Porcelain Princess

Porcelain Princess

Jon
Jacks

Other New Adult
and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

The
Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping
Ugly

The
Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy
Tale

A
Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things – The
Last Train

The
Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the
Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year
Circus

P –
The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker
Slippers

Heartache High (
Vol I)
– Heartache High: The Primer (
Vol II)
– Heartache High: The Wakening
(
Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg

Seecrets
– The Cull
–
Dragonsapien –
The Boy in White Linen

Text
copyright
^©
2014 Jon Jacks

All rights
reserved

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‘
Although she may sound like the stuff of fairy tales, the
Porcelain Princess is actually as real as you or me…(But) without
your belief in her, the Porcelain Princess can only weaken,
becoming once more as lifeless as the clay she was originally so
lovingly formed from.’

Excerpt from
The Porcelain
Kingdom

*

The
Porcelain Child

She was working
as quickly as she dared now.

Everyone who saw
her could see she was suffering from the Fading. She was now quite
transparent, such that anyone could quite clearly make out whatever
lay beyond her.

Worse still, as
she worked she could tell that her fingers were less substantial
than they had been only a few days previously. Almost through will
alone, she ensured the consistency of the clay by turning it like a
never ending whirlpool in her hands, creating substance and
solidarity from what could so easily have dried out and been
nothing more than particles of dust.

Even so, the
clay she was delicately moulding would at first refuse to obey her
probing and caressing, and it would take many attempts to achieve
the effect she desired.

The face had to
be angelically beautiful. The body – despite its puppet-like joints
– had to be as realistic as possible.

Fortunately, as
any creator of objects or stories realises, the material you work
with seemingly possess its own will to take form; a will that you
fight against to the detriment of your creation. The will flows
through you, as if that will is merely using you like a convenient
tool to accomplish its own aims. It knows better than you what form
your creation should ultimately take.

And so her lack
of substantiality actually worked to the advantage of the perfect
forming of the material she worked with, for she could never hope
to bend it completely to her own will.

Even so, she
hung so close over the firing of the clay, transforming it all in
the crucible of flames into an ethereal, pearl-skinned beauty, that
the heat would have burned her badly had she not already been so
lacking in substance.

Her husband
would tell her to rest, to let him finish her work; but she
refused. This, after all, would be her gift to him before she
finally Faded from this world.

‘
She
will be the daughter we never had time to have,’ she insisted. ‘But
you, you my dearest, must promise me that you will grant our
daughter
life
.’

And as his wife
began to finally fade away to nothing before him, and they could no
longer even hold hands, her husband promised; he would find the
Illuminator.

And she smiled,
and whispered, ‘I love you’; for they both believed that the
Illuminator could grant their daughter the gift of life.

*

‘
Shhhussshhh!’

No matter how
quietly the two boys tried to move through the darkened interior of
the caravan, the wooden floor creaked loudly beneath their
feet.

‘
Who’s going to hear us?’ the other boy hissed back, yet
keeping his voice low just in case. ‘These silly
puppets?’

He
contemptuously knocked a group of puppets hanging from a pillar by
their strings, setting them clattering noisily.

‘
Shhhussshhhh! People passing by
outside
might hear us,
idiot!’

‘
So?
They’ll just think it’s that ogre of a Puppet Master and his
daughter. Only
we
know they’ve both headed off
somewhere!’

Quickly and
expertly opening and rifling through drawers and cupboards, the
boys casually cast aside anything that wasn’t worth
stealing.

‘
What’re you giggling at?’ one of them gruffly demanded of the
other.

‘
I
didn’t giggle; only
girls
giggle! I thought it was
you
giggling!’

‘
Are
you calling me a girl?’

‘
Course I ain’t! It must be the wind whistling through the
planks of this old heap!’

Rising up from
where he’d been kneeling by an opened cupboard, he glanced
nervously around the small, incredibly cluttered room.

‘
Gives me the creeps, it does, all these weird puppets. All
like little demons hanging from their strings.’

He grabbed at a
cluster of puppets dangling from the ceiling, glaring fearfully at
their sharply angled faces, their mischievously wide eyes and
grins.

‘
Boo!’ shrieked a larger, even more devilish face as it
suddenly came at him from out of the darkness.

‘
Yaarrrgghh!’ the boy screamed in horror, falling backwards as
he tried to hurriedly get away.

The Devil
laughed wickedly. He glowered down at the fallen boy.

‘
Oh,
you should’ve seen your face!’ he shrieked, immediately
transforming into the boy’s friend as he whipped away the
evil-looking mask.

‘
What? Karl, you idiot!’ the fallen boy growled
angrily.

Picking up a
wooden ornament he’d thrown aside as worthless earlier, he hurled
it as his still chuckling friend.

‘
You
almost scared me to death! I thought these ugly puppets had come to
life!’

Karl laughed all
the more.

‘
You’re the idiot, Kraig! Puppets don’t come to life!
Look!’

He violently
shook a group of hanging puppets.

‘
Boo!’ he snarled directly into their faces.

‘
Oh
yeah?’ Karl answered dismissively as he scrambled back onto his
feet. ‘What about the Porcelain Princess then, smarty pants?
She’s
a puppet. And
she’s
alive!’

‘
Hah!
That’s
just a story!’

‘
What
do you mean, just a story? You’ve heard tinkers and travellers
swear they’ve seen her. They say she’s real enough!’

‘
I’m
not saying she’s not
real
! I’m saying I don’t believe she
was ever a
puppet
! Besides, she’s made of porcelain; not
stupid bits of old wood and papier-mâché like this ugly
lot!’

He shook and
glared at the dangling puppets once more.

‘
This
place still creeps me out.’

Karl felt edgier
than ever as he noticed the glittering glass and painted eyes
looking back at him out of the darkness.

‘
You
saw how they’d managed to paste one of their posters to the top of
the old bell tower. It’s too Faded to hold
our
weight; so
how’d
they
get it up there?’

Kraig wasn’t
listening anymore; he was trying the door leading through to the
caravan’s living quarters, but it was securely locked.

‘
I
reckon,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘that if we started a small fire,
we could burn enough of this door away to clamber
through.’

‘
Oh,
I wouldn’t do that if I were you!’

‘
What? Stop it, Karl; it doesn’t work on
me
,
idiot?’

‘
It
wasn’t me,’ Karl insisted petulantly, not wanting to be fooled
again. ‘It was you, sort of throwing your voice, or
something.’

‘
Throwing my voice?’

Turning away
from the door, Kraig was surprised to find that Karl was right
behind him. The voice he’d heard had seemed to come from somewhere
farther back inside the cart’s darkened store room.

‘
But
if it wasn’t you – arrrgghhh!’

Small, roguishly
grinning faces suddenly rushed out of the darkness towards the two
boys.

‘
Wwwaaarrrghhh!’ Karl wailed in terror along with
Kraig.

*

Using their
strings as rope swings, a group of puppets swept towards the
cowering boys.

Letting go of
their strings to drop to the floor, the puppets surrounded and
trapped the two terrified thieves against the door. Even though no
longer fixed to their strings, the puppets still moved as if alive.
With their legs confidently splayed, and their hands on their hips,
their eyes twinkled with mischievous glee.

‘
Please, please don’t hurt us,’ Karl pleaded as he and Kraig
nervously clung to each other.

‘
We…we weren’t really going to take anything, honest,’ Kraig
added hopefully, unnerved by the steady glare of the grinning
puppets.

‘
We
know,’ sternly replied a puppet the boys took to be a beautiful yet
evil witch.

‘
You…you do?’ Karl stuttered unsurely. ‘How…how?’

‘
Because we
also
know how the Porcelain Princess came
to life,’ said a puppet dressed as if he were an aging yet still
frightening wizard.

There were only
four puppets, the boys soon realised. And they only came up to the
boys’ waists. But they were alive. Moving, speaking, breathing, as
if they were children suffering some strange physical affliction
rather than puppets with a magical life of their own.

Yes, the boy had
heard
tales of the Porcelain Princess; but they had never
actually
seen
her. Besides, the Porcelain Princess was said
to be beautiful, kind, and wise – and no difference in size to a
real girl. But
these
puppets? One was a wicked witch,
another a malicious wizard. The third could be either a treacherous
Joker or an even more dangerous Devil, going by the immense horns
sprouting out of the top of his head. The fourth, although a pretty
enough young girl, had an untrustworthy, Elvin sharpness to her
face.

The boys
shivered in even more terror as something slithered out of the
darkness.

It was a puppet
dog, clutching what appeared to be a real bone in its jaws. Looking
up at the terrified boys, it dropped the bone and hungrily licked
its lips.

‘
How…
how
did the Porcelain Princess come to life?’
Kraig asked, anxiously stumbling over every word as if he feared
hearing the puppets’ answer.

‘
Well,’ said the elf-like puppet, ‘I reckon she was
once
a
naughty
girl like me.’

‘
Or
maybe, like me, even a boy.’ Suddenly jumping up to grab a pair of
hanging strings, the Joker lunged towards the two boys, bringing
his evilly grinning face close up to theirs. ‘A boy caught
stealing
from the Puppet Master!’