Fairy Tale

by Stephen King

“Burton has become an anchorite, living deep in the woods

With me were my cousin Claudia, my nephew Aloysius, and my niece Leah.

Then there was that thing he’d said about the Rumpa Bridge. My mother had died on the bridge over the Little Rumple,

and a Rumpelstiltskin kind of guy had almost killed me.

“Someday my prince will come,” I half-sang.

Snow white and the seven dwarves

“You told me Hana is a giant and the night soldiers are the undead.”

Woody had told me Hana the giant came from a place called Cratchy).

Royalty in exile, I thought. She and Woody and Leah. Not the three little pigs but the three little bluebloods.

YOU’LL FIND THE CITY GATE LOCKED BUT LEAH’S NAME WILL OPEN IT! ONLY HERS! LEAH OF THE GALLIEN!

Lilimar—what that refugee boy had called the haunted city—but

I stopped, staring at the A crossbar that had been turned into an arrow. The palace was dead ahead, but the arrow was pointing me away from it.

Hana would be at least twenty feet tall when standing.

Worst of all was the trust I saw in Radar’s eyes every time she looked up at me. You trusted a fool, I thought. Worse luck for you, honey.

“Lord High’s what we call Kellin, chief of the night

soldiers.

Kellin, also known as the Lord High.

“Long days and pleasant nights.”

Thirty-one was a prime number, divisible only by one and itself. Thirty-two, though… that was divisible all the way down.

They were, you know, gray people.” “Ain’t they most of em,” Hamey said. “Ever since Flight Killer came back

from the Dark Well.”

lay with kingsblood royal. And

It’s their blood, Charlie, that berdecks us from the gray.

Only there was genetics to consider, wasn’t there? The people of Empis might not know about

it, but I did. There could be unfortunate results as bad genes spread, and royal families were good at spreading them.

Couldn’t there also be

genetic code that provided immunity to the deforming gray?

Hamey said the Galliens had ruled Empis for time out of mind but that fambly tree has been chopped down.

“Elden,” she said. “Elden of the Gallien.”

Flight Killer

Elden, I thought. I knew the name. Falada the

horse, speaking for her mistress, had told me that Leah had had four sisters and two brothers. Leah had seen Robert’s poor crushed body. The other brother was also dead, although she hadn’t said how it had happened, or if she had see...

good to her, Falada said. Falada, who was actually Leah herself. The ot...

One scrap:

Mr Bowditches information he told Charlie

Another scrap:

More information from mr bowditch

Would they (meaning the would-be plunderers from our world) fear waking the

terrible god of that place from its long doze?

When Mr. Bowditch made his last visit, the King of Gallien (whose name was probably Jan) and the Queen of Same (name unknown) had already been deposed.

At least five of their seven children had been killed. Leah escaped, along with Auntie Claudia and her uncle or cousin (I couldn’t

remember which...

What if he had gone down as Elden and come back as the Flight Killer?

“Are you the true prince? The one come to save us?”

The night soldiers were electric zombies.

“Elden is Flight Killer.” “So they call him.” “Does he have another name? Is he Gogmagog?”

“Don’t ever say that name! Do you want to wake what sleeps in the Dark Well?”

think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.”

Latin

Think Gogmagog is scary? Our world is sitting on a potentially world-ending supply of nuclear weapons, and if that’s not black magic, I don’t know what is.

King Jan fell ill. His son Robert, who’d always been the favored one as well as the older of the two boys, waited in the wings, ready to drink from the sacred cup. (I imagined engraved

butterflies around the rim.) Elden, the younger brother, was pretty well forgotten…

Elden was jealous of his brother and jealousy grew into hatred.

suburbs or smallies? It came to the same thing.

Not many of the King’s Guard stood with Elden when he came