Jack and the Giants

by Piers Anthony

  “You’re so smart!” Harriet said, hugging me.

  “Just lucky,” I said modestly. But I was of course quite pleased. “It should be a while before they give up the chase and return home. Maybe we can find something worthwhile, like knives and camping supplies, so we can rough it in the forest.”

  “And insect repellant,” she agreed. “In case there are giant spiders, wasps or scorpions.”

  We had a plan of action. But I couldn’t help wondering: if we escaped this dangerous realm and found our way home, whether physically or by waking up, what was there for us? Poverty and oppression? I wasn’t sure I really wanted to return. At least, not yet.

  We checked another room. There in a suspended cage was a regular size yellow chicken. “Well hello, hen,” I said, talking to it the way I do sometimes.

  “Hello, man,” the hen replied in a rather squawky tone. “Have you come to rescue me from my cruel captivity at long last?”

  Bemused, I simply stood there, staring. A talking chicken!

  Harriet recovered before I did. “We’ll try,” she said. “We’re escaped captives ourselves. The giants were going to eat us.”

  “They do,” the hen agreed. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I am Henrietta.”

  “How can you talk?” I asked, curious. “Where I come from, animals don’t talk, at least not in the human manner.”

  “This is not where you come from,” the hen reminded me. “This is more like a dreamland. Things are different here. Animals can talk, if they want to. I didn’t have much use for it, before, but now with you here, I do.”

  “Why are you caged in the house, instead of out in the barnyard?” Harriet asked.

  “Because I’m not an ordinary chicken. Well, back home I’m an ordinary fowl, but I dreamed of laying gold eggs, and here in this realm I can. But the giants captured me, and caged me so I couldn’t escape, and now I have to lay a gold egg a day or they’ll make chicken soup out of me. It’s awful!”

  Gold eggs! Now I remembered that aspect of the Jack and the Beanstalk legend. The Hen that Laid the Gold Eggs.

  “I’m Harriet,” Harriet said, completing the introductions. “And this is Jack.”

  “Jack the giant killer?” the hen asked eagerly.

  “No, Jack the has-bean,” I said quickly. “I came up on a bean stalk.”

  “Come on, Jack,” Harriet said urgently. “We have to rescue Henrietta before the giants return. Think of something!”

  I gazed at the cage. It was about twelve feet above the floor, well clear of the walls. An isolation cell. “Maybe I could reach it in a jump.”

  “No,” Harriet said. “You’d just catch it and break its cord so everything crashed to the floor and maybe kill Henrietta.”

  “Don’t do that!” the hen squawked, alarmed.

  I focused my (I hoped) superior brain. “A rope!” I said. “That we can throw up there and climb up to unlock the cage.”

  “If we just had a rope,” Harriet agreed.

  “There’s some tie-string in the waste basket,” the hen said helpfully.

  We found it. What was string to a giant was light rope to us. I quickly looped it into several crude knots, then threw it up to catch the bottom of the cage. It missed, but I tried again, and again.

  “We’ll get you out soon,” Harriet promised. I hoped she was right.

  “Before you rescue me, I have a confession to make,” the hen said. “I can’t lay gold eggs in the real world, only here. So if it’s wealth you want, I can’t help you.”

  “You can’t talk there either,” Harriet said. “But this is not about that. This is about saving your life and freedom, and ours too. We’ll work together.”

  “I really appreciate that.” The hen paused, then said: “However, I know where the giants keep the eggs. Those should remain gold wherever they are.”

  That was a smart bird. She had first verified our good will, then told us how to get the gold.

  “I’m broke,” I said, still trying to snag the cage. “I could really use some gold.”

  “So could I,” Harriet said. “Would it be unethical to take those eggs?”

  “From the giants? They’re trying to enslave or eat us,” I said. “I regard it as the spoils of war.”

  “The giants stole them from me,” Henrietta said. “I hereby make a gift of them to the two of you. There are a dozen gold eggs in a bag in the cupboard over the counter.”

  Harriet checked and found the small bag. “Oh, it’s heavy!”

  “Gold weighs a lot,” I said.

  “It does,” she agreed, and put the bag in her purse. “We’ll share, evenly, when we get back.” That seemed good to me. At this point I wanted to share more than gold with her.

  A knot finally caught, and I climbed the rope, putting my feet on the knots. The cage tilted crazily, but held. When I got there I reached up to unlatch the cage door. It swung open and the hen leaped out. She spread her wings and glided to the floor. She was free. “Glorious!” she cackled.

  Harriet joyfully hugged me as I dropped to the floor. “I knew you could do it!” she said, and kissed my cheek. I loved it when she did that. I wrapped my arms about her, but hesitated when my fingers fell below the base of the tee-shirt and caught her pert bare bottom. Fortunately she didn’t notice. I think.

  Before we could celebrate further, we heard a noise at the door. The giants were returning, and by the sound of their stomping they were not pleased. Their prey had escaped them. “We have to get out of here!” I said.

  “Use the dog door,” Henrietta said. “It’s always open. This way.”

  She knew the layout. That helped. We followed her to the rear of the house as the giants stomped outside.

  The dog door was huge, about twelve feet high. But it was on horizontal hinges and swung freely. We could push our way out through it. That was, of course, what it was designed for.

  “Only one thing,” Henrietta said.

  “Can it wait?” I asked, conscious of the tromping of the giants in the next room. “We’ve got to get out of here now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Henrietta said.

  Exasperated, I paused with my hand on the swinging door. “What?”

  Then we heard it: a loud angry growl outside. The dog had returned, and was about to use the dog door to enter.

  “Get back!” the hen cried. “Fido will eat us all!”

  We retreated from the dog door just as the giants entered the house from the human door. Then the dog door smashed upward as the beast leaped through. The canine was a true monster, almost twelve feet tall at the shoulder and ugly in proportion.

  He winded us and growled menacingly. Slaver dripped from his muzzle.

  The two giants spied us. “Get them!” they shouted together.

  We were caught between the two terrors, each of which seemed worse than the other. What could we do?

  Chapter 6:

  Lightning

  “Jack...what do we do?”

  Harriet was behind me, holding my shoulder. Fat lot of good it did getting behind me, since the two menaces were coming from two different directions.

  We were back in the kitchen. The house wasn’t much, although gigantic to humans. Just a kitchen, a living room, and a couple of bedrooms. A hundred ideas occurred to me, almost instantly. Yes, I was getting smarter and my brain sharper. Unfortunately, all the ideas that occurred to me would result in our deaths. At least, that’s what I quickly deduced.

  We couldn’t dance for them or play for them. We certainly had no where to run or hide. We couldn’t outrun the dog. And the kitchen itself was bare, with nary a cupboard to hide within. The floor itself was wood, and sloppily laid out. Surely there was a seam or a groove between the planks, or maybe a knot within the wood....

  Except we didn’t have much time to look. Or, rather, any time at all.

  They continued closing in. Now the giant leaned down, and sniffed. “You stole my hen and you stole my gold eggs, too. I
am going to cook you slowly.”

  I realized then that his eyesight wasn’t very good. In fact, he seemed to rely often on his nose, which seemed to be his superior sense. I wondered if all giants were the same. I considered our chances of bolting forward, through the giant’s legs. The dog would surely follow, and mayhem would ensue. Except, of course, I didn’t want to trust our lives to mayhem.

  “I want the girl,” said the giantess. “Raw. Eat her slowly.”

  “Jack...” whispered Harriet, her breath hot on my neck.

  “Jack...” squawked the hen in my arms.

  I cursed my balky brain. Superior or not, it wasn’t giving me much to work with, and our time was nearly out. If only I were as big as the giants, or as strong, or...something? What else was I potentially four times stronger than that could save our hides? There was something here. I was sure of it.

  “Or,” said the Giant, “we can let Fido have his way with them.”

  “But not the hen!” cried the giantess. “I loves my gold.”

  “Aye, so do I.”

  They paused briefly, making an effort to think.

  “Well, then,” said the giant, reaching for me, “me thinks it’s time to eat—”

  I had it. Yes, I was four times as small as the giant, but I was also four times as strong as normal. Which put me at the same level as the giant. In fact, other than his size advantage, our strength should be about equal.

  I didn’t have time to analyze my hypothesis, although my superior brain told me it was sound. His hand was reaching for me...reaching for my neck in fact. His meaty paw was easily as big as my pillow at home...and far filthier. As his hand opened, I grabbed the closest finger to me, his index finger. I grabbed it and twisted with all my strength, and the resulting crack was music to my ears.

  “The blasted morsel broke me finger,” screamed the giant.

  Back home, back on earth, I was no stranger to the gym or working out. That is, until my gym membership ran out and I couldn’t afford to renew it. Indeed, my four times the strength might, in fact, actually be greater than the giant’s.

  The giant stomped his boots, howling. By my estimates, his boots were as big as my dining room table—certainly big enough to do some serious damage, if not permanent damage.

  I grabbed Harriet’s hand and pulled her toward the closest bedroom. Fido, who had been momentarily distracted by the howling and stomping giant, kicked into gear. I heard his massive claws trying to find purchase on the wooden floor—but not having much luck. Good for us. His scrambling, sliding paws, bought us just enough time to dash into the bedroom.

  “Oh, no. Not here again,” bemoaned Henrietta.

  Indeed, we were back in the same room where we had found the hen. In fact, the knotted string I had used to climb up to her was still hanging from the cage.

  “Quit complaining,” I said to the hen. “Now, you were in here for a long time. Is there any escape from this room? And hurry!”

  “Oh, I suppose you could try the window. But they usually leave it shut tight.”

  I rose up on my tiptoes. Indeed, it was shut tight, and now Fido appeared in the room, barking nonstop, drool hanging from his jowls, bearing down on us.

  Yes, I was four times stronger here, but that dog was menacing and huge...and it was going to get ugly, and bloody. “Stay back,” I told Harriet.

  “No,” said the woman of my dreams, shouldering past me. “You stay back.”

  She marched in front of me, raising both her hands, and what happened next surprised the heck out of me...and this coming from a guy who had just climbed a magical beanstalk into a land of giants. Zigzagging bolts of lighting appeared from her, and fried the nose and paws of the charging dog. He nearly did a backflip, and I almost felt bad for the brute. Almost.

  I smelled singed hair as Harriet lowered her hands and turned back to me, grinning.

  “What was that?” I asked, knowing we didn’t have too much time for idle chitchat.

  “I’ve always been mildly telekinetic.”

  “Tele-what?”

  “I can move things with my mind, back on earth. Nothing too remarkable. I can make a feather float, or even bend a spoon on good days. And so I figured—”

  “Your tele-something-or-other would be four times stronger,” I finished. “Wait, I saw you levitating a pencil once!”

  “Yes, I did that often when I was bored.”

  “I thought I was going crazy.”

  “No, not crazy. And it’s called telekinesis.”

  “Well, let’s telekinesis our butts out of here.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How does it work?” I asked. “And show me quick. They’re coming. All three of them. And they don’t sound happy.”

  She turned and raised her hands and concentrated, and more jagged bolts of lightning appeared...and shattered the nearby window. “It works like that,” she said.

  “Well, I may not know how it works,” I said, grabbing her suddenly superheated hand, and pulling her toward the shattered window. “But I like it.”

  I helped her up onto the sill first, then tossed up the hen, who squawked loudly. I scrambled up behind her, and then we were both through the window, careful of the sharp fragments. We leaped from there and landed in the long grass...and were running again. This time, the giants didn’t give chase.

  We were free. For now.

  Chapter 7:

  Talents

  We holed up in an old giant squirrel’s nest high in a tree, where Fido would not be able to reach us, and the giants would not think to look, we hoped. We relaxed, the three of us, unwinding. We would be moving on soon enough. We had agreed to wait until night, then make our way back to my beanstalk, and descend. This might all be a communal dream, but it seemed safer to be dreaming in my house than up here in Giantland. I would make a place for a hen’s roost, and—dare I hope?—Harriet might share my bed.

  “I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” Henrietta said. “I really appreciate your rescuing me. So please don’t take this the wrong way.”

  “Take what?” Harriet asked. She was curled nested in my embrace, a position I loved. The gentle heaving of her bosom under the tee-shirt appealed to me, too.

  “Some honest comment.”

  Now I was curious. What was on her poultry mind? “Let’s have it.”

  “You folk are not phenomenally smart.”

  I felt Harriet tighten. A chicken was calling humans stupid? But her voice was deceptively quiet. Women, I think, were good at deception. “How so, Henrietta?”

  “You didn’t have to toss me up to the window. You’ve seen me fly.”

  Oh. “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.

  “And what you demonstrated, Harriet, was not telekinesis. It was electricity.”

  Harriet tensed, then relaxed. “You’re right! I didn’t move anything with my mind. I zapped the dog and window with lightning bolts.”

  “But I saw you levitate a pencil,” I protested.

  Harriet worked it out. “I guess it wasn’t exactly what I thought it was. Maybe I used static electricity to levitate the pencil and the feather. But here in Giantland with much stronger power, I didn’t bother with lifting light things. I simply let loose with the charge. In the tension of the moment I never realized that it was a different phenomenon.”

  “It certainly worked,” I said appreciatively. “I wonder whether I have any similar talent, here on the Cloud?” The word “cloud” had assumed a new meaning recently.

  “Maybe you’re the one with telekinesis.”

  I laughed. “If I’d had that, I never would have had to face down the bully straw boss at the office. I’d have given him a hotfoot instead.”

  “That’s not telekinesis either,” Henrietta said. “That’s pyrotechnics. Fire projection.”

  “Or maybe goosed him with a loose umbrella,” I said, embarrassed. “But it’s academic. I never had any psionic talent.”

  It was Harriet’s turn
to be curious. “Maybe it was too weak to show in the real world. But here on the Cloud it can be strong enough to make a difference. Telekinesis, teleportation, levitation, whatever. We should find out what it is, because we may need it to get out of here.”

  The prospect appealed. “It would be nice if I could simply fly away from danger, or conjure myself to a safe place. How do I find out what talent I might have?”

  “Try them in order,” Harriet suggested. “Find out what works.”

  “Like jumping out of this tree and seeing if I can fly? That’s chancy.”

  She nodded. “Maybe it should wait for a better time.”

  “So let’s catch a nap now, so we’ll be alert tonight,” I said.

  We settled down to sleep. It was a little slice of heaven to have Harriet reposing in my arms, the top of her head near my face. I couldn’t resist kissing her soft red hair, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  “I felt that,” she murmured sleepily.

  Oops. “Sorry.”

  “Do it again.”

  Oh. I happily buried my face in her curls, and drifted off to dreamland. Then woke just enough to wonder: if this was all one big dream, how could we sleep in it? But of course I had slept after seeing the beanstalk by my window, so maybe it was possible. It was as easy to dream of sleeping as it was to dream of giants or magic talents, and maybe more sensible.

  As night closed, we carefully descended to the ground and separated briefly for natural functions. Did functions exist in dreams? They must, because we ate in this dream. Fortunately it wasn’t cold, so Harriet’s scanty attire sufficed for now. In fact I rather liked it; she had very nice legs, and that wasn’t all.

  Now there was a problem: I wasn’t sure exactly where the beanstalk was. I had been carried some distance by the giant, in the satchel, and he could have gone in any direction. I would know the general lay of the land if I saw it, there with the river and the castle, but how close to that were we? Also, would I know it by night?

  I halted, struck by a realization: we had not been in that castle. The giants’ home was a hovel in comparison. So who lived in the castle?