Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  “So,” Sgt. Lightfoot continued, “you think the kid’s yanking our chain, or what?”

  “Not at all,” Ms. McGinty said. “He’s not that kind of a boy. Anyone with any sensitivity can see that.”

  Balthazar smiled. He had done the right thing in confiding in her.

  “So, what? The kid’s a psycho, then?” the sergeant pressed. “I mean, I know that’s not the technical term for it, but, you know . . . ,” he mumbled, ears turning pink under Ms. McGinty’s hard stare.

  “In my conversation with Balthazar I found him open, sincere and communicative.”

  Yes!

  “A sweet, gentle kid who values logic and sees himself as very sensible.”

  It was nice, finally, to be understood.

  “But he is also very, very, very confused.”

  What?

  “Right, like a psycho.” Sgt. Lightfoot nodded.

  “The term,” Miss McGinty informed him coolly, “is delusional. Probably an acute stress reaction to some real trauma connected to whatever really happened when his family abandoned him. Something really horrible must have happened to that poor boy.”

  Blood rushed to Balthazar’s face. The whole friendly, wanting-to-help thing had just been an act.

  “I’ve put in a call to request a psychiatric evaluation,” she continued. “He’s clearly in a highly overwrought state. He needs to be watched very carefully.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sgt. Lightfoot said, looking into the room where Balthazar no longer was.

  Ms. McGinty turned to look as well. “Oh no . . . Balthazar!”

  But she was too late. He was already out of there.

  Log # 370

  As Humphrey is my witness, I swear I’ll rip off my head and drop-kick it off the CN Tower if I EVER confide in my stupid family again.

  So why exactly did I tell them about the weird zombie guy under the stage? Because I wanted them to understand that taking a job in this theater was a very, very bad idea. And did Moms and Dad listen? Of course not. One, because they were super drunk on cheap pink dinner-theater champagne. And two, because they never listen to me in the first place. Blake, unfortunately, was not so oblivious. “Zombie? Did you say zombie?”

  Next thing you know, he’d dragged me back under the stage to show it to him, with nothing for protection but the teaspoon I barely managed to grab off one of the tables.

  BLAKE: I could totally take a zombie.

  ME: Sure you could. Can we leave now?

  BLAKE (stabbing his walking stick into the shadows): Somebody should totally make a movie about me kicking zombie butt.

  ME: Great idea. Can we leave now?

  BLAKE: Wait, did that zombie bite you? Because if it bit you, I hate to say it, but you’re no longer my sister, you’re a zombie and I’ll have to kick your butt.

  ME: I’m not a zombie. Can we leave now?

  BLAKE: Spoken like a potential zombie.

  ME: See ya.

  Anyway, whoever or whatever it was that had been there before had obviously blown this Popsicle stand, and I was about to as well, when I noticed a faint glitter in the deepest shadowed area. A fine-linked gold chain with this weird, ugly metal lump at the end of it. It was heavier and colder than I would have thought as I picked it up. Humphrey hissed and shrank back into my curls. Creepy and perfect. I was about to put it on when klepto Blake snatched it out of my hands. “What’s yours is mine. . . .”

  As payback, I was about to scoop his heart out with my teaspoon when an explosion of white flapping feathers erupted between us.

  “ZOMBIE!” Blake screamed and would have smashed it, but I caught his walking stick just in time.

  There, between us on the ground, was that Fabuloso kid’s bird, the white dove. Its feathers were all broken and dirty, and it was making the most pathetic oodling sound.

  “Yeah, real scary zombie.” Giving Blake my hairiest eyeball, I picked the poor thing up with all the gentleness I could find in me and told it it would be okay. I’m good at lying like that.

  10. Trolls

  It was not even five o’clock, and the sun was already setting on the worst day of Balthazar’s entire life. Fists shoved deep into his pockets, he hurried away from the station, past rows of dried-out Christmas trees lined up along the curb for collection.

  With a pang, he remembered the tree his mother had rescued for them a couple of days earlier. “People can be so wasteful. This will be perfect for our Christmas celebration.”

  The Fabulosos never celebrated Christmas until a week or so after the fact. Mrs. Fabuloso claimed this was because it was more special that way. But obviously the family’s busy holiday performing schedule factored into this timing as well. Only now Christmas was seeming further off than ever.

  Shoulders hunched against the cold, Balthazar trudged on past six doughnut stores, then paused as he crossed the Burgoyne Bridge to look down at a large heap of blackened rubble poking out of a tangle of icy bracken. The heap had once been his family’s theater, the Fantasticum, back before he or his sister or his brothers were born. A grand five-hundred-seater that used to fill to capacity every night with Fabuloso fans from all over the province. Back before it burned to the ground.

  An accidental fire, his parents had explained. Faulty wiring. These things happen. But sometimes, especially at the end of an especially bad week, Balthazar would find his dad leaning against the crooked quince tree behind their house, staring across the creek at the charred skeleton of the old theater.

  “You should have seen her before,” Mr. Fabuloso would say. “She was magnificent.”

  And Balthazar, staring at the shards of blackened rock, would nod, although all it looked worthy of now was a wrecking ball.

  “We’ll perform there again someday,” his dad would insist. “Once we’ve saved up the money to fix her up.”

  “Sure.” Balthazar would pretend to agree, the promise sounding to him just like all his dad’s other plans—unrealistic.

  Anyway, what Balthazar needed right then was his own plan. And also, even more importantly at that exact moment, a bathroom.

  Fortunately, Gabriela Park and its public facilities were just ahead. Hurrying across a deserted field, bare trees reaching out from the ground around him like blackened mummy hands, Balthazar ducked into a squat, white building through a door marked MEN. If he was quick about it, he could be out of there before it was totally dark.

  The graffiti in Gabriella Park’s bathroom was not the sort to win any prizes for literary merit, but there was something soothing about how totally unrelated it was to anything else that was going on in Balthazar’s life.

  Here I sit, broken hearted,

  Paid my dime and only farted.

  Next time I will take a chance,

  Save my dime and crap my pants.

  I just wrote on the wall. Take THAT, society!

  I’LL BE RIGHT BACK.—GODOT.

  (whatever that meant)

  Anybody can piss on the floor. Be a hero and poop on the ceiling.

  Poop on the ceiling. Not bad, actually. Then Balthazar noticed some large, fresh-looking purple writing on his left that he didn’t remember seeing a second ago. Look right, the words said.

  Looking to his right, he saw large purple letters instructing him to Look left.

  Right, left, right, left. Toilet tennis. Ha, ha, pretty funny. Only then, when he looked back to his right, the purple words now said: Look behind you.

  That was weird. He blinked and looked again. The words were even bigger now.

  LOOK BEHIND YOU!

  O-kay . . .

  Turning around uneasily, he saw huge purple writing scrawled across the mirror.

  DON’T MOVE! I’M COMING TO GET YOU!!!

  Time to get out of there.

  But as Balthazar started for the door, the sound of fast-approaching rough voices and heavy footsteps stopped him. Quickly he scrambled back into a stall, just as three teenagers came spilling into the bathroom, mouths wide with hyen
a-laughter and jackets bulging with shoplifted junk food. The Trolls! It was a nickname these thugs had earned not only from their bad breath and overdeveloped physiques, but also from a core brute viciousness that nobody wanted to acknowledge as belonging to the human species.

  Balthazar’s first feeling was relief. He knew these guys, and there was no way they could have pulled off that magic graffiti—let alone spelled it correctly. His next feeling was fear. He knew these guys. Too old for middle school, they still hung around the bus stop just off the campus, picking off the stragglers and tormenting their old teachers who no longer had any power over them. Their acts of brutality were legendary among the kids of Grantham.

  By keeping his head down and walking an extra half-mile to a bus stop farther from school, Balthazar had managed to stay clear of them. Until now. Putting his eye to the crack along his stall door, he watched as the Trolls punched each other and ripped into a large bag of Doritos.

  “Ha! That was too easy!” the wild, skinny one named Kier sneered, casually pounding a dent into an empty paper-towel dispenser.

  “Knock it off!” growled Gregg, the biggest of the three.

  “Whatsa matter, Greggy, ya think he’s gonna hear? Ya think he’s following us?” Kier cackled.

  “Yeah, like if he could even get . . . even get his wheelchair ’cross the street,” said Donno, dead-eyed and lumpy, with a strange flat patch across his forehead from where he had been dropped as a baby.

  “ ‘I’m an old man. I’m an old man!’ ” Kier mimicked. “Still,” he added wistfully, “mighta been fun if he’d tried.”

  “So who nabbed the ciggies, then?” Gregg grunted. “Crack ’em out.”

  As the Trolls hunkered down to enjoy their stolen loot, Balthazar eased himself down onto the broken tiles. Floor slime soaked up through the knees of his jeans as he crawled toward the exit, trying not to inhale the bleachy, uriney fumes or secondhand smoke.

  He was almost out the door and would have made it, too, if Gregg, at that exact same moment, hadn’t taken a step back, his heavy boot landing right on top of Balthazar, pushing him facefirst into the muck.

  “Yo, Kier, check out the squirrel I just caught,” Gregg chuckled, hoisting Balthazar up by his belt.

  “Squirrel? Looks more like a snitch to me,” Kier said, scowling.

  “Put me down!” Balthazar cried, feet struggling to find the floor.

  “Hey, I know who that is. It’s that magic kid. You know, from that show that does . . . that does magic,” Donno said. “My grams took me once before she kicked it.”

  “Oh yeah,” Gregg said, smiling, “the one with that hot girl in it. She was in my science class the first time I took it.”

  Hot? Fanella? These guys were seeming more and more dangerously stupid by the second.

  “Show us some magic!” Donno said, clapping excitedly.

  “Yeah,” Gregg said, nodding, “show us some magic and we’ll let you go.”

  Swallowing hard, Balthazar searched his panic-frozen brain for a trick he could do. Any trick. “Does anyone have a quarter?”

  “Ugh, are you two wet-wipes for real?” Kier protested disgustedly as Donno pulled a greasy coin out of his pocket.

  “Perfect,” Balthazar said, examining the bit of silver nervously. “2002, a very good year. But you know money. Easy come,” he continued, passing his hand over the coin, then pointing at his empty palm, “easy go.”

  Donno applauded delightedly and Gregg shrugged noncommittally. But Kier was staring at him with the hard, angry-eyed stare of a true magic-hater.

  “Oh really,” he said, grabbing Balthazar’s other hand. “So what do you have in here, then?”

  “Nothing,” Balthazar pleaded, his bandaged thumb aching as Kier squeezed it hard.

  “Oh really,” Kier said, viciously prying open Balthazar’s fingers to expose the “disappeared” quarter. “What’s this, then?”

  “Ta-da, it’s back again,” Balthazar said lamely, heart sinking faster than the coin falling from his hand.

  “You must think we’re a bunch of dummos,” Kier snarled.

  The light had gone from Donno’s eyes, replaced by dull resentment.

  “Whatever,” Gregg said, stepping aside to let him out. “It’s all fake anyway. Tell your sister hi from me.”

  “Uh, yeah, okay,” Balthazar said, ducking past him.

  “Like hell,” Kier snarled, body-checking Balthazar against the NO SMOKING sign. “He ain’t going nowhere till I know he won’t blab.”

  “Give the squirt a break.”

  But Kier was already dragging Balthazar back into one of the stalls.

  “Let him go?” Kier sneered. “You is a fat softy, ain’t you?”

  “Better that than a scrawny-assed psycho!”

  “An’ I ain’t takin’ that from you, Gregg Gund!”

  Balthazar ducked just in time as Kier’s fist slammed in over his head and into Gregg’s eye.

  Next thing you knew, the two Trolls were on the floor, rolling around in their shoplifted loot, Donno kicking at them to try to separate them, which only made them madder.

  Before Balthazar could make another bolt for the door, a stray elbow caught him on the nose, exploding everything into white pain and a brain full of popping stars. Going down, he saw a squiggle of blood fly from his lips, bright as a neon glow-stick. Then all went black.

  11. Gassius Fartibus

  “What if he’s dead?”

  The warm, metallic taste of blood filled Balthazar’s mouth as tickly ash from one of the Trolls’ cigarettes dropped onto his face.

  “Mphw,” he groaned as a steel-toed boot nudged at his left kidney.

  “He ain’t dead,” Kier said. “Might be better if he was, though. No witnesses.”

  “We ain’t killing no one,” Gregg growled.

  “I didn’t say nuttin’ about killin’, Greggina. We just gotta hit him in the right part of the head that makes him forget. Concusserate him. Now, which part of the head do you think that might be?”

  “The forehead?” Donno suggested.

  “Naw, it’s the soft spot on the top,” Gregg said. “I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

  “I say it’s right here,” Kier said, jabbing Balthazar’s temple with an old piece of pipe.

  This was not going to end well unless Balthazar did something, and fast. Calling on his stage-combat training, he braced one foot against the wall of a stall, then kicked the other straight up into Kier’s chin. Bam! A direct hit!

  With an outraged cry, the Troll stumbled back into the sink, his weight wrenching it off the wall. Freezing-cold water sprayed out of the busted rusty pipes.

  “You are so dead!” Kier roared.

  With a fast roll, Balthazar was up, but Donno was in front of him blocking his way out.

  “Who’s the dummo now?” Donno smiled dully, grabbing Balthazar’s arm and twisting it up painfully behind his back.

  “Yeah, let’s see you magic your way out of this one, magic boy,” Kier said as he picked up the pipe again.

  Closing his eyes, Balthazar willed some real magic to come. Something to make Donno let him go, or make all of them disappear, or explode this entire situation in a giant fireball.

  Instead what he heard was singing.

  “There was eggs, eggs,

  with short fat hairy legs

  in the store, in the store.

  There was eggs . . .”

  The voice was harsh and rasping, like whoever was singing had eaten cigarette butts and broken glass for lunch.

  “. . . eggs, with short fat hairy legs . . .”

  “What is that?” Kier said, tightening his grip on the pipe nervously.

  A stocky, shambling rag-pile of a man came stumbling in.

  “In the quarter mas-ter, quartermaster store,” the rag man sang, opening a ratty umbrella to fend off the spraying water.

  His look was, if possible, even more alarming than his voice. His matted, gray-streaked hair was more
like the stuff you pull out of a clogged vacuum cleaner than something that belonged on a human head. The face beneath his battered top hat was puffed and pickled. The hand that clutched his umbrella was covered in thick, rubbery scars, and missing two fingers. And the smell . . . even in the stinky bathroom, the guy reeked.

  “My eyes are dim, I can-not see.

  I have no-ot brought my specs with me.

  I have no-ot brought my-aye specs . . .

  with . . . me!”

  He finished on a high, off-key falsetto, with a wet dead-animal of a fart.

  “Gross.” The Trolls cracked up.

  The man’s offended silence was even louder than his singing. “Excuse me,” he said, toppling toward them, “but what did you just say?”

  The Trolls exchanged nervous, skittery smirks.

  “Your toot,” Kier said at last. “It, you know, smells bad.”

  “My toot smells bad?” the man boomed back at them. “Of course it smells bad. It’s a fart! Is that the best you can do?”

  “Wha?” Donno grunted in confusion.

  “Well,” the man said, “your friend’s description just seems a little lacking in imagination. There are a hundred different ways he could have said it. Bad-ass: ‘If I stank like you, I’d cut off my nose.’ Respectful: ‘All hail Gassius Fartibus!’ Descriptive: ‘A beefer! A barn-burner! A musky turnip! A rhino-stopper!’ Awed: ‘Hark, the toothless wonder speaks!’ Gracious: ‘You must never have to worry about lice, with such a robust fumigation system.’ Considerate: ‘Mind you don’t go near any open flames.’ Sympathetic: ‘The fartiste is so often misunderstood.’ Environmental: ‘There goes the ozone layer!’ Poetical: ‘A blast far crueler than the arctic wind!’ Or tragic: ‘Inhale the treacherous odor that mars the majesty of that magnificent man, a stench ripe with its own perfidy!’ Your friend here could have said any of those things. But did he? No. Perhaps because he knew that if he did I would have to kill him.”