Mr Luzlic quietly stepped toward her. She felt him reeling over her, his menacing eyes above that horrid grin piercing straight into hers. She thought back to the story of Rumpelstiltskin as she remembered it from her childhood. She'd remembered David saying the other day that this particular story had really creeped him out as a kid, and she had to admit she agreed with him. This one had terrified her, almost as much as the witch in the gingerbread house. Here was a man who didn't eat children - at least it didn't say so in the story - but he did appear out of nowhere, he did know how to do fantastical things like spinning straw into gold. Who was he? Where did he come from, and where did he disappear to afterwards? At the end of the story he'd tried to take the queen's baby. Why? Why on earth would this creepy magical man want to do something like that?
She was desperately trying to stop herself from shivering, to keep her gaze fixed on his. She had to keep him from turning round and looking at David. He just needed another minute and he'd be free.
"So you want to know my plan, do you?" he said. "Well, I suppose there's no harm in telling you. I have another few minutes before the spell will be cast, anyway. What it comes down to, Elle, is happily ever after."
"Happily ever after?"
"That's right. Three little words - but such a lot of power they have! Have you ever wondered what they really mean? To be happy - to be successful, powerful, dominant, triumphant - forever! To have your wildest dreams come true! There is immense power in the concept of happily ever after. For too long these simpering stories you call fairy tales have all been ending up the same way: the nice, kind, charming characters all get to have their happy endings, and the villains, the monsters, the unloved and the disregarded - they end up written out completely. No happy endings for the big bad wolf, are there, on the end of the woodcutter's axe? Or for the giant who falls crashing from the sky, the witch baked alive, the evil queen who dances herself to death in her red-hot iron shoes. And no happy ending for me, either. For decades - centuries, even - I was exiled, weak, living in fear. When my happy ending was stolen from me it robbed me of my power and magic, and it took years for me to gain the strength to claim it back. Well, those days are over now. Tonight I am taking back my power. Tonight I will get my happily ever after."
"But why would you need us for that?"
He gaped at her as if she were stupid.
"You still don't get it, do you? I told you there is immense power in happily ever afters, and I meant it. Look at all of you." He swept his hand round, taking in the circle of thrones - for a second Elle panicked he would turn and see David, but thankfully he didn't. She still didn't dare look in his direction but she hoped against hope he would be out of his first restraint by now, tearing off his second one. "The nine of you represent a colossal amount of unharnessed, untapped magical energy. Nine people who, tonight, will have their happy endings ripped away from them. Nine people whose stories, through the power of my magic, will never be allowed to end in a happily ever after."
"And when you take our happy endings, what will happen to us?"
"You will no longer exist. That is, you won't be killed - you will simply cease to be. If you have no future, no ending, then your present simply ceases to exist. As I understand it you will be sent to a place of nothingness. A place of eternal ongoing torment. A place where hope cannot exist."
"Like hell, then?"
"People over the years have had different names for it." He shrugged. "To be perfectly honest, I don't care where you all end up. I don't need you at all. But by performing the magic to rob you of the endings of your stories, I will obtain the power of all of them - and it will make me the most powerful sorcerer the world has ever known! That is my happily ever after, Elle. Eternal power, eternal glory, eternal magic. A small price to pay for nine little children disappearing. And anyway, after a day or two, no one will remember any of you ever existed."
She felt a horrid convulsion go through her. He'd been right, what he said before. It was worse than dying. Dying would be quick. And afterwards they would be mourned. Their families would miss them. What happened to them would mean something.
What he was suggesting instead was far, far worse than that.
She bit her lip for a second. There was one question playing on her mind, but she didn't want to satisfy him by asking it. The problem was he was too clever. He saw at once what was in her mind.
"I see what you're thinking. Why you? That's what you're wondering, isn't it? Why did I let you see it all?"
"Something like that, yes."
"I'll tell you why. It's because you're clever, Elle. Much too clever for your own good, in fact. You would have seen through it all at once, and probably worked out your place in it all from the very start - if I didn't distract you by having you look for clues elsewhere."
"So you made me see all those things? Made me have those dreams, and see the symbols for what they really were?"
His devilish grin was playing across his lips again.
"Fun, wasn't it? Well, perhaps you don't think so. But I've certainly had some fun with you this week."
He wheeled round suddenly, and to Elle's horror looked right at David. A sigh of relief shuddered through her. He was sitting back in his chair, and in the half-light it looked as if he hadn't budged since he'd been tied there. Only Elle knew differently. She could see part of the tie around his wrist hanging loose. At least one of them was completely untied, and he was just holding it in place around his wrist now to avoid being detected.
"You thought he had something to do with it for a while, didn't you?" Mr Luzlic said, turning back to her. "And why was that? Because he was too good to be true. Well, that's the point, Elle. He was too good to be true because I chose him to come here for that exact purpose. What you have there is a perfect boy. A perfect boy for you, in fact."
"You brought him here for me?"
"Of course. Because you two are my final happily ever after. Cinderella and her Prince Charming."
Charming. That word. A word that, out of nowhere, had come into her mind a week ago after a pleasant walk through the woods.
"Why the fairy tales?" she said in a mad burst. "Why magic up all those things to attack us? Why not just kidnap us yourself?"
"It had to be the stories, Elle. The stories are where the power lies! These tales passed down through generations - with each telling their happily ever afters grow more powerful. If I could take those stories and twist their endings, make them gruesome and horrible instead of bright and charming, then I would be able to drag the power out of them. I would be able to cast the spell that transfers the power of those stories into me, and me alone."
He began another slow walk round the circle.
"That's what all this comes down to. Taking the happily ever afters out of the fairy tales." He looked down at Marigold Loxley. "If these stories don't end happily they have nowhere near as much power as they do. What if, for example, Goldilocks never escaped the three bears? What if Rapunzel was never freed from her tower? What if Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf - or Jack is crushed to death by the giant? What if Snow White is never awakened by a handsome prince? What if the witch gets to gobble up Hansel and Gretel after all?"
He had reached David by now, and he leaned down over him.
"And what if Cinderella never gets to kiss her Prince Charming?"
He took a step forward into the circle, and at that moment David lunged forward from his seat. Mr Luzlic whirled to him, face full of fury. He raised a hand and David was immediately flung backwards through the air as if he'd been struck by a speeding car. He fell to the ground with a hard thud next to Russell's chair.
"David!" Elle screamed.
He didn't move. A low, pained groan came from him.
Elle looked back at Mr Luzlic, whose face was wrenched with rage.
"Why must you all keep trying these stupid little games? I am going to win. Don't you understand that? In less than one minute it will be midnight. Your story will be over. All of your stories will be over. Say goodbye to your prince, Elle. You won't ever get to see each other again."
He threw back his head with another horrid cackle of laughter.
Elle stared at him. She sensed something happening around her - dust beginning to swirl along the floor in a vast spiral just outside the circle of thrones. It gathered momentum, swirls and eddies forming into clouds that picked up from the ground and rolled through the air. Within seconds a dizzying vortex of smoke seemed to be raging all around them, like a blizzard swirling around the outside of a snowglobe.
This was it. Mr Luzlic's final spell. The spell that would steal away their happy endings and banish them all out of existence.
But she wasn't afraid. As a matter of fact she was feeling strangely elated. There was one ace up her sleeve that Mr Luzlic clearly knew nothing about.
"You've made a mistake," she said.
Mr Luzlic's eyes shot to her - she was terrified for a second to see those black hollow eyes that had stared at her from Kaye's face this afternoon.
"What?" he snarled.
In the swirling clouds around them there were now flashes of light, shrieks of high screaming wind - a whole thunderstorm surging round their heads, ten times stronger than the one raging outside. She shouted over the noise:
"You see, your idea of fairy tales is all based on what you think to be a happy ending. I'm sorry to tell you that things are different nowadays. There are new types of fairy tales. We don't want the same sort of things that the girls in those stories wanted."
Mr Luzlic gave another raucous laugh.
"Oh, please! You want to give me some feminist bullshit about not wanting to marry Prince Charming? Admit it, Elle, if only for your own sake - one last moment of honesty before you're gone forever! You wanted to kiss that boy the first second you laid your eyes on him. It's true, and you know it is!"
He was shaking with rage and with triumph, a mad figure standing alone in the scream of the wind and the blaring shadows of the clouds rolling past. A flash of lightning lit his face with a sudden flash of electric blue: a grotesque skull held in a lunatic grin.
Elle heard, somewhere in the distance above the din, a clock beginning to chime twelve. Midnight. Here it was. The moment Mr Luzlic had waited centuries for, and which she could snatch away from him with just a few little words.
A smile spread itself very slowly across her lips.
"Maybe that's true. Maybe I did want to kiss him. But maybe he never wanted to kiss me."
Mr Luzlic paled. He spun his head swiftly but it was too late.
David had clawed his way to his knees. He turned toward Russell, ripping the gag from round his mouth. And in one graceful gesture he leaned down and planted a gentle kiss on Russell's lips.
The scream that came out of Mr Luzlic was unlike anything Elle had ever heard. A scream of pure anguish. A scream of centuries of work vanishing in smoke before his eyes.
He took a desperate step toward David and Russell, but as he did a bolt of lightning leapt out of the swirling clouds and charged straight toward him. Elle screamed; David threw himself sideways across Russell. The bolt of lightning struck Mr Luzlic right where he was standing, a colossal burst of blinding light blasting outwards. For a second Elle saw him silhouetted in a dazzling light; it looked as if he were being physically ripped into a thousand pieces, blasted apart like the disintegrating pages of an old book.
And then, just as quickly as it had all begun, it was over. His scream died away into nothing - as did the storm, which swirled in a second to a sudden stop, the smoke clearing away and the dust skittering to a halt and resettling itself on the floor.
The room was still and silent once more. And through the empty theatre the clock tolled the last stroke of midnight.
David picked himself shakily to his feet and walked slowly and tentatively forward into the middle of the circle. He said:
"What happened? Where's he gone?"
Elle stared down at the floor. Where Mr Luzlic had stood a second before was nothing but a small pile of grey dust.
"I think you stole his happily ever after," she said.