by Heide Goody
Roy snoozed on, with an empty bottle in his lap and Buster lying at his feet, while strange little voices chatted in the shadows.
“Now this plan can only work if we are careful to make sure of two things,” a precise little voice was saying. “Number one. Roy, our Prince Charming, must not see us at any time. Number two, we need to follow my plan to the letter. Are you all clear on your roles?”
There were mumbles of assent and a discreet, farty toot.
“Can we not just whack him on the bonce and kidnap him like the others?” said a gruff Black Country voice. “It’s a solid approach. Never fails.”
“Of course not,” said the precise one. “There’s no point in Disco rounding up the other ones unless we leave this one alone. Now, equipment at the ready.”
“Lads?” came a voice. “This crossbow?”
“What is it?” said the precise one.
“I’m struggling to get it up. Can one of you help me?”
“You want a job doing, you might as well do it yourself,” sighed a whiny and impatient voice.
There was a twang and then a thunk from the wooden beam above Roy’s head. He woozily wondered what the voices and sounds were. Either the apple-ish drink had caused some remarkable dreams or the television surround sound was far better than he recalled.
“And hoist, ya bastards,” said the gruff voice.
“Ooh,” said a suggestive voice as it rose up from behind Roy. “Bit thin on top for a Prince Charming, this one.”
Roy felt something brush his forehead.
“Glasses away,” said the suggestive one. “Now, pull me off, boys.”
“You’re on dog tail duty, Shitfaced,” said the precise one. “One, two, three, tug.”
Buster gave a sudden bark.
Automatically, Roy sat up.
“All right, lad. I’ll take you for a walk in a short while,” he mumbled.
He blinked drunkenly at the TV screen.
Roy’s living room was the sort of man cave that Avenants had enjoyed for hundreds of years, with a fireplace, a set of decanters and comfortable chairs. Roy had added a sixty-inch plasma television as a concession to the modern world. However, to his bleary eyes, the plasma screen looked more like a large rectangle of cardboard with a hole cut in it.
Roy fumbled for his glasses but they weren’t on his forehead. He grumbled and shifted and prepared to go back to sleep.
“Attention!” barked an ugly little fellow on the TV. (Was he standing on an upturned flowerpot?) “We interrupt the scheduled programme to bring you a bastard newsflash. There has been a spate — What the fuck’s a spate?”
“It’s a lot,” hissed the precise voice, “stay in character!”
“There have been a lot of mysterious disappearances of garden centre staff.”
“What?” Roy leaned forward and squinted. “Crikey O’Reilly!”
“All right, keep your hair on,” said the gruff one, turning back to his script. “People are advised not to panic as those staff who are missing are said to be safe and well. Expect further details in the newspaper tomorrow — What’s all this shite?”
“He’s been drinking, he can’t go now!” said the precise one.
“He’ll miss all the boring bits of the journey if he’s half-cut.”
“Fine!” The gruff one rolled his eyes and finished the script. “This concludes the newsflash and you will now be returned to your regular programme.”
“What?” said Roy again and yawned.
“We’ve got a few hours before we need to edit his morning newspaper,” he heard the precise voice say as it trailed off into the distance. “Let’s go and get the paints out.”
Chapter Eight
When sunlight slanted through the window to wake her, it also brought the scraping and tapping of blue birds. Ella resolved to employ one of those ball gowns as a makeshift curtain. She shifted position but her head felt heavy with sleep. Unusually heavy. She raised herself slowly and found that her hair was trapped under her shoulders. Her hair hadn’t been shoulder length when she went to bed.
“What the hell…?”
She pulled the covers aside and found that her entire body was twisted and tangled up in her hair, which was at least eight feet long by the look of it.
“Oh great, I’m a Wookie.”
She stumbled out of bed and tried to stand upright. It took a while, and every movement tugged on the hair, causing pain on her scalp. When she had recovered the use of her arms and legs she pushed hair from her face and shuffled over to the full-length mirror.
It was barely possible to tell that a human was at the core of the mess in front of her. She looked like something cleared out of the plug hole in a giant’s bathroom and shaped into a pile to dry.
“Scratch that. I’m Cousin Itt.”
The scraping at the window was accompanied by a gleeful chirping sound, but Ella, gripped with a truly horrible thought, ignored it. She wove a hand through her matted tresses, aiming for her groin. Had this appalling hair growth spread to other areas?
“Pubes normal,” she breathed with relief. “Probably not a fairy tale thing to have a handsome suitor climbing up your minge.”
The cheeping turned to angry squawks.
“What? Am I spoiling the magic by being rude? Is there a No Swearing rule for ladies? Well it’s all wank, do you hear me? It’s not just wank, it’s bastard bollocking cunting wank with… with nipple custard.”
The birds squawked even louder.
Turning, Ella tripped on her hair.
“Oh, this is impossible,” she said. “Knob-gobbling impossible,” she added for the benefit of the birds.
Ella took a few moments to try and work out a system with her hair. It pulled down on her head in every direction, causing a dull ache. She was unable to separate or manage any part of it, and she grunted with pain and frustration. A renewed tapping at the window made her look over. The birds held up one of their messages on a chip wrapper.
Yo shud be mor ladylike
She opened her mouth to unleash another round of Tourette’s for Amateurs, but realised that they had dropped their sign and were holding some objects. One held a hairbrush, and the other held a comb and a pair of scissors. She shuffled over to the window and opened it to let them in.
“Against my better judgement, you understand?”
The birds set to work, picking up beakfuls of hair and teasing out the tangles with the comb and cutting through the more truculent knots. Ella stood in the centre of the room and let them get on with it, slightly unhappy with the smugness of their tweeting. After an hour and a half, they had it brushed and braided. They’d also fetched Ella a dress from the wardrobe that she put on, rolling her eyes.
“Is this Disney Princess or buxom Bavarian wench?” she asked them but they ignored her sarcasm.
Nonetheless, a dress was better than standing there naked. Her hair was still as heavy as a sack of potatoes pulling at her scalp, but at least she could move around, taking armfuls of it with her as she went. It was growing so quickly that the top couple of feet was now unbraided, but that was fine because it was coming straight off as soon as she got hold of those scissors. She looked at the bird who was holding them and held out her hand. It gave her a questioning look.
“Scissors,” she said.
It flew back a little.
She stepped towards it, dragging her monster thatch with her.
“I just need to trim a bit more.”
It settled down on top of the wardrobe and gave her a look.
“You don’t want me to get split ends, do you?” she asked. “No prince wants that.”
The bird looked at her, tweeted something unmistakeably insolent, and then dropped the scissors on the top of the wardrobe. It whistled to get the attention of its companion and then they flew up and out the window, but not before the one on the wardrobe aimed a kick at the scissors and sent them clattering down the back of the monstrous oak edifice. The birds looped t
he loop as they twittered at their combined cleverness.
Ella hauled her hair over to the wardrobe. “I’m going to have weightlifter’s arms by the end of this,” she said, and felt round the back. The gap behind the wardrobe was tiny. She gave the wardrobe an experimental shove. It didn’t give by a single millimetre. It was solidly built and felt as though it might even be bolted to the floor.
“Bollocks.”
She hurried to the window to shout abuse at the birds but the words died in her throat. The view outside the window had changed. Yesterday, she had been shrunk and stuffed inside a model tower. Now…
Now, she suspected, the apparent one-hundred-foot drop had become quite real. The path running through the model village was gone as were the green verges beyond. Now, the tower was planted in the centre of a wide forest. (Another bloody forest!) There were open fields and the suggestion of villages in the distance.
“Bollocks,” she said again, softly.
Stymied, Ella spent several minutes coiling her braided hair around her waist so that she could move around. She ended up almost as wide as she was tall, but it relieved some of the pressure on her scalp having the weight supported, so she was able to waddle about with relative ease.
She needed something to eat — no point starving out of spite — so she went to the kitchenette to check out the food. There were several boxes lined up in a cupboard, but on closer inspection their contents were eerily similar. Mix for gingerbread sat next to Make your own classic teatime treats (gingerbread) and Cookie mix (ginger flavoured). Ella frowned.
“Rule twenty-two. Never trust gingerbread.”
However, it looked as though she’d be having gingerbread for breakfast or starving. Ella put the oven on, made up some of the mixture and carefully arranged separate islands of mixture on a baking tray. She examined it from every angle to be sure that no two blobs of mixture were touching or could possibly end up in any way person-shaped.
“You’re not tricking me, gingerbitch.”
Satisfied, she put the tray in the oven and went back to consider the wardrobe and the vital scissors that rested behind it. She paced out the width and depth of the wardrobe, the distance from the bed (the second-heaviest thing in the room) added them together and concluded that her plan might work. She was momentarily distracted by a tiny sound, which might almost have been the sound of dough re-arranging itself in the oven. She narrowed her eyes but refused to be distracted. Heavy things. She cast around the room looking for the heaviest things and began to pile them on the bed. The spinning wheel and embroidery frame went on top along with everything out of the kitchen cupboards. Plates and jugs crashed into each other as the pile grew bigger. There was a tapping at the window.
Yor making a mes
Ella grinned.
“Just doing a little interior decorating,” she told them. “Don’t worry. I’m an expert.”
It filled Ella with a perverse pleasure to know that her actions caused the birds’ disapproval. The oven pinged, announcing that the gingerbread should be ready. She waddled across to the oven, wishing that it had a glass door so that she might see what was in there.
“Never trust gingerbread.”
She opened the door a crack and peered inside. Nothing moved, there was just the delicious smell of fresh baking. Her biscuits lay perfectly still on the tray and looked very tempting indeed. She opened the door fully and pulled out the tray with a cloth and placed it on the side.
“Surprise! Skeep-beep de bop-bop!”
A bizarre figure bent upwards from the tray. Ella’s biscuits had melded into the most humanoid combination that they could manage, but given their beginnings as defiantly lumpy blobs of dough, the end result looked something like a space hopper orgy. It moved with surprising agility for something whose limbs were basically rocks.
“No breakfast for me then,” said Ella.
“Ooh and I’m so very, very tasty! Ski-bi dibby dib!” said the gingerbread creature, strutting along the counter like a bag of oranges falling down the stairs. “I bet you’d love to chase me, wouldn’t you?”
“A bit tied up at the moment,” said Ella, but then a thought crossed her mind. “I could chase you in a few minutes if you give me a hand with something first.”
“Well, all right. As long as it’s not a trick. Boop-ah-doo! You wouldn’t take advantage, would you?” It bobbed, a coy, questioning look somehow conveyed in its stance.
“No, of course not,” said Ella. She felt a pang of something like parental responsibility for this odd, camp creature. “We’ll sort a couple of things out and then you can run free.”
“And you will chase me?”
“Yes.”
Ella got to work while the gingerbread creature jigged in anticipation and performed improvised scat singing. She unwound her hair from her waist and threaded it between the legs of the bed. She trailed it along to the wardrobe and threw a large coil onto the top. With some adjustments from the side, she got it where she wanted it, which was along the top, wedged in the small gap between the wardrobe and the wall. She then trailed the rest of it back to the bed and joined up with the other end, so that she now had a huge loop of hair that she could use to pull the wardrobe at its highest point. She really didn’t want to take the strain on her scalp, so she twisted the two ends around the leg of the bed and trod firmly on the join before heaving on the loop with all of her might. There was no movement whatsoever in the wardrobe. She heaved again. There was the smallest sound of settling or shifting. She heaved again and again, in an attempt to rock the thing, and almost imperceptibly it started to move, thumping heavily on the floor.
“Can we do chasing yet?” asked the gingerbread creature with more than a hint of petulance. “Sham-pa dabba dam-pa-dah!”
“Just give me a minute, will you?” grunted Ella. She was getting somewhere at last. The wardrobe thudded the floor and banged the wall as it rocked. Ella ignored the angry bird sounds coming from the window and dragged harder. The wardrobe toppled and slammed to the floor with such a monstrous crash that Ella feared briefly that it might cause a complete collapse.
Moments later she went to find the scissors amidst the plaster dust. She plucked them out in triumph and wasted no time in giving herself a drastic haircut. She grabbed a handful at her shoulder and just cut and snipped, cut and snipped. Her gargantuan hair fell to the ground with an audible thump.
“Right then, my little gingerbread friend?”
“Boop-a-la-la doop-doop?”
“Let’s climb down this rope of hair and do some chasing, shall we?”
The gingerbread creature jiggled and swung various spherical appendages with joy.
“You know what would be more fun than climbing down, Shoop-a-doo?” it squeaked.
“What?”
“Getta load of this skiddle-iddle! You tie that end to something and follow my lead.”
“Okay.”
It grabbed the end of the hair-rope and bounced to the window.
“Open up!” it commanded.
Ella finished knotting the rope to the bed and opened the window, not sure what it would do next. She didn’t expect to see the gingerbread creature hurl itself straight to the ground, where it bounced and wobbled away, still holding the rope. It made its way across to a tree and climbed up. Quite how it climbed up, Ella would have been hard pressed to say, but it looked as though it involved blind optimism combined with an ability to fling its centre of gravity into any available crevice. About twelve feet from the ground it stopped and tied the rope securely to a branch. It tested the tautness with a brief tug and yelled up to Ella. “Chase meeeeee! Um-pum de pam-pam!”
Ella grabbed a coat hanger from the wardrobe carnage and fashioned it into a two-handled boomerang shape. She sat on the windowsill, popped it over the top of the hair rope and jumped off, sliding down towards the tree on her new zip wire. It was a relatively gentle ride, but it was made all the more interesting by the birds performing angry fly-bys. Even more
interesting was the question of how she was going to stop. She didn’t need to give it that much thought as the tree intervened. With prehistoric animal instinct, she released the coat hanger, hugged the tree and rode its rough and painful bark the few short feet to the ground.
She landed with a loud ‘oof’ and a bruised nose.
She was in the midst of a forest, the high and doorless tower behind her. But it seemed she hadn’t quite left the model village behind. It was as though the world, tugged between reality and fancy, had schizophrenically given up on the struggle and settled on a mish-mash. For here was a model watermill by a tiny brook. And here was a moss-covered model church. And here…
“Wait a minute!”
One house made her gasp with its familiarity. It was a facsimile of the house that she lived in with her father in Nether-cum-Studley. It was so real that she could almost see someone moving around inside. She squinted. Yes! She could see Myra in there. Specifically, Myra was in Ella’s room, wheeling a rack of clothes across the floor, in front of a huge mirror.
“She’s really done it!”
“Chase me! Shoop papa-doo!”
“She’s made my room into a dressing room. Great.”
“Come on, chase me now!” demanded the gingerbread man. “You promised.”
“Just a moment,” said Ella, looking across at the other buildings. There was a castle, a huge thing, partially smothered with aggressive thorny bushes that came down, level by level, to the banks of a pond. Ella had seen that place before in a book her dad had shown her: Thornbeard House, the home of Mr Dainty. If she looked hard enough, could she see her father there? Yes! He sat alone in a room and looked utterly miserable.
“Dad!”
Of course, he couldn’t hear her. This was just a vision, a trick of the magic. If only she could reach out and tell him everything she now knew. Ella felt a pang of anxiety for him; he looked positively morose. Cataloguing Dainty’s valuables was still clearly proving a major headache.
