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.’

Chapter 14

Once upon a time there was a little house in a big wood. It was a dear little house. It was adorable. The glass in its small, leaded windows was so old and distorted by age and authenticity that light stood about as much chance of getting in through them as an unemployed Libyan has of getting into the United States, and the sheer weight of the climbing roses on the front elevation was threatening to pull the house’s face off and dump it around the front door in dusty heaps. It had been photographed so often you could almost see it hold its thatch back with both hands and show the cameraman a bit of basement.

And in the cottage there lived a cute little girl called Snow White, along with seven dwarf samurai. And three bears. And three little pigs. And three blind mice. And a cross-dressing werewolf. And that was just the downstairs parlour.

Ask the residents of Own Goal Cottage (such a pretty name, even if nobody has a clue why it’s called that) about the reasons for the overcrowding, and if they’ll admit that the place is a wee bit cramped (which is by no means certain) they’ll be sure to tell you about the great flood; the flood in which all the other cottages in the domain were washed away, leaving only this place and Suckerbet Castle still standing. Just don’t bother asking when this flood was, because they won’t remember.

On the wall of the parlour there hung a big mirror in an ornate gilded plaster frame; and it had a crack in it that ran diagonally across the face. Even before it was broken it hadn’t been much good, of course, for it was a distorting mirror, bought by Dumpy the dwarf from a travelling circus for the sole reason that it was cheap.

In front of the mirror one fine sunny morning stood Snow White, in her prettiest gingham dress, with her brightest and most cheerful pink ribbons in her hair. She smiled at it, wedged her face into a demure smile, and asked:

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’

In the cracked mirror there appeared a rough impression of what her face might look like if it was inadvertently put in a blender. One eye was six inches higher than the other, the two halves of her nose made her look as if she’d been drawn by Picasso and then got in a fight with a barful of marines, and her mouth was a fat red slug trying to climb a ladder.

‘You, O Snow White,’ said the mirror, ‘are the fairest of them all.’

Snow White preened herself like a contented cat, even though she knew the mirror said exactly the same thing to everybody who asked the question. It had worried her for a bit, until nice Mr Hiroshige had explained to her that since all things are, cosmically speaking, One, all reflections are the same reflection and so everybody is by definition the fairest. Although she was somewhat disappointed, in the end she came to the conclusion that that was probably the best way to deal with the matter. After all, where there is no competition there’s no conflict, and where there’s no conflict there’s peace. Except in this case, when the flying pigs swoop too low and the sonic boom breaks all the glass in the greenhouse. Fortunately, that only tended to happen once in a blue moon; say, on average, every sixty-two days.