Page 14 of Dreams Come True at the Fairytale Museum

‘This isn’t funny, Warren!’ I stand looking at the empty display plinth where Cinderella’s glass slippers usually are, but this morning, they’re nowhere to be seen.

My instant assumption is that Warren has taken them in another attempt to replace them with the pink plastic monstrosities he’s already been firmly rebuffed for.

He’s arrived early this morning. At least, there’s a fancy black supercar in the Ever After Street car park and no one else around here owns a car like that.

I shout his name again because he is not replacing those glass slippers on my watch, and when I still don’t get a response, I stomp up the stairs towards the office. ‘Warren!’

I’m halfway up the second flight of stairs before he appears on the landing above me, his mouth full of something he’s munching on. ‘Did you say something?’

‘No, I’ve only been shouting at you for the last ten minutes. Where are my shoes?’

He glances downwards. ‘On your feet, I wouldn’t wonder.’

‘Not those shoes, the glass slippers.’

‘What glass slippers?’ He’s good at pretending not to know what I’m on about.

‘Cinderella’s gla—’ My eyes fall on what he’s eating and I gasp in shock. ‘Why are you eating that?’

He holds up the toffee apple he’s already taken several bites of. ‘It’s very nice. Thank you.’

‘It’s Snow White’s poison apple!’

His face turns whiter than Snow White’s porcelain skin. ‘It’s not really poisoned, is it? Because I know you don’t like me but that would be a cruel trick if it is. Was I supposed to recognise it and find it funny?’

‘What?’

‘You left it on my desk! I thought it was a breakfast-shaped peace offering!’

‘I did nothing of the sort! And no, of course it’s not bloody poisoned, it’s just a red apple with green candy mixture poured on through a stencil so it’s got the Evil Queen’s skull motif on it. You’re eating one of my exhibits!’

‘Oh.’ He glances down at the apple, and then shrugs and takes another bite. ‘And very nice it is too.’

‘Warren! This is not funny! Where have you hidden the glass slippers?’

‘I haven’t touched the glass slippers. Why, what’s happened to them?’

‘They’re not where I left them last night and you’re the only other person here. And you certainly have no qualms about tampering with my exhibits!’ I jerk a hand towards the apple he’s taking another bite out of.

He brandishes it at me. ‘You left this on the kitchen table beside my stuff. I assumed it was for me.’

‘No, I didn’t! It was displayed in a box in the Princess Suite when I last saw it yesterday!’

‘Well, it was on my desk when I arrived this morning.’ He motions for me to go back down the stairs as he follows me.

I march into the Princess Suite and point out the empty display box where Snow White’s apple usually stands, with a plaque explaining how the Evil Queen disguises herself as a haggard old woman and tricks Snow White into taking a bite, and then I turn around and point to the empty plinth where the glass slippers have disappeared from.

‘Maybe a Fairy Godmother turned them into lizards overnight.’

‘She turned the lizards into footmen, not shoes, and— Oh, for God’s sake, this has nothing to do with the Fairy Godmother!

’ I snap as my frustration gets the better of me.

He’s obviously been messing around with things and is trying to get out of it now he’s been caught. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t notice?’

He goes to reply, but a noise makes its way to my ears and I hold up a finger to shush him. ‘What is that noise?’

‘What noise?’

We both listen to the usual silence of the museum at this time of morning, but today it’s interrupted by a… sort of whirring noise. ‘That noise? Like a droning… burring… noise. You don’t hear it?’

He shrugs and gives me a blank look.

‘It’s coming from…’ I turn around and head for the Fairytale Homes hall.

The whirring is definitely coming from in here.

I follow the noise over to the far corner, a little nook filled with straw and a sole spinning wheel…

which is spinning by itself. It’s always threaded with gold thread, and the clockwork mechanism that powers it has clearly been wound up, which it definitely wasn’t last night, and now the straw that fills the corners of this little nook is covered by masses upon masses of golden thread.

I turn to Warren. ‘Hilarious. I thought you didn’t know any fairytales.’

‘I don’t. What are you talking about? What fairytale is this?’ He puts his head round the room divider and peers in, looking between the piles of gold thread and the spinning wheel. ‘Sleeping Beauty?’

‘Rumpelstiltskin!’ I crouch down to turn off the wheel and look around at the masses of thread in despair. What the heck am I going to do with all this?

‘Spinning wheels feature in more than one fairytale?’ Warren sounds confused.

‘Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. It’s— Oh, it doesn’t matter. Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold in exchange for a woman’s firstborn child, and she only gets out of the deal if she can guess his name correctly, and when she does, he tears himself in half.’

‘He sounds like a nice chap.’

In the middle of what’s been a crazy morning so far, where I can feel my stress levels climbing higher by the second, the laugh that bursts out makes everything stop for a moment.

My stress levels plateau and I can suddenly see us standing here, watching a spinning wheel spin by itself while he eats Snow White’s apple and I wonder where a pair of glass shoes have got to.

I sigh and roll my shoulders, trying to loosen up and take a few deep breaths.

‘Look, this is very funny and all, but—’

I’m interrupted by a knock on the front door, and I dodge around Warren and run to see who it is. I open it when I recognise the familiar figure through the glass in the door.

‘You haven’t lost Cinderella’s shoes, have you?’ Witt is standing outside, holding the glass slippers in his hands.

‘Yes! Where did you find these?’ I take them carefully from him as Warren appears behind me and I introduce them, even though I know that news of Warren’s presence had spread around Ever After Street within minutes of his arrival last week.

‘In the castle ballroom. All on their own, in the middle of the dancefloor… waiting for their princess, presumably?’

I can’t see Warren’s face, but I can hear his sceptical raised eyebrow. ‘How the heck did they get up there? Is this a joke?’

Witt shrugs. ‘No idea. Sadie and I were shocked to find them there. We left a window open last night, that’s probably how they got in.’

‘By themselves?’ I say in confusion. What is going on this morning?

‘Well, you know what these magical exhibits are like,’ Witt says with a nonchalant shrug. ‘Maybe the Fairy Godmother put a spell on them.’

For a non-existent fictional character, the Fairy Godmother is getting blamed for a lot of things today. I call a thank you after Witt as he hurries back down the steps, and while I’m watching him go, Warren takes the shoes from my hands and knocks them gently together.

‘So you’re telling me that these inanimate objects somehow got all the way up to that castle on their own?’

I take them back from him because I’m still convinced this is his doing, even though breaking into the Ever After Street castle seems far-fetched, even for him. ‘I don’t know.’

‘And you really didn’t put the apple on the kitchen table? I assumed it was something you sold to customers and you’d left one for me to try.’

‘I do sometimes have them to give away to customers, but only if I’ve had time to make a batch the night before, and I haven’t for a few days now.’

‘By “give away”, I hope you mean “sell for a reasonable price”.’

I don’t reply because, honestly, I’ve thought about it, but I feel guilty charging customers for something extra when they’ve paid the entrance fee. If I force myself to get over that, maybe it would be a small way of bringing in some much-needed cash?

He takes my silence for the answer it is. ‘You have a very, very strange approach to running a business.’

‘And you have a strange approach to practical jokes.’ I brandish a faceted crystal shoe at him, more than a bit annoyed that he’s made yet another good point about the toffee apples. ‘If you’re trying to mess with me, it’s not funny and it won’t work.’

‘Lissa, I haven’t touched any of this stuff. It was probably a customer at the end of the day yesterday and we didn’t notice it before we left.’

‘No, I do a quick walkaround every evening before I lock up. Cinderella’s slippers were on their plinth and Rumpelstiltskin’s wheel definitely wasn’t spinning, and I don’t even have that much gold thread in the museum.

I have one roll upstairs in case anyone wants a demonstration.

That’s way more than one reel of thread. Someone’s brought it in.’

‘Yeah, and you were still here when I left last night, so my guess is that this is a ploy of your doing to mess with me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know, your mind works in mysterious and mildly concerning ways. Why would I do it either?’

‘I don’t know, your brainwaves are probably affected by the tightness of that super-stiff collar. That’s tight enough to cut off oxygen to the brain and cause moments of madness.’

It’s his turn to stop and laugh, a slightly unhinged laugh. ‘What would any rational person think if they overheard us now? This is by far the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had.’

Even so, I can’t help feeling a bit guilty when he undoes the top button of his white shirt and loosens his stiff collar, and his forehead furrows as he looks at the shoes I’m still holding.

‘Are you saying that you haven’t done this?

That someone else has come in and moved things and started up a really strange spinning wheel, thrown a load of gold thread all over the place, and stolen a pair of shoes? Like… vandalism and theft?’

‘It’s not vandalism, is it? No harm has been done, apart from a shedload of thread to clear up…

and the shoes have found their way back to us,’ I say, even though I can’t get my head around it.

It’s quite possibly the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the museum, and that’s saying something after being here every day for over ten years, but I’m flummoxed.

Warren must be involved – there’s no other possibility.

‘But they didn’t go walkabouts on their own in the first place, did they?’ He raises that sceptical eyebrow again, and I know how it sounds, but it doesn’t seem malicious.

‘Oh, maybe it’s like that film? You know the one with Ben Stiller where the exhibits come to life at night?’ Warren’s still holding the apple core in one hand, but he flaps the other one like he’s trying to remember.

‘Night at the Museum?’ I suggest and he nods in agreement, looking the most animated I’ve seen him until now.

‘Oh, yes, that’s much more likely. Glass slippers that walk by themselves, a spinning wheel that’s spun itself into a frenzy of gold thread, and a poison apple that’s magicked its way up three floors to the kitchen all on its own.

That’s unquestionably the most reasonable explanation.

Good job, Warren, you’ve solved the mystery. ’

‘You’ve spent the past week going on about magical wishing wells, but you think Night at the Museum is absurd?’

‘Everything about this morning so far has been absurd,’ I mutter, wondering why he’s so blasé about this. The obvious answer is that he’s messed with things to wind me up or make me think there’s something sinister going on.

‘Does anyone else have a key?’

‘No. Only me, and now you.’ I gulp a bit too loudly as the lie slips off my tongue. Mickey has my spare key, but it’s not like she’s going to have come in and done something like this during the night, and seeing as he’s already complained about her using the kitchen, it’s better not to mention it.

‘Maybe I should call the police…’ I suggest, not really intending to, but certain that it will force him into admitting culpability.

‘Oh, yeah, that’ll be great for business.

Blue lights and officers swarming the place because a spinning wheel started up by itself.

’ He rolls his sharp blue eyes and looks around the lobby.

‘Let’s sit tight for now. Nothing’s really happened, has it?

Nothing’s been damaged that we know of, and the only missing thing has been returned.

Let’s see if anything else happens before we jump to conclusions. ’

Ah-ha! Almost as good as proof of guilt. If he didn’t already know what was going on, he’d want to find out, wouldn’t he?

‘And if it is the exhibits coming to life by themselves, then we don’t want to scare them because that has so much potential to go viral and get everyone talking about Colours of the Wind.

’ He cups his hands around his mouth and calls out to the whole museum.

‘You hear that, exhibits? If you want to move by yourselves, feel free! You have our full support!’

‘No, they don’t!’ I squeak in horror. ‘No sentient exhibits, thank you! Don’t encourage them!’

‘Are you kidding? This is the most exciting thing that’s happened in years. Sentient exhibits would really put this place on the map. I’ll even clear up the gold thread so they don’t feel bad about it.’

I’m sure it’s a way of directing suspicion away from himself, but I appreciate it anyway.

I can’t remember the last time there was a mess made around here and I wasn’t the one clearing it up, and it feels nice to not be as alone as I usually am.

No one is ever really alone on Ever After Street, but this is the first time I’ve ever had someone here to share the day-to-day running of the museum with, and it feels much better than I expected.

‘Oh, maybe it’s a ghost!’ He sounds genuinely excited, and the grin on his face is one of pure childlike joy, even though I’m almost certain he’s pulling my leg. The best course of action is to go along with it, bide my time and try to figure out exactly what his angle is with this.

‘Did I forget to tell you about the museum ghost?’ I call after him. ‘It’s been haunting these halls for years. Tries to murder anyone who wants to change things. It’s especially fond of all those property developers who come a-knocking.’

‘Good job I’m not your average property developer then.’ He turns back and gives me a wink and a cheeky grin. ‘And I thought my competition had lessened in recent years.’

I laugh despite myself. He has a way of being funny at unexpected moments, and I’m starting to suspect that the first half of that sentence is very true indeed.