by Jack Heckel
Liz looked at Dorian in confusion, “Pumpkins? There were no pumpkins in my story.”
The bespectacled dwarf reached across and patted her hand. “My dear, that is what we call artistic license. Let them work. Perhaps a little poetry would help you fall asleep.”
The other dwarves slipped out behind Dorian, and the birds on the window dispersed in a sudden blur of fluttering colors. Alone with her poetic tormentor, she groaned in defeat.
“I see the pain is growing worse,” he consoled. “Don’t worry, Liz, you’re in good hands.” Dorian positioned his glasses on the very tip of his nose and opened his book. “Couplet will take your mind off your body’s agonies.”
THE NEXT MORNING the sun rose, and with it so did the curtain on what Grady had entitled, “Ash and Cinders: The Real Story of the Death of a Dragon and the Rise of a Queen.” He and Sneedon, his co-author, had worked on the play all night and were anxious for an audience. So, with the hearth as a backdrop and the foot of the bed as a stage, Liz watched as the dwarves ran through a marionette production that resembled her and Will’s story in almost no respects. There was a wicked stepmother instead of the Princess, the dragon seemed to have fallen by the wayside (apparently the puppet proved too challenging to construct), there was a kindly fairy (mostly because they had a fairy puppet on hand from an earlier production), and a pumpkin carriage, and a disappearing gown. It was all wrong and she might have said so, except that somehow they had managed to capture her emotions during the ball with such perfection—her terror at the beginning, rising elation as she danced with the Prince, and then despair as she fled up that long stair—that when the curtain fell (quite literally, as it had been strung between the bedposts with a particularly dubious length of string), she found herself in tears.
“Well, what do you think?” Grady asked with none of his usual growl. All the dwarves poked their heads above the foot of the bed and waited eagerly for her review.
Liz wiped her eyes dry and smiled at the little group. “I think the butler would have to be a fool not to let you see his master.”
The dwarves gave a huzzah, broke out a large crockery jug of ale, and after a few rounds began dancing about the room. Elizabeth clapped along with them until Grady stopped the frivolity with a shout, “HEY! What are we doing? We need to get this stuff packed up, you guys. It’s off to the Beast’s we go! On foot, it’ll take us a day or two at least to get there, so we have to get started.” There was another shouted cheer and the little group dance out the door in a clatter of boots and caterwaul of off-key singing.
Liz beckoned Dorian to stop, and the elderly dwarf, still red in the face from the dance, puffed over. She put a hand on his head. “Thank you, Dorian, for doing this favor for me. You cannot know what it means to me.”
He blushed. “Don’t think anything of it. To be truthful, we haven’t had a good story to tell for years. Our last few have been . . . well, awful. We’ve needed some inspiration, and”—he paused and winked at her—“it doesn’t hurt that our new muse is easy on the eyes.”
She smiled sweetly. “Oh, how you flatter, Dorian, but thank you.” Then she straightened her face. “Now remember, if you manage to see the Master, you must ask him to take my warning to Lady Rapunzel.” The dwarf nodded seriously and she continued. “And, if he is in any doubt as to the truth of my existence and need, you should give him this.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the slipper.
“I—we can’t . . . No!” the dwarf spluttered.
“Please take it, and use it to the best effect. I shall always have the memory, and trust me when I say that the memory is all that will ever come of my time with the Prince. He was an illusion, a child’s fantasy, and if this silly glass shoe can help my brother and the King and my friend escape the Princess, then I will be happy.”
Dorian raised himself up to his full height, all two feet and nine inches, put a hand over his heart, and bowed deeply. “I swear to you, Lady Elizabeth, we will return, and we will bring help.”
She bent down and kissed the top of his head. “Thank you. Oh, and Dorian, the humerus is up here.” She pointed to the unplastered part of her arm above the elbow.
Dorian blushed from the top of his ears to the tip of his nose and scurried to the door.
“One last thing,” she called to him. “What did Grady mean, ‘It’s off to the Beast’s we go’?”
The smile on the dwarf’s face slipped momentarily, and then he said with affected lightness, “Don’t you worry yourself about that, it’s just a little inside joke. You know Grady.” Before Liz had a chance to say anything further, he slipped out the door.
About the Author
JACK HECKEL’s life is an open book. Actually, it’s the book you are in all hope holding right now (and if you are not holding it, he would like to tell you it can be purchased from any of your finest purveyors of the written word). Beyond that, Jack aspires to be either a witty, urbane world traveler who lives on his vintage yacht, The Clever Double Entendre, or a geographically illiterate professor of literature who spends his nonwriting time restoring an eighteenth-century lighthouse off a remote part of the Vermont coastline. Whatever you want to believe of him, he is without doubt the author of the premier volume of the Charming novels, Once Upon a Rhyme. More than anything, Jack lives for his readers.
www.jackheckel.com
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Happily Never After copyright © 2014 by John Peck and Harry Heckel.
ONCE UPON A RHYME. Copyright © 2014 by John Peck and Harry Heckel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780062359261
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