Unhappily Ever After
Conner Flynn read the invitation to his classmate's graduation party, grimaced and tossed it in the wastebasket. He envisioned his friend's back yard decorated with balloons and crepe paper streamers in the school colors, a sheet cake topped with a graduation cap and CLASS OF 2009 written in colored icing. There would no doubt be family-friendly pop music, hamburgers and hotdogs cooked on the grill, dishes of chips and dips and sugar- and alcohol-free drinks. Worst of all, the party was sure to be supervised by several adults.
"What fun is a party without booze and sex?" Conner complained.
"Why don't we have our own party, then?" his girlfriend, Jessica Hansen, suggested.
"Like my parents would be any more lenient."
"Who said we have to have the party here?"
"Where then? Your house?"
"No. I was thinking about that old kiddy park, Fairy Tale Woods. It's been closed for years, so we can have the place all to ourselves."
"Isn't there a padlock on the gate?"
"I know where there's a tree with large branches that hang over the fence. We can climb it and get into the park that way," Jessica explained.
"I think I remember that place," Conner said, trying to form a mental picture of the park's layout. "There were scaled-down houses as well as miniature, life-size and some giant figures of fairy tale characters. There were even a few kiddy rides."
"Most of that stuff is still there. Wouldn't it be fun to party with the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf?"
Conner agreed that it would, especially since there would be no chaperones there to spoil the fun.
* * *
That Saturday night while most of the graduating class gathered at one of the five parties being held in town, Conner, Jessica and four other seniors drove to the abandoned Fairy Tale Woods to celebrate the end of school.
Jessica parked her mother's minivan in a far corner of the deserted parking lot where no one would spot it. Then she got out of the car, locked it and raced her friends to the fence. She was the first to climb up the low-hanging branches.
"See how easy it is," she told the other two girls who were eyeing the tall tree with cautious uncertainty.
Once the young women were over the fence, the boys followed, carrying six-packs of beer and a large thermos filled with rum and Coke.
"Wow! This place is awesome!" Nicole Jordan exclaimed, shining her flashlight on the twenty-five-foot-high Mother Goose that had welcomed children and their parents into Fairy Tale Woods for more than five decades.
The six youngsters walked past the empty ticket booth and through the rusted turnstile. Everywhere they looked there was evidence of trespassers. Several of the figures had been vandalized. Cinderella's Fairy Godmother lost an arm, and Jack be Nimble lost his head. Graffiti covered the Three Little Pigs' homes, the Crooked Man's crooked house and Hansel and Gretel's gingerbread cottage. And the ground was littered with empty beer cans and bottles, cigarette butts and condom wrappers.
Of the six teenagers, only Stacy Cahill was apprehensive about venturing further into the park.
"Did you see that sign?" she asked. "It says NO TRESPASSING. CARETAKER ON DUTY."
"Yeah, maybe five years ago," Lucas Burns, her date, laughed. "If there's a caretaker now, he's not doing a very good job, is he?"
"No one is gonna catch us here," Jessica insisted. "So quit worrying, will you?"
"I still don't think it's a good idea."
"Come on," Lucas urged. "We're here to have fun."
He punctuated his sentence with a popping of the top on a Budweiser can.
"To graduation," Conner declared, joining his friend in a toast.
Nicole and Tommy Smith, who had been dating since the eighth grade, headed for the Mad Hatter's tea party.
"Too bad we don't have one of those old boom boxes," Nicole said as she jumped up onto the table and began dancing. "We could use some music to get the party going."
"I don't know about you guys," Jessica laughed, throwing her arms around her boyfriend's neck, "but Conner and I intend to make our own music. Don't we, honey?"
"Yeah, but not just yet. First, I intend to do some serious drinking."
Three beers later, Nicole began to grow restless.
"Why don't we do some exploring?" she suggested. "Unlike most of you, I was never here as a kid."
"Sounds like it might be fun," Tommy agreed.
Lucas and Stacy got up from the tea party table, ready to join in even though Stacy still had strong misgivings.
"Are you coming, Jessica?" Nicole asked.
"Nah. You guys go on ahead. We'll catch up with you later."
"Okay, but don't do anything I wouldn't do," Tommy yelled over his shoulder as the four teenagers began walking along the weed-infested stone pathway.
But Jessica and Conner weren't paying any attention. They were already walking on the stone path that led in the opposite direction.
* * *
While the four young people who had headed east were climbing the bridge of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, Conner and Jessica headed west and found the Seven Dwarfs' cottage. They stared through the large Plexiglas window at the seven small-sized chairs and seven equally undersized beds.
"Too bad we can't get inside," Jessica said.
"I think there's a door in the back, one the employees used so they could get inside the displays and change the light bulbs."
The access door was locked, but given its age, Conner had little difficulty breaking the padlock with a heavy rock.
Jessica shined the flashlight on Snow White and the seven little men.
"I'll bet that one's Sneezy, and there's Doc and Grumpy."
"You remember their names? I bet you'd be a natural on Jeopardy."
"Look at this," Jessica exclaimed. "Seven little beds all in a row. Maybe we could lie across them."
She quickly pulled off her shirt and jeans and stretched across the beds in her underwear.
"Let's play a game," she teased. "I'll be Snow White, and you be one of the dwarfs. Ah, but which one will you be? Not Bashful, I hope, or Sleepy. I know, you can begin by being Dopey and then I'll try my best to make you Happy."
As Conner was unzipping his fly, he momentarily froze.
"Did you hear that?" he asked.
"Hear what?"
"Music. Someone is playing a flute or something. It reminds me of that Celtic crap your mother listens to."
"It's your imagination."
"No, I definitely hear something."
"Maybe Little Boy Blue is blowing his horn. Who cares? Come on over here," Jessica coaxed.
Under normal circumstances, nothing would have taken Conner's mind off sex, but the music was so hypnotic, so compelling, that he could not ignore it. He zipped up his fly and reached for his shirt.
"What are you doing?"
"I'll be right back. I've got to know where that music is coming from."
"Are you crazy? I'm ...."
Jessica became silent when she noticed she was speaking to an empty room.
Annoyed and frustrated, she rolled over onto her stomach.
"Why is it all the girls in the fairy tales get handsome princes and I get a frog? It doesn't seem fair."
The movement was so sudden and so unexpected that Jessica had no time to scream much less defend herself. In a matter of moments, the seven little mannequins raised their mining picks and buried them in Jessica's recumbent form as Snow White looked on with a beatific expression on her hand-painted face.
Meanwhile, as his girlfriend lay dead on the seven dwarfs' beds, Conner continued to follow the sound of the strange flute. He wandered off the path and into a heavily overgrown wooded area. The deeper he ventured into the woods, the louder the music became. When he stumbled upon a clearing, he found a dozen or so figures of children following a piper.
I vaguely remember this story, he thought. It was called the Pied Piper of Hamburg—or something like that—but I thought the piper was supposed to rid the town of ....
The sound of hundreds of scurrying rodents now competed with the melody of the piper's music, and both grew in volume. Soon the rats began nibbling at Conner's feet. When the terrified teenager tried to shake the gnawing animals off, he only managed to lose his balance and topple over. No sooner did he hit the ground than the rats swarmed over his body. Only when the last of the teen's shrieks died away did the spellbinding music come to an end.
* * *
Nicole was bored with exploring, so she sat down on Aladdin's magic flying carpet and drank rum and Coke from the thermos. Stacy sat beside her but declined a drink.
"What are you, the designated driver?" Nicole asked.
"No, I just don't like the taste of alcohol," Stacy answered.
"Hey, you two," Lucas called. "Don't you want to see if the kiddy rides are still here?"
"Not particularly," Nicole replied and took another drink from the thermos.
"I'll go," Stacy volunteered and left her former classmate on the magic carpet.
Tommy felt obligated to remain with his girlfriend.
"Gonna let me have some of that?" he asked.
Nicole handed him the thermos, and he finished what was left.
"Now that the booze is all gone, what do you want to do?" he inquired.
"I don't know, but I don't want to walk around in the dark anymore, looking into windows at fairy tale figures. This stuff is for kids."
"Then how about some adult entertainment?" he teased, trying to unbutton her blouse.
"Out here in the open? No way," she declared, drunkenly slurring her words as she spoke.
Tommy looked around and spotted the three bears' house nearby.
"What about in there?"
Nicole shrugged her shoulders.
"I suppose so."
When she got down from the flying carpet, she was unsteady on her feet, and Tommy had to support her as walked toward the six-foot-tall building.
"Oh, we're too late," he laughed when he saw a figure of a blond-haired mannequin sleeping in Baby Bear's bed. "Somebody booked this room ahead of us."
With the room spinning around her, Nicole sat down on Papa Bear's bed. Tommy sat beside her, took her in his arms and kissed her neck. The romantic moment was spoiled when her body stiffened and her hand went to her mouth.
"I'm gonna be sick."
"Oh, great," the amorous teenager groaned as his girlfriend ran outside to vomit in the tall weeds that surrounded the bears' house.
Nicole threw up once, twice, three times. When her stomach was empty, her head began to pound. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, wishing she had a drink of soda to get the sour taste out of her mouth.
She remembered seeing a water fountain between Jack's beanstalk and the Old Woman's shoe. The water line to the park might be turned off, but she was willing to take the chance that it wasn't. In the moonlight she was able to clearly see the white stones of the pathway, even without a flashlight. Soon she saw the beanstalk towering above her. Jack was at the top, looking down at his mother's cow.
Nicole walked up to the stone water fountain and turned the faucet. Nothing happened.
"Damn it!" she swore. "I'd pay a week's allowance for a bottle of Dasani."
She had taken only a few steps back toward the direction of the three bears' house, when a wave of dizziness engulfed her.
"I swear I'll never mix rum and Coke with beer again," she cried and fell to her knees, feeling like her insides were about to trade places with her outsides.
As she fought back the urge to vomit again, she felt something brush against her leg.
"I hate this place!" she exclaimed through clenched teeth.
She looked down at her calf and saw a green vine growing up her leg toward her knee.
"What the ...?"
Nicole frantically tried to extricate herself from the rapidly spreading beanstalk. She opened her mouth to call out for Tommy, but the vine viciously hoisted her into the air with such violent force that her spine cracked.
I'm going to be paralyzed for life, the young girl thought with alarm as the beanstalk carried her higher and higher up.
Soon she was more than three hundred above the ground. She looked down at the spectacular view. To the east, she saw Lake Harmony and to the west the glowing lights of her home town.
It's so beautiful, she thought just moments before the beanstalk hurled her down onto the roof of the three bears' house.
Tommy, who had fallen asleep in Papa Bear's bed, awakened with a start when he heard the loud thud on the roof.
"Who's out there?" he called. "Is that you, Nicole?"
There was no reply, for Nicole was lying on the roof, dead.
"Lucas, if that's you trying to scare me, you'd better knock it off or you'll be sorry."
When there was still no reply, Tommy got up from the bed and went outside to investigate. As he passed through the doorway, he felt a drop on his cheek. Was it raining? Another drop and another. He looked up, and saw Nicole's twisted, broken body hanging precariously on the edge of the roof.
Heedless of the darkness, Tommy fled from the grisly sight. He ran past Jack's beanstalk, Aladdin's flying carpet and the Three Billy Goats Gruff bridge. Without a flashlight, he had difficulty seeing the figures. While racing across the overgrown pathway, he tripped over the spoon near the base of Miss Muffet's tuffet and fell headlong into the spider's web. He grimaced with revulsion when he felt the sticky, silky material against his flesh. He tried to pull away but couldn't. The more he struggled to get free, the more entangled he became.
All of a sudden, he glimpsed a movement in his peripheral vision.
"Thank God you guys found me. Hurry up and help me out of here. We've got to get the police. I think Nicole is dead."
But the dark shadow that was inching toward him was not human. Mercifully, Tommy fainted from fright before the giant spider paralyzed him with its poisonous venom and drained him of his blood.
* * *
"Isn't it kinda late?" Stacy asked as she and Lucas sat on one of the toadstool picnic benches that surrounded the park's dilapidated snack bar. "Shouldn't we start back?"
Lucas sighed. Why had he brought Stacy with him? She wasn't like the other two girls. He and Stacy had been going out for two months already, and he hadn't gotten beyond first base.
"We'll head back to the ticket booths and wait for everybody there," Lucas said. "Just let me rest a minute longer. My feet are killing me."
Stacy walked over to a hill on which Jack and Jill were tumbling down.
"Look, it's a wishing well," she called, but Lucas wasn't listening.
She reached into her pocket, found a quarter and tossed it into the well.
What should I wish for? she wondered.
She realized with a smile that she already had everything to make her happy: a loving family, a nice home and a bright future ahead of her.
"Right now, the only wish I have is that I was home, safe in my own bed, sound asleep."
Having made her wish, Stacy walked back down the hill to rejoin Lucas near the site of the former snack bar, but he was no longer there.
Perhaps he's relieving himself in the bushes, she thought with a blush.
After all the beer he had consumed, it was a likely assumption.
Stacy waited a few minutes and then called, "Lucas? Where are you?"
She heard a muffled sound coming from the tall, narrow castle behind the snack bar, so she walked to the back of the building, where Rapunzel looked out of a window high in the enchantress' tower, her long hair cascading down to the ground.
"Lucas?"
Stacy heard the muffled sound again and shined her flashlight over Rapunzel's tresses. She screamed and dropped the light when she saw Lucas hanging by the neck in Rapunzel's long hair.
The sight of her date's dead body sent Stacy running in terror. She was so frightened that she completely lost all sense of direction. In her desperate flight, she found Conner Flynn's remains, nearly devoured by rats; Jessica Hansen's body, pierced by the dwarfs' tiny pick axes; Tommy Smith's pale, bloodless corpse entwined in the spider's web; and Nicole Jordan's lifeless form still dripping blood down onto the stoop of the three bears' house.
Eventually, Stacy found her way to the ticket booths. Just when safety seemed within her grasp, she remembered that the gates of Fairy Tale Woods were securely locked. Jessica had shown them the way in: by climbing a tree on the other side of the fence and dropping from the overhanging branches. It had never occurred to Stacy to ask how they would get out.
* * *
"It's no use," the scared young woman cried when she repeatedly failed to reach the branches that hung over the park's tall wrought iron fence.
Her nerves already on edge, she let out an involuntary scream when the clock atop Cinderella's castle chimed midnight.
As though on cue, the fairy tale characters slowly came to life, and one by one they turned in Stacy's direction. The Big Bad Wolf growled, showing his great big teeth—the better to eat her with. Three blind mice scurried toward her, and the farmer's wife followed, brandishing her carving knife.
"No," Stacy whimpered as she fell to her knees.
The three bears—Mama, Papa and Baby—advanced menacingly, and the girl knew she would never get out of the park alive. Just as the Pied Piper's rats and Miss Muffet's spider were about to bring her nightmare to an end, the fairy tale characters all stepped aside, making a pathway for a man on a white horse.
Stacy looked at the rider and caught her breath. While his ermine-trimmed doublet and the jewel-studded gold crown on his head proclaimed his royal birth, it was the black hair, blue eyes and dimpled smile that identified him as Prince Charming. The young girl's heart fluttered when the handsome prince got down from his white stallion and stood before her.
"I am here, fair one, to do your bidding," Prince Charming announced with a regal bow.
"I don't understand."
"I am here to fulfill your wish."
The prince reached out his hand. In his palm was the quarter she had dropped in the wishing well. Then, with a graceful, fluid movement, he mounted his horse and lifted her up into the saddle. Stacy closed her eyes and rested her head on Prince Charming's velvet doublet. When she opened her eyes again, she was home in her own bed.
* * *
"How was the party?" her mother asked when Stacy went down to breakfast the next morning.
The horrifying events of the previous evening came flooding back to her.
"Did you have a good time?"
"Yes," Stacy replied hesitantly.
Only after her daughter had a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice, did Mrs. Cahill show her the Sunday edition of the local newspaper. The headlines proclaimed FIVE TEENAGERS KILLED IN TRAGIC CRASH. According to the article, Conner Flynn, Jessica Hansen, Lucas Burns, Tommy Smith and Nicole Jordan were fatally injured in a car accident when Jessica lost control of her mother's minivan as she was driving at a high rate of speed and struck a large tree, not far from the abandoned Fairy Tale Woods. Police suspected alcohol was involved.
"But that's not what happened," Stacy mumbled.
"What's that, dear?"
"I just can't believe this happened," she corrected herself.
"It's so sad, but these accidents always seem to occur around graduation time. I'm glad that nice young man who drove you home last night hadn't been drinking."
Stacy shivered. She did not recall how she'd gotten home. The last thing she remembered was sitting in the saddle next to Prince Charming. Maybe she had not been to Fairy Tale Woods after all. Perhaps she had gone to one of the graduation parties, and someone slipped a drug into her soda.
I don't know what happened last night, she thought, but I'm home now, and I don't want to think about what I thought I saw ever again.
* * *
Nearly a decade later, Stacy was married and living with her husband and two children in Pennsylvania. During the holidays and for two weeks in the summer, she and her family traveled to Massachusetts to visit her parents.
"We've got a nice day planned for the children," Grandma Cahill announced one July day after the family arrived at her house. "Someone bought Fairy Tale Woods and restored it to its original condition. I'm sure the kids will love it there."
The last place Stacy wanted to go was back to the park that had been the source of so many of her nightmares.
"I thought we'd take them down to the beach for a picnic," she said, offering an alternate plan.
The kids vetoed the idea, crying, "We want to go to the amusement park."
"We'll be here for two weeks. We can go to the beach some other day," her husband suggested.
Stacy reluctantly gave in.
The drive to Fairy Tale Woods brought back memories of the night when six teenagers wanted to celebrate their graduation in an abandoned kiddy park. When her father pulled into the parking lot, Stacy was surprised by the changes the new owners had made. The large tree, whose branches once overhung the fence, had been chopped down; and the fence itself had been replaced with an electronic surveillance system. Although Mother Goose still welcomed children and their parents near the ticket booth, she was given a fresh coat of paint. The graffiti throughout the park had been painted over, and the litter was gone. Even the tracks of the train ride had been restored and a new locomotive put into service.
Stacy trembled when she saw the Three Little Pigs' homes, the Crooked Man's Crooked House and Hansel and Gretel's gingerbread cottage. With their father and grandparents following closely behind, her two children immediately scrambled off to see the crooked cat and crooked mouse.
"I'll meet up with you at the snack bar," Stacy called to them. "I have to go to the ladies' room."
She set out along the same stone path she, Lucas, Tommy and Nicole took during the night of the impromptu graduation party: past the Mad Hatter's tea party and the Three Billy Goats Gruff bridge. It wasn't until she found Aladdin's magic flying carpet that she stopped to rest. Still trembling with fear, she tried to convince herself that none of the disturbing things she had imagined took place that night actually happened. Her friends were killed in a car accident, not by the harmless fairy tale characters around her.
You're an intelligent woman, she told herself, a college graduate. You know these figures couldn't have come to life. It's just not possible.
Her eyes wandered to the refurbished Aladdin, flying on the carpet with his magic lamp in hand, but the face of the famed Arabian prince was Tommy Smith's! They were all there, she soon discovered: Conner Flynn became the Pied Piper of Hamlin; Jessica Hansen, the fair Snow White; Lucas Burns, Jack at the top of the beanstalk; and Nicole Jordan, the long-haired Rapunzel.
Stacy felt faint and grabbed on to the side of the sorceress' tower to keep from falling down.
"Miss, are you all right?" a concerned voice asked.
"I'm not feeling well, but I'll be okay in a minute," Stacy answered, turning toward the sound of the man's voice. "Prince Charming!" she exclaimed when she saw the young man's familiar black hair, blue eyes and dimpled smile.
The handsome young man laughed.
"I'm just the caretaker here."
"How long have you had this job?" Stacy asked, suddenly realizing how she had gotten home after the tragic graduation party.
"For a while," he said cryptically.
"Well, I'd like to thank you for taking care of me that night."
"It was my pleasure," he replied and then directed her toward Jack and Jill's hill. "There's a wishing well up there. Perhaps you'd like to make a wish."
"I just might at that," she said and watched Prince Charming vanish in the crowd.
This story is inspired by Fairy Tale Forest (Oak Ridge, NJ), the Gingerbread Castle (Hamburg, NJ), Fantasyland (Gettysburg, PA) and all the other similar places from my childhood that are now gone.
I don't know where Salem found this pin-up, but it's definitely not a Puss in Boots from any children's fairy tale book! (Shame on you, Salem!)
