by Mike Ashley
Gretel began to whimper. “But I’m scaaaaared! Those swans bite. Can I at least go into the house and get a golf club or something to—?”
Carlisle shifted the gun. “If you don’t do as I say, I’ll be pleased to teach you the meaning of the word expendable, my dear.”
Grousing and whining, Gretel kicked off her shoes, stripped off her stockings, hiked up her skirt, and stepped into the pond. “Here, goosey,” she called timidly, holding out one hand to the ringer swan. “Here, nice goose-goose-goosey. Come to Mama.” The way all four of the birds kept their distance, she might as well have been waving a hatchet. Hansel and Carlisle observed her fruitless efforts at poultry-herding with rising amusement, laughing until the tears ran down their faces.
“Good Lord!” Carlisle exclaimed, gasping for breath. “That girl couldn’t get a goose at a stag smoker.”
“Let the old doll do it,” Hansel suggested. “She wanted to see the black bird so bad, make her work for it.”
“A capital notion,” Carlisle said. He gestured meaningly with his gun.
As a disgruntled Gretel waded out of the pond, I sloshed in past my ankles. It took me all of twenty seconds to cut the right swan from the flock and herd it onto the grass, much to the astonished whispers of Carlisle and his cronies. I’ll tell you a little secret from my long-gone childhood: Before Hansel and Gretel, before the gingerbread cottage, even before I first heard the Black Arts whispering my name, I was a snot-nosed German peasant brat like ten thousand others. And when you’re a dirt-poor farmer’s daughter, you know the first job they hand you, almost as soon as you can toddle? Goose-girl.
The three of them gazed at the phony swan like it was the answer to the fifty-dollar question on Beat the Band. Carlisle said a few words over the critter’s head: Its neck shortened and its webbed feet went from black to red while its plumage went switcheroo from white to black like a cheating woman’s heart. The bird looked around stupidly, honked once, settled down on the grass and laid an egg.
A golden egg.
Gretel pounced on it like a studio head on a starlet, but Hansel got there first and strong-armed her away. “What’s the big idea?” she shrilled. “I earned this!”
“The hell you did,” he countered, shoving her away a second time. “I guess it was your face got treated like a tough steak? If anyone earned anything, it’s me!” The over-confident little creep bent over to seize the egg. He learned the error of his ways when his adoring sister kicked him in the pants, sending him head first into the pond. He got up dripping duckweed and grabbed her by the ankle, dragging her into the water with him. The swans took off, flapping their wings and making enough racket to wake the dead.
“Children, please.” Carlisle rolled his eyes like a woman who’s wondering whether retroactive birth control isn’t such a bad idea after all. “The bird will lay more eggs; there will be enough for all of us, in time.”
The pair of them paused in mid-shindy. Hansel glowered at the English prettyboy: “This is between me and my sister.”
“Yeah!” Gretel hauled herself out of the muck bottoming the pond and tucked a dripping lock of hair behind one ear. “Don’t tell us what to do. You wouldn’t even be in on this caper if not for Hansel. He was the one who made sure LeGras got an eyeful of you up in Frisco, but he could’ve picked any other two-bit swish for the job. We were the brains, you were just the bait. You think you’re the only pebble on the beach?”
“No,” the limey admitted, he raised the .45. “But I am the only one with a gun. And now that I come to think about it, I don’t believe I want to share at all.”
He sent a bullet whizzing past Gretel’s ear. Any closer and you could call the story “Hansel and”. Brother and sister exchanged a look, then took to their heels like they had a flock of Zeros on their tail. Carlisle squeezed off a few more shots to speed them on their way. The black bird honked like crazy at the sound of gunfire but stayed put surer than if someone had driven a railroad spike through its foot. Carlisle laughed like a crazy man.
He was anything but.
“Now that’s what I call sporting,” I remarked. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll come after you . . . sister?”
He quit laughing and flashed me a look like a shiv, sharp and ugly. “How did you know?” His features started to blur at the edges, then to run like cheese on a griddle, but his grip on the 45 was rock solid.
“Maybe I’m not such a bad shamus after all. You were the one who lifted the disguise spell off the black bird. That means you had to be the one who slapped it on in the first place.” I looked over to where the goose was still trying to take it on the lam, in spite of the invisible tether holding her down. “Pretty impressive sorcery from a sugarpuss-for-hire. That little holding spell you’ve got on the goose confirms it: You’re one of us, sister.”
Carlisle’s prettyboy looks were all gone by the time I finished. His slender body filled out, his short blond hair went long and grey, and his gigolo get-up flashed into a heap of gypsy-bright glad rags. Me, I prefer to work in traditional black, but it’s not like we’re unionized.
A witch can wear what she wants.
“You dare include me in your pathetic, penny-grubbing witcheries?” my newly unmasked colleague countered. “You are a petty hireling, I am a mastermind! I used those stupid mortals as my tools: They did the dirty work, I reap the prize. And it was so easy!” She threw back her head and laughed. “Like you, I was a refugee, a despised foreigner in this so-called ‘Land of the Free’. Free! All things here have a price, all costly. I lived hand to mouth on their sufferance, accepting the pittance they deemed a ‘fair’ wage for my services. Bah. I spit on their ‘fair’ wages.”
She did, too. Bogey jumped out of the way. It was all he could do. She’d sold her soul to his Head Office, same as me, so he was powerless to attack her, with or without my say-so: Professional courtesy.
I didn’t like her spitting on my cat, but there was something I liked even less: She was riding the Red broomstick. If she was so in love with Comrade Stalin’s way of doing things, why did she bother coming here when she left the Old Country? Maybe because back then, Iron Joe was in Hitler’s pocket deep enough to call him sweetheart? I got a bad feeling in my gut. If they ever got up another witch-hunt in this country, I’d know who to blame.
“There was a better way, I knew it,” she went on. “A road to the big score, a clean shot at Easy Street. No more dabbling in love potions and impotence tonics, no.”
“Six of one—” I began. She ignored me. She was tuned in to Life Can Be Bitterful and she couldn’t hear anything else.
“My chance came when LeGras hired me. While in his employ, I discovered he possessed the black bird. I resolved to make it mine, to use it to obtain luxury beyond my wildest dreams.”
“Sweet dreams,” I remarked. “That must’ve been when it hit you: You couldn’t use your magic to pull off the heist because you set up most of the spell-shielding tools in this dump before you found out about the bird. That must’ve stuck a burr under your saddle.”
She ground her teeth together, remembering. “A galling situation, but temporary. It was only a matter of finding the proper cat’s-paw for the job.”
“Namely Hansel? I’ll bet he jumped at the chance to get rich quick. Greedy little bastard.”
Her lip curled. “Will it surprise you to learn that the lure of gold was secondary in persuading him? Who would expect a common gunsel who sold his favours to be a romantic at heart? It was simple to disguise myself as Carlisle and seduce him, then open his eyes to the possibility of obtaining a fortune at his former master’s expense. I even made him think it was his own idea. Oh, I am brilliant!”
“And still you chased him off like that? After all the two of you meant to each other?” I clicked my tongue. “Flirt.”
The look on her face would have given Beelzebub a case of frostbite. “He is lucky I let him escape alive, him and his floozy sister. Do you think I ever intended to share anythin
g with them?”
“That goose can lay enough gold eggs to satisfy everyone in LA, if you don’t count the boys down at City Hall. What’s the matter, Einstein? You can’t divide by three?”
“You would ask me to retain them as my partners? To trust them? You?” She sneered. “How long do you think it would be before they decided there was one too many hands in the egg basket and shoved me into a bake-oven, hmmm? Perhaps you did not learn from your previous experience with those brats, but I am no such fool. Farewell.” She was done with the .45, so she turned it into a hankie and waved bye-bye with it before picking up the goose and starting to go.
“Hold it, sister!” I called after her. “You think you can just walk away from this?”
I’d been dealing with mortals too long; I’d forgotten what it was like to confront one of my own people. I just got my last word out when she turned on me faster than milk on a hot summer day and slammed me with the same lousy immobilization charm she’d used on the black bird. I felt my feet root themselves so firmly to the ground that I knew my ordinary escape spell was useless. A team of hopped-up gophers couldn’t dig me free. Unless she ended it or something ended her, I was planted for the duration.
Maybe I couldn’t move, but I could still fight. I struck back with my own incantation. It left my fingertips like a bolt of lightning, but it hit her like a splash of cheap cologne.
“My specialty is shielding spells,” she said, coolly wiping my splattered sorcery off her face. “Or have you forgotten all I did for LeGras? None of your puny magics can touch me. Now will you let me leave in peace, or do I make you regret it?” She didn’t bother waiting for an answer. I was beneath her contempt. When she showed me her back, she might as well have slapped my face.
“Aloha,” I growled, and whispered the rest of what I had to say.
The black bird exploded in her arms like a honking cherry bomb. Feathers flew everywhere, blood drenched her carnival-coloured skirts, and one webbed foot landed smack on top of her head like the latest word in Paris millinery fashion. She whirled on me, shrieking: “What have you done?! What in seven hells have you done?!”
It was my turn to gloat and I did it pretty. “Just a little something for the war effort, sugar. My war. How long you think it’ll be before the cops show up and find me stuck here? Bogey’s a sloppy eater. With all the blood he spilled inside that house, they’re gonna be asking a lot of questions, like about what happened to LeGras and his buddies. If my neck’s got to pay the final bill for your shell game, I’m making sure that you don’t get anything out of it except a couple slices of white meat and a bellyful of might-have-beens.” I slipped my hands into my pockets, casual, and added: “Don’t you listen to The Shadow, sister? Crime does not pay.” I tried to ape Lamont Cranston’s creepy laugh; it came out a cackle.
“And fools do not live!” she screeched, her empty hands filling with the biggest damn’ fireball I’d ever seen in all my years of witchcraft.
That was when I knew I’d bought me some serious trouble. You don’t use a fireball unless you mean business, and a witch only means that kind of business when she steps into a no-holds-barred duel-to-the-death of sorcery. Fireball spells contain the power of five hundred thousand sticks of dynamite. Casting one takes so much out of you that you’re useless for a week after. On the other hand, one is usually all it takes.
A fireball spell is so much destruction tucked into one little package that it’s a good thing only a few witches know how do it. Too bad I’m not one of them.
When she saw me standing there, not even trying to conjure up a fireball of my own, she smiled. For a second I knew how Poland must’ve felt when the Wehrmacht swept over the border. My last thoughts, just before she pulled back her arm, took aim, and let fly, were: Thank the Powers there’s nothing like this in mortal hands, and I hope there never will be or we can kiss our broomsticks goodbye.
Then the flames hit me.
I put back the glue brush and smoothed down the edges on the latest newspaper clipping in my scrapbook. The accident was still fresh enough for the dailies to use type so big I could read it without my glasses. The gas company kept yapping about how gas was safe, blaming the whole thing on customer negligence, saying that Mr LeGras or one of his servants must’ve done something wrong with the pipeline to call up the biggest explosion in the history of the greater LA area. They were partly right. LeGras did do something wrong, sure enough, but the only pipeline with his name on it was the one that went straight to Hell.
Bogey jumped up on my desk and sat on the open scrap-book, forcing me to pay attention to him. He was born a demon, but he’s all cat at heart. I’d be peeling gluey newsprint off his tail for hours.
“Want your toy?” I asked. I took the silver chain off my neck and let him swat at the little jade-and-pearl pinky ring dangling from it. While Bogey played ping-pong solitaire, I marvelled how something so small had contained power enough to save my skin. Bogey’s too. He’d ducked under my skirts just as the fireball hit.
Hit and bounced straight back onto the one who’d launched it. Thanks to the shielding spell on that little ring – a spell she’d set in place herself – the rogue witch got everything she’d been aiming at me, only tripled. Her own shielding spells couldn’t stand up to that. There wasn’t enough of her left to grease the wheels of a kiddie car.
“That was a close one,” I told the cat. “Too close. When I couldn’t take her down with my magic, I knew I’d have to turn her own against her. Too bad I had to blow up the bird, but I had to make her mad enough to want me dead. Lucky I managed to slip this baby on my finger in time or she’d’ve got her wish.”
Bogey caught the ring with a left hook, yanking the chain out of my hand. I let him chew on it awhile. “I’m getting too old for this job,” I sighed. “Even a cat can play me for a sucker. Gretel did it too, easy; too easy. I knew better than to trust her, but still I let her reel me in like a prize marlin. Suckers make lousy detectives. Pretty good corpses, but lousy detectives. Maybe it’s time I retired, found a cosy cottage up the coast, got back into the bakery business, a little babysitting, six of one—”
My office door flew open with a bang. She was five-foot-six of danger, half of it legs, the other half fireworks. “I need your help,” she said. She had one of those breathy voices that leave you gasping for air like you’ve just been kissed, long, hard, and professionally. “It’s my stepmother. I – I think she wants me dead.”
I nodded her into a chair. When she crossed those gams, my little dream house on the coast went up in a fireball bigger than anything LeGras’s pet witch ever threw at me. Oh sure, I knew the odds were stacked against her giving me a tumble, but I do my best work when I’ve got more stars in my eyes than Graumann’s Chinese Theater’s got in their cement.
That was when I knew that this was how my life was going to stay, until the day they chucked my broom into the janitor’s closet at the LA morgue: One case after another, rubbing elbows with the dolls and the deadbeats, the chumps and the chisellers, the gophers, gorillas and goons, with maybe a princess or two thrown in to keep the game interesting. A whole lot of fairy tales and not enough happily-ever-afters.
But hey. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Or the gingerbread.
FROG
Tina Rath
You’ve met Tony Rath, now here’s his other half, Tina. Tina has been selling stories for nearly thirty years, including a poem that was published on a bus in Hackney! Please don’t ask why. She is noted for her knowledge of vampires in fact and fiction, though the following story has shapechanging of another kind. When I started this anthology I made up my mind I wasn’t going to have any more stories on the theme of the Frog Prince. Not one. Not even half of one. Well, maybe a bit. But this is different.
“This is going to be a very difficult letter. You see, I don’t really know where to start, or even who to address. Dear everyone, I suppose. Well, then – Dear everyone – I’m really sorry. No, truly I am. I k
now you did your best for me, and don’t think that I’m not grateful. You stood by me when the tabloids mounted that campaign suggesting that I’d left eight hundred fatherless tadpoles in the Well at the World’s End, and you said that DNA tests wouldn’t be necessary to disprove the allegations, although I was perfectly willing to—”
The prince sat back for a moment, staring down at the thick, marbled paper. And was that because they really did trust me, he wondered, or because they were afraid the tests might show that those tadpoles were my offspring? After all, I was in that well for a hundred years, and a frog can get pretty lonely – am I sure even now that those tests would have put me in the clear? He sighed, and started to write again.
“And when that cable channel wheeled out Sir Mortimer Groaning, the pop-genealogist, who said that in spite of my having clearly undergone a successful transformation there was always a chance that I would introduce frog genes into the royal bloodline, you came right out there, fighting for me—”
Although perhaps it might have been done with more, well, sensitivity. He remembered his then future father-in-law shouting at his fainting then future mother-in-law, who’d had a preview of the tapes.
“For Heaven’s sake, woman! Look at your own family, I mean look at them with an unprejudiced eye, and tell me that most of them wouldn’t be improved by the addition of a few frog genes. I mean to say, frog genes aren’t the worst thing in your blood-line, if you’ll allow me to remind you of it. Look at your aunt Ethelburga. I know your family always told everyone that she was rescued by young Siegefried from that dragon just in the nick of time, but I’m not so sure of that. Oh, I know, they arranged a quick marriage, because of course it was love at first sight, they said, and then a good long honeymoon to allow them both to recover from their ordeal, and lo and behold they come back from a year in the wilds of Ruritania with those triplets. Well, they could be Siegefried’s, I suppose, he was no oil painting, but I do have to say that Franz and Ernst are the only young men of my acquaintance who have never needed to borrow a cigar lighter. And that girl, Ethelinda, she’s got scales! Iridescent green scales! – Not unattractive, in an odd sort of way,” he added thoughtfully.
