Temp: An Accidental Fairytale Read online

  Temp

  An Accidental Fairytale

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  Already Famous

  Temp

  An Accidental Fairytale

  A.E. Mayer

  Cricket Ink

  Atlanta, Georgia

  CRICKET INK

  Copyright © 2011 by A.E. Mayer

  All characters and events in this work, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-9836069-0-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  To R.B. Always.

  Acknowledgements

  For Dr. Lightning, my constant companion.

  For DSM, who encouraged me to write even though you don’t read fantasy books.

  With thanks to my official beta readers: Gamma, Bailey, Aaron, Lauren, and Papa the poet.

  Thanks also to Professor Camuto, who always managed to say something insightful, and Matt, who gives great advice. To Steph, who helped me see the obvious. With big thanks to Anthony, an endlessly optimistic and creative person.

  And finally, for everyone who ever fantasized about keeping the car in drive on Monday mornings.

  A Note to Pirates, Monsters and Hellions

  I love technology. Without it, publishing this book might have taken years. Or—gasp—it might never have been published at all. Major publishing houses and fancy literary agents are flooded with manuscripts, and it’s almost impossible to get someone to believe in you if they never read a word you’ve written. If you don’t know someone in the business, or several someones, you have a better chance of getting eaten by a dragon than getting a big publisher to notice you.

  Thanks to technology, this book was brought to the light of day by an underground publisher called Cricket Ink. Without technology, Cricket Ink wouldn’t have had a chance, but today it does. And a chance is a wonderful thing.

  That is why I am pleading with you personally, people across the Internet and the universe, Pirates, Hackers, and beloved Captain Bookworms, not to copy this book or read one that has been copied. I would love to one day reach a point where my work could freely be given away to you, the person I wrote it for. But for now, if you share this book electronically, you’re not stealing from some huge corporation or a faceless publisher. You’re stealing straight from me, the author, a regular person trying to survive by writing and storytelling.

  I have an e-reader and love it. If you have an e-reader as well, good for you. Please enjoy this book on your e-reader, but please do it after you’ve paid the legal tab. The publisher and I could really use the profits (to do things like buy food and write more stories for you).

  Thanks for being good monsters and doing the right thing.

  I hope you enjoy the story.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue • The Control Room

  Chapter 1 • Harried Horses and Troublesome Tenants

  Chapter 2 • Gilda the Godawful

  Chapter 3 • Pleather and Porcupines

  Chapter 4 • Trailer Trash and Fainting Belles

  Chapter 5 • Stray Dogs and Dangerous Drives

  Chapter 6 • Mars After Dark

  Chapter 7 • White Coats and Disappearing Doors

  Chapter 8 • Talk of Djinns and Animal Skins

  Chapter 9 • Voices, Visions and Villains

  Chapter 10 • The Sleeping City and the Lost Lake

  Chapter 11 • The Return of Riggins

  Chapter 12 • Ferocious Ties and Fireflies

  Chapter 13 • Shooting Spears and Shark Attacks

  Chapter 14 • Library Books and Lies

  Chapter 15 • Mermaids and Madstones

  Chapter 16 • Curses and Ashes

  Chapter 17 • Benjamin and His Buttons

  Chapter 18 • Back to Work

  “How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than 60 years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?”

  -Logan Pearsall Smith

  “The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.”

  -Ellen Glasgow

  PROLOGUE

  The Control Room

  Herb hunched in the itchy old chair that creaked whenever he wheezed, his shaking fingers tracing their way over a complicated network of buttons. For an immortal god, he felt pretty exhausted.

  He was in the dim basement control room of the Paper Door Company, which had been his home for years. The chair wasn’t up to handling his oversized, stiff frame, and it groaned in protest every time he moved, which was usually just to eat or push buttons. The chair’s complaints were a constant threat—if you gain one more pound, it seemed to say, then that’s it. I’m going to collapse. I wasn’t made for this.

  The room was a vast, expansive maze of buttons that covered the entire basement. They flickered on the walls, on the ceiling, even on the floor. Huge, awkward buttons the size of hubcaps, buttons the size of peas, blinking buttons, bright buttons, buttons in all colors and shapes. Buttons painted with symbols, buttons labeled with forgotten words, buttons like bugs crumpled in the corner of a seldom visited room. In the tangled sea of buttons, Herb crouched in a remote corner, visible from a distance by the man-shaped silhouette in button lights, audible by the occasional groaning of the chair and his labored gasps.

  His breathing often blended with the scrapes and squeaks of vermin skittering through the walls on their way to more amiable destinations. They were his neighbors, and even they were headed for better things. The air was stale and smelled of rotting paper books.

  The one exit door was round as a porthole, and he never bothered to use it anymore; in fact, it had been years since he left the room at all. The floor was littered with crumpled food and drink containers mixed with piles of open books.

  A few years ago, just before he’d stopped going home for good, he’d ordered a lifetime supply of junk food. Cargo sized boxes were stacked one upon the other, so when he was hungry, which was often, he just had to wheel over and grab a box of chips from the top.

  Herb once had the dashing style of a hunky model selling lemon dish detergent or butter substitute—wavy blonde hair, sharp bright turquoise eyes, and a smile that sparkled so much you could almost hear the “ding” of clinking champagne glasses when he grinned. He was once tall, over eight feet, with chiseled features and an even more chiseled frame.

  But years, ages in fact, had melted his figure into a different shape. His hair had faded, thinned, and frizzed into a mop that resembled an abandoned rat’s nest. His teeth yellowed, browned, and softened until his sparkling grin was more like a grimace. It was half sneer, half something else—like the crooked smile an alligator shows you right before its jaws yawn to eat you up. His figure had grown stocky, then pudgy, then fat. He curled and shrank like he was being boiled down. His breath came in straining puffs and hisses so pronounced that any casual observer, if he had any, might assume the breath was his last. A sour odor surrounded him, a stench like socks that hadn’t been changed in ages. Now ringing in at just over six feet tall, he was almost as wide.

  The floors of the Paper Door Company were organized according to stature. If you were important, you worked on a higher
floor. If you were unimportant, and most workers there were, you worked on a lower floor. The top floors far above the clouds were for the gods, senior management so high up in the chain of command that workers on the lower floors sometimes suspected they didn’t even exist. They were gods, after all, and religious subscriptions weren’t a requirement for employment. Respect, rumors and reverence surrounded these superstar bosses of the business. They were legends.

  Herb had began as Founding Technical Architect on the top 724th floor at the cusp of the heavens, but his corporate evolution ended up being more of a devolution. Sometimes when you start at the top, you have nowhere to go but down.

  Once upon a time, long ago on the wavering 724th floor overlooking the whole of the world, Herb (then called Hephaestus, god of engineering) was a hotshot. He had a nice chair with a mesh back, adjustable arm rests and lumbar support. A chair reserved for top executive leadership. It supported his hunky, eight-foot frame without flinching.

  But Hephaestus let himself go. He became more and more difficult to work with. He threw frequent tantrums that rattled the building, and the rest of the gods grew tired of him. As his maintenance outweighed his genius (or so they thought), he was demoted down one floor, then another. And another, and another. The gods pushed him off onto lower management, who demoted him further. He started to go by Herb instead of Hephaestus.

  But even as generation after generation of management continued to downgrade his rank, even as he sank from low to lower to lowest, Herb managed to wheel his good chair down with him.

  One late evening, when Herb had left the third floor for the night, a young manager swiped the chair and traded him a dingy one that Herb could barely squeeze into. When he tried to thunder and shorted out, the gods relocated him to the basement. They told themselves that the Founding Architect would be most at home there, but in their hearts they knew they just wanted to be rid of him. But it’s almost impossible to kill a true immortal, no matter how fat and weak they are. Hephaestus had never been a people person—he was technical, while the rest of the gods were more about the marketing. He could huff, puff, fuss, pitch a fit, and short circuit all he wanted in the basement. They moved him out of sight, and he fell out of their minds.

  Unfortunately for Hephaestus, the system he had built was too flawless. The gods didn’t need him anymore. He wasn’t a valuable team member, he was a safety net in case of disaster. And it was unlikely that disaster would ever come.

  “My partner totally screwed me,” Hephaestus growled for the 16,855,747th time. If it hadn’t been for his partner, everything would have been different. He mulled over this as he mashed some more buttons.

  Herb still held the title of Director of Engineering, but that didn’t matter. The bottom line was that the door network that he had built so long ago still worked. No one wanted to deal with the details of how or why. His creation, the crux of the Paper Door Company, had brought obscene wealth to everyone involved at the top and revolutionized transportation and tourism for the whole globe. Herb had birthed an industry that forgot its creator.

  Though he could once run at top speed for a few hundred miles before breakfast, now he hobbled across shorter and shorter distances—chair, bathroom, chair. And even this was becoming more burdensome. His world shrank until its axis and entirety were contained inside the control room. It was his creation, his empire, his domain. Ignored and forgotten, cringing and grotesque, this was the one place he still had power.

  There Herb sat for years and years, forgotten by upper and lower management, running the button room that no one bothered to remember even though it was the foundation of their business, even though the comings and goings of their globe and everyone in it depended on the network. There Herb sat, pondering, blistering, and creaking in that rotten chair. And over the years, almost unbeknownst to Herb, an idea wiggled its way into his mind. Why did he keep running the control room? Why did he keep working for the company when they had treated him so?

  The other gods weren’t like this. They were still young and strong and gorgeous. Aging around the edges, but what could anyone expect after thousands of years? Hatred and bile burned like acid in his heart. He ignored the fact that his condition was his own doing, that it was the result of a breakable pattern. Centuries and millennia of festering, resentment, and thinking only of himself had poisoned him from the inside out. His thoughts shifted from his love of building and creation to the resentment of those around him until it narrowed to the confines of his own most basic, selfish needs—breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, dessert, and more snack. He was the engineer of the entire Paper Door system, but he was also the engineer of his condition. There was no one else to blame, which made him blame everyone else even more.

  Herb was still a god, but he had changed. For even immortality is not a guarantee.

  One afternoon, he ate an average lunch of three sandwiches, two bags of Giant’s Crunchy Crisps, a whole box of popped Pittywail’s Pippycock with extra thick candy coating and three SlimWaif diet meal drinks (to keep things healthy). The third diet drink was the last straw for the chair, who’d had enough.

  It committed an unhesitating suicide and Herb spilled to the floor with a cracking thud. He and the chair were a tangled heap of broken sprockets and odorous, swollen limbs. It took him almost an hour to hoist himself up again.

  He heaved himself up with aches and groans, his overburdened bones echoing the ghostly creaks of the chair. It took him several minutes to catch his breath as he clung, kneeling, to the control console for support. Gulping down wisps of air, he made his way to a pallet of Hippogriff Twisty Treats. He closed his eyes, summoned all his strength, and inched onto the supply box with shaking knees. The crate moaned with strain. He took his time to stand, his frame being more circular than tall.

  In a curved upper corner of the colossal room, he located a miniscule button that was almost up to the ceiling. He reached out to brush a blanket of dust off the button and sputtered as debris flew into his nose and throat. This threw him into a choking fit that had him bent over for several minutes. The button was the size of a seashell, and it was, upon closer inspection, different from all the others. It was almost translucent but still colorful, the way an opal reflects milky rainbows. Even though it was tucked into the darkest corner of the long, low room, it glowed once the dust was brushed off. It appeared to have come alive.

  Herb, his hands quaking with the tremors of age, examined the button for a full minute, tilting his head to catch the different lights and colors that emanated from it. His lips drew back to show cracked brown teeth that protruded like a predator’s and the corners of his splintery eyes crinkled without mirth. He reached up, touched his pudgy index finger to the button, and a tingling warmth ran through his shaking hand, which steadied on contact. He licked his lips, smacked his gums and caressed it. Then he shoved it down with all his strength.

  In a single moment, all the doors opened.

  Herb was finally alone.

  From The JOURNAL

  of

  J. B. B. Elders

  I don’t have much in common with my parents. For one thing, they grew up in a world ruled by people.

  When they were kids, the only creatures who weren’t humans were animals that lived in wildernesses or zoos. Monsters, or the creatures I am familiar with as part of everyday life, were just stories. Fairytales.

  People were still aware of certain mysteries, though. Some events, even the ones that contradict the reality you’ve defined for yourself, are too difficult to ignore. But living with questions can be uncomfortable. For example, why are some people luckier than others? Why am I so unlucky? What was it that just went bump in the dark?

  So to help themselves categorize these mysteries, to put everything strange in a neat little box where it couldn’t hurt them, people crafted stories. They were a coping mechanism against mystery. Myths and legends did a great job of fencing in all the things that didn’t make sense, all the things
that were unexplainable. Stories took fear out of the strange. Over time, as the memory of what created them faded, stories became less about coping with the inexplicable and more about entertainment value. As they were passed down, people forgot why they existed and how they’d gotten started. Bizarre accounts and unexplainable occurrences morphed into old wives’ tales, fables, yarns, and myths.

  If anyone believed these old legends of monsters were true, most were wise enough to keep quiet. Anyone who admitted to believing in the characters of cultural fiction was branded as an outcast, pariah, or village idiot. They were shunned and may as well have been shuffled off to the same barren wilderness that contained any other animal unfit for society.

  But one day, in a violent collision of fates, the social outcasts, pariahs and village idiots were proven correct. It turned out that everyone’s crazy old cousin, who had always sworn he’d seen a fairy or was this close to catching a garden gnome way back when, wasn’t wrong. The crazies were right—there were creatures and monsters, and plenty of them. It was impossible to deny because, in the span of Earth’s longest moment, they were right there. Out in the open. In front of everyone.

  Millions of monsters were shot into Earth in a single instant as if they had been catapulted in through a thousand different doors. Which is exactly what happened.

  Dragons hurled through the skies. Pixies glittered in trees. Dwarfs plopped into the middle of traffic. Mermaids sputtered into unfamiliar seas.

  Basically, it was chaos.

  CHAPTER 1

  Harried Horses and Troublesome Tenants