The Fourth Bear nc-2

by Jasper Fforde

  “Vertical stripes, mainly.”

  “Why?”

  Jack watched Ashley think. Due to the Rambosian physiology of a translucent outer membrane filled with a blend of gelatinous liquid, Jack really could see his mind working. “Amorous linguini” was how one unkind observer put it—but that wasn’t far wrong.

  “It’s the linear uniformity in the vertical plane,” Ashley explained with a shiver, and turned a darker shade of blue. “We don’t much fancy bar codes, railings or pinstripe suits either. Mind you, horizontally we have no problem with any of them—which is why we like to wear our pinstripes perpendicular to the norm.”

  “I always wondered about that,” replied Jack slowly. Conversation was never easy with Ashley. There really wasn’t much in common between humans and Rambosians—except for a passionate interest in order and bureaucracy. During his lunch hour, Ashley could often be found indulging in his hobby of “carspotting,” which is like trainspotting, only with cars. On the weekends Rambosians would cluster around one of the town’s many vehicle-number-recognition cameras, where they’d all get a bit tipsy reading the binary data stream. Other than that they lived their own lives and didn’t say very much. That was the thing about aliens that no one ever really expected. They’re a bit dull.

  The walkie-talkie crackled into life. “Jack, are you there?”

  It was Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, Jack’s number two at the Nursery Crime Division. They had been together since the Humpty affair, and although there had been a few hiccups in the early days, they now got on well. She didn’t know why she’d been allocated to the NCD but was glad that she was. Despite its being a career black hole and the butt of many station jokes, she felt somehow that she belonged. She didn’t know why.

  Jack picked up the radio and keyed the mike. “NCD-1 in position front of house. All quiet.”

  “I thought I was NCD-1,” replied Mary over the airwaves. “I’m in the front line today.”

  “No, you’re NCD-2. Ashley’s NCD-3, and Baker and Gretel are NCD-4 and -5.”

  “I should be NCD-3,” cut in Baker. “I’ve been working part-time at the division longer than anyone.”

  “Shall we stick to names?” asked Mary. “It’s going to be a lot easier.”

  “Whatever. Spratt at front of house, nothing to report.”

  “Good,” replied Mary. “We have thumb reentry in T minus? five minutes.”

  This time there’d be no escape for the Scissor-man.

  Inside the house Mary was briefing Conrad’s parents for the last time. They stared at her anxiously, but with both Jack and Ashley at the front and Gretel and Baker at the back, it seemed as safe a sting operation as they could make it.

  “Your backs are to be turned for Conrad’s thumb to go in at 2330,” explained Mary as she checked her watch. “At the same time he should lean back on his chair, refuse to eat his soup and play with these matches. I’ll be in the closet and on the radio, so if we can’t catch the Scissor-man before he reaches the house, I’ll give the thumb-out order and Conrad aborts all actions. Do you understand?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman looked at each other and then at Conrad, who at seventeen was old enough to understand the risks. Like many of the children in the area, he had lived in a condition of understated terror for so long that he now barely noticed. He had never had a brush with the cautionaries himself; the presence of Roland Snork in the neighborhood was enough for most children. Roland’s face was frozen in an ugly grimace because the wind had changed while he was making a face, and although the thirteen cosmetic surgeries had alleviated the problem somewhat, he was one of the more obvious warnings to uncautionary behavior. But if all went well, children like Roland wouldn’t suffer a lifetime of humiliation for a few injudiciously made faces. The parents of Cautionary Valley had banded together and unanimously voted for normality. For surly, grunty teenagers who dropped their clothes on the floor and stared vacantly out from behind lanky, unwashed hair. For untied shoelaces, messy rooms, homework left until the last moment, inappropriate boy/girlfriends and unregulated nose picking. For brooding silences, funny smells in the bathroom, hours spent on video games and ignored calls to the dinner table. It all seemed so normal, so blissful. They had phoned the police, who gladly batted it down the line to the Nursery Crime Division.

  “We’re happy to go ahead, Sergeant,” said Mr. Hoffman with a dryness in his throat. “There are methods other than terror to instill discipline. We want to be like normal families, where threats of mutilation and a sorry end to achieve good behavior are met with a sarcastic, ‘Yeah, Dad, like way to go—you’re such a zoid, like, y’know. Tight.’”

  He sighed deeply and turned to his son. “Conrad? Are you happy to go ahead?”

  The boy nodded his head enthusiastically.

  “Yes, Father,” he replied good-naturedly, “if it is for the good of everyone. Would anyone like a sandwich or a cup of tea?”

  “No, Conrad. There’ll be no more tea making for you after tonight.”

  “Are you sure? I could bake you all a cake, too—and then play the piano for your entertainment before taking the dog for a walk and repainting the spare room.”

  Even Mary found him a bit creepy. She didn’t have any children of her own—unless you counted her collection of ex-boyfriends—but children to her were meant to be something a little more than mindless automatons.

  The Hoffmans hugged each other nervously, but when Mr. Hoffman shook Mary’s hand, she noticed that his left thumb was missing.

  “I was one of the first,” he muttered sadly, following her gaze.

  “A life lived in fear is a life half lived. A life half lived is fear lived in half. A life half feared is fear half lived.”

  Some people have a way with words, but Hoffman wasn’t one of them.

  “What exactly is the Scissor-man?” asked Mrs. Hoffman, who found the idea of characters from cautionary tales made flesh and blood a little strange, as well she might.

  “We call them PDRs,” explained Mary. “Persons of Dubious Reality. Refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence, and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless. They do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done—and it’s our job to stop them.”

  “Are you sure the Nursery Crime Division is up to it?” Mrs. Hoffman added, mirroring a strongly felt suspicion within the community that the regular force wasn’t taking their concerns seriously.

  “Of course,” replied Mary confidently. “Only two months ago we successfully detained a ghoulie, a ghostie and a long-legged beastie.”

  “And the bump in the night?” asked Mr. Hoffman anxiously.

  “What about that?”

  “Ah,” returned Mary, scratching her chin thoughtfully, “no, the bump got away—but I’m sure you would agree a seventy-five percent success rate in that particular operation was a very good result indeed.”

  Constables Charlie Baker and Gretel Brown-Horrocks were waiting in the back garden, covering the house from the potting shed in case the Scissor-man came from that direction. Unlike Ashley, Mary and Jack, Baker and Gretel were occasional members of the NCD, brought in only when the need arose. Baker had been designated a D-minus in “public social skills” owing to his acute hypochondria and was used only for internal duties within the Reading Central police station.

  “Want some Vicks?” he said to Gretel, offering her the small bottle after trying in a most noisy and unpleasant fashion to clear his sinuses, which seemed to be incessantly blocked with possibly the finest cold viruses that natural selection had managed to create.

  “No thanks,” replied Gretel in her soft German accent. Her skills in forensic accountancy kept her much in demand, not only in Reading but throughout most of the Berks & Wilts consta
bulary. NCD work was meant to “get her out more.” She was glad that it did. At the end of the Humpty affair, she had met the man who was now her husband. He was seven foot three, and she was six foot two and a quarter. It was a match made perhaps not in heaven but certainly nearer the ceiling.

  “Do you have to sniffle constantly?” she asked him.

  “The sniffling’s nothing,” replied Baker. “Do you want to see my rash?”

  “You showed it to me already.”

  “That was a tiddler. This new one covers two-thirds of my body and has raised pimples.”

  “It does not.”

  “It does so—or it will soon, if my diagnosis is correct. What’s the time?”

  “One minute to go. We keep our eyes open—and for God’s sake stop that sniffling.”

  Baker made one great big huge supersniffle that drew everything swilling around his lower sinuses into the space between his eyes, where gravity, being the force it was, would ensure that it would not stay for long.

  Back inside the house, Mary counted off the seconds on her watch. At five seconds to go, she keyed the mike on her walkie-talkie and said, “Thumb reentry T minus five seconds.”

  After consulting her watch for those last five seconds, she climbed into the closet, shut the door to nothing more than a crack and signaled to the Hoffmans. They nodded sagely and began the routine they had rehearsed down the road at the supermarket, where the Scissor-man had no influence.

  Mr. Hoffman, in an overly dramatic fashion, said, “We’re going to leave you here to finish your soup on your own, Conrad. Don’t play with those matches, don’t lean back on your chair, and don’t you dare suck your thumb when our backs are turned!”

  They sighed, walked out of the kitchen and closed the door behind them. Conrad was now alone in the kitchen, with only Mary watching through a crack in the closet door. He stared at his thumb for a moment, having never even contemplated sucking it—not since he was first warned about the Scissor-man. His father had a missing thumb to prove it, and Conrad was always careful to avoid getting his thumb anywhere near his mouth, just in case the Scissor-man should make a mistake.

  He paused for a moment, thumb outstretched, and looked at Mary again. She nodded to him and smiled. If they were to catch the Scissor-man, this was the only way. After wavering for a few more seconds, Conrad opened his mouth, and in went the thumb. He paused for a few moments then obediently carried out the plan they had rehearsed. He leaned back on his chair, idly struck a match and said petulantly, “I don’t want my soup!”

  Jack and Ashley had climbed out of the car and were looking about attentively at the time the thumb went in. There was a distant rumble of thunder, and somewhere a dog barked. Other than that, nothing seemed unusual.

  “What does the Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man look like?” asked Ashley.

  “Tall, red-legged—carries a huge pair of scissors. Believe me, you’ll know him when you see him.”

  Ashley looked down at his own hands. He had three fingers and two opposable thumbs on each hand, and any of them would grow back if lost. The idea of a thumb’s not growing back hadn’t occurred to him until that morning.

  Gretel and Baker were alert but, like Jack and Ashley, also to no avail. No Scissor-man—nothing. The night was clear and crisp, and the moon had risen so it was easy to see. There was nothing to be seen in either the Hoffmans’ garden or in any of the next-door gardens. There shouldn’t have been anyway. The entire neighborhood had been evacuated for the operation. Only personnel involved in the sting were in residence.

  “Gretel?” came Mary’s voice over the radio. “Anything your end?”

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “Stay put,” came in Jack’s voice. “We wait. Mary, is Conrad still sucking his thumb?”

  Mary looked out of the closet and confirmed that yes, he was still sucking his thumb, not eating his soup and leaning back on his chair while playing with matches, something that he was actually finding great fun. They waited five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Nothing.

  Mr. Hoffman put his head around the door. “Is anything happening?”

  “No, sir. We must be patient.”

  Mr. Hoffman said, “Okay,” and shut the door again.

  Every minute Mary would ask for a status report, and after twenty reports in as many minutes she keyed the mike and said in an exasperated tone, “Jack, when was the last cautionary-related crime?”

  Jack turned to Ashley. The alien had many talents, but only a few that might have been considered useful. One that definitely had its uses was his total recall.

  “Five-day accelerated starvation due to soup refusal, July ninth, 1978. Single thumbectomy on December twenty-third, 1979. A fatal house fire on the night of January twenty-sixth, 1985, might have been match-play-related, but it was never proved.”

  Jack relayed the information to Mary, who replied, “Twenty-five years since the last definite scissoring. What if he’s retired or inactive or something?”

  “You mean Cautionary Valley has been living in terror for over two decades when they needn’t have?” said Gretel from her position in the back garden. “I’d be a bit pissed off if that was the case.”

  “It’s a possibility,” replied Jack, “but only that. I say we give it another half hour, then abort and go away for a rethink. Briggs will have something to say about the overtime as it is.”

  Everyone radioed in agreement, and all was quiet again.

  “Gretel?” said Baker in the potting shed.

  “What?” replied Gretel, who was thinking about tall babies.

  “You’re a woman.”

  “I know this.”

  “Yes, well…” he said a bit awkwardly, “I just thought… do you think Pippa would go out on a date if I asked her?”

  “You mean beautiful Pippa in the control room? No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

  “I mean ‘No’ as in ‘No, I don’t think she’d go out with you.’"

  “You might have paused for thought or something,” said Baker in an affronted tone, “or been ambiguous—to save my feelings, y’know.”

  “Sorry. You ask a question and I answer it,” replied Gretel, who had a reputation for directness that sometimes didn’t sit well with higher authority. “I’ll tell you why. Remember that time you sneezed on her?”

  “It wasn’t just her.”

  “I know. It’s just that girls don’t really like that sort of thing.”

  Baker nodded slowly. He’d suspected for a while that they might not. Still, he never thought it really fair to have a girlfriend, since he had only six months to live. The thing was, he’d had only six months to live for over thirteen years now.

  “Hmm,” said Charlie, half to himself, “I think I need a doctor who’ll give me a year to live.”

  “Do you like it here?” asked Jack to Ashley. They were leaning on the car but still keeping a close lookout on the front of the house.

  “Here, in this street?”

  “No, Ashley, this planet.”

  “Most agreeable,” replied Ashley happily. “The filing is excellent, the sitcoms top-notch and the bureaucracy to die for. But far and away the best feature is your digital mobile phone networks. We can taste the binary data stream in the air. It gives your cities a favorably congenial atmosphere—to you, something like the bouquet of a fine wine.”

  Mary was beginning to get a bit uncomfortable inside the closet, and she looked at her watch with increasing frequency, willing the hands to move faster so they could all go home. She shifted to get more comfortable, the door swung shut, and there was a soft click.

  “Blast!” she muttered as she gently pushed at the door. It was no good. It was shut fast.

  “Jack,” came Mary’s embarrassed voice over the walkie-talkie, “I’ve just locked myself in the closet and I can’t see the kitchen anymore. Can we abort?”

  Jack looked around. The street was empty and quiet. He had said they�
�d go to midnight, and he liked to be good to his word.

  “No,” he said to Mary over the radio as he walked through the garden gate.

  “Sir,” came Gretel’s voice over the airwaves, “it’s just a thought, but my mother told me never to hide in closets in case… I was locked in.”

  Jack looked around again. It had been quiet before, but now it seemed somehow even quieter. There was no distant hum of traffic, nothing. It was as though Cautionary Valley were suddenly an island, cast adrift from the rest of Reading and the world. He’d felt it before in the same place twenty-five years earlier. He shivered with the onset of a cold breeze, and his breath showed in the night air.

  He brought the radio to his mouth and whispered, “He’s here.”

  He signaled to Ashley to stay put, ran in a circuitous route to the front door and entered the house. When he opened the kitchen door, he stopped short, as there was a small conflagration on the kitchen table. The matches Conrad had been playing with had caught fire with an impossibly bright flame and were now rapidly burning a path up the table to where the boy sat, rooted to the spot with fear. They’d thought of this, and Jack killed the fire with a handy extinguisher, opened the closet door to let Mary out, then barked to Conrad, “The thumb—back in!”

  In his panic the boy had stopped sucking his thumb, but now he obediently did as he was told. No sooner was the thumb in when the back door was flung violently open, and before Jack and Mary could even blink, a wild-eyed figure in crimson trousers leaped in brandishing a giant pair of gold scissors. With expert precision the tips of the scissors closed around Conrad’s thumb, and the Scissor-man would doubtless have snipped it off and been gone again in a flash if Jack hadn’t shouted, “HOLD IT!”

  The Scissor-man froze. His bloodshot eyes darted toward Jack with a mixture of fear and insanity. He looked gaunt and pale, with an untidy shock of nicotine-stained hair; a tailor’s tape measure hung from the pocket of his bottle green jacket.