Stiltskin (Andrew Buckley) (13 page)

Smoke rose slowly from all four stone chimneys in the settlement, suggesting that occupants were more than likely inside. Rumpelstiltskin wanted to avoid confrontation but had no desire to continue his journey without some sort of weapon. His answer lay beneath him, at the bottom of the rocky hill. As the sun completed its triple axel, its rays glinted off the metal of a hatchet stuck in a stump used as a platform for splitting wood.

Perfect!
The Dwarf began to look for safe passage down the hill. The last thing he wanted to do was get any more beat up or bloodied before the day was done.

No sooner had he finished the thought than a fiery something flew like a bullet out of Miller’s Forest and slammed into the back of the Dwarf. The little man was not simply pushed over the edge, but was rather flung without the slightest bit of grace. The jagged rocks of the steep hill were horribly inconvenienced in the course of their stony lives as a surprised and enraged Dwarf bounced across them.

Rumpelstiltskin landed in an uncomfortable heap at the bottom of the hill, his clothes shredded, blood seeping from various gashes, and although he wasn’t a doctor, he was pretty certain that several of his ribs were broken. He rolled himself onto his back and began scanning the skies for whatever it was that had struck him from behind. The darkening sky revealed nothing out of the ordinary. At the moment, this was perfectly fine as he was quite content to just lie still and bleed quietly. He felt coldness seep into his bones and the fear of losing consciousness edged into his mind.

A dark shadow appeared above him.
The Jabberwocky
has come to collect
.

“Who are you?” said a childlike voice from the shadow standing over him.

Rumpelstiltskin blinked, and then squinted his eyes. A young girl, around six years old, stood over him. One of the settler’s daughters, he assumed. She had long, blonde hair as was traditional among the witch’s followers. A round face with rosy cheeks and the innocence that everyone loves to see in young children stared down at him. A spark of hope ignited somewhere behind the Dwarf’s eyes and he whimpered a little for effect.

“Hello, little girl,” he struggled.

“Are you okay, mistuh?”

“I was”―cough, cough―”resting at the top of the hill enjoying the sunset when I lost my footing and here I am,” moaned the Dwarf.

“Want me to get dada?”

“No, no, I want you to help me.”

A small fireball blazed across the sky. The source of his current predicament suddenly occurred to him. A Fairy! An angry one!

“What can I do?” squeaked the girl.

“Well, you see, little girl, I don’t think I can move, and you see, it’s my puppy I’m worried about.”

The little girl’s face brightened. “You have a puppy?” she asked, excited and totally oblivious of the growing pool of blood beneath the small man lying in front of her.

“Yes.” Rumpelstiltskin could taste blood and his vision was going blurry. The fireball flitted across the sky again, closer this time. The damned insect was making sure she’d done the job properly. Time was of the essence. “His name is Foofoo and he’s my best friend.”

The little girl screwed up her face in disgust. “A boy puppy? I don’t like boy puppies.”

“Did I say he? I meant she. A little girl puppy.”

The girl’s face brightened again.

“I bet she’d love you. But I fear I’m dying down here and I won’t be able to take care of little Foofoo anymore. I won’t be able to feed her. She’s probably so scared.”

The little girl’s face looked panicked and she clasped her hands together nervously. “I could take care of her for you?”

“Well, yes, that would be an option. But… uh… I would still need to go get her for you and I’m in no condition to do so.”

“You could tell me where you live?”

“It’s very hard to find!” snapped the Dwarf.

The girl looked a little taken aback.

“I mean, I’d be happy to take you there if I could just get better. Don’t you wish I was healed so that I could take you to see little Foofoo?”

The little girl nodded enthusiastically. Rumpelstiltskin would have rolled his eyes if he thought the effort wouldn’t make him pass out.

“I need you to say it.”

“Say what, mistuh?”

“That you wish I was better,” suggested the Dwarf.

The little girl tilted her head. “Why?”

Rumpelstiltskin tried to move and screamed in pain.

“Ohh, poor Foofoo,” he cried.

The little girl gasped.

“I wish you were better and not bleeding everywhere or making that little gurgling sound.”

A smile crept across the evil little man’s mouth. “Granted!”

His bones cracked back into place, the blood that had soaked into the earth retreated into his body, filling his veins and pumping through his evil little heart. The skin knitted itself together and his bruises vanished. Even the wounds inflicted upon him by the Rabbit were gone.

The Dwarf jumped to his feet and grabbed the hatchet from the stump.

“Aha!” he shouted triumphantly. For all the limitations of his magical powers, sometimes he had moments of brilliance.

He turned on the little girl who was slowly backing away, her bottom lip quivering. Should he simply take her head off or knock her out? A little girl was no threat, really, but she could alert others to his presence. He shifted the hatchet in his hands so he could strike her with the blunt end and swung for her tiny, terrified-looking head.

Out of nowhere, the Fairy, still doused in flames, flew in front of the girl, taking the full force of the blow. Veszico’s tiny body hurtled toward the giant wooden statue in the middle of the settlement and was lost from sight somewhere in the straw hair of the fake deity. The dry straw promptly ignited and began to burn, slowly at first, before building into a raging fire that consumed the statue within moments and started to spread to the structures.

Rumpelstiltskin turned and fled around the back of the settlement, picking up the Eastern Road, and kept running until his Dwarf lungs gave out two miles later and he stopped to rest for the night.

The fear that compelled such speed was the possibility of discovery by the witch’s followers which, as it turned out, wasn’t a possibility at all as they were far too busy trying to stop their settlement from burning down. Later that night, the followers failed to believe the little girl’s story about a Dwarf who had almost died and had a puppy called Foofoo and then got better and then hit a burning Fairy into the statue causing the complete destruction of their settlement.
Too farfetched
and
stop being ridiculous
were muttered and the girl was chastised for making up stories. It was then decided that the fire and consequent destruction of their homes was a sign from Rapunzel that the time to free her from her prison was growing close and all her followers should be prepared. They were wrong, of course, but when it came to religion, truth and fiction often made a cute couple.

What was strangely coincidental was that the settlement disaster wasn’t the only fire that happened in Thiside on that particular night. Several miles away and a few more hours into the night, a second blaze erupted, and once again, no logical cause could be determined.

he minutes turned into hours and the hours turned into more hours as darkness descended on Thiside with as much passion as the absence of light could possibly muster. Robert hadn’t exercised this much since secondary school physical education classes, where he was forced to run cross-country over the desolately damp and cold fields in Southern Yorkshire. He managed to run for only the first five minutes before giving up, walking the rest of the way, and always came in dead last.

In truth, he barely noticed the time passing as he took the opportunity to learn as much as he possibly could about Thiside. His fond hope was that he could figure out why he was along on this ride in the first place. Lily was extremely patient with his obvious ignorance and answered most of his questions about the world they currently occupied to the best of her ability. Robert had learned about some of the inhabitants of Thiside. He now knew that humans only made up half the population. Other inhabitants included Humanimals: half human, half animal. There were also Dwarves, Fairies, Gnomes, Munchkins, Giants, Goblins, Ogres, Mermaids, and a variety of creatures that he’d never heard of, even in stories in Othaside.

It had taken a while, several explanations, and some fairly strong insults to his intelligence by the Gnomes until he finally understood how the doors worked. If someone with the Rabbit’s blood as a passport passed through a door, he would go to an equivalent location in Othaside.

Equivalent probably wasn’t the best way to describe it, as locations between realities could sometimes shift as if both realities were blankets that had been stitched together at random points by a deranged sewing woman driven mad by the intricacies of needlepoint and occasionally felt the need to undo her work and re-sew elsewhere.

If the traveller didn’t have a passport, they would be transported quite randomly to another location in Thiside. Doors moved constantly, as if they had a mind of their own. They weren’t driven by anything; they had no purpose except to link locations and worlds and over the past several decades, according to Lily, the amount of doors had diminished considerably. She hinted that there was a moment in their history when a great source of magic had vanished from their world and ever since then, the amount of magic in Thiside began slowly to decline.

After the first hour into their journey, Robert had resolutely decided to ignore the Gnomes. It seemed the best course of action, as any verbal sparring ended in them winning; it appeared that the Gnome race had developed a keen sense of how to insult people. It was a skill they had sharpened throughout the last several centuries until it was as dangerous and as deadly as the weapons they kept concealed upon their person. It was also obvious that the Gnomes had no respect for Othaside or any of its inhabitants, although Robert had no idea why. When he’d asked the Gnomes why they hated Othaside so much, they made a statement that compared Robert to the passing of gas from an elderly female Rath.