Beauty Read Online Free PDF

he’s still alive.’ Up on the cart, a fat man’s head lolled forward, the reins having slipped from his hands. The prince tried to straighten him up, but the man’s weight slid sideways and he lay across the seat. The prince shook him. ‘Hey!’ he said, loudly, the word a stranger in the eerie silence around them. ‘Hey, wake up! Wake up!’ The fat man didn’t move. He didn’t even snore or grunt or shuffle as the prince wobbled him.
    The huntsman looked at the animals around him; not one of them dead and rotten as he’d been expecting to find in this lost kingdom. The prince had struck on it without thinking.
    ‘They’re asleep,’ he muttered. ‘They’re all asleep.’
    ‘That can’t be right.’ Petra dropped to her knees and stroked the sheepdog. ‘They can’t have been asleep all this time. Not for a hundred years. It isn’t possible.’
    But it appeared, as they moved on, that it was entirely possible. Every living creature they passed was lost in slumber, apparently having fallen asleep in the same instant. There was a soldiers’ outpost as they walked into the first main streets of the city, and two were asleep face down on a chess board. Others had crumpled in a heap at their sentry posts. The huntsman counted about fifteen. ‘That’s a lot of soldiers,’ he said.
    ‘Maybe they were at war,’ the prince answered. ‘The kingdoms are always at war.’
    It was an apparently affluent city and there were some beautiful mansions set back in their own grounds, again with sleeping soldiers guarding the high gates, but even the ordinary cottages closer to the castle were well maintained, even though the flower-beds were overgrown with weeds. Here and there long grasses had sprung up everywhere between cobbles and flagstones. Animal life might be slumbering but the plant life still grew, although not to the proportions expected. ‘Whatever this is, it’s affected every living thing,’ Petra said, stooping to examine the flowers.
    As they moved closer to the centre of the pretty town the huntsman noticed that some houses had the windows roughly boarded up and when he prised the wood from one they saw that the glass behind was smashed and the contents of the house were either broken or ruined in some way. This had clearly been done before the city fell asleep, and he could find no rhyme or reason to the house that had been wrecked. They were ordinary people’s homes. What had happened to the people who had lived in them?
    After a while they split up to explore more thoroughly, and everything they found was the same. Men, women and children, all asleep in a variety of strange places. One woman’s face was badly burned where she’d been making soup on a stove, now a long time cold, and as she slipped to the floor she’d pulled the pan down over her.
    Only in one cottage did the huntsman find anyone in their bed. Whoever it was they must have died before whatever happened to send the city to sleep, and all that remained was a skeleton in a nightdress with wisps of thin hair poking out from beneath a black nightcap. A knife stuck through the thin fabric of her dress and now that her flesh had rotted away, it leaned loose against her ribs where some unknown assailant had stabbed it into her breathing body. It was a strange cottage, with none of the bright colours found in so many of the others, and there was a cold, stale dampness hanging in the air as if none of the outside warmth had crept in during the long years that had passed. He looked in the small cupboards and found jars of herbs and bottle of potions with words he didn’t understand on the labels. It was a witch’s cottage, he was sure. He shivered and was about to leave when the small stove in the tiny main room caught his eye. The door was open a tiny fraction and something glittered inside. He crouched and pulled the black iron door open.
    Inside, sitting on a pile of soot, were a pair of sparkling slippers. He reached in and took them