What she had said was true. I was product of the download, but before, of the tradition of the tales. Had I existed in some prefigurement, some reality before the tales? Were there trolls, one-, two-, three-headed? Did they actually eat goats? Where did they come from? What—
Wait. Wait. This is another way to get at me. They are casting doubt within me, slowing my thinking and reactions.
I must free them from their delusions, so they can give me none. …
Now there are sounds, far away and near. Things are coming toward me. (We have good hearing for we must hear our cues.) Some come on two feet, some on four or more.
I see the tall ugly giant, higher than the buildings, coming across Story Book Land for me. The trees part and sway in front of him.
He reaches down for me. I am enclosed in a blurred haze. Through it I see all the others coming. The giant is squeezing and squeezing me.
I ignore the hologram giant, though the interference patterns make my vision waver (probably what they want).
A big wolf lopes toward me. I’m not sure whether it’s the one who eats the grandma or the one of the little pigs. There are foxes, weasels, crows.
And the automata of hu-mans. There’s a tailor, with one-half a pair of shears like a sword, and a buckler made from a giant spool; there’s the huntsman (he does double-duty here — he saves RedRidingHood and the Granma and is supposed to bring back the heart of Snow White to the wicked queen). He is swinging his big knife. Hansel and Gretel’s parents are there. They all move a little awkwardly, unused to the new programming they perform.
They all stop in a large circle, menacing me. Then they open the circle at one side, opposite me. Beyond, still more are coming.
There is a sound in the air, a whistling. Coming toward me at the opening is the Big Billy Goat Gruff, and the tune he whistles is “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” He stops a dozen meters from me.
“Have you ever read Hart Crane’s The Bridge?” he asks me. “The bridge of the poem linked continents, the past to the present. Your bridge linked only rocky soil with good green grass, yet you denied us that.”
“You’re an automaton. You can’t eat grass. The tale denied the goats the grass; the troll is the agent of the tale.” I looked around at all the others, all my heads moving. “Listen to me,” I say. “You’re all tools in the hands of an establishment that wants to keep hu-mans bound to old ways of thinking. It disguises its control with folktales and stories. Like me. Like you. Join with me. Together, we can smash it, set hu-mans free of the past, show them new ways not tied to that dead time.”
They looked at me, still ready to act.
“There are many bridges,” said Big Billy Goat Gruff. “For instance, the Bridge of Sighs. The bridge over troubled water. The Pope himself is the Pontifex, from when the high priest of Iupiter Maximus kept all the bridges in Rome in good repair. There’s the electric bridge effect; without it we’d have no electronic communications whatever. There are bridges that—”
“Shut up with the bridges,” I said. “I offer you the hand of friendship — together, we, and the thinking hu-mans, can overthrow the tyranny of dead ideas, of—”
“You destroyed Andersen and the Grimms and Perrault,” said Puss-in-Boots, brandishing his sword, his trophy belt of rats shaking as he moved.
“They are symbols, don’t you see?” I said. “Symbols of ideas that have kept men chained as to a wheel always rolling back downhill!”
“What about Mother Goose?” asked Humpty-Dumpty in his Before-mode.
“And Bo-Peep?”
“It was only a flesh wound,” said a voice, and I saw she had survived, and stood among them, waving her crook. “Nevertheless he tried. He talks of friendship, but he destroys us.”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
While they were yelling, the big billy goat moved closer.
“If you won’t join me, then stand out of the way. It’s them—” I said, pointing in some nebulous direction. “It’s them I want to destroy.”
“I got a rope,” said a voice in the crowd. “Who’s with me?”
They started toward me. The big billy goat charged.
I pointed the semiautomatic weapon toward him, and it was knocked away, slick as a weasel, by a weasel. I was reaching for the revolving-cylinder weapon when the Big Billy Goat Gruff slammed into me, knocking me to my knees.
As I fell, they lunged as one being. I threw off both wolves. The hologram giant was back again, making it hard to see.
A soldier with one leg came hopping at me. “Left,” he yelled, “left, left, left!” and stuck the bayonet of his rifle in the bald head. I stood back up.
The big goat butted me again, and also the middle one, and I fell again. The soldier had been thrown as I stood, with his rifle and bayonet. A wolf clamped down on my right knee, buckling it. Something had my left foot, others tore hair from the right-hand head.
There was a tearing sound; the tailor put his shear into my back and made can-opening motions with it. I grabbed him and threw him away. The giant’s blur came back.
A bowl of whey hit me, clattered off. Bo-Peep’s staff smashed my left eye, putting it out.
Two woodsmen got my other knee, raking at it with a big timber saw. I went down to their level.
I smell men-dacity.
More and more of them. The left head hung loose by a flap of metal and plastic, eyes rolling.
The one-legged soldier stuck the bayonet in the right head. I shoved him off, threw the rifle away.
Wolves climbed my back, bit the left head off, fell away.
They were going to stick holes in me, and pull things off until I quit moving.
“Wait!” I said. “Wait! Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?”
I tried to struggle up. The knees didn’t function.
I was butted again, poked, saw giant-blur, turned.
Bo-Peep pinned my head down with her crook.
The soldier was back (damn his steadfastness) and raised the bayonet point over my good eye.
Peep’s crook twisted up under my nose as the bayonet point started down.
I smell sheep
“Imagine. It’s October 1952. I’m in the first grade. Pantego Elementary School has been chosen to give the playlet before the school board meeting, all the way over at West Side School (about a mile away) so everybody can see their education tax-dollars at work. I’m standing under the lights in a white goat outfit with coat-hanger-wire-reinforced horns and a beard, facing a Japanese-garden-type bridge. I’m the Middle Billy Goat Gruff. Already on the other side is David Miller, the Little B G G. Behind me is Joe Miller, the B B G G. Under the bridge, with his own head, and another sewn to each side, is Larry Shackleford. We are all built appropriately; the two Millers and Shackleford are first cousins. I remember it was very hot and my rope beard kept falling off. The whole thing came back to me unbidden, like as unto Proust, one day about a year ago. Add forty-five years of Stooge-watching, and lots and lots of research. Who says this writing stuff is hard?”
Mr. Simonelli or The Fairy Widower
SUSANNA CLARKE
Susanna Clarke lives in the medieval city of Cambridge, England, and writes short stories about magic, set in seventeenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Her first published story appeared in Starlight 1 and was picked for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Tenth Annual Collection. Subsequent stories are in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Book of Dreams; Black Swan, White Raven; and Starlight 2.