EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  ‘The Professor’s machine is now on the other coast of your country,’ said the Mandarin, smiling smugly. ‘Safely beyond any pursuing officialdom.’

  He paused and leaned forward, and so did we all, because we had seen the frame of the porthole swing open. Bone nudged me again, and I edged just a little closer to the guard he had wiggled at earlier.

  Then something glistened at the bottom of the screen and something else, bent and dripping, waved across it, and then the Professor flopped out into full view in the moonlight of the lonely West Coast road.

  I think, then, all of us, with the possible exception of the Mandarin, screamed.

  ‘The blunderer,’ snarled the Mandarin, ‘the fool! He has killed himself. He could have killed me! He could have killed me!’

  ‘But he’s not dead!’ shrieked Waldo, watching the thing up there extend a groping part of it ahead to leave a slimy red trail on a boulder. ‘Look, look, you can see his heart beating on his outside! You can see his lungs puff up and empty! Filling! He’s still alive! Oh, God—he’s still not dead!’

  I went for the guard at my side then, because he had forgotten all about me, and I grabbed his gun away from him easily, because he had forgotten all about that too, and Bone did the same with his guard, his guard’s gun, and we killed them both, just like that, and Bone shot the third guard and I shot the Mandarin, but he was dodging through a door beside him which hadn’t been there before and all I managed to do was blow his left arm to bits just before the door closed, and then I remembered that didn’t count for much because the arm was only metal and plastic since I’d shot his flesh-and-blood arm off years before, so I guess that shows you I’m getting old.

  — 19 —

  ‘DON’T BE TOO HARD ON YOURSELF, WESTON,’ said Bone, ducking his head as he passed beneath a bat-winged demon carved on the underside of a low stone arch, ‘you had no way of knowing he was standing by an exit.’

  ‘He’s always standing by an exit,’ I said, holding a hand in front of my candle because walking this fast made it flicker and I didn’t want it going out.

  ‘I wish he wasn’t alive,’ said Waldo, who was the leader in our trip through this weird place because it was his tunnel and he was the only one who was familiar with all its strange little tricks. ‘I know he’ll try to kill us! That’s how his mind works!’

  ‘Surely,’ said President Parker, giving us a dumb smile all around as we hurried along, ‘he won’t hurt us now, will he? I mean, all he’ll be doing is fleeing for his life!’

  Bone sighed.

  ‘Mr President,’ he said, thumping his cane just a little louder than necessary, ‘up to now, I have not invoked any of the privileges of age, but you must understand that all of this has been extremely wearing to me. Here I am, for example, hobbling at top speed, carrying a candle that is dripping burning wax on my hand, because, years ago, it was decreed company policy at Waldo World that tiny, flickering flames should be the only means of illumination provided in this bizarre underground tunnel which Mr Waldo has seen fit to decorate as a sort of ancient catacomb, complete with sepulchers piled full of automated skulls which gnash their teeth and rattle their jaws as you walk by.’

  ‘Some of the skulls have rats in them which are automated, too!’ said Waldo, and Bone glanced at him.

  ‘I am sure some of them do, Mr Waldo,’ he said. ‘Exactly my point. To continue, Mr President, if I am to survive the last phase of this business and be of some assistance to you, I really feel I must insist that you abandon this compulsive optimism, as I find it particularly wearing. I know it will be very difficult for you, that it will go against the very fiber of your being, but please do indulge me.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Bone,’ said the president, looking a little puzzled. ‘I’ll be happy to do anything I can.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Bone, brushing a dangling plastic spider from his face, and then he turned to Waldo. ‘You say you were entirely unfamiliar with the door the Mandarin used?’

  ‘I never saw it in my life,’ said Waldo. ‘And none of our secret panels do what that one did—weld themselves shut. It just doesn’t make any financial sense to build a doorway you can only use once.’

  ‘So he’s loose in some tunnel whose route and connections are entirely unknown to you,’ said Bone, ‘and you’ve said you’re only vaguely familiar with many other alterations and projects he’s involved himself with during his association with you these last two years or so.’

  ‘I let him do what he wanted to, Mr Bone,’ said Waldo, looking at him with those steel eyes of his showing because no one had bothered to hunt up his dark glasses in the mess we’d left behind. ‘I know it was wrong of me, but that’s what I did.’

  ‘So what do you think he’s up to?’ I asked Bone, swerving to avoid the clutch of a bony plastic hand.

  ‘Exactly what Mr Waldo said he was up to,’ he muttered. ‘One way or another, he’s setting out to murder us. Indiscriminately. All of us.’

  ‘But surely he won’t want to kill the president, Mr Bone!’ Waldo gasped.

  ‘Why not, sir?’ Bone asked. ‘He has no further use for him. The Professor’s machine was to transport his captive safely away, but it’s proven a ghastly farce, and Spectrobert’s gas has killed off all his soldiers and thereby eliminated the possibility of any extempore alternative. No, Mr Waldo, the only pleasure left him is our destruction, and since you tell us that this catacomb leads directly to the base of that monstrous duck statue, which is to say to a point a mere few paces from the front gates of this establishment, the chances are he’ll try to kill us here, in this macabre place.’

  ‘Something ought to be done about people like that,’ Parker said peevishly, maybe trying to show he wasn’t optimistic.

  ‘Quite right, sir,’ said Bone, glancing at him. ‘Hopefully, we shall.’

  ‘Are you thinking about the sort of things the Mandarin plays with?’ I asked Bone. ‘Trapdoors? Or spikes from the walls? How about guillotines from the ceiling? All these stalactites would hide them pretty neatly.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said the president, lifting his candle for a closer look.

  ‘I haven’t ruled it out,’ said Bone. ‘But it seems unlikely since this tunnel was originally constructed as an ordinary passageway for the Waldo World staff. I suspect the attempt, or attempts, will be of an invasive nature. Knowing the Mandarin, I imagine he will do his best, even in executing an impromptu attack such as this to use means as esthetically appropriate as he can muster.’

  ‘You mean whatever he uses,’ said Athenee, ‘it’ll have the right feel for an underground cemetery.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Bone.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the president, sighing. ‘I just don’t know.’

  We went on a little further in silence after that, and were passing an extended series of open niches containing skeletons in rags which softly rattled as they writhed, when Waldo suddenly held up his hand and we stopped in a bunch with our candles flickering.

  ‘What is it?’ said Bone. ‘Do you see something?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘These eyes aren’t that good in a dark place. I smell something. Something musky. It’s true what they say, you know. The other senses compensate.’

  ‘I got it, now,’ I said, after a few sniffs. ‘Animals. A lot of them.’

  We peered ahead and then, as if we’d rehearsed it like a dance team, all of us wheeled at once and peered behind. Sure enough, a few bright red eyes just missed dodging out of sight quick enough to fool us.

  ‘They sneaked back up around a bend in the tunnel,’ said the president. ‘Mr Bone, what are those things?’

  ‘I am very sorry to have to tell you that they are wolves, sir,’ said Bone, after a grim pause. ‘Special pets of the Mandarin which I’ve encountered before, but never in this disadvantageous situation.’

  ‘Not your ordinary wolves, mind,’ I said, holding my candle a little higher, and wishing it was a lot brighter. ‘The Mandarin wouldn
’t bother killing people with ordinary wolves.’

  ‘They are gigantic survivors from the Pleistocene epoch,’ said Bone. ‘They should have died out with the mastodons, but one of the Mandarin’s agents, a professional Transylvanian hunter, came across a pack of them in the Carpathians. They are huge, quite terrifying creatures and it’s highly possible that sightings of them and slaughters by them through the ages have contributed to some of the dark legends of that area.’

  ‘They’re perfect for an underground cemetery,’ I said to Athenee, and then I looked over the gun I’d taken from the gray guard and made a little announcement to the group at large. ‘I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think I have that many bullets.’

  ‘And I have no idea what’s left in the clip of the weapon I purloined,’ said Bone.

  ‘Nor I of this one I took,’ said Athenee. ‘And these three guns are all we have. That doesn’t seem much to offer a pack of Pleistocene wolves. Am I pronouncing that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and to Bone: ‘Maybe we should make as much distance as we can while those things are still in the skulking mood.’

  ‘No,’ said Bone. ‘They’ve let us have a glimpse of them and that means they’ve started toying with us. If we try to go on they’ll start by plucking one or two of us off from the rear. Once we’d fallen into the inevitable panicky scramble, they’d fall upon us and feast. We’ll have to do something clever. Now.’

  Bone peered into the darkness thoughtfully, then bent to study a skeleton scrabbling pathetically at the heavy, half-closed lid of its stone sarcophagus.

  ‘These things move,’ he said to Waldo. ‘How much more can they move?’

  ‘They can do pretty much what I want them to,’ he answered. ‘They were the prototypes of the Waldobots, actually. It was easier and cheaper making them skeletons instead of people during the experimental phase. Fun, too.’

  ‘How do you animate these bones?’ asked Bone.

  ‘We’ve got hidden controls scattered through the tunnel,’ he said. ‘Let me show you.’

  He walked over to a pale stone coffin with a sleeping knight in full armor carved in marble on its lid, and when he pulled at the handle of the knight’s broadsword, the panels on the coffin slid this way and that, a keyboard floated into view, and the thing turned into a kind of Gothic organ.

  ‘We call it a Xylobone,’ said Waldo, smiling, putting his fingers on the keys. ‘It’s funny, you know, I would have told the Mandarin about these, but he never thought to ask.’

  He played a couple of notes and a skeleton sat up in its niche. He played a few more and it swung its legs over the niche’s edge and slid to a standing position on the floor.

  ‘Pretty neat, huh?’ asked Waldo, and I said: ‘Pretty neat!’

  ‘Make it walk,’ said Bone. ‘Make it walk until it stands under the center of the tunnel’s arch.’

  Waldo played a few more notes and the skeleton obediently tottered to the center of the tunnel.

  ‘Now make it reach up,’ said Bone, and when Waldo had doodled a couple of high notes the skeleton did; but the tiny bones at its fingertips missed the peak of the ceiling’s curve by a half yard.

  ‘Blast,’ said Bone. ‘But bring out some more of them, bring out a lot more. Form a line of ’em from one wall to the next. And hurry, I’ve seen those wolves’ eyes flicker into sight three times now as we’ve done this.’

  Waldo played a spooky little fugue upon his Xylobone and, one by one, and then in little, shuffling, rattling groups, the skeletons crept out from dark, cobwebby holes in the walls; clattered out of rusty, hanging cages; sneaked from sewers whose lids they’d pushed aside. Bone watched all of this carefully and issued another command when the first rank of them were standing in a wavering row.

  ‘Have them clutch each other,’ he said, ‘and have the outer ones clutch the walls. Make that one there grab hold of that chain; make the one on the other end embrace that stone angel.’

  They formed a double row, and then a third, each time locking themselves together according to Bone’s instructions, building a thicker and thicker wall of plastic bones.

  But on the other side of that wall the wolves were growing braver. They started by making quick darts out and back, first only one at a time, then in twos, then in swirling little packs. After that, one bold wolf came out and sat and stared at us.

  ‘My God,’ said Athenee, ‘that’s not a wolf; that’s a bear!’

  ‘In its day, mademoiselle,’ said Bone, ‘bears were the size of elephants, and elephants grew hair. That thing had to compete with saber-toothed tigers for its prey. You will note its frontal fangs are typical of the era, being as big as the blades of Bowie knives, and curved to hook the victim into its bite. I imagine a man’s entire forearm could fit comfortably in its mouth.’

  He turned to Waldo and said: ‘Have the skeletons form a fourth rank, and I think there are enough now to support some of them climbing up on top to extend the wall to the ceiling. Always have them embracing; entangle them as much as possible. I must say the effect is quite Hieronymus Bosch.’

  Now there were four huge wolves squatting in the open; their red, dripping tongues hung and swayed from a foot and a half to two feet from their mouths as they panted and drooled and watched the skeletons moving, and watched us behind the skeletons. Suddenly, so quick that he’d done it before you’d realized he’d started, the nearest and the largest of them had sprung up, darted forward, wrenched one of the skeletons loose from the wall. He dragged it to a corner where he tore it into chunks, and then he threw the chunks across the floor in all directions, furious because he’d found they held no meat.

  The other wolves prowled and sniffed the plastic rubbish. One or two of them actually broke a few bones open and bent the steel rods inside with their teeth, and when they realized their proper prey was not the skeletons at all but the people hiding behind them they squatted again, but this time in a much larger group, and stared through the bones at us with their red eyes, making wolfish plans.

  Bone had orchestrated six ranks of woven skeletons into the wall by now, and was working on the fourth rank in the group of the top, which was plugging the gap to the ceiling, when that same boss wolf which had led the pack before suddenly lifted into the air and hit that top row hard enough to make the whole wall bend back and totter. But it held.

  ‘More of them, Mr Waldo,’ said Bone. ‘More of them as quickly as you can.’

  Waldo bent lower over his Xylobone’s keyboard and played it even faster, but he looked at Bone over his shoulder and shouted: ‘We’re just about out of them!’

  The huge wolf had not slipped back from the top of the wall, he was still up there and, worse, he was fighting his way through at its very top, where Bone’s weaving of skeletons was thinnest.

  ‘Everybody get your guns pointed and ready,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how much it’ll take to stop that thing, but I’ll bet it turns out to be quite a lot!’

  Bone, Athenee, and I formed a triangle and aimed the barrels of the weapons we’d taken from the gray guards at the center of the top row of skeletons. We watched it bulge more and more under the pressure from behind and then saw it erupt outward in a shower of plastic bones as a gray paw as big as my head with claws spreading out in front of it like a fan of ivory knives burst through, followed immediately by a huge hairy snout snarling around a set of teeth that would send chills down your spine if you saw them in a glass case on a dusty skull in a museum during a rainy afternoon, but which definitely froze your blood when viewed under the present circumstances.

  Bone was closest and in the center and he didn’t hesitate to put what was left of his ammunition, I’d say about ten rounds, right into the center of that snout, but it kept coming, with eyes on top of it which were glowing like coals, all of it framed by a huge headful of iron-gray hair with each strand bristled out straight as a nail so the whole thing looked like a hairy explosion.

  Athenee and I kept our fingers on the
triggers since we’d long ago lost all interest in placing single shots, but now there was a second paw, and now there were huge red ears like those that sprout out from the side of devils’ masks at Halloween, and both our guns were only clicking when the bulk of its shoulders heaved into view, big as a bear’s shoulders just like Athenee had said, and I was wishing I’d thought to save a bullet for her because of what was likely to happen next, when the shoulders sagged, and the snout gave a final gnash and went still, and the paws spread just one more time each and folded and the goddam thing was dead.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ snapped Bone, because the wolf was twitching and jerking again, not on its own this time, but because the other wolves were tearing at it from behind. ‘They’ll eat their way through him in no time, if we linger, and be on us!’

  We hurried down the rest of the tunnel as fast as Bone could hobble, and Waldo was just pulling open a big iron door at the end of it when we heard a crash and a howling in the dark behind us, and after we’d all scuttled through the door and out, and just before Waldo and I finished pushing it shut, I saw the first wolf padding round the nearest bend full tilt, and then Waldo pushed a huge, black bolt that looked to be exactly what you would ask for to seal things off in a catacomb, and when that bolt had slid solidly into its sockets I didn’t mind the thumps and clawings and growls and yelps on the other side of that thick, solid iron door at all. As a matter of fact, they were almost a kind of music.

  — 20 —

  ‘SO THAT’S IT, THEN,’ said President Parker as Waldo opened the outer door with its view of the entrance to Waldo World only thirty or so yards ahead. ‘We’re free!’

  Then he turned with a grin.

  ‘I hope you won’t accuse me of undue optimism this time, Mr Bone!’ he said.