Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read online

  The lindworm hissed, straightened a little at the table. Then it hissed again, and the skin split again down its other side, a louder sound this time, as if the split was deeper. The lindworm shuddered, as if this time the splitting bothered it more. This time, when the skin came away, it wasn’t dry: the tissue under it wept, and a faint strange metallic smell started to fill the room.

  The skin went into the middle of the table, and Caroline stood up, her eye on the knife, and pulled off another layer of clothes. She was getting cooler, which was a relief, but she was also wondering whether the story was going to be right about how many skins this thing had. Oh, mum…it had better be! She sat down again, pushed the deck across to the lindworm.

  It shuffled, gazing at her. Once again Caroline started feeling that strange drowsy pressure, and along with it, a feeling, not of tiredness this time, but of hopelessness. She won that hand, and the next: and, hissing more loudly each time, the lindworm split its skin away. But somehow it didn’t seem to matter.

  Twice more she got up and pulled off a layer of clothes: and once more she dealt, and once more the lindworm did: and somehow none of it seemed to matter. The cards hit the table before her, face down, and each one seemed to say in a whisper, as it hit, What possible difference will this make? As if, even if you did win, as if whatever was left over, whoever was left over, would want you. Just give it up, just let it go. You’re going to lose anyway. Why prolong the inevitable?

  But Caroline concentrated on those cards, and particularly on their backs, the designs on them, graceful and precise. She picked them up and studied them for meaning. It seemed to take longer than usual, a lot longer.

  “You’re stalling,” the lindworm said. “It’s not going to help.”

  Caroline wavered in her seat, staring at the cards. How many hands now? she thought. But this one, anyway, this one was good.

  “Just give it up,” said the lindworm. “What’s the point? Let it happen. You know it’s going to…” It sounded almost kindly. The voice reminded her of Matt’s…

  Caroline swallowed, sat up straighter. She dared a glance at the lindworm, not so much at its eyes as at the rest of it. It looked bigger, somehow: taller, wider. But also somehow it looked more bloated, less substantial, less scaly. There was something less solid about it. Caroline stared at her cards one last time, laid them down. “Four of a kind,” she said. “Show.”

  The lindworm hissed, laid its own cards down. Two pair.

  Caroline grinned, but the grin felt weak. She stood up to slip out of one more layer of clothes. She started to feel chilly as she sat down again, despite the fire burning right beside her.

  Across from her, the lindworm squirmed, coiled, uncoiled. It made a thin high whining noise for a few moments, like a power saw, and then its skin split again, with more force, as if something was pressing it more forcefully from inside, almost pushing to get out. The creature that came out of that skin was even less scaly, more like a slug or worm: only a few scales seemed to cling about the plates of the head, and only the eyes kept that brilliant gold: everything else about the thing was going wet and leaden, like the sky outside.

  Caroline took the cards to deal again, but her concentration was starting to fail her. All that wine, all this stress… The fire burned brightly behind her: she tried to keep that firelight in her mind as well. But it kept fading. She glanced up at the bloated, pallid thing coiling and pulsing across the table from her. The eyes…

  Caroline looked away, and kept nearly looking back again, and had to stop herself and concentrate as best as she could on the shuffling.

  Snake and bird… snake and mouse. The images kept occurring to her. Those “fascination” stories were, well, just stories. But at the same time, what if they had some basis in truth? What if they had the same kind of basis that the lindworm story itself had? If there were actually serpents who were the expression of some kind of curse, why couldn’t they have unusual powers over the minds of their victims, why couldn’t their eyes swallow you up like, like—

  She shook her head brutally. The lindworm was glaring at her. “Deal,” it said.

  The pile of shed skins and shed clothes in the middle of the table was getting higher, getting in the way of the playing space. Caroline shoved it over to one side, looked at her opponent, shook her head again. It was hard not to look at those eyes. In poker, you looked at the other player’s eyes, if you could. And with the lindworm there was no other way to judge expression.

  Matt, she thought. Matt. Poor Matt.

  She dealt, and put the deck down, and stared at her cards. A feeling of horror crept over her. Oh, no. I can’t do anything with these. She started to say, “Dealer draws,” feeling those eyes resting on her, overwhelming her, making her hand reach out—

  Then Caroline took control of her hand back, reached sideways instead, and gripped the blade of the Fright Knife, hard.

  The pain shocked straight through her as if she’d grabbed a live wire. The lindworm hissed in fury. Caroline looked at her cards again. She looked up, met those eyes full on.

  They froze her in place, descended on her, devoured her. You are fit to be nothing but meat, they said, and she knew it in her soul to be true. There is no single soul on this planet that will ever waste its time loving you. Your last bedmate should have taught you that. You will live alone: you will die alone. No victory is worth enduring years and years of such a life. Take death now, in company, while you can: because no one will ever care about your death as much as I will.

  Caroline felt the tears running down her face, and slowly stood up to do what was the only thing left to her, to take off the last layer of clothes, to stand bare before her doom. She felt the blood running down and didn’t care about it, saw the taut, shining, swollen head come toward her—

  —and caught a flicker of firelight out of the corner of her eye, and on the cards she held.

  “No,” she whispered.

  Those impossibly huge eyes seemed to recede. The wavering, shivering, pallid shape across from her began to tremble.

  “Nice try,” Caroline said, in a voice that barely worked. “But not quite nice enough.”

  She put down her cards on the table. Ten, jack, queen, king, ace of hearts.

  Royal flush.

  Slowly, slowly, shivering like jelly, the lindworm started to slowly rise from where it coiled behind the table. “You cheated!”

  “Oh?” Caroline said. “How?”

  “You—they—”

  With the greatest effort, Caroline managed a smile.

  “They were marked! The cards were marked!”

  Her grin didn’t change. “Prove it.”

  The lindworm started scrabbling with its claws among the undealt cards. The look of balked fury on the snake’s face, the spell’s face, was hilarious. But Caroline wasn’t going to waste precious time enjoying the show. “Cut the crap!” she said, picking up the Fright Knife. “Show your hand right now, or I’ll save you the trouble and pin you to the table!”

  The lindworm screamed. The drying tears sticky on her face, Caroline took a hasty step backward, ready to use the knife.

  And, still screaming, the lindworm burst, the last skin shredding away from it like something caught in a hailstorm of razorblades.

  Caroline stood there in the sudden wet silence, panting with exertion and terror, and the sudden removal of that awful pressure on her mind. There was slime everywhere, and a truly revolting smell. For a moment, she didn’t move. Then she reached out to the wet, messy cards, and turned them over.

  All spades: ace, King, eight, seven, three. Busted flush.

  How appropriate, she thought, looking around. I just wish it didn’t mean I was going to have to replace my carpet. There goes that long weekend in Paris…. She stepped around the table to look at what was left. It was gross in the extreme: a nasty slimy translucent mess of… what?

  And—was there something still buried in it?

  The phone from the lobby r
ang.

  Gasping, Caroline staggered down the hallway, gulped a little air, and picked up the phone. “Yes?”

  “Is everything all right up there, Miss Desantis?”

  She gulped again and tried to get her voice to sound at least slightly normal. “Uh, fine, Harry. Why?”

  “Your next door neighbor called. Said that someone was getting very… loud in there.” His voice suggested that he very much didn’t want to say loud how.

  “Uh, sorry, Harry, it was the, uh, the entertainment system. We were watching a monster movie, and the volume got out of hand.”

  “Oh,” her doorman said. It was not precisely a tone of voice that suggested he believed her. It sounded more like Harry wanted her to know that the excuse was just barely acceptable… just this once.

  “It’s okay, though,” Caroline said, turning to look back toward the dining room table. “We’re, uh—” That shape underneath the slime was moving slightly, weakly. And abruptly something stuck out of the slime.

  It was a hand.

  “We’re done with the horror movies for the evening, I think,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

  “I’ll let the neighbors know,” Harry said. “Good night…”

  He hung up, and Caroline could have sworn she just barely heard him chuckle. She hurried back to the table, knelt down beside it, paused for a moment, and then thrust her hands into the awful heap of slime, pulling out with great difficulty what lay inside it.

  At least the slime made it somewhat easier to manhandle him down into the bathroom: though he was likely to have some carpet burns later. With considerable difficulty, Caroline shoved the slimy naked form into the shower stall, turned the shower on, and then stood back as the gasping noises started and the naked shape started flailing around.

  “Sorry,” she said, turning to grab a towel for him, “it’s always pretty cold when it starts up—”

  The spluttering and gasping got louder. “What happened,” said that slightly European voice after a moment, “oh, this is disgusting, what is this stuff, it won’t come off—“

  “The story calls for lye at this point,” Caroline said, kneeling down. “But that’s not something I’d have in the house. I guess we can use Clorox if we have to…”

  From the floor of the shower stall, Matt began to laugh weakly. “Please, no,” he said. And then he started laughing again.

  “What?” Caroline said, kneeling down by the shower stall and looking into those wonderful eyes.

  “Clorox, yes, all right. But not the wire brushes!” Matt said.

  She stared at him—then held out the towel for him, and a moment later, pulled him close.

  It was quite some time before he pulled back, and even then, he only pulled back slightly. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “I am… more than grateful.”

  “You should be,” Caroline said. “It’s not every day I bring home a magic giant snake for coffee.”

  “Magic giant snake prince,” Matt said.

  She gave him a look. “Oh really? Prince of what?”

  “One of those little European countries you probably never heard of.”

  “Oh? Try me.”

  “Cariola.”

  “What?”

  He looked suddenly abashed: at least, as abashed as a half-naked guy sitting on the floor of a shower stall might normally have time to. “Okay,” he said, “so I lied. Not prince.” Caroline gave him a look. “Duke.”

  Her look got more incredulous. “Well, you don’t hear a lot about enchanted dukes!” he said, sounding annoyed. “You have to admit, ‘Prince’ sounds better—”

  “Give me a break. And ‘Cariola?’ You’re making it up.”

  “I am not!”

  “Then why have I never heard of it?”

  “Because you have no grasp of history. Or possibly geography. But it’s not your fault. Democracies often have lousy school systems.”

  “I beg your pardon!” she said, outraged. “Ireland is a democracy!”

  “Only for the last century. Your people had kings. High Kings.”

  She laughed. “You can just leave out what they were smoking,” she said. “So. An enchanted duke, huh?”

  “Disenchanted,” Matt said. “Cursed: but now the curse is broken.”

  “Don’t tell me. Bad-tempered fairy left out of the christening invitations?”

  Now it was his turn to give her a look. “Evil chief minister with a pet sorcerer and a preferred heir. Comes to the same thing.”

  “If you say so…”

  He laughed for sheer joy. “Oh, Caroline, you have no idea how impossible I thought this was ever going to be, how long I was trapped that way—” And if his eyes had not been wet before, they were now. “Caroline—”

  She put a finger on his lips. “Ssh,” she said. “I’ve got an idea…”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go get us some happy ending.”

  ***

  Much, much later, Caroline said: “So where is Cariola exactly?”

  “Oh, so you believe in it now?”

  She punched him in one arm. He grimaced, then grinned. “No, really, where is it?”

  “Slovenia. For the moment.”

  “Oh? You have plans?”

  “Right now? Only dental. Unless you say otherwise.”

  She shook her head, entirely happy for things to be just the way they were—and, it seemed from the way their conversation had been going earlier in the evening, the way they would likely be for the rest of their lives.

  “But can I ask a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Were those cards marked?”

  Caroline just grinned. “Your curse was cheating,” she said. “Let’s just say I leveled the playing field.”

  He smiled back, and one more time, Caroline got goosebumps. “Now,” he said, “my princess. About that happy ending—”

  “Yes?”

  “Seconds?”

  About “Midnight Snack”

  Once upon a time, when the Young Wizards series was just getting started and the books were still at Delacorte, my then-editor Olga Litowinsky asked me to do a story for an in-house anthology of YA short fiction called Sixteen. The anthology did very well, and various of its stories, including mine, were selected for publication in numerous US textbooks.

  Something interesting started happening at that point. One of the young characters tells the other that a parent is concerned about the way they’ve been behaving, and suspects that one or both of them might be on drugs. The other character, knowing that both of them (but especially the first one) are completely innocent of this kind of thing, snorts and says, “You kidding? You wouldn’t know which side of your nose to put the marijuana up.” Seems positive enough, huh? Two “clean” kids dealing realistically with fallout from a fantastic situation. Well, imagine my bemusement when the first textbook publisher to want to use the story demanded that the drugs reference be excised.

  I remember being annoyed at the time, but thinking that the issue wasn’t worth making a big deal over; I chopped the line and let the story go through otherwise unchanged. Now I’m beginning to wish I’d dug in my heels, for I find I was at the thin edge of a problem which has become much, much worse.

  These days, in the US (and I have to say that I’ve never once had a problem of this kind with textbook publishers from outside the land of my birth), pressure groups from both right and left are insisting that any content that might possibly upset or challenge any student anywhere should be removed from their textbooks. A quote from a Washington Post article:

  So much for the old truism that no maiden was ever ravished by a book. The ideologues of right and left have, apparently, bottomless faith in the power of the written word to shape not just the minds of the young but to determine the course of their lives. They believe that to describe something is to endorse it, so they insist that what they do not endorse cannot be described. The sp
ineless textbook publishers and testing companies capitulate with not a peep of protest, indeed with a smile, for the paycheck is very large. “What’s left,” [author Diane] Ravitch asks, “after the language police and the thought police from the left and right have done their work?” Her answer deserves to be quoted at length:

  “Stories that have no geographical location… Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant… Stories in which older people are never ill. Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved… Stories in which fantasy and magic are banned. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored. Stories about science that leave out any reference to evolution or prehistoric times. Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time.”

  In a word: Fantasyland, a place so wildly disconnected from reality that it makes Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom seem by contrast a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Edvard Munch.

  Grrrrrr. I decline to be part of such efforts, which certainly continue. For example: in my most recent wander about the web to see who might have a copy of the story online, and how it might have been changed, I discovered a version in which the word “virgin” had been redacted and replaced with “innocent person”. Seriously? Now not only can we not talk about sex, but we can’t talk about the state of not having had any? Someone somewhere is seriously, seriously unwell.

  Anyway, this story is no longer allowed to appear anywhere in a censored form if I have anything to do with it: one disservice to my younger readers, however minor, has been enough. Never gonna cave again.

  Midnight Snack

  Dad came down with the flu that week, so I had to go down to the subway and feed the unicorns. That was okay, but Jerry saw me going down the street Thursday night and started following me. Now normally that would be okay too—even if he does call me “Frogface” all the time. But that night the timing was lousy.