Happily Ever After, Ltd. - 4. Once Upon A Time

It took Ryan a few seconds to remember who he was, but it took him a lot longer to figure out where he was. He was lying on the cold hard floor of a large room, at the foot of a large four-poster bed. There were high stone walls with flame torches bracketed against them. Decapitated heads of wild beasts, mid-snarl, were mounted along every side.

“Dave?” Ryan called out. “What happened? Where are we?”

But Dave wasn’t there. Ryan was alone. He got to his feet and put one hand against the wall to steady himself, but found that it wasn’t made of real stone. It was some kind of rubber. Then he saw the torch flames weren’t real either; they were strands of red and yellow silk, flickering over a light bulb.

Before Ryan could try to make sense of it, there were heavy striding footsteps approaching from outside the door. Ryan’s first thought was that he had been drugged and kidnapped. His kidnapper was probably a psychopath with a sick medieval fetish. Who knew what sinister torture devices he had in the next room? Ryan knew all about that sort of thing. He and Doug had been obsessed with CSI all through high school.

The footsteps got closer and closer. Ryan rushed to the door and twisted a large key, locking it, just as the visitor began to rattle the doorknob. There was a series of booming knocks.

“Son!” came a deep voice. “Unlock this door!”

“Please don’t hurt me!” Ryan shouted. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you want! I don’t have any money on me – but my friend – the one I was with? He has five dollars! We spent the rest. I’m sorry! I’ll go to an ATM! I have a couple of hundred dollars in my account! And a twenty-dollar iTunes voucher in my wallet! You can take it all!”

“Son!” the voice boomed through the door. “This foolishness will get you nowhere! You are now a man, too old for such games!”

There was another thump against the door.

“Please go away!” Ryan begged. “I’m armed!” He saw an axe that was attached to a suit of armour in the corner. He grabbed the axe’s handle and pulled, but it was glued to the statue, which crashed to the ground.

There was another thump at the door, which rattled on its hinges. “You are too old for these shenanigans! What would the ladies say if they knew how their prince is behaving?”

Ryan ran over to a moose head mounted onto the wall. He grabbed its huge blunt antlers and wrestled it free from its frame. It came loose and crashed on top of Ryan, pinning him to the floor, the moose’s glassy black eyes staring straight into Ryan’s.

Another thump, and one of the door’s hinges snapped off.

Ryan rolled the moose head off and managed to lift it up, his arms wrapped around its giant neck.

There was one final thump, and the door flew open.

Standing in front of Ryan was one of the largest men he’d ever seen. The man had an enormous white beard and at first looked ancient, although as he stepped into the light, it looked like the lines on his face might’ve been drawn on with a pencil. On his head was a large gold crown.

“Son,” he sighed, “I had to kick your door down again. I do wish you weren’t stubborn.”

Ryan’s arms ached with the effort of holding the moose. “Please, I don’t know who you are and I don’t know where I am, but please, let me go. My parents have money – and my friend Doug, well, he has no money, so don’t ask him to pay any ransom.”

“My dear son.” The man moved towards Ryan. “End this charade and let us embrace.”

“No!” Ryan shouted, brandishing the moose head as best he could. “Keep back, pervert!”

“Ah, that proud beast,” the man said, looking fondly at the moose. “It was slain during your tenth birthday hunt. I remember that day well. You were a much gentler, more compliant boy in those days.”

“You’re mixing me up with someone else. I don’t hunt. I would never hunt!”

“I understand your distress,” he said. “It’s hard to believe but I was once a young prince myself. But tonight, you must choose your future queen.”

“Stay by the door! Or else I’ll – I’ll—”

“Alright, my son. If I promise to stand over here by the door, will you promise to hear me speak?”

“Fine! But only if you tell me where I am!”

“Why, you know where you are,” he said, as he retraced his steps to the door. “You are on the brink of greatness!”

“Be more specific!”

“Everything you know – everything you have ever seen – will soon become yours.” He took the crown off his head and held it out to Ryan. “This ancient crown will pass to you one day, and probably soon. As you know, I am old, and you are my only heir.” He moved forward with the crown.

“What did I tell you!” Ryan shouted. “Stay back and keep that stupid hat away from me! I don’t know who you are or what’s going on. I just want to go back! One minute I was sitting on the waterfront, and the next minute, I’m in some kind of, some kind of … weird rubber dungeon!”

The man sighed and placed the crown back on his own head. “You are deeply troubled, which is something that I understand perfectly. Tonight is a big night for you.”

“No it’s not! Stop saying that.”

“But it is. All the invitations have been sent out. Every lady in the land has been invited, but of course you only need to concern yourself with the beautiful ones.”

“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ryan said.

As strange as the man’s words were, however, there was something vaguely familiar about them.

“I will leave you now,” he said, “but I shall send my doctors to see you. Their drugs can cure any ailment.”

“Drugs?” Ryan said. “Oh my god, that’s what this is. You’re a drug addict, some kind of insane drug addict. Or one of those homeless people who dresses up in costumes, or you’re schizophrenic – and, and—”

“You will live happily ever after, my son – whether you like it or not.”

He turned and left through the demolished doorway. Ryan dropped the moose head, his arms aching.

Ryan knew there would be an explanation for this. It had to be some kind of elaborate trick, a practical joke. Well, he had fallen for it, so the game should’ve been up – but nobody was jumping out from behind the tapestries with a camera and there was no TV host shaking Ryan’s hand and slapping him on the back.

Ryan went over to the capsized suit of armour and pulled it back up to a standing position. He noticed something on the side of the helmet, a faint shimmer. There was an engraving of some kind, like a brand name. Ryan looked at it closely.

It was HAPPILY EVER AFTER, LTD.

And that was when the penny finally dropped.

*

Ryan hadn’t read fairytales in years, but you would’ve had to be living under a rock not to have heard about Happily Ever After, Ltd. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing one of the Happily Ever After commercials, where good-looking parents were always reading bedtime stories to their cute toddlers. The company had brought all the classic fairytales “to life” through some sort of state-of-the-art technology. Ryan’s father had tried to get him to read articles about it in New Scientist.

Lately, Ryan had seen Happily Ever After books every time he walked into a bookshop, but he’d only ever picked up one, and that was last Christmas Eve. Ryan and Doug had yet again left their shopping to last minute and joined the hordes of desperate shoppers on December 24th. After buying aprons for their mothers and a toy helicopter for Doug’s father, they went into a bookstore. Doug still needed to get something for his niece, Charlotte, and Ryan was getting a present for his father. Ryan was looking for any book to do with war. War novels, war poetry, war theory, war photography or war biographies.

In the centre of the shop was a large Christmas tree, surrounded by piles of Happily Ever After books. There were narrow-waisted dolls to go with each book. Each doll had a ghoulish, interactive feature.

Pour water into the holes in RAPUNZEL’S neck and watch her HAIR GROW!

Twist SLEEP BEAUTY’S arm and she WAKES UP!

Push the POISONED APPLE down SNOW WHITE’S throat!

“What do you think of a Happily Ever After book for Chuck?” Doug asked.

“Her name is Charlotte. You can’t abbreviate it to Chuck.”

“It’s all I can do not to call her Spoilt Little Bitch,” Doug muttered. “What about a Snow White book? Or Rapunzel. Rapunzel’s cheaper.”

“I don’t know. When we were kids, we never wanted books for Christmas. Come to think of it, I don’t think anyone ever wants books for Christmas. Except Dad.”

“Yeah, but these are Happily Ever After books,” Doug said. “Little girls love that crap. You know, like, once upon a time, some hot girl had a really crap life. You know, with some ugly old stepmother being all, ‘Hey, bitch, clean my floors!’ Then some dude comes along and bangs her for twenty years until her tits sag and then he starts doing it with all the maids and stuff.”

“That sounds like your fairytale, Doug.”

“Maybe I’ll get her nothing,” he said. “Nobody’s going to notice. Mum and Dad are already getting her a hundred things. I’ll be at the magazines. Come get me when you’re ready to go.”

All around the Happily Ever After table, little girls were pawing at the dolls and mothers were grabbing books faster than the shop assistants could replenish them. Ryan picked up one book from the pile and flipped through it. Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful girl – invited to the Ball – pumpkin chariot – it was love at first sight – and they lived happily ever after. There were pictures too, but one in particular caught Ryan’s eye. It was a picture of a King, a fat old man with a bushy white beard, wearing an oversized crown. He looked so ridiculous, so pompous, that Ryan smiled.

Then the King moved.

His mouth opened – or at least, Ryan thought it did. He stared at the picture, barely even blinking, waiting for the King to move again. But he didn’t, and Ryan began to think he had imagined it. Ryan stood there staring at the page until a woman interrupted.

“Is that a Cinderella?” she asked urgently.

“Uh.” He looked at the cover. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Are you sure you’re going to buy it?” she asked. “I think it’s the last copy in the store and Santa Clause has already promised my daughter he’d get her one! Please, if you’re not going to buy it—”

“I’m not going to buy it,” Ryan said, pushing it into her clutching hands.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” she said tearfully. “God, I hope there’s still a doll left.”

Ryan turned away from the display and went to the Military section. He told himself he had definitely imagined the picture moving. The stress of shopping on Christmas Eve had clearly taken its toll. Ryan didn’t give the King another thought, until now.

*

He panicked.

“HELLO!” Ryan screamed. “CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? I’M INSIDE CINDERELLA! AS IN THE FAIRYTALE! I THINK THEY THINK I’M THE PRINCE! THERE’S BEEN A MISTAKE! IS ANYONE READING ME? HELLO?”

He kept shouting until his throat was sore.

Then he had a brainwave. He ran into the middle of the room and began twisting his feet in and out, bumping the backs of his shoes together.

“There’s no place like home,” Ryan chanted, his eyes closed tightly. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

He opened his eyes.

He was still in the same room.

Ryan looked down at his old scuffed shoes. Of course it wasn’t going to work without the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, or at least a pair of proper heels. What a bad time not to be a cross-dresser.

“Fuck!” Ryan said, and he almost never swore.

*

It was the busiest police station in the city. The officers were over-worked, underpaid, and being disciplined every time they had to use pepper-spray on a meth addict swinging a samurai sword. Phones were always ringing, drunks were always screaming in the holding cells, and there was always the same smell: cheap air freshener barely concealing the underlying stench of what they were dealing with. On this particular day, a young woman was vomiting copiously into a dustbin in an interview room, an African man was screaming from the cell that all police were “fucking racists” including the black detective who had arrested him, and a murder suspect was creating volumes of unnecessary paperwork by confessing only to petty crimes that he had clearly not committed.

The last thing that Sergeant Damien Hobbs needed was a serious problem, but such a problem was now standing in his office. The problem’s name was David Renton and, after being dismissed by the desk officers, he had demanded to speak to a sergeant. As soon as Hobbs heard the gist of David Renton’s story, he told his colleagues that he’d deal with it. Hobbs needed to ensure that Mr Renton’s claim was not taken seriously. Hobbs knew that David Renton was not under the influence of drugs or liquor, nor was he mentally unstable. The young man’s lunatic claim was deeply disturbing to Hobbs, because Hobbs knew that there was nothing lunatic about it at all.

Dave was now pacing back and forth in front of Hobbs’ desk, recounting for the tenth time what he’d seen. “And I’m telling you, he vanished. We were there, and he vanished. I mean, seriously, tell me, how can somebody be in one place one second and the next second, not be there anymore?”

Hobbs checked his watch, feigning disinterest. “Look, we can’t file a missing person’s report for twenty-four hours. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the person returns without a scratch and there’s a logical explanation.”

“Have you even listened to me? He’s not missing. He literally vanished, into thin air, right before my eyes. Don’t you have procedures for this kind of thing? Like when kids get snatched? You don’t have to wait twenty-four hours for that.”

“We do have protocol for cases like yours,” Hobbs said, “but you’re not going to like it.”

“Tell me.”

“We can take a person into custody here, if we suspect they’re suffering from psychoses, drug-induced or otherwise. We can hold the person here under the Mental Health Act.”

“What?!” Dave said. “Ryan doesn’t need medical help, he’s missing! He needs to be found. He vanished.”

“Not medical help for him. Medical help for you.”

“For me ...? What the hell are you talking about?”

“If you really do want me to act on this, in accordance with our protocols, you’ll be spending the rest of the day in a padded cell screaming about people vanishing in clouds of fairy dust.”

“No, there wasn’t any fairy – wait, are you threatening to lock me up?”

“I’m telling you the facts. You’re not like the usual crazies we get. You took a dodgy pill, maybe, or tried something for the first time. It’s a crime, of course, but it’s not the worst. I can overlook it if you head home and sleep it off.”

“What? You think I’m on drugs?”

“What’s more likely?” Hobbs asked. “A young man with no criminal record – who’s probably never even jay-walked – tries drugs for the first time and experiences a visual hallucination, or – now think about this carefully – people are vanishing into thin air.”

Dave thought about it. Of course his story sounded completely insane. Dave knew that if somebody told him what he was telling the sergeant, he wouldn’t believe them. But he also knew what he had seen.

“Fine,” Dave said eventually. “I’ll go. But when it turns out something bad has happened to Ryan, I am personally going to make sure that the shit hits the fan – and that you get a face full of it.”

*

Sergeant Hobbs shut the door and locked it. He picked up his phone and dialled a number that he’d hoped never to call again.

Hobbs would never forget the day he first met Dorothy Weaver. He’d been sitting in a patrol car listening to the midday news and eating a pulled pork roll, most of which was falling in his lap. It had been a quiet day, until a call came in – a report of a hysterical teenage girl at a nearby bus stop. Hobbs put the sirens on and sped the four blocks, hoping to catch the bus stop flasher, who’d recently been exposing himself to unsuspecting schoolgirls.

But what Hobbs found he would never forget.

The girl was standing at the bus stop, tears streaming down her face, clutching her school bag. Gathered around her were three of the most terrifying creatures Hobbs had ever seen. They were pig-like creatures, with little black eyes, large snouts, pink ears – but they were dressed in suits and ties, and stood upright on their two back trotters. As Hobbs stepped out of the car, he heard the creatures speaking with human voices.

“Please stop crying!” said the first creature. “We only need to know what your house is made out of.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times,” the girl cried. “I don’t know! It’s my parents’ house. I just live there.”

“The wolf huffed and puffed my house of straw.”

The second creature crossed his front trotters. “That’s why I invested in brick.”

“But sticks are cheaper,” said the third.

Hobbs had seen countless horrors – murders, suicides, overdoses, car accidents – but he had never been truly afraid of anything before. But now, for the first time in his life, he was completely petrified.

But as it turned out, Hobbs didn’t need to do anything. A white van pulled up behind his patrol car. A small woman came rushing out, followed by large man holding a wire net.

“Step back, miss!” the large man said to the teenage girl.

“Oi!” the first creature shouted. “What do you think you’re going to do with that?”

The man threw the net over the three pig creatures, who fell to the ground squealing, their trotters in the air. Now they looked more like pigs. The large man dragged them to the van and pushed them into the backseat.

“Officer.” The small woman approached Hobbs. “My name is Dorothy Weaver. I’m with Happily Ever After, Ltd.” She handed him her business card.

Hobbs finally found his voice. “What the hell were those things?”

“There was a security breach in the Little Pigs division. We need to get the pigs back into the story urgently, so I can’t explain it all to you right now. However, I think you’ll find that no criminal offence has taken place. A technical error, nothing more. You can of course contact me to discuss this further, if you need. My details are on the card.”

Dorothy Weaver was so calm and authoritative that Hobbs simply nodded. The van sped off and the teenage girl collapsed into Hobbs’ arms and began sobbing. Hobbs looked over her shoulder at the business card he had been given.

Dorothy Weaver

Managing Director – Cinderella

Happily Ever After, Ltd

In the days that followed, Hobbs researched the company online. He read about the “bold, new, groundbreaking innovations”, but he couldn’t wrap his brain around what these innovations actually were. Hobbs then began looking into police records, to see if there had ever been any similar incidents in the past. He learned that there had been other incidents, other complaints, other missing persons. A drunk man had been jailed overnight claiming he was the bean-seller from Jack and the Beanstalk. An anonymous call from a woman saying the witch from Hansel and Gretel had tried to kill one of her husband’s colleagues. Confusing accounts of poisoned apples, little blonde girls breaking into houses, trolls under bridges – but each file he found was stamped CLOSED or COMPLAINT WITHDRAWN. The more Hobbs learnt, the more afraid he became, of the company and what it was capable of.

Hobbs knew that if he tried to tell anyone about the talking pigs, or any of the other files he’d found, he would’ve been laughed at – or worse, made to see the police counsellor. And so for the first time in his twenty-five-year career, he backed off. He decided to block out the memory of what he’d seen. This turned out to be surprisingly easy because, after a week, Hobbs had already started to think of it as nothing more than a bad dream – and after a month, he hardly thought of it at all.

*

“Ryan was with someone?” Dorothy said, after Hobbs had told her what had happened. “Jesus. You’d better give me his details.” She scribbled down David Renton’s name and address. “Alright, don’t worry. I’ll have our head of security take care of it.”

Hobbs was not happy. “You know that this isn’t the first time your company has made trouble.”

“The talking pigs? That was a relatively minor incident and unless I’m mistaken that girl was completely unharmed. Hello? Sergeant?”

But Hobbs had hung up.

In her office, Dorothy quickly made another call. “Fiona, I need you to send the head of security up to my office immediately. Yes, I mean Burnham. No, it’s not a personal matter.”

She slammed the phone down.

“Fuck!” she said, and she almost never swore.