by Gary K. Wolf
“In the beginning, yes, it was. According to legend, it performed splendidly for such wealthy and powerful potentates as Kubla Khan and King Solomon. Unfortunately, the imprisoned genie eventually found a way to circumvent the wizard’s intentions. It began to throw in what we moderns call a ringer, most often in the form of a time limit. Say you wished for wealth. You would get it. But after perhaps a year or two, the spell would dissolve, and your fortune would fritter away. The same with love, power, whatever you’d asked for. The person who made the wish would have his good life come crashing down around him and never know why.”
“Could he remake the wish?”
“Yes, up to his three wish limit.” Cackleberry pushed his spectacles up and perched them on the top of his head, but they kept slipping off the backside so he finally gave up, removed them completely, and laid them on his desk. “According to the legend, most wishees used their three wishes quite rapidly and did not have any left to correct things when the genie’s trickery came to light.”
“What became of this lantern?”
He shrugged. At least I think he shrugged. Since he didn’t have any shoulders, there was really no way to tell for sure. “Legend has it that someone destroyed it.”
“How do you do that?”
“It’s not nearly as simple as you might think.” He crossed his hands over his breast pocket. “First of all, you must be pure of heart. Above the temptations of ordinary mortals. You must call forth the genie, best him in hand-to-hand combat, and drown him in the sea. Not the easiest of tasks.”
“What about the magic words that get the genie to appear? What are they?”
Cackleberry tamped some tobacco into a long pipe specially curved to follow the line of his stomach. “The words have been irretrievably lost. Even the old legends fail to specify them.”
“Would they have been printed somewhere on the lantern itself? Say inscribed on the bottom?”
“Possibly, but highly unlikely. It would have made the lantern too easy to operate. Although there are stories to the effect that this is how it was done. Thousands of years ago unscrupulous merchants painted bogus incantations on common teakettles and passed them off as magic lanterns, an event which gave rise to the Persian custom of inscribing simple platitudes onto the bottoms of such objects.”
“Could anyone who knew the magic words use the lantern?”
“Yes, although naturally the lantern would not work for humans.”
“It wouldn’t? Why not?”
“Because it only worked for bonafide ‘toons.”
That tracked with the message on the scroll, the part about great tragedy resulting should this fiendish device ever fall into the hands of a ‘toon. “Did Jessica ever show you a photo of a teakettle and ask you if it was a magic lantern?”
He scratched his head, or maybe his ear, or maybe his neck. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact,” he said.
I handed him the Alice in Wonderland picture I had lifted from the library book. “Is this the teakettle she showed you?”
He put on his glasses and studied the photo. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the one. In fact this is the same photo of it, although hers was still in the book.”
“And what did you tell her about this teakettle? Is it a magic lantern?”
He looked at me strangely, and then he laughed. “You’re spoofing with me, aren’t you? Just the way Jessica was. Of course, that teakettle isn’t a magic lantern. How could it be? There is no such thing as a magic lantern. Never has been, and never will be. The magic lantern is a mythological object. Everyone knows that.”
I stopped by to see my friend the scientist, the one I’d asked to analyze the teakettle.
He gave me his report. It was a common teakettle, plain and simple. Made out of ordinary iron. It contained traces of nothing more exbtic than orange pekoe tea.
Next I called my friend in the police department. He had completed his check of Rocco and Dominick DeGreasy. It was pretty much as Carol had said. They had grown up dirt-poor in a crummy neighborhood. They had come out of left field in the business world. One day nobody had heard of them, the next day they owned the biggest cartoon syndicate in town. Everybody had chalked if off to a combination of good judgment, luck, and the judicious application of raw muscle. I was about to hang up when my informant threw in the kicker.
“Got to hand it to them,” he said. “They’re doing a great job of crossing the line.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“According to their birth records,” he said, “both Rocco and Dominick DeGreasy are bonafide, humanoid ‘toons.”
Chapter: •36•
I went home and found Roger taping his nose back on with cellophane tape. “I’m starting to disintegrate,” he said plaintively. “I’m afraid it won’t be long now.”
He had reaffixed his nose a good half-inch off center, making him look like he hadn’t quite cleared the entrance to a revolving door.
“Come here,” I told him. “Let me help you with that.”
I led him into the kitchen where I keep my household repair stuff. I took out a tube of glue and untaped his nose. I put a generous dollop on it, and another in the middle of his face. I stuck his nose in place and scooted it around until I had it perfectly centered. “I’ll have to hold it here for a few minutes until this dries.”
“What’s the use?” he said. “You get my nose stuck on, and something else falls off. My ear or my mouth or my arm.”
“So what?” I told him. “I got plenty of glue. We’ll keep you together.”
He tried to nod, but I had his head locked under my arm and he couldn’t move it, so he grunted instead. “Tell me,” I said, “did you have your teakettle before you married Jessica?”
“Yes,” said Roger. I let him loose, and he gave his replaced nose a test wiggle. It held up just fine. “Yes, I got it about a month prior to meeting her.”
“Where did you keep it?”
“In the kitchen, on the stove. Where else would you keep a teakettle?”
I mentally pictured Roger’s place. “As I remember it, from your living room, you can’t see the stove or anything on it. Right?”
“Yes,” he said somewhat baffled.
“When you proposed to Jessica, did you first sing her a chorus of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’? Particularly, did you sing out the last line of the song, the part that goes ‘May your dreams come true’?”
Roger scratched his head, but gently. He didn’t want to risk dislodging any more of his bodily parts. “I can’t remember. It seems I did sing her something, and since that was our song, it was probably the one, but I can’t remember for sure.”
“What about just before you got your contract from Rocco DeGreasy? Had you been singing that song then, and maybe wishing for a contract?”
He spread his hands open. I noticed he had lost a digit from each hand and was down to six fingers total. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I honestly can’t remember. Why? What bearing could it possibly have on the case?”
“Ill tell you in time. First, I’m going to ask you something that might seem kind of strange, but it is important. Have you ever seen a genie come out of your teakettle?”
“Are you kidding? Of course, I’ve never seen a genie come out of my teakettle. There are no such things as genies. Everybody knows that. A genie is the ‘toon equivalent of a human’s bogeyman. Something parents invent to frighten children into going to sleep.”
I had the teakettle inside a paper sack. I took it out and showed it to Roger. “Is this your teakettle?”
“That’s the one.”
I set it down in the middle of the floor. “Do me a favor. Sing me a chorus of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask questions. Just sing.”
“If you say so.” Roger sang the song.
Even though I had no idea what effect a bullet might have on a genie, as Roger approached the final, critical line, the
line inscribed on the teakettle’s bottom, I reached into my trench coat pocket for my gun.
Roger arrived at the final line, “May your dreams come true,” and sang it.
I stared tensely at the teakettle as Roger’s balloon drifted past.
Nothing happened.
Of course, nothing happened. What did I expect to happen? This was a teakettle, not a magic lantern. There is no such thing as a magic lantern. Everybody knows that.
I picked up the teakettle and tossed it to Roger. “Here, sport. Make yourself useful. Take this into the kitchen and brew us up a nice, hot pot of tea.”
Chapter: •37•
Roger, crashing around the kitchen, didn’t hear the knock on the door and just as well, because it turned out to be Jessica.
You could replace Jessica’s nose with a turnip, and she wouldn’t ever be ugly, but today she wasn’t the glamour girl who made a million hearts go pitty-pat, either.
The way she had her hair severely pulled back and knotted gave her head the shape of an olive, a perfect setting for her pimento-red eyes. She wore a rag-tag City College sweatshirt and shapeless woolen pants. Her tears flowed down her cheeks heavily enough to rust her necklace. A string of word balloons bubbled out of her so fast, she could have gotten work as an aerator tube in the bottom of a fish tank.
I shut the door to the kitchen so she and Roger wouldn’t see one another.
Jessica sat on the sofa and took a stab at dabbing her cheeks dry with a lace hankie four inches square. It didn’t even make a dent. I would have offered her something bigger, but she’d never soak up her tears with anything short of a bedsheet. Since I only owned one of those, she’d just have to make do with what she had. “You got a problem?” I asked.
She responded with a mishmash of speech and balloon, five words spoken and three floating free in the air. “I’m about to be arrested for Roger’s murder.”
“How do you know?”
“I have a policeman fan downtown who told me that Captain Cleaver went in for an arrest warrant this afternoon.”
“You know what he’s got on you?”
Her head bobbed up and down. “Apparently there’s a night life tour bus that goes along Roger’s street. Cleaver contacted everyone aboard. As it turns out, several tourists saw me going up to Roger’s bungalow that night. One even took my picture. That, plus Roger’s dying words, gives Cleaver enough to indict.”
A sharp bit of spadework on Cleaver’s part. The guy could have been a detective superstar if he’d only been born into the right species. “Sounds like he’s nailed you.”
“But I didn’t do it,” she sobbed. “I swear I didn’t do it. You’re the only one I’ve got to turn to. Help me. Please.”
I stuck two cigarettes in my rnouth and lit them both. I held the lighted match in my hand, watching it burn closer and closer to my fingers. Only when I could feel the heat, only when it really started to tingle, did I reach over with my other hand and snuff it out. I passed her one of the ciggies. “I’ll do what I can for you,” I told her, “but it doesn’t come free.”
She brushed a few bedraggled strands of hair out of her eyes. “Whatever you want,” she said.
“I want you to tell me a story, a fairy story about a teakettle. And this time skip the malarkey about gold, jewels, and the Templar Knights.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, but you’ll think I’m fooling you again.”
“Try me and see.”
She took a deep pull on her cigarette and blew a smoky veil around both of us. “The teakettle’s not a teakettle at all. It’s really the fabled magic lantern of ancient Persia. I first became aware of it when I overheard a conversation between Rocco and Dominick. They had apparently been looking for it for years. Ever since they used it to cross the line.”
“I know about them being born ‘toons,” I said. “You telling me this magic lantern made them human?”
“Correct. And made them rich, too. It cost them two wishes apiece. They each had one wish remaining, but before they could use it, a thief stole the lantern from them. They searched the world over for it, but never saw it again.
“Not that it really mattered to them, not then. They were wealthy, and they were human. Rocco even married a human woman and fathered a human child. Then, slowly, the spell went sour. The syndicate went into a tailspin, and so did Dominick and Rocco.”
I thought back to Rocco’s office and the way his troll stood beside him with a net. At the time I had figured it was because the troll wasn’t too bright. Now I realized it was actually because when Rocco drank he sometimes gave off ear puffs. “So they had to retrieve the lantern and use their final wishes to reverse the reversals,” I said.
“Yes,” said Jessica. “They searched again but couldn’t locate it. Then Roger popped into the scene.”
A few more pieces of the jigsaw clicked into place. “Your unwilling marriage taken together with Rocco’s compulsion to give Roger a contract said ‘magic lantern’ to Rocco and Domnick.”
“Right. Shortly after I returned to Rocco and told him my story, he showed me a sketch of the lantern and asked me if Roger had anything like it, though he didn’t tell me what it was. I said it looked like Roger’s teakettle, the one he kept on his stove. Rocco drafted a Baby Herman strip set in Roger’s kitchen and sent Carol Masters over to photograph it. When he and Dominick saw her results, they knew they had found the lantern again.
“They tried to buy it away from Roger, and even to steal it but failed.
“I knew how to deactivate Roger’s alarm. I was about to break in and get the lantern for myself when Roger shot Rocco, and my whole plan went out the window. So I improvised. I followed Roger to his bungalow. I told him I had seen him kill Rocco but would forget about it in return for his teakettle.”
“Kind of an odd swap. You tell him why you wanted it?”
“No, and he didn’t ask.”
“Did he admit the crime?”
She shook her head and the tear-soaked makeup on one of her cheeks turned into a mudslide. “Not in so many words. He feigned innocence, but I knew better. You learn to read a man like a book when you live with him for a year.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She untied the scarf from around her neck and wiped it across her forehead. It came away soaked. “Roger told me sure, take his teakettle. He told me it was upstairs on the nightstand in his bedroom.
“As I went up to get it, he sat down at the piano and started to yodel that sentimental piece of trash he always referred to as ‘our song.’
“I searched the bedroom high and low, but no magic lantern. I saw then what that pathetic rabbit had in mind, with the bedroom, and the song. He was trying to seduce me.”
“Can’t blame him for trying.”
“I suppose not.” She brushed the tears off her cheek and looped her hair behind her ears. It made her look a little better, but not much. “I was about to go back downstairs when I heard Roger talking to somebody. The two of them seemed to be arguing. I was afraid it might be the police come to arrest Roger, so I ducked back into the bedroom.
“Then I heard a shot. I rushed downstairs and found Roger lying across the banister, dead.
“The front door was open. I looped the piano music around the doorknob to keep it that way. Deactivating the alarm was such a complex process, and I was so nervous I didn’t want to risk it.
“I checked in the kitchen, but the lantern was gone. So I left.”
“Any idea what happened?”
“I suppose Dominick must have gotten into the house, shot Roger, and taken the lantern with him.”
I had a few more questions, but I never got to ask them, since just then the kitchen door swung open and out came Roger, carrying two cups on a tray. “Tea time,” he said jovially, saw Jessica on the sofa, and swallowed his own balloon.
Chapter: •38•
High noon had arrived. Roger and Jessica faced each other across my living room.
Je
ssica’s eyes popped out slightly, and her mouth chewed the air.
“Jessica,” Roger said in a scrolly script framed with teeny-tiny hearts. “I love you. No matter what you did, I love you, and I always will.”
“You’re dead,” said Jessica, panic nibbling at the edge of her voice. “I went to your funeral. How can you be here when you’re dead?”
“That’s not really Roger,” I told her. “That’s his doppel.”
“What? His doppel?” Jessica backed to the wall, as far from Roger as she could get. “That’s impossible. Roger’s been dead for nearly two days. Doppels don’t last anywhere near that long. An hour, two at the most. That’s how long doppels last. This can’t be a doppel. This must be the real McCoy.”
“No, he’s a doppel all right.” I pointed at Roger’s sniffer. “You can see the glue line where I stuck on his nose.”
“Jessica.” Roger set down his tray and approached his wife. “I know you didn’t leave me of your own free will. I know deep down you still love me. What scant time I have left in this world I want to spend with you. Visiting those intimate restaurants we used to enjoy. Going for walks in the country. Riding the merry-go-round in the park.”
He reached out to touch her. She skedaddled away from him so fast you’d have thought his hand had fangs. “Get away from me, creep. What do you mean, I didn’t leave you of my own free will? You bet I did. I never loved you, never. Not when we married, and not now.”
Roger stopped in his tracks. The hearts around his words cracked in half, fluttered to the floor, and melted into about a hundred piles of lumpy mush. I’m not the kind of guy who feels sorry for anybody. I think most people make their own problems and deserve what they get. But I’ve got to tell you, right then that rabbit gave my heart string a tug that nearly yanked it out of my chest. “I think you ought to know,” I told Jessica, “that it was Roger here who talked me into handling your case.”
She looked at Roger with all the gratitude you’d show toward something that slunk into your garden and nibbled the leaves off your brussels sprouts.
