Snow White and the Seven Samurai

Chapter 13

The accountant sat up.

He’d been dreaming again; a most bizarre dream, in which a substantial number of his clients had gathered together in the great hall of the wicked queen’s castle and then vanished in a cloud of glittering pixels. He shook his head, as if trying to make the dream fall out of his ear. Usually, his dreams dealt with profit and loss accounts, quarterly statements, double grossing-up of advance corporation tax and other relevant issues. He enjoyed his dreams. Quite often they were so specific, he was able to charge his clients for having them. This sort of thing was as unwelcome as it was unfamiliar.

In the top left-hand corner of his office, he noticed, there was a cobweb. It wasn’t a particularly fine example of the genre, more of a wispy mess that looked like the sort of candy floss you might expect to eat in the house of Lucrezia Borgia. It wasn’t the sort of thing any self-respecting fly would be seen dead, let alone frantically struggling, in, obviously produced by a spider who didn’t take much pride in its handiwork (spiders don’t weave gossamer with their hands, but delicacy of expression forbids a more apt choice of words). It was quivering, vibrating even, as if in tune with a million wave-patterns that rushed into it from every side (and a fat lot of good that’d be to a hungry spider; can’t eat radio signals, can they?) and were caught and held in the threads until they solidified into tiny droplets of water that slid down the micron-thick wires and fell, like small, fat shooting stars, to join the rapidly growing pool that was collecting in the accountant’s empty coffee-cup.

There’s a thought, the accountant mused. A web that catches messages from all over the world. A world-wide web. What possible use could it ever be, though?

Hello. Hello? HELLO!

The accountant reached for the nearest file and opened it.

For pity’s sake, Grimm, switch your bloody modem on! Though why I’m telling you to switch it on when you can’t hear me, because if you could hear me it’d mean you’d already have switched your modem on… Oh God, just listen to me, I’m starting to babble. Has anybody in the building got a stamp I could borrow?

The web shuddered a little, though there wasn’t a draught. A young bluebottle, who’d just passed his flying test and was really stretching his wings for the first time, hadn’t quite slowed down quickly enough. Bugger, it thought, as the foul sticky stuff refused to let it have its legs back; then, since flies are fatalistic creatures, it stopped struggling and hung upside down, waiting for the main event. Nothing happened. Just my luck, the bluebottle reflected, first time out on my own and I run smack into the bogies.

Curious; it was almost as if it could hear voices — some people called Softcore in a place so far away it couldn’t possibly ever matter were apparently trying to talk to two friends of theirs called Grimm, to ask them why they hadn’t reported back yet, and also what the explanation was for the unusual activity they were monitoring on [some technical stuff that the bluebottle couldn’t and didn’t really want to understand] and did that mean the Crazy Old Bastard was up to something?

All very peculiar, the bluebottle thought; and it’ll never replace the blindfold and last cigarette. You can’t beat the old ways at a time like this.

Below, the accountant’s head began to droop again. It slid forward and hung from his neck like an over-ripe pear on a thin branch. His eyes closed; then opened again. He could see a tiny reflection of himself in the pool of condensation that had gathered in the bottom of his cup.

‘Running DOS,’ he said. ‘Please wait.’

We’ve been waiting long enough as it is, you idle bloody— Hang on. You’re not Neville Grimm. Who the devil are you?

‘Bad command or fi—’

Don’t give me any of that crap, please. I write this garbage, remember? Save it for the customers. And listen; I need to talk to Neville Grimm, urgently. Can you pass on the message?

The accountant’s eyes glazed over, then blinked seven times. ‘Channel now open,’ he said. ‘Please transmit now.’

Neville. Neville, you dozy… Hey, you. I thought you said you’d put me in touch with Nev Grimm. All I’m getting is static.

‘Drive Nevgrimm is not ready,’ the accountant droned. ‘Please try again or restart Mirrors.’

Oh Gawd. You can tell we designed this crap, can’t you? All right, transmitting as text—only files for later retrieval. Don’t lose it, okay? Here goes. I’m sending through the update, that’s Mirrors 2000 1.1, with this message. We’ve fixed it so it’ll overwrite all existing files, repeat, all existing files, which means we’ll be able to control the whole box of tricks from back here. Your priority one is to make sure that the Crazy Old Bastard, the woman Tracy Docherty, the girl Sis and the boy Carl do not, I say again do not, leave the Mirrors domain. That way, we can seal the whole thing up tight as an actuary’s bum, throw away the key and get on with running this company the way it ought to be run. And before you start panicking, there’s two outshots reserved for both of you under filename THREEPIGS.EXE, so you’ll be able to get out before we close the domain up for good. Just make sure you get the right one, or you’ll find yourself buried under a load of useless fonts before you can say Clive Sinclair. You got all that? Why am I asking, when you can’t bloody well hear me? Oh…

The accountant’s hand shot out and knocked the cup over, spilling the water on to his desk, where a thick pile of papers quickly absorbed it. The accountant opened his eyes.

‘Bugger,’ he muttered, ‘now look what I’ve done.’ He scooped up the papers, tried to mop up the water with his tie, then hit the intercom button.

‘Nicky,’ he barked, ‘bring me a J-Cloth, quick as you like. And another coffee.’

‘Right you are,’ crackled the voice at the other end.

Presumably she didn’t mean it.

‘Tracy?’ said the little doddery old man.

The wicked queen looked round, did a double-take and stared at him. ‘Mr Dawes!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh my God. I thought you were…’

Mr Dawes shook his head. ‘Well, I’m not,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’

Neatly sidestepping a pair of samurai, the wicked queen vaulted over a bench on to a table and down the other side, patted Fang absently on the head, ignored Julian and gave Mr Dawes a hug that would have squashed a grizzly bear. ‘Mr Dawes!’ she repeated. ‘Oh boy, am I glad to see you!’

‘Are you? That’s nice.’ Mr Dawes disentangled himself from the wicked queen with the ease of a bullet passing though a sheet of wet blotting paper. ‘Is there a mirror anywhere in this tiresome place? There’s some things I think I ought to sort out.’

‘Hey!’ Carl’s voice, loud and piercing with all the abrasive clarity of youth. ‘You’re Ben Dawes! You run Softcore! Wow!’

Mr Dawes gave him a sweet, sad look, the sort that’s worth a million of the sort of words that are usually immediately followed by off. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘And don’t tell me, you want to be a software engineer when you grow up. My advice is don’t. Either of them. And now, if you don’t mind…’

It occurred to Sis, as Carl stopped dead in his tracks and went red in the face, that if this was really the celebrated Ben Dawes, then of course he’d have had plenty of practice in making bumptious young computer freaks shut up; still, it was quite an awesome exhibition. It would be nice, she reflected, if he could make the same technique work on armed guards and Japanese warriors. Assuming it really was the great Ben Dawes. She remembered something.

‘Excuse me,’ she said.

Mr Dawes turned to look at her. For a moment she was afraid he’d loose that awful stare on her; but for some reason he didn’t. He looked even more like a kindly old uncle than ever. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘Excuse me,’ she repeated, ‘but are you sure you’re Ben Dawes?’

The old man smiled; it was a very sad smile. ‘Last time I looked,’ he said.

‘Ah. It’s just — you’re rather older than I expected.’

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

‘Ah.’

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘It’s the climate in these parts,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure it agrees with me. Now then, where was I? Oh yes. A mirror. Any mirror will do,’ he went on, and he was speaking to — yes, confound it, it was the wicked queen, although a moment ago Mr Dawes had called her Tracy, which seemed improbable. ‘Polished metal’d do at a pinch,’ he added. ‘Or even a bit of wood with a good beeswax shine on it. Surely that’s not too much to ask, is it?’

‘Sorry, Mr Dawes,’ the wicked queen replied awkwardly, as if she’d negligently brought him a cup of warm blood instead of his morning coffee. ‘Usually there’s any number of mirrors around the place, but just now we seem to be right out of them.’

‘Marvellous. Well, there must be something—’ Just then Mr Hiroshige, who’d got his sleeve snagged on the corner of the table, managed to free himself and advanced on the wicked queen, brandishing his sword in the approved, highly ceremonial and utterly symbolic manner. He’d just, in fact, accidentally sliced through a bowl of wax fruit and a table lamp; and as he swung the shining katana around his head, the light flashed on the immaculately burnished steel of its three-foot blade.

‘You there,’ Mr Dawes barked, and at once the samurai stopped brandishing and stood on one leg looking extremely self-conscious. ‘Stop fooling about with that thing and give it to me. Hurry up,’ he added, snapping his arthritic fingers, ‘that’s the way. Now then,’ he added, as he took the sword from Mr Hiroshige’s unresisting hand, ‘let’s see what we can see. Tracy, I’d be ever so grateful if you could stop those buffoons with guns clumping up and down. This is rather delicate work, you know, especially under these conditions.’ As he spoke, an oppressive weight of guilt and shame seemed to encompass the Baron’s halberdiers, as if they’d been called up to the front at morning prayers and told off in front of the whole school. They shuffled back out of the way, holding their assault rifles behind their backs and trying to look inconspicuous. For beginners, it was a creditable attempt.

Mr Dawes held the sword blade up to the light; then he laid it down again, took off his glasses, rubbed them on his sleeve, put them back on his nose, breathed on the sword, rubbed that with his sleeve and held it up again, squinting at it. ‘Not used to bright light, you see,’ he explained. ‘Now then. Mirror!’

For a heart-twistingly anxious moment, nothing; then the face of a very old and venerable Japanese monk appeared in the steel.

‘Mirror,’ Mr Dawes repeated.

The monk stared at him impassively for about three-quarters of a second; then he bowed slightly from the neck and opened his lips.

‘What?’ Mr Dawes frowned. ‘Oh, right. Never mind all that now. Select Setup, quick as you can.’

The Japanese gentleman bowed again and vanished. Mr Dawes made an exasperated noise with his teeth and upper lip and sat down on a bench, tapping the fingers of his free hand on the table. Everybody else seemed to be watching, and also (Sis realised) trying to avoid being noticed by Mr Dawes; even Fang had curled up under the table with his tail between his legs. She wondered why this was; after all, he seemed a nice enough old man, not to mention being the rich and famous Mr Dawes; then she remembered the effect that a very slight brush with his displeasure had on Carl (he was under the table too, and the only reason his tail wasn’t between his legs was that he didn’t have a tail). A nice enough old man, she decided, but also formidable; kindly old Uncle Darth.

And then she noticed someone who wasn’t respectfully cowering: a cute, fresh-faced blonde girl, a year or so older than herself, with pigtails that came down to her waist and cheeks as rosy-red as the bruises on the face of someone who’s just been done over by a Glasgow dope gang. Snow White, she deduced, and she looks ready to commit mayhem. As yet, though, she didn’t look as if she was about to do anything more aggressive than mere savage pouting (she’s got the lips for it, God knows; she’s what you’d expect to see if Frankenstein had gone to work for the Disney corporation), but it crossed Sis’ mind that she ought perhaps to warn Mr Dawes; and then she thought of what might happen if she interrupted Mr Dawes when he was busy, and decided that he was probably old enough and avuncular enough to look after himself. She looked away — At precisely the same moment that Snow White made her move; which is why the first Sis knew about it was the ear-splitting shriek as Snow White snatched Mr Miroku’s sword out of his fist, leapt up on to the table and aimed a ferocious slash at Mr Dawes’ head. Fortunately, she missed; but the blow knocked his sword clean out of his hand and sent it flying across the hall. It hit a wall, rebounded and fell with quite remarkable precision on to the rope that still attached Dumpy, Tom Thumb and the Brothers Grimm to the battering ram, cutting it in two.

The Grimms had been fidgeting nervously for some time; now that they were suddenly and unexpectedly set free, they didn’t hang about. Grimm #2 hurled himself under the table, but #1 lowered his head and charged at Mr Dawes, yelling something inarticulate and managing to head-butt the poor old man without actually having to look him in the eye. At this point Fang sprang up from his crouch under the table. Perhaps it was because he’d been human for so long he’d forgotten what size his true shape was, or maybe it was just a freak outbreak of clumsiness. Whatever the reason, he stood up too fast and too tall, nutted himself on the underside of the table and flopped back to the floor with his eyes shut.

With Mr Dawes’s restraining influence temporarily removed, the gathering became a trifle disorderly. Desmond and Eugene (who’d been utterly paralysed by the sight of Mr Dawes, though they had no idea why) caught sight of Julian and went for him like a pack of hunt saboteurs in pursuit of a Range Rover. Julian didn’t hang around; he scrambled up on to the table in a flurry of clattering trotters and galloped along it at a speed you’d normally expect to be far beyond the ability of even a souped-up Formula One pig, until he had the misfortune to cannon into Dumpy, who’d wanted to hit one of the halberdiers in the eye (because he was there, presumably) and had climbed on to the table so as to be able to reach. At this point Fang came out of his table-induced swoon, caught sight of two little pigs, and instinctively took a deep breath. The pigs saw him, recognised him and stopped dead.

‘Hey, you!’ Eugene yelled to Dumpy. ‘Leave that and get this bastard wolf off us. That’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?’

Dumpy blinked; his head was still full of breathtaking indoor fireworks after his collision with Julian, but a remark that finally makes some sort of sense after you’ve been living in a world with severe continuity problems has power to penetrate even the wooziest skull.

‘Darned right you are,’ he whooped with all the satisfaction of a short but fierce warrior who finally knows what he’s supposed to be doing; at once he threw himself at Fang and would undoubtedly have knocked the stuffing out of him if only he hadn’t missed and gone rolling across the floor like an out-of-control snowball. ‘Dammit!’ he yelled, as he trundled towards the door, “Stiltskin, Thumb, do something!’

Rumpelstiltskin, of course, was still up in the gallery. He’d been hoping very earnestly that whatever it was that was going on could manage to carry on going on without him, and he was just about to plead a bad cold or a severe attack of conscience or a grandmother’s funeral when he observed that Fang was now more or less directly below him, and that on the parapet of the gallery, just nicely handy and conveniently balanced, was a large potted fern. He nudged it and it fell.

‘Wugh!’ said Fang as the pot hit him; then he closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.

Dumpy, who’d pitched up against the doorframe and rolled back on to his feet, punched the air with his fist. ‘Yeehah!’ he shrieked. ‘We done it! We done nailed that old big bad wolf!’

Snow White and the wicked queen, who’d been having a little private wrestling-match to decide who was to have Mr Miroku’s sword, both looked round simultaneously. Then they looked at each other.

‘Something went right,’ said the queen.

Snow White growled like an angry dog, let go of the sword and belted her with a cut-glass fruit bowl, causing her to lose interest; then she picked up the sword and advanced along the top of the table towards Mr Dawes, who did a fine impression of a crab in reverse gear backing round a tight corner.

‘It won’t work, you know,’ he said.

‘You reckon?’ Snow White lunged, missing Mr Dawes by the thickness of a cigarette paper. ‘We’ll see.’ She feinted to his left then, as he dodged, brought the blade whistling down, snipping a button off his jacket cuff with a degree of precision that’d have been the envy of half the surgeons at Guy’s Hospital. ‘I’m the fairest, and that’s how it’s going to stay,’ she snarled. ‘Now keep still while I kill you.’

She swung again; but this time the blade bit an inch and a half deep into the oak of the table-top, and while she was struggling to twist it free, Mr Dawes ducked under her arms and made a Warp Two dodder for it. He got up quite a respectable turn of speed, but it didn’t get him very far, because Grimm #2 reached out from under the table and tripped him up. ‘Get him,’ he yelled to his brother; and to be fair, Grimm #1 wasn’t far behind; the only reason he didn’t get there earlier was because he’d stopped to pull a bell-rope clear from the wall. He pounced on Mr Dawes and started tying him up.

‘Bugger that,’ Grimm #2 shouted. ‘Kill the old sod.’

Grimm #1 swivelled round, his hands tight on the rope. ‘I can’t do that,’ he shouted back. ‘That’d be murder.’

‘Nah. Aggravated pesticide, top whack.’

Grimm #1 scowled. ‘Look, we tie him up and get out of here, and that’ll have to do.’

Then both of them were shoved out of the way as Snow White charged through, still gripping the sword. ‘This is between him and me,’ she warned, carelessly letting the tip of the blade pass no further than a thirty-second of an inch from the tip of #2’s nose. ‘Stay out of this, unless you fancy going home salami.’

#1 opened his mouth to object, but #2 got in before him. ‘Fair enough,’ #2 said. ‘You do it, we don’t mind. Equality of opportunity is one of the things Softcore takes most seriously.’

Sis looked round in desperation; but the samurai didn’t seem as if they were interested in intervening, while the halberdiers were standing there like book-ends. The pigs and the dwarves just seemed out of it all, somehow, as if their storyline was over and someone had switched them off to save electricity. She looked away.

And saw the doors that led up to the gatehouse tower fly open, and a great torrent of what looked very much like thick soap-suddy water come flooding into the hall, with three or four frantically struggling mops riding the crest of the tidal wave like surfers as depicted by L.S. Lowry. A fraction of a second before the flood caught her up and swept her away, she thought she might just have seen a tiny elfin female and an equally diminutive male clinging on to the bolts that had held the doors shut; though whether that meant they’d deliberately opened them or were just clinging to something to keep from being drowned in the suddy deluge, she neither knew nor (Help! I can’t SWIM!.’) particularly cared.

It’s a terrible way to go, drowning in a sea of soapsuds. The assurance that, once the flood has subsided and your sodden, swollen body pitches up somewhere among the driftwood and other assorted flotsam, your clothes will be whiter than white and free of those hard-to-shift stains is little real consolation.

Most of the hapless victims trapped inside the great hall when the deluge broke through coped remarkably well, all things considered. Fang, for instance, swam round in circles until his strength was just about to fail, whereupon he was rescued by the three little pigs, who had improvised a raft out of an upturned table (complete with a tablecloth sail and serving spoon oars) and were arguing among themselves as to which of the three chandeliers pointed north when Fang floated by.

‘Let him drown,’ said Desmond. ‘For pity’s sake, he’s the big bad wolf.’

‘Shut up,’ Julian argued, reasonably enough. ‘And help me get him on board.’

‘On table, surely.’

‘You can shut up as well. Come on, jump to it. Or do you want to spend the rest of your lives on this contraption?’

It was remarkable how quickly their differences had been put aside, once it became apparent that Julian was the only one with a clue as to what to do.

‘All right,’ Desmond grunted. ‘Eugene, get his ears. Now then; one, two, and heave!’

Fang landed in the well of the table with a bump, too exhausted to do more than wag his tail feebly. Julian, however, was in a hurry.

‘Now listen,’ he said, grabbing Fang by the scruff of his neck and lifting his head. ‘You see that archway over there? Good. Now that’s the way out on to the battlements — we’re floating level with them right now. If we can get this raft over there before the sud level rises much more, we can get out on to the ramparts and shin down the drawbridge ropes. Piece of cake. All you’ve got to do is blow in the sail, right? I said right?’

‘I don’t care. You used to be bloody good at huffing and puffing and blowing things down when it was a real pain in the bum. If you need an added incentive, how about if you don’t get huffing and puffing before I count to three, you’re going to be breakfast, lunch and dinner until further notice? You like that idea? Okay then. Get huffing.’

Quickly, with his ears right back against his skull, Fang huffed. Then, more from force of habit than anything else, he puffed. And then the raft skimmed across the surface of the great hall like a speedboat, cutting a huge wake of froth and bubbles as it went and spewing out a tidal wave that turned the great hall into a jacuzzi.

‘Too fast!’ Julian screamed, as the raft shot towards the archway like a torpedo. ‘Too fast…!‘

His words dopplered away into nothing as the raft shot through the arch, bump-bump-bumped down a flight of steps and slid off through another archway and over the parapet like the crew of the Enterprise doing warp nine back to the nearest starbase in time for Happy Hour.

‘We’re flying!’ Eugene shrieked above the scream of the wind all around them.

‘In a sense,’ Julian yelled back.

Fortunately, and at odds somewhere in the region of seventy million to one, they touched down on the moat, bounced like Barnes Wallis’ celebrated bomb, and skimmed along the lush grass of the castle foregate before coming to a gentle, civilised stop in the middle of a cesspit. Almost immediately after stopping, the table submerged with a loud and flatulent glop! leaving Julian and his brothers struggling out of the smelly mire, happy as pigs in muck (which is to say, not very).

‘Don’t say a word,’ Julian warned, as they scrambled out of the pit and collapsed on the grass. ‘I’ll just mention this. If the Wright boys had made a nice soft landing like that at their first attempt, they’d have been hugging themselves with glee.’

‘Yes,’ Desmond muttered, after spitting out a mouthful of cesspit. ‘Well. I think the basic idea was bad and getting that bloody wolf to blow in the sail was about as daft an idea as anybody’s ever had in the history of the world. On both counts…’

‘What’s he’s trying to say,’ Eugene interrupted, ‘is that two wrongs don’t make us Wrights. So what. We’re still in one piece. I say we forget about the whole thing, and…’

‘Hang on.’ Julian held up a trotter for silence. ‘Where’s the wolf?’

The three little pigs looked round. Sure enough, there was no trace of Fang to be seen anywhere. The pigs exchanged glances and stared at the bubbling, glopping surface of the cesspit.

‘May he rest in peace,’ said Desmond, after a long while. ‘And whatever else is in there, of course.’

‘Maybe we ought to try to fish him out,’ said Eugene reluctantly. Julian shook his head.

‘Nice thought,’ he sighed, ‘but he’s been under — what, forty-five seconds? A minute? He’s huffed his last puff and that’s that. What a way to go,’ he added with a shudder. ‘Apt, but nasty. Come on, let’s find a stream or a pond or something, before anybody sees us.’

Desmond nodded thoughtfully. ‘Forgive and forget, huh? Oh well, why not? It’s no skin off my snout, provided it’s guaranteed he’s not coming back.’

Julian stared at the billowing mere, then shrugged his sloping shoulders. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he said with a sigh. ‘If the bugger does manage to survive, we’ll never have any trouble about him creeping up on us unawares. Not unless the wind’s in the other direction and we’ve all got really bad colds.’ He shook his head, then pulled himself together. ‘Move it, you two,’ he said. ‘First a bath, then we’ve got a house to build. It so happens I was reading the other day in Scientific Gloucester Old Spot about a way to make high-tensile breezeblocks from straw. Game, anybody?’

‘At last,’ muttered Tom Thumb. ‘Now I understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Why it’s such an unfair advantage being small.’

The elf grunted. ‘Good for you,’ she replied. ‘Now it’s your turn to bail.’

As well as being magical and containing a simultaneous translator/amplifier unit that’d have most terrestrial electronics manufacturers sobbing themselves to sleep from envy, Tom Thumb’s hat was watertight and therefore suitable for bailing soapsuds out of an up-ended floating contact lens. It had been Thumb’s suggestion that they name the lens the Nelson; something to do with being temporarily blind in one eye was the reason he gave, and the elf was too busy sloshing suds over the side in a soggy hat to object.

‘Anything to report?’ he asked, as he took the hat and stooped to dip it in the suddy bilges of the lens.

‘Just listen to yourself, will you?’ the elf snarled back. ‘Ye gods, it’ll be splice the mainbrace and make it so, Number One in a minute. No, there’s nothing to report, just a lot of damn great big soapy bubbles as far as the eye can.

The lens lurched alarmingly, and if the elf hadn’t had reactions like a caffeine-addicted rattlesnake, Thumb would have been lost over the side for sure. As it was, the lens was only a degree or so of tilt away from capsizing.

‘What the hell…?‘Thumb spluttered, through a mouthful of soap.

The elf craned her neck to see. ‘Styrofoam cup ahoy,’ she replied. ‘What careless maniac left that there, right in the middle of a shipping lane? And why are you talking in that funny voice?’

‘I lost the hat over the side,’ Thumb wailed. ‘it’s no good. We’re shipping too much soap, and without the hat I can’t bale out. We’re going to sink. All we need is a string quartet in full evening dress, and we could do an utterly authentic Titanic re-enactment.

‘You’re the captain,’ the elf snarled back, one leg over the side. ‘If you insist on going down with your lens, that’s your business. I’m going to jump for it.

‘Wait for me!’

There was a tiny plop, followed shortly afterwards by another, similar. Not long after that, a wee small voice cried out, ‘heeelblgblgblggbgbgggbbbllgb!’

‘Hang on, I’m coming!’ the elf yelled, kicking frantically. ‘Don’t you dare drown on me, you big sissy, not after all I’ve… Just a minute,’ she added, standing up. ‘You clown, it’s only knee—deep.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Stand up and try it for yourself, idiot.’ The elf grunted, and wiped suds off herself. ‘Marvellous,’ she added, ‘we’re standing on top of the gallery rail. Here, give me your hand, I’ll pull you out.’

‘Just a minute, I think I can see the hat. That’s better,’ Thumb went on, scrambling on to the rail with the hat pulled lopsidedly over the back of his head. ‘You know, I really thought we’d had our chips that time. You know how you’re supposed to have your whole life flash before you when you’re about to drown? Well, it’s true. I saw it, the whole thing; us getting married, the reception, with your Uncle Terry getting drunk and falling down the back of the chair, little Tom junior’s first day at medical school…

‘Just a second,’ the elf interrupted. ‘That’s your future life, you idiot.’

‘Oh? Oh,’ Thumb repeated, as the implications hit him. ‘Oh, right,’ he added pinkly. ‘It’s a pity I didn’t notice how we get off this rail, then.’

‘I could push you back over so you could have another look,’ the elf suggested.

‘That’d be cheating,’ Thumb said firmly, ‘which would tend to corrupt the validity of the data. How’d it be if we just walked along the rail and climbed out through that window over there?’

The elf looked where Thumb was pointing. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘You’re sure it’s safe?’

‘Well, the alternative is staying here and drowning. You choose; I’m biased.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing, for sure,’ the elf said, as they tightrope-walked towards the open window. ‘If we do get out of this alive, I’ve had it with fairytales. No more fooling about with big bad wolves and homicidal woodcutters and wicked witches with machine guns and psychotic pigs for me. No more Miss Nice Girl. We’re going to move right out on to the outskirts of the forest and open a video library.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Thumb replied, in a rather wobbly voice. ‘Happily ever after, and all that jazz.’

‘Certainly not,’ the elf replied severely. ‘Miserably and fighting all the time, like real people. That way,’ she added, ‘ever after might get to mean longer than a week.’

He was a single star in an infinite blackness, a tiny speck on an endless ocean, one solitary spectator in an otherwise deserted Wembley Stadium. On all sides there was nothing but an eerie expanse of white bubbles, like some bizarre Antarctic seascape shrouded in low fog.

‘Go on,’ Dumpy growled. ‘Git.’

‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ replied the mop plaintively. ‘Properly speaking, I’m not obliged to carry passengers at all. I’d be well within my rights…’

‘Shut up.’

‘Witches, now,’ the mop continued, taking no notice, ‘we’ve got to stop for witches, ‘cos they’re entitled, provided they’ve got a current brush pass and all. But it doesn’t say anything in Regulations about giving lifts to passing dwarves. I could probably get in serious trouble for this, you realise.’

‘Keep swimmin’.’

‘It’d be different,’ sighed the mop, ‘if you appeared to have the faintest idea about where it is you actually want to go. But we’ve been cruising round in circles for hours now, and my handle’s starting to hurt something awful. I’m going to have to insist that you either specify a valid destination, or—’

‘Over there,’ Dumpy broke in urgently. ‘Quick.’

‘Now you’re sure about this, aren’t you?’ said the mop. ‘Because if you suddenly decide to change your mind…’

‘Quit complaining,’ Dumpy said. ‘That’s my partner over there.’

Sure enough, on the bubble-thronged horizon, a bedraggled figure was clinging desperately to a floating baguette. ‘Hang on, ‘Stiltskin,’ Dumpy roared. ‘I’m a-comin’ to get you.’

‘Now just you hold on a moment,’ the mop objected. ‘One of you’s bad enough, but if you’re suggesting I stop and take on another one of you freeloaders—’

‘Do it or I’m gonna stick your head down a toilet full o’ Harpic so fast you won’t know you’re born. And that’s a promise.’

‘Vulgar beast. All right then, if you absolutely insist. But you’re taking full responsibility.’

‘So sue me. Hey, you sure you can’t go no faster’n this?’

The mop drew up directly alongside Rumpelstiltskin’s baguette, and Dumpy quickly pulled him aboard. For some time he could do nothing except spit out water and swear, with the outraged mop keeping up a running commentary of protests while he did so. When at last he’d finished with all that, he heaved a sigh that seemed to come from deep down inside his socks.

‘Serves me right,’ he groaned, ‘for turning my back on a perfectly good scam to go trailing and paddling about playing Heroes. What I wouldn’t give for a nice cool dry cellar with a spinning wheel and a big heap of straw.’

The mop shuddered under them like a nervous horse. Frantically, Dumpy grabbed a handful of mop-strings and pulled. ‘Whoa there,’ he commanded. ‘Ain’t no call to be in such a gosh-danged hurry. You just bide there quiet and let me think.’

‘Honestly,’ muttered the mop darkly, ‘is this the time to go trying entirely new experiences?’

‘Shuttup.’ Dumpy looked round, but there was nothing to see except the billows of white, eye-stinging foam, and he had to admit that he didn’t know what to do. That troubled him; a dwarf, surely, ought to know exactly what to do at any given moment. He should be in command, in charge of every situation, proud, self-reliant and brimming with self-confidence. A dwarf should walk tall.

‘Looks like this is it, then,’ mumbled his colleague beside him. ‘The end of the chapter. For you, the story is over.’ He sighed. ‘Well, there’s probably worse ways to go, though I’d be surprised if there’s many that are more bizarre.’

‘That ain’t no way to talk,’ Dumpy replied, shocked. ‘Dwarves don’t quit, boy. That jes’ ain’t the way.’

‘Oh, put a sock in it, please!’ Rumpelstiltskin exploded. ‘God, you should listen to yourself for a minute, you really should. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.’

Dumpy narrowed his eyes. ‘What you sayin’?’ he demanded.

‘Quite simple,’ Rumpelstiltskin replied, turning his back. ‘So simple, in fact, that even you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting your head around it. Ready? Then I’ll begin. You — do — not — talk — like — that. Nobody — does. Got that? Or would you prefer to wait for the novelisation?’

A surge of fury set out to cross Dumpy’s face, but it was overtaken by a flood of bewilderment. ‘What kind o’ nonsense you talkin’ now, partner?’ he groaned. ‘You done bin out in the sun with no hat on, and that’s fo’ sho’.’

‘You see?’ Rumpelstiltskin cried, whirling round so fast he nearly upset the mop. ‘You can’t even do it properly. It’s just what Thumb was saying a while back, only we didn’t listen to him. You’re not you, get it? I can remember now, you see. For some reason, when the water came up to my chin and I thought I was just about to drown, all the memories that’d somehow been locked up in a cupboard in the back of my mind came busting out, and I remembered! I used to know you.’

Dumpy blinked at him. Somewhere at the back of his own mind was a tiny voice yelling Help! Let me out! ‘You did?’ he queried.

‘We used to work together,’ Rumpelstiltskin replied. ‘That’s if you can call it work, of course. There were seven of us, and we lived in a real dive of a place out the west edge of the forest. All the neighbours used to refer to us as Dwarves Behaving Badly.’

‘I…’ Dumpy raised his voice to yell a rebuttal, but somehow didn’t. ‘I remember,’ he said.

‘Thought you would. We used to go off to work every morning down the sewage plant, then troop back of an evening, send out for pizzas, open a couple of cases of beer, put a dirty film on the video…’

‘We used to dry our socks in the microwave,’ Dumpy interrupted suddenly. ‘Once a month, regular as clockwork, we’d take ‘em off, sloosh them down with the garden hose, then bung ‘em in at Defrost for ten minutes. Very good way of doing them, too. Efficient.’

‘That’s it, you’re right,’ Rumpelstiltskin said. He’d noticed that Dumpy’s accent and vocabulary were completely different as well, but he didn’t mention that. ‘I remember that. And then she came along and said we mustn’t do it any more.’

Dumpy winced. ‘Snow White,’ he said.

‘Yup. Dear God, how could I ever forget her?’

‘Takes some doing, I agree,’ Dumpy concurred with feeling. ‘You remember the newspaper she used to put down all over the furniture?’

‘The pink velvet curtains with brocaded tiebacks.’

‘Having to iron the dishcloths.’

‘That godawful picture of happy kittens playing with a ball of wool she made us hang in the bog. Where the peanut calendar used to be.’

‘The little frilly lavatory brush holder in the shape of a cutely grinning pig.’

‘And none of us daring to say a thing. Which was fair enough, because you had to be as brave as two short planks to say anything when she was in one of her moods…’

‘That’s amazing,’ Dumpy said quietly. ‘And to think, I actually managed to forget all that. I’d have thought it’d have taken three hours with a chainsaw and a jemmy to get all that stuff out of my head.’

Rumpelstiltskin nodded. ‘It’s all been very…’

‘Quite.’

‘And…’ Rumpelstiltskin sat up as if someone had just jabbed a needle up through his trousers. ‘Dammit, we were Japanese.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘We were, straight up.’ Rumpelstiltskin frowned, as if he was trying to grip elusive memories in the folds of his brow. ‘At least, part of us was. About the time the rest of us was playing cowboys. Something suddenly went wrong, and we were…’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘forget that. Must’ve been imagining it. For a moment there, though, I could have sworn — OH, JESUS, LOOK OUT!’

‘Look out!’ is, of course, a particularly useless form of warning, because it’s so vague. It can even be counterproductive, since your immediate reaction on hearing it is to look round. If the source of danger is in front of you and closing in very fast, it can be absolutely disastrous.

‘NOOooo!’

In retrospect it was all Mr Nikko’s fault. At a time when young Mr Akira should have been concentrating a hundred per cent on steering the long wooden bench they were using as a makeshift canoe, Mr Nikko had been telling him all about the hypothesis that so long as you’re truly as one with the boat, the direction you actually point the rudder in is irrelevant, since in the higher reality all places are one and the same anyway, and what really counts is not arriving but being in a state of harmonious travel towards (or away from; makes no odds) one of the infinite aspects of the place you’d wanted to go to. In consequence the bench hit the mop and nine people (seven samurai, two dwarves; calculation based on a simple head-count rather than being by weight or by volume) were catapulted into the foam.

Far away, something went Clickcrinklecrinklewhirrrr.

CHARACTERMERGE.EXE was doing its stuff; reintegrating that which had been delaminated, slotting back together the thin strips of what had been blown in all directions. It was like watching one of those shown-backwards sequences of a mill chimney falling down, where the long heap of scattered bricks suddenly seems to pull itself together and stand up as a solid tower once again.

So that was all right; except that where there had been seven samurai and two short plains drifters who couldn’t swim thrashing wildly in the soapy water there were now seven dwarves who couldn’t swim thrashing wildly in the soapy water and, not to put too fine a point on it, drowning.

‘Igor!’

Oh Jesus, now what? ‘Yes, boss?’

Treading suds like an up-ended paddle-steamer, the Baron raised his arms above his head and pointed in the direction of the laboratory. ‘Igor, did you remember to switch the power off?’

‘Me? No, I thought you…’

Zap.

At this point, with half the protagonists drowning and all of them, drowning or not, suffering the effects of a million volts getting loose in a hallful of soapy water, Mr Dawes decided that enough was enough.

When he’d set up the domain, he’d guessed that something like this might happen: a combination of a systems meltdown and a virus infection, quite possibly deliberately introduced by his enemies in the company, very likely exacerbated by further mutations from within the domain itself. It can be rough in virtual fantasy. In cyberspace, nobody can understand you when you scream.

So he’d built in a last-ditch save-all defence mechanism, a digital equivalent of the system that floods a ruptured compartment in a submarine or an airliner with instantly drying foam. That’s where the suds motif had come from, in fact; at the time it had struck him as a piquant little play on themes.

He hadn’t planned on being trapped inside when it went off.

But that wasn’t a serious problem. All he had to do to get out of trouble was what he in fact did — Which was to reach out four inches to his left, feel for the power socket and pull out the plug.

‘That’s it, is it?’ Carl said, clearly disappointed.

Mr Dawes sighed. His definition of suffering fools gladly was giving them a little wave of commiseration as the man in the black hood kicked away the stool from under their feet.

‘What were you expecting, exactly?’ he said. ‘Lethal feedback? All of us trapped the wrong side of the screen and looking for something big and heavy to break the glass with? Grow up, son; and while you’re at it, get a life. It’s only a game.’

‘But…’ Carl held his peace, albeit unwillingly. Not all that long ago, he was sure, he’d been a little wooden puppet, and then a huge humanoid monstrosity with a bolt through his neck; he could remember it all as clearly as if it were yesterday; except that he’d been up all the night before last and had spent yesterday fast asleep. Now he thought about it hard, he couldn’t remember a thing.

They had rematerialised in an office. It was a nice office. It was the sort of office God would have liked to have if only He’d had as much money as Mr Dawes. The Seven Years War was fought to decide who owned an area rather smaller than the square of carpet under Mr Dawes’s desk.

‘In fact,’ Mr Dawes went on, as he lit a cigar the size of a giant redwood, ‘it’s all quite simple.’ Back here, he was quite definitely twenty-nine; a youngish, shortish twenty-nine, the baby-faced sort that gets exceptionally good value out of each razor-blade. Such a small man behind such a big desk; the bizarre incongruity of it made some of the special effects Sis’d seen on the other side of the looking-glass seem positively mundane. ‘There were these guys. They used to be on the board of Softcore till quite recently.’

‘How recently?’ Sis interrupted. Mr Dawes grinned and glanced at his watch.

‘About three minutes ago,’ he replied. ‘Anyhow, they had the same dumb idea about how the domain works as your kid brother here. They thought I could be stranded there permanently.’

‘Gosh,’ Sis said. ‘How silly.’

The door opened, and a secretary brought in the coffee. A jug and three cups.

‘Quite,’ Mr Dawes said. ‘So I stranded them there instead.’

Sis spilt hot coffee down her front. ‘But I thought you said it was all just a game,’ she stuttered. ‘Not for real at all, you said.’

Mr Dawes shrugged. ‘There’s real,’ he replied airily, ‘and then again, there’s real. You want to know how real it is, you go down to the ninety-eighth floor and look for Eileen Suslowicz, George McDougall and Neville Chang. If you can find them,’ he added, stirring his coffee, ‘I’ll give you the company.’

Sis thought for a moment. ‘Snow White,’ she said.

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘That was Eileen. George and Neville were the Grimm boys. You run across them?’

Sis nodded. ‘The wick— sorry, Tracy said they weren’t from inside the, um, domain.’

‘Tracy’s a good kid,’ Mr Dawes said, with a faint hint of fondness in his voice; the sort of slightly mellow tone you might expect from the head of Strategic Air Command talking about his favourite warhead. ‘On reflection — sorry, no pun intended — maybe I should have told her more about what was going on inside the corporation. But then she’d have been worried, afraid she couldn’t handle it herself. Much better she thought they were only pretend people.’

‘I see.’ Sis made a quick inventory on her fingers. ‘So there’s the three bad guys—’

‘Not bad,’ said Mr Dawes. ‘Misguided.’

‘The three misguided guys,’ Sis corrected, ‘and Tracy, all still stuck down there. That’s four real people—’

‘Five, actually. There’s also our chief accountant. But he prefers it down there. Reckons he gets far more work done. He’s a very sad man. You met him, yes?’

Sis nodded. ‘Five people,’ she said. ‘And they might as well be dead.’

Mr Dawes made a vague gesture. ‘Let’s call it living in a world of their own. Remember, with the best will in the world, they started it. What else would you have me do?’

Sis frowned. ‘You could go back and rescue them. And don’t say it’s not possible,’ she added sternly, ‘because I don’t believe you.’

Mr Dawes stood up and walked to the window, from which you could clearly see the curvature of the Earth. ‘Maybe I haven’t explained it clearly enough,’ he said. ‘It’s a fault I have, I know. Especially when I’m talking to people who aren’t in the business. I can’t go back there,’ he said, leaning on the windowsill, ‘because there’s no there to go back to. It’s a computer simulation, that’s all. And all I had to do to leave it was pull out the plug and switch off the machine.’

‘But that can’t be right,’ Sis protested vehemently. ‘You said yourself, this Eileen woman who was Snow White, and the other two—’

‘Snow White,’ said Mr Dawes quietly. ‘The Brothers Grimm. One’s a girl from a fairy story, the other two have been dead for a hundred years. That’s why they don’t exist, kid. Don’t you see that?’

‘But we were there. And we exist.’

‘Ah.’ Mr Dawes’s smile was reflected in the glass of the window. ‘But we’re real people.’ He drew on his cigar, and the smoke obscured the reflection. ‘Neat, huh? So much better than having them buried in concrete or dumped in the Bay. And so simple, you could say it was child’s play. Hey, kid,’ he added, turning to Carl, who’d gone an unwholesome shade of green. ‘You don’t like coffee? I’ll tell Evette to go fetch you some milk.’

‘You arranged it all,’ Sis said, very quietly. ‘You set it all up just so they’d try and get you, and you could get them. That’s…’

‘Business,’ Mr Dawes replied. ‘And pleasure too, of course. I like squashing bugs.’

More than anything else in the entire world, Sis wanted to go home. Mum’d be going frantic for one thing; for another, there was something about Mr Dawes and his office and his soft, quite pleasant way of talking that made her want to hide under the bed, probably for the rest of her life. But there was still one question she badly needed the answer to.

‘I still don’t understand,’ she said. ‘They were real people, just like you and me. When you pulled the plug, we all just found ourselves back here, in this building…’

‘My building,’ said Mr Dawes. ‘Which you and your brothers broke into. But I’m not going to call the police or anything, even though you did make things a little hard for me back there.’

‘All right,’ Sis said. ‘We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to make such a mess. But if we’re all real and it was all just a computer thing, how can they still be there, like you said? It’s just not…’

Mr Dawes sighed. ‘You want to know the answer, don’t you? Okay, you want it, you can have it. Follow me, and on your own head be it.’

He led the way down a long corridor to a service lift that went either up or down (there was no way of knowing) for a very long time; and then the door opened and they were in a large, bare room with a concrete floor and no windows. In the middle of the room was a trio of free-standing computer workstations surrounded by three chairs. In the chairs sat three people, a woman and two men: Snow White and the Brothers Grimm.

‘George and Neville you already know,’ said Mr Dawes. ‘And you saw Eileen briefly back in the great hall. You know, the resemblance is really kinda striking.’

All three were dressed in white surgical gowns; they had black plastic helmets and goggles on their heads, wires connected up to various parts of their bodies and plastic tubes going in and out of them like an Underground map. ‘They’re alive all right,’ said Mr Dawes, matter of factly. ‘And perfectly real. Well, as real as they ever were. Trust me, I’m a computer bore. I know about these things.’

Sis didn’t want to look, but she found that she had to. ‘They look awful,’ she said at last.

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But it’s cheaper than litigation and more legal than murder, and the joy of it is, they did all this themselves. I’m not sure I even have the legal right to unplug them. I shall carry on paying their salaries,’ he added. ‘It’ll just about cover the cost of keeping them like this.’

A spasm of something like pain flitted across Snow White’s lovely face. Fairest of them all, no question.

‘She’s alive,’ Sis protested. ‘And she’s here, in real life.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Dawes, ‘but she doesn’t know that. Maybe it’s all a matter of opinion, anyway. I mean, it all really comes down to what you’re prepared to believe.’

‘Can we go now, please?’ Sis said. ‘I’m truly sorry I asked now.’

She turned her back on the three of them (three little chairs, three little computers, who’s been climbing about in my head?) and walked quickly to the door.

‘Really,’ she said, as Mr Dawes keyed in the security code, ‘really and truly, they’re dead, aren’t they?’

Mr Dawes looked at her with no discernible expression. ‘Let’s just say they’re away with the fairies,’ he replied gravely. ‘Time you were getting home.’