Stiltskin (Andrew Buckley) (3 page)

“Come in here, please, Robert,” his boss had asked and Robert had obeyed.

“Yes, sir?”

“Sit down, Robert,” said his boss and Robert obeyed.

“You’re fired.”

“Sorry?”

“No use apologizing now, what’s done is done.”

“I’m fired?”

“Reiterating the fact is going to do nothing for you. Clean out your desk and get out.”

“But this is so sudden. The company is doing well; I thought my work was excellent. Well, not excellent but not that bad, anyway,” explained Robert.

“Don’t get me wrong, Robert, we think the world of you, you’re a top notch accountant, excellent with numbers. Time for you to go, though, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t understand.”

His boss laughed. “You and me both, my friend, makes no sense to me either.”

“Then why am I being fired?”

“It was the strangest thing. We had our usual managers meeting this morning and your name came up. We all thought you were doing a fantastic job and we were all impressed at how you handled that Jenkins file.”

“I’m so confused.”

“We had our coffee and then we made the unanimous decision to let you go.”

“Unanimous?”

“Unanimous! Strangest thing, like I said. But we hope you’ll be very happy with whatever it is you end up doing.”

And with that the phone rang, the boss answered it and waved Robert, who was still fairly dazed, out of his office.

Robert staggered out into the sea of cubicles that constituted the accounting monolith of Chikum Finance. Several heads peered up over their cubicles and stared at Robert, who was replaying the conversation over in his mind.

“All right there, Robby?” said Martin.

Martin was one of the few people at Chikum Finance that Robert could actually stand. Or at least tolerate for small amounts of time. This was despite the fact that Martin’s eyes were situated far too closely together.

“Yeah,” replied Robert.

“Oh. They told you, eh? Thought they might’ve waited ‘til later in the week.”

“You knew?”

“Well, yeah, mate. It was a big secret, ya know, so obviously everyone around here knew about it.”

Robert glanced at the sea of cubicles and most of the heads bobbed back down below their fabric-encased walls. “Well, that’s just great, isn’t it?”

“Uh… is it?”

“No, it’s bloody not,” said Robert and stalked off out of the building, completely forgetting to take his umbrella with him. An hour later, he found himself standing on the corner of a street he didn’t recognize soaked to his skin and getting constantly wetter. Every few minutes, a bus would drive through one of the various, well placed puddles and splash him. He didn’t care. He was miserable.

He decided to head west. He lived in the West End of the city in a small leaky apartment with ancient fixtures and high rent. His landlady was a turbulent old bat named Gertrude who never removed the rollers from her hair because she believed it would ruin the curl. Robert didn’t feel like seeing Gertrude right now, but he did feel like going home and taking a bath.

Baths always relaxed him; as far back as he could remember it was his favorite thing to do, and if anything had even the remotest chance of curbing his misery it was a nice hot, relaxing bath. The one thing Robert’s apartment had going for it, and the primary reason that he took the place, was the antique bathtub. It was beautiful white porcelain with a high hanging shower head, clawed feet, and a set of taps that would make members of the
Antiques Road Show
wet themselves. Yes. A bath would be a good idea.

A double decker whooshed by and drenched Robert.

Miserable
.

He turned and headed west, nearly knocking over a pretty young girl with auburn hair and the kind of face that wasn’t pretty, wasn’t ugly, but lived in that special place in between the two. By the simple act of almost bumping into her and noticing her hair colour, he was immediately made even more miserable. Sarah had auburn hair. Sarah didn’t live in that special place in between pretty and ugly, she lived very much to the North of pretty, over the mountains and far away. She was gorgeous. And up until last night, she had been Robert’s on again, off again girlfriend. This time it was off for good. In the past, they had fallen out for whatever reason, usually ridiculous stuff. Robert would forget to take out the trash and Sarah would get angry. That easy mistake would turn into World War Three and they would break up, only to get back together again the following day realizing they were just fighting over something petty. This time, she had no good reason. The breakup was over nothing. She’d just called it quits. Robert spent the day heartbroken. Sarah had gone to Paris to shop for the day. The two of them had never really balanced in the way a healthy couple should.

Sarah was petite, with long, flowing, auburn hair and greenish-grey eyes. Robert was tall, almost lanky, with messy brown hair and an awkwardly chiselled face. Sarah had graduated from Oxford and majored in Psychology. Robert had attended the University of Manchester where he barely scraped together enough credits to graduate with a degree in accounting. Sarah liked animals and had always kept a cat as a pet. Robert was allergic to cats; they brought him out in a rash. Sarah was funny and social and captured the attention of everyone in any room she walked into. Robert was ignored in a corner like a stained piece of carpet that’s hidden by placing the TV stand over it. Sarah had a family that could be traced back generations without the slightest hint of divorce. Robert’s adoptive parents separated when he was six years old, and he had tried several times unsuccessfully to find his real parents who apparently didn’t exist anywhere in the entire world. Sarah exercised. Robert didn’t. Up until last night, Robert had truly believed that opposites attract. Now he believed that it was all a matter of perspective.

Sarah had come over to his apartment and stood in his doorway looking beautiful. Robert thought that the doorway probably felt very lucky to have someone so beautiful standing in it. She had looked Robert in the eye with barely any emotion and told him point-blank, “Robert, I’m leaving you.” Her voice was silken smooth and had the ability to make penguins melt.

“What?” asked Robert from his recliner. Robert’s voice made penguins tilt their heads in a questioning motion.

“I’m leaving you, Robert. I have to, I’m afraid. I’m so sorry,” she said.

“But why?” asked Robert and dropped his potato chips.

“To be honest, I’m not sure. It’s just something that has to be done. I’m sure one day it’ll make sense to both of us.” And with that, she walked out of his life.

Stupidly annoying nonsensical things like this had happened to Robert all his life. At the age of ten, they had irritated him but now he was thirty-three it just seemed common. When he turned five, every single toy in his room had vanished. His adoptive parents were furious but at the same time couldn’t figure out how a five-year-old could make all those toys disappear. Robert didn’t know either, he’d just woken up and they were gone.

When he was thirteen, an overdeveloped twelve-year-old girl had bullied Robert to the point where he was on the edge of insanity. One day while bullying him, for no reason at all, her hair fell out. Robert had been accused of shaving her head and promptly punished. At sixteen, he had passed his graduating math exam with flying colours. Later that same day, he was expelled for no apparent reason. At the ages of three, seven, twelve, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-six, and thirty-one, he had fallen asleep only to wake up somewhere else entirely. One time he woke up and found he was locked in the Tower of London. Another time he woke up at Stonehenge. And another time he’d woken up in his elementary school teacher’s flower garden. While attending university in Manchester he had maintained a three-hour conversation with a friendly German Shepherd who had told him why dogs sniffed each other’s rear ends. None of it made sense. And what had worried Robert the most was that it never scared him, never seemed strange to him, and worst of all it had since stopped concerning him to the point where he just accepted it.

Robert hailed a cab and finally got out of the rain. After spending thirty minutes in the hell that was London traffic he entered the front door of his apartment building and squelched his way up the ancient staircase, leaving sopping wet footprints as he went.

“Darkly!” screeched Gertrude, whose voice sounded like a nasally version of nails on a chalkboard. Gertrude stood at the top of the stairs wearing a flowery nightgown over faded jeans. The rollers in her hair looked like they could be removed only by utilizing some serious power tools. “Look what you’re doing to my floors with your dampness, why you’re dripping wet, what are you dripping wet for, Darkly?”

“Hello, Gertrude. Sorry about that. Having a bad day.”

“You think you’re having a bad day? The damn TV service isn’t working, I’ve missed three shows already this morning. And now I find you making a mess in my hallway.”

“Sorry, Gertrude. I just want to get upstairs. It’s been a really bad day.”

“I hope you know the rent is due tomorrow, Darkly? You were two days late last month. You should borrow some money from that lady friend of yours if you’re coming up short. Nice girl, that, very pretty. Not sure what she wants with the likes of you but there you go.”

The sound of a game show drifted from Gertrude’s open door.

“Oh, the telly’s back on!” she exclaimed and shuffled back into her room, slamming the door behind her.

Robert had never put much stock in game shows but today he thanked his lucky stars that at the very least, one thing had gone right today. He continued upstairs and unlocked his door.

He checked for messages on the answering machine and discovered that exactly what he expected was true. No one wanted to talk to him. He walked into his once white bathroom, which over time had started turning a funny yellow color, and turned on his bath. He turned the taps to get the temperature just right and stuck in the plug. He took off his soggy clothes and dumped them in his laundry basket. He wandered, naked, into his kitchen and turned on the kettle.
There’s nothing like a good cup of tea after a hot bath
. He looked through a stack of smutty literature sitting on his coffee table and finally selected one of Sarah’s old celebrity gossip magazines. He heard a
sploosh
somewhere close by and figured he must have water in his ears from all the rain.

He looked at the cover of the magazine to see a couple of pretty actors had just adopted their seventh child from a poor country, making them the nicest people alive. He pushed open the bathroom door and then a variety of things happened which would change Robert’s life forever.

First of all, there was a fully clothed Dwarf holding a large knife sitting in the over-flowing bathtub. Secondly, Robert realized he himself was naked. And thirdly, the Dwarf was looking at him with a pair of the darkest eyes he’d ever seen. Chills ran laps up and down his spine.

“You must be Robert Darkly,” said the Dwarf.

Robert promptly screamed like a girl and slammed the bathroom door.

umpelstiltskin cackled incessantly as he ran along the riverbank putting further miles between himself and the Tower. He couldn’t help himself. Sixty years to the day he’d been trapped in the Tower, and finally he was free. Free to do exactly what he wanted. Free to trick and cheat and cause trouble. And more importantly, he could finish what he started. Getting out of the Tower was the easy part; the deal he’d struck with the Mad Hatter guaranteed he’d get past the lake guards and through any doorway to Othaside. All he had to do was find one. He remembered it being easier; he remembered doors being everywhere. That was sixty years ago and a lot of things can change in sixty years.