Once I was an elegant machine sliding effortlessly to the dream road.

Once I was an elegant machine sliding effortlessly to the dream road, a Cadillac Eldorado blue celestial of 1959 with rear fins that looked like angel wings and a V8 engine that roared asphalt poems. Now, I am a rusty metal knead, parked in the gutter of madness, with the tires punctured by logic and the upholstery crushed by the rats of reason. I remember, with a painful sharpness, the day Raymond, my twin brother, suggested the idea.

Raymond, with his eternal shark smile and his propensity to quote Rais Gilles as if he were a conscientious Guru, was always the engine of our misadventures. I, Harry, was the brake, the voice of caution drowned in a sea of ​​absurd. We were the psychological copies of the Grimm brothers, Raymond the collection of macabre stories and I scribe reluctant, forced to transcribe nightmares with a trembling pen.

The idea, like all those of Raymond, was great and grotesque: to recreate the stories of the Grimm in the reality located in the 21st century of the technologically called by the western themselves, using, as decorated, the anodine town of Havenhurst and its inhabitants as involuntary puppets. A sinister remake, with a touch of 'Seven' and a pinch of 'Pulp Fiction,' If Quentin Tarantino had regretted some very bright skin skin with a Wilhelm Grimm fascinated by the curiosity of the unknown.

"Harry, imagine," Raymond said, with his eyes shining with a manic fervor. "Red dumplite, not a naive little girl, but a femme fatale to Sharon Stone, fiercely reducing the fierce wolf, Movie that would be interpreted by anyone less than Ted Bundy in the repeated scene that captures the delusional specular moment, believing ted, being to be-being, at the same time that the executor the unfortunate girl under the unbearable experience. Terror! "

I obviously put the shout in the sky. Ted Bundy, our neighbor, was an endless butcher, with kind face of that yes, and with a suspicious talent for the exploded, but from there to Feroz Wolf?

"Raymond, this is crazy! Ted is a normal guy, a bit quiet, but normal!"

Raymond let out a laugh that resonated on the walls of the house, a house that our great grandfather had built based on the principles of elliptical geometry, a place where the walls were curved and time seemed to slide to the sides. Raymond had always been a William James Sidis enthusiast and his theory of the fourth dimension.

"Normality, Harry? In Havenhurst? Do not make me laugh. Everyone here are waiting for their script whose guillotine falls on the last page. Do you not see the dramatic potentiality in Mr. Peabody, the old man with the garden full of gnomes and hundreds of white mice whose red eyes illuminated every night? It could be rumpel. His thick arthritic fingers! "

Mr. Peabody, a man who had once given me a rose in his garden, turned into a greedy goblin. The idea was as absurd as blasphemous.

Our uncle Vernon, a corpulent man with a beard that looked like a wild bird nest, interrupted our discussion. Vernon was a fervent follower of Rousseau, a believer in the purity of man in natural state. His diatribes against civilization were legendary, especially after his third whiskey. "You are perverting innocence, boys," he bramed as a deer in zeal Vernon, pointing to the face with an accusing finger. "Grimm's stories are warnings, not manuals for instructions for budding psychopaths!"

Raymond simply smiled and offered Vernon a drink. The uncle, despite his objections, fully accepted. Hypocrisy was a common feature in our family.

Over time, Raymond convinced me. It was not difficult, actually. I had an innate ability to manipulate my insecurities, to transform my fears into a kind of perverse curiosity. In addition, the idea of ​​escaping the monotony of Havenhurst, to shake the golden cage of our bourgeois existence, was tempting.

Thus began our particular adaptation of the stories of the Grimm. We select our actors, choosing the inhabitants of havehurst based on an twisted internal logic. Bonnie, the hairdresser with cut -cut hair tongue, would be Cinderella's cruel stepmother. Mr. Abernathy, the greedy banker of underwear, would be King Midas to which everything he played became, transforming everything he touched into silk lingerie. Even our grandmother, a sweet and senile woman who wove cat socks, was chosen for the role of the witch of the ginger house where towards infinitesimal integrals applied to the dimensions of the stories.

Raymond, our director and screenwriter, orchestrated each scene with meticulous cruelty of modern Aereo Obsessive. He recruited Anton Chigurh, a guy, quiet like the one under the sea, who said he was an pest exterminator of our modern cities, such as Hansel and Gretel's woodcutter who was screaming for the forest that his mission was to clean everything. Chigurh had a cold look and a captive bolt gun that he used with disturbing familiarity to the slightest imaginary offense.

The representation of Little Red Riding Hood was particularly disturbing. Raymond had persuaded Bundy to take his role seriously, and the butcher hugged the opportunity with a disturbing enthusiasm. The scene in which Bundy, disguised as grandmother, was waiting for the innocent Red Riding Hood in the forest, gave me chills that I still feel. 

The climax arrived during the recreation of Snow White. Raymond had convinced the Sheriff Brody, a woman of a recourse with a murky past, adapted by the scriptwriters to play the role of the evil queen she was not. Brody, apparently, had a personal grudge against the young Lily, a silent girl with an angelic beauty whom she chose for the role of Snow White.

During the poisoning scene with the digital apple marked with access to the fingerprint and facial recognition, Brody replaced the false apple with a real one, sprinkled with a stolen lethal pesticide during his usual merodies by abandoned houses. Lily fell to the ground, convulsing with white foam acid that came out of her nose when trying to breathe. Panic seized everyone. Even Raymond seemed momentarily disturbed.

Sheriff Brody, with a cold smile frozen by insistent Pause on his face, approached me. "This is for my son, Harry," he said, with the voice full of viper poison that he still carried in his pocket. "Lily took it ... Now the fair revenge is executed."

It was then that I understood the true magnitude of Raymond's madness. We were not recreating the stories of the Grimm, we were living them. Havenhurst had become a scenario of horrors, and we were responsible. After Lily's death, the police began investigating. Detective Norman Stansfield, a man with his eyes tired of undergoing his own look and a cigarette perpetually hanging from his lips as a trapped white tormented by cancer, was relentless. He interrogated everyone, touring the streets of Havenhurst as an inquisitive spectrum that was collecting the night shadows fallen through the streets and carried them dragging with serene cadence of their steps.

Raymond, far from intimidating, delighted with the attention that they present. He considered police investigation as the grand final of his Macabra masterpiece. I, on the other hand, were consumed by remorse. Lily's images dying in the forest persecuted me day and night as a sleepwalking ghost.

Detective Stansfield cited himself for a last interrogation. He sat in a cold and bleak room, offered me a cigarette and stared into my eyes.

"We know what you did, Harry," Stansfield said, with a serious voice borrowed. "We know everything about your little horrors. Raymond dragged you to the abyss, but you are equally guilty."

I tried to deny, but the words stuck in my throat as in the M30. I knew Stansfield was right. I was as guilty as Raymond. He had been complicit in his madness, had allowed the darkness to seize Havenhurst.

In the end, Raymond and I were arrested. Raymond, radiant and proud, declared herself innocent alleging feigned dementia. On the contrary, I declared myself guilty of all possible positions. I wanted to assume responsibility for my actions and those of all the other equally criminals, to atone for the death of Lily and the destruction of Havenhurst. Now, I am locked in a cold and humid cell that was Miasma condemned to immobility, waiting for my judgment. Raymond is in a mental institution, where, they say, he continues to plan his next macabre masterpiece for which he was looking for among the most degenerate viles of his environment by putting them daily to the test with which he always put them beyond the limit of horror. Sometimes, I wonder if everything was a dream, a nightmare begats by my disturbed mind. But then, I remember Lily's face, Raymond's brightness, and the bitter taste of the remorse invades my being.

Once I was an elegant machine sliding effortlessly to the dream road. Now, I am an oxidized scrap, a monument to madness and guilt. And sometimes, in the darkness of my cell, I swear to hear the echo of the laughter of the Grimm brothers, mocking my destiny that they had planned some century before. Rousseau's purity has gone with the New Heloise. There is only the elliptical narrative way that my family and everyone else became the most disturbing characters of the new original stories. 

By Carlos del Puente relatos