Geek Fantasy Novel (17 page)

“Chessie, it’s Ralph. What’s going on? Daphne said she was going to rescue us, didn’t she?”

The woman-who-increasingly-was-not-Chessie-at-all stared back.

“I’m sorry,” Ralph said carefully. “You look like someone I knew.”

“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

Ralph muttered, not loud enough for her to hear: “I think you do.”

“I suppose you’d like to know how you got here. I’ve been caring for you for a week,” the woman said, in the babbling manner of fairy-tale exposition. “You had quite a nasty fall — I would suggest you not tax yourself. I will ask you no questions, and suggest you do the same of me, at least for the moment. To keep you from going crazy, and all that.” She fixed those eyes on Ralph, and she liked something she saw there; her expression brightened. “Would you care for something to eat? I’ve been preparing pumpernickel toast daily since you arrived. It’s wound up slop for the hogs every morning until now. I would love to bring some out.”

Ralph put a hand to his stomach. He wondered: Was he hungry? As soon as he thought of it, he was famished. “Thank you. Some toast would be great,” he said.

Regina left. Ralph scanned the room for any sort of weapon, but he had come up with nothing by the time she returned with a tray, holding a few hot slices of brown-black toast, a broad knife, and a ceramic jar of butter. She watched with pleasure as Ralph bit into a thick piece, steam rising over his face. “Where am I?” he asked once he had finished, trying to remain cool. Which was indeed a difficult thing to remain, tucked into an antique bed alongside a teddy bear.

“You’re in my home. It’s so rare that I have guests at all, that I must say I was so happy to come across you. You dropped from the sky, right over my coop. Fell right through the thatch and crushed my best-laying hen and four of her eggs.”

“I fell from the sky? I killed a chicken?” asked Ralph, impressed despite himself. Wait until he posted
that
online.

“Yes,” Regina said, winking. “I’ve known a few Water-Warlocks in my time. You undoubtedly wish to work your magic in secret. Well, your secrets are safe with me.”

“I promise, I’m not a warlock, or wizard, or anything. I’m from New Jersey.”

Ralph knew a great many things, among them:

• His home IP address
  
• C++, UNIX, Pascal, Java, BASIC, ASCII, HTML, and CGI Scripting
  
• The names of the three major temperature scales and the boiling point of water in each
  
• Elvish (both Quenya and Sindarin)
  
• His Jedi name
  
• His age in binary code
  

… but he didn’t know one lick of magic. Nonetheless, Regina nodded sarcastically.
“Of course
you aren’t a magician. You just
happened
to be flying in the sky.”

“I mean it. Come on, give me the real Chessie for a moment. I need some help — I can’t use my legs!”

“You’ll find a bedpan under your bed,” Regina announced, looking at Ralph pityingly as she opened the door. “Your mind was obviously weakened by whatever dropped you out of the sky; I’d suggest you get as much sleep as you can. I’ll be outside tending to my flowers.”

After Regina left, Ralph lay back and stared at his new quarters. He wanted to explore, to open the drawers and throw back the curtains, but he simply couldn’t get his legs to move. Or maybe Regina was right, and his mind was weakened. His brain could be becoming mush, mush, mush.

The room was perfectly still. So still, in fact, that he could hear the wings of a fluttering fly. Ralph watched the insect hop around the room, explored
his surroundings along with it. The fly spent some time investigating a worn bureau, flitted to the stuffed bear, walked the perimeter of a small mirror on the wall. Ralph grew bored, lay back and stared at the thatch of the ceiling. Then the fly entered his vision again. Until now it had avoided the borders of the room, but finally it landed on the ceiling. The moment it did, it dropped directly to the coverlet and lay motionless.

Ralph waited for it to buzz away again, but it never did. He lifted the poor creature to his eyes, and found it was quite dead. Rimmed in frost, its wings were winter panes of glass. The corpse thawed in Ralph’s hand. He dropped it to the floor, then watched in horrid fascination as it frosted all over again.

Ralph shrank into the bedding and pressed his eyes closed.

He was awakened by the noise of a text message being received. Delighted, he patted the pockets of his nightgown — but no phone. The ding came from somewhere below him. Ralph leaned far over the side of the mattress and saw, sure enough, that the pair of jeans Cecil had given him had been wedged far under the bed. He placed a hand on the freezing floor — touching it was like handling ice cubes, deeply uncomfortable but not impossible — and reached for the pants. By stretching his middle finger out, he was able to graze a denim belt loop. He seized the jeans and rooted through for his phone.

It had low batteries and one bar of reception — not enough to place a call, but enough to receive a message, from an unknown number:

RALPH NEED SOME HELP JUST ASK FOR IT.

Ralph placed the phone back in his jeans pocket, rolled them up neatly, and hid them under the bed. How was he supposed to ask for help? He certainly couldn’t ask Regina, given that Chessie had held true to her warning him that she would be out for his blood.

I can see him, silently mouthing the text message’s words and chewing a fingernail, as puzzled and anxious as if he were indexing his rock collection.

Let us hope that Ralph doesn’t decide to ask for help aloud. For narrators must come when requested, and a story with two narrators can only be confusing to us all — crap, he did it.

Hello, Ralph,
responded a voice broadcast from far above even me.
Maarten Sumperson on the line. How may I help you?

Nuts.

Ralph bit his lip. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to talk back to booming voices from above, if that would mean he was irrevocably crazy, like a prophet or something.

Ralph. You asked for help. Surely you have some bidding?

Despite its volume, Maarten’s voice is soothing — soft, with a slight Dutch accent. “I need some help, please,” Ralph whispered.

Yes, Ralph?

“I don’t know. What’s going on?”

You’re in the retelling of a story. 12,455 words. First narrated in 1845, by yours truly. Commissioned by one Hans Christian Andersen.

One narrator is surely enough, Maarty.

He requested help. I’m not trying to cause trouble.

Sure, Mr. Look At Me, I’m Maarten Sumperson! I Have
Seniority
! I’ve Worked With Some
Famous
Authors! It doesn’t mean you can butt into
my
story, which
I’m
telling —

No. You’ve moved onto Daphne’s quest now, which is a re-telling. Check your handbook, if you want —

Take it away, Maarty. Don’t you worry about me and my self-esteem.

“Mr. Sumperson,” Ralph asked, “sorry to interrupt you, but could you tell me more about why I’m inside another story?”

It’s a popular record in the log. Hold on, I’m new to the computerized system….

Ralph heard the distant clacking of keys.

Let’s see … story was originally requested by Mr. Andersen as a souvenir of the wish-granting of a little girl of his acquaintance named Gerda. Common name: “The Snow Queen.” He came up with the setup, of course; I engineered it and wrote it all down.

“And why is that important now?” Ralph asked.

Well, let me see … the tale record has most recently been accessed by a Duchess Chessimyn of Cheshire, exercising her rights under the Kelling Provision to log on to our Royal Narratological Guild database under her official authority as a wish-granter. It seems she’s adopted the tale as a starting point for Miss Daphne’s wish. Godmothers often do this sort of thing when they haven’t had time to properly plan. Though it’s hardly ideal to plagiarize, it isn’t exactly frowned upon. While “The Snow Queen” was developed by an expert narrator, namely myself, the new version will be modified by the same apprentice narrator your tale has had so far, and catalogued as a lesser incarnation of a masterpiece.

Really. Want to say that again, jerk?

You want to stop working against your own main character for your utterly transparent “secret” reasons?

“I’m sorry, what? And I thought Hans Christian Andersen wrote ‘The Snow Queen,’ ” Ralph whispered.

He did, in a manner of speaking. But even so, he employed a narrator, someone who was actually telling the story, and that wasn’t Mr. Andersen. We narrators are the ones who actually do the work, up there in the catwalks, making sure the story unfolds properly. You’ve undoubtedly read many of my tales before, though you never saw my name. It’s quite thrilling to finally be known, really —

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I bet Chessie is going to return soon, and I’d really like to know what I have to do. Where is Daphne, and how do I find her?”

She wished to save you and Cecil. She’s off doing that.

“I need saving?”

Yes, very much. You’ve been imprisoned by the Snow Queen herself. She’ll have you dead within a fortnight.

“Yipes. So how do I find Daphne?”

You can’t. You’re too weak. You’re the damsel in distress.

“Do I have to be?”

You tell him, Mr. Official Narrator.

All right, enough attitude. Why don’t you retell him the original Snow Queen story, Maarten, since that’s what Daphne’s lived so far? Condense it, though. And stop after the capture of the young man — that’s where I want to go in new directions.

Ready, Ralph?

Ralph nodded and nestled deeper into the sheets, shivering as he glanced at the door.

Storytime.

Once upon a time
, Maarten began,
in a distant city, three children named Daphne and Cecil and Ralph lived with their families in cramped rooms in neighboring buildings.

“Wait, this is really Daphne? And Cecil and me?” Ralph interrupted.

Get a sense of metaphor, you literal-minded American. This is her
internal
state. It doesn’t have to be
exact —

“Okay, okay.”

Besides, I’m telling you the original version. It hasn’t really happened in this case, but she
believes
it has, so it may as well have —

“Sorry, sorry, calm down.”

It’s just this modern crisis of imagination, I … okay. To continue. All this time the snow was falling fast. Winter in this land isn’t like it is in New Jersey, Ralph. The snow is thick and never stops. It never lingers on the ground, but it’s always tumbling, with flakes that are so broad they blind you when they hang off your lashes.

One time it was so snowy that Daphne couldn’t even see Ralph or Cecil — when she looked for them, all she could see were snow creatures flying at the window.

The snowflakes have a queen — whenever they come so close that you can’t see past them, that’s where she flies. She’s the largest snowflake of them all, but she’s also more than that; when she peers in the windows, the flakes freeze in the strangest patterns, like flowers.

“Iterated fractals,” Ralph murmured, geekily. “Cool.”

The Snow Queen, you see, is made of ice! She’s the most beautiful creature you’ve ever seen. She dresses like a lady, in the finest white gauze, and she glitters from millions of little flakes that live deep in her skin. Fragile and grand, all at once. But even though her eyes shine like stars, there isn’t any peace in them.

As for Daphne’s Ralph and Cecil, they grew to love sledding more than anything else in the world, spending their mornings in the town square with the other boys, tobogganing through the streets. Daphne would miss them so much, but they would always come back to play with her in the afternoon, later and later each day.

Now, some of the boldest boys would fix their sleds to farmers’ carts or big dogs’ tails to be carried around the town. One morning the biggest sleigh ever imagined appeared. White all over, it was, and driven by gray horses. In it sat the whitest figure, muffled in fox fur.

“Just like in Narnia!” Ralph exclaimed.

No. That’s the White Witch. The Snow Queen came first. Pay attention. This figure drove her sleigh around the main square, and all the boys tried to catch her. But most of them couldn’t manage it. The bigger boys were too clumsy to get their sleds attached; the littlest boys were nimble enough, sure, but their legs were too small, and they couldn’t run fast enough. No, only Cecil and Ralph could. They were old enough to catch up, and young enough to slip their sled-ropes over the hitch. Away they went. They rode the giant sleigh through the square again and again, the other boys cheering and hooting the whole time!

Clock’s ticking, Maarten. Ralph will be killed before you finish your rambling.

Then, when the sleigh came to a quiet spot, the driver lifted the boys off their sled and placed them right next to her. Cecil sat closest. He could only see her face, but even so he knew she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. When she looked at him with her ice-perfect eyes, he couldn’t speak. Whatever she said to him, he nodded.

“Are you cold?” the Snow Queen asked Cecil. “You must be frozen. Crawl under my fox fur cloak.”

As soon as she said it, he knew he was very cold, so he did as she said.

They were going so fast now, all through the town, that before they knew it they were in the countryside. The boys got scared when they saw how fast they were going past the hedges and streams, so they shrank into the Snow Queen’s warm fur cloak. Then, suddenly, the giant flakes around them had turned into great big birds pulling the sleigh through the big sky.

“You’re still cold,” she said, and then she kissed Cecil. Her kiss was more chill than ice, and he couldn’t break free. He felt like he was dying for a moment, and then he was colder than the air and the snow, and he felt as comfortable as if he were at home with his own mother.