Geek Fantasy Novel

by E. Archer

  “Beatrice!” Cecil cried, hugging his sister.

  She stared numbly at her brother, until she took in the Hall of Treasures and gasped. “Where are we?”

  Prestidigitator gave Beatrice a hug. Shocked, she reacted with stiff limbs.

  Chessie ripped the fairy from Beatrice, threw her to the ground, and kicked her in the ribs. The duchess stared down at the creature and chewed her nails.

  “What are you —” Ralph yelled as he clutched the stunned little fairy to his chest.

  “She’s no fairy. No wish actor can interfere that way. It’s against contract. Tell me, little demon, who are you?”

  “It’s Prestidigitator,” Ralph said. “She’s been with me the whole way.” But, now that Chessie pointed it out, there was something odd about Presti. She was a lot bigger than he remembered. Her face seemed to sag, somehow, and her clothes seemed ill fitting. She looked more like a Prestidigitator blow-up doll than the real thing.

  “Daphne?” Beatrice asked.

  “Daphne!” Ralph said.

  Presti reached around to a zipper at the back of her neck, removed her magical uniform, mechanical wings and all, and was revealed as Daphne. How she fit that puffy tutu into a fairy costume, no one will ever know.

  “I can explain,” she said, clutching her ribs and eyeing Chessie nervously. “Beatrice and I came to save Cecil, but right when we were going to get inside we got caught — well, Beatrice got caught — but I had worn my fairy costume with the wand that Mum got me from British Home Stores, so I guess when I entered the wish no one stopped me because it looked like I belonged here. I know the costume doesn’t fit me perfectly and I’m very sorry but I just meant to help my brother, so don’t kick me anymore. Please.”

  Chessie looked up at me meaningfully. “It’s as you say,” she barked. “The real Prestidigitator got blown up by a bunny not half an hour ago.”

  “No!” Ralph cried, wondering if that meant the actor who had played Prestidigitator had been blown up, too. “How do the special eff —”

  But at that very moment his voice was drowned out by a massive rushing sound.

  “What’s that?” Daphne hiccupped, looking reproachfully at Chessie.

  “The fairies,” Chessie cursed. “You’ve done it, now, Cecil! All the fairies of the kingdom have been freed.”

  Have you ever seen a pigeon trying to roost and unable to find a spot to land? The sound he makes is a collection of desperate thrashings — his wings beat against the air, against the walls, against the ground, against each other. Imagine a million pigeons trying to do the same, accompanied by murderous screeching. Then put it all on the other side of thick walls. This is what was heard in Chessie’s sanctum.

  Chessie put her hand to her throat. “Millions of fairies. Billions of fairies. Coming to kill me.”

  She looked up at me pleadingly. “Make it stop, darling! Now!” But she knows what I can and cannot do.

  “They can’t get in, can they?” Daphne moaned into Ralph’s chest.

  Chessie screeched. “Does anyone have a cell signal?”

  Beatrice and Ralph pulled out their cell phones and shook their heads. “Oh, don’t worry about yourself, dear,” Chessie snapped to Daphne. “They’ll love you. You’re practically half fairy, yourself.”

  The stones of the wall appeared to breathe against one another. Then one was knocked out and fell to the ground. The daylight creeping through the resulting hole was fettered by the horde of fairies outside.

  Chessie put down her wand and gestured for the others to surround her. Her manic demeanor dropped away; suddenly she was no longer Chessie the evil duchess, but the mortal Ralph remembered from the Battersby grounds. “Okay, listen up, children.”

  Cowed by Chessie’s change in manner, they obeyed.

  “Look, Cecil,” Chessie said rapidly. Her eyes darted between her nephew and the growing hole in the wall. A fairy leg could now be seen, kicking about and trying to gain a foothold. “I granted your wish. I think I’ve done a bang-up job, actually. You’ve freed all these fairies, and they’ll glorify you forever — and that has been the real point of all this, hasn’t it?”

  “Of course not —” Cecil started.

  “No time. Argue later, dear. But I planned only up to this point. Honestly, what’s supposed to happen now is that we all vanish away once your wish is completed. You go back to your ordinary life changed and broadened, and la-la, all’s perfect. But something’s gone wrong. Cecil failed, and Daphne succeeded, but this wasn’t supposed to be her wish. There’s too many fairies. I can’t believe this is happening again.”

  The walls started to buckle, and Daphne screamed.

  “Again?” Ralph asked.

  “Enough!” Chessie said. “Listen to me, Daphne and Beatrice. The only way out of this will be another wish. Anyone who truly loves Cecil can wish to save him — and save all of us in the process. But I’ll warn you — I thought we were orchestrating Cecil’s wish on the fly, but if one of you wishes us out of this, it will be your only wish, and it will be truly spontaneous. The narrator won’t be able to guarantee anyone’s safety, even less than he’s been able to here. Do you understand? This is no longer a game.”

  “I was turned into poo!” Ralph said. “This was never a game!”

  Daphne stopped crying long enough to nod at Chessie. She wiped her nose, then started wailing all the louder when a chunk of plaster plummeted from the ceiling and sprayed shards about her.

  “Now! One of you wish!” Chessie said.

  “I want my Mummy and Daddy! Can’t we go home?” Daphne cried.

  “No!”

  “You can’t be serious.” Cecil said. “Of all the irresponsible adults I’ve ever known, you —”

  “Shut up. We’re done with you.”

  “You’re going to kill us so we learn a lesson?”

  Chessie sniffed. “The killing part was unplanned.”

  Cecil rolled his eyes.

  “I’m teleporting you away from your doom! Do you want to keep trying my patience?”

  “Just get on with it,” Ralph urged.

  “Beatrice, make the wish!” Cecil said.

  “I … I was going to wish for something else. I already had something in mind.”

  “I can’t believe this. Selfish until the end.”

  “IwishtosavemyselfandCecilandRalphandChessieand —” Daphne said.

  Chessie released her breath. “I do solemnly grant thee thy wish, dreaming, in accordance with the fine tradition of Royal wish-granting, that you find thy greatest desire, and in so doing come to know thyself.” Chessie huddled them all together.

  “Wait, one thing,” Ralph said. “She didn’t mention Beatrice by name, does that matter?”

  “Enough!” Chessie said crossly. “Daft boy. I will hear no more from the geek.”

  “That doesn’t sound very nice —”

  “I said enough!”

  The ceiling began to quake and heave. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” Daphne said, wedging herself between Ralph’s and Cecil’s legs.

  “Silence!” Chessie said. “I need to concentrate, you little goblin!”

  “Please!” Ralph said, “What about Bea —”

  But then, with a barked “sorry if this doesn’t work out,” the wish was granted. Chessie, Cecil, Daphne, and Ralph were all gone. Just in time, too, as right then the ceiling buckled and dropped its tons of rock to the floor.

  And Beatrice? If the mass of stone hadn’t killed her (which it did), the flurry of gemstone and porcelain shards from the shattered figurines would have. No, she was dead forty times over within a split second.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Yes, she really died. Just like that. Abandoned and squashed.

  Quit your crying.

  BOOK III:

  DAPHNE’S WISH

  THE SNOW QUEEN

  CHAPTER XXX

  Ralph awoke in a bed, which is a very appropriate place to do so. Someone had tucked stiff and fragrant cotton s
heets tightly around him and cradled his head in scratchy embroidered pillows. A patchwork bear regarded him from the foot of his straw mattress. He rubbed his eyes and took in more of the room.

  Doilies and dust, everywhere. Woodcut geese hung on the wall, suspended by lengths of raffia. A candle burned nearby, even though the daylight was strong enough to set the window curtains glowing. A hanging needlepoint proclaimed the RULES OF THE GENTLE HOME, which were too far away to read, and would have been massively boring even had he been able to.

  “Hello?” Ralph called.

  There was no answer, but in the quiet that followed he could hear footsteps from somewhere beyond the closed door.

  He threw back the sheets; he wanted to be alert and standing whenever his host (or captor) came into the room.

  Someone had changed his jeans and doublet for an old-fashioned nightshirt, stitched with flowers at the hem. Even with a geek’s sense of fashion, he knew he looked pretty lame. He forgot about the nightshirt, though, when he swiveled and lowered his feet to the floor. He gasped in shock. The air may have been warm, the window sunstruck, but the floor was icy.

  Gritting his teeth against the cold, he tried to stand. His legs buckled under him.

  He caught the edge of the mattress before he fell, and hurled himself back into bed, sinking deep into the thick sheets and prickly straw beneath.

  The footsteps stopped at the other side of the door. His eyes darted as he watched the latch raise and release. He envisioned what kind of foul creature might barrel forth — a bugaboo with furry limbs and a beak, a human-sized lizard with curved yellow nails.

  She had lost her hairstylist and cosmetic dermatologist, apparently, and was suddenly an old woman; nonetheless, it was Chessie. Her hair fell limply about her face, streaks of gray instead of her old frothy blond highlights; the skin beneath her eyes sagged. As she rubbed her hands down a simple dress she regarded Ralph with imperturbable eyes.

  When she neared, Ralph saw her irises were remarkable — how had he never noticed them before? — a white-water blue that shone as if lit from the other side.

  “My name is Regina,” the woman said. Her voice was the same, but the accent was different. It was as if Ralph were meeting Chessie’s twin, separated at birth and raised in the eighteenth-century countryside.

  “Chessie, it’s Ralph. What’s going on? Daphne said she was going to rescue us, didn’t she?”

  The woman-who-increasingly-was-not-Chessie-at-all stared back.

  “I’m sorry,” Ralph said carefully. “You look like someone I knew.”

  “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

  Ralph muttered, not loud enough for her to hear: “I think you do.”

  “I suppose you’d like to know how you got here. I’ve been caring for you for a week,” the woman said, in the babbling manner of fairy-tale exposition. “You had quite a nasty fall — I would suggest you not tax yourself. I will ask you no questions, and suggest you do the same of me, at least for the moment. To keep you from going crazy, and all that.” She fixed those eyes on Ralph, and she liked something she saw there; her expression brightened. “Would you care for something to eat? I’ve been preparing pumpernickel toast daily since you arrived. It’s wound up slop for the hogs every morning until now. I would love to bring some out.”

  Ralph put a hand to his stomach. He wondered: Was he hungry? As soon as he thought of it, he was famished. “Thank you. Some toast would be great,” he said.

  Regina left. Ralph scanned the room for any sort of weapon, but he had come up with nothing by the time she returned with a tray, holding a few hot slices of brown-black toast, a broad knife, and a ceramic jar of butter. She watched with pleasure as Ralph bit into a thick piece, steam rising over his face. “Where am I?” he asked once he had finished, trying to remain cool. Which was indeed a difficult thing to remain, tucked into an antique bed alongside a teddy bear.

  “You’re in my home. It’s so rare that I have guests at all, that I must say I was so happy to come across you. You dropped from the sky, right over my coop. Fell right through the thatch and crushed my best-laying hen and four of her eggs.”

  “I fell from the sky? I killed a chicken?” asked Ralph, impressed despite himself. Wait until he posted that online.

  “Yes,” Regina said, winking. “I’ve known a few Water-Warlocks in my time. You undoubtedly wish to work your magic in secret. Well, your secrets are safe with me.”

  “I promise, I’m not a warlock, or wizard, or anything. I’m from New Jersey.”

  Ralph knew a great many things, among them:

  His home IP address

  C++, UNIX, Pascal, Java, BASIC, ASCII, HTML, and CGI Scripting

  The names of the three major temperature scales and the boiling point of water in each

  Elvish (both Quenya and Sindarin)

  His Jedi name

  His age in binary code

  … but he didn’t know one lick of magic. Nonetheless, Regina nodded sarcastically. “Of course you aren’t a magician. You just happened to be flying in the sky.”

  “I mean it. Come on, give me the real Chessie for a moment. I need some help — I can’t use my legs!”

  “You’ll find a bedpan under your bed,” Regina announced, looking at Ralph pityingly as she opened the door. “Your mind was obviously weakened by whatever dropped you out of the sky; I’d suggest you get as much sleep as you can. I’ll be outside tending to my flowers.”

  After Regina left, Ralph lay back and stared at his new quarters. He wanted to explore, to open the drawers and throw back the curtains, but he simply couldn’t get his legs to move. Or maybe Regina was right, and his mind was weakened. His brain could be becoming mush, mush, mush.

  The room was perfectly still. So still, in fact, that he could hear the wings of a fluttering fly. Ralph watched the insect hop around the room, explored his surroundings along with it. The fly spent some time investigating a worn bureau, flitted to the stuffed bear, walked the perimeter of a small mirror on the wall. Ralph grew bored, lay back and stared at the thatch of the ceiling. Then the fly entered his vision again. Until now it had avoided the borders of the room, but finally it landed on the ceiling. The moment it did, it dropped directly to the coverlet and lay motionless.

  Ralph waited for it to buzz away again, but it never did. He lifted the poor creature to his eyes, and found it was quite dead. Rimmed in frost, its wings were winter panes of glass. The corpse thawed in Ralph’s hand. He dropped it to the floor, then watched in horrid fascination as it frosted all over again.

  Ralph shrank into the bedding and pressed his eyes closed.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  He was awakened by the noise of a text message being received. Delighted, he patted the pockets of his nightgown — but no phone. The ding came from somewhere below him. Ralph leaned far over the side of the mattress and saw, sure enough, that the pair of jeans Cecil had given him had been wedged far under the bed. He placed a hand on the freezing floor — touching it was like handling ice cubes, deeply uncomfortable but not impossible — and reached for the pants. By stretching his middle finger out, he was able to graze a denim belt loop. He seized the jeans and rooted through for his phone.

  It had low batteries and one bar of reception — not enough to place a call, but enough to receive a message, from an unknown number:

  RALPH NEED SOME HELP JUST ASK FOR IT.

  Ralph placed the phone back in his jeans pocket, rolled them up neatly, and hid them under the bed. How was he supposed to ask for help? He certainly couldn’t ask Regina, given that Chessie had held true to her warning him that she would be out for his blood.

  I can see him, silently mouthing the text message’s words and chewing a fingernail, as puzzled and anxious as if he were indexing his rock collection.

  Let us hope that Ralph doesn’t decide to ask for help aloud. For narrators must come when requested, and a story with two narrators can only be confusing to us all — crap, he did it.<
br />
  Hello, Ralph, responded a voice broadcast from far above even me. Maarten Sumperson on the line. How may I help you?

  Nuts.

  Ralph bit his lip. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to talk back to booming voices from above, if that would mean he was irrevocably crazy, like a prophet or something.

  Ralph. You asked for help. Surely you have some bidding?

  Despite its volume, Maarten’s voice is soothing — soft, with a slight Dutch accent. “I need some help, please,” Ralph whispered.

  Yes, Ralph?

  “I don’t know. What’s going on?”

  You’re in the retelling of a story. 12,455 words. First narrated in 1845, by yours truly. Commissioned by one Hans Christian Andersen.

  One narrator is surely enough, Maarty.

  He requested help. I’m not trying to cause trouble.

  Sure, Mr. Look At Me, I’m Maarten Sumperson! I Have Seniority! I’ve Worked With Some Famous Authors! It doesn’t mean you can butt into my story, which I’m telling —

  No. You’ve moved onto Daphne’s quest now, which is a re-telling. Check your handbook, if you want —

  Take it away, Maarty. Don’t you worry about me and my self-esteem.

  “Mr. Sumperson,” Ralph asked, “sorry to interrupt you, but could you tell me more about why I’m inside another story?”

  It’s a popular record in the log. Hold on, I’m new to the computerized system….

  Ralph heard the distant clacking of keys.

  Let’s see … story was originally requested by Mr. Andersen as a souvenir of the wish-granting of a little girl of his acquaintance named Gerda. Common name: “The Snow Queen.” He came up with the setup, of course; I engineered it and wrote it all down.

  “And why is that important now?” Ralph asked.

  Well, let me see … the tale record has most recently been accessed by a Duchess Chessimyn of Cheshire, exercising her rights under the Kelling Provision to log on to our Royal Narratological Guild database under her official authority as a wish-granter. It seems she’s adopted the tale as a starting point for Miss Daphne’s wish. Godmothers often do this sort of thing when they haven’t had time to properly plan. Though it’s hardly ideal to plagiarize, it isn’t exactly frowned upon. While “The Snow Queen” was developed by an expert narrator, namely myself, the new version will be modified by the same apprentice narrator your tale has had so far, and catalogued as a lesser incarnation of a masterpiece.