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.