The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  After failing to determine where Alice might actually be using logic, I elected to descend into the trance state that I use when I am unable to find an answer any other way. Somewhere around four in the morning, I floated back to full consciousness and carefully let myself down to the floor. Testing my weight on my leg, I decided that it would get me as far as I needed to go.

  I padded into Martin’s bedroom and stood next to his bed. “Martin . . . Martin?”

  He didn’t even twitch.

  “Martin!” I called, somewhat louder. Still no response.

  I launched into reveille, full blast.

  Martin began to pummel his pillow, flailing at it with both fists. “I can’t get out of my tent, Mr Arken! There’s a bear in here and it’s . . .”

  He sat bolt upright. “Victor! What in hell do you think you’re doing, you addlepated idiot?”

  “Trying to wake you up,” I said calmly. “Get your car keys.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  He reached over and turned on the light on his night stand, temporarily blinding both of us. “What time is it?” he groaned.

  “Time to get moving. I know where Alice is.”

  As Martin drove, I explained my theory. I watched his face from street light to street light, like a slow motion strobe, as he fought the idea, then began to see the symmetry of it. Grudgingly, he admitted each point, until I had laid out a complete, internally self-consistent scenario. He didn’t like it, but he had to admit that it made sense.

  Parking spaces were no problem in the wee hours of the night, so we parked right in front of Cal Rosen’s apartment building. Martin turned to me and said, “Last chance, Victor. From here on in, we’re either heroes or fools. Do you want to back out?”

  “Do you?”

  He grimaced. “No, I guess not. Now that you’ve gotten me out of bed, I might as well see it through.”

  Once inside, the security guard looked at me strangely when I asked my key question, then scratched his head and said, “Stay put. I think I can answer that easily enough.”

  He took a ring of keys and unlocked an office across the hall from us. In less than a minute, he was back, carrying a large ledger. He was running his finger down the page. “Yup, there was an apartment leased on the fortieth floor just a week ago.”

  I gave Martin a triumphant I-told-you-so look and said, “You’re aware that Cal Rosen’s little girl was kidnapped this past Friday. We have reason to believe that the newly let apartment may factor into the abduction.”

  The guard’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Martin. “Honest?”

  “Do you know if anyone has moved into that apartment?”

  He traced across the page with his fingertip. “It doesn’t say so here in the book. Normally they check this little box here when the tenant moves in.”

  “Good. If it’s empty then surely you wouldn’t have any objection to letting us look it over, would you?” Martin, for all his faults, can be convincing when he wants to be.

  “Uh, well, I guess not.”

  “Naturally, you’ll come with us. If it should turn out that the kidnappers are using that apartment for a base of operations, then we may need a backup.”

  Shrewd psychology on Martin’s part. Considering that the guard’s shift was probably one of the most boring jobs in the city, I’m sure he would have welcomed a blazing gun battle to relieve the monotony.

  The elevator ride to the fortieth floor was tense. The guard kept slapping the black leather holster at his side as if to reassure himself that his gun was handy in case he needed it. As we walked down the corridor, he began to fiddle with the keys on his key ring.

  When we reached the door, he tried the master key in the lock, but it would not turn. “The lock’s been changed,” the guard said, partly puzzled, partly annoyed.

  “It’s logical,” I agreed, turning to Martin, who simply nodded.

  The guard, thinking that he had cornered a gang of desperados, raised his hand to beat on the door, no doubt to demand their immediate surrender.

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “Do you mind if I try?”

  His hand froze in mid-swing. He stared at me in confusion. “Try what?”

  “The door, of course.” Without waiting for permission, I slipped the tip of my tongue into the lock. “It’s a new lock all right, the metal hasn’t worn smooth yet,” I commented as I felt out the tumblers.

  The guard turned to Martin. “Is he doing what I think he’s doing?”

  “I’m picking the lock,” I assured him. “But if you ever tell anyone you saw me do this they’ll never believe you.”

  “Hell, I don’t believe it,” he said, perversely fascinated.

  The lock was intricate, but I finally got it. “Martin, turn the knob while I hold the pins, the mechanism is too stiff for me to do it with my tongue.”

  I had forgotten that Martin’s hands were full – with me, naturally. The guard saw this and turned the knob, reaching for his gun with his other hand.

  “I don’t think you’ll need that,” I told him. “Besides, if there should be legitimate tenants in here, you’ll scare them out of their wits.”

  He nodded. “Right.” He didn’t look as though he was completely convinced.

  We entered the darkened apartment. There was a cardboard box just inside the door. In the box was a small purple stuffed horse, no . . . a unicorn. Martin whispered softly, “Bingo!”

  The bedrooms were to our right. The first one was empty. The door to the second one was barely visible in the light coming from the hallway. It was closed.

  “Open it quietly,” I instructed the guard. “We don’t want to frighten her.”

  “Her? You mean the girl’s in here?”

  “Open the door quietly,” I repeated. He did so. “Alice?” I called softly, causing my voice to resemble her father’s. “Alice?”

  “Daddy?” came a voice from the small bed near the window.

  “Jesus and Mary!” the guard breathed. “You were right.” Then, louder, he called, “Are you okay, little girl?”

  “Who’s that? Daddy, who’s with you?”

  The guard flipped the light switch, revealing a dishevelled little girl sitting up in bed, grubbing an eye with the back of one hand. “Daddy? Where’s Daddy?”

  “It’s all right, Alice. We’re going to take you home in a few minutes,” I told her. To the guard I said, “You take care of Alice. I don’t think there will be anyone else in the apartment, but you’d better check. We’re going to get her father.”

  Martin and I stepped down the hall. Rather than put me down in order to knock, he simply thumped the door with his foot several times. A moment later, he asked, “Do you think I should knock again? I don’t hear anything.”

  “No, I think he’s coming.”

  Sure enough, the door opened to reveal Cal Rosen. He blinked in confusion. “What do you want?”

  “Mr Rosen,” Martin said, “we’ve found your daughter.”

  Rosen leapt at us, using his forearm as a battering ram to push us aside. Martin went down hard on his backside, losing his grip on me in the process. I fell on the carpet.

  Martin rolled to his feet, cursing, “You okay, Victor?” he asked, watching Rosen pounding down the hall towards the elevators, his house coat flapping.

  “I’ve got a rug burn the size of a dinner plate, but nothing fatal. Let’s go.”

  Martin picked me up and swung me under his arm. His hand was right in the center of the abraded patch of skin. It felt as though he was scraping my hide with rusty razor blades.

  He skidded to a halt before the bank of elevators, staring in consternation at the indicator on the one Rosen had taken. “Who the hell ever heard of somebody taking the elevator to get away?” he demanded indignantly.

  “You did,” I told him. “Just now.”

  “So now what do we do?”

  “Take the other one, fool! Unless you think you can run down forty floors worth o
f stairs fast enough to beat that elevator.”

  By the time the other elevator arrived, we had seen the indicator for Rosen’s go all the way to the first floor without stopping. Unless he was sneaky and rode it back up again, he was headed outside . . . somewhere.

  Martin continued to fume as our elevator slid downwards. He slammed his fist against the control panel, exhorting the elevator to go faster. I could understand his frustration; being unable to do anything active in the pursuit of Rosen was irritating. Speaking of irritating . . .

  “Martin, could you shift your grip a bit? You’re hurting me.”

  He looked down. “Oh, sorry.” He moved his hand a bit. “Victor, you’re bleeding!”

  “I expect so. I left a fair amount of skin on the carpet in front of Rosen’s door.”

  “I . . . it’s just that your skin looks so leathery.”

  “Maybe now you’ll believe me when I tell you that the seat belt chafes me.”

  When the door opened on the lobby. Martin bounded out, headed for the front doors, then brought himself up short. “Bet you anything that he went out the back way,” he muttered.

  “It’s a cliché, but you’re probably right.”

  We crashed though the back door into a dark alley. Not so much as a single street light relieved the gloom. Martin halted. “Damn, I can’t see a thing.”

  I assumed that his eyes simply took longer to adjust than mine. “Go to your right,” I said.

  He started off at a slow walk with his free arm held out in front of him.

  “Bear to your right, you’re about to hit the wall.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can see it.”

  “Where do I go now?”

  “Keep going forward. You’re doing fine.”

  “I feel like the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” Martin complained.

  “Yup,” I agreed. “You’re carrying all your brains in your arm.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a faint flicker of movement. “There he is!” I cried.

  “Where?”

  “Can’t you see him?”

  “Not a thing.”

  It was surely the strangest capture in history. I gave Martin directions until he literally stumbled over Rosen’s feet where he was hiding behind a dumpster, hoping until the last instant to escape notice.

  In all the years I had been on Earth, and after all the adventures Martin and I had been through, I had never been bandaged before. I didn’t like the sensation. Then again, I don’t wear clothing, either. The entire concept of being bound up by cloth is foreign in every sense of the word.

  “Martin, when can we take this thing off?”

  “When you quit bleeding.”

  Marie smiled at me in a kindly fashion. “Would it help you forget the bandage if I gave you that head of lettuce now?”

  I couldn’t help it. I started salivating. “You remembered!”

  Martin turned his head slowly to stare at her. “You brought a nasty, mouldy, rotten, slimy, evil-smelling head of lettuce over here and put it in my refrigerator?”

  “Naturally. The only way to serve lettuce is properly chilled.”

  “But it might,” he waved his hands in the air vaguely, “spread germs or something.”

  She shook her head sadly. “When’s the last time you looked in your refrigerator? There are cultures of every microorganism known to man in there. Where did you get that orange gunk growing on the pan on the second shelf, anyway?”

  “That’s a chocolate pie . . .” He subsided into uneasy muttering.

  “How long has it been in there?” she persisted, not satisfied to let him off the hook so easily.

  “It’s the one you made me for my birthday,” he admitted guiltily.

  She stared. “Your birthday was six weeks ago, you idiot! You haven’t eaten it yet?”

  He was trapped and he knew it. If he said he liked it, she’d want to know why he hadn’t eaten it. If he said he didn’t like it, she would probably make him wear it, orange fungus and all.

  I came to his rescue. “Marie, he thought it was so good he wanted me to share it with him. Of course, the only way he could do that was if he let it spoil a bit before serving me my slice.”

  She looked from one to the other of us before throwing up her hands. “Men!” Then she frowned at me and threw up her hands again. “Aliens!”

  Martin threw me a grateful glance and tried to change the subject, “Don’t you want to know about Rosen?”

  She pursed her lips while she decided whether or not to give the two of us a good tongue lashing. “Oh, all right. I can tell you’re bursting to tell me how clever you were.”

  “It wasn’t me, it was Victor.”

  Her expression softened somewhat. She turned to me. “Don’t you ever get tired of bailing lover-boy here out of tough spots?”

  “He does have his uses. He had to drag Rosen out from behind the dumpster. Considering that Rosen outweighs me four to one, I couldn’t have done it.”

  She turned and walked into Martin’s tiny kitchen to stir the spaghetti sauce that was simmering on the stove. “So how did you know that Rosen kidnapped his own daughter?” she called back over her shoulder.

  I answered, “He said the ransom note said ‘the usual’ things. It bothered me. How would he know what the usual things were? Why was he so blasé about the note? There were a few other oddities, too. For instance, he sounded defensive about the ransom being a half million dollars, and the fact that it happened to be his approximate net worth. From then on, it was trivial. If he had her, then he’d want her close by so he could check on her easily. Since he lived in an apartment building, the obvious thing to do would be to put her in another apartment, preferably on his floor. Turns out that he told Alice that he loved her so much he’d gotten her a whole new bedroom. She thought it was great.”

  Marie leaned out of the kitchen. “But wasn’t that dangerous, leaving her in there by herself?”

  “He had the stove and the oven – anything dangerous – turned off at the circuit breaker. Other than that, he tucked her into bed and was certain to be there when she woke up in the morning. It was really quite safe. And of course, it was only temporary.”

  “But why did he hire a detective in the first place?”

  “Typical amateur criminal mentality. He was trying to gild the lily. He thought it would look more impressive if he could hand his ex-wife a report from a detective that said that his daughter was nowhere to be found.”

  “Let’s see . . . then the bogus ransom note was just a cover to liquidate everything he had. He would have waited a discreet period of time, then moved away with the half million and Alice and started a new life with no one the wiser.” She leaned out of the kitchen again, licking a wooden spoon. “Am I right?”

  “On the money,” Martin said, then coughed gently to let her know he expected applause.

  She scowled and brandished the spoon at him. “That was terrible.”

  Martin sighed. “I’m still smarter than Rosen. He was headed for his car. The only thing was, he had panicked when he saw us and ran out of his apartment without his car keys.”

  Marie frowned. “But couldn’t he have just gone back inside after them?”

  He nodded. “Certainly. He was going to, but Victor saw him hiding in the darkest corner of the alley.”

  She looked at me. “I’m not sure I understand. If he was in a dark corner, how did you see him?”

  I picked at one edge of my bandage – false modesty. “You’re aware that I don’t sleep, right? It’s no secret that I wander all over the apartment at night. Everyone has always simply assumed that I have good night vision. I do, of course, but I can also see into the infrared.”

  “So you saw Rosen by his body heat?” she demanded.

  “You and I look at that hot spoon that you’re holding and we assume that we’re seeing the same thing. It never occurs to either one of us to get the other to describe what they see in detail. Martin
and I had never been in a situation where it had come up before.”

  “Makes me wonder what other things you can do,” Marie said.

  I flickered a few inches of my tongue at her. “That’s for Wanne to know and you to find out,” I teased.

  Marie got so flustered that she dropped the spoon and darted back to the safety of the kitchen. “Is the little girl all right?” she blurted.

  “Oh, she’s fine,” Martin said. Then he chuckled. “As a matter of fact, she’s in love with Victor.”

  This brought Marie back out into the living room. “What?”

  “After we got Rosen under control, we went back upstairs. Alice was getting scared by this time, because she didn’t really know the security guard and she still wanted to see her father. Victor came to the rescue. I put the two of them together in the corner and Victor kept her amused by imitating every single animal at the zoo. When her mother arrived, Alice wanted to take Victor with her. She thinks he’s cute.”

  “She wanted her mother to buy me from Martin on the spot. She was not pleased when she found out that I wasn’t for sale. I fear that the child has been rather spoiled,” I noted grimly.

  “Speaking of getting spoiled, little buddy, you’re going to have to do your own walking for a while. You’ve nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets,” Martin said.

  “I am not spoiled,” I said indignantly. “That was medical necessity. My knee was hurt . . . by you, I might add.”

  Martin snorted. “Maybe so, but I didn’t hear you complaining about getting the royal treatment.”

  “Well, no,” I admitted. “It was rather nice.”

  “Supper time,” Marie called. She placed a dinner plate with the rotting head of lettuce on it at one end of the table. “You will be eating with us, I assume,” she said to me.

  “I’d like to, yes. Will one of you get me down off of this chair?”

  They looked at each other and laughed.

  “Spoiled,” Martin said.

  “Spoiled rotten,” Marie agreed.

  THE BIRTH OF A. I.