EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  ‘Quite so,’ said Bone, chewing a bite of the Omelette aux Fines-Herbes, which is his standard fallback dish in a strange restaurant, which this one certainly was. ‘Perhaps something literally flowery, such as his “Embracing Lotus Petals” head crusher, might be the answer, but perhaps that would be just a little too gory for the children. Perhaps you could have him hovering over that ghastly cage which lets rats feed on you, one section at a time, the thing he calls the “Six Gates to Paradise.”

  ‘Have you made those up?’ asked Waldo, looking a little pale. ‘Has he actually used such things?’

  Bone smiled and nodded and took a little sip of mineral water.

  ‘Repeatedly,’ he said. ‘And with considerable enjoyment. His masterpiece along those lines was a blasphemous, mechanical statue of Buddha which was able to perform a very credible variation of the “Death of a Thousand Cuts” on its victims. The thing’s a forerunner of your Waldobots actually, and when one considers how many days it takes to execute that particular torture properly by hand, one is forced to admit the device certainly was a genuine time-saver.’

  ‘I think you are making poor Mr Waldo a little sick,’ said Athenee.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Waldo, waving his hand vaguely. ‘No, really, I’m quite interested. But I have to admit I didn’t realize he was that awful a person.’

  ‘He is,’ I said. ‘But his new pals won’t have any trouble keeping up with him, though they each have their little quirks. The Professor, for example, likes to make little scientific points as he kills you, if he can, such as how much of you can be surgically removed by laser beams before you’re actually dead. I remember once when that kind of curiosity naturally led to his figuring out he could let a witness live and suffer for years and not tell on him, if he only removed the brain of the informant and sewed it up in the skull of a chimpanzee. We once broke in on the place he was hiding too late to save the life of the witness, but at least we were in time to prevent him from completing the operation.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Bone, laying down his fork and studying our host closely, ‘I think Mademoiselle Athenee is quite right and that we should stop telling Mr Waldo these gruesome things. We’ve obviously upset him dreadfully.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Waldo. ‘Please. I’m really very interested. It’s just that I had no idea these people were capable of such things. But we have to deal with them, don’t we?’ He swallowed. ‘How about Spectrobert?’

  ‘My father,’ said Athenee.

  ‘Oh!’ said Waldo, startled. ‘I didn’t know! How did he get involved with these horrible men?’

  ‘Because he’s as bad as they are,’ she said. ‘Maybe worse.’

  ‘A brutal and inventive sadist of inexhaustible appetite, our Spectrobert,’ said Bone. ‘He is, in a way, particularly chilling because no one knows his original identity, since no one has ever seen his real face and lived. He either keeps his head covered with a meticulously cut, black-silk version of an executioner’s hood, or shields his features in an endless series of brilliant disguises. The essential trick of him is that he could be anybody; it lends him a highly effective sort of existential eeriness.’

  ‘He’s the one I want to get,’ said Ashman.

  Bone paused and took a thoughtful sip of water.

  ‘He was, for instance, an exact simulacrum of Weston, here, when he very nearly killed me in a singularly bizarre mansion, bizarre even for San Francisco, atop Nob Hill. Weston himself was in full view at the time, rendered unconscious and tied in a chair, and I had ample chance to compare him and Spectrobert’s imitation of him carefully. Outside of a slight variation in an arching of the left nostril, there was no discernible difference between them.

  ‘Weston and I were in that mansion because we had been hired to protect the eccentric family which dwelt there and I am afraid we did a rather bad job of it as Spectrobert killed them all, one by one and very horribly, with the claws and working jaw of a dreadful costume he’d designed and worn for that purpose. He was, you see, posing as a family monster which the family believed they had inadvertently imported from their ancestral Scottish castle when they relocated to this country.

  ‘It was, perhaps, the most grotesque disguise of his career; certainly effective, decidedly deadly, and I will confess that during one livid moment—when I came upon him on a darkened staircase, tearing the head of Angus McGiver off the old man’s shoulders with a single twist—his skillful use of it briefly convinced me the family’s hoary old superstition was, in fact, the absolute truth.’

  ‘How horrible!’ gasped Waldo.

  ‘Quite so,’ agreed Bone. ‘I still find it hard to believe that my intellect could have been so appallingly misled, but it happened, nonetheless. In any case, Spectrobert offered to remove his Weston disguise and show me his real face before he killed me with an acid-spraying device he’d specially constructed for the purpose, but I declined out of a sense of honor as I’d observed that Weston had worked himself loose and would shortly rescue me and that, therefore, I would not die, layer by layer, according to Spetrobert’s plan. To this day I’m still not sure whether my gesture was absurdly high-minded, or if I regret it or not.

  ‘They’re terrible, then,’ said Waldo, staring down at his plate. ‘All of them. They’re much worse than I thought.’

  Later that evening, after we’d made the last plans we could think of and Bone and I were alone and I was about to leave, Bone stopped me with a little wave of his palm and asked me what I thought about Waldo.

  ‘Just the same as you,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was telling him the worst things I could think of about those bastards. Is that why you were telling him the worst things you could think of about them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bone, sighing. ‘He’s obviously involved.’

  ‘If we’d known about it earlier we might have turned him,’ I said. ‘As it is, I guess the best thing to do is let him run and use him as a weathervane. I don’t think he’ll do anything on his own, but we should always have someone right next to him, just in case.’

  Bone stood and walked to the window. Waldo World was still lit up, but its streets were almost empty.

  ‘It really is a marvelous arena to meet them in,’ he said. He turned to me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you think we’ll manage to kill them this time? Permanently? Or will they kill us?’

  I smiled and shrugged, and he smiled back, and we left it at that.

  Athenee was waiting on the terrace of her suite when I arrived. I joined her at the shiny railing and we put our arms around each other and looked out at the lights of Waldo World. A Quackycart with three people and an angel in it buzzed by below and the angel’s glistening wings flapped in the breeze as one solitary firework blossomed in the black sky for no particular reason.

  ‘He’s almost done it,’ she said, ‘he’s almost made a fairyland.’

  ‘It’s easier for me to imagine the elves from up here and at night,’ I said.

  ‘My father was always making fairylands,’ she sighed. ‘Of course it goes without saying they were all sinister ones. I spent my babyhood in one of them. I took my first steps in an old castle on a high, wild cliff on the coast of Brittany. All the peasants believed it was haunted by real fairies, but I never saw any, even though I searched for them.

  ‘But then I never saw my mother, either. One night, just before I was taken off to bed, I asked my father about her and he told me she had been a fairy princess who had died of marrying a mortal, so I decided that, since I was her daughter, I must be the fairy who was haunting the castle.

  ‘Some years later, shortly before my father was forced to leave because of a series of mishaps in his smuggling operations, a favorite kitten of mine wandered away during a beach walk and I followed after her deep into a cave which the tides had carved out of the base of the cliff beneath the castle. I found the cat curled up in the doorway of a lovely tomb set in a beautiful, salty grotto.

  ‘The door of the tomb was made of copper and co
vered with a bas relief of sad, pretty angels reaching upward. Over the door, carved deeply into the coral from which the tomb was made, was written “Athenee.”

  ‘At first I thought the tomb had been made by my father for me against the day of my dying, but then I slowly and solemnly realized that this must certainly be the resting place of my mother’s body.

  ‘That evening during dinner I took my courage in both hands and told my father I had seen the tomb and read the name on it and he paused between one bite of homard à l’Américaine and the next and told me in a very quiet voice not to speak of it again. The servants waiting on the table were taken away just after dessert by rough men dressed as sailors. It was their bad luck to have overheard me.

  ‘My last memory of the place is looking back through the windows of my father’s limousine at high, chalky clouds rising like thunderheads and covering the landscape. My father had mined the castle and the cliff so that all would explode and then fold in on itself and be forever sealed off from strangers. Seeing me stare out, my father reached over and patted my hand, something he rarely did, and whispered: “Don’t worry. She is not harmed. She is safe.”’

  We looked down on Waldo’s try at a fairyland for just a little longer, and then we went inside and forgot it, and yesterday, and tomorrow.

  — 15 —

  THE SUN WAS SHINING and the sky was blue. Waldo World looked just like the pictures in its folder.

  Bone was stationed in the command post we’d established in the private room atop Elf Castle where I’d had lunch with Waldo during my first visit, and Ashman had gone back to New York in order to travel back with the presidential party, and things were all moving along in that calm, unstoppable way they take on when you’ve laid your plans and all you can really do is tinker with them until the action really starts.

  I was working my way to the front gate, checking out various arrangements we’d made here and there as I moved along, and chatting with agents, some in the flesh and some over a folding pocket intercom with an earplug, and it really made me feel like a member of the club.

  I’d tried to get Athenee to take one of the gadgets, too, until she pointed out that if she found her father he wouldn’t be at all happy to learn she was wired, but I sure did hate to see her walk off alone and disappear into the crowd without that walkie-talkie. I knew she was tough, I knew she was smart, but I also knew that might be the last time I ever saw her alive.

  The press had been kept dangling until the very last moment, as per the plan. All they knew was that Parker was in New York, and all they’d been told up until an hour ago was that there would be a really dandy story and photo opportunity somewhere in the vicinity this morning, so they were all standing eagerly by because, of course, none of them wanted to take a chance on getting scooped.

  Now the specifics had been given out and the media, as some damned fool has got us all calling them, came down full force on Waldo World—tv, newspapers, magazines, the whole bunch—and Frank Nealy was going crazy trying to give each reporter the impression he thought they were the most important one, and of course everybody figured he was giving the real story to someone else.

  My timing was pretty good because I had just turned up at the base of the Quacky statue when everybody started making excited noises because someone with a long-range viewfinder had just spotted the presidential caravan traversing the bridge.

  Nealy was there, sweating even more than usual as he checked the distance between the main gate and the steps of Elf Castle where Waldo had just made his appearance, probably imagining a couple of hundred terrible things that might prevent his boss and the nation’s chief executive from meeting smoothly in Quacky’s shadow.

  ‘My mother told me there’d be days like this if I got into public relations,’ he told me. ‘I’m really going to tie one on tonight. I’m going to aim for an instant blackout.’

  The line of flagged limos was pulling within range of the naked eye by now, with the presidential carrier, long and gleaming, right in the middle, and I ground my teeth and wished it would turn around and leave because I didn’t see any way in the world there wasn’t going to be a whole lot of trouble.

  I felt a touch on my arm and saw that Waldo had come up beside me. He seemed frailer and thinner than before and the sun made him look pale and had turned the Polaroid shading in his glasses almost black.

  ‘These awful men, Mr Weston,’ he said. ‘I know they’re criminals. I know they’re very, very bad. But can you tell me, are they mad? Are they crazy people?’

  ‘They’re nutty as fruitcakes,’ I said, looking down at him and watching him kneading his hands. ‘They’re a hundred percent gaga. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering what to expect.’

  ‘Expect anything,’ I said.

  The limos parked in an expensive-looking row before us and after the lesser members of the Praetorian guard had poured out of the ones before and behind, the doors of the main car opened and Ashman popped out, looking wary, followed by the president, waving and smiling, followed by none other than Hewliss; so Bone’s concern must have really got through to the head honcho because under ordinary protocol he’d have left it to Ashman to handle the job.

  The president turned his attention entirely on Art Waldo, who had come up to shake his hand and otherwise welcome him, and Ashman and Hewliss formed a sandwich around the two of them while the other troops acted as the wrapping. They did it just in time because now the tv people were pushing their little logo microphones in hard, and the press photographers were making that rattlesnake racket with those fancy shutters of their cameras, and of course everybody wanted close-ups.

  Standing next to Parker, Waldo looked scared and cringing, almost as if he expected the president to start beating him. I saw Parker pick up on it with a puzzled expression and then reach out with his big hands and sort of pat Waldo’s shoulders the way you’d soothe a nervous animal and when that seemed to be working I glanced up at the top of Elf Castle, I suppose with some idea of seeing Bone gazing down at us, but of course all that could be seen was the thick web of gargoyles which covered the whole upper area of the tower like a fuzzy clown’s wig. Then I heard Bone’s voice coming through the little speaker in my earplug.

  ‘Don’t worry, Weston,’ he said. ‘I see you.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the important part,’ I said into my intercom. ‘How do we look? What’s happening that us ants down here are missing?’

  ‘Nothing alarming so far,’ said Bone, ‘though I confess I expect it momentarily. The band has formed and will be marching into view shortly, accompanied by a small army of people in ridiculous costumes. Outside of that and this whole grotesque place, I see nothing unusual.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Keep in touch.’

  The president and Waldo climbed into the Quackycart with Ashman and Hewliss and a third agent seated behind them. The third man was especially for Waldo, and while Hewliss and Ashman mostly peered out and up and around, the third man kept his eyes strictly on the small cartoonist.

  The Quackycart started with a quack from its horn, the rest of us surrounded the silly thing, and the bunch of us started off down the center of All-American Avenue with the big brass band Bone had predicted in front of us, all trimmed in gold and blaring away full blast, and a bunch of actors dressed up as cartoon characters out of Waldo’s movies clowning along beside us and looking a lot jollier than the agents and I.

  By now the Waldo World visitors had got the message that the president was amongst them and were pressing in for a look at their leader with their children on their shoulders, but they were a friendly bunch and Waldo’s security people, all decked out in old-timey cop uniforms with big gold stars—some of them so much into the spirit of the thing that they were even wearing handlebar moustaches—weren’t having much trouble managing them.

  Being a policeman really puts you in the wrong frame of mind for a party. You peer past the balloons looking fo
r lurkers and you check out the stuffed toys for suspicious bulges, and you even wonder if the little kids might be armed midgets because it’s been done. You’re no fun at all.

  I did take in the blue sky and the sun I mentioned, and that the colors of the buildings looked as bright as I’d ever seen them, and now and then a tune the band played reminded me of long-ago Memorial Days in Elkhart, Indiana, but then I’d see something or other I couldn’t make out and realize my fingers had gone under my lapel and were resting on the butt of my gun.

  The worst moment before the last part came as we were passing the Haunted Graveyard, which was a little more in keeping with my mood than all this other stuff, and my heart froze and my breath stopped on the half exhale when I thought I caught a glimpse of someone dressed in black ducking behind a tomb.

  ‘Check out the decorations on top of the graveyard,’ I said, talking into the pocket intercom which had somehow got into my hand, and wondering how I’d managed to push the right buttons that quickly. ‘Look for a big, tall guy with a black cloak and a black mask.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  It was an agent named Pyle who I’d met for the first time yesterday and who thought a lot of himself.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘And if it’s who I hope it’s not, neither is he. Get it in gear!’

  I saw him and a couple of others appear from the back of the big green ‘D’ that finished off ‘GRAVEYARD’ and watched them spread out over the shaggy, spooky, blue-gray plastic grass and disappear amongst the fake cypress trees and tombs.

  ‘Be careful, damn it!’ I said.

  The band played ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze’ and now and then I’d catch a quick peek of an agent bobbing out from behind a crypt or hopping over a low gravestone, but no new glimpse of the man in black.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Pyle, out of breath. ‘There’s absolutely no one here, damn it!’