Night at the Museum - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  So anyway, I turned in a circle so my belt buckle could see the whole room and started talking to the air, exactly the kind of professional assistance I’m sure Dr. Becca was looking for.

  “I’m sorry,” I said by way of explanation. “I’ve got a Bluetooth comm set up with my tech guy back home, and he put a camera in my belt buckle so he could see what I see. Or what I would see if my eyes were down where my—”

  “Bubba,” Joe cut in, probably just in time going by the blush on Dr. Becca’s face. “Does anything look odd to Skeeter?”

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Nothing in the visible spectrum. Gimme a second to switch to infrared…nothing there. UV looks good, too. There’s nothing the camera can pick up, fellas,” came the report into my ear.

  “Skeeter says the camera doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and apparently my belt buckle can do infrared and ultraviolet. Cool, huh?” I kinda thrust the belt buckle out at Joe and Becca, then realized how that probably looked through the translucent plastic and pulled my crotch back. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Becca replied. “So you didn’t find anything?” she asked.

  “Well, no, but that was just a quick scan across a couple of spectra. Now we get down into the investigatin’ part of things. Let’s start with provenance on the artifacts.”

  She gaped at me. “Excuse me?”

  “Provenance. It means where did all this shit come from,” I said.

  “I…know what provenance is, I just…”

  “You just didn’t expect me to know what provenance is.” I finished her sentence for her. “Don’t worry about it, Doc. I know I sound like what you get if Buffy banged the cast of Duck Dynasty, but I do know what I’m doing. There’s some nasty shit out there, and I’m the best there is at hunting it down and killing it.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  I grinned at her. I didn’t hold back, I gave her the full-blown “I have been through the shit and come out the other side” crazy grin. “I know ‘cause I’m still alive. And all the sonsabitches that tried to kill me ain’t. I’ve killed more monsters than any other Hunter working for the Vatican, except for that old boy that got the Black Forest in his territory, and can’t nobody compare to the shit that comes out of that place. But as far as America goes, you have standing before you the baddest mother in the valley. So I don’t fear no evil. Now, about that provenance?”

  She looked at me, a little wide-eyed, then turned her gaze to Joe. He just shrugged and said, “He’s right. There’s really nobody better.”

  “Okay, then,” Becca said. “Where do you want to start?”

  “Let’s start at the oldest and work our way forward. If there’s anything really powerful here, it’s unlikely to be all that recent in origin. Meanwhile, you can tell me what’s been going on.”

  “When we first made the change, it was small things. Paint rollers and pans left out where people would step on them in the dark, ladders leaned precariously against doors so they fell on people when they walked through, the kind of things that are annoying, and painful, but nothing really harmful. We had a few people get bruised, and few shoes and skirts get ruined from paint, but we all just assumed that the contractors had left things lying around. But when we came in on a Monday and cases were smashed, we knew the contractors had nothing to do with it.”

  “It happened over the weekend?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, leading me over to a remote corner of the exhibit. “This is the starting point of the exhibit. You enter from there—” She pointed toward a pair of sliding doors. “And begin here, with ancient Japanese dragon masks.” She pointed to the wall. “The masks are to hang just off the wall and be backlit, so there’s very little seen but the eyes, until you step here, and hit a pressure pad in the floor.”

  She stepped into place in front of where the mask should hang, and a set of lights came on aimed at the wall, revealing a colorful dragon mural painted about twenty feet down the wall. A pair of bars hanging from wires started to jiggle, indicating where the masks would move. A recording came in over the speakers in the ceiling, and I started to get a lesson in Chinese and Japanese Dragons. I didn’t know there was a difference. Something about toes was all I got from the recording ‘cause I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.

  “So these masks are the oldest things in the exhibit?” I asked. “I might need to see them.”

  “We can do that, but they’re in our secure storage until the exhibit is almost ready to open. They are very old and valuable, so we don’t want to just leave them hanging around while we’re under construction.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “What’s that thing?” I pointed to a case a little further into the exhibit.

  “That’s the next stop,” Becca said, sliding past me to go stand in front of the case. Just like with the dragons, when she stepped on the right spot on the floor, lights clicked on. These all focused on a two-foot square case on about a four-foot high pedestal. In the center of the beams of light was a gleaming white skull, and what I saw on the skull made me gasp.

  “Skeeter, do you see that shit?” I murmured.

  “I do, Bubba. I do indeed, but I can’t imagine how I’m seeing it.”

  “Yeah, it don’t make no sense to me, either. I thought they turned to dust when you chop their heads off.” At least, every bloodsucker I’d ever killed turned to dust, or at least bloody slush, when I killed it. Actually, come to think of it, I’d never killed one old enough to turn to dust. The ones I killed always made a mess that needed way more of a Shop-Vac than a Dust Buster.

  “Oh, it’s not real,” Becca said with a little laugh. “I mean, obviously it can’t be real because…wait, what?”

  I nodded at her, and Joe stepped forward to look closer at the human skull sitting in the case with extended fangs protruding down over its lower jaw. “Yeah, this is fake, Bubba. The fangs are in the wrong place, and they’re obviously snake fangs just added onto the real teeth. It’s a good fake, but it’s fake. Look here, Beck.” He motioned her over and pointed to the skull. “On a real vampire, the fangs are the first canines, closest to the incisors, but you’re got them on the second canines, which puts them too far apart to actually bite someone. Also, the fangs don’t look like this when they’re down. They just look like long pointy teeth, only a little more so. They don’t look like snake fangs, or even a cat’s teeth. They don’t make those neat little puncture wounds like in the old movies. It’s more that they rip a hole in the victim’s carotid and just catch the spray and drink it.” He stood up quickly, as if he realized all of a sudden that he was close to a girl and was afraid of getting cooties.

  I was obviously going to have to lock these two in a broom closet with a bottle of scotch before this case was over. I cleared my throat. “I’m pretty sure the fake vampire head isn’t causing any of your troubles, so what’s next?”

  “Next we move to the djinns and rakshasa. Rakshasa are—”

  “I know what rakshasa are,” I interrupted. “They’re invariably Clemson or LSU fans, so they’re among my least favorite monsters. They’re also universally mischievous assholes, so if it’s mostly pranks, you might very well have a tiger-man running around here in disguise.”

  “Well, I thought that might be the case as well, so I installed a lot of extra mirrors around the exhibit, but so far I haven’t seen anyone paying extra attention to themselves.” I grunted a little at the idea. She was smart. Rakshasa are shapeshifters whose natural form is male human bodies with the heads of tigers. Being part cat, they are incredibly vain, complete assholes, and prone to shit in your shoes if you do something they don’t like. I made that last part up. They won’t shit in your shoes; they’ll just rip you to shreds or cast a spell that turns you into a mouse or something equally unfortunate.

  If you don’t think being a mouse is unfortunate, remember that these are essentially six-foot tall cats, so it’s a pretty unfortuna
te place to be a mouse. Since they are so vain, a rakshasa can’t ever pass a mirror without stopping to admire itself, fix its hair, and generally be a pretty pretty princess for a minute. Becca installing mirrors all over the place without anyone noticing the creature probably means there wasn’t a rakshasa nearby. Especially if she used good mirrors. Good mirrors still use silver backing, and silver is rough on magic, so a rakshasa looking into a silver-backed mirror would reflect its true form for anyone to see.

  “And yes,” she answered my unspoken question. “I used silver mirrors.” Yup, smart chicks will be the death of me.

  Chapter 5

  “Okay, so what’s next?” I asked.

  “After the rakshasa, we move on to the Western European section of the exhibit.” Becca led us through a hallway that was a lot narrower than anything a dude my size really wanted to walk through, and we came out into a replica of what looked like the biggest Brothers Grimm mashup you’ve ever seen. There was a cabin big enough to walk into made out of candy, and the trail led right up to the door, so we went in. Inside there was a whole Hansel & Gretel setup, complete with an animatronic witch, huge oven, and a couple of kid mannequins in a cage.

  We stepped through a door in the witch’s cabin and came right out into Little Red Riding Hood’s Grandma’s bedroom, complete with a werewolf in the bed and a woodsman wielding an axe at the monster. We stepped through another door, and I saw the base of a giant beanstalk. I looked up, and tucked away within the rafters of the building was Jack, a dummy rigged to slide down the beanstalk with a golden goose under his arm.

  “Y’all went all out on the robots in here, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “We designed this exhibit for the maximum interaction with our patrons, yes,” Becca replied. “This is where the trouble started getting more serious. We came in one morning and several robots were malfunctioning, and the woodsman was reoriented so his axe swung right at head level every time the door opened.”

  “So you’ve got a monster that’s good with robots? That don’t make any sense,” I said. “Look, usually either you have a monster, in which case you have a bunch of dead bodies and blood and people pieces strewn everywhere, or you have a human, and you’ve got a bunch of people scared shitless but mostly not hurt. People want something. Monsters just kill shit. And they’re real good at killing shit, and not so good at picking around with electronics. I think you’ve got a human problem, not a monster problem.”

  “That’s what we thought, too. Then we started finding bodies,” Becca said.

  “Bodies?” Joe asked, finally shaking off the funk he’d been wallowing in since we arrived.

  “It started with small animals, mice and rats. I thought maybe some of the mice from the animal lab downstairs got loose, but these weren’t white mice. They were just random field mice, then a few rats, then a dog.”

  “Where were these animals found? Was there a pattern to their arraignment? Any sort of ritualization of the killing, or did it seem to be random?” Joe fired off questions rapid-fire, like a machine gun. It was good to see him engaged, but a little unnerving how quickly he snapped back to himself once the specter of evil magic was raised.

  I left the two lovebirds talking about rat blood and finger-painting in entrails and started poking around the exhibit myself. I whipped out my Leatherman and popped a back panel off the woodsman’s torso. The wiring was clean, with no apparent cuts or splices, so whoever messed with the big guy really did a killer job. This part of the drama was looking more and more like a very corporeal culprit, as opposed to something attached to one of the artifacts, but I kept poking around just to be sure.

  I wandered through Contemporary America, pushing buttons that made Robert Pattinson’s eyes light up and his skin sparkle, and turning a knob that made a computer-generated Taylor Lautner get really hairy and even shorter than normal, but I didn’t see anything that didn’t look way more like it was man-made than anything touched by a monster. “Skeeter,” I said, tapping my Bluetooth.

  “Yeah, Bubba?” He sounded like he was doing something, and I couldn’t tell if I interrupted his nap time or his porn time. Either way, I didn’t much care.

  “I’m bored. Is there anything in any of this shit that looks haunted?”

  “Nope, nothing.”

  “Possessed?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Magical in any way?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Then what the hell is going on here?” I asked the air.

  “If you ask me, that mouthy little bitch is getting what’s coming to her, and it’s about time,” came a voice from the other side of a display case. I stood up on tiptoes to see over the case full of props from The Walking Dead and peered into the beady eyes of a very sour-faced old dude. He looked like he’d spent the last two years chewing lemon rinds raw, and the fifteen before that getting his ass kicked in high school. He was every stereotype of the kind you expect to find working in a museum. He was skinny, short, maybe 5’ 8”, with a short-sleeve blue dress shirt, a darker blue tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and I shit you not, an honest-to-God pocket protector.

  “And who might you be?” I asked Mr. Personality.

  “I’m Dr. Douglas Cornwell III, senior exhibits programmer and expert in early twentieth-century amusement paraphernalia.” He stepped around the case and held out his hand. We shook and he said, “I apologize for being snippy earlier. It’s been a very trying period throughout the entire facility.”

  “And I assume the mouthy little bitch you were talking about is Dr. Knowles?” I asked. I didn’t like this dude, and not just because he was slagging Joe’s ex, who seemed okay for a big-brain type. Something about him just irritated the piss out of me, probably the way he managed to stare up at me and still look down his nose at me.

  “Dr. Knowles-it-all?” He almost spat when he said the name. “Yeah, that’s her. She’s the little upstart that got my exhibit bounced until later this year, and out of the main halls, too! Now I’ll only have two little rooms to display the entire depth and breadth of Americana toy-making. That’s almost impossible, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “I reckon it’s good you’ve got more time to plan, then,” I said.

  “Oh, is that what you ‘reckon’? Well, that just goes to show what you know, which is nothing. She didn’t bump me from the calendar to give me more time; she did it to get herself more money. My exhibit won’t come online now until well after the budget for the next three years’ worth of capital expenses is approved, not to mention this year’s raise cycle!”

  It all made sense suddenly. “So you’re really just pissed at her because now you won’t get a raise, or a new computer, or whatever,” I said.

  “That bitch’s machinations—”

  “Evil plans, maneuvering,” Skeeter whispered in my ear.

  “—have cost me an opportunity to acquire several priceless pieces for the museum’s collection already, and without a significant increase in my departmental budget, my conference travel plans may have to be curtailed, or even cancelled. And several buying trips I had planned for New Mexico and the Southwest may be put on hold as well, all because of Dr. Knowles and her monster exhibit. Well, I, for one, am glad to hear it’s being shut down.”

  “Shut down?” I asked. “Nobody’s said anything to us about a shutdown. We just got here to look into things. There’s no need to shut stuff down before we get a chance to poke around and find out if there’s a supernatural element in the stuff that’s been going on around here.”

  “Well, of course there isn’t,” the snotty little curator scoffed.

  “And you know this how?” I asked. “Are you behind all the troubles Dr. Knowles has been having?”

  His pasty face went half a shade whiter at my question, but he recovered enough to splutter, “Of course not! I simply meant that as there are no monsters, these supernatural theories will quickly be disproven, then we can go on about the business of running a museum, not a theme
park!” He waved a finger in the air, for emphasis I guess, then stormed off past me. Well, truth is, he tried to, but when he stormed by me, he kinda ran into my shoulder and bounced off. I reckon he was accustomed to people yielding the right of way to him a lot more than I did, because he tried it again, and bounced off again. This time he turned sideways and scooted between me and an exhibit case and vanished into the bowels of the museum.

  “I see you met my biggest fan.” Becca’s voice came from my right, over by the entrance to the exhibit.

  “Yeah, he’s a dick,” I said. Joe glared at me a little, but Becca just giggled. “What’s his beef with you? You steal his parking place, or make them convert the cigar lounge to a women’s restroom?”

  Becca laughed again, then her face went serious. “I honestly don’t know the root of his problem with me. Maybe he just hates educated women. But he’s worked against everything I’ve tried to accomplish since the day I got here. He tried to get funding blocked for the monster exhibit, then tried to stir up community sentiment against the exhibit saying I was promoting witchcraft and Satanism.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Bubba!” Joe shot me a look, but I ignored him.

  “It’s a valid question,” I said. “So are you promoting witchcraft and Satanism?”