Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in the edge of the forest. Her hair was black, and was always in two small plats. She wore a checked black and white frock, with red and white striped socks with a pair of rosy red dolly shoes. Her lips were small and red, her skin was white and her eyes were green with dark eyelashes. One day she was out with her wicker basket picking blossoms from the long branches off tall trees. As she was wondering through the woods, something red in the grass caught her eye. She went up to it and saw that there was a small red puddle around it. It was a human heart.
She bent down on all fours and picked it up; it was covered in blood, running off the heart and onto her hand. Something in the girls head told her that it will be useful, so she slipped it in her basket next to the flowers and lifted herself off the grass. She was about to go home when she saw ahead of her, a small dark cave. There was a big grey rock in front of her, and at the bottom in the middle was a black cave.
The girl was so curios that she went right up to it; bent down and looked through. It was so dark that she couldn’t see all the way through. With her wicker basket still on her arm that still contained the heart, she crawled through, with her mind wondering with imagination of what could be on the other side.
The little girl expected a wood, full of elves, fairies, unicorns, princesses locked in towers with extremely long hair, fairy godmothers coming to poor girls needs and helping them get to the ball before midnight, witches waiting for the fairest of them all to take a bite out of a poisons apple and small cats, in leather boots.
But what she saw was completely different. There was a wood. The trees were all thin, and their branches were all entwined like the claws of witch’s hands. The grass was tall and untrimmed, all grey, white and black. The sky was black and grey and the moon blended in and it was almost invisible.
Right in front of her was a house. Not a small cosy, humble, welcoming, cottage like in some fairy tales. It was as grey and black as the scenery. Some of the windows were boarded up with black boards. Some on the windows were cracked, some had curtain drawn, but they were all covered in thick dust. The slates on the roof were all in wrong places, some were missing, and some were pilling up in the gutter.
The little girl’s red socks and pink flowers were the only things in this whole new world that had colour. Cautiously, the little girl went up to one of the window and rubbed the dust off it. It was stuck on so much by rain that only the top layer would come off. She peered in but it was still to blurry. She could see faintly something dangling from the ceiling. Inside it was something moving. It looked small, but it was too hard to tell.
She went to the door. It was open. She slowly went in, and looked around the room. There was a big fire in the corner, but it was black and white. The house was made from grey stone; there was a stone mantel piece over the fire. There were hooks from the wall with knives hanging off them, all different shapes and sizes. There were dozens of keys hanging of the ceiling tied with string. And on the back of the room there was a cage hanging from the ceiling with a small living creature inside, when the little girl looked closer, she saw that it was a boy.
She approached the boy, her dolly shoes making small tapping sound on the stone floor. When she stopped her looked at here with his dark eyes. They were red, like he had been crying recently. His hair was flame red like his brasses; his white shirt was dirty, as was his black torn trousers. His legs were hanging out of the cage and his hands wrapped round the bars. There were curly patterns in between each bar, on the top and bottom. Only then did the girl saw that there was a hole in his chest and his heart was missing.
The little girl said hi and the boy said hi back. She asked what happened, and he said that a witch imprisoned him here, took his heart and hid it. He said that was the only way to be free. The little girl handed him the heart and told him where he found it. He took it and thanked her repeatedly. He pressed it back into the hole but it didn’t heal like she expected it too. But when heart was back in the cage door opened.
The little boy climbed out but fell as soon as he got on his legs. He said that he had been stuck in that cage for a long time, and had not used his legs for a long time, making them useless. After he got used to walking he thanked the girl and told her that the witch was as black as coal. She was just a silhouette. As they were running out of the house and back into the cave, the silhouette witch was watching them from the window. She waved her hand, chanting a spell and cast a spell on them both.
The girl and the boy started to feel their strength fail, they were still running, but they were getting slower and slower. The silhouette witch was in front of them holding a silver frame. She pushed it towards them, trapping them in it. The little girl and the little boy felt themselves going thin and papery. They tried to climb out but, unfortunately they turned into nothing but a pure painting before they could get out again.
Now they witch hung them up on the wall next to the cage where the little boy hung and where the little girl saved him. Before she displayed them, she took the little girls and the little boys heart and hid them, but in a more secret place.
And so they were never seen again.
The end