“‘Your natural beauty will outshine those painted, corseted slatterns,’ Ash-Peter told her. ‘Now you can go to the ball, but you’ll have to take the carthorse. You can leave him at the end of the drive.’
“And so Cinder-Ella galloped to the ball.”
“The great house in the hills was lit in every window like a great golden chandelier. When she arrived, her entrance, breathless and unaccompanied, down the winding stone staircase of the Mayor’s mansion killed all conversation in the ballroom below. Nobody ever entered alone—such a thing broke every rule of etiquette, and the townsfolk always insisted on doing everything by the book, for they were in truth rather provincial—but Cinder-Ella’s natural beauty swept aside any possible complaint. Although she was quickly surrounded by suitors, she refused them all until the Prince himself, dressed in white and gold, approached her.
“They danced so gracefully together that gradually the floor emptied out and the other guests moved to the edges, watching the couple in awe and admiration. The Prince was light on his feet and loved to dance and whirled Cinder-Ella around until she was quite exhausted. She knew that her sisters would return home soon after midnight, so she kept a watchful eye on the clock above the staircase.
“Her own family failed to recognize her, such was her transformation into a beauty. The Prince ignored every other girl in the room, and danced only with Cinder-Ella, so that she lost all track of time. It was only when she looked around and saw her stepsisters leaving in disgust that she knew it was time to go. Breaking free of the Prince just as he asked her name, she ran to the steps and beat them out of the door. But in her rush she lost one of the silver-twig shoes, and it was this that the Prince found after she had gone.
“Of course nobody knew the identity of the Prince’s dancing partner, and although the entire ballroom was agog with gossip they could not help the Prince discover who she was. She had appeared from nowhere and had vanished into the freezing night.
“The Prince announced that he would search the town for her the next morning, and so it came to pass that he and his chief of guards began knocking on every door, asking to meet every female in the house.
“When he reached the merchant’s home, Cinder-Ella’s stepmother answered the door and summoned her own daughters, but nobody else. The stepsisters simpered and mewled about the Prince while his guard produced the silver shoe. They each tried it on in turn, but it fitted neither foot because they were at least three sizes too big for such a pretty little slipper. The stepmother took her daughters aside and urged them to cut off their ugly toes to fit the shoe. So while their mother engaged the Prince in conversation about the weather, they went out to the woodshed and each took turns with an ax to hack off the toes of their right feet. Soon their stumps were bleeding so badly that they looked like bony nubs of butchers’ shop gristle, and they were in so much pain when they limped back that the Prince was put off of letting them try on the slipper and sent them away, as he hated the sight of blood.
“‘Are you sure there is no one else here at all?’ asked the Prince’s guard.
“‘No, there is no one here,’ said the stepmother. But one of the ravens from the hazel tree alighted on the guard and clawed at his clothes, and as he was batting the bird away he glanced through the scullery window, and there he saw smut-faced Cinder-Ella tending to the burning grate.
“‘What about her?’ he asked.
“‘She is nobody, just a scullery-maid,’ sniffed the stepmother.
“‘Nevertheless I must meet her,’ said the Prince. ‘Bring her to me.’
“Cinder-Ella shyly tried on the shoe and of course it fitted perfectly.
“‘Wonderful!’ the Prince cried. ‘You are surely the girl I danced with.’
“‘I am, sire,’ she replied, lowering her head in his regal presence.
“‘Then I shall return to the Mayor’s house tonight and we shall continue to dance merrily, and I shall marry you and dress you up and show you off to the entire nation, and you will be my pretty little dancing doll forever, as befits a Prince. Until tonight, then.’ He shook her hand politely and rode off with his guard.
“The stepsisters were furious. They hobbled toward Cinder-Ella, leaving a bloody trail, and pushed her back into the scullery, further and further, until she was on top of the roaring fire. ‘If we can’t have him, you shall not have him,’ hissed one of them, and grabbing a poker she shoved it at Cinder-Ella, pushing her into the flames. The other twisted her arm and bent her back over the flames until she could no longer remain upright. They rammed her onto the burning coals and held her in place with pokers until the flames set fire to her clothes and her hair and singed her flesh until it was black. Lying below the burning logs, Ash-Peter could hear his sister’s desperate cries, but could not rise up to save her.
“And so poor Cinder-Ella perished in dreadful agony. Her blood and her tears put out the fire and turned the embers to cold ashes as the sisters went off to prepare for another ball, where they hoped once more to turn the head of the Prince.
“There was nothing left of Cinder-Ella except her dainty right foot, which had been thrust beyond the edge of the grate. Ash-Peter roared with fury, and as he did so his anger ignited the coals again and he rose up, and the Ash-Boy stepped out of the great fireplace into the scullery. He stood before the fire and dusted off his gray ashes and found himself whole once more, and he swore revenge for his sister’s terrible death.
“That night, the Ash-Boy waited for the rest of the family to leave the house. Being roughly the same size as his sister, and most alike in complexion and deportment, he donned her ball gown, gloves and tiara. Luckily the Prince had left the other twig-slipper, so he still had a matching pair. Then he slipped out to find the cart horse and rode off to the Mayor’s house.
“At the expected hour Ash-Peter arrived at the top of the grand staircase in his dead sister’s raiments. He was worried that the guests might spot the difference, but the room was lit with candles so nobody noticed and indeed, they were so very similar in height and bearing and even beauty that nobody thought it odd at all.
“As soon as the Prince saw Ash-Peter dressed in his sister’s finery he rushed over, and if he saw the difference he did not show it, for the moment the orchestra started to play he picked Ash-Peter up and whisked him to the dance floor, and once again he waltzed the night away. This time, though, the Prince’s partner did not rush off before the stroke of midnight, but stayed to dance until even the Prince needed to catch his breath, and led Ash-Peter to his private balcony, where they kissed in shadows.
“As the guests dispersed, the Prince led Ash-Peter upstairs to the suite the Mayor had given him (for his own castle was several days’ ride away) and carried his bride-to-be toward his bed. He blew out the candles and undressed his prize and throughout that night he displayed all the manly prowess that might be expected of a Prince.
“The next morning his maids and servants brought him breakfast and found him in bed with a slender young man curled beneath him. They pretended not to notice and scurried from the room, but a whisper was started that became a scandal that quickly spread throughout the entire town, so that when the Prince awoke and appeared at his bedroom door, ready for his morning bath, the Mayor and the Bürgermeister and all of the town’s officials were there to point the finger of accusation at him, for this, as I mentioned earlier, was a very provincial town.
“After a few minutes’ deliberation, and despite a rather unbelievable plea of total ignorance from the Prince, the Mayor’s soldiers took their guest out to the courtyard and hanged him until his heels stopped kicking.
“While all this commotion was occurring, Ash-Peter slipped out of the grounds, found his horse and returned to the merchant’s house.”
“It was snowing hard when he arrived, and the family was starting to freeze because Cinder-Ella’s blood and tears had put out the fire, and nobody could make it stay alight. The merchant tried burning newspapers and his wife
tried lighting twigs, and even her daughters tried blowing on matches, but nothing would make the fire catch, so they crept off to their chambers to cover themselves in blankets and huddle together in the deepening cold.
“Ash-Peter saw himself in the looking glass and knew he could not stay in human form for much longer, so he took the cold ashes from the fireplace and smeared them all over his face and body and said: ‘Now I must once again be what I became before, an Ash-Boy,’ and it was true for he was already losing the softness that made him human. He looked like an angry warrior who had risen from the grate to take revenge for his sister’s cruel fate.
“He told the ravens in the hazel tree to peck out his stepsisters’ eyes, but they stared at him blankly, for they were just birds and had attacked the Prince’s guard because they feared he was threatening their nest. The only magic in the household had come from the fireplace where Cinder-Ella had lovingly tended the flame that held her brother’s form.
“So Ash-Peter took the ax from the woodshed, and sharpened its blade on a stone until it had a razor edge, then went upstairs to find his stepsisters. They were wrapped in blankets in their bedchambers, shaking with the cold, and when they saw the fearsome Ash-Boy walking toward them, dragging his ax so that it sparked against the flint floor, they screamed in terror.
“‘So you would cut off your toes to win your Prince, would you?’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would have a better chance if you fitted Cinder-Ella’s gloves.’ And he chopped off their fingers one by one until their hands were just trowels of bloody flesh. The stepsisters screamed and howled and shook, but nobody came to rescue them. ‘And perhaps the Prince would marry you if you fitted Cinder-Ella’s dress,’ Ash-Peter cried, hacking pieces of flesh off their sides until their limbs were lopped from their bodies and their innards fell from beneath their ribs. ‘And perhaps you would have been wed if you’d worn Cinder-Ella’s fine tiara,’ he said as he brought the sharp blade of the ax down across their pates, and with their silly skulls split they expired in dreadful agonies.
“He was about to head for his father’s room when he heard Cinder-Ella’s voice in his ear. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘do not punish our family any more, for they have no children left to comfort them in their cold old age and surely that is punishment enough.’
“Ash-Peter saw that she was right. By now the house was freezing. The bread and meat in the kitchen had turned hard as rock, and so there was nothing for the merchant and his wife to eat. The water had solidified in the taps, so there was nothing for them to drink. The floors and the doors were crusted in thickening ice, and warmth would never come here again. And so he left the selfish merchant and his shrewish wife and returned to the scullery.
“Scooping out the remains of his sister’s ashes, he took them to the little woodshed at the end of the garden and lit a fire with them the very first time he tried, and he stayed warm in the wooden box while the frost cracked the windows of his father’s house and icicles like great glass spears formed along the edges of the roof.
“He waited. Soon enough, his father and stepmother spotted the glowing light of the woodshed from their window and hurried, shivering, from the house. He heard his stepmother say, ‘Someone is warming themselves on our land, and they shall pay. We’ll kick them out into the cold and take the fire for ourselves.’ But as she slammed the front door behind them, the icicles on the roof cracked loose and fell, spearing each of them clean through the heart.
“Ash-Peter emerged from his woodshed and checked that they were dead. Then he returned to his fire and climbed into his sister’s flames and danced and danced, quite mad in grief and victory, until the furnace consumed him and there were only his ashes left.
“And they mingled with his sister’s ashes, and the icy wind blew them away to the farthest corners of the kingdom, where they warmed the deserving and froze only those with bitter hearts.
“The End.”
He closed the book and lowered it, studying his daughter’s face.
For the last five minutes she had hardly stopped crying long enough to draw breath. “So you see,” he said, tenderly wiping away her tears with his sleeve, “there are fairy tales where the beautiful girl gets the Prince and there are ones like real life, where nothing ends as you expect it.”
And as his daughter started to cry once more, he threw aside the book and went downstairs to find something sharp before resuming the fight with his wife.
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER is the multi-award–winning author of more than thirty novels and twelve short story collections, including Roofworld, Spanky, Disturbia, Paperboy, and Hell Train. He has also written eleven Bryant & May mystery novels so far, the latest being Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart. These follow the adventures of two elderly detectives who investigate impossible crimes in London. The cases are filled with dark humor and often gory, bizarre deaths. PS Publishing recently issued Red Gloves, a collection of twenty-five new horror stories by the author to mark a quarter century in print, and he scripted the War of the Worlds video game featuring Sir Patrick Stewart. He currently writes a column in the Independent on Sunday and reviews for the Financial Times. His latest books are Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Vanished, the graphic novel The Casebook of Bryant & May, the sinister comedy-thriller Plastic, and a memoir, Film Freak.
The Elves #1
A certain mother had her child taken out of its cradle by the elves, and a changeling with a large head and staring eyes, which would do nothing but eat and drink, lay in its place.
In her trouble she went to her neighbor, and asked her advice.
The neighbor said that she was to carry the changeling into the kitchen, set it down on the hearth, light a fire, and boil some water in two eggshells, which would make the changeling laugh. And if he laughed, all would be over with him.
The woman did everything that her neighbor bade her.
When she put the eggshells with water on the fire, goggle-eyes said, “I am as old now as the wester forest, but never yet have I seen anyone boil anything in an eggshell.” And he began to laugh at it.
While he was laughing, suddenly came a host of little elves, who brought the right child, set it down on the hearth, and took the changeling away with them.
The Changeling
BRIAN LUMLEY
The sun was beginning to set as I finned lazily into the shallows, thrust my speargun before me and laid it to rest in six inches of still water, then turned over and sat facing the sea. Removing my face mask, snorkel and fins, I tossed them onto the fine yellow sand at the water’s edge behind me. I wasn’t at all concerned that my things might drift off, carried away by a wave and lost to the current; for this was the so-called tideless sea—the Mediterranean—and I couldn’t possibly lose my gear to surf or current on an evening as calm and still as this one, when the only ripples worth mentioning were the ones I had left in my wake, only now catching up with me and beginning to lap at the beach.
When I had gone into the water maybe forty-five minutes earlier, a handful of people—British tourists—had been leaving, commencing a two-mile trek back to the crowded resort on a jutting promontory that was completely out of sight and sound of this small, cliff-guarded bay. This secret-seeming place was no more than a hundred yards wide end-to-end, like a mere bite—or bight?—that the ocean had sculpted from the bleached-yellow cliffs. With its soft sand and secluded—one might even say isolated—location, its crystal-clear water and sunken rocks that formed a shallow, reef-like bottom no more than sixty or so feet out from the beach, the bay set a scene which conjured a single word: “idyllic.” Little wonder that artists love to paint in the perfect light of the Greek islands, with their dramatic, sometimes lush, sometimes sparse, frequently parched or calcined scenery.
And yet again, as when I had first set eyes on this lonely place while descending the rough-hewn path down the face of the shallow cliffs, I wondered about the absence of commercial activity in what was apparently a virtual haven of peace and quiet. Ind
eed, I had dreamed of such places—my main reason for coming to Greece in the first place; yes, dreamed of bays such as this, and more especially of the tranquil waters that lapped their shores.
But where was the seemingly inevitable, almost compulsory taverna? Where the stacked sunbeds and parasol sunshades—not to mention the bronzed attendant with his purse and clinking drawstring bag of drachmae? Nowhere in sight! Not a bit of it!
Oh, there had been at least one attempt at some sort of industry, and possibly more than one. The steps down the cliff, for instance: someone had cut them. And there, near the eastern extreme of the bay—where, upon my arrival in the midafternoon, I had settled myself down—that single circular concrete base whose central hole had once accommodated the stem of just such a parasol as now was nowhere evident … unless a rusting skeleton cage minus its canopy, half-buried in the sand at the foot of the cliffs, was all that remained of it.
Of course, the resort’s owners might well have discouraged any such attempts by an outsider at building a gainful business enterprise here, especially one that could detract from its own profitability. But then, why not adopt and adapt this place for its own, perhaps supplementing its earnings and easing the crowding on its own rather small beach? There again, as an outsider myself, I had no knowledge of local Greek land rights. It wasn’t at all unlikely that this tiny bay was under some sort of protective government order; why, it might even be privately owned! Then again, being in my own right the proprietor of a small numismatic business in England where I dealt in collectible coins, on the one hand I considered the failure to put this marvelous location to use a lost opportunity and even a waste; on the other—perhaps contrarily or selfishly—I was glad that the bay had managed to stay as it was and exactly as nature intended. At any rate, for the duration of my stay.
Fearie Tales Page 20