Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read online

  —until something went BUMP against the door, and everyone’s hearts tightened.

  The hunter stood up with the ale-horn in his hand. “Yes?” he said, very loud. “Who is it?”

  “It’s the trolls,” said a voice from outside—a nasty voice that was frightened, and trying to hide it.

  “And what do you want?” said the hunter.

  “We want to know—do you still have your big cat in there, that you had last night?”

  The farmers all stared at each other. The bear looked up with interest, and licked its chops. “Yes,” said the hunter. Then he had a thought, and said quickly, “And what’s more, she had kittens this morning, and they look like they’re going to be bigger than she is, and all the neighbors hereabouts are taking one apiece. Want one?”

  There was screaming from outside. “No,” yelled the troll, “and we’re never coming back, so don’t bother saving us one just in case!”

  And the screaming dwindled away to nothing, and the night was quiet again.

  The trolls never did come back; and the hunter knew this for certain, for the farmer whose Yuletide he saved made the hunter a present of a snug bit of land on the eastern side of the Dovrefell, by a little lake. There the hunter built a small neat house, and though he still wandered and hunted the forests as he loved to do, he always came home again. The bear went everywhere with him, and in later times his children and grandchildren drowsed against it by the fire in the winters, and swam with it in its cold blue lake in the summers. And it must still be there, for even now some people in the north of the world put a little food out “for the Bear” at Yuletide, and the food is always gone in the morning. And who would dare to take it?

  Certainly not the trolls….

  About “…Under My Skin”

  The following story is based on yet another tale from the Nordic end of things.

  For some reason the Scandinavian fairytale landscape seems full of the non-squeamish, no-nonsense kind of heroine whose answer to life’s problems, either natural or supernatural, is astonishingly straightforward: just go on and hang up your dead horse’s head and start having long conversations with it; or go ahead and skin the bull and then carry its magic hide all over the landscape with you so it’ll conjure up the things you need. These are women for whom part of the solution to a thorny magicak problem may well include a bucket of lye soap and a good stiff brush.

  Our heroine here follows in that tradition (with a touch of the Celtic thrown in)…

  …Under My Skin

  Now this time, Caroline thought, it has to be right.

  The screen in front of her filled up with about eighty lines of code, and she peered at the section in the middle that had been causing her all the trouble for the last six hours of her workday. I mean, she thought, I’ve fixed this about twenty times now. It has to be right now. But with code, a single semicolon out of place in a line, or a line that ended without a carriage return, could screw up hours and hours of work unless you caught it—

  It all looked just fine. But she was not deceived into any excess of pleasure with herself; she knew better. “Okay,” she muttered. “Let’s see.”

  She pulled down the menu at the top of the screen, selected the option that said View in browser, and held her breath.

  The browser window popped open, showing her nothing but white for a few moments…then filled with the green-baize background of PokerPlayerzz.com. The table structure that overlay the background started to sketch itself out, filling with pictures and words. Then the animated hand of cards, a restatement of the PokerPlayerzz logo, started to deal itself down onto the table structure. Royal flush: ace, king, queen, jack, ten.

  And every card was backwards.

  Caroline shrieked out loud, and pushed the keyboard away from her, furious. “I can’t believe this!” she moaned. “I cannot believe this!”

  From a few cubicles down came the sound of rueful and sympathetic laughter. “Two hundred and eight…”

  “Shut up, Michelle!”

  “I’m betting you’ll hit your three hundredth scream by next Wednesday.”

  From anyone else Caroline would have refused to take this kind of thing, but Michelle was working on a different part of the same project— “grooming” code files that had been generated by some of the company’s less talented coders in eastern Europe. Grooming, hell, Caroline thought: it’s a total rewrite. Not that we’re being paid for original work. And Michelle’s sufferings had been as extreme as Caroline’s, if not worse.

  “The hell with this,” Caroline said. “I’m done. Come on, we’ll go get a beer and plan the invasion of Bulgaria. When we rule the place, the first ones up against the wall are going to be all their coders.”

  “I’d really like to go, but I can’t,” said the long-suffering voice. “This module’s got to be turned in before start of business in New Delhi: they’re rolling it out at tomorrow at local midnight.”

  “What time is it there?”

  A pause. “Two-thirty in the morning.” A sigh. “I’ll make it…just.”

  Caroline sighed too, looking at her own monitor. Even though she knew she could leave now, she could just hear what Walter the Boss from Hell would say when he dropped by the cubicle ever so casually around Monday lunchtime and found that the graphics routines on the new splash page were still misbehaving. Can I get this thing to behave by lunch on Monday? Can I really?

  She reached out to her trackball, killed the browser window, and stared at the screen full of code one more time. That routine right there. If I move that—

  “You screamed,” said a masculine voice, slightly European-sounding around the edges, and concerned. “Are you all right?”

  Caroline glanced up at her cubicle door. Standing there, with his head cocked just slightly to one side and a curious expression on his face, was a tall, slim, broad-shouldered guy in Friday casuals, a fawn shirt and mahogany sweater, and fawn chinos and brogues. Now where have I seen him before? Oh, I know, he’s one of the implementation-and-logistics people up by the north windows. Caroline had seen him up there a few times when all the networked printers down her way were busy, and she’d had to go farther afield than usual for a printout.

  “I’m fine, uh—” She made the trying-to-think-of-your-name,-help-me-out-here gesture with one hand while she hit the scroll key with the other, but she wasn’t looking at the screen: she was looking at him. I really should get up that way more often. Dark hair, late twenties, high cheekbones, big dark eyes… Oh, what’s the point? Odds are he’s gay.

  “Matiyas. Matiyas Ferenj,” he said. “Or Matt: whatever. And you are, uh—” He made the help-me-out-here gesture back at her, with a slight wry smile.

  “Caroline Desantis,” she said. She nodded at him, glanced back at the screen. “You can’t have been here all that long or you’d know that hearing me scream is no big thing…”

  “It is if you’re just down the hall from it,” Michelle said.

  “Shut up, Michelle,” Caroline said, as from two cubicles down came the sound of poorly stifled laughter.

  Matiyas looked at her a little oddly. “Marcus Donnelly said you were from Ireland,” he said.

  Caroline just glanced at him sideways, her eyebrows up. Okay, here we go. ‘You don’t have an Irish accent…’

  “But you don’t sound Irish,” Matiyas said. “Are you really from Belfast?”

  Caroline smiled, though as smiles went it was probably a pretty weary one. “Heard that, did you? Think I might start planting bombs under people’s desks?”

  He gave her a slightly embarrassed look. Caroline laughed, shook her head. “I was born here, though,” she said. “Accidentally.”

  Matiyas’s look got more embarrassed still. Caroline grinned a little, as that was the expected result. “Not that way,” she said. “My dad was a correspondent with Reuters: he met my mum when they assigned him to their Belfast bureau. After they were married, they wanted to start a family. But he got reassig
ned over here right away, and my mum wanted to wait till they got back to the North. Except it didn’t turn out that way.”

  Matiyas blinked. “Your mother,” he said, “thought Northern Ireland was a better place to be born than here?”

  “Less dangerous,” Caroline said, “yeah.” Now his look of complete astonishment was really amusing her. “Are you surprised? You have no idea what New York looks like to people over there when they see it on the news. Lots more gun crime than we ever had in Belfast, even before the cease-fire. Five, ten people gunned down every day: Murder Central! When I finished school and decided to come here to work, you should have heard all my friends.” She purposely turned on the harsh Belfast accent. “‘Oh no, don’t go to New York, you’ll get shot!’”

  He laughed. It was a particularly nice laugh: for some reason, the hair stood right up on the back of Caroline’s neck when she heard it. Maybe it was the sudden warmth of his eyes as hers met them—the sudden sense of connection, as if a stranger was somehow seeing that another stranger had the same problems, and wasn’t so strange any more…

  “Anyway, work kept my dad here a while longer than planned, so I wound up being born here,” Caroline said. “Then when I was six we moved back to the wee North. Too late for my accent, though: it was well stuck in Manhattan by then. I took a lot of stick for that at school. But eventually they learned to let me be.” She smiled. “Finished my leaving cert, went to university, graduated…and saw where the good jobs were, back then. Moved back here five years ago.” She shrugged. “What about you?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “Ten million of them in the Naked City, I hear,” Caroline said. She sighed, leaned back from the computer. “And I’m done with this one for today.”

  “I’ll see you later, then,” Matiyas said. And suddenly he was turning to go.

  There was something about the suddenness that surprised her. What surprised her even more was her voice saying, “Matiyas?”

  He paused, looked over his shoulder.

  “I didn’t mean you should sod off or anything!” Caroline said. “Gonna clock out in a few minutes, sure. But if you’re not busy, and you’re done for the day, some of us go out on Fridays about now: come on out with us! Mich, you sure you can’t wriggle free?”

  “Not a chance. Thanks, though…”

  “But there’s still Tessa and Tad—they’re always up for a drink on the way home. Come on out with us.”

  Matiyas looked surprised. “Uh,” he said. “Okay.”

  He wandered off across the wilderness of cubicles toward where his was. Caroline didn’t know him all that well: she didn’t normally visit the north-side people, the rollout crowd. Mostly she socialized with the other debuggers and the software implementation jockeys. But listen to me! We get as insular in here as we do in our neighborhoods. God forbid someone from the Upper East Side should shop west of Fifth Avenue: the heavens would fall if someone who lived in SoHo went north of Twelfth for their groceries! And obviously the world will end if a code wrangler has a beer with some rollout guy…

  But it didn’t quite wind up that way, for Tessa had gone home early, and when Caroline went looking for Tad, it turned out that Tad hadn’t come in today at all, but had called in sick. And there was Matiyas, standing there by the door to the elevator lobby with his coat over his arm, looking like someone who suspected he was about to be ditched after all.

  Oh, jeez, just look at the poor guy, Caroline thought, as she headed in that direction. One beer with him won’t hurt, no matter how much of a bore he turns out to be.

  “So where are we going exactly?” he said, as they went through the glass buzzer-door. He actually held it for her: old-fashioned manners, how nice…

  “There’s a place down at the corner of Central Park West,” she said. “Their happy hour just started, and the prices aren’t too bad…”

  “Sounds excellent,” Matiyas said.

  They made idle elevator chatter on the way down, headed across the sterile polished black stone downstairs lobby, and came out into the wet dullness of a Manhattan autumn afternoon. All the traffic in 65th Street was at a cacophonous standstill, stuck behind some huge delivery truck further up the way: the two of them dodged across the wet street between cars, heading up toward the corner of 65th and Central Park West. There yet another plan came undone as they discovered that the front and sides of the bar were covered with scaffolding, and the windows boarded over with CLOSED FOR RENOVATION signs.

  “Well, that is annoying,” Matiyas said. Briefly, that accent Caroline couldn’t quite pin down came out fairly strongly. European, yeah, but not German or anything like that… She was tempted to ask about it, but decided to let it be: she’d had more than enough of that kind of thing from various of her co-workers when she first took this job. And after they’d made up their minds that she wasn’t a terrorist or a bigot or someone who might go postal on them, it seemed like everybody wanted to know everything about her—which wasn’t something she was used to. So many people just don’t seem to have any sense of privacy any more. Just leave him his…

  “Yeah,” Caroline said, “it is.” She looked at the crammed blue and white M72 bus that was presently turning past them into CPW, its windows almost opaque with condensation from people’s damp clothes and damp selves. “Look,” she said, “there’s not much in the way of decent bars on this side of the avenue till you get right down to Lincoln Center. But I know a good one almost straight across the Park. We can cut through there, if you don’t mind getting rained on a little.”

  “Sure, why not?” Matiyas looked around him equably. “After being cooped up all day, a little fresh air is good. Even when it’s a little wet as well.”

  They paused at the corner of 66th and Central Park West, waiting for the light to change. Across the street from them, to the left, the ever-present white holiday lights of Tavern on the Green were already turned on, outlining the building, and twined through and around the trees, an unsubtle glow against the sullen overcast and the uplifted limbs of the surrounding trees. “You ever eat in there?” Caroline said as the light changed and they crossed the street.

  Mike nodded as they bore rightward toward the underpass that avoided the inflowing traffic onto the transverse road. “Once,” he said. “Never again. The place is full of posers. Especially the ones who insist on sitting out there.” As they came up out of the underpass, he jerked his head leftward in the direction of the restaurant’s glass-walled conservatory wing, blazing with light across the undercut transverse road and through all the intervening trees. “So everyone can see them, and know how much money they’ve got to blow on mediocre food…”

  Caroline grinned as they hung a left onto the first of the paths inside the Park’s low outer wall, heading eastward. To her, even the least-native New Yorkers seemed to turn into restaurant critics within days of their arrival: Matiyas was no different. “I guess you have a better class of posers where you come from?”

  It was as nosy as she planned to get, but even so, he gave her a look of slight amusement, almost as if he’d known what she was thinking before. “Well, class is always something of an issue,” he said, “in the older parts of the world, no matter how we pretend otherwise. You see those who flaunt old titles and have nothing else to recommend them: and others who work hard and wear the titles only as ornaments, for public functions—like tiaras. The princess who runs MTV Europe… the prince who brews the best beer in Bavaria…”

  “You know those people?”

  Matiyas shrugged. “You run into them at parties. Or their kids, at school.”

  “Very high-end,” Caroline said, as they came around the rightward curve of the path and headed toward the center of the Park. “So what’s a guy who rubs shoulders with royalty doing laboring in the concrete canyons?”

  He flashed a grin at her. “Well, you can rub shoulders all you like, but rubbing money off, that’s another story! I did some web development work in Munic
h and Frankfurt… but the pay wasn’t great, the advancement was slow, I was bored. Then—” He grinned a little more broadly. “Well, they call Frankfurt ‘Manhattan-am-Rhein’, you know: the skyscrapers, the busy lifestyle. I thought, why not try the real Manhattan? So here I am. It took a while to get the work visa, but it was worth it. The pay’s better, and besides, it’s useful being foreign here: the company wants people with ‘the international outlook.’ Whatever that is.”

  “Maybe just that they actually believe in other countries…” Caroline said, amused. “At least insofar as they can make money off them…”

  He laughed again, a soft appreciative sound, and once again Caroline got goosebumps. Or maybe it’s just the weather, she thought: the coat she’d brought this morning was soaking up the rain a bit, chilling her down.

  Fortunately the rain was already letting up a little as they passed south of the Sheep Meadow and into the center of the Park. Despite the dull gray weather, the place was pretty enough, here at the tail end of the glory of the autumn leaves. It had been an unusually brilliant fall, early frosts setting the leaves ablaze more emphatically than usual: but that same seasonal precocity meant that there was little left of the splendor now, only a few trees in sheltered spots having managed to hang onto their leaves this long. As they headed downhill toward the center of the Park, some of the stubbornest trees were flanking their path—beeches and oaks that seemed to be practically clutching the leaves to keep from letting them go, as if to spite the nearby maples, which had by and large given up and now stood dark and bare against the slowly falling dusk.

  Matiyas had fallen silent for the last couple of minutes, looking up and around him as they walked. “Do you get color like this back home?” she said.