Everything in creation is just a trick of the light - the only difference between heaven and hell is who's running those lights, who's got the switch, who knows the cues.

It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's all they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her.And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.

I'm an extra in your story. Well, you're an extra in mine, boy.

And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome's veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You're not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.

Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?