An Imp's Tale

And now for something a little different...

I offered stalwart and brilliant artist Mikakitty a gift story to help lift her spirits. She requested this, a dark fantasy story that ties in to the Brothers Grimm and their ilk. She enjoyed it so much that she sketched this accompanying picture of the imp's subtly inhuman eyes shining in the darkness.

No TF here, only the tale of a young imp and his troubled coming of age. Hope you enjoy it!

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An Imp's Tale

"Imp! There's a customer at the counter. Attend to them!" Werner Schloss bellowed.

The customer waiting at the pawnshop's counter saw a child-size figure stagger about with a loping gait before climbing a stepstool to bring itself to eye level. His appearance--subtly inhuman, with pointed ears and slitted eyes--might have had more of an effect if the waiting patron had been less drunk.

"What'll Schloss give me for these?" the customer, a man in decent but tattered merchant's clothes, slurred. He dumped a pile of assorted trinkets on the countertop.

"To pawn or to sell?" The imp's voice had a high pitch, and sibilants hissed out uncomfortably between his needle-sharp teeth.

"P-pawn," the customer said, his acrid breath roiling over the imp's head. "Missus will have a fit if she notices they're gone for good...women and their baubles..."

The imp sorted the small pile with his claw, briefly touching each to ascertain its value and history. Unlike Schloss, he didn't need to use a loupe or bite the gold...it was all there in the touch, a flood of sensations and memory.

The large ring was only gold plate over a cheap iron core, but...will you marry me?...it was a wedding ring. The man's wedding ring, which he had given to his wife on the banks of the Neckar when they were both young and pretty. It had last touched her skin some days ago, when she had thrown it at her husband in a dispute...where have you been all evening? Out with your whore, or your cups?...he had pretended to place it back in her jewelry box, but had palmed it instead.

"Are you sure you want to pawn this?" asked the imp. "It seems like you might regret it.

"I'm here, aren't I?" snapped the customer. "There are other pawnbrokers, you know!"

"Less conversation and more working!" cried Schloss from the back. He could easily have come out, but that would have meant interrupting his mutton and ale. The imp had the welts to show what happened to those who came between Schloss and his feasts.

"As you wish, sir," the imp said sadly. He placed the ring with a pile of other gold-plated items--two other wedding rings, from the customer's sister and his mother, and a brooch. There was one item that was a better gold alloy, small 18-karat earrings, while the other trinkets were brass and went into a third pile.

"To pawn the lot will be 20% of their value, 75 kreuzer," said the imp. "You'll have 20 days to collect them and repay the loan."

"75 kreuzer?" the customer cried. "Do you have any idea how much I paid for them? I need at least a gulden!"

"I bet you'd like a conventionsthaler for the lot too, but that doesn't mean it'll happen!" Schloss's meal audibly dribbled down his fat chin as he spoke.

The imp touched the only gold item. "You paid fifty kreuzer for this from a fence in Möhringen, who stole it from a corpse in a Hoppenlaufriedhof burial chamber," he said. He touched the wedding ring. "Twenty kreuzer from your uncle in Plieningen, who assured you it was solid gold even though he plated it himself from a cheap slug he bought off Goldenthal in the marketplace."

Audibly swallowing, the customer cut the imp off. "All right, all right," he said. "Stop that. Maybe I'll take my business somewhere I can get more respect." It was clear from his tone that he meant a pawnbroker that was easier to dupe.

"You won't get any more than that from anyone who knows what they are doing!" Schloss's chair was audibly pushed back, and the imp could hear his heavy footfalls.

Saying nothing, the customer collected his trinkets. The imp held onto the wedding ring a moment longer, and spun it in his claws before dropping it into the man's angry, outstretched hand. The customer left with a slam that echoed through Schloss's shop, but at least if he was able to reclaim the pawned items his wife would find her new band to now be solid gold.

It was the power of a little spinning in the right kind of imp's hands, after all.

Werner Schloss had come up behind the imp as the customer left, and he cuffed the creature with one of his massive and callused mitts. "Lost me another customer, have you?" he roared. The blow cast the imp off the stepstool he'd been perched on, landing heavily on the floor.

"You heard the offer I made," the imp whimpered. "It was fair."

"But then you had to spook him by explaining the history of every little bauble in his miserable little heap!" cried Schloss, who followed his remark up with a vicious kick. "Customers are like candles, best left in the dark!"

"I'm sorry...!" shrieked the imp, trying to cover himself from Schloss's savage blows.

"And don't think I didn't see what you did with that drunk's wedding ring," Schoss bellowed, accentuating the words with another kick. "I told you, gold's value is in its scarcity! You spinning mroe of it into existence hurts my business!" The old pawnbroker had many, many vices, but stupidity wasn't one of them. He'd once read law at Hohenheim, and had a shrewd business sense with a knack for tiny details...and never let any small mistake the imp made go unpunished.

Whimpering, the imp curled into a prostrate ball in anticipation of more blows, but Schloss had made his point. The pawnbroker spat on the floor and walked back to finish his meal. After a moment, the imp pulled himself up and limped back to his stepladder stool to mind the counter once again.

It wasn't his fault that he could tell the history of precious objects by touch, nor that he could create gold in the same way. A creature born in the crucible of greed and misery that a pawnshop represented...how could he be any other way? He could feel, smell, taste the waves of greed wafting off of every customer that darkened the door, and it sickened him.

But Schloss's shop was all he'd ever known, and the fond memories that came in across the countertop were the sole rays of sunshine in the imp's otherwise dark and dusty life.

The next time a customer wandered in when Schloss was occupied, the imp once again climbed up to the desk to meet them. This time, however, it was a woman who had a faded beauty cast about her like a cloak. She didn't radiate the usual waved of avarice, and the imp greeted her with a smile.

"Oh, my!" the woman said. "What a strange sort of child you have, Herr Schloss!"

"Child!" Schloss laughed from his meat-loaded table in back. "That's no child, it's an imp! It appeared in a caul under my desk one day, and I've put it to good honest labor!"

It was true, the imp had precipitated from the intense feelings and desires that had built up in the pawnshop over its century or more of existence in the Schloss family. The imp had read this in Schloss's books on demonology--pawned but never sold by an aspiring scholar at Hohenheim--in the dead of night, for reading anything but account books was cause for a beating in the old pawnbroker's eyes. Imps like himself were birthed into the world and their characteristics shaped at the most basic level by the crucible that precipitated them.

Given imps' reputations as troublemakers, tricksters, and accomplices of the devil...most people would drive the newborn imp out, or try to drown it, or strangle it with its own caul. Schloss had cut the caul open with a knife and raised the imp within to work the pawnbroker's trade. It was another shrewd move, especially given how quickly imps matured and learned.

"Can I help you?" the imp said.

"I've come to try and retrieve something that my husband was forced to pawn some time ago," the woman said. "Here is the ticket."

The imp took the proffered slip and hobbled into the vault to locat the item. #571L7...there it was. A gold-plated locket of unusually fine craftsmaship for someone as destitute-looking as the woman out front. Gingerly, the imp lifted it out of its box with one claw...and was overcome with the associations that it flooded through his mind.

...it's expensive but I want you to have it...

...something to remember him now that he's gone...

...it's the only thing I have left of him...

...we have to eat, and that's worth more than a memory...

The imp gasped, and shook his head. Delicately, taking care not to leave a fingerprint, he opened the locket with one claw. A portrait miniature of a young child lay inside, again of a quality far beyond what one might have expected for someone who appeared as poor as the woman out front.

Children only rarely came into the pawnbroker's, but they had often handled the jewelry and trinkets that were pawned, and their memories always stood out as particularly clear and innocent in the imp's vision. They typically carried none of the greedy taint that infected so many who did business with Schloss, and that...to the imp, that was like the scent of lavender or jasmine that sometimes blew in off the street on beautiful days.

He returned and set the locket atop the counter. "The date on the slip is the sixth," he said, "and today is the twenty-seventh. I'm afraid you're one day beyond the loan period."

"Oh dear," said the woman. "I have enough to pay back the loan...what happens if I am a day late?"

"Then the item is for sale at the usual asking price, and should have been put out in the case by my idiotic imp yesterday night," groused Schloss from his dinner table in the back. "If you want it back, you have to pay the full price!"

The imp flipped the ticket over. "The loan was for 20 kreuzer, and the sale price is 50."

"50 kreuzer? Half a gulden? Oh dear, oh dear," the woman wrung her hands. "My husband and I have been carefully saving…we were only barely able to gather the 20."

"I'm afraid…I already know what the pawnbroker will say, if I offer to honor the original price," the imp said sadly.

"I understand," the woman said. "Perhaps…perhaps in time I will be able to afford it, if no one purchases it. But it has been difficult without it…it is the only memento I have of my dear child, you see."

The imp clutched the locket in his claws. He'd had a glimpse into the squalid circumstances of the lady's life…there was no way she could accumulate 50 kreuzer without some emergency intervening before Schloss melted down his "useless" items at the end of the month. And yet…the creature was moved by the display of emotion, within the locket and without. Imps could not reproduce, just as they could not easily be slain, so it would never be his lot to have a child…but raising a child to rise above the cruelty and greed that the imp saw every day had long been one of his most cherished and secret dreams.

"I suppose I can let you…wear it one last time, before you go," the imp said quietly, hoping that Schloss would be too distracted by the sound of his own chewing to notice.

"Oh, that would be…lovely, thank you." The woman leaned over the countertop and allowed the imp to fasten the locket around her neck. Then she walked a long, slow circuit of the customer area with one hand pressed to it, before returning to the counter and handing it back. The imp accepted it, still warm from the woman's flesh, and had a flash of seeing himself at the counter…how strange and forlorn that creature looks, if only someone would treat it with compassion…

"Thank you for your kindness, sir," she said to the imp. "Even just wearing it again for a moment was a great relief."

The imp caught himself smiling as she left…a smile that quickly faded as he turned to see Schloss standing behind him.

"You let her wear it?" the pawnbroker cried. "You let her wear it? All she had to do was peddle a sob story about a dead brat and you let her lay a hand on my merchandise? She could have run out the door with it, or worse, broken it!"

"I could sense that she wouldn't," the imp protested. "There was no greed there!"

"You and your senses," Schloss roared. "More trouble than they're worth! I should have drowned you in your caul when I found you and saved myself the bother!"

The beating he received that night made all the imp's prior abuse at Schloss's hands seem like a mere practice run by comparison.

When the shop closed, Schloss fed the bruised, battered imp with scraps from his table--there was no real need to eat, but it enabled the creature to heal from his abuse more easily. The imp, for his part, settled in a small cupboard in the kitchen that he had made his own. Sleep was another things imps did not generally require, so he contented himself with his usual distractions. The demonology book, carefully retrieved from its place on the pawnbroker's bookshelf. A small collection of scrap paper that the imp doodled on--filling ream after ream with pictures of human families and smiles and children. And the memories he had gleaned from the day's items, which were his for the keeping and the reliving.

Imps may generally come and go as they please, for their silver cord is broken out of the caul. The imp had puzzled over that passage many a long and lonely night; the chroniclers seemed to think it meant teleportation, but he had never been able to do so. Then again, even walking was difficult under Schloss's eye much of the time.

Imps may hear the keen of their ken from a far distance. The imp was quite sure what that meant; he had often allowed himself to relax and his consciousness to flow outward into the city. He almost always immediately drew it back in, though. The greed, the overwhelming avarice that suffused every pore of the metropolis…it was the crucible out of which the imp had been born, but its sheer hatefulness was like ground glass. Every now and then there would be sweet relief as an altruistic soul--probably a child, could be found, but the nastiness of the ordeal kept the imp locked securely within himself to a degree that he was sure did not trouble his brother and sister imps…if they existed.

He had, after all, never met another of his kind, and he felt that most humans probably told themselves he was merely a stunted and deformed example of their people. And perhaps they were right, since the imp found their excesses so frightfully obscene that he sometimes huddled and rocked for hours in his cabinet to make the sensations stop.

But then…there was the locket, and the woman who had borne it, and the son of whom it was a memento. They were the first in a long while to be free of the greedy taint, and the imp was grateful for the opportunity to feel their purity. But of course Schloss had turned that feeling to bile, as he turned everything else.

Imps are treacherous creatures and prone to mischief. The imp had never, in all the years that Schloss had raised or kept him, offered anything but his service and gratitude to the old man. And what was his reward? Beatings. Taking advantage of the poor and the confused, like that bereaved young mother.

It was time to change that.

In the dark of the night, the imp retrieved the locket and its ticket from the display case. It had the lady's address written on it, in case Schloss needed that information to collect a debt (as often happened when the pawned item was fake). A few more small items were pilfered as well, the imp reveling in the disobedience. Grimly, he snuck toward the door with his loot in hand, and swung it open.

Schloss lay there asleep, snoring loudly. The imp jumped up on his bed and slit the old man's throat with the child's dagger that had been in one of the cases.

Gurgling, the old pawnbroker had awoken, his eyes bleary and vengeful. But his cry died a whisper in his throat, and his final swat at the imp was weak and tremulous. Only in death did the oily aura of avarice vanish from the only family the imp had ever known. He kicked over the oil lamp next to the bed, which quickly spread into a conflagration that consumed the little shop and both buildings abutting it. The imp liked to think that the old man's ill-gotten gold had run in rivers down to the sewer where it belonged.

"Oh, my!" the woman cried when the imp appeared at her doorstep the next day. "How can I ever thank you?"

"Let me live here," the imp begged. "Let me stay here and earn my keep."

The woman--Hilda was her name--had never let her husband touch the locket, but when introduced to the imp he recoiled a little at the latter's strange appearance and short stature. But there was no aura of avarice about him, at least none that stood out against the background greed of the city.

"We would be honored to take you in, but we sadly do not have enough money for another mouth," the man--Gunther--told the imp.

"I do not need to eat," the imp told him. "I can go without."

"We can barely afford to feed ourselves," Hilda lamented. "Even with your gift, we are sure to pawn in in hardship once more."

It was then that the imp used his power for the first time without the disapproval of Schloss behind him. He seized a few rude wooden cups on a nearby table and spun them into gold.

"I can help you with that," he said. "If you'll just let me stay."

Gunther and Hilda had no objections.

Over the next few weeks, the imp was able to help the family--just the two adults since the death of their only son--move into a nicer home in the Baumstadt district. With all the gold he could create without arousing suspicion, the imp enriched the couple such that Gunther became known as Herr Rumpel--Mr. Rattle--for the change purse full of impish gold he took to carrying. Hilda--Frau Rumpel to the neighborhood--began wearing fine dresses instead of her homespun ones, and both gave up their trades of cobbler and seamstress respectively.

"Oh, dear, would you mind spinning this?" Frau Rumpel would ask the imp. "Oh, dear, would you mind spinning this?" The imp was happy to oblige, gleefully setting aside Schloss's warning. He didn't let his power extend out, though, as the neighbors' greed soon became so overpowering that it was enough to counterbalance the lack thereof in the Rumpel house.

"Oh, dear, would you mind spinning this?" Hilda said one day, handing the imp a stick.

"I need to wait a bit," the imp replied. "I think people are beginning to become suspicious. Your story about a rich relative will only hold up for so long."

"Oh, but we need it, dear," said Hilda. "There are things we absolutely must do."

"What's that?" the imp asked. "The pantry is full and neither of you need work any longer."

"Well, there's a lovely new dress in the window of Hauldhagen's, and I absolutely must buy it."

"What…what's wrong with the one you have?" the imp asked. "It's brand new."

"It's out of style," Hilda cried. "Will you spin the twig or not?"

The imp, shocked, complied. Had he…? No, no. It was impossible. It must be the intense greed of the neighbors, nothing more. They were jealous of the Rumpels' newfound success and poisoning the air with it…

Soon the requests became more and more extravagant. Entire pieces of furniture gilded, an upgrade to a fine mansion on the river. Hilda's conversations with the imp had once been long-winded and kind as she filled him in on the parts of life, from childbirth to old age, that Schloss had kept from him or forced him to seek out in books. Now her discussions were short and peppered with demands. Gunther, too, rarely spoke as he once had about his trade and his relatives in Baden. Instead he would obsessover what needed buying, and who needed hiring.

Eventually, when Gunther and Hilda appeared before him and demanded that an armoire be spun to gold, the imp snapped.

"No, I won't. I can't even spin it, it's too heavy."

"You can tilt it on one corner, dear," Hilda said, "and spin it a little that way."

"The floor won't hold the weight!" cried the imp.

Hila and Gunther looked at each other and laughed. "We can buy another floor," they said. "A hundred other floors!"

"Haven't you enough already?"

It was there, then, and unmistakable. Once they had been denied--felt even the whiff of denial--from their previously pliable imp, the Rumpels threw off waves of furious, nauseating greed…just like everyone else.

"Who are you to say what's enough and what isn't?"

"Trying to keep all the wealth to yourself, is that it?"

"You're spinning gold for someone else, aren't you? Aren't you?"

The imp raised his hands. "Enough! Please, don't ask me to spin any more! You need to think, you need time to come back to yourselves, to let the greed dissipate."

"It's ordering us around!" Hilda cried. "Impudent little wretch! Show it some manners, Gunther!"

With his cane, her husband struck the imp a blow, and it slid across the floor with an ugly bruise over one eye.

"Fine, fine," the imp whimpered. "I'll do it tomorrow, I promise."

"See, it just needed a little persuading, dear," Hilda laughed, with avarice roiling all around her. "Well done."

The Rumpels' home burned to the ground the next day; the charred bodies recovered from their bedroom by the Polizei were found to have had their throats cut. Officials speculated that they had been murdered by brigands jealous of their newfound (and inexplicable) wealth. No one noticed the small weeping figure on the riverbank, nor the tiny golden locket it flung into the waters.

Time and again, the imp found that those it tried to aid were overwhelmed with greed; he would stretch out his consciousness, his gift, to look for those that were pure and noble, but the allure of gold was too much for the fragile people to bear, and they eventually succumbed to the avarice and were like all the rest. The imp would murder them out of mercy, for it was far better to die than to be so terribly and irredeemably corrupted. He spared only those with children, for he could not bear to harm them even as their paretns were twisted into caricatures.

The last family, the Stiltzes, were still warm in the ashes when the imp had an epiphany. No one whom he had tried to help had ever commented on the fact that he had no name, that Schloss had never seen fit to bestow one. They had all been blind to that simple fact by their greed, latent or expressed…and that greed was a function of their upbringing. That was the inescapable conclusion--greed begat greed. The only way to solve the problem, then, was to take a child and raise them from birth to be selfless--to give up on the flawed adults and seek out his old dream of children and family, getting right what generations of greedy humans had gotten wrong.

But it was no simple matter of stealing a child. No, it would have to be given to him freely, and from someone whose greed was of a low or latent quality. For the imp could never bear to tear a child away from an unwilling mother, and the older children who might follow him willingly were already too twisted by greed.

So the imp retired to a small hut in the mountains, to gather himself away from the ground-glass greed of the city. Every day, he would project himself out as far as his power would let him, searching for gaps in the greed and investigating them. Most were dead ends; a few even warranted merciful release from their problems at the end of a knife. The few promising ones turned out to be men or barren women.

That is, until one day. The imp heard from a greedy pawnbroker that it was stalking to "release" that the king had taken a commoner whose boastful father had talked her into a corner. Unless she could complete the impossible task in the boast, she would die.

"That is my opportunity come at last," the imp said to himself as he strangled the pawnbroker and dumped the body into the sewer. "I can present myself as a savior, take a trinket or two to judge her worth, and if all works out…secure for good and all my heir at last, to begin relieving this poisoned place of its greedy sins."

Before it left the cottage, though, the imp decided that the time had come at long last to pick a name for itself. A charred log in the fireplace was his stylus, just as burnt charcoal had been in Schloss's cuboard all those long years ago, and the stoned of the hearth were his paper. It was, the imp thought, a fitting summation of the journey he had taken, and the hope he held out for the future:

RUMPLESTILTZKIN.