by Tom Holt
He broke off. The puppet had winked at him. ‘Did you see that?’ he gasped.
‘See what, boss?’
‘It winked at me.’
Igor craned his neck to see. ‘You sure, boss?’ he said. ‘Can’t say I saw anything myself.’
‘It moved, I’m sure of it.’ The Baron sat down heavily on the shell of a burnt-out instrument console. ‘Or maybe the radiation’s addled my brains. I could have sworn…’
‘Hello,’ said the puppet, sitting up at an angle of precisely ninety degrees. ‘Are you my daddy?’
The Baron made a curious noise: wonder, triumph and deep disgust, all rolled up in one throaty grunt. ‘It’s alive,’ he croaked. ‘Igor, do you see? It’s alive.’
‘Oh sure,’ Igor replied. ‘We got ourselves a walking, talking, moving, breathing, living doll.’ He closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘When you go back and tell the investors about this, I want to be there. Can I have your lungs as a souvenir?’
‘You’re my daddy,’ said the puppet. ‘I love you. My name’s Pinocchio and I’m going to live with you for ever and ever.’
The Baron groaned and buried his face in his hands; which surprised the puppet, because he’d imagined his daddy would be pleased to see him. A safe assumption to make, surely? Maybe not. There was so much about this wonderful new world he didn’t know, and wouldn’t it be fun finding out?
Deep inside his wooden brain, a tiny voice was squeaking Hang on, this isn’t right, it isn't fair, let me out! My name is Carl and I’m a human, and where’s my sister and brother? But the grain of the wood soaked up the last flickers of neural energy, and the dim spark drenched away into the cold sap. ‘My name is Pinocchio,’ the puppet repeated; and if its nose grew longer by an eighth of an inch or so, nobody noticed.
‘You sure this is the right place?’ Rumpelstiltskin asked.
‘I reckon…’
A chair crashed through the front window of one of the saloons on Main Street, making a hole through which something small and human-shaped followed it shortly afterwards. The chair didn’t travel much further than the saloon’s front porch, but the small humanoid object, being lighter, travelled further and made it as far as a muddy puddle in the middle of the street.
‘…so,’ Dumpy concluded.
The swing doors of the saloon opened and a large, burly, bald-headed man in a barkeep’s apron flung a tiny hat out on to the porch. It was sort of conical, like the narrow end of an egg. It was made out of an acorn-cup.
‘And stay out,’ the barman explained.
The two dwarves waited till he’d gone back inside, then strolled over to the puddle, across which the tiny creature was doing the breaststroke.
‘Howdy,’ Dumpy said.
‘Get knotted.’
Dumpy shrugged. ‘Only being sociable, friend. You Thumb?’
‘Who wants to know?’
Dumpy rested his hands on his knees and leaned over. ‘If you’re the Tom Thumb who’s got a $50,000 reward on his head in Carabas for cattle rustling and grand fraud, then I got a job for you. If not, then screw you.’
‘A job? What kind of job?’
Rumpelstiltskin nudged his colleague in the ribs. ‘Sorry if I’m missing the point,’ he hissed, ‘but isn’t this one a bit too small to be of any use to us?’
Dumpy grinned. ‘When you bin in this business as long as I have,’ he whispered back, ‘you’ll learn that good things ain’t all that come in small packages. This here is Tom Thumb, the meanest son-of-a-gun who ever got agoraphobia in a shoebox.’
Rumpelstiltskin shrugged. ‘Up to you, I suppose. D’you want me to grab him?’
‘Don’t even think about it, partner,’ Dumpy warned.
‘Okay, he’s small, but so is five ounces of plutonium. Also, what with him bein’ a bit on the small side, he’ll be able to do things we can’t. Y’know, like crawling down ventilation shafts and overhearing secret plans. Talking of which, ain’t it ever struck you as odd the way the bad guys always choose to have their tactical meetings plumb underneath a vent grille? I ain’t complaining, mind; just strikes me as curious, is all.’
‘Hey, you.’
Dumpy looked down. ‘You talking to me?’
‘Yes, you. The tall bastard.’
‘Hey.’ Dumpy scowled. ‘Ain’t nobody ever called me that before. Not as is still alive, anyhow.’
‘What, you mean “bastard”?’
‘Hell no. Tall.’
‘Quit making wisecracks and go get my hat.’
Dumpy raised both eyebrows. ‘You givin’ me an order, Tiny?’ he muttered softly.
Tom Thumb sighed. ‘It’s for your own good. Go on, get a move on. Or are you standing around waiting till you evolve into a sentient life form?’
Before Dumpy could make an issue of it, Rumpelstiltskin fetched the hat and handed it over. The tiny man grabbed it and jammed it hard down on to his head.
‘That’s better,’ he sighed. ‘There’s an integral sound amplifier/universal translator built in to the hat. Means you can talk to me without shouting, and you can hear what I’m telling you. All right?’
‘Reckon’s—’
The tiny man winced, as if Dumpy had just stubbed out a cigarette in his eye. ‘Not so loud, for God’s sake. This is sensitive equipment here.’
Rumpelstiltskin nudged his colleague in the ribs. ‘Brilliant combination we’ve got here,’ he whispered. ‘Aggressive, foul-tempered and a wimp. What’s he supposed to be for, then? Lulling the enemy into a true sense of security?’
‘Shuttup,’ Dumpy growled back, ‘you ain’t helping.’ He leaned forward and grabbed; the little man tried to get away, but Dumpy’s forefinger and thumb closed on his leg. He yelped as Dumpy picked him up, in the manner of a man removing a cranefly from a bowl of borscht, and let him dangle for a few seconds before dropping him into an empty matchbox and sliding it shut.
‘Like I always say,’ he sighed. ‘If you ain’t got their respect, you gotta earn it.’
It was disconcerting, to say the least, to hear a loud, raucous voice coming from inside a matchbox; enough to make at least one passer-by freeze in the act of lighting a cigarette, stare at the match he was about to grind against the side of the box, think hard and put it carefully away with a mumbled apology. Dumpy, meanwhile, was counting to ten.
‘All right,’ he said to the box. ‘You quit making that awful noise and I’ll let you out.’
The matchbox replied in language that was certainly forthright. A little match girl, who had been huddling in a shop doorway looking pathetic and doing a brisk trade as a result, stood up in a marked manner and walked away. Dumpy tossed the matchbox up in the air, caught it left-handed, tossed it up again, backhanded it with his left hand into his right, shook it vigorously and let it fall to the ground.
‘Ready yet?’ he asked pleasantly.
‘Okay. You win.’
Dumpy picked up the box. ‘You were right,’ he said to Rumpelstiltskin. ‘A wimp.’ He slid back the lid and shook the tiny man out into the palm of his hand. ‘You want the job or not?’ he asked.
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Nope.’
‘Persuasive bastard, aren’t you?’
Dumpy smiled. ‘Guess it’s my naive charm,’ he replied. ‘Welcome aboard.’
‘Do you trust that man?’ Sis demanded as they squelched out of the swamp into the trees.
‘Depends,’ the wicked queen replied, ‘on what you mean by trust. If you mean, am I sure I know what he’ll do next, then yes. And that’s all that matters, surely.’
The forest floor was carpeted with fallen leaves, which stuck like wallpaper to the portions of portable swamp they had on the soles of their shoes. It was also getting dark. Sis shivered, not entirely because of the slight chill in the evening air. ‘This is probably a silly question,’ she said, ‘but do you know the way home?’
The queen shrugged. ‘Depends on what you mean by know,’ she replied. ‘I can navi
gate pretty well by narrative patterns, but my geography’s lousy.’
‘Don’t you ever give a straight answer to a simple question?’
‘Depends what you mean by straight.’
Sis sighed wearily. Her legs were painfully tired and what she wanted more than anything else was a nice hot, foamy bath, but she was realistic enough to recognise that her chances of finding one in this context were roughly those of winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. So, as much to take her mind off her poor feet as from any desire for knowledge, she asked the queen what she meant by navigating by narrative patterns.
‘Easy,’ the queen replied. ‘As I said, in this neck of the woods, things — adventures, that kind of stuff — happen so reliably and regularly that you can navigate by them. Or at least,’ she added wistfully, ‘you could if the system was working. For example, by now we should have run into one crooked old man handing out magic wishing-pennies, three old crones gathering firewood who’d have told us what comes next in the story, at least two lots of highway robbers and a unicorn. So if we’d wanted to give directions to someone following us, we’d have said something like straight on past the old man, at the third crone turn left till you come to the second bandits, then follow your nose till you reach the unicorn, then sharp right and you can’t miss it. The joy of it is,’ she added, ‘you can tell the time as well as work out where you are. You know, if that’s the lion with a thorn in its paw, it’s got to be 12.07.’
Sis shivered. ‘Lion?’ she asked apprehensively.
The queen smiled. ‘Not in this part of the forest. Just wolves.’
‘Wolves,’ Sis repeated; as if on cue, the air was torn by a long, faraway howl. Sis squeaked and hopped up in the air.
‘Relax,’ the wicked queen told her. ‘No wolves in this part of the story.’
Sis nipped smartly in front of the queen, then turned and pointed. ‘What’s that, then?’ she asked. ‘A copy-editing mistake? Lousy spelling?’
Sure enough, half hidden behind a tree some fifty yards away stood a large, slate-grey wolf, with small red eyes and a collection of teeth worth a five-figure sum to a tooth fairy. The queen gave it an unconcerned glance and nodded slightly. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to Sis as the wolf nodded back, ‘one of ours.’
‘Really?’ Sis muttered nervously. ‘How can you tell?’
‘I’ll show you an easy test.’ She held out her hands. ‘Count those,’ she said.
‘Two.’
‘That’s how you know it’s one of ours.’
Sis nodded. Logical. Depends on what you mean by logic. ‘So what do we do now? Go back to the palace and wait, like he said?’
‘Not on your life,’ the queen replied, unhooking a bramble from her sleeve. ‘That’s the last thing we want to do.’
‘Oh?’
‘Believe me.’
‘And why’s that? No, let me guess. Narrative patterns.’
The queen half nodded her head. ‘Narrative patterns have got something to do with it, admittedly. Mostly, though, it’s because by now the whole palace’ll be twelve feet deep in soapsuds. Or had you forgotten?’
Sis bit her lip. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But what are you going to do about that? Does this mean we’re on our way to whatever passes for an estate agent in these parts to look for somewhere else for you to live?’
The wicked queen shook her head. ‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘As soon as the system’s back on line I’ll be able to deal with that sorcerer’s apprentice thing and that’ll be that, except for a few tidemarks in the curtains. Life goes on, you know, even in make-believe.’
‘So what are we going to do?’ Sis demanded. ‘Just wander round in circles in this horrid wood until we bump into a wolf that isn’t one of ours? I thought taking the bucket to your accountant was meant to solve something.’
‘That remains to be seen,’ the wicked queen replied absently. ‘The trouble with you is, you’re all linear.’
‘Uh?’ Sis scowled. ‘Is that an insult or a compliment?’
‘As in linear as two short planks,’ the queen explained. ‘You think in straight lines, instead of graceful curves. That’s not going to get you very far, I’m afraid.’
‘Huh.’ Sis pouted. ‘I’d rather be linear as two short planks than curved as a hatter.’
They had reached a small clearing, and for the first time in what seemed like ages, Sis could see a patch of blue sky between the branches of the trees. ‘Where’s this?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me, it’s somewhere narrative.’
The queen nodded. ‘You’re getting the hang of this,’ she replied. ‘If I’ve got my bearings right, this is a brief but significant adventure which ought to bring us out on the main narrative drag. Sort of a short-cut.’ She peered round, obviously looking for something. ‘Which with any luck’ll save us at least two unnecessary plot developments and a couple of setbacks. Tell me if you spot anything that looks like a humble cottage, will you?’
Sis was about to say that she’d be hard put to it to miss something like that when she realised that she was staring at a small, picturesque house at the far end of the clearing. Ludicrous to say that it hadn’t been there a moment ago, because unless it was built on the back of a Howard Hughes among tortoises, it didn’t look capable of scurrying about the place. She just hadn’t noticed it, that was all.
‘You mean like that one?’ she said.
‘Just the ticket,’ the queen replied cheerfully. ‘Now then, let’s just hope this works.’
Immediately, Sis felt hairs on the back of her neck standing to attention. ‘What if it doesn’t?’ she asked.
‘We get eaten. Come on, don’t dawdle.’
When they reached the cottage the queen knocked at the white-painted front door, counted out loud up to twenty, pushed the door and went in. Apparently, nobody in this neighbourhood locked their doors; possibly, Sis speculated, for the same reason that spiders don’t lock their webs. As soon as her eyes had become accustomed to the light, she looked round.
‘Oh no,’ she said, backing away. ‘Don’t say we’re where I think we are.’
Three chairs: one big, one middling, one small. On the table, three wooden bowls (ditto), three wooden spoons (ditto), three mugs (ditto).
‘Upstairs,’ Sis whispered. ‘Three beds?’
‘Large, medium and small,’ the queen confirmed. ‘We’re in luck.’
‘Yes, but what sort? It comes in two kinds, remember. In luck up to our necks is the way I’d describe it.’
‘Don’t be such a misery,’ the queen replied. ‘My old master the sorcerer used to say that a problem’s nothing but an opportunity wearing a funny hat, and inside every disaster there’s a triumph struggling to get out.’ She smiled nostalgically. ‘Full of stuff like that, he was.’
‘Quite,’ Sis replied darkly. ‘Full of it sounds about right. You never did say what happened to him in the end.’
‘You don’t want to know,’ the wicked queen said quickly. ‘Come on, this is your chance to be a star.’
‘My chance? Now wait a minute…’
Before Sis could protest any further, the wicked queen grabbed her by the shoulder and marched her up the stairs. Three beds, as anticipated; one large, one medium, one small with obligatory pink bedspread and matching pillowcase. On top of the pillow lay a rather dog-eared, obviously much-loved button-nosed humanoid doll. It was dressed in a jacket with tiny lapels, tight straight trousers and sunglasses, and its black hair was slicked into a kiss-curl. Ah, thought Sis, who’d seen something similar on the television, a teddy.
‘What are we doing here?’ she demanded.
‘Gate crashing,’ the queen replied, kicking off her leaf-encrusted shoes and flopping on the medium-sized bed. ‘What else would we be doing in the Three Bears’ cottage?’
‘Yes,’ Sis insisted, ‘but why? And if you say narrative patterns, I’ll make you eat the curtains.’
‘You and whose army?’ the queen y
awned. ‘Sorry, but a better example of narrative patterns would be hard to come by. Just think for a moment, instead of whining. In this —’ She waved her hands in the air. ‘Well, for want of a better word we’d better call it a dimension, though of course it’s nothing of the sort. In this dimension, things don’t just happen in the messy, haphazard way you seem to favour where you come from. Things here happen because there’s a slot or a hole precisely their size and shape in a story. And it’s a well-known fact that once you’ve skimmed off all the tinsel and watercress, there’s only about twenty stories; all the rest are just the same ones with added bells and whistles. Accordingly, everything here has got to fit into its proper story, or else there’s chaos. That’s why you and your repulsive little siblings crashed my beautiful system; there wasn’t a slot for you, but you came in anyway and that blew a huge hole right through the middle of everything. So, first things first, until we can find a way of getting rid of you, we’ve got to try a little damage limitation and find a slot to put you in. So; I thought about what you’ve done here so far — barge in uninvited, treat the place like you own it, break things, spoil things; in addition to which you’re a cute little girl—’
‘Hey!’
‘—So the choice was obvious. You’re a Goldilocks. An absolute natural for the part. What else could you possibly be? And here we are.’
‘I am not cute.’
‘I wouldn’t bet the rent on that if I were you,’ the queen replied with a nasty grin. ‘If they weren’t all down at the moment, I’d suggest you look in a mirror. You wouldn’t know yourself.’
Sis clutched instinctively at her face. It felt the same, more or less; but since she’d never spent hours lying in the dark feeling her own face, that didn’t mean a lot. But (now that the queen mentioned it) she could feel an unaccustomed tugging at the roots of her hair on either side of her head; she felt gingerly and discovered — ‘Plaits,’ she groaned.
‘With big pink bows,’ the queen confirmed maliciously.
‘You’ve also got big blue eyes, freckles and a great big golden curl right in the middle of your forehead.’