Charming, Volume 1

by Jack Heckel

  The white-­haired dwarf interrupted the lecture with a frown. “Steady on, Grady, steady on . . .”

  Grady returned the frown. “Well, Dorian,” he said with a one-­eyed sneer at Liz, “I expect more manners from someone we saved from certain death, carried a good five miles over rocks and through caves, all while enduring the threats and slanderous insults of her lunatic boyfriend. But, maybe I’m old-­fashioned.” He ended by shrugging dramatically and bristling his prodigious brows at Liz.

  The sleepy dwarf half opened his eyes at this and yawned. “Besides, narcolepsy is nothing to laugh at.”

  “Exactly, Sloane,” Grady spit, “that’s right—­”

  “Allergies aren’t either,” the red-­nosed fellow sniffed. “I’m normally not this bad, by the way,” he said in an aside apparently meant for Liz. “Only . . . Only . . . Only—­ACHOO! . . . I’m terribly allergic to lavender.”

  “Precisely, Sneedon,” Grady exclaimed “You see—­”

  “Or maybe it’s the pollen in the air,” Sneedon continued. “You know, ­people don’t know how deadly springtime can be. Spring, and nuts of course . . . Oh. And berries, not to mention shellfish. And then, there’s gluten and . . .”

  Grady reached over and tweaked Sneedon’s nose roughly.

  “Youch!”

  “Dammit,” Grady complained. “We don’t have time to run through a list of your allergies; we’ll be here till next week. The point I’m trying to make is—­”

  “Actually, I think narcolepsy is pretty funny,” giggled the cheerful fellow.

  “Me too,” said a whisper of a voice that must have come from the still-­hidden dwarf.

  “Hayden and Baldwin have a point,” Dorian said. “We have used Sloane as a pretty regular punch line in our plays.”

  “Yeah,” sniffed Sneedon, who still looked a little hurt that the topic of his allergies had been dropped so quickly. “Like our humorous adaption of ‘Rumpelstilt—­” He sneezed again. “ . . . kin’. Come to think of it, didn’t you script it so I was to sneeze every time I said ‘Rumpelstilt . . .” and again “ . . . skin?”

  With rising irritation, Grady said, “That’s entirely different Sneedon . . .”

  “Or, the send up we gave him in ‘The Dwarf and the Pea,’ ” suggested the hidden dwarf.

  “All right, Baldwin, you’ve made your—­”

  “Or ‘Sleeping Ugly,’ ” Sloane murmured with another wide yawn.

  “Well, that was just—­ HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!” shouted Grady. “We’ve never done a play called ‘Sleeping Ugly’.”

  The hidden dwarf, whose name Liz thought was Baldwin, giggled. “No, but it is a really good idea.”

  Grady raised a finger to the sky and opened his mouth to argue, but stopped short and, lowering his hand, said, “Granted, but we’re getting off topic. The point is . . .”

  Liz was finally awake, at least partially from having to shift her gaze this way and that to keep up with the six-­way debate, and had come to the conclusion that enough was enough. “The point is, I have been a terribly ungracious guest. For this I apologize. I am clearly deeply in your debt. But, could you will indulge me a few questions?”

  She paused a moment to see if the talkative Grady would continue his sermon. He did not, but looked none too pleased at having his monologue interrupted—­again. Liz nodded and raised her forefinger. “Where am I?” She raised her middle finger: “If you are not the Seven Dwarfs, then who are you?” She raised her ring finger: “How did I get here?” She let those questions linger for a heartbeat, and then raised her pinkie emphatically: “And where are my clothes?”

  The five visible dwarves blushed from neck to forehead. Even Sloane woke up long enough to turn a bright cherry red before falling asleep again. They all turned to look at Dorian, who was sweating so profusely, Liz was afraid for his health. He put a finger under his collar and pulled. Then gulping air like a landed fish, stuttered, “W-­Well, you see . . . now then . . . that is . . . what I mean to say . . . well . . . we . . . ahhhh . . . er, that is, I had to, um, examine you.”

  “Examine me?” Liz said, her voice raising several octaves.

  “I am a doctor,” he said gravely.

  “Of literature . . .” the unseen voice of Baldwin whispered from its hiding place.

  Dorian glared in the direction of the hidden dwarf. “Yes, well, regardless, I did bandage your head and fix your arm.”

  “I still . . . still say her arm didn’t look all that bad,” Sloane said between yawns.

  “How would you know?” Dorian asked. “You slept through the whole thing.”

  “I did not,” Sloane said with a lazy blink. “I was . . .” He yawned violently, and Liz found that she couldn’t help but follow suit. After a sleepy smack of his lips, he continued, “ . . . watching and—­”

  But that was as far as he got. A gentle snore erupted from the dwarf and a visibly relieved Dorian continued. “The point is your arm was broken. A fracture of the humorous, if you must know.” He wiggled his glasses at her in what could only be described as a professorial manner.

  Liz had broken her arm as a child. The way she could wiggle her fingers without pain made her think the little man was exaggerating. “I think it is pronounced humerus, Dorian,” she said. “And, it doesn’t feel broken.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t broken,” Sloane said with eyes so heavily lidded that it was impossible to know if he was awake or was talking in his sleep.

  “Right,” Dorian said, ignoring Sloane’s comments. “So, with your arm broken and your head bashed in, I—­”

  “Removed my dress!?”

  Dorian blushed again and Grady decided to answer. “Some gratitude. I told you, we shouldn’t have helped her, Dorian.” He shook a finger at Liz. “Look, lady, we find you at the bottom of a ravine, your arm bent all wrong, and your head bleeding, and all you can do is complain about your modesty?”

  “It’s not so much my modesty,” Liz lied, “and more a question of whether any of you are qualified to examine young women? I mean you’re miners!” She was beginning to recover from her initial shock and now was angrier at the helplessness of her situation than at what had actually happened.

  Grady reddened around the neck and squinted at her. “There you go making assumptions again. We’re dwarves so we must be miners, eh? I’ll have you know we are artists, and you, Miss, are not that young.”

  Liz glared back at him for the remark about her age, and said in disbelief, “Artists?”

  “Actors,” Hayden answered.

  “We are not actors,” Grady countered with a snarl.

  “But we act.”

  “Perhaps I should say that we are not merely actors,” Grady said. “We are artists that on occasion author, produce, and perform dramatic works.”

  “But we do act,” Hayden said in happy, but relentless, repetition.

  “I won’t have this argument again,” Grady said. “We are a bloody artist collective, and you know it!” He turned back to Liz and said in honest, if aggressive, confusion, “Now, where were we?”

  Liz fought her growing desire to laugh. Maybe her arm wasn’t broken, but they had done what they thought was best, and no real harm had come of it. Still, she decided they should squirm a little more, if for nothing else than the comment about her age. She cleared her throat. “You were telling me how being an actor—­I mean an artist—­ qualifies you to examine a woman—­even if she is old?”

  Grady, openmouthed, turned on her as though he had forgotten she was there. “I thought that would have been obvious! We are used to dealing with the exposed form—­in all its shapes—­no matter the flaws.”

  Liz could not help blushing, and to his credit, so did Grady.

  “Yes, well, perhaps we could move on,” Dorian pleaded.

  Apart from a twittering of bird
s, there was a general silence that he took for consensus. Dorian poked at his glasses with his thumb until they were listing badly to the left and nodded. He raised his forefinger. “Let’s see, your first question was where are you? You are in the Cottage of the Seven Players, deep in the White Wood. You have been with us something a little short of a week.”

  “And, you were right,” Baldwin said, poking his head up above the edge of the footboard of the bed and eyeing Grady, “we are the Seven Dwarfs . . . at least we are six of the Seven Dwarfs. You-­know-­who is in rehab.”

  “We are not the Seven Dwarfs, Baldwin,” Grady barked, emphasizing the “Seven Dwarfs” with imaginary quotation marks. “We, each of us, played one of the seven dwarves in that awful play.”

  “Awful play?” Liz protested. “Snow White? It was fantastic. My mother took us to see it when we were children. I loved it, especially the singing numbers.” She hummed a few bars of one of the songs.

  “Thank you,” five of the dwarves said in unison.

  “Crass commercial fluff,” rasped Grady.

  “Wait,” Liz said firmly, “you called the seventh dwarf ‘You-­know-­who.’ Who? Do you mean Dop—­ ?”

  “Shhh . . .” interrupted Grady. “Don’t. The rights to that name, in particular, were sold, and well, in fact, we sold the rights to the whole play to pay off some um, ill-­advised, well . . . I guess you could call them investments.”

  “He means, we lost big on the horses,” Hayden translated with a smile.

  Grady glared at him and continued, “The point is, if you don’t want to wind up in the poor house with us, you’ll not mention that play again. The new owner lives in another magical kingdom, but he has some bloody good lawyers. They could be anywhere.”

  All six of the dwarves looked about uncomfortably as though these lawyers Grady spoke of might actually be hiding somewhere in the room.

  Grady’s muffled growl broke the tension, “Anyway, if you must know, his name is really Dominic. He went solo. Made a mockery of his art by going around entertaining the masses in a one-­man comedy show called Big Ears and All.”

  “Quite successful too,” Dorian said softly. “It was after he made it big that we got the offer for the rights to . . . that play.”

  “Yeah, and we sold it,” said Grady.

  “Poor Dominic,” Hayden said in a happily mournful voice.

  “What happened to him?” Liz asked.

  Baldwin piped up from his hiding place. “After the lawyers from that other kingdom gave him the cease and desist, he got hooked on snuff. Put all his money up his nose. Sad, really.”

  “I’m allergic to snuff,” Sneedon sniffed seriously. “Did you know I’m also allergic to—­”

  Grady slapped Sneedon’s nose, eliciting a violent sneeze and a round of chuckles from the other dwarves, “I warned you I wouldn’t tolerate any more talk about your allergies.” Sneedon rubbed his nose sadly while Grady concluded. “Point is, Dominic was a sellout and deserved everything he got.”

  “Oh, ignore Grady,” Dorian said, “he’s just grump, uh, angry because he has writer’s block.”

  “Speaking of which,” Grady harrumphed loudly. “I don’t have time for idle chatter and neither do you, Sneedon.” He jumped from the foot of the bed and stomped toward the door. “Coming, Sneedon?”

  Sneedon shook his head, which made the tasseled cap perched atop it wiggle amusingly. “Uh-­uh. I want to hear the answer to her last question.”

  The dwarves all turned back to Liz. Baldwin’s face appeared above the footboard. Sloane’s eyes opened and, for once, stayed that way.

  “That’s right,” Dorian said. “You asked us how you got here. We want to know the same thing. How does a lady appear at the bottom of a ravine, in the middle of the woods, with a broken arm and shattered head?”

  “I’m warning you, it has all the hallmarks of something a crazed stalker-­groupie would do,” Grady muttered under his breath.

  Suddenly Liz’s mind cleared, and the events since her escape from the tower came flooding back. Her eyes widened in alarm. “My God, the Princess has some evil power! Elle! Will! I—­I must warn them.”

  She was moving before the words were out of her mouth, but with the movement came a flood of pain that radiated simultaneously from her bandaged head and plastered arm. Gasping, she fell back into bed.

  Dorian sprang to her side, “Lady . . .”

  “Liz,” she grunted. “My name is Liz.”

  “Liz,” he said. “You shouldn’t move. The boys were right before. You were in terrible shape when we found you.” He scratched his head. “Doctor or not, the fact is you shouldn’t be up and moving about.”

  Liz sighed and lay back against the pillow. She felt so weak. “I have to. My brother, he may return to the castle at any time. I must get a message to Elle. Do you have a horse? Is there anyone nearby? An inn perhaps?” She wanted to say more, but her head was swimming and she felt nauseous.

  Dorian scratched his tangled beard. “We’re pretty far out in the woods, Liz, and we don’t own any horses ourselves on account of, well—­”

  “On account of horses being great untrustworthy beasts,” Grady spit.

  In a soft, almost whisper of a voice, Hayden said, “There is our patron . . .”

  At this suggestion, Baldwin disappeared, once more, below the foot of the bed, and the remaining dwarves exchanged uneasy glances.

  “Patron?” Liz murmured weakly.

  “Well,” Dorian replied, rubbing a hand along the back of his neck, “I suppose technically he is not our patron.”

  “Yet . . .” Sloane added vaguely.

  “He’s more of a patron . . . in waiting.” Sneedon sneezed.

  “All we need to do is get an audience with him and we’re sure we’ll be able to win him over,” chirped Hayden merrily.

  “What? You’ve never seen the fellow?” Liz asked.

  “No, not yet,” Dorian admitted.

  “It’s that damnable butler,” Grady groused.

  “He has no artistic soul,” Sneedon agreed.

  “Last time, he set the dogs on us,” Sloane said between snores.

  “But this time will be different,” Dorian said, trying to rally the other dwarves. “You’ll see. This time, we’ll give the man a performance that will knock him out.”

  Grady grunted, “How? This time we’ve got nothing. Neither Sneedon nor I have had a decent idea for months. We don’t even have enough material for a one act, much less a proper play.”

  A deep silence fell on the room.

  “I have a story,” Elizabeth interjected. “A story that might melt even the butler’s heart of stone.” She looked about the room, “Did you find a bag with me?”

  Dorian nodded and brought it to her. She began digging through it with a purpose. With a flourish, she pulled out the crystal slipper and held it in the air for a moment, so that it flashed in the sun. It was an act of unconscious stagecraft that worked magic on her audience. The dwarves sat staring dumbly at the little sparkling shoe.

  “How did I get here?” she said in a faraway voice. Liz cradled the shoe in her lap, remembering the only night she had worn it and the man with whom she had danced. Tears rose in her eyes. The shining image swam and wavered, and she whispered, “I suppose you could say I am here because my family has, for generations, believed in Happily Ever Afters . . .”

  The dwarves exchanged collective glances. Grady opened his mouth to say something and the other five dwarves silenced him with a simultaneous hiss.

  Liz shook away the sadness and smiled. “Well, my own little fairy story started the night the dragon attacked our farm. We had doused all the lights when we heard, on the night air, its first cry, and then saw the sky light up with its fires.” She was staring out the window at the trees beyond. “Well, we were sitting there, in the d
ark, and Will grabbed my hand, put a book in it, and said, ‘Liz, you sit tight. I’ve got to go do something.’ And off he went, just like that.”

  Liz blinked, and the gathered tears streamed two-­by-­two down her cheeks. “I’ve never been more afraid in my life, because by the moonlight I could see that the book he’d given me was the “Dragon’s Tale,” and I knew he had no intention of coming back. He was going to try and do something heroic. All he ever really wanted was a chance to do something noble.”

  “Holy hell!” yelled Grady. “You’re the dragon slayer’s sister?”

  The other five dwarves whistled in unison.

  “I suppose,” she responded, “but that night we were just William and Elizabeth Pickett.”

  “Mmmhmmm,” the six dwarves hummed together. “And?”

  And so, Liz told her story to the six little men, and the sun rose high as the dragon died and Will journeyed to the dark tower. Lunch was served, and, over bowls of steaming soup, they listened, enraptured, as she danced with Prince Charming at the ball. And, as the sun began to dip again toward the horizon, she was finally riding her horse into the dark wood with the bewitched valet. When at last she stopped, dark shadows had crept across the room. At some point in her telling, a fire had been laid in the deep stone hearth, and the six dwarves were sitting in its orange glow, staring at her with rapt attention.

  She blinked at them and wet her lips. “Well, what do you think? Is it a good story?”

  “Good?” Grady crowed. “Sister, with a few rewrites it could be a sensation!”

  “Rewrites?” she asked.

  “Sure, sure,” he said smoothly, and nodded over to Sneedon, who pulled a pencil and pad of paper from the open cuff of his sleeve. “A little tweak here or there for drama, you understand, and to smooth out the rough spots in the narrative.”

  “Rough spots, but—­but all that was the truth. What really happened.”

  He waved her to silence. “Now, now, the Seven Players have no use for pride of authorship, Liz. It’s about creating the best theater possible. That means writing rich characters, providing those characters with the right dramatic arcs, putting them in appropriate settings, and so forth.” He ran a hand through his hair and snapped, “I’ve got it! Squash . . . no, pumpkins! A metamorphosis of mice and pumpkins. I mean the symbolism . . .” He turned to the door, spun on his heel, and called out, “Well, come on, Sneedon. We’ve got work to do.”