by Heide Goody
Ella closed her eyes and sighed heavily.
“Really?”
“Yes, my dear, and have you brought me a cake and a small pot of butter from your mother?”
Ella threw up her arms in exasperation. “Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”
“Then put the cake and the little pot of butter on the stool and come get into bed with me, little girl.”
“Excuse me, what did I tell you about calling me a ‘little girl’?”
“You said it was creepy,” said the wolf and then coughed. “I mean, I wouldn’t know, we’ve never met before.”
“I’ve never met my grandma before?” said Ella archly.
“I mean,” said the wolf quickly, “we’ve never met and discussed such things.”
“Nice recovery,” said Ella. “So, what now?”
“Slip your things off and get into bed.”
“Er... no.”
“Please?”
“No. Can’t we just do the ‘Oh, grandma, what big teeth you have!’ thing?”
The wolf shifted position making the tiny bed creak. “Arms.”
“What?”
“You start with arms. Oh, what big arms…”
“Really? Not eyes. Or ears.”
“I don’t mind,” said the wolf. “It’s just, you don’t just cut straight to the teeth bit, sweetheart. That’s, like, the punchline. And you’ve got to build up the repetition. Arms, legs, ears, eyes and then teeth.”
“Whatever. Oh, grandma, what big arms you have.”
“All the better to hug you with, my dear,” said the wolf.
A ripple of something passed through the room. It wasn’t physical. It wasn’t tangible. It was as ephemeral as a sigh, as fleeting as a breath of air. It was a shudder of pleasure up the spine of the world.
“What was that?” demanded Ella.
“It’s good,” said the wolf. “Keep it going.”
“Oh, grandma, what big —. No, wait. Stop. What the hell was that?”
“Seriously. Don’t stop.”
“It went right through me like…”
“It felt good, yeah?” said the wolf.
“It did,” said Ella warily. “It felt… right.”
“Exactly,” said the wolf. “Go with it, sister. Don’t lose the moment.”
Ella was caught on the balance of moment, torn between two deeply primal feelings. She felt the joy of the rhythm and rightness of the game they were playing, the roles that she and the wolf were acting out. At the same time, she felt a drowning person’s fear, a sordid horror at how easy it would be to give in and play along.
She looked at the wolf and felt the pull of the words. “No.”
The wolf stirred in the dark. “No?”
“No. And I hope I don’t have to explain the meaning of the word ‘no’ to you, Mr Wolf.”
There was movement that might have been a shrug.
“Nope,” said the wolf, “I guess I’m just going to have to cut straight to the teeth bit.”
He leapt at her, white fangs visible in the gloom.
Chapter Four
Ella yelled and leapt back, slamming the door as she exited. The wolf hit the door with an ‘oof’ and a howl. As Ella stumbled away, she heard the wolf hit the door a second and far more effective time. Chunks of dark chocolate embedded themselves in the nougat plaster and skimmed far across the Tic-Tac parquet flooring.
“Wolf!” she yelled at the four dwarfs in the kitchen.
“No animals in the food preparation area!” exclaimed OCD.
Windy trumpeted in fear as the wolf smashed through a barley sugar doorjamb and into the kitchen, a lacy bonnet slipping from his head.
“Every dwarf for himself!” yelled Inappropriate.
Ella grabbed the largest piece of toffee chair leg on the floor and spun around to defend herself.
The wolf, an unnaturally large beast when she had first met him, appeared even larger now. Rounder, full-bodied, as though he had just swallowed an entire…
“Oh, now I’m really angry,” she said.
The wolf leapt, jaws wide. Ella swung. They crashed to the floor together and rolled. Ella sprang up again automatically, dazed, and looked for her lost weapon. It was clenched tightly in the wolf’s bared fangs.
Ella crouched for a split second and grabbed another chair leg, although this one was barely more than a stump.
“You’d better spit up Mrs Jubert right now!” she said.
“Nng ead ugh furf!” growled the wolf around a mouthful of toffee.
“What?” said Ella.
The wolf blinked, went momentarily cross-eyed as he stared at his own snout and then grunted.
“Nng fedd nng ull ead ugh furf.”
He coughed, shook the drool from his jaws and grunted again with effort. His jaws remained firmly closed on the toffee mass.
“Got something stuck in your dentures, grandma?” said Ella.
“Gud dumm,” swore the wolf and bowed his head sheepishly.
He laid on the floor, braced his front paws against the ends of the chair leg and pushed, to no avail.
“Let’s kill it!” yelled Inappropriate, already rooting through the kitchen drawers for a knife.
“No one’s killing anyone!” said Ella firmly. “We’re going to get Mr Wolf’s jaws open somehow and… I assume you swallowed Mrs Jubert whole?” she asked the wolf. “I believe it’s traditional in these… cases.”
He nodded dumbly.
“Then you’re going to spit her up,” she said.
“We’re also two dwarfs down,” said OCD.
Ella looked at the wolf. He gave a ‘maybe’ shrug.
“Right,” she said. “We need to prise those jaws apart.”
“We could melt the toffee with boiling water,” suggested OCD.
The wolf gave him an alarmed look.
“We could go get a woodcutter,” said Inappropriate.
“Why?” said Ella.
“They know what to do.”
“They know how to cut wood,” Ella conceded.
“I’m just saying,” said Inappropriate, “it’s a practical problem. We need a bloke.”
“Get a man?” said Ella. “That’s your solution?”
Windy parped in the affirmative.
“Ridiculous,” said Ella.
She made a quick search of the house and came back with a pair of fireside tongs. She knelt down beside the wolf and searched for a gap in his teeth in which to insert them. The wolf looked at Ella nervously.
“Be a brave boy,” she told him and wedged the tongs in sharply.
She flexed the tongs and the wolf grunted in pain but his jaw remained closed.
“Id hurrs,” he complained.
“Big baby.”
She strained at the arms of the tongs. The wolf whined, “Muh deef! Muh deef!”
Ella feared that the toffee was going to prove stronger than her but then Inappropriate helpfully commented, “You see, this is why we needed a man” and the resultant anger gave Ella the required muscle power to wrench the wolf’s mouth open.
The wolf yelled in pain. The toffee leg was still stuck to his upper teeth (with at least a couple of lower teeth embedded in it) and it hung there like a ridiculous handlebar moustache.
“Yuh weally hurd me,” said the wolf around the toffee.
“You swallowed an old lady!” Ella countered and viciously smashed the toffee from his upper jaw, one side then the other.
“Mother Hubbard!” swore the wolf.
“Enough of that,” said Ella firmly. “Mrs Jubert. Now!”
The wolf licked the new gaps in his teeth and eyed Ella’s tongs bitterly.
“I’m the Big Bad Wolf…” he said, warningly.
“You’re fat. I’ll give you that,” said Ella. “Vomit her up now.”
“Sister, I can’t hurl on command.”
“Wolves, canis lupus, like most mammals, have a gag reflex,” said OCD.
Inappropriate took hold
of the wolf’s front teeth and held his mouth open.
“Maybe I could reach for them,” he said. “Coo-ee! Old crone! Psycho! Can you hear me?”
The wolf tried to say something but it was indecipherable with two dwarfs tucked in his mouth. Ella had the tongs handy in case the wolf decided to swallow them too.
“You could try massaging the uvula,” said OCD.
“I can never find the uvula,” said Inappropriate.
“Leave this one to me,” said Windy, strode forward and proudly presented his buttocks to the wolf’s mouth. “I’ve got some quality gingerbread a-brewing inside me.”
Inappropriate stepped back, still holding the wolf’s mouth open, and Windy let loose with a powerful, flappy fart. The wolf recoiled, retching.
“Go with it!” said Windy. “Let the medicine do its work.”
The wolf heaved two shuddering hurls and then up came a dwarf.
“Psycho!” Shitfaced, delighted, hugged the bile-drenched dwarf.
“That was fucking horrible,” declared Psycho.
The wolf heaved again and disgorged a heavy electrical fuse, a taxidermy badger, an empty jar, a car licence plate, a large egg and then, jaws distending impossibly, a black cloaked and very confused old lady.
“I thought I was dead,” she murmured as Ella helped her up.
“Not quite,” said Ella.
“I wasn’t impressed,” said Mrs Jubert. “I thought I ought to complain but I didn’t want to make a fuss.”
Ella guided her to a chair, then took the knotted blanket-cloak off her own back and put it around Mrs Jubert’s shoulders.
“Hang on,” said the wolf with a concerned look on his face. “One last…”
He retched and spat out a second dwarf who hissed and kicked as he landed on the floor.
“That’s right!” grouched Passive Aggressive. “Leave me ‘til last, why don’t you!”
OCD catalogued the contents of the wolf’s stomach in his Filofax.
“One Solomon jar. One infernal fuse. One licence plate: Louisiana, Sportsman’s Paradise. One duck egg containing the hidden heart of Koschei the Deathless.”
“Where did all this stuff come from?” said Ella.
“I get around,” said the wolf. “I’m a wolf with a mysterious past.”
“Bad diet, more like.”
Ella became conscious of her phone buzzing and automatically answered it.
“Hello?”
“Ella?”
“Myra!” said Ella, moderately surprising herself by being glad to hear from her future stepmother.
The dwarfs reacting with scathing frowns and worried looks at the mention of her name. Even OCD paused in the middle of packing all of the wolf’s stomach junk into a little sack.
“Where on earth are you?” said Myra.
“Hard to say,” said Ella and looked at the woman who was clearly Ayleen Jubert but definitely not the Ayleen Jubert Ella knew. “I’ve come out to see a client.”
“But where did you vanish to?”
“Vanish. Well, I…”
“You and I were having a nice chat in the night club and then I was going to introduce you to some eligible young men I’d met.”
“Sorry. I don’t need any eligible young men in my life right now.”
“And then you vanished.”
“Yes, I know. Sorry. Things have been a little crazy.”
Crazy, Ella thought, was a scandalous understatement.
“And I see the seating plan is still not ticked off on the shared to-do list,” said Myra.
“I’ve been, um, off-grid but I do have a seating plan.”
She reached into her back pocket and removed the neatly folded seating plan OCD had given her in the pantry the day before.
“It’s really quite good,” she said.
She turned the paper round and saw for the first time that the reverse was covered in various scribblings (if one could call OCD’s precise penmanship scribbling). One small section caught her eye.
Potential PCs
R. Avenant — classic PC, distant royalty.
Mr D — wealthy with aristocratic lineage, Bloody Chamber Gambit? Red Rose Gambit? Mr D = perfect beast. Good “persuasion” potential - hold GH until needed
???? — Could we engineer a Handsome Jack / Woodcutter scenario?
“What the hell…?” said Ella.
“Is there a problem?” said Myra.
“No,” said Ella, without conviction.
“Look,” said Myra, “whatever happened last night, I think it’s important you come home.”
“I’m kind of in the middle of nowhere,” said Ella.
“Then I’ll send someone to get you.”
“There’s no need to send someone to get me,” Ella assured her.
The dwarfs gasped in alarm (apart from Windy who parped in alarm).
“The huntsman!” hissed Inappropriate.
“You put that phone down now, bab,” said Psycho.
“Is someone there with you?” said Myra. “Do you need help?”
“Psychiatric maybe,” Ella said to herself.
Before she could react, Psycho used the wall as a launch pad, leapt up and smacked the phone from Ella’s hand. It span across the floor towards the door.
“Christ’s sake, Psycho!” she snapped.
Ella picked up her phone and tapped the blank screen. She tried to turn it on and, when it didn’t, peeled the back off and experimented with removing and replacing the battery. Nothing.
“Bugger,” she said softly.
“Broken?” said the wolf who had padded silently up beside her.
“The battery might have gone flat,” she said.
The wolf sat down and scratched his ear with a hind leg.
“To be honest, sweetheart, I’m surprised it lasted this long,” he said. “It’s hardly in-keeping with the… the, um, aesthetic.” He jerked his snout up at the gingerbread cottage behind them.
Ella nodded. “Wolf?” she said.
“Uh-huh?” he said.
“If I asked you to tell me what the hell’s going on here, would you give me a straight answer?”
“As straight as I know,” said the wolf.
“Fine. What the hell’s going on?”
The wolf licked his fangs. There was still toffee clinging to them. “It’s leaking out,” he said.
“Leaking?”
“Yup. You know when you catch a rabbit and you crush it between your jaws. All the blood and snot and rabbit goo comes out. Some comes out where you bit it but it also comes out its mouth, its nose, its eyes and —”
“Stop,” said Ella. “This rabbit chomping analogy. I’m not really feeling it.”
The wolf sighed and tossed his head.
“Okay, sister. It’s like the rain. Are you okay with rain? Is that a palatable enough metaphor for you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“The rain comes down and it trickles down the hillside. And the streams become rivers and it all goes rushing towards the sea.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s like that.” The wolf as he rootled in his mouth, trying to get toffee out of his teeth.
“What is?”
“This,” said the wolf. “There are certain places and times and people that it happens to. Just like winter storms and flood valleys and even if someone builds a dam and tries to hold it back, it finds another way.”
“What does?”
“Look, I was happier with the rabbit metaphor, to be honest,” said the wolf.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about yet,” said Ella.
“Happy endings,” said Shitfaced from up high.
Ella had forgotten she had left the dwarf there. The yellow-hatted drunkard sat on the roof.
“Happy endings,” agreed the wolf.
“Happy endings?” said Ella. “As in Thai-massage-with-a-happy-ending?”
“I don’t even know what that means and I don’t want to,” sai
d the wolf. “All this, the cottage, the witch, the gnomes — ”
“Dwarfs,” said Shitfaced.
“Whatever,” said the wolf. “All this — even me — is nature’s way of trying to give you the happy ending you deserve.”
“Did I ask for one?”
The wolf huffed. “Most people would give their eye teeth for a happy ending. But they don’t get the chance. You, princess, you’re special.”
“Me?”
The wolf nodded.
“You’re like… a sewer.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“All right, like a drainage ditch.”
“Not much better.”
“Dyke?”
“Stop it.”
“Point is, it’s got to come out through you.”
“But why? Why me?” said Ella.
“Why does the stream trickle this way, not that? Why does the raindrop on the leaf roll left, not right? Who can tell the water where to flow? Who can say when the storms will come, when the rivers will run dry?”
“Wow, man,” said Shitfaced. “That was poetry.”
“It’s not an answer,” said Ella.
The wolf shrugged.
“All I know is you can’t fight it. Even if you do, like that madwoman at Rushy Glen, you can’t put it off for ever. And I bet you she wishes she’d got herself a knight in shining armour and a castle of gold instead of a busted-up hovel and sciatica. I know I would.”
“Wait. What did you say?” said Ella.
“I said, I’d rather have a castle of gold than some busted up hovel.”
“Before that. You said Rushy Glen.”
“I did,” said the wolf.
“You know where it is?”
“Not exactly.”
“But it’s my grandma’s house.”
“Oh,” said the wolf, surprised. “In that case, yes. I know where your grandma’s house is. I know where everyone’s grandma’s house is,” he said, confidently.
“No, you’re not allowed there,” said Shitfaced.
“Why not?” said Ella.
“You’ve got to come with us. We’ve got to keep you safe until it’s time for you to go to the ball.”
“I’m not going to a ball. I’m going to Rushy Glen.” She turned to the wolf. “And you’re taking me.”
“No, he can’t!” Shitfaced began to shout. “Lads! Lads! She’s running away!”
“Quick, let’s go,” Ella prompted the wolf.