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‘Not me, you fool,’ he said. ‘Him.’ Then he fell over.

The queen took a step back, while the remaining sword-fighter closed his eyes and made a face. ‘You clown,’ he sighed. ‘You realise what you’ve just done? You’ve nutted the hero.’

‘Oh.’

‘That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself, is it?’ said the swordfighter angrily. ‘All these years we’ve been working together on this, all the hours we’ve put in, the strains on our marriages, the quality time we haven’t had with our kids, and all you can say is, Oh. Well,’ he went on, stooping down and picking up his opponent’s sword, ‘there’s nothing else for it. Here, catch.’

The queen just managed to grab the sword before it impaled her. ‘Excuse me?’ she said.

‘You bashed him, you take his place,’ the swordfighter replied. ‘Only reasonable. And remember,’ he added, as he aimed a swipe at her that would have done to her head what your butter-knife does to your breakfast hard-boiled egg if she hadn’t managed to duck at precisely the last possible moment, ‘you’ve got to win. Okay?’

‘But I…’

The swordfighter wasn’t listening, and fairly soon the wicked queen was far too busy to talk, unless you count largely involuntary remarks such as ‘Eeek!’ as talking. Even while she was dodging the blows, however, a select committee of her mind was pointing out that this sort of thing was exactly what she ought to have been expecting, given the foul-ups in the narrative patterns and the hopeless tangle the various alternative versions had got into by now. In fact, the committee reported, a simple role reversal was about the mildest form of nuisance possible at this juncture; think how much worse it could have been if this was one of those junctures where the current narrative was gate-crashed by bits of another story…

It was while the committee was considering its findings and filing its expenses claim that the big doors at the far end of the hall suddenly burst open. The swordfighter, who had just knocked the sword out of the wicked queen’s hand and was preparing to run her through, hesitated, looked round, muttered, ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ and let his sword-arm drop to his side.

In the doorway stood seven samurai.

‘Now what?’ Grimm #1 asked.

They were standing under a tree, over a low branch of which they’d slung a rope. One end of the rope was tied round the trunk of the tree, and the other had been worked into the noose around Fang’s neck.

‘Guess,’ replied Dumpy grimly. ‘Now, when I say pull—’

‘Something’s not quite right,’ interrupted Tom Thumb. ‘We’re missing an important point here, I’m convinced of it.’

Dumpy waved his hands in a dismissive gesture. ‘Sure, he should be on a horse,’ he replied. ‘But we ain’t got no horse, so we’ll just have to make do. And one, and two, and…’

Fang, meanwhile, had caught the elf’s eye, and she’d tiptoed over to the tree, shinned up it and settled herself in a low branch next to Fang’s ear.

‘Gggugg,’ Fang muttered. ‘Ggg. Gg.’

The elf shook her head. ‘Relax,’ she replied, ‘it’s going to be all right. You know as well as I do what happens now. Just when they’re about to do the business, an arrow comes whistling out from the nearby trees and cuts the rope, you roll away and escape in the confusion. It’s a stone-cold certainty. You could bet your life on it.’

‘Ggg!’

‘Hang on,’ said Tom Thumb, as Dumpy and the Brothers Grimm took up the strain, ‘I’ve figured out what’s wrong. No,’ he added loudly, ‘stop!’

‘But you just said hang…’

‘Figure of speech. Look, you’re going about this entirely the wrong way. That’s now how you waste big bad wolves. They’ve got to drop down chimneys into big tubs of boiling water.’

Dumpy scowled at him. ‘Quit horsin’ around, partner,’ he grunted. ‘That ain’t no way to run a lynchin’.’

‘But that’s the proper way of doing it,’ Thumb objected. ‘Everybody knows that, surely. I learnt that at my mother’s knee…’

‘Ain’t never heard such foolishness,’ Dumpy growled. ‘Look, are we lynchin’ this sucker or ain’t we?’

(‘Any minute now,’ the elf whispered confidently. ‘Pfft. Whizz. Snick. Job done. Any ideas where we’re going to have lunch afterwards?’)

‘All I’m saying is,’ Thumb said, ‘we’d better get this right because we only get one shot at it. I mean, if we do it the wrong way and the clients throw a wobbly and refuse to pay up, we can’t very well bring the wolf back to life and have another go.’

Dumpy thought it over for a moment. ‘Guess you may be right, at that,’ he conceded. ‘Only question is, where the Sam Hill we gonna find a big tub o’ boilin’ water and a chimney out here in the backwoods?’ He looked round and—

‘Just a second,’ Grimm #2 objected. ‘That cottage wasn’t there a minute ago, surely.’

Dumpy grinned. ‘You figure it just done sprung up like a mushroom, son? Maybe that kind o’ thing happens where you’re from, but not hereabouts.’

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ Grimm #2 replied, or he would have done if he hadn’t suddenly thought of Milton Keynes. ‘Of course it doesn’t happen often where we come from,’ he said. ‘And it shouldn’t happen here, either. Something funny’s going on here if you ask me.’

‘Well I didn’t, so get the sucker down and let’s mosey on over and have a look-around. We’ll be needin’ a long ladder, I guess.’

‘Now that’s odd,’ said the elf, as the Brothers Grimm slackened the noose round Fang’s neck. ‘By rights, there should have been an arrow, but there wasn’t. Something’s gone wrong. Most disappointing.’

Fortunately, Fang was in no fit state to reply, so he had to keep his views on the elf’s choice of the word disappointing to himself. He spent the time taken in reaching the cottage in compiling a shortlist of disappointments he’d have liked to share with the elf, up to and including total immersion in boiling groundnut oil.

‘This is weird,’ muttered Grimm #1, examining the door of the cottage. ‘Didn’t we just come from here?’

‘All these cottages look the same to me,’ his brother replied. ‘Back home, of course, it’d have two Porsches and a Volvo parked outside, and the kitchen would be all Delft blue and yellow with a split-level grill and lots of pine.’

‘Talking of kitchens,’ said Grimm #1, ‘keep an eye out for something to eat. I’m starving. Is it my imagination, or don’t these creeps eat food?’

‘Only when it helps the story along. Haven’t you got the hang of how things work here yet?’

‘Huh. Well, what I think this story desperately needs right now is a deep-pan Seafood Special with extra anchovies. It’s what Shakespeare would have done. And Ernest Hemingway.’

Inside the cottage it was dark and gloomy, and there was an off-putting smell of damp. It didn’t feel lived in at all.

‘Okay,’ Dumpy sang out, ‘let’s make a move. You two, go find a big pot and fill it with water. Thumb, light a fire. Rumpelstiltskin, you’re with me…’ He stopped dead and looked round. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Anybody seen Rumpelstiltskin?’

There was a moment of thoughtful silence while everybody realised that they hadn’t. Dumpy sighed, then shrugged. ‘Makes no never-mind,’ he said. ‘He weren’t no good no how. Right, I’ll go find a ladder. Thumb, guard the prisoner.’

‘Oh yes?’ demanded Tom Thumb, as Dumpy disappeared through the door. ‘And how exactly am I supposed to…?’

The door shut, leaving Thumb alone with Fang and the elf. There was a moment of awkward silence.

‘Don’t make it hard on yourself,’ Thumb said, trying to raise a snarl but getting a whimper instead. ‘You just sit still and everything’s going to be just fine.’

‘Except that I’ll be chucked down a chimney into a tub of boiling water,’ Fang replied. ‘Apart from that, though, I’ll have absolutely nothing to worry about. Elf, get these damn ropes undone quick.’

‘I…’ The elf hesitated. ‘Look, I hate to be a wet blanket, but…’