Happily Ever After, Ltd. - 9. The Terrorist

“Your Highness,” the Stepmother said.

Her long, ice-cold fingers closed around Ryan’s hand. He saw that her necklace was so tight that the pearl beads were pressing into the loose skin around her throat.

“Um, hello,” Ryan said. “How’s it going?” He tried to pull his hand away, but she tightened her grip.

“May I present my daughters,” she said. “This is my eldest, Lucille,” she said motioning to the scary one, “and my youngest,” the moody one, “Katrine.”

“Oh, so it’s only the two daughters? Just, um ...”

“Lucille, Your Highness,” said the scary one.

“Katrine, Your Highness,” said the moody one.

“Lucille and Katrine are my daughters,” the Stepmother said, frowning. “I introduced them to you a moment ago.”

“Yeah, no, I get that. But like, in these modern times, families aren’t just, you know, nuclear anymore. There are second marriages, and other children, half-siblings, millions of cousins ... and then sometimes your husband dies, and you’re left with his child ...”

“I am a widow,” the Stepmother said suspiciously, letting go of Ryan’s hand. “I’m a widow twice over, in fact. Lucille and Katrine are daughters of my first husband. I had no children with my second but he did have a daughter of his own. After his death, I took her in, at considerable expense, as housekeeper.”

“Yes! Her! Do you know where she is? Did she come with you?”

“A housekeeper at a Royal Ball?” Lucille scoffed. “Not likely.”

“So you haven’t seen her here?”

“She had too many chores to finish,” the Stepmother said.

“Really?” Ryan looked back up at the clock. It was nearly half past eleven. Surely Cinderella should’ve arrived by now.

“You seem quite anxious, Your Highness,” Lucille said. “Would it not please you to dance with me?”

“Maybe some other night,” Ryan said.

Lucille smiled, her two front canines sticking out over her lower lip. “Really? Do you mean it? But I thought you were announcing your bride tonight.”

“Um, I don’t know really know what’s going on with that,” Ryan said. “So you definitely haven’t seen Cinderella here? Not even anyone who looks like her?”

“Of course not, Your Highness,” the Stepmother said. “Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

“Yes, fine!” Ryan said. “Um, it’s been a bit of a weird night.”

Ryan looked up at the clock again. Eleven twenty-five. Mild panic began to creep back up on him. He had absolutely no idea what to do.

But then there was a hand on his shoulder, and a man’s voice came from behind him.

“Excuse me, Your Highness.”

Ryan turned around. The man standing in front of him was tall and thin, with curved posture like a question mark. He had thinning dark hair, narrow eyebrows, and a moustache that twisted up at the corners.

“I apologise, ladies,” he said to the three women, “but I need to speak with His Highness for a moment. Would you excuse us for a moment?”

“Of course,” they said in unison, all curtseying, and retreating back to the corner of the hall.

Ryan had no idea who this man was, but he could tell straight away that there was something different about him. Ryan couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Who are you?” Ryan asked. “The King’s shoe polisher?”

He laughed, and Ryan saw what it was about him that was so different. He had marks on his face. Most people do, of course, but Ryan hadn’t seen any normal facial blemishes in Cinderella world. This man had small lines around his eyes, a scar on his chin, and a single hair protruding from his left nostril. “No,” he said. “I’m not part of Cinderella at all.”

“You’re not?”

“No,” he said. “My name is Bjorn. I’m a human being, just like you.”

*

Bjorn had always been different.

As a child, he refused to cut his hair short, so it fell over his face, giving him a sinister phantom-like appearance. In both the classroom and playground, he sat alone, away from the other children, but always watching them. His classmates thought Bjorn was not only strange, but scary. On the rare occasions that Bjorn did speak, he sounded like a grown-up. He used words like “social construction” and “democratic system”, and he never laughed at knock-knock jokes.

But as strange as his classmates found Bjorn, he found them even stranger. In particular, Bjorn was baffled by how fanatical the other children were about fairytales – even the boys. Every week, the students took it in turns bringing a book to class for the teacher to read to them, and every student chose a fairytale. When it was Bjorn’s turn, he brought his uncle’s copy of Mein Kampf.

There was a meeting with Bjorn’s parents, the teacher, and the headmaster.

“It was ironic,” Bjorn kept saying but nobody, not even in the headmaster, knew what that meant.

“Next time, he’ll bring Rumpelstiltskin,” Bjorn’s mother reassured the teacher.

The other children’s obsession with fairytales was not limited to the classroom; they all liked acting out the scenes during lunchtime. The girls would climb to the top of the playground slide, lie down, and pretend to be under an enchanted sleep. The boys would try to climb the slide to awake the girl with a kiss. (Unless the girl under the enchanted sleep was Tara-Lee Pollack, who nobody wanted to kiss, on account of her supposed “germs”.)

On weekends, the girls were always inside wearing plastic tiaras and using their older sisters’ cosmetics. Meanwhile, the boys spent their weekends outside fencing with wooden poles and playing “Beanstalk”, which was a game where each boy had to find and climb a taller tree than the one before him.

Bjorn never wanted to join in any of these games, which was just as well, as he was never invited to participate. Instead, Bjorn came to despise fairytales. He believed that they were over-simplified, meaningless, and always featured characters that were more wooden than Pinocchio. The characters also made such bad decisions. Why, Bjorn always wanted to know, does Little Red Riding Hood deviate from the path at the suggestion of a wolf? Why does Goldilocks break into a house and climb into the beds? Why do the Goats cross the bridge so far apart from each other? And the plot devices were always implausible, from the glass shoe that could only fit the foot of one person, to kisses that woke the dead, to the woodcutter that could pull living humans from wolves’ stomachs.

But more than anything, Bjorn grew to hate the final three words of every fairytale.

Happily ever after.

That phrase was a cruel illusion and, even at a young age, Bjorn knew better. He’d picked up on clues early on. One morning before school, he saw the art teacher crying in her car, then she stopped wearing a ring on her wedding finger, then her surname changed back. Another time, he’d overheard his parents talking in tight, urgent whispers about their mortgage and that the bank might do something called “foreclosing”.

And then, of course, there was the news on television. Bjorn watched it every night, even though his mother told him that he was too young to worry about current events. But Bjorn saw planes falling from the sky, heard about famines in faraway lands, and watched young men opening gunfire at schools because girls had broken up with them. That, Bjorn knew, was the real world – not sugar-sweet fairytales. But nobody ever talked about those things. Children weren’t meant to know about any of that. Children were only meant to know that everyone lived happily ever after.

But Bjorn knew that people didn’t live happily ever after. He knew that the world was a real, painful place. He watched as all the other children were herded like sheep towards the illusion of a perfect life, a life they would one day find did not exist.

“But they’re only stories,” the child psychiatrist said to Bjorn. “Can’t you enjoy them for what they are?”

“That’s like asking me to enjoy a suicide cult for what it is,” a six-year-old Bjorn replied.

Bjorn had indeed been a strange child, but he grew up to be an even stranger teenager. Puberty added acne, wispy facial hair, and a gangly frame. He also began dressing only in black, not because he was suicidal, but because he felt like it. He continued seeing psychiatrists intermittently, usually at the suggestion of teachers, rather than his own parents, who believed Bjorn when he said he wasn’t depressed. One of the last psychiatrists was particularly pessimistic about Bjorn’s prospects and, at the end of their first meeting, he informed Bjorn that he was displaying strong signs of anti-social behaviour. To avoid leading a life of deviance, the psychiatrist recommended that Bjorn undergo intensive therapy.

“You can shove your intensive therapy up your ass,” Bjorn said.

Bjorn was indeed showing signs of deviance. And he was only getting started.

*

“The Fairy Godmother was deleted,” Liam said. “She vanished halfway through the makeover. She’d gotten the dress and the shoes onto Cinderella, but hadn’t finished her hair and hadn’t transformed any pumpkins into carriages.”

The Core Book showed the same.

Cinderella waited and waited, but to no avail.

The Fairy Godmother did not return.

“How long does it take to reinstall her?” Dorothy asked.

“She won’t be back up and running until after midnight,” Liam said. “By then it’ll be too late.”

“So it’s doomed,” Dorothy said. “It’s completely doomed.”

Now that she had admitted it, the others all knew it was true.

*

“You’re real?” Ryan rushed forward and shook Bjorn’s hand. “Thank god. I’ve been going out of my mind! So it’s true? We really are inside one of those Happily Ever After fairytales?”

“Yes, we’re in Cinderella.”

“So, did they put you in here too? How long have you been here? Are we ever going to get out? What’s with the food over there? Not that I’m hungry. Can you even get hungry in a book?” The questions were pouring out.

“Slow down, slow down,” Bjorn said. “I can answer all your questions, one at a time.”

“Alright. Why am I here?”

“You’re here because the real Prince Charming vanished earlier today. You were probably only meant to be a thirty-minute replacement before the Ball started, but there have been – technical difficulties.” It seemed like Bjorn was trying to suppress a smile. “So you’re probably going to be here until the end of this cycle.”

“Well, it would’ve been nice if you’d told me that when I got here,” Ryan said. “So you’re here as a sort of Happily Ever After tour guide?”

“No, not at all,” Bjorn said. “I’m not with the company.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m here without the company’s knowledge,” Bjorn said, “and most definitely against their wishes.”

“But if they didn’t put you in, then what are you doing here?”

“I’m the one who eliminated Prince Charming,” Bjorn said conversationally. “I’m what they’d call a fairytale terrorist.”

Ryan leapt back like he’d been stung.

“You’re a – terrorist?” Ryan nearly choked on the word. “Oh my god! You’re going to kill us all!” He turned towards a nearby cluster of ladies. “Get help!” Ryan shouted. “There’s a bomb!”

Bjorn slapped his hand over Ryan’s mouth. “You idiot!” he said. “If you start screaming, how do you think the story will go? The ballroom will have to evacuate and then where will you be?”

Ryan pulled away. “Just tell me, do you have a bomb?”

“Of course I don’t have a bomb,” Bjorn said. “Please listen to me. We can help each other.”

“How could you possibly help me? You’re the one who got me stuck in here!”

“You said you needed a tour guide,” Bjorn said. “I can do that for you. I can guide you every step of the way and promise you a safe departure from the story when it ends. Nobody knows this world as well as me, not even the people who created it. I’ve been living in here for two months.”

“You’ve been here for two months?” Ryan said. “But the story only lasts for a few days, doesn’t it?”

“Three days, two nights,” Bjorn said.

“So what’s been happening to you at the end? I mean, after they’re married and it’s all finished?”

“It fades out,” Bjorn said, “and then we start all over again, right back where we began. The characters’ memories reset, but not mine. Because I’m a human, I remember everything.”

“So,” Ryan tried to wrap his brain around it, “you’ve been living the same three days over and over for the last two months?”

“Exactly,” said Bjorn. “But today, things are finally different. Prince Charming is gone and you are here. Even now, everything’s changed. Look around. Nobody’s dancing. The King is furious. And you, with your shirt untucked, you look like you’re wearing a dress.”

“I had to untuck it. The pants are too tight, you know, down there.”

“You don’t realise how powerful the changes are, but they’re all happening because you’re here. Reality is starting to take over. It’s finally starting to seem real.”

For a short time, Ryan had been so relieved to have met another human being, but within minutes Bjorn seemed more fictional than any of the characters.

“Why does it matter if it seems real or not?” Ryan said. “It’s a children’s story.”

“It’s precisely because it’s a children’s story that it matters,” he said. “Children read that troubled characters can simply fall in love and live happily ever after. It becomes a mantra, being repeated throughout their lives.”

“Oh, come on.” Ryan rolled his eyes but Bjorn pressed on.

“Didn’t it happen to you?” he said. “When you were a little boy at school, weren’t you told you’d grow up, meet a girl, and live happily ever after?”

“So what if I was? It didn’t do me any harm.”

“That fairytale mantra – meet a girl, live happily ever after – implants unhealthy and unnatural expectations in most children. You grew up brainwashed into believing that all you needed to do is get married and live happily ever after. That can cause major issues later in life – divorce, depression, suicide. The consequences can be psychological and emotional. There can often be financial, social and even physical damage.”

“You’re the one doing the physical damage!” Ryan said. “You killed Prince Charming. You hung around in a book for two months poisoning him – and you probably killed Cinderella, too!”

“No, I didn’t do anything to Cinderella. If I’d poisoned both of them, the entire story would’ve just been terminated.”

“Okay, so where is Cinderella then?” Ryan asked. “It’s half past eleven – she only has thirty minutes to get in and get out again. What time does she usually get here?”

“She’s always here at eleven o’clock sharp,” Bjorn said. “The latest I’ve ever seen her arrive is two minutes past. I don’t think she’s coming.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because I think it’s not only Cinderella world that’s changed with you here. Prince Charming’s disappearance has probably resulted in total chaos at the Happily Ever After offices too.”

“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” Ryan said.

“Look around. You’ve got a whole room full of normal-looking girls to choose from. You could go back and ask one of the stepsisters to dance. Tonight we have the chance to rewrite Cinderella.”

“I don’t want to rewrite anything! I’m not going to make things worse than they already are.”

“I’m not asking you to create chaos,” Bjorn said. “Just by being here, you’re doing what I’d hoped you’d do. They won’t get the happy ending they want with an actual human. But if you were to go down a different path, that would demonstrate my point even more strongly.”

“A different path? You mean like choosing someone else?”

“Yes. What about that girl you were speaking with earlier? At the banquet table? Her name’s Blanche. She’s got a nice face, doesn’t she? She’s pretty without trying, unlike all the others. She’d be a good choice for your bride.”

“Yeah, well, Blanche seemed really chatty,” Ryan said sarcastically.

“Happily Ever After, Ltd doesn’t program the bigger girls for dialogue,” Bjorn said.

“What do you mean?”

“Larger-sized female characters are meant to be in the background. They’re completely mute. After all, the actual Prince Charming would never have spoken to them in a million years.”

“Oh. That’s a bit rude.”

“It is. And how do you think it makes bigger girls feel, in real life? They grow up reading that if you’re skinny and fair, you’re a princess, but if you’re fat and dark, you’re standing in the background. Or you’re a witch who eats children.”

To Ryan, it seemed that Bjorn had a lot of problems, but Ryan only had one, and that was getting out of the story. As far as Ryan could tell, the best way to do that was to give the company the happy ending that they needed – by dancing with Cinderella, by taking her shoe, and by marrying her – so that was what he intended to do. But he knew he needed help, so he was going to have to negotiate.

And luckily, Ryan realised, he had a secret weapon.

“If Cinderella isn’t coming on her own,” Ryan said, “then I want to go and fetch her.”

Bjorn raised his eyebrows. “And how do you plan to do that?”

“You,” Ryan said. “You know everything about Cinderella world, so you know where she lives. And you’re a footman, right? You’re in charge of carriages and horses, so you can take me there.”

Bjorn laughed. “I’ve spent the last two months sabotaging Cinderella. And tonight, tens of thousands of children all over the world are getting a much more realistic bedtime story. Why would I try to help you put the story back on track?”

“Because you want an unconventional fairytale,” Ryan said, “and I’m probably about as unconventional a Prince Charming as you could have hoped for.”

“What do you mean?” Bjorn said.

Ryan took a deep breath, then uttered the same two words to Bjorn that he’d said to his parents the year before – their least proud moment. But now Ryan was here, doing everything he could to find a girl and marry her, and for a moment he wondered if his parents would be proud of him now.

*

Dorothy had accepted defeat, and now thought of the months ahead. Incident reports, meetings, sales dropping, audits, legal department, the media. One sleepless night blurring into another.

“Hang on a second,” Maria said, reading the Core Book. “Something’s happening.”

Dorothy looked up wearily. “What is it now?”

“It’s Ryan!” Maria said. “He’s going to fetch Cinderella himself.”

“What?”

“Yes,” Liam confirmed from his computer. “He’s riding out to the Manor.”

“It’s a miracle!” Maria said.

“It’s impossible,” Dorothy said. “He’s riding there himself?”

“No,” Liam said. “He’s gotten a footman to – oh, no.”

“Oh no, what?”

“The character taking him to Cinderella is our intruder.”

“So a terrorist is taking the prince to pick up a half-finished Cinderella? That’s even worse than nothing happening at all.”

But Maria wasn’t listening. She wrapped her arms around the Core Book and began smothering it in kisses.

“Maria!” Dorothy said. “Have you gone completely mad?”

“Oh, Cinderella!” Maria cried joyfully. “You will go to the Ball!”