Page 19 of Dreams Come True at the Fairytale Museu
‘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 thespindleof 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 Iknowthat 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 canhearhis 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.Whatis 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 castleon 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 youreallydidn’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’snotfunny and itwon’twork.’
‘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 havethatmuch 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 ofyourdoing to mess withme.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘I don’t know, your mind works in mysterious and mildly concerning ways. Why would I do it either?’
