Snow White and the Seven Samurai

Chapter 4

‘Hell fire and buggery,’ said the elf, with a barely suppressed snigger. ‘Exactly what happened to you?’

The handsome prince snarled. ‘You think it’s funny, don’t you?’ he said bitterly.

The elf shrugged. ‘Poetic justice, maybe. Actually, you should see yourself, it suits you. Better than the frog outfit, anyway.’

‘Get stuffed.’

The handsome prince took a step forward, staggered and grabbed hold of a tree to steady himself. It had been bad enough being turned from a wolf into a frog, but at least the leg count had remained fairly stable. The sudden jump from quadruped to biped was something quite other.

‘I guess that’s what’s meant by an identity crisis,’ the elf went on unkindly. ‘If you ask me, you’re headed for really major personality problems if you keep this up. Not that you haven’t got plenty of those already,’ she added fairly. ‘It’s just that they’re pimples on the bum compared to what’s in store for you.’

The handsome prince levered himself upright and extended a leg. His instincts were screaming at him that this was all wrong; walking on two legs was just a party trick, not the sort of thing any self-respecting wolf would even attempt to do while sober. He ignored the siren voices in his head; there was work to be done, he was way behind schedule, his recent performance record was looking pretty abysmal and he had his quarterly management assessment looming on the middle-to-short term horizon. Wolfpack didn’t listen to excuses or tolerate failure; they didn’t make allowances if you got turned into something nasty, because getting turned into something nasty in itself implied a whole subcategory of failures. He knew exactly what his superiors would say: if you’re dumb enough to allow yourself to get turned into a handsome prince, you’re just going to have to compensate as best you can. We are not an equal opportunities employer.

‘Come on, you,’ he grunted at the elf.

She ducked behind a nettle. ‘You leave me out of it,’ she said. ‘Both times I’ve done my bit; you’re the one who keeps screwing things up. Anyway, this is nothing to do with…’

Before she could complete the sentence, the handsome prince grabbed, closed his hand, snarled in triumph and then resorted to intemperate language as he discovered the hard way that human beings don’t like the touch of nettles on their bare skin. The elf wriggled and squirmed like a cabinet minister on a chat show, but it didn’t do her any good.

‘This is kidnapping,’ she squeaked. ‘Also assault, intimidation and discriminatory treatment of an ethnic group.’

‘Yes,’ replied the handsome prince. ‘Now shut your face and keep still.’

After half an hour or so of rubber-legged staggering, he’d reached the stage where he could reliably go more than three yards without falling over. Since he was in a forest, with lots of trees to hang on to, it wasn’t so bad. He ought to be able to deal with the next item on his agenda.

Eventually, after a lot of effort and a great amount of unintentional comedy (imagine John Cleese doing funny walks in zero gravity on a highly polished floor) he reached the edge of the forest and peered through the screen of low branches at the plain beyond. He saw what he was looking for, and chuckled.

He was looking at something which at first sight could have been taken for a giant windmill. It had huge, carefully shaped sails forming an X on one side, and stood on a circular plinth, which in turn was cemented into the ground. The upper section, which looked like a salt cellar designed by an illiterate giant, was clearly intended to revolve, turning with the wind. Where it differed from the average windmill was in having searchlights, 50-calibre machine guns and a barbed-wire entanglement.

You had to give the little buggers credit for trying.

He lurched, limped, wobbled and staggered out of the wood, across the plain and up to the gate in the white picket fence that surrounded the whole installation. A porcine head poked up out of a kevlar-reinforced skylight, took one look at him and vanished. Klaxons began to blare and red lights flashed. Under the ground there was a rumble of hydraulics as the ground fell away at the handsome prince’s feet, revealing a deep trench lined at the bottom with savagely pointed stakes.

The handsome prince stooped, picked up a pebble and tossed it lightly against one of the steel-shuttered windows.

‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anybody home?’

He stood still and listened carefully. The afternoon air was still, and he could make out the sound of raised voices inside the tower, made audible on the outside as they vibrated off the stiff steel plate of the shatterboards.

‘It’s him,’ hissed a voice. ‘I know it is.’

‘Rubbish. It’s a human.’

‘Yeah,’ replied the first voice irritably. ‘And last time he was a frog. Can’t you see it’s another damn trick?’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘Can’t I? Watch. And load the fifty-cals. I’m going to blow him apart where he stands.’

The handsome prince took off his hat, with its cheerful feather sticking out of the side, and waved it. ‘Can you hear me in there?’ he called out. ‘Hello?’

‘Yes, but if he is a prince and we gun him down in cold blood—’

‘Oh get real, Eugene. If he’s a prince I’m Noel Edmonds. Now get out of the way of my rangefinder. All I can see is your fat backside, and I know how far away that is.’

The handsome prince stood on tiptoe. ‘I’m looking for a pig called Julian,’ he called out. ‘Anybody of that name live here?’

The nose of a surface-to-surface missile poked out of a loophole at the top of the tower, followed by the tip of a pig’s snout. There was a flash as the sunlight caught the nose-ring.

‘Who wants to know?’ called out a voice from the loophole.

‘You don’t know me,’ the prince shouted, ‘I live the other side of the forest. But I met this talking wolf back along, and he asked me to give you a message.’

The snout vanished and reappeared a few moments later. ‘So why couldn’t this wolf carry his own messages?’ it demanded.

‘He was caught in a bear trap at the time,’ the prince replied. ‘Wasn’t looking all that chipper, to be honest with you. Lost a lot of blood. In fact, I’d say if he isn’t got to a vet in the next ten minutes, he’s had it. That’s why I want to use your mirror.’

The pig’s head went away again, and the handsome prince started to count to ten. Just when he’d reached eight, the head popped out again.

‘Assuming you’re telling the truth,’ it said, ‘we’ve got nothing to be afraid of. But why the hell should we want to help that sucker? He does nothing but blow our houses down. Let the bastard rot.’

The handsome prince frowned. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it?’ he said.

‘True. What of it?’

‘Fair enough,’ the prince replied. ‘I just thought there was rather more to you pigs than that. I was wrong. I’ll try somewhere else. It’s all right.’

Silence from the tower; then, ‘Oh, the hell with it. Okay, we’re winding back the ditch cover now.’

Reprise of the hydraulic hum, this time with feeling. The plates slid back over the spike-filled trench, and a doorway opened through the wire. The handsome prince waved his thanks and walked up until he was within fifteen yards. Then he took a deep breath — Once he’d gone and the dust had started to settle, Julian climbed out of the lavatory cistern he’d been cowering under and looked around at the wreckage of what was supposed to be his home.

‘Eugene?’ he called out. ‘Desmond?’

Something moved under a near-intact sheet of plasterboard. ‘Has he gone?’

‘I believe so, yes.’

When the first gust of air from the handsome prince’s lungs (call it the huff) had hit the sails, they’d begun to turn; at first slow and graceful, gradually picking up speed, until the humming sound they made became unbearable. The tower had moved all right; more than that, it’d spun like a top round the concrete base as the forward momentum of the sails had tried to drag it out. It was quite a sight.

Then the handsome prince had started off Phase II; puffing. It was at this point that a lot of the shutters and other projecting features that didn’t lie flush against the outer skin of the tower were ripped away and flung through the air like autumn leaves. The hum of the blades became a searing scream, and their axles started to glow red hot.

The third attempt was better. More dramatic. Brought the house down, in fact.

First, however, it lifted it up, with a horrible snap and the groans of overstressed metal. The blades were now little more than a molten blur, and the shriek and whine of the slipstream on the curved aerofoils had been loud enough to boil a man’s brain. And still the handsome prince had gone on blowing, until something structural had given way with an ear-splitting twang, and quite unexpectedly the main body of the tower had lifted clear of the pedestal and launched itself into the air, lifted up by the action of the four ‘foils. For a second and a half, maybe two seconds, it hung in space like a huge dandelion seed, until gravity and entropy reminded it that this was no way for a building to behave and escorted it back to the ground. It landed the wrong way up and flew to bits.

‘I knew it was him,’ growled Desmond. ‘I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. All that stuff about expecting better things from us because we’re pigs; what human would ever have said that?’

Julian avoided eye contact. ‘What I want to know is,’ he said, ‘how’s he doing it? First a wolf, then a frog, and now a human. What the hell is the creep going to show up as next?’

Desmond spat out a chunk of concrete. ‘A JCB, maybe. At least that’d be honest. Now what I’d like to know is, where the hell were those two hired dwarves of ours when we needed them most? How much again did you say we were paying them?’

‘Off recruiting,’ Julian said. ‘Just our luck. I honestly didn’t expect to see him back again so soon.’

‘Underestimating the enemy,’ Desmond complained. ‘You keep doing it, and we keep ending up ham-deep in rubble.’ He sighed and shook himself, dislodging a dust-cloud that enveloped him completely. ‘Look, I know you’re going to bite my head off for being defeatist, but why don’t we just move on? Up sticks and go somewhere else where he isn’t going to bother us? It’d be so much easier—’

‘Sure,’ Julian replied. ‘Until the next one of his kind shows up and it starts all over again. Face it, Des, sooner or later we’d have to stop running and stand and fight. Better to do it here and now and get it over and done with.’

‘You know something, Julian? I can’t wait to see you with an apple in your mouth. It’d stop you talking garbage, for one thing.’

Julian shrugged. Matter of opinion, presumably. It had felt like the right thing to say, but maybe Desmond was right; perhaps it would be better to clear off out of the forest altogether, or go back to living in a sty with all the other non-uppity pigs, where they belonged…

‘Come on,’ he said, kicking away a strip of tangled steel with his hind legs. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

‘More power!’ roared the Baron.

Fearfully, Igor obeyed, throwing his weight against the huge lever and driving it forward. Livid blue sparks like fat, sizzling worms cascaded from the contacts. Somewhere a fuse overloaded, but the failsafes and backups cut in immediately; a fine piece of work, though the Baron said it himself, continuity of power supply guaranteed no matter how recklessly he abused the system. He bent down over the Thing strapped to the bench and peered hungrily at the dials on the control panel.

‘More power,’ he repeated.

Igor’s eyes widened like an opening flower in stop-motion. ‘The resistors,’ he screeched. ‘They’re at breaking point as it is. They just can’t take any more!’

‘More power.’

Oh well, muttered Igor to himself, he’s the boss, presumably he knows what he’s doing. And if he doesn’t — well, in years to come Katchen and the children would take a picnic up to the ruined tower on the top of the mountain, and Katchen would bring them into the burnt-out shell of the laboratory and point to a man’s silhouette appliquéd onto the flagstones and say, ‘See that? That’s your Uncle Igor.’ Immortality, of a sort. And it was better than working in the cuckoo-clock factory.

He edged the lever forward, and at first nothing happened. Then somewhere behind the massive screen of lead bricks, something began to hum, and a moment later a tremendous surge of power began to burgeon and swell, like the wave of a surfer’s lifetime on Bondi Beach. Little silver beads of molten lead glistened like dewdrops in the interstices of the shield.

A few inches away from the Baron’s nose, the needle on a dial suddenly quivered. ‘More power!’ he roared, slamming both fists down on the console and sending his coffee-mug (a birthday present from Igor, thoughtfully inscribed World’s Best Boss) flying to the floor. Igor closed his eyes, mumbled the first four words of the Ave Maria, and thrust the lever all the way home.

Raw power sprayed out of the circuits like fizzy lemonade from a shaken-up bottle. One of the minor transtator coils dissolved instantaneously into a glowing pool of molten copper; but the backup took the load, and the meter hardly wavered. You could have boiled a kettle on top of the main reactor housing, if you didn’t mind drinking luminous green tea.

‘Yes!’ thundered the Baron. ‘Igor, it…’

Before he could say exactly what, a gun barrel-straight shaft of blue fire burst from the mighty lens poised a few feet above the bench and enveloped the Thing completely. The Baron screamed and threw himself at the fire-shrouded form, trying to beat out the flames before they utterly consumed his creation; but before he even made contact, a tremendous force hauled him off his feet and slammed him against the far wall. Igor ducked under a table as a cyclone of distilled energy ripped circuit-boards and clamps and conduits out of the benches and juggled them in a spinning maelstrom of blinding heat and light around the glowing outline of the Thing. It was incredible, awesome, terrifying; Spielberg let loose in the effects laboratory with a blank cheque signed by God.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. All the lights snapped out and the laboratory was shrouded in darkness, except for an ice-cold blue glow from the bench where the Thing had been. The smoke cleared, and there was silence except for the sizzle-plink of molten copper slowly cooling.

‘Igor?’

‘Baron? Are you all right?’

Cautiously, both men stood up and stared at the bench and the source of the unearthly blue light. ‘Did you see what happened, Igor?’ the Baron whispered. ‘That fire… Is there anything left?’

Igor shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘I was hiding.’

Together they approached the bench. The blue fire danced on the scarred surface of the oak like the brandy flare on a Christmas pudding, and in the heart of the glow, where the Thing had been, there was a shape; humanoid, certainly, with the correct number of limbs and in more or less the right proportions, but…

‘My God,’ whispered the Baron. ‘Igor, what have we done?’

‘What d’you mean, we?’ Igor whispered back. ‘I just work here, remember?’

Where there had been a seven-foot frame of carefully selected muscle and bone, painstakingly put together from raw materials taken from the finest mortuaries in Europe, there was now a short, stocky child-shaped object with a small, squat body, sticklike arms and legs and a head that was too large for the rest of the assembly. It was wearing brightly coloured dungarees, an Alpine hat with a feather in it and shiny black shoes. It was made of wood and had a perky expression and a cute pointy nose.

‘It’s a puppet,’ the Baron growled.

‘So it is,’ Igor replied, trying to keep the grin off his face and out of his voice. Despite all the melodrama of the last half hour, he couldn’t help liking the little chap.

‘A puppet,’ the Baron repeated. ‘A goddamned wooden puppet. What in hell’s name am I supposed to do with that?’

He broke off. The puppet had winked at him. ‘Did you see that?’ he gasped.

‘See what, boss?’

‘It winked at me.’

Igor craned his neck to see. ‘You sure, boss?’ he said. ‘Can’t say I saw anything myself.’

‘It moved, I’m sure of it.’ The Baron sat down heavily on the shell of a burnt-out instrument console. ‘Or maybe the radiation’s addled my brains. I could have sworn…’

‘Hello,’ said the puppet, sitting up at an angle of precisely ninety degrees. ‘Are you my daddy?’

The Baron made a curious noise: wonder, triumph and deep disgust, all rolled up in one throaty grunt. ‘It’s alive,’ he croaked. ‘Igor, do you see? It’s alive.’

‘Oh sure,’ Igor replied. ‘We got ourselves a walking, talking, moving, breathing, living doll.’ He closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘When you go back and tell the investors about this, I want to be there. Can I have your lungs as a souvenir?’

‘You’re my daddy,’ said the puppet. ‘I love you. My name’s Pinocchio and I’m going to live with you for ever and ever.’

The Baron groaned and buried his face in his hands; which surprised the puppet, because he’d imagined his daddy would be pleased to see him. A safe assumption to make, surely? Maybe not. There was so much about this wonderful new world he didn’t know, and wouldn’t it be fun finding out?

Deep inside his wooden brain, a tiny voice was squeaking Hang on, this isn’t right, it isn't fair, let me out! My name is Carl and I’m a human, and where’s my sister and brother? But the grain of the wood soaked up the last flickers of neural energy, and the dim spark drenched away into the cold sap. ‘My name is Pinocchio,’ the puppet repeated; and if its nose grew longer by an eighth of an inch or so, nobody noticed.

‘You sure this is the right place?’ Rumpelstiltskin asked.

‘I reckon…’

A chair crashed through the front window of one of the saloons on Main Street, making a hole through which something small and human-shaped followed it shortly afterwards. The chair didn’t travel much further than the saloon’s front porch, but the small humanoid object, being lighter, travelled further and made it as far as a muddy puddle in the middle of the street.

‘…so,’ Dumpy concluded.

The swing doors of the saloon opened and a large, burly, bald-headed man in a barkeep’s apron flung a tiny hat out on to the porch. It was sort of conical, like the narrow end of an egg. It was made out of an acorn-cup.

‘And stay out,’ the barman explained.

The two dwarves waited till he’d gone back inside, then strolled over to the puddle, across which the tiny creature was doing the breaststroke.

‘Howdy,’ Dumpy said.

‘Get knotted.’

Dumpy shrugged. ‘Only being sociable, friend. You Thumb?’

‘Who wants to know?’

Dumpy rested his hands on his knees and leaned over. ‘If you’re the Tom Thumb who’s got a $50,000 reward on his head in Carabas for cattle rustling and grand fraud, then I got a job for you. If not, then screw you.’

‘A job? What kind of job?’

Rumpelstiltskin nudged his colleague in the ribs. ‘Sorry if I’m missing the point,’ he hissed, ‘but isn’t this one a bit too small to be of any use to us?’

Dumpy grinned. ‘When you bin in this business as long as I have,’ he whispered back, ‘you’ll learn that good things ain’t all that come in small packages. This here is Tom Thumb, the meanest son-of-a-gun who ever got agoraphobia in a shoebox.’

Rumpelstiltskin shrugged. ‘Up to you, I suppose. D’you want me to grab him?’

‘Don’t even think about it, partner,’ Dumpy warned.

‘Okay, he’s small, but so is five ounces of plutonium. Also, what with him bein’ a bit on the small side, he’ll be able to do things we can’t. Y’know, like crawling down ventilation shafts and overhearing secret plans. Talking of which, ain’t it ever struck you as odd the way the bad guys always choose to have their tactical meetings plumb underneath a vent grille? I ain’t complaining, mind; just strikes me as curious, is all.’

‘Hey, you.’

Dumpy looked down. ‘You talking to me?’

‘Yes, you. The tall bastard.’

‘Hey.’ Dumpy scowled. ‘Ain’t nobody ever called me that before. Not as is still alive, anyhow.’

‘What, you mean “bastard”?’

‘Hell no. Tall.’

‘Quit making wisecracks and go get my hat.’

Dumpy raised both eyebrows. ‘You givin’ me an order, Tiny?’ he muttered softly.

Tom Thumb sighed. ‘It’s for your own good. Go on, get a move on. Or are you standing around waiting till you evolve into a sentient life form?’

Before Dumpy could make an issue of it, Rumpelstiltskin fetched the hat and handed it over. The tiny man grabbed it and jammed it hard down on to his head.

‘That’s better,’ he sighed. ‘There’s an integral sound amplifier/universal translator built in to the hat. Means you can talk to me without shouting, and you can hear what I’m telling you. All right?’

‘Reckon’s—’

The tiny man winced, as if Dumpy had just stubbed out a cigarette in his eye. ‘Not so loud, for God’s sake. This is sensitive equipment here.’

Rumpelstiltskin nudged his colleague in the ribs. ‘Brilliant combination we’ve got here,’ he whispered. ‘Aggressive, foul-tempered and a wimp. What’s he supposed to be for, then? Lulling the enemy into a true sense of security?’

‘Shuttup,’ Dumpy growled back, ‘you ain’t helping.’ He leaned forward and grabbed; the little man tried to get away, but Dumpy’s forefinger and thumb closed on his leg. He yelped as Dumpy picked him up, in the manner of a man removing a cranefly from a bowl of borscht, and let him dangle for a few seconds before dropping him into an empty matchbox and sliding it shut.

‘Like I always say,’ he sighed. ‘If you ain’t got their respect, you gotta earn it.’

It was disconcerting, to say the least, to hear a loud, raucous voice coming from inside a matchbox; enough to make at least one passer-by freeze in the act of lighting a cigarette, stare at the match he was about to grind against the side of the box, think hard and put it carefully away with a mumbled apology. Dumpy, meanwhile, was counting to ten.

‘All right,’ he said to the box. ‘You quit making that awful noise and I’ll let you out.’

The matchbox replied in language that was certainly forthright. A little match girl, who had been huddling in a shop doorway looking pathetic and doing a brisk trade as a result, stood up in a marked manner and walked away. Dumpy tossed the matchbox up in the air, caught it left-handed, tossed it up again, backhanded it with his left hand into his right, shook it vigorously and let it fall to the ground.

‘Ready yet?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘Okay. You win.’

Dumpy picked up the box. ‘You were right,’ he said to Rumpelstiltskin. ‘A wimp.’ He slid back the lid and shook the tiny man out into the palm of his hand. ‘You want the job or not?’ he asked.

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Nope.’

‘Persuasive bastard, aren’t you?’

Dumpy smiled. ‘Guess it’s my naive charm,’ he replied. ‘Welcome aboard.’

‘Do you trust that man?’ Sis demanded as they squelched out of the swamp into the trees.

‘Depends,’ the wicked queen replied, ‘on what you mean by trust. If you mean, am I sure I know what he’ll do next, then yes. And that’s all that matters, surely.’

The forest floor was carpeted with fallen leaves, which stuck like wallpaper to the portions of portable swamp they had on the soles of their shoes. It was also getting dark. Sis shivered, not entirely because of the slight chill in the evening air. ‘This is probably a silly question,’ she said, ‘but do you know the way home?’

The queen shrugged. ‘Depends on what you mean by know,’ she replied. ‘I can navigate pretty well by narrative patterns, but my geography’s lousy.’

‘Don’t you ever give a straight answer to a simple question?’

‘Depends what you mean by straight.’

Sis sighed wearily. Her legs were painfully tired and what she wanted more than anything else was a nice hot, foamy bath, but she was realistic enough to recognise that her chances of finding one in this context were roughly those of winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. So, as much to take her mind off her poor feet as from any desire for knowledge, she asked the queen what she meant by navigating by narrative patterns.

‘Easy,’ the queen replied. ‘As I said, in this neck of the woods, things — adventures, that kind of stuff — happen so reliably and regularly that you can navigate by them. Or at least,’ she added wistfully, ‘you could if the system was working. For example, by now we should have run into one crooked old man handing out magic wishing-pennies, three old crones gathering firewood who’d have told us what comes next in the story, at least two lots of highway robbers and a unicorn. So if we’d wanted to give directions to someone following us, we’d have said something like straight on past the old man, at the third crone turn left till you come to the second bandits, then follow your nose till you reach the unicorn, then sharp right and you can’t miss it. The joy of it is,’ she added, ‘you can tell the time as well as work out where you are. You know, if that’s the lion with a thorn in its paw, it’s got to be 12.07.’

Sis shivered. ‘Lion?’ she asked apprehensively.

The queen smiled. ‘Not in this part of the forest. Just wolves.’

‘Wolves,’ Sis repeated; as if on cue, the air was torn by a long, faraway howl. Sis squeaked and hopped up in the air.

‘Relax,’ the wicked queen told her. ‘No wolves in this part of the story.’

Sis nipped smartly in front of the queen, then turned and pointed. ‘What’s that, then?’ she asked. ‘A copy-editing mistake? Lousy spelling?’

Sure enough, half hidden behind a tree some fifty yards away stood a large, slate-grey wolf, with small red eyes and a collection of teeth worth a five-figure sum to a tooth fairy. The queen gave it an unconcerned glance and nodded slightly. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to Sis as the wolf nodded back, ‘one of ours.’

‘Really?’ Sis muttered nervously. ‘How can you tell?’

‘I’ll show you an easy test.’ She held out her hands. ‘Count those,’ she said.

‘Two.’

‘That’s how you know it’s one of ours.’

Sis nodded. Logical. Depends on what you mean by logic. ‘So what do we do now? Go back to the palace and wait, like he said?’

‘Not on your life,’ the queen replied, unhooking a bramble from her sleeve. ‘That’s the last thing we want to do.’

‘Oh?’

‘Believe me.’

‘And why’s that? No, let me guess. Narrative patterns.’

The queen half nodded her head. ‘Narrative patterns have got something to do with it, admittedly. Mostly, though, it’s because by now the whole palace’ll be twelve feet deep in soapsuds. Or had you forgotten?’

Sis bit her lip. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But what are you going to do about that? Does this mean we’re on our way to whatever passes for an estate agent in these parts to look for somewhere else for you to live?’

The wicked queen shook her head. ‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘As soon as the system’s back on line I’ll be able to deal with that sorcerer’s apprentice thing and that’ll be that, except for a few tidemarks in the curtains. Life goes on, you know, even in make-believe.’

‘So what are we going to do?’ Sis demanded. ‘Just wander round in circles in this horrid wood until we bump into a wolf that isn’t one of ours? I thought taking the bucket to your accountant was meant to solve something.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ the wicked queen replied absently. ‘The trouble with you is, you’re all linear.’

‘Uh?’ Sis scowled. ‘Is that an insult or a compliment?’

‘As in linear as two short planks,’ the queen explained. ‘You think in straight lines, instead of graceful curves. That’s not going to get you very far, I’m afraid.’

‘Huh.’ Sis pouted. ‘I’d rather be linear as two short planks than curved as a hatter.’

They had reached a small clearing, and for the first time in what seemed like ages, Sis could see a patch of blue sky between the branches of the trees. ‘Where’s this?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me, it’s somewhere narrative.’

The queen nodded. ‘You’re getting the hang of this,’ she replied. ‘If I’ve got my bearings right, this is a brief but significant adventure which ought to bring us out on the main narrative drag. Sort of a short-cut.’ She peered round, obviously looking for something. ‘Which with any luck’ll save us at least two unnecessary plot developments and a couple of setbacks. Tell me if you spot anything that looks like a humble cottage, will you?’

Sis was about to say that she’d be hard put to it to miss something like that when she realised that she was staring at a small, picturesque house at the far end of the clearing. Ludicrous to say that it hadn’t been there a moment ago, because unless it was built on the back of a Howard Hughes among tortoises, it didn’t look capable of scurrying about the place. She just hadn’t noticed it, that was all.

‘You mean like that one?’ she said.

‘Just the ticket,’ the queen replied cheerfully. ‘Now then, let’s just hope this works.’

Immediately, Sis felt hairs on the back of her neck standing to attention. ‘What if it doesn’t?’ she asked.

‘We get eaten. Come on, don’t dawdle.’

When they reached the cottage the queen knocked at the white-painted front door, counted out loud up to twenty, pushed the door and went in. Apparently, nobody in this neighbourhood locked their doors; possibly, Sis speculated, for the same reason that spiders don’t lock their webs. As soon as her eyes had become accustomed to the light, she looked round.

‘Oh no,’ she said, backing away. ‘Don’t say we’re where I think we are.’

Three chairs: one big, one middling, one small. On the table, three wooden bowls (ditto), three wooden spoons (ditto), three mugs (ditto).

‘Upstairs,’ Sis whispered. ‘Three beds?’

‘Large, medium and small,’ the queen confirmed. ‘We’re in luck.’

‘Yes, but what sort? It comes in two kinds, remember. In luck up to our necks is the way I’d describe it.’

‘Don’t be such a misery,’ the queen replied. ‘My old master the sorcerer used to say that a problem’s nothing but an opportunity wearing a funny hat, and inside every disaster there’s a triumph struggling to get out.’ She smiled nostalgically. ‘Full of stuff like that, he was.’

‘Quite,’ Sis replied darkly. ‘Full of it sounds about right. You never did say what happened to him in the end.’

‘You don’t want to know,’ the wicked queen said quickly. ‘Come on, this is your chance to be a star.’

‘My chance? Now wait a minute…’

Before Sis could protest any further, the wicked queen grabbed her by the shoulder and marched her up the stairs. Three beds, as anticipated; one large, one medium, one small with obligatory pink bedspread and matching pillowcase. On top of the pillow lay a rather dog-eared, obviously much-loved button-nosed humanoid doll. It was dressed in a jacket with tiny lapels, tight straight trousers and sunglasses, and its black hair was slicked into a kiss-curl. Ah, thought Sis, who’d seen something similar on the television, a teddy.

‘What are we doing here?’ she demanded.

‘Gate crashing,’ the queen replied, kicking off her leaf-encrusted shoes and flopping on the medium-sized bed. ‘What else would we be doing in the Three Bears’ cottage?’

‘Yes,’ Sis insisted, ‘but why? And if you say narrative patterns, I’ll make you eat the curtains.’

‘You and whose army?’ the queen yawned. ‘Sorry, but a better example of narrative patterns would be hard to come by. Just think for a moment, instead of whining. In this —’ She waved her hands in the air. ‘Well, for want of a better word we’d better call it a dimension, though of course it’s nothing of the sort. In this dimension, things don’t just happen in the messy, haphazard way you seem to favour where you come from. Things here happen because there’s a slot or a hole precisely their size and shape in a story. And it’s a well-known fact that once you’ve skimmed off all the tinsel and watercress, there’s only about twenty stories; all the rest are just the same ones with added bells and whistles. Accordingly, everything here has got to fit into its proper story, or else there’s chaos. That’s why you and your repulsive little siblings crashed my beautiful system; there wasn’t a slot for you, but you came in anyway and that blew a huge hole right through the middle of everything. So, first things first, until we can find a way of getting rid of you, we’ve got to try a little damage limitation and find a slot to put you in. So; I thought about what you’ve done here so far — barge in uninvited, treat the place like you own it, break things, spoil things; in addition to which you’re a cute little girl—’

‘Hey!’

‘—So the choice was obvious. You’re a Goldilocks. An absolute natural for the part. What else could you possibly be? And here we are.’

‘I am not cute.’

‘I wouldn’t bet the rent on that if I were you,’ the queen replied with a nasty grin. ‘If they weren’t all down at the moment, I’d suggest you look in a mirror. You wouldn’t know yourself.’

Sis clutched instinctively at her face. It felt the same, more or less; but since she’d never spent hours lying in the dark feeling her own face, that didn’t mean a lot. But (now that the queen mentioned it) she could feel an unaccustomed tugging at the roots of her hair on either side of her head; she felt gingerly and discovered — ‘Plaits,’ she groaned.

‘With big pink bows,’ the queen confirmed maliciously.

‘You’ve also got big blue eyes, freckles and a great big golden curl right in the middle of your forehead.’

‘Yetch!’

‘You should worry. You’re not the one that’s got to look at you. Honestly, if this was a Disney film you’d be chucked out on your ear for excessive cuteness. Not to mention blondness with intent to nauseate.’

‘Shut up.’

‘But there,’ the queen sighed, turning her head away in an ostentatious manner, ‘it’s very bad manners to mock the afflicted, so I won’t say another word.’ She stretched her arms and legs like a cat, then sat up on the bed and put her shoes back on. ‘That’s enough here,’ she said. ‘We’d better go down and start smashing furniture.’

It helped Sis to be able to take her feelings out on a dear little chair, and by the time she’d finished with it there wasn’t enough of it left to provide a packed lunch for an infant woodworm. The cold porridge didn’t interest her nearly as much, even though it was a long time since she’d had anything to eat. She forced down a couple of spoonfuls just to stop the queen nagging at her, spilt milk all over the tablecloth, and trod on a little wickerwork donkey she found on the mantelpiece. The last, the queen pointed out, wasn’t exactly canonically correct, but Sis maintained that it was essential to her reading of the part. Then they sat down on the two surviving chairs to wait.

They were deep in a discussion of the state of Mummy and Daddy Bear’s marriage — separate beds, the queen felt, was a sure sign that the whole thing was on the rocks — when the door opened. Which of them was more surprised, Sis and the wicked queen or the three little pigs, it’d be hard to say.

For what little evidential weight it carries however, it was Julian who spoke first.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ he complained. ‘It was bad enough when he was a handsome bloody prince. The bimbo outfit’s going beyond a joke.’

The wicked queen opened her mouth to say something but decided against it. Sloppy thinking, she chided herself. A failure to think things through to their logical conclusion before taking action. Of course, what with the system being down and everything being in a state of narrative flux, the last people you’d expect to see in the Three Bears’ cottage would be the Three Bears. And, come to that, the deceased system’s fatally Boolean logic, unable to locate the Three Bears, would automatically revert to the nearest available match, namely the Three Little Pigs. Spiffing.

‘Told you,’ Desmond muttered, shifting the pad of his crutch under his arm. ‘Told you it was pointless running away to this godforsaken backwater and trying to hide from the bugger. I say we do Plan B and that’ll be an end to it.’

Julian stared at him. ‘Plan B? That’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?’

‘No. Let’s do it now, get it over and done with.’

The wicked queen cleared her throat. ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

‘Shut it, you,’ Desmond snarled. ‘Oh, you think you’re so damned smart, don’t you, with your shape-shifting and your disguises and everything. Well, we’re going to show you this time all right. This time, it’s our turn. Eugene, where’s that remote?’

Julian tried to protest, but Desmond and Eugene scowled him down. ‘Des’s right,’ Eugene said, handing his brother a slim black plastic box with red buttons on the top. ‘Let’s end it right now. Okay, so the house goes up in smoke, us too, but at least we’ll take this bastard with us. At least he won’t be able to terrorise other pigs the way he’s terrorised us.’

‘Excuse me,’ the wicked queen repeated urgently. She could feel sweat in the palms of her hands; a sure sign that (as her old mentor the sorcerer would have put it) a bloody great big opportunity was descending on her from a great height. ‘I think there’s been some sort of mistake.’

Desmond only laughed. ‘Too right, wolf,’ he said grimly. ‘And you just made it. Eugene, stand in front of the door, just in case he tries to make a run for it.’

The wicked queen recognised the key word; a short, unostentatious little grouping of letters, easily overlooked in the rough and tumble of dialogue: he. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said sweetly, ‘but I’m not a he, I’m a she. So’s she. Two shes.’

‘Nuts,’ replied Eugene contemptuously. ‘You’re a wolf. In she’s clothing,’ he added ineluctably. ‘Prepare to die, sucker.’

‘Now wait a minute.’ Sis stood up, missed her footing, wobbled and grabbed the table for support. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you’re planning to do, but it’s nothing to do with me, okay? I’m just an innocent civilian. I don’t even belong here. You want to do something horrible to her, be my guest, but…’

Julian was listening; the other two weren’t. Desmond in particular was devoting his entire attention to the buttons on the remote control in his left trotter. ‘Armed and ready,’ he said harshly. ‘Plan B laid in and ready to roll. It’s a far, far better thing…’

The rest of his apt if predictable quotation was drowned out by the noise of the explosion.