- WARNING: NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED. ‘Tinkerbell’ meets ‘Tales Of The Unexpected.’ I don’t think ‘Writing Magazine’ wants me to enter any more adult fairy story competitions.
IT WAS, indeed, a sign of the times that even the fairies had resorted to theft.
Jan had collapsed at the first sniff of the magic dust, but Twinkles had reckoned without him falling across the doorway. The big oak door wouldn’t budge with three hundred pounds of bodybuilding Dutchman lying unconscious in front of it.
Jan, despite his fluttering assailant’s best efforts, wasn’t moving. Brute strength was never going to work. Twinkles was just two inches tall and Jan was a mountain. Also, Twinkles didn’t really know any proper magic, certainly nothing she could use in a situation like this. Twinkles had skipped fairy school far too often to learn anything more than the basics.
In fairness, she made a spectacular blend of fairy dust which had won her prizes at the Great Summer Fete, an event organised in her home town every year. Very popular the Fete had been too, right up to its ill-fated final year when it had been tragically razed to the ground by an inebriated dragon.
Now, thoughts of the Fete took Twinkles back to a dark place, a place where a hopeful young fairy’s life had been destroyed forever. Twinkles’ mother had been cruelly taken from her whilst innocently exhibiting chutney. Twinkles remembered hovering there, wings beating uselessly in the breeze, watching as the marquee went up like a firework in the savage, all-consuming furnace of a dragon’s burp.
As well as the fairy dust Twinkles could also, by twitching her nostrils, turn almost any potato into a hamster.
Twinkles bitterly regretted her magical limitations now. Her friend Dingle Dangle could have made Jan disappear with a flick of her wand. Piff Paff could have levitated him. Geoff could have passed straight through the door like a ghost.
Geoff didn’t have a fairy-sounding name like the other fairies.
But her friends weren’t there to help Twinkles now, and weeks of meticulous planning had ended in failure. She wouldn’t be able to pay Lamulax the Demon King his rent when he came calling, and he’d unleash his hounds on her.
Jan, regaining consciousness, interrupted Twinkles’ train of thought with a sudden grunt. Jan saw Twinkles spinning before his eyes, recoiled in terror and confusion, and lashed out clumsily in self-defence. It was futile. She was too fast. Jan took a desperate swing at his tiny, shiny nemesis, missed her completely, and tripped over his own feet, falling headlong down a nearby staircase.
Indifferent to the fate of the once more poleaxed Jan, Twinkles turned the door handle and entered the study.
Moonlight from the window behind Twinkles flooded the room. The diamonds spread across the antique mahogany desk reflected the moonbeams back at her. The gems sparkled seductively. Twinkles knew that her victim had planned to work into the night. She had timed it so well.
Markus Grunhild was slumped across his desk, fingers still touching the tumbler of brandy poured from the decanter Twinkles had drugged that morning. Presuming Grunhild had passed out during his first drink, which he would have poured – creature of habit as he was – at eight pm, he would have swallowed enough tranquiliser to keep him out for maybe an hour. The grandfather clock in the study was striking nine. Twinkles didn’t have long.
Oh no. Grunhild had fallen, head down, over the diamonds. Twinkles saw his fingers twitch. He was waking up and she’d have to act quickly.
Twinkles had first noticed Grunhild on a sunny morning two months ago when he’d flashed a smile outside one of Amsterdam’s most exclusive banks. Twinkles had seen the words ‘M. Grunhild’ stencilled in golden calligraphy on the expensive attaché case, eavesdropped on Grunhild telling a giant companion called Jan about a ‘consignment from Dubai’ and plans for a ‘secure inspection.’
Grunhild had stepped into an armoured vehicle with a silver briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. It was easy for the tiny fairy to follow the vehicle unobserved to its destination, a mansion cum fortress in the suburbs. No expense had been spared in equipping the premises with the latest high-tech security features. For any intruder to break in unnoticed they would need to be invisible or extremely small.
Small.
Like Twinkles.
Twinkles had learned more online at one of Amsterdam’s internet cafes, hopping from key to key, googling Grunhild. The man was a world-renowned authority on diamonds. The bank regularly brought him in from his office in Bremen, Germany, to value gems. This latest set was from Nigeria with an estimated value of more than five hundred and seventy million Euros.
Back in the present, Grunhild woke to find his arms and legs bound tightly to a chair. As he moved his head and upper body from the desk, Twinkles tugged hard on the cord she’d secured around his shoulders, snapping Grunhild upright.
As ghastly a surprise as this was for Grunhild, it was little compared to the sight of a firefly of strangely human appearance dancing malevolently in front of him. It was time for Twinkles to claim her loot. The back-up anaesthetic she’d already deployed into Grunhild was doing its work.
‘What … what are you doing?’ he managed before all feeling was lost and speech became impossible.
Twinkles may, for half a second, have wondered to herself how everything had come to this, but there was little conscience left in her now. She had crossed a line and was on a path which would lead her, kicking and screaming, into Tinkerhell.
The diamonds meant nothing, for they were as worthless as apple pips in Fairyland. What did pay the bills, however, was teeth. Gold-capped ones in particular. It was Grunhild’s own set of these, shining in the sun when he’d smiled, which had caught Twinkles’ eye outside the bank.
The CCTV camera in the study whirred on, but no-one was watching. The guards in the control room had long since been fairy-dusted.
Twinkles rummaged in her sack for an appropriate tool. She knew that Lamulax wouldn’t care if the rent was in less than pristine condition.
And so, with there being no real need for finesse, Twinkles the tooth fairy swung down the claw hammer.
copyright (c) carterbloke 2019
Photo credits
The following photos (with formatting effects added) used under Creative Commons licence.
- Mordred Fairy c/o *Death Essence* (flickr.com)
Simon Carter 