Happily Ever After, Ltd. - 7. The Queen

Dorothy couldn’t afford to remain in a foul mood when she returned to her office. Dave was beginning to stir. He groaned and rubbed his eyes. His throat was sandpaper-dry and his head was throbbing. He hadn’t felt this awful in years. It was like he was reliving his first hangover.

Dorothy knelt down in front of him. “Hello, Mr Renton! How are you feeling?”

“Don’t shout in his face,” Burnham said.

“Are you feeling alright?” Dorothy asked.

“My neck ...” Dave gingerly touched the red mark on his neck and winced. “What happened?”

“You were shot with a small tranquiliser dart,” Dorothy said. “Very small, in fact, and actually quite harmless. So no hard feelings!”

Dave rubbed his eyes again and blinked, as Dorothy’s face came into focus. Dave pulled himself up in the chair. “Who are you? Where am I? God, my mouth is seriously dry …”

Burnham poured a glass of water, which Dave took gratefully. “Excellent, thanks.” But then his eyes widened and he leapt out of the chair, the glass falling from his hand and shattering. “It’s you! You’re the one who shot me!”

Beneath Dave’s feet, the floor seemed to tilt sideways. He grabbed onto the side of Dorothy’s desk, the room seeming to rock back and forth.

“You’ve drugged me! And you took Ryan too, didn’t you? Where is he? You’ve killed him, haven’t you? This is some kind of underground human trafficking ring and this is where you keep your prisoners!” But even in his semi-tranquilised state, Dave knew that couldn’t be quite right. He wasn’t chained in a basement with thirty frightened foreigners and he wasn’t crammed in with the cargo of a rat-infested boat. He was in a very nice office with two well-dressed people. “Or ... or ... maybe you’re sick corporate types who get their kicks kidnapping innocent people! I know all about that. I’ve seen Hostel!”

Horrifying possibilities flashed across Dave’s mind – he had to get out of here. He stumbled towards the door, his limbs feeling floppy and useless. He tripped up over his own feet and fell sideways. Burnham rushed forward and caught him.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Burnham said.

“What do you mean you’re not going to hurt me?” Dave said, trying to break Burnham’s hold on him. “You already shot me! Like you probably shot Ryan!”

“Ryan is perfectly safe,” Dorothy said. “We’ve brought you here to explain everything. Ryan is fine. Nobody is in any danger. Please, have a seat. Would you like anything? Tea or coffee? Something to eat?”

“No! Just tell me where Ryan is!”

Burnham wrestled Dave back into the chair. “She said sit.”

“Okay, I am, I’m sitting!” Dave said. “So go on, what possible explanation could you have for any of this?”

“Have you ever heard of Happily Ever After, Ltd?” Dorothy asked.

“What? What do they have to do with anything?”

“That’s where you are. The offices of Happily Ever After, Ltd. I’m the manager of the Cinderella division.”

“What? Why am I here? Is Ryan here too?”

“I’m getting to that,” Dorothy said patiently. “What I’m about to show you may shock you.”

She handed him a copy of Cinderella. Dave looked at the front cover and couldn’t help but laugh. “Cinderella? Oh, yeah, I’m really shocked.”

But Dorothy stared at Dave, saying nothing. Dave looked back down at the cover, confused. The title CINDERELLA looped across the top of the page in font that literally sparkled. Beneath the title was Cinderella herself, wearing an enormous white wedding dress, with a silver tiara perching on top of her long yellow hair. Beside her was the Prince, wearing a white shirt and green trousers.

“I really don’t get what I’m supposed to be looking at.” But then Dave took another look at the Prince’s face. “Well, I guess you could say that the prince kind of looks like Ryan. But obviously it can’t actually be Ryan.”

“Actually,” Dorothy said, “it can. It is.”

Dave’s queasiness instantly became nausea. “Oh my god.”

“Please, don’t panic,” Dorothy said. “It’s only temporary.”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I bloody am.” Burnham handed Dave the wastepaper basket. After a minute of dry-heaving, Dave looked back up. “So he’s in a book?”

“Yes,” Dorothy said.

“But isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not in the slightest,” Dorothy said.

“What if something goes wrong and he gets hurt – or worse?”

“He can’t get hurt,” Dorothy said. “But even if it could come to that, we would simply terminate the story, and Ryan would be ejected back out into the real world – totally unharmed.”

“Alright.” Dave finally let himself exhale. “So how much longer is he going to be in there?”

“Not much longer,” Dorothy said vaguely. “We’re rebuilding the original Prince. He should be ready to go at the start of the next cycle. Everything will be back to normal before anyone notices.” She hoped.

“Before the police notice,” Dave said.

“You’re making us sound like criminals.”

“But you are. I’ve been shot, drugged, and kidnapped, and Ryan is being held against his will in a fairytale! How can you defend what you’re doing?”

Dorothy sat down beside Dave. “Because fairytales are important. Didn’t your parents ever read any to you?”

“Of course they did.”

“Cinderella?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Mostly I wanted them to read Hansel and Gretel. The idea of building a house out of gingerbread always fascinated me.”

“And now you’re studying architecture,” Dorothy said.

“Oh, come on.”

“Fairytales affect children in a way that no other stories can. Children read about seven small men taking in a young homeless woman, or they read about a prince who climbs up a rope made of hair to save the woman he loves – and the stories change them. Fairytales are one of the few remaining sources of influential good in the world.”

“But they’re only stories! Who cares if the happy ending works out or not?”

“Imagine you’re one of the thousands of children reading Cinderella on any given day. And imagine that suddenly, things start to go differently. Prince Charming isn’t at the Ball. Cinderella has to stand by herself all night, in her new dress and glass shoes, waiting. Prince Charming never meets her and she goes back to her life of servitude to her step-family, the end. Imagine the damage that could do to a vulnerable young mind.”

“Damage?! But it’s not even real!”

“Fairytales are the essence of human virtue. We now know that children exposed to fairytales from a young age will have a better quality of life.”

“What do you mean, a better quality of a life?”

“Happy marriages. Successful careers. Raising well-adjusted children of their own. Longer life spans.”

“Longer life spans?”

“That’s what the research shows.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. You’re saying you can justify the messed-up things you’re doing because you think it somehow makes kids live longer?”

“Yes, among other things,” Dorothy said. She got to her feet, checking her watch. “Mr Renton, I’m happy to answer any questions you have. I know this must all be a significant inconvenience for you. But I believe Ryan is about to arrive at the Ball, so you’ll have to excuse me for the time being.”

“So what happens to me now?” Dave said.

Burnham was still blocking the doorway. “We’ll have to accommodate you here,” he said.

“What if I made a run for it?”

Burnham tapped the tranquiliser gun hanging off his belt. “You wouldn’t get very far.”

“So, you’re going to stay here pressing a gun to my head?”

“No, I’m not.”

“So what, then?”

Burnham turned to Dorothy. “You’ve got the keys?”

“Right here,” she said.

“You’re going to lock me in here?” Dave said.

“There are books to read,” Dorothy said, gesturing to her bookshelf, “and we’ll bring you whatever you want. You’ll be able to do anything you like.”

“Anything except exercise my right to freedom?” Dave said.

“Yes,” Dorothy said, “everything except that.”

*

A rosy-cheeked lady came into the bedroom to spray Ryan with a yellow bottle of perfume. She was much less terrifying than the tailors or the barber and a lot more talkative.

“Who,” she kept saying, “will you choose at the Ball?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said.

She made a big show of winking. “But Your Highness, you must have your eye on someone.”

Ryan didn’t want to ruin the suspense by telling her it was a foregone conclusion, but it was surprisingly easy for him to sit there and say nothing. She seemed happy to chatter to herself. As the last of the perfume was emptied over Ryan’s wrists, there was a light tap at the door. The perfume lady immediately dropped to her knees, the yellow bottle breaking on the floor.

There was no mistaking the woman standing in the doorway. It was the Queen. The Queen was a tall, handsome woman, with a small crown perched on top of her head. But her face looked almost clownish, heavily powdered, with large circles of blue eye-shadow. She rushed across the room, her arms in the air, and pressed her wet lips against Ryan’s cheek.

“How handsome you look tonight!” she said in a deep voice. “If only there was enough time for a portrait! But alas, the Ball is about to commence.”

“Really?” Ryan’s panic had abated slightly, but suddenly returned in full-force. “Now?”

“Yes, son,” she said. “And as you know, you must choose a bride tonight.”

“Yes, I’ve heard.”

“Think of it like a fun game. Choosing can be a lot of fun, you know. It’s also fun being the girl who gets chosen. Why, your father chose me, among a flock of hundreds. He must have known that mine was not only a fleeting beauty but an enduring beauty.”

The Queen was an arrogant woman, but it seemed like a harmless type of arrogance.

“With so many women my age, it’s so sad to watch their hair go grey and fall out. There really is nothing sadder than a bald patch on a woman. But my beauty has never dimmed. Not once. Look. Look at my hair. Can you see any traces of my scalp?”

She lifted her crown and bowed her head.

“Uh, no,” Ryan said, glancing down at her thick brown mane. “No scalp to be seen.”

“Oh, you are a good son.” The Queen replaced her crown and gave Ryan another wet kiss on the cheek. “I only want you to be happy. You will try, won’t you?”

“I may as well.”

“Good.” The Queen slid her arm through Ryan’s, and locked it in place. She turned and headed back out the door. With his arm caught in hers, Ryan had no choice but to stumble after her. The corridor was dark and cold, and he had to keep craning his neck to avoid hitting his head against the low stone ceiling. He realised that although he hadn’t enjoyed the ordeal in the bedroom, he was even more afraid of leaving.

The Queen made a sudden sharp turn, and they were going down a different corridor – then she turned again, and dragged Ryan up a narrow staircase, then down another passageway. Each staircase and passageway seemed narrower than the one before it. At first, Ryan tried to keep track of the route so he could get back to his room as soon as the Ball was over, but after the seventh new hallway, he gave up.

Ryan knew they were getting close when he heard a rumble of voices. He’d played trombone in enough school recitals to recognise the sound of an orchestra tuning. The Queen escorted Ryan to the bottom of a steep staircase, which led upwards to a velvet curtain. She let go and he pulled his arm free.

“Now,” she said, “I will join your father on the throne, then you will be announced. That’s when you come up and wave. Remember your wave. You didn’t have all those waving lessons only to come here tonight and flap your arm about like an eel! It’s the one thing you need to know if you’re ever going to be King. One wave paints a thousand words.”

“Um, can you show me the wave one more time?”

The Queen swept her arm around as if painting with an invisible brush. “See?” she said. “Waving can be such fun.”

Ryan copied the motion. It seemed easy enough.

“You’ll be fine,” the Queen said. “Good luck.”

She quickly patted down any loose strands of hair, checked her lipstick in a small mirror on the wall, then went up the staircase, and through the curtains. There was a polite smattering of applause from the other side.

Then came the King’s voice. “Good ladies and gentle men!” he said. “I present to you none other than your future King! His Royal Highness, the Prince!”

Ryan got halfway up the staircase before he lost his footing and slid back down to the bottom. The King poked his head through the curtains and saw Ryan lying there in a heap.

“Get up here now!” the King said.

“I’m trying!” Ryan climbed up the stairs on all fours and crawled through the curtain.

He was at the top of an enormous, splendid room the size of a football field. On all sides, the walls seemed to go on forever, up to a ceiling so high that it seemed no bigger than a fingerprint. The room was completely filled with people applauding and cheering, an endless crowd of faces looking up at Ryan. All their voices became a single roar, the sound he imagined a dragon would make.

On either side of Ryan, the King and Queen sat down in their thrones.

“What on earth are you doing on the floor?” the Queen asked.

“Get to your feet and wave, you fool!” the King shouted.

Ryan managed to stand up, his mind again blank. His arm felt like a new and unfamiliar appendage. He tried to move it in a circular motion. The King groaned.

The applause slowly died down. The orchestra, on the far side of the hall, began to play a light, cheerful tune – but nobody moved. All eyes were still on the prince.

“Don’t just stand there!” the King said.

“Yes, dear, go and claim your bride!” the Queen said.

And straight away, Ryan had his first problem. He knew he was supposed to dance with Cinderella, but no idea how to find her. He hadn’t read the story in more than ten years. Was Cinderella was already here, waiting to be asked to dance? Or did she arrive later? According to the large clock against the back wall, it was only nine o’clock. If she was already down there, that meant three hours of dancing before midnight, and that seemed like a lot.

Ryan turned to the King and Queen. “You guys wouldn’t know what Cinderella looks like, would you?”

“Who?” said the Queen.

“She’s this girl I wanted to dance with,” Ryan said. “But I’m not sure she’s even here yet.”

“There’s a room full of ladies right in front of you,” the King said. “Get down there and dance with as many of them as you can!”

“Yes,” the Queen said. “Choosing is quite fun.”

“I was thinking I could just sit up here for a little bit,” Ryan said.

“No! You get down there right this second!” the King shouted, getting to his feet so suddenly that for a second Ryan thought the King was going to push him off the podium.

“Alright, alright,” Ryan said. “I’m going.”

But as he made his way down to the sea of bosoms and ball-gowns, he knew looking for Cinderella would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Possibly harder, because he didn’t even know what she looked like. Ryan had absolutely no idea what he was doing but for the first time it occurred to him there was a good chance that it would not end happily at all.

*

As soon as Dave was alone in Dorothy’s office, he began ransacking her drawers. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find, but he knew he couldn’t sit there waiting like an obedient prisoner. Most of the drawers were locked and the ones that weren’t held little interest. He found old manuals earmarked with post-it notes, meticulous folders of meeting minutes, and hundreds of tiny boxes containing paper clips and staples. Dave was disappointed but not surprised. The top two drawers were locked, so if there was anything important in the office – like spare keys for the door or a loaded pistol – it was probably in one of those.

Dave then turned his attention to the bookcases along the walls. There were hundreds of different versions of Cinderella, and of every fairytale Dave had ever heard of, and even ones that he hadn’t heard of. It wasn’t until the last shelf that Dave found something of interest. It was a red folder containing the architectural blueprints of the floor. To the untrained eye, blueprints were nothing but criss-crossing shapes and confusing measurements. But Dave had spent the last two and a half years living the life of a sleep-deprived architecture student. He knew what he was looking at.

He spread the blueprints across the floor and got his bearings. In Dave’s mind, the drawings lifted off the page. It was as though he’d acquired x-ray vision. He could see the corridor outside, all the other rooms on the floor, and the elevators and stairwells. But Dave knew he was on the twelfth floor and after a few minutes of examining the blueprints, he realised that even if he could get out of the office, he didn’t have much hope of escaping the building.

But Dave wasn’t thinking about escaping. He was thinking about rescuing.

*

At first glance, a reader mightn’t have noticed anything unusual in the pages of Cinderella. After all, Cinderella herself was exactly where she should be, at home beside the fireplace wishing (Burnham called it whinging) on a star. She was alone but the Fairy Godmother was due to appear at any minute. Meanwhile, the Prince had arrived at the Ball, and was making his way through the room, inspecting the ladies.

But, reading between the lines, there were a few strange details. Up on their thrones, the King was in a foul mood and the Queen kept opening and closing her mouth, but was not saying a word. Down on the dance floor, the Prince was smiling nervously at a few of the ladies. He even made a few attempts at conversation, but these were all met with silence. Oddly, not a single character in the room was actually enjoying themselves.

“Surely someone in there must be having a good time,” Dorothy said, when Liam pointed this out. “Ryan’s doing everything he’s supposed to do. He’s not that different to the Prince Charming model ... is he, Maria?”

For the last hour, Maria had been compiling a file on Ryan. A Google search had revealed that he’d played trombone in the school orchestra, and also that he regularly discussed Star Wars in online forums. On Facebook, Maria saw that Ryan was diligent in posting birthday messages on his friend’s pages, and also that he did not drink much alcohol, due to having a low tolerance for it. With some help from Liam, Maria had also managed to hack into the student database of Ryan’s university, and saw that he was a consistent B-minus student, who had a perfect attendance record for all his classes. Maria was confident that she had not overlooked anything.

“He had a nice normal upbringing,” Maria said. “The only strange thing I could find is that he never learnt to ride a bicycle. Apparently he kept falling off and eventually gave up. And while his parents aren’t exactly royalty, they seem nice enough. The father’s a pharmacist and the mother teaches remedial classes part-time.”

“What about this?” Dorothy picked up a photograph of Ryan standing on a boat, wearing a lifejacket. He was standing next to an unshaven young man, who was not wearing a lifejacket, but who was raising his middle finger to the camera. “Who’s that?”

“That’s Douglas Jenkins,” Maria said. “He’s Ryan’s best friend. He is a bit of a bad apple. We accessed his school records, he was always in trouble at school, and from his social media accounts, he appears to be fairly promiscuous. But it doesn’t seem like he’s been a bad influence on Ryan at all. From what I can tell, Ryan himself is a true gentleman.”

“And,” Liam added, “he’s being surprisingly compliant in there.”

Dorothy turned the pages of the Core Book, watching as the Prince walked through the ballroom. Ryan definitely was sticking to the story. The Queen had escorted Ryan to the Ball, but he hadn’t been dragged there kicking and screaming. He was playing along. Finally, something had come as a relief to Dorothy – but she would not for a second let herself believe that this was actually going to work.