was persistent and I really wanted his story.

Needless to say, in the end I get my way. He agreed to tell me his story on the strict terms that I must print everything as is. No rewriting his words, and no leaving anything out. It must all go into the story.

I left it to him as to where he wanted to begin his tale. Seeing as how the rest of the world was clueless as to any of the details. And as I waited I realized he wasn’t the hideous creature every tale made him out to be. In fact he was quite handsome. For being centuries old at this point, he looked no older than a man in his twenties. There was nothing hideous or monstrous about him at all.

It was as I let my mind wander that he began. Heedless of my inattention he talked into the tape recorder as though I was no longer there. And in view of the situation, maybe to him I wasn’t. Here is his story at last in full. Spared no detail by my hand or by that of my editors.

“It’s been multiple centuries since people wrote about me. They focused on only what I tried to do after all of my misfortune occurred. What the public doesn’t know is that I succeeded in taking the baby. And I raised her as my own. But the people who wrote the fairy tale wanted a story with a happy ending for the mother. No one ever cares as to what happens to the other people inside the story.

I shall begin my story on the day I turned twenty-two. For that’s really where it all started. It was the beginning of a long summer. One in which I would fall in love, find myself, and gain immortality all in succession. In this age it was odd for me to not have settle down to begin a family at my age. The women believed me past my prime and didn’t want their daughters around me. The men merely thought I was content to be alone all my life. But I was neither and grew tired of my lifestyle. I wanted to find a wife.

The few friends I had at the time decided to take me out for a night on the village. The pub was merry and cheerful. It was full of drunkard men and women, my friends soon among them. But I hung back in the shadows merely watching. I had no desire to join them in their drunken madness. Despite their protests I sat alone and left them to chase after the loose women in the bar.

Inside those moments of solitude was where lady Destiny shot me with her fated bow, so to speak. Rosalyn stepped through the door of the pub and into my life. Little did I know that the damsel who came in would change my life forever. As damsels in distress are often prone to do, and then she smiled at me.

She was drawn to me. A woman lost in an unfamiliar place, and I was the only one on my own who wasn’t drinking. It seemed as peculiar to her as it did to everyone else. Yet you could tell by the look her eyes that she took comfort in my isolation as well. As I got up to greet her I noticed how frail she seemed up close. It was as though her life had been pure hell and she had just escaped the torture of it. All of this was reflected by her eyes, without a word being spoken, as she looked back into mine.

Offering her a chair she sat down with her back to the crowd. And as I sat down across from her, she started to weep. It was uncontrollable as if she had been order to do nothing but wail. She must have cried for at least ten minutes before she straightened up and told me her story.

Rosalyn’s tale was a sad one. In short, her father had made her life a living hell and her mother had abandoned her long ago. It made my soul hurt to hear her story. I wanted nothing more than to shelter her from anything else happening. She had run away from her plantation and her father a couple of weeks before and had been wandering ever since. She had no idea where she was, or what she was going to do.

We went for a walk after this to help her calm down. She wiped at her eyes with a kerchief after the darkness of the sky hit us. It appeared that she was embarrassed to have been crying to hard in public. I thought she was braver than anyone I had ever known. Thought it was improper by far I invited her to stay with me at my cabin in the woods until she knew what her plan was. After thinking for awhile she decided that she would. And the few weeks that followed were bliss.

All of it happened in a flash. We fell in love. Neither of us expected it to happen, we both thought that she would leave quickly after making her plan. But she didn’t. I proposed to her after only a month and she agreed happily. My family was ecstatic that I was finally going to wed. My mother let me have my grandmother’s ring to give to her. Bliss enveloped us in our own little world, but neither of us knew that in the end we would betray each other.

The wedding was small, just my family and a handful of friends. Sadly Rose had no one to invite. I was her world at the moment. Though I had absolutely no problem with that, I enjoyed being with her. Every moment with her was just perfect. Shortly after the wedding she became pregnant, and the months that followed she started to change. She would have mood swings and tantrums one day and be perfectly happy the next. I was worried, but people told me not to be. They said it was normal for the first child to do that to the mother.

Yet I continued to worry, as it only got worse. More and more often she was moody and depressed, she didn’t want to do the things she normally did. It scared me but I continued to stay by her side. When the baby came, everything changed. She was permanently in her moody state. Finding fault with everyone, especially myself and with the baby. She would go out on walks by herself for hours and not come home until I went to look for her.

When the baby turned seven months old she snapped. I was out hunting in the woods to store up for the winter, when I heard her screaming. As quick as I ran home it wasn’t fast enough. Rosalyn had lost it; I came back into the house as she lifted the blanket off of the baby. Rose had smothered her to death. When she saw that I had come into the house she ran at me. I stepped aside speechless. She ran past me into the woods and I heard another scream, I ran out after her only to find that she had stabbed herself in the heart with my axe.

I had lost everything. My entire life was over it seemed to me. Running away from the scene of their deaths, I went back into the woods and ran deeper in than I had ever been before. There in the woods as I stopped I found a small stream and I stooped to drink from it and then kept wondering, eating random fruits that I found along the way.

There is no way to tell how I gained my immortality, but I was certain it was from one of the things I ate in the woods that night. Eventually I slept on the ground until morning when I wandered into town and told my family all that had happened.

After this happened and we had their funeral, I turned to traveling around the countryside as she had before she came to me. One night as I stumbled into a small village I heard word that someone had just given birth to a baby girl. It hurt my heart to think of this. My emotions over took me and I kidnapped the baby. No, there was no guessing of my name, no three tries. I merely snuck into the house after they fell asleep and took her.

As I said earlier in my story, I raised her as my own until she left to do her own thing. I watched her get married and settle down. And since her death I have been alone, staying out of the way of the rest of humanity until you tracked me down. But this is the end of my story, and now you must leave.”

He meant it as well. The look in his eyes was murderous. I knew I had to leave. And so I gathered my things and left, immediately turning into my office to write the story to give to you. Whether you take pity on him, or hate him is up to you. But now the world finally has the real truth behind Rumplestiltskin.