Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  “Didn’t like the ziti?”

  “They say if you’re sane you can’t break the skin,” Pagan said, inspecting the bruised pink bite marks in her pale, freckly skin. “No blood, see? Hah!” A sketchbook was lying open beside her, but she closed it quickly before Balthazar could see what she had been drawing. “Hey, so have you ever, you know, noticed anything weird about this theater?”

  “Not until you guys showed up,” Balthazar said.

  “Ha ha,” she said. “Never mind. What are you doing out here, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be onstage?”

  “I’m looking for my bird,” Balthazar said, casting his eyes around the floral room. “White, pink eyes, feathers. See anything like that?”

  Pagan nodded. “Bursting out of your rear end. Kind of crazy to have animals in your act if you don’t know how to handle them properly.”

  “Crazy,” Balthazar agreed, looking pointedly from her bitten arm to the bulbous spider in her hair. “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  Slipping past her into the dining room, Balthazar scanned the exit sign, sconces and any other place he could think of where Rover might have gone to roost, but saw no sign of her. It felt weird being on the audience side of the stage, but also pleasantly anonymous, like he could be wearing Speedos and a scuba mask and no one would even notice.

  Spotting an empty table toward the back, he took a seat. As he watched the show, he couldn’t help but notice how well things were going now that he was out of it. Fanella, back to her charming, sweet stage-self, had captured Rat King Freddy in a giant bubble as Franky (who had taken over as Nutso) kept twisting around like he thought another dove was about to come busting out of his butt, milking Balthazar’s humiliation for laughs. A much better me than I was, Balthazar thought glumly as the audience roared with laughter and banged their forks against their glasses.

  He had spent his entire life force-fitting himself into a show that was obviously better off without him. Well, he was better off without them, too, he decided. He hadn’t asked to be born into this family. He could have been completely comfortable in a family of bookkeepers who would remember to pay the bills so their electricity wasn’t always getting shut off. Or even a family of total boneheads—where at least he would get to be the talented one.

  Log # 369

  Nutso is dead. Long live Nutso. Apparently the Fabulosos think their audience is so stupid we won’t notice that the Nutcracker Prince is suddenly a full foot shorter. But I have to admit, the actual magic in this show is not half bad. I especially liked the bit where the elderly Queen of the Snowflakes made the water in all our drinking glasses freeze and wound up “accidentally” freezing Blake’s mouth shut as well. She’s kind of my personal hero now.

  Anyway, the show’s pretty much over. They’re doing the climactic Sugarplum Fairy bit—materializing themselves out of paintings, transporting themselves between different gift boxes, transforming the dirty dishes the waiters are carrying on their trays into mounds of sugarplums. Moms is so miserable she’s eaten her entire dessert and all of ours as well. I, too, am looking miserable, but inside my head I am doing a secret happy dance.

  Tomorrow this stinking rose pit will be but a memory and we will be off to ruin some other more worthy lives. They just have to get through to the end of the show without some disastrous screwup. Come on, you can do it! Almost there! Almost . . . oh God, there’s that horrible buzzing again. And now . . . what the . . .

  8. Disappearing Act

  As Balthazar stared at the stage, a loud buzzing started throbbing inside his head. A side effect of his angry thoughts, he figured. But then he noticed that other people in the dining room seemed to be hearing it as well. Maybe the crappy old sound system? Then came the smell. A sickly, rancid smell of rotting meat.

  Thick, cold gray fog was flooding the stage, thick as sheep’s wool. And there was something up with the Christmas tree as well. It was . . . it was growing. Not just taller, but wider, too. Its purple and gold branches began churning and whirring like scrubbers in a car wash. Its lights shone brighter and brighter until they were as harsh and blinding as interrogation lights. Like it was possessed. All the while, the buzzing was getting louder and louder.

  “Get off, you perverted shrubbery!” Gaga cried, bashing away at the groping branches with her handbag.

  “Boys!” Balthazar heard his parents shouting from somewhere deeper in the tinsel underbrush. “Fanella! Where are you?”

  “Mommy!” Fanella’s voice came from another part of the stage.

  “Razahtlab! Razahtlab!” the twins cried as the churning tinsel enveloped them.

  This was no act; they were terrified.

  Instantly Balthazar was on his feet, running wildly for the stage, barely registering the angry protests of the diners as he jostled their tables, spilling coffees into laps.

  “Hey, watch out for the boots!” Blake protested as Balthazar tripped over his outstretched foot.

  As he struggled back to his feet, Balthazar saw that he was too late. The smoke had already cleared, the tree had shrunk back down to regular size, and his family was gone.

  There was no applause from the audience, just an uneasy and dissatisfied silence. The Fabulosos were all locally pretty famous for their disappearances, and they each had their own signature way to do it. Mr. Fabuloso worked his into the end of some spontaneous-combustion effect. Gaga disappeared as the grand finale to her Dance of the Seven Veils. Fanella favored encasing herself inside a giant bubble, then vanishing in a puff of bubblegum-scented air when it popped. With the twins, it wasn’t so much about how they disappeared as how they came back—climbing out of an audience member’s purse or rolled up in a rug delivered by a UPS guy. Mrs. Fabuloso’s disappearances were the funniest, on account of her generally being so distracted by her multitasking that she would leave some part of herself behind—like her smile, grinning in midair like the Cheshire cat.

  This disappearance was totally different from any of those, and it was taking way too long for them to come back.

  “Freddy, Franky?” Balthazar called across the empty stage. “Mom? Dad?”

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Mrs. Fistula heckled. But even she looked confused.

  “Fanella? Gaga? Anyone?”

  They weren’t in the wings, the greenroom, the dressing room, the props room or the bathroom.

  By the time Balthazar returned to the stage, most of the patrons were already heading for the exit.

  “Re-fund, re-fund, re-fund,” Mr. and Mrs. Fistula chanted gleefully.

  “What’s going on?” Balthazar asked the empty air.

  “Good question!” Turning, he saw the owner of the theater, Rose Pfeffenfucher, stomping toward him, her face a whirling mass of pinched, angry frown-lines like a big ol’ thumb about to squash a bug. “That’s just what I would like to know.”

  9. Double-Crossed

  The police are here to serve and protect the innocent, Balthazar reminded himself as he stared up at the Grantham Police Station. The fact that the building looked like a giant evil robot spider, ready at any moment to pull itself free of its foundation and go on a laser-blasting rampage of death and destruction, was just an unfortunate coincidence.

  “Stop lollygagging, you lazy lummox!” Rose Pfeffenfucher bawled, dragging him across an especially slippery patch of ice. “I suppose your freaky family thinks it’s funny,” she fumed on, rock salt grinding beneath her boots like teeth, “taking off in the middle of a show!”

  “They didn’t take off,” Balthazar protested. “They disappeared.”

  “ ‘They disappeared,’ ” she mimicked, the corners of her mouth pinching down so far they almost met at the bottom of her hard, round chin. “Of course they disappeared. They’re magicians. But is that what I pay them for?”

  “Uh . . . yes?”

  “No, stupid!” she spit in a way that involved actual, real, technical spit. “I pay them to come back after they’ve disappeared.”

 
; The police station’s large plate-glass windows filled the lobby with the cold, rotten grayness of the day outside, giving the room a sealed-in fish-tank feeling.

  “Wait here!” she ordered, shoving Balthazar at a row of hard plastic chairs before storming the front desk.

  Nerves had dried out his mouth, and all that was left in his old stainless-steel thermos was a thin dribble of hot cocoa. But at least it was still warm, which was what he loved about his thermos. It kept hot things hot and cold things cold no matter what other craziness was going on.

  Shivering, he raised the cap to his mouth and was about to swallow down the last comforting dregs when he noticed an old lady sitting across from him. More than old, she looked Paleolithic, her face as wizened as a dried apricot and her body gnarled like an old tree stump. Strange. He hadn’t noticed her there a second ago.

  Sniffing the air, the old woman smacked her lips hungrily.

  Balthazar looked down at the little dribble in his cup.

  “It’s cocoa,” he said. “Do you want some?”

  Nodding, the old crone held out a large, thick-knuckled hand.

  Draining the cup, she held it out again for more.

  “Sorry, that’s all there was.”

  As Balthazar reached to take the cup back, she grabbed hold of his wrist, peering at him intently with her milk-white eyes.

  “There’s . . . a rooooad,” she whispered, leaning toward him with the creaky rustle of branches in a heavy wind. “We can’t . . . remember its name. Can you . . . can you help us, child?”

  “I—I don’t know,” he stammered. Honestly, he didn’t feel in much shape to be of any help to anyone at the moment. “I’ll try.”

  “It is . . . like a path . . . through a field,” she continued, eyes burning. There were bits of twigs in her hair, like birds had been nesting in it. She seemed way too old to be out by herself. Had she lost her family, too? Or maybe they had all died off.

  “This road . . . it doesn’t exist. But it can . . . if one walks . . . on it . . . long . . . enough. What . . . what is . . . it?”

  “A road that is not a road,” Balthazar repeated. “Is it a riddle?”

  The poor crazy old lady nodded eagerly.

  A road that is not a road . . . Balthazar was actually pretty decent with riddles. A road that is not a road. The answer was right at the tip of his tongue when—“

  This the magicken?” a gruff voice interrupted.

  Looking up, Balthazar saw a large, red-faced police officer lumbering toward them.

  “That’s the little stinker, all right,” the Pfeff snapped, peering spitefully at him from behind the cop’s meaty arm. “Don’t you let him squirm out of it.”

  “Wait,” Balthazar said. “That old lady, she needs help. I think she’s lost.”

  “What old lady?” the officer grunted.

  Looking back, Balthazar saw the old riddle lady shuffling toward the exit with an uneven gait. One of her legs, he saw, was gone from just below the knee, replaced by an unfinished-looking tree branch, bark still on it.

  “Come find me,” her voice drifted back to him, “if you ever figure it out.”

  “She’s right there . . .”

  But then she pushed open the door and was gone. Not just gone out of the building, but gone entirely. There was no sign of her at all on the other side of the plate glass.

  “Misdirection,” the Pfeff said accusingly. “And don’t let him fool you with that pitiful face, either. If your family thinks this is the way to get a raise, they’ve got another thing coming!”

  “They’re not trying to get anything,” Balthazar protested. “They’re the ones that need help. They disappeared. There’s been some kind of foul play.”

  “The foul play was against me!” the Pfeff countered. “I’m the one who had to refund all those tickets, you little crook!”

  “I’m not a crook!”

  “Settle down, the pair of you,” the officer growled. You could tell from the look of him that he had gone into police work for high-speed chases, lethal shoot-outs and bloody hand-to-hand combat, and that he was finding it hard to work up much enthusiasm for the case at hand. “Fine.” He glowered at them both. “You’d both better come with me.”

  Gloating, the Pfeff poked at Balthazar with a stubby finger. “You’re in trouble now, boy. Oh yes you are.”

  Balthazar looked back once more at the clear glass door through which the old lady had vanished. Was this some new kind of thing? People just randomly disappearing for no reason?

  The room Sgt. Lightfoot brought them to was small and airless and smelled like wet cardboard.

  “Look,” he said, dropping a phone in front of Balthazar like something he had just killed with his bare hands. “You seem like a sensible kid. For a magicken. So why don’t you just call your family and tell them to come get you. Then we can all just forget about this publicity stunt and go home.”

  “They can’t hide forever,” the Pfeff interjected shrilly, waggling her finger in Balthazar’s face.

  “Ma’am, if you would just let me handle this.”

  Balthazar knew they wouldn’t be home. But he couldn’t help hoping anyway as he punched in the numbers and listened to the phone ring.

  “You have reached the fabulous, fabulous Fabulous Fabuloso residence,” Mrs. Fabuloso’s voice trilled on the prerecorded voice-mail message. “We are so sorry to miss your call, but we are off spreading wonder and joy to the people of Grantham. Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as supernaturally possible. Have a magical day!”

  He listened all the way through to the end of the message before hanging up.

  “You need to help me find them,” he said. “If they had disappeared on purpose, don’t you think they would have taken me with them?”

  “Maybe,” Sgt. Lightfoot grunted, pushing his chair back from the table, “maybe not. We see all sorts. Wait here, I’m going to make a couple calls.”

  “And I,” the Pfeff declared, “am going home to soak my bunions. Oh, and PS,” she added, pinning Balthazar to the back of his chair with one final vicious finger-thrust, “you and your freaky family are all fired!”

  The door slammed shut, and for the first time since his family had disappeared, Balthazar was truly and utterly alone.

  When the Pfeff had been poking at him and Sgt. Lightfoot had been looming over him, all he had wanted was for everyone to go away. But now that they had, that felt even worse.

  “Knock, knock.”

  Balthazar looked up.

  There, in a draft of cooler, fresher air, stood a friendly-bike-messenger-looking person, cheeks pink from the cold outside.

  “Gita McGinty,” she introduced herself, taking off her helmet and shaking out a long cascade of shiny, bread-colored hair. “Sorry I kept you waiting. I was over at this Save the Great Lakes thing when they called. I biked here as fast as I could.” Her hand was cool and firm when Balthazar shook it. “I’m the social worker assigned to your case. And you’re Balthazar Fabuloso, right?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “My parents picked the name.”

  “Good choice,” she said, twisting her hair into a businesslike knot and taking two cans of strawberry cream soda out of her backpack. “So anyway,” she continued kindly, “the reason why I’m here is to talk with you about what’s going on, make an assessment and figure out a plan of action. What do you need?”

  Balthazar hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until the frosty, creamy drink was bubbling down his throat. Tears stung stupidly at the back of his eyes. People had been horrible to him all day, and now that someone was actually acting halfway human he was falling apart?

  “Just my family back,” he said.

  Ms. McGinty nodded, opening her save-the-lemmings notebook and trying out one ballpoint pen after another from her bag until she found one that worked. “Let’s talk about what happened.”

  Settling her chin into her interlaced ink-stained fingers, Ms. McGinty fixed he
r wide-spaced eyes on him. He could see that her right ear stuck out a bit. Not in a bad way, but in this way that made it look like she really wanted to hear what he had to say.

  Still Balthazar hesitated. To explain what had happened to his family, he would have to reveal their most closely guarded trade secret—real magic. Taking a deep breath, he decided to trust her.

  “I was lying in bed,” he began.

  Once he started, it was just such a relief to have a sympathetic listener that he didn’t want to stop. On and on he talked, words spraying out like soda from a shook-up can.

  “And I guess that’s everything,” he concluded, feeling a bit awkward about having blabbed on for so long.

  Ms. McGinty was scribbling so hard it looked more like carving than writing. “Thank you,” she said at last, looking up. He could see she was shaken. “Is there anything else you want to add? Anything about what really happened?”

  Balthazar thought carefully, then shook his head.

  “I . . . I need to go talk to Detective Lightfoot. Do you think you’ll be okay on your own?” she asked. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Balthazar nodded. He actually felt pretty good, all things considered.

  Ms. McGinty stopped at the door. “Don’t worry,” she said, giving her earlobe an anxious twist. “I’m going to make sure you get all the help you need.”

  The small, brown dullness of the room didn’t bother Balthazar so much now that he knew help was on its way, but he needed to use the bathroom.

  Stepping out into the hall, he heard Sgt. Lightfoot’s voice coming through a cracked-open door just a few feet away.

  “Still no sign of the rest of those magickens,” he was saying. “But we have identified an uncle who could take the boy. No fixed address, though. Just a PO box.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Ms. McGinty replied.

  Peeking through the crack, Balthazar saw that the two grown-ups were in a little room with a big one-way window that looked into the room he had just left.