Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998

Leftovers by Dan Crawford

Miss Muffet had only that one second to decide what to do, and only two hands. Her spoon was in one of the hands, her bowl of curds and whey in the other. She set off pell-mell, milk dripping from the breakfast dish as she ran.

The tuffet was left behind, of course, just sitting in the meadow with no idea what had happened. It had not minded its work, which was usually to be sat on indoors, but it had not been tuffeting long enough to know this was unusual. I wonder if she’ll come back for me, the little cushion thought.

She never did, between her fear of spiders and the unreasoning terror that had made her forget exactly where in the countryside she’d been having her snack. For lack of anything else to do the tuffet waited.

The rain was an annoyance now and then, and for a while a batch of baby spiders lived in the lining, which the tuffet found ticklish. But by and large the tuffet found life in the meadow no more irritating than a life of being sat on in the house.

After several months the tuffet heard a sound of heavy breathing. It thought at first that this might be a cow. Cows had wandered through the meadow from time to time accompanied occasionally by a goat. But none of them had had any interest in tuffets.

This was a tall man, though, a man who had been dressed in bright armor and shining royal garb. The clothes were torn now, and the armor was dented. There were scorch marks on his helmet, and some of his hair was singed.

He was breathing hard and walking with difficulty. His eyes were wide with horror.

He’s seen a spider, thought the tuffet sagely.

The man looked over his shoulder and stumbled. His head came down smack in the middle of the tuffet. This appeared to surprise him. He tried, briefly, to rise. Then he put up a hand, pulled the tuffet up into a bunch under one ear, and went to sleep.

The nap was a brief one, but the man seemed gratified by it. “I’ll take you along,” he whispered, lifting the tuffet. “I may live to sleep again.” He thrust the cushion behind his breastplate and turned back the way he’d come.

One corner of the tuffet protruded from behind the armor so the cushion could see where it was heading. The man was making his way to a burned, broken forest. “General Keles?” he called. “Colonel Bural?”

No one answered. The tuffet couldn’t see where any spider could be hiding in all this devastation.

“They must have gone back to the castle,” the man murmured. “But where is the...”

“Araaaa!” something answered.

Slithering toward them came a long yellow snake. Flame flickered at its nostrils. Here we go again! thought the tuffet.

But the man did not run. Instead he reached to his waist and drew a sword.

“Well met, worm! Have you killed my friends?”

The creature was either snickering or taking deep breaths. A bolt of flame flew from its nose, sizzling the air around them. The man ducked, but his sword was knocked from his hand. As he reached for his dagger, the creature hurtled forward with surprising speed.

And the man could not touch his dagger. The tuffet was in the way. “Out!” ordered the man, pulling it free.

No need to shout, thought the tuffet. It isn’t my fault.

“Ack!”

The snake stopped short and twisted its head to one side, eyeing the man.

“What?” The man, about to drop the tuffet, took a step forward, the cushion upraised. “What is it, worm? You’re not afraid of a... a pillow?”

Tuffet, thought the tuffet.

“Ack,” the snake said again. “Ackackack.” It turned, starting away as quickly as it had started forward.

“No, you don’t!”

The man charged, reaching under his breastplate for his dagger. “Come back!” He ran after the big snake.

“Ackack,” the snake said, but now the man had caught up with it and was climbing its back. The snake’s head shook left and right, but the man held on with his knees, the dagger in one hand, the tuffet in the other.

“Ackackackack,” said the snake. “Ack-a-choo!”

This was the last thing it said.

“I don’t know what happened,” the man said when he was back at the castle, where his friends had indeed gone for shelter. “I shook this pillow at it, and it started to make strange sounds and tried to run.”

“Is the dragon allergic to feathers?” demanded the king.

“No,” said a tall man with a long grey beard, “only to dairy products. You weren’t eating your lunch near this pillow, were you? It looks over here as if someone spilled some whey on it.”

“We may never know,” said the man, who was the king’s son. “All we know is that, whatever power this pillow has, it has saved the kingdom.”

“We shall put it in the treasury,” the king decreed, “and all my magicians shall study it to find out what magic it possesses to so frighten a dragon.”

“It’s the stain,” murmured the man with the grey beard, but he took the tuffet to the treasury.

The tuffet waited there for a number of years, but no magician could ever decide why the dragon had turned and run. At length the young man became king himself and had the tuffet put in a public museum as a trophy of his greatest battle. The people came from miles around to see this and the dagger and the fangs of the dragon.

“Do you know, dear,” a middle-aged woman told her daughter, “I used to have a tuffet just like that when I was your age. I wonder whatever became of it.”

The tuffet studied the current size of the former Miss Muffet and shuddered. That, it thought, would be worse than spiders.