When she had so aggressively snatched the slipper from Apsara’s hands, she had also dislodged the already precariously fixed servant’s wig we had piled all those masses of golden, tumbling locks under.
And so now those tumbling locks have tumbled once more, despite Apsara’s best efforts to quickly gather it all up once more, obviously hoping no one had noticed.
But how could anyone not notice?
Her hair glitters like it’s a form of light created by the Glass Slipper itself; a cascading waterfall of miniature suns.
Even the prince’s companions are entranced.
No wonder the prince is besotted.
Of course, one person entirely immune to Cinderella’s charm is the Fairy Godmother.
When she sees the effect Apsara’s transformation from indistinct servant to an un-ignorably gorgeous girl has had on everyone, the Fairy Godmother rages at the injustice of having her coronation as queen snatched from her hands.
‘So,’ she snarls, ‘let’s see if love conquers age, shall we?’
And she tosses the Glass Slipper into the air, sending it twirling towards Apsara.
*
It was the twirling of the Glass Slipper in the sunlight, of course, that had turned the child Apsara into the teen Cinderella.
Even through the increasing pain and dizziness of my injury, I realise that the Fairy Godmother intends to ensure the prince sees Cinderella swiftly age before him.
Even if Apsara recognises what’s about to happen, and leaps out of the way, the chances are the slipper will smash upon the floor.
The prince’s companions, who are obviously in no rush to see him married, will use the slipper’s breaking as an excuse to declare that he can’t be sure that this is the Cinderella he’d met at the ball, that this might all be part of a magical entrapment.
As I’d been following Apsara as she’d made her way towards the door, I’m close enough now to throw myself forwards, placing myself beneath the whirling slipper, the light emanating from it playing everywhere about me like spiralling rainbows scattered across a clear pool.
Apsara briefly appears horrified that I’m preparing to catch it, when I know full well what it could mean to me.
But thankfully she realises that this is for the best, that she has to move back and aside to ensure the slipper’s magical scattering of light has no further effect on her.
I can already feel the effect it’s having on me.
I’m growing weaker, weaker than I already felt.
I’m finding it hard to reach up, to reach up high at any rate.
Am I getting smaller?
My jacket cuff certainly seems too large.
Even as I try to work out exactly what’s going on, I keep my eye on the spinning slipper. It’s whirling has dislodged the severed toe nestled within it.
The toe rolls towards the rim.
It tumbles from the slipper.
It drops down towards me.
I gawp in surprise and horror.
The toe slips into my gaping mouth.
Before I know what’s happening, before I can stop it, I’ve swallowed it.
*
Chapter 47
Uugh!
My own toe!
I’ve just swallowed my own toe!
I urgently try to dismiss the thought from my mind; I still have to catch that whirling slipper!
But it’s hard to keep up with it. My own shoes seem massive upon my feet, weighing me down.
My jacket is way too large for me.
Instead of catching he slipper, as I’d hoped, I have to content myself with reaching out, flaying at the slipper with my hand; and sending it flying back into the air once more.
*
Recognising that something so delicate and precious looks sure to shatter on striking the ground, others dash forward to catch and save the slipper.
It’s not a wise thing to do.
As the whirling slipper throws out its strikingly resplendent beams, it ages those it catches in its play of colourful light. A companion of the prince is struck a considerable number of times in this way, his ageing more pronounced than the others, such that like me he finds he’s unable to catch the slipper as he’d hoped; and so he too has to be satisfied with simply knocking it back up into the air.
The glorious whirling of spectral light plays about everyone once again. Only this time, those seeking to catch the flying slipper find themselves growing younger, not older.
Their bodies shrink, their clothes becoming too large for them.
As, of course, had happened to me.
I haven’t grown older; I’m younger, younger than I was when I’d last lived in this castle.
*
Chapter 48
It must be the way the slipper twirls; clockwise, or anticlockwise.
A forwarding or a reversal of time.
My wound has healed, I realise, but I don't think that’s due to my difference in age; I think I’m benefiting from yet another sliver of the glass.
It must have been embedded in the toe I’ve swallowed.
I use my new found youth, energy, and exuberance to bring the toing (Hah! Toeing maybe?) and froing of the slipper to an end, leaping up first onto a chair, and then the table, to at last catch the soaring shoe.
When all the chaotic scrabbling comes to a close, I’m a young girl once more.
The servants clothes hang off me.
I look like a twelve year old, dressing up in father’s clothes.
The Fairy Godmother observes me with a mix of what could be admiration and hate.
‘You’ve wasted your time trying to save it,’ she announces with a bitter laugh before turning back to face the startled, perplexed prince. ‘For I have the real slipper here.’
She reaches into her fabulous gown.
And draws out the other Glass Slipper.
*
Chapter 49
The prince, naturally, is more bewildered than ever.
‘But…but that’s the one I brought…’ he says unsurely, pointing towards the slipper I’m holding.
‘Left and right shoes, My Liege,’ one of his men – now little more than a young boy in oversize clothes – hisses in warning to him.
The Fairy Godmother glowers at the boy, making him shrink all the more into his clothes.
‘Not in this case!’ she hisses in warning like a snake. She whirls around to point accusingly at Apsara. ‘She switched them on you when – dressed as a servant – she first took it from your own man!’
She pronounces ‘dressed’ such that it drips with connotations of the foulest treachery.
Why else would anyone be dressed as servants unless they meant to harm the prince?
‘Take them,’ the Fairy Godmother commands her men, a wave of her hand confirming that she also means that I should be arrested.
The prince’s own men leap into action, but not to save us.
They join in with the Fairy Godmother’s men, surrounding the large table I’m standing on. Others forcibly apprehend Apsara, pinioning her by the arms.
And when the prince steps forward to protest at the way his Cinderella is been treated, he too is surround, but by his own companions, cautioning him that his more suspicious father the king has already told them to guard him from any further uses of magic.
What could I do?
I did what any disgruntled twelve-year-old girl would do.
I furiously throw the Glass Slipper I’m holding at the laughing Fairy Godmother.
*
At least this time the slipper sails through the air in a more direct course.
Its ageing effects only briefly affect the men it whirls over.
The Fairy Godmother hadn’t been looking my way when I’d thrown it. She’d only had eyes for the prince, seductively striding towards him as she held out the glass slipper for him to take.
Something makes her look my way at the last second, however. Perhaps a glint of reflected light in
the glass of the slipper she held.
Whatever it is that makes her look my way, it’s too late for her to do anything about it.
Fortunately for her, I think, I didn’t throw it high enough to have any affect on her age.
Even so, she screams in terror.
The Glass Slipper crashes hard against her cloak of diamonds.
Even a magical slipper, of course, would find it hard to resist an impact against diamonds, the hardest substance known.
There’s a tinkling, a shattering, of glass.
An eruption of light.
An avalanche of glass slivers.
All continuing, bizarrely, to head in very same direction they’d been travelling in while wholly melded together.
The slivers whirl through the Fairy Godmother, unstoppable.
Soaking up all the light about her, glittering all the more.
Like a rain of stars.
But where these new stars didn’t shine with their absorbed light, there was only a deep, indefinable darkness left lying between them.
A darkness, I sensed, formed not from an absence of light, but a lack of compassion.
A darkness that shrieked even as that too vanished, as if it were now nothing more than a puff of smoke.
*
All that was left of the Fairy Godmother was the Glass Slipper.
It must have dropped from her rapidly dissolving hand to the floor at some point, and yet it hadn’t smashed.
It hadn’t even been chipped, unless you include the missing slivers about the rim.
It had even landed the right way up, cat-like in its fall.
Of the other slipper, there was nothing to be seen.
Not even slivered pieces, glistening upon the floor, glowing with their fleshly acquired, new light.
Yet now that I know more of this fabulous slipper, I have an idea where they might be.
They’re part of the slipper regally standing upon the floor, melded into it; returned to where they belong.
And what of the darkness, that absence of compassion, they had torn through?
The slipper can’t absorb such a thing, I believe. It can only ever reflect – reject – it.
I think, too, that I know where that peculiar darkness has gone.
Bess, Cer, Ber and Us; for aren’t they the creations – the creatures – of the Glass Slipper?
From where else could they have originated?
As Cinderella tries on the slipper, the slipper that was only ever meant for her, and so fits her ever so perfectly, I slip away to say goodbye to my faithful beasts.
I don’t need the Glass Slipper to return to my own time.
For I recognise now, of course, that this is my own time
*
Chapter 50
Just as the story tells us, Cinderella is indeed sister to my sister.
She is daughter to my father, and my mother.
Yes, yes; I see all this now.
I also see that this is how it has to be.
I could make changes, of course; but why, when it all works out so well?
I collect a blouse to wear from my room, while the other, ‘older’ me is still down in the surgery. I take a spare one, packing it into a bag with a number of objects I know I’m going to need.
A mirror.
A ring.
A necklace.
A small cup.
A letter opener.
A candleholder.
A flower vase.
A book, The Glass Kingdom.
My farewell to Bess, Cer, Ber and Us is far sadder than I expected, even though I tell them I will be meeting them again quite soon.
Besides, I reassure them; the old me will be out to see them soon, wearing the highwayman’s clothes I’ll find in the surgery’s cupboard – and they should make her welcome, for we are all linked, all one.
Soon, of course, I’ll be queen.
End
If you enjoyed reading this book, you might also enjoy (or you may know someone else who might enjoy) these other books by Jon Jacks.
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent
Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak
Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife
Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland
The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas
Memesis – April Queen, May Fool – Sick Teen – Thrice Born – Self-Assembled Girl – Love Poison No. 13
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