Read Snow White and the Giants Online
Authors: J. T. McIntosh
Snow White and the Giants (10 page)
Although this puzzled Sheila, it also seemed to satisfy her.
I rushed Sheila. She wanted to spend hours getting ready, as women do. She
took it for granted she'd have a bath and do all the other things that had
to be done, and we'd get out about seven or eight or nine.
But I thought, I had a feeling, that if we didn't sidestep fate, we'd lose
the chance. Maybe twenty giants would arrive and keep us at home by force.
And as we closed the front door and walked to the car -- my car --
I was certain there had been something behind that feeling, for I
felt myself wakening up. A moment before I had felt tired and rather
disinclined to go out after all, and if I hadn't been hustling Sheila,
if there had been any easy way to change my mind, I'd have been quite
content to stay at home watching television instead.
We drove to Shutdey and southwards across country to a new roadhouse,
the Orbit, on the nearest main road. We had been there just once before,
for a drink.
We talked only casually. Miranda wasn't mentioned, nor the giants,
nor Jota, nor Dina. And all the chill between us gradually melted. I
realized in wonder that I liked being with Sheila, that we were going
to enjoy ourselves. It had been like this before we were married, and
for a short, a very short time afterwards.
I was happier than I had been for years. Sheila and I would have
children. We'd become a family. There must be some solution to the
problem of Dina, if we really worked on it. Perhaps it would be a tough
one -- she might have to be shown, with brutal directness if necessary,
that if Sheila and I couldn't live our lives in peace with her around,
Dina couldn't be allowed to stay around.
Curiously, although I completely accepted Miranda's statement that I could
have normal children, I left her promise that something would be done
about Dina entirely in the air. I didn't even think about it again. That I
could have a family without fear was, after all, not hard to believe. It
had been doubts that had been set at rest, not certainties. Dina turning
into a normal teenager was something more in the nature of a miracle.
A mile or so short of the roadhouse, Sheila said: "We're far too early,
Val. There won't be a soul there, and it's too soon for dinner. Let's
stop for a while."
So I drove off the road.. .
Married couples abandon pre-marital parked-car behavior for a hundred
excellent reasons. Kids stay parked for hours, not necessarily misbehaving
themselves, because they've nowhere else to go. After marriage, many
couples try to recapture magic moments in cars parked at favorite spots
. . . but even if they stay in love, it can't be the same.
Yet Sheila and I, just off the road, in broad daylight, managed to go
back. We did nothing more than hold hands and talk, yet it was the same
as it used to be -- half an hour was a minute. We talked about nothing
at all, certainly not about Miranda or Jota or Dina.
We moved on in the end only because, despite the magic, we were
hungry. And the magic needn't necessarily fly away.
By this time I had made up my mind irrevocably about Dina. Something
which she couldn't help was strangling her life. But it couldn't be
allowed to strangle three lives instead of one.
The roadhouse was long and low. The noise from it as I parked the
car rather took me aback, because we'd thought it was a fairly quiet
place. Then I realized that on such a hot night all the windows were
wide open.
Sheila had put on a new dress, and I didn't get the effect until she
emerged from the ladies' room. She flushed with pleasure as I looked at
her, knowing that I meant what I looked.
She wore a short green dress with just enough cleavage, and I saw in
wonder that she was much more beautiful than she had been the |ast time I
looked at her in this way. A business associate who had married a lovely
girl and then divorced her had told me once, over a drink, that he had
never wanted her more than when he saw her for the first time after she
had remarried.
I was lucky. I was having the same sort of experience, only for me it
wasn't too late.
I tried not to think of Miranda, and then, as Sheila went ahead to our
table, I let myself think Of Miranda . . . and Sheila didn't suffer by
comparison after all.
Miranda was the actress in the safari picture. Her perfection had the
same unreality. She wasn't a girl who worked wonders with nothing at
all. She had access to tricks far beyond anything available even to the
girl in the safari picture.
Sheila didn't have any tricks. And Sheila was my wife.
We had a wonderful time. It was easily the best evening we had ever
spent together. And with every second together, we came closer.
Only once more during the evening, while Sheila and I were dancing,
did Miranda come to mind. And it was with gratitude, for I knew that
if I had not somehow been released that day, Sheila and I would not be
spending this evening, this kind of evening together.
We didn't prolong the evening greedily. We knew that unlike kids out
on such a date, we didn't have to part afterwards. We could go home --
and to a home without Dina.
So it was not long after ten when we got back in the car and started to
drive home.
"What's that, Val?" Sheila said idly.
I stared, and then put my foot hard down.
The sky ahead of us was on fire.
I'd seen fires at night before. Quite often they look far worse than
they are. An empty barn aflame can light the sky, over a hill, like a
burning town.
But this was something more than a burning barn. We could see flames
shooting high, flames and smoke -- and Shuteley was still ten miles away.
The flames that seemed to be shooting miles into the sky really were what
they seemed.
At once it all fell into place. The giants
knew
. Now I understood Greg's
visit and his bizarre idea of insuring against disaster in the next
twenty-four hours. Of course he hadn't meant to collect. He hadn't even
meant to have the policy drawn up. He had merely been amusing himself.
Other things began to assume more significance. Miranda had
known
. I'd
stay at home, and I'd gone out partly to make her wrong. Had she known
then I'd die? Or had she been thinking something quite different, that
I'd be safe out of it, because the Queen Anne house was in a bend in
the river hundreds of yards from the town?
Dina . . . my heart missed a beat. Gil's house was in the middle of old
timbered houses in the oldest part of town.
Then, with hope, I remembered that Miranda knew where Dina was and had
said she expected to see her later.
The giants, who had known all about this fire, surely didn't propose
simply to stand and watch, did they?
"What is it, Val?" Sheila said, and for a moment I thought she didn't
even realize Shuteley was on fire. But then she added: "What are you
thinking about?" and I knew that she'd been watching my face.
"About the giants," I said.
"You mean -- they did this?"
I hadn't been thinking that, and still didn't, on the whole. It seemed
far more likely that, knowing this was going to happen, they had booked
their seats for the show in advance. Maybe last week they'd watched the
Great Fire of London, seeing St. Paul's burned down, and eighty-seven
parish churches, and 13,200 homes.
At the thought, I jerked convulsively and so did the car. The Great
Fire was in 1666. This was 1966, the three hundredth anniversary of the
London disaster. Could that be coincidence? Or did it, in a twisted way,
explain everything?
"Sheila," I said. "Can you remember the date of the Great Fire of London?"
"Sixteen something," she said wonderingly.
"No, I mean the day and the month."
"You must be kidding," she said.
It was a possibility that the giants were teenage vandals of time,
destroying for the sake of destruction and doing it on a scale beyond
belief. Things I knew made this possible too -- the way, for example, in
which the giants, even Miranda until a few short hours ago, obviously
regarded Shuteley and the people in it as mere shadows of living
creatures.
Was that what Miranda had meant when she used the word tragic -- tragic
because suddenly, because of what had happened between us, she realized
that the people of Shuteley were something more than names fading from
ancient gravestones?
But then I remembered a small item in a TV program some weeks ago,
unimportant at the time. That had been the exact anniversary of the
Great Fire. It was past. So this wasn't just a fantastic, manufactured
playback for the giants' amusement, three centuries later.
"Talk to me, Val," said Sheila. "And don't drive so fast. You nearly
went off the road at the last corner."
I slowed a little. As we approached Shuteley the fire seemed to spread
until it was all around us, although that couldn't be so.
"Shuteley," I said. "The most old-fashioned town in England. Oh,
afterwards it's always easy to see . . . the Titanic, instead of being
unsinkable, was constructed so that if a certain thing happened she
absolutely
had
to sink. The Lusitania acted as if she wanted to be
sunk, paying no attention to instructions and being in one of the last
places she ought to have been. At Pearl Harbor, half a dozen warnings
were ignored, disbelieved, and what should have been expected was an
unbelievable shock -- "
"What are you talking about?" she asked, bewildered.
"Fire risk. Well, who should know better than me? Naturally, every new
building in Shuteley has to conform to all the latest safety regulations.
Modifications are always being made in all the old houses. But how much
has it amounted to? Shuteley's the most inflammable town in England --
perhaps in Europe."
"You mean, a fire only had to start, and it would be bad?"
"Something like that." My thoughts were jumbled. Sometimes I thought
the giants had done it all, with my black-halted playmate Snow White as
the schemer-in-chief. Then I found myself dismissing the giants as an
irrelevance, mere spectators.
"Gradually, of course, the risks have been lessening," I said. "But you
know Shuteley . . . changes that would take ten years anywhere else take
fifty in Shuteley. And this summer there's been hardly any rain. Not
only the town is bone dry, but the grass, the bushes, the trees. The
river's as low as it has ever been."
"You think it's very bad, don't you?" Sheila said quietly.
I did, though in an oddly theoretical, uncommitted way. So far I was
only guessing.
So I mused: "Maybe this is the fire that's going to change our whole
conception of safety measures. When the Titanic sank; there was no rule
that there had to be lifeboat accommodation for every passenger. The
company thought they'd done pretty well because they'd done far more
than the regulations demanded . . . We did the same. I'm sure of it. A
lot more could have been done in Shuteley."
After a pause, thinking of the giants again, I said bitterly: "I should
have known. I had all the clues."
"What could you have done?"
"Nothing, I suppose. I don't know. Tried to get the police to move the
giants on, perhaps. Watch them. Make sure they didn't have a chance to
do any damage."
"Then you do think they did it."
"I don't how. But if they didn't start the fire, they knew it was going
to happen."
"Miranda too?" She said it quite evenly, with no detectable malice.
"Miranda too," I said bleakly.
It seemed to take an interminable time to drive ten miles. The road was
narrow and winding, It was not possible to average more than forty, and
in trying to do the journey too quickly I was losing time, and knew it,
and lost more time trying to make it up. By this time I had realized we'd
have reached Shuteley sooner if I'd asked Sheila to drive. My brain was
too involved with other considerations to allow me to drive well. But
I didn't want to stop now to let her take over. The time lost might be
greater than the time saved.
"I never knew this road was so long," I groaned.
"What can you do when you get there?"
"I don't how. At least make sure the firemen, the police, everybody
involved, know about the giants, if they don't already."
"Val," said Sheila quietly, "calm down. Think -- no matter how bad it
looks, it's only a fire -- "
"Only a fire!" I almost screamed.
"Please, Val . . . Shuteley doesn't consist entirely of wooded houses. You
said yourself safety modifications are always being made. Spaces have
been cleared. And we have a modern firefighting service, with the latest
equipment. You know that as well as I do. Better."
Her calm words took effect, although we now smelt smoke, burning wood,
burning rubber, and -- I hoped I was imagining this -- burning flesh.
Of course she was right -- despite the inferno we were driving towards,
the orange gouts of flame shooting high into the dark sky, the billowing
clouds of smoke pouring upwards, the sudden spurts of flame which told
of oil explosions or gas leaks.
What we were seeing, the red-orange-yellow glow which made driving
difficult, dimming the headlights, must, simply had to be, far worse in
appearance than it was in actuality. It looked as if we were approaching
a city the size of Manchester ablaze from end to end. And Shuteley would
be lost in a suburb of Manchester.
I took a bend with a screaming of tires and for a minute or two,
frustratingly, we were tearing along at right-angles to the blaze,
getting no nearer. There was a slight rise just this side of the river,
which meant that we wouldn't get a direct view of the town until we were
within two hundred yards of the Suspension Bridge.
Yet as Sheila said, it couldn't be all that bad. Shuteley being a town
in which fires that did occur could be more serious more quickly than in
other places, the fire-fighting service was that much more efficient and
better equipped. In the Great Fire of London there could have been little
the Londoners could do except throw buckets of water over smoldering
timbers. In Shuteley, a great deal of damage was undoubtedly being done,
lives might be lost, but the outbreak would be contained.
I remembered Dina again, and caught my breath as I found myself thinking
that if she died, one problem was solved . . .
I rushed Sheila. She wanted to spend hours getting ready, as women do. She
took it for granted she'd have a bath and do all the other things that had
to be done, and we'd get out about seven or eight or nine.
But I thought, I had a feeling, that if we didn't sidestep fate, we'd lose
the chance. Maybe twenty giants would arrive and keep us at home by force.
And as we closed the front door and walked to the car -- my car --
I was certain there had been something behind that feeling, for I
felt myself wakening up. A moment before I had felt tired and rather
disinclined to go out after all, and if I hadn't been hustling Sheila,
if there had been any easy way to change my mind, I'd have been quite
content to stay at home watching television instead.
We drove to Shutdey and southwards across country to a new roadhouse,
the Orbit, on the nearest main road. We had been there just once before,
for a drink.
We talked only casually. Miranda wasn't mentioned, nor the giants,
nor Jota, nor Dina. And all the chill between us gradually melted. I
realized in wonder that I liked being with Sheila, that we were going
to enjoy ourselves. It had been like this before we were married, and
for a short, a very short time afterwards.
I was happier than I had been for years. Sheila and I would have
children. We'd become a family. There must be some solution to the
problem of Dina, if we really worked on it. Perhaps it would be a tough
one -- she might have to be shown, with brutal directness if necessary,
that if Sheila and I couldn't live our lives in peace with her around,
Dina couldn't be allowed to stay around.
Curiously, although I completely accepted Miranda's statement that I could
have normal children, I left her promise that something would be done
about Dina entirely in the air. I didn't even think about it again. That I
could have a family without fear was, after all, not hard to believe. It
had been doubts that had been set at rest, not certainties. Dina turning
into a normal teenager was something more in the nature of a miracle.
A mile or so short of the roadhouse, Sheila said: "We're far too early,
Val. There won't be a soul there, and it's too soon for dinner. Let's
stop for a while."
So I drove off the road.. .
Married couples abandon pre-marital parked-car behavior for a hundred
excellent reasons. Kids stay parked for hours, not necessarily misbehaving
themselves, because they've nowhere else to go. After marriage, many
couples try to recapture magic moments in cars parked at favorite spots
. . . but even if they stay in love, it can't be the same.
Yet Sheila and I, just off the road, in broad daylight, managed to go
back. We did nothing more than hold hands and talk, yet it was the same
as it used to be -- half an hour was a minute. We talked about nothing
at all, certainly not about Miranda or Jota or Dina.
We moved on in the end only because, despite the magic, we were
hungry. And the magic needn't necessarily fly away.
By this time I had made up my mind irrevocably about Dina. Something
which she couldn't help was strangling her life. But it couldn't be
allowed to strangle three lives instead of one.
The roadhouse was long and low. The noise from it as I parked the
car rather took me aback, because we'd thought it was a fairly quiet
place. Then I realized that on such a hot night all the windows were
wide open.
Sheila had put on a new dress, and I didn't get the effect until she
emerged from the ladies' room. She flushed with pleasure as I looked at
her, knowing that I meant what I looked.
She wore a short green dress with just enough cleavage, and I saw in
wonder that she was much more beautiful than she had been the |ast time I
looked at her in this way. A business associate who had married a lovely
girl and then divorced her had told me once, over a drink, that he had
never wanted her more than when he saw her for the first time after she
had remarried.
I was lucky. I was having the same sort of experience, only for me it
wasn't too late.
I tried not to think of Miranda, and then, as Sheila went ahead to our
table, I let myself think Of Miranda . . . and Sheila didn't suffer by
comparison after all.
Miranda was the actress in the safari picture. Her perfection had the
same unreality. She wasn't a girl who worked wonders with nothing at
all. She had access to tricks far beyond anything available even to the
girl in the safari picture.
Sheila didn't have any tricks. And Sheila was my wife.
We had a wonderful time. It was easily the best evening we had ever
spent together. And with every second together, we came closer.
Only once more during the evening, while Sheila and I were dancing,
did Miranda come to mind. And it was with gratitude, for I knew that
if I had not somehow been released that day, Sheila and I would not be
spending this evening, this kind of evening together.
We didn't prolong the evening greedily. We knew that unlike kids out
on such a date, we didn't have to part afterwards. We could go home --
and to a home without Dina.
So it was not long after ten when we got back in the car and started to
drive home.
"What's that, Val?" Sheila said idly.
I stared, and then put my foot hard down.
The sky ahead of us was on fire.
I'd seen fires at night before. Quite often they look far worse than
they are. An empty barn aflame can light the sky, over a hill, like a
burning town.
But this was something more than a burning barn. We could see flames
shooting high, flames and smoke -- and Shuteley was still ten miles away.
The flames that seemed to be shooting miles into the sky really were what
they seemed.
At once it all fell into place. The giants
knew
. Now I understood Greg's
visit and his bizarre idea of insuring against disaster in the next
twenty-four hours. Of course he hadn't meant to collect. He hadn't even
meant to have the policy drawn up. He had merely been amusing himself.
Other things began to assume more significance. Miranda had
known
. I'd
stay at home, and I'd gone out partly to make her wrong. Had she known
then I'd die? Or had she been thinking something quite different, that
I'd be safe out of it, because the Queen Anne house was in a bend in
the river hundreds of yards from the town?
Dina . . . my heart missed a beat. Gil's house was in the middle of old
timbered houses in the oldest part of town.
Then, with hope, I remembered that Miranda knew where Dina was and had
said she expected to see her later.
The giants, who had known all about this fire, surely didn't propose
simply to stand and watch, did they?
"What is it, Val?" Sheila said, and for a moment I thought she didn't
even realize Shuteley was on fire. But then she added: "What are you
thinking about?" and I knew that she'd been watching my face.
"About the giants," I said.
"You mean -- they did this?"
I hadn't been thinking that, and still didn't, on the whole. It seemed
far more likely that, knowing this was going to happen, they had booked
their seats for the show in advance. Maybe last week they'd watched the
Great Fire of London, seeing St. Paul's burned down, and eighty-seven
parish churches, and 13,200 homes.
At the thought, I jerked convulsively and so did the car. The Great
Fire was in 1666. This was 1966, the three hundredth anniversary of the
London disaster. Could that be coincidence? Or did it, in a twisted way,
explain everything?
"Sheila," I said. "Can you remember the date of the Great Fire of London?"
"Sixteen something," she said wonderingly.
"No, I mean the day and the month."
"You must be kidding," she said.
It was a possibility that the giants were teenage vandals of time,
destroying for the sake of destruction and doing it on a scale beyond
belief. Things I knew made this possible too -- the way, for example, in
which the giants, even Miranda until a few short hours ago, obviously
regarded Shuteley and the people in it as mere shadows of living
creatures.
Was that what Miranda had meant when she used the word tragic -- tragic
because suddenly, because of what had happened between us, she realized
that the people of Shuteley were something more than names fading from
ancient gravestones?
But then I remembered a small item in a TV program some weeks ago,
unimportant at the time. That had been the exact anniversary of the
Great Fire. It was past. So this wasn't just a fantastic, manufactured
playback for the giants' amusement, three centuries later.
"Talk to me, Val," said Sheila. "And don't drive so fast. You nearly
went off the road at the last corner."
I slowed a little. As we approached Shuteley the fire seemed to spread
until it was all around us, although that couldn't be so.
"Shuteley," I said. "The most old-fashioned town in England. Oh,
afterwards it's always easy to see . . . the Titanic, instead of being
unsinkable, was constructed so that if a certain thing happened she
absolutely
had
to sink. The Lusitania acted as if she wanted to be
sunk, paying no attention to instructions and being in one of the last
places she ought to have been. At Pearl Harbor, half a dozen warnings
were ignored, disbelieved, and what should have been expected was an
unbelievable shock -- "
"What are you talking about?" she asked, bewildered.
"Fire risk. Well, who should know better than me? Naturally, every new
building in Shuteley has to conform to all the latest safety regulations.
Modifications are always being made in all the old houses. But how much
has it amounted to? Shuteley's the most inflammable town in England --
perhaps in Europe."
"You mean, a fire only had to start, and it would be bad?"
"Something like that." My thoughts were jumbled. Sometimes I thought
the giants had done it all, with my black-halted playmate Snow White as
the schemer-in-chief. Then I found myself dismissing the giants as an
irrelevance, mere spectators.
"Gradually, of course, the risks have been lessening," I said. "But you
know Shuteley . . . changes that would take ten years anywhere else take
fifty in Shuteley. And this summer there's been hardly any rain. Not
only the town is bone dry, but the grass, the bushes, the trees. The
river's as low as it has ever been."
"You think it's very bad, don't you?" Sheila said quietly.
I did, though in an oddly theoretical, uncommitted way. So far I was
only guessing.
So I mused: "Maybe this is the fire that's going to change our whole
conception of safety measures. When the Titanic sank; there was no rule
that there had to be lifeboat accommodation for every passenger. The
company thought they'd done pretty well because they'd done far more
than the regulations demanded . . . We did the same. I'm sure of it. A
lot more could have been done in Shuteley."
After a pause, thinking of the giants again, I said bitterly: "I should
have known. I had all the clues."
"What could you have done?"
"Nothing, I suppose. I don't know. Tried to get the police to move the
giants on, perhaps. Watch them. Make sure they didn't have a chance to
do any damage."
"Then you do think they did it."
"I don't how. But if they didn't start the fire, they knew it was going
to happen."
"Miranda too?" She said it quite evenly, with no detectable malice.
"Miranda too," I said bleakly.
It seemed to take an interminable time to drive ten miles. The road was
narrow and winding, It was not possible to average more than forty, and
in trying to do the journey too quickly I was losing time, and knew it,
and lost more time trying to make it up. By this time I had realized we'd
have reached Shuteley sooner if I'd asked Sheila to drive. My brain was
too involved with other considerations to allow me to drive well. But
I didn't want to stop now to let her take over. The time lost might be
greater than the time saved.
"I never knew this road was so long," I groaned.
"What can you do when you get there?"
"I don't how. At least make sure the firemen, the police, everybody
involved, know about the giants, if they don't already."
"Val," said Sheila quietly, "calm down. Think -- no matter how bad it
looks, it's only a fire -- "
"Only a fire!" I almost screamed.
"Please, Val . . . Shuteley doesn't consist entirely of wooded houses. You
said yourself safety modifications are always being made. Spaces have
been cleared. And we have a modern firefighting service, with the latest
equipment. You know that as well as I do. Better."
Her calm words took effect, although we now smelt smoke, burning wood,
burning rubber, and -- I hoped I was imagining this -- burning flesh.
Of course she was right -- despite the inferno we were driving towards,
the orange gouts of flame shooting high into the dark sky, the billowing
clouds of smoke pouring upwards, the sudden spurts of flame which told
of oil explosions or gas leaks.
What we were seeing, the red-orange-yellow glow which made driving
difficult, dimming the headlights, must, simply had to be, far worse in
appearance than it was in actuality. It looked as if we were approaching
a city the size of Manchester ablaze from end to end. And Shuteley would
be lost in a suburb of Manchester.
I took a bend with a screaming of tires and for a minute or two,
frustratingly, we were tearing along at right-angles to the blaze,
getting no nearer. There was a slight rise just this side of the river,
which meant that we wouldn't get a direct view of the town until we were
within two hundred yards of the Suspension Bridge.
Yet as Sheila said, it couldn't be all that bad. Shuteley being a town
in which fires that did occur could be more serious more quickly than in
other places, the fire-fighting service was that much more efficient and
better equipped. In the Great Fire of London there could have been little
the Londoners could do except throw buckets of water over smoldering
timbers. In Shuteley, a great deal of damage was undoubtedly being done,
lives might be lost, but the outbreak would be contained.
I remembered Dina again, and caught my breath as I found myself thinking
that if she died, one problem was solved . . .
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