“Someone’s broken into the building, sir,” Rogers said. He looked young, Rogers. His cheeks were flushed, perhaps nerves or excitement, being addressed directly by his boss. His hair was brown and buzzed close to his head.
“Did they get anything?” Randy’s face, on the other hand, paled visibly. No doubt he was imagining the backstories, stored in the safe in his office, just as I was.
“No, sir. It seems they were trying to get into your office, sir.” The kid glanced at Randy, like he was afraid Randy might get upset, take it out on him. Clearly he was new; he didn’t know Randy at all.
“Ah.” Randy chuckled a bit. I smiled too. Anyone who tries to break into a Wizard Detective’s office won’t soon forget it. “Thanks, Rogers. We’re going to head in.”
“Ah, both of you, sir?”
“Yes, Rogers. This is my friend, Peter. He’s helping me with the case.” I waved awkwardly and kind of nodded at him.
“Yes, sir. Let me know if you need anything, sir.” Rogers did a sort of salute/bow type thing, and because Randy is kind, he did it back to him. Randy held up the yellow tape for me to pass under and then did the same with the second, everyday yellow tape. We were stopped again at the door by another officer, who simply wanted to know if Randy would like some coffee. He seemed to be taking orders on a notepad.
“Double latte,” Randy said, “with caramel on top.” We walked through the hallway to Randy’s office. We got lost.
“Does it always take so long to get to your office?” I asked, as we finally approached the door labeled “Randy Potts: Lead Detective.”
“Just when something exciting is about to happen,” Randy muttered.
Immediately we could see where someone had tried to break in—the wooden door frame was scratched an inch deep, as though someone had tried to carve their way to the bolt. Which was missing. In fact, the door handle and entire locking mechanism were gone.
When that hadn’t worked, it seemed our perp (you just say stuff like this in Detective, okay?) had tried fire. The psycho had literally tried to set the door on fire—though you could only tell from the scorch marks on the wall and ceiling around it. The door was unharmed.
And when that hadn’t worked, it looked like the nab (what? it’s fun) had tried to break through the door with something very heavy. There was only the slightest dint in the middle of the door—which meant that a whole lot of force went into this.
“Rogers,” Randy said over his shoulder. The young man appeared immediately.
“Sir?”
“Did we get any surveillance on this? The hall cameras, the entrance? Have you all watched the tapes yet?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And?”
“Well, sir . . . I think you should probably look at them yourself. The burglar seems to have altered them or perhaps had some kind of masking technique to block his face—something that would fall more under your department.”
By this he meant magic.
“All right, that’s fine, Rogers. Bring the tapes to my office in twenty minutes. We’ll be inside.”
Once Rogers had scampered off, Randy pulled his wand from his belt, pointed it squarely at the middle of the door, and closed his eyes in concentration. A moment later, there was a small clicking sound, and the door swung inward.
I knew that the crook hadn’t been able to gain entry to his office, but still, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that it was just the same as I’d last seen it—though with slightly fewer papers on the desk, as the backstories were hidden and locked away.
Randy waved his wand again at the brick wall behind his desk. Rather than the whiteboard this time, a small metal safe appeared in the wall. He walked up to it and, back to me, entered the combination. I busied myself looking at the picture of his kids on his desk.
“How old are Molly and Brent now?” I asked.
“Hm?” Randy had stepped away from the wall, a pile of papers in one hand, and with his wand hand, returned the wall to brick. He turned and saw me looking at the photo.
“Oh, Moll’s thirteen and Brent’s eleven. They’re visiting from Boarmoles for Christmas this year. Might even take them up to the Symbolic Slopes for some skiing—well, not actual skiing, but you know . . .”
I didn’t, really, but Randy had spread the backstories carefully on the desk. Of course we didn’t have all of them, but we at least had the ones he’d confiscated from Terrill and Ivor outside of the wardrobe. I walked around to the other side of the desk and just moments after beginning to read, Randy gasped.
“There it is!” he said, pointing at the top of one of the handwritten pages. This one was very, very old, hardly legible anymore. But he was right; there it was near the top:
Frog has always been taller and green. More friendly/relaxed than Toad. Toad is shorter, stout, and brown. Always has been more serious.
As a child Frog’s friendliness led to some trouble. Animals trying to take advantage, you know. Ex:? attempts to trick Frog into joining him for dinner—Frog being the dinner, of course. Frog is good & kind, though, & agrees & makes delicious meal, brings to? home.? is terribly allergic to an ingredient—even the smell—and must leave his own home, sick as a dog. Frog is left to enjoy the delicious meal himself, having unknowingly beaten character.
These occurrences happen many times w/ Frog, always being good at heart.
(If developed for story, will fill in name later . . .)
“Ohhh, Peter, if this keeps showing up . . .” Randy picked up another of the backstories, the Gingerbread Man’s:
Gingerbread Man has tougher adolescence than most—the other pastries, sweets, and cookies at the bakery do not like him, for his high-pitched voice, but this makes for his later strong will and determination. For example, Gingerbread Man encounters . . . a ladyfinger? a snickerdoodle?
? taunts him mercilessly for his rather high voice and for resembling a man rather than cookie. Of course,? and rest of cookies are actually just jealous that baker created Gingerbread Man in his own image
Possible baker is God metaphor . . .?
Either way? is eaten.
The backstories went on like this—Ms. Wilkinson had a? who she’d married at twenty-eight and then divorced at twenty-nine—clearly not important enough in her later life to warrant a name. Early on in the Wind in the Willow’s mouse’s life, she’d met another nameless mouse (?) whose glasses she broke, then later, another unknown? whose boyfriend, Ratty, she’d inadvertently stolen. And then, of course, there was mine, the kid I’d apparently hurt at school, though no matter how hard I tried to concentrate and stretch my memory back, I just couldn’t remember it. It was never mentioned in my books.
“Sir,” Rogers’s muffled voice said from the other side of the door. “I have those tapes you wanted, sir.”
“Wow. How did that scene take twenty minutes?” I asked. Was I really that slow a reader?
“You know. Time in Fiction . . . Come in, Rogers!”
Rogers’s young, blushing face peered tentatively around the door and then he stepped into the room, holding out what looked like three old VHS tapes.
To the utter discomfort of Rogers, Randy waved his wand again, and the brick wall behind him turned into a white wall with three very large and very old television screens. And no, I don’t mean flat screens mounted on the wall; I mean the three clunky boxes were imbedded in the wall, the front three inches or so sticking out.
Really, you’d think after all that Dan Brown success, the Detective building would have a higher budget.
“Okay, let’s take a look,” Randy said, inserting the first tape into a little flap beneath the middle TV.
As Rogers had said, it really did look like this fell more under “Randy’s department,” because try as we might to make out the face on the tape, we couldn’t. It was almost like the perp was so dull we couldn’t properly see him . . . or her. It was just a very blurred and indistinct figure.
As we watched the thing easily break into
the building’s front entrance (it merely punched something armlike through the glass window next to the front door, reached in, and unlocked the building), the strangest thing was, it seemed to shift.
At one moment I was sure it must have been a man; the next, it seemed almost reptilian, then alien, a plant, an object, a goddess, an angel. It seemed to be a sort of moving energy field, morphing from one possibility to the next but never quite taking form—never becoming more than a blurred figure moving across the screen.
Of course on these televisions, we could only see it in black and white, but I felt, more than I saw, that this creature was glowing slightly and was every color and no color all at once. After the first tape, detailing its descent down the front hall, finished playing with a soft click, nobody said anything.
“Sir, do you think it’s . . . ah . . . magic?” Rogers asked finally, awkwardly. Randy was the only Wizard Detective in his department and one of just two in Fiction (the other one, as you might know, works alone and lives in Fictional Chicago). Though his colleagues found his ability dead useful, they also found it abnormal, creepy, and just plain illogical, so they usually avoided discussing it.
Randy got up and put the next tape in without answering. We watched as the figure approached Randy’s office door. For a moment, it just stood there. Then something terrible happened.
The amorphous thing became slightly more defined—not fully, though, it was still a blur. But something about it gave off the impression of sharp edges. I hate to sound like I’m in New Age, but it sort of gave off this cold, metallic, almost knifelike energy. It began hacking away at the door frame, pieces of wood flying in all directions. Once the frame was chiseled away, the creature removed the handle and the inner workings of the lock, probably supposing the door would just swing inward with nothing left to keep it closed. When that didn’t work, it moved away from the door, considering it.
“Well, that was weir—”
And then it burst into flames.
“JESUS CHRIST!”
“What’s going on in here?” a rather large and kingly lion asked, poking his head into the open (and rather beat up) door.
“Rogers, close that door!” Randy barked. “Lions just walking around, poking their heads into top-secret rooms. Wouldn’t happen at Baker Street, I’ll tell you that much.”
As Randy griped about accidental allusions, the questionable creature on screen pressed itself to the door—the very door the lion had just poked his head into—blurred flames licking the ceiling and the wall around it but not so much as singeing the wooden door. After a few moments, the flames began to flicker; they were fire, then water, then a potted plant, a dresser, a man, a little girl, a badger, and on and on, faster and faster, until finally, the thing landed on one—the indistinct outline of a wrecking ball, hanging from a chain, suspended in midair.
The chain began to slowly swing, moving the obvious weight of the ball back and forth, back and forth, until it began to pick up momentum. When the ball finally crashed into the door, it didn’t just fail to break through, but the door seemed to have finally had enough. And just like in Sci Fi when a spaceship reaches the point of light speed and there is that silent but absolutely powerful clap of energy that seems to sort of curl in on itself before bursting outward in light, well, that’s what the door did. Things seemed to grow very still for a moment, the wrecking ball paused in midswing, tiny words appeared on the screen above the creature:
Oh crap.
Then with a blinding blast of light that obscured the entire screen, the wrecking ball was gone.
“Wow,” I noted.
“Yes, well,” Randy said modestly.
“I can’t believe it.” I shook my head, staring at the screen. What was this thing? What had happened to it? And “How did the tape survive that blast?”
“VHS tapes, sir,” Rogers said from behind me. He made to take the tapes back to evidence, but Randy told him he’d like to hang on to them for a while. Rogers agreed and left, closing the remarkable wooden door behind him. Randy pointed his wand at it, and with a clicking noise, the door locked, despite the fact that it didn’t have a handle, a lock, or any real way to do so.
“Peter,” Randy said in a low voice, still looking at the screen, “do you know who I think this was?”
I had no idea. “?”
“Exactly.”
“Ah. Well, isn’t that . . . good, then? I mean, didn’t your door just demolish it?”
Randy shook his head, still looking at the screen, which was paused on the blast. He pointed up to the left-hand corner, where, now that I looked, I could see tiny, tiny white flecks like snowflakes floating in the air and out of the shot.
“That spell wasn’t designed to kill anyone. It merely entangles the target’s photons, extracting information about group A’s original composition and passing that information on to group B, meanwhile dematerializing group A in the original location, thus creating an exact replica of the creature’s particular makeup in another location in space-time,” he explained. “I got the idea from Sci Fi.”
“So this? is out there somewhere in the universe, now or perhaps in any other time, just floating around as particles?”
“Well, technically we’re all just floating around as particles,” Randy pointed out, with a nod of his head. “But yes, you’re right. The probability that? would reconfigure in our world in this time and in this story is incredibly unlikely. Though I wouldn’t say an impossibility. After all, this is Fiction, and I have a feeling—”
“Randy, don’t . . .”
“—that tomorrow is going to be important!”
I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the day.
* * *
14 This is why there are so many Black Market bathroom items from the Real World—because trips to the toilet are rarely ever mentioned in books. Why would they be? It’s weird. That felt weird, right? Let’s not do that again.
CHAPTER SIX
Randy was right, of course, and the next day was important, though luckily it had nothing to do with?, who, as far as I was concerned, was in some parallel universe reconfigured as a Swiffer Sweeper or something. No, the next day was important because it was the first day of our second year at Fiction Academy.
Almost as soon as we got there, Randy ran into the Detective building to dig up as much information as he could on this? character. See, Randy had enrolled the year before in Fiction Academy, just like me, but he’d been placed immediately into the Detective genre and had quickly worked his way up to Lead Detective. Since he’d studied at Fiction Academy once before when he was about my age, these days he was mostly just taking an elective here and there to further his learning when he wasn’t “on the job.” Which, as you’ve probably surmised, was about never. This semester he was taking Clues in the Classics and a once-a-week lecture on Fantastical Interior Design.
Jenny and I, on the other hand, would be starting our day with the mysterious Person vs. Self class. I didn’t know much about it, other than what I’d seen of the classroom the previous year—a dark, bare room with no desks, tables, or lighting other than the dim candles flickering along the walls. It had been cold and windy, even though there were no apparent windows or even vents.
So as you can imagine, we were more than a little hesitant. Once we’d made our way down the steps of the main building, down and down and down, into the Conflict Hallway in the dungeons, we found a line of about fifteen students waiting outside the classroom, all looking as nervous and perplexed as I felt.
“Class starts in three minutes!” Jenny loud-whispered, eyes bulging. The thought of Jenny being late for her first class of the year was unthinkable. She pushed her way to the front of the line; I reluctantly trailed behind.
“Excuse me, excuse me.” Jenny wedged herself right in between the first person in line and the second. “Do you know why we’re not going in yet? You do know class starts in just one minute now—why aren’t you going in yet?”
&nbs
p; The man in front of her—a thirtysomething ex-YA vamp, by the looks of him, rolled his eyes in a bored fashion and pointed at a handwritten note pinned to the door.
Person vs. Self.
Welcome. At exactly 9:00 a.m., please allow yourselves into the room, one person at a time. The rest of the students are to remain waiting in line outside until their turn.
Thank you.
Professor S
Jenny looked down at her watch again.
“Well, it’s nine!” she said, as though she’d known all along about the note. “What are you waiting for?”
The not-well-described YA vamp flashed a vague but still patronizing smile, showing off teeth of a fashion, and stuck a finger up in front of her face—which one was unclear (but I think I can guess)—and turned the handle to the room. A cold breeze passed between the gap in the door before he closed it behind him with a very loud and definite clink.
We waited in nervous anticipation for about five minutes, then ten; then our nervous anticipation turned into just plain nerves, then anticipation, then impatience, resignation, boredom, and, after about thirty minutes, hunger. I’m sure concern for the other student should have registered somewhere along the way, but I wasn’t all that fussed. I’ve never much liked YA vamps.
Finally, after about forty minutes, in a class that was only two hours and had fourteen more students to go, the vamp walked out of the room. He was even whiter than he’d been beforehand, shaking, and perhaps it was just the brief scene we’d had with him earlier, but he looked slightly more detailed. His red eyes were bulging slightly, and what I’m sure were once dark, seductive circles under his eyes (as only YA vamps can pull off, I assure you) were now just circles. Without a word, he walked down the stone hallway and back up the spiral staircase leading to the rest of the main building.
Jenny looked at me expectantly.
“What?” I asked. She gestured at the door. “Oh, you want me to go first? You were so eager to get in there earlier.” After just a few seconds, though, the people in line behind me began complaining, shouting for someone to just go, to hurry up, so with a deep breath I opened the door and stepped inside.
The Timeless Tale of Peter Able Page 7
