Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  The Trolls weren’t smiling anymore. They were seriously freaked.

  “And besides,” the man added, “I’m missing an enzyme, so what you are effectively doing here is making fun of a disabled person. Is that how you bullies get your kicks? Mocking the handicapped?”

  The sudden wail of a police siren interrupted his tirade.

  “Oh crap,” Gregg muttered.

  “Run for it!” Kier shouted.

  Balthazar started to bolt after them but the man held him back, circling a heavy arm around his shoulder. “Not you,” he said. “You’re staying with me.”

  “What? No, I’m not,” Balthazar protested.

  “Come now, Balthazar, didn’t you get my message? Don’t you know who I am?” The derelict leaned in closer until his swollen, vein-webbed nose was pressing right into Balthazar’s. “Take a good look.” His breath smelled like something had crawled down his throat and died. He was redder, puffier and smellier than anyone Balthazar had ever met before in real life—but there was something familiar in his glaring, bloodshot yellowy-blue eyes.

  “Did . . . did you come to one of my family’s shows?”

  “Did I come to one of your family’s shows?” The hobo snorted. “I was the family show! I’m your uncle. The Incomp’rable Ignatius! Come out of retirement at last!” He looked around, waiting for applause.

  12. Shoebox

  Outside the bathroom, the light-polluted night sky was the color of bruised fruit. As the gut-punchingly cold air cleared the fog that had settled over Balthazar’s brain, he started to take stock of his situation. His family had disappeared; his social worker had declared him insane; he was freezing cold and soaking wet; and his new official guardian was a gross hobo guy with digestive issues. Could life possibly get any worse?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ignatius said.

  Balthazar’s heart sank. Just what he needed. Another mind reader. “You do?”

  “You’re thinking,” his uncle said, biting off a strip of jerky that he had salvaged from the bathroom floor, “about all the amazing things you’ve heard about me. My meteoric rise to fame. The way I changed forever the very way the good people of Grantham look at magic. How I vanished mysteriously at the height of my popularity, leaving a gaping hole in the world of stage magic. So which of the stories you’ve heard about me is your favorite? The time I made the Port Dalhousie carousel disappear? How I made Thirteen-Mile Creek run backward? Don’t be shy. You can tell me.”

  “Er, I . . . I don’t really have one,” Balthazar said.

  “Pick two, then,” Ignatius offered generously.

  “The thing is,” Balthazar admitted, “my family doesn’t really talk about you. Ever.”

  Ignatius gnawed at this information for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “of course they wouldn’t. Better to forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “What I’d prefer not to remember.”

  Ignatius pulled a soggy lump of Kleenex from his pocket and blew his nose loudly, then peered intently at its goopy contents like a witch doctor reading entrails. “You needn’t waste my time telling me about what happened,” he continued. “I already got the whole scoop from that social worker of yours. Rita, is it?”

  “Gita,” Balthazar said coldly. “Gita McGinty.”

  “Gita McGinty.” Ignatius rolled the syllables on his tongue. “Interesting name. What’s her background? Irish? Indian? Half-and-half?”

  “No idea.”

  “But she was nice, right?” he pressed. “She sounded nice. Over the phone. A bit of a lilt to her voice.”

  “She was horrible,” Balthazar said.

  “But pretty? She sounded pretty. You know, like the librarian who wears her hair up with glasses but then she lets it down and—”

  “Hideous,” Balthazar lied.

  “Really?”

  “Cross-eyed, snout-nosed and covered in gross, bubbly warts,” Balthazar added with extreme satisfaction.

  “Ugh,” Ignatius groaned. “And to think that woman wanted to meet with me.”

  Pulling a flask from his pocket, he took a long guzzle, then offered it to Balthazar.

  “I’m twelve,” Balthazar said. “I don’t drink.”

  “Hmph,” his uncle snorted. “How dehydrating for you.”

  They walked the rest of the way home in silence, Balthazar’s hands shoved deep in his pockets, his fingers closed around the gristly old wishbone that Gaga had given him. Please be home. Please be home.

  “The old homestead looks like crap,” Ignatius observed as they arrived at last at the hunkering lump that was the Fabuloso mansion. “What the hell happened?”

  Pretty harsh for a guy who smelled like he hadn’t changed his socks in six years.

  “We’ve been busy,” was all Balthazar said, reaching under the dead hydrangea bush for the spare key.

  Turning the key in the lock, he stepped into the vestibule and flicked on the light.

  “Hello? Anybody home?”

  There was no jumble of shoes by the door, no coats hastily looped up on the hooks, no shouting, shrieking or sounds of explosions.

  The hollow feeling in Balthazar’s chest echoed the emptiness that seemed to fill every nook and cranny of the house—the heavy emptiness of a theater after a show has been canceled but the sets haven’t yet been taken down.

  Generally the Fabulosos turned on as few lights as possible, to keep their electricity bills down, but this time Balthazar didn’t stop until he had switched on all the lights in the house and every shadow was obliterated.

  Circling back around to the front hall, he found his uncle still standing outside the open front door, a draft of cold air rushing in around him.

  “You should probably come in,” Balthazar said, “before you let all the warm air out.”

  “Yes,” Ignatius said, nodding. “Of course.” He swung his foot forward like he was going to step in, but then spun around and stepped away. Shaking his head, he walked quickly toward the door again, stopping short again at the threshold. “Just . . . just give me a minute.”

  Heading back into the parlor, Balthazar heard what sounded like someone banging his head against the door frame, but he decided not to turn around to see for sure.

  Opening the cast-iron doors of the wood-burning stove, he arranged some kindling around a crumpled piece of newspaper. Everyone else in his family could make stage-magic fire, but he was the best at building real fires. The kind that actually could warm up the house.

  Turning, he saw that his uncle had come in.

  “Twenty years since I’ve been here,” Ignatius said, looking around the parlor as if he thought the furniture might suddenly attack him at any moment. “Feels strange.”

  “What happened?” Balthazar asked. “Why did you disappear?”

  Ignatius said nothing.

  “If you’re going to be looking after me, I think I have a right to know.”

  His uncle studied him with his sore, busted-windowpane eyes. Measuring. “No,” he grunted at last. “No, you don’t. In fact, as a minor you have virtually no rights whatsoever, legally speaking. I took on that burden when I foolishly agreed to be your guardian.”

  “If you think it’s so stupid, why did you do it?”

  “I was drunk.”

  “What about getting my family back?” Balthazar said.

  “Of course I’m going to get them back. But let’s get one thing straight. I have not signed up for irrelevant prying into my past, or for the role of miserable, depressed old fart whose life is changed by the love and companionship of some pathetic misfit of a kid.”

  A sudden knock at the door interrupted him.

  “I’m going to go get that,” Balthazar said.

  “If it’s that ugly social worker, tell her I’m not here,” Ignatius called after him.

  There was nobody on the front porch, or anywhere around that Balthazar could see. But as he turned to go back inside, his foot bumped against a sh
oe box lying on the welcome mat—a designer shoe box with air holes cut in it and a folded scrap of paper tucked under the faux-distressed bootlace tying it shut. “She needs a vet,” the note read. The writing, he recognized, was the same rough, scrabbly kind he had seen in Pagan Fistula’s sketchbook before she had slammed it closed.

  13. Grubbits

  Hands trembling, Balthazar pulled the shoelace off the box and lifted the lid. He hadn’t thought there was room for his heart to sink any lower, but when he looked inside the box, it found a way. There, cushioned in piles of jet-black silks, was his dove, her body limp as an old sock, with a creepy purple-black scratch beneath her eye that throbbed with a strange, icy coldness when he touched it.

  “Rover!”

  “What’s up with the pigeon?” Ignatius asked, looking down over his nephew’s shoulder.

  “She’s a dove,” Balthazar corrected him.

  Frowning, Ignatius sniffed at the bird, then carefully fanned open her wing, exposing a gangrenous knot of bubbling infection branching out beneath her skin in wriggling rivulets and tributaries. But worst was the smell—sweet and gluey like a combination of freezer-burned old meat and the awful stink of old air conditioners when their Freon is leaking out. “Grubbit spawn,” he muttered darkly.

  “Gru-what?”

  “No time for chitty-chat,” Ignatius said, disappearing down the hall. “Quickly now, follow me!” A loud crash followed from the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?” Balthazar demanded, looking at the broken pile of breakfast dishes his uncle had tipped off the kitchen table onto the floor.

  “Preparing the operating surface,” Ignatius replied, swabbing the table with a hot, soapy sponge.

  Balthazar shook his head. “No way. She needs a vet.”

  “No time,” Ignatius said, pulling on a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves. “Besides, if my guess is correct no vet will have seen a case like this in over five hundred years. We’re the only shot she’s got. Ready now?”

  A chilly fog rose off Rover’s limp body and her eyes were dull and milky. Balthazar swallowed as he laid her down on the table. “Ready.”

  “Here, put these on,” his uncle said, hitting him in the chest with a second pair of dishwashing gloves. “I’m going to start squeezing. And whatever comes out, I need you to catch it in this.”

  Gloves loose and floppy on his hands, Balthazar barely managed a fumbling catch of the baby-food jar his uncle tossed at him.

  “Hold her steady, now. Wing out. That’s right.”

  Gently but firmly, Ignatius began squeezing and pinching at the deepest of Rover’s scratches. His BO was outrageous, but it was nothing compared to the putrid smell rising out of Rover’s scratch, coming up in icy puffs with each squeeze. Warm stomach acid flooded Balthazar’s mouth but he swallowed it back down. He could feel Rover’s frightened heartbeats rattling through her hollow bones.

  Ignatius’s eyes were on the scratch, intent as a cat at a fishbowl. What was he looking for? Then Balthazar saw something rippling just under the skin. Ignatius saw it, too, and with a quick, decisive squeeze, he pushed the thing up to the surface: an inky-black little squiggle.

  “Festering fumets! Get it! Get it!” But before Balthazar could scoop it into the jar, it had squirmed back under her skin. “Blast!” Ignatius swore, tearing off his gloves. “Can’t feel anything in these damn things.”

  Once more Ignatius began to squeeze, with quick, upwards pinches until it squirted up to the surface again. Ready this time, Balthazar quickly scooped the tarry blob into the jar and slammed on the lid.

  Peering through the glass, he examined the strange teardrop-shaped thing—black and wriggly like a little tadpole. Thrashing its tail, the thing shot forward, straight at his face, splattering into four or five smaller little squiggles as it hit the glass, then right away pooling together again to shoot forward once more—frost crystallizing against the side of the jar with each impact. “What . . . what is that thing?”

  “Shhh. Ready now.”

  “There’s more?”

  There were, in fact, twenty-three more, each blobbing into the last as Balthazar added them to the baby-food jar until the seething lump was the size of walnut.

  Balthazar’s eyes ached from staring, and the chill from the glass had made his bad hand go all stiff and throbby, but finally the sinister purply-blackness was gone from all of Rover’s scratches, leaving a sore but healthier pink tinge in its place.

  “That’s the last of them,” Ignatius declared, his neck cracking painfully as threw his head back.

  “What are they?” Balthazar asked again, staring at the thrashing mass.

  “Grubbits,” his uncle said darkly, giving the jar a thoughtful shake and sending the little blobs sloshing around inside. “Or is it Grubbucks? The information I’ve been able to gather about Gloaming spawn is slippery.”

  “Gloaming?”

  “Nothing magic. Very ancient. From before existence. You know how magic makes something out of nothing? Well, the Gloaming makes nothing out of something. Horrible stuff. Technically, it’s not supposed to be able to exist in a living world.”

  “Then how do you know that’s what this is?”

  “Because,” Ignatius said, “it killed my brother.”

  14. The Fantasticum

  “Killed your brother,” Balthazar repeated when he could find his voice. “You mean . . . you mean my dad?”

  Ignatius shook his head impatiently. “No, the other one. Benjamin.”

  “But he died in an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” Ignatius pressed.

  “A stage accident? I think? I can’t really remember. My family doesn’t really like to dwell on stuff like that, so—”

  “So he is forgotten,” his uncle snorted. “I suppose that’s one way to stay sane.”

  “What happened?”

  Ignatius fell silent, considering the question. The darkness outside pressed in at the walls and windows, and the silence pounded in Balthazar’s ears, broken only by the wet, fishy splattering of the thrashing black lump inside the baby-food jar. Then, just as Balthazar was beginning to give up on getting an answer to his question, just as he was almost starting to feel relieved, his uncle began to speak.

  “You’ve heard about the Fantasticum, yes?”

  Balthazar nodded.

  “Now, there was a theater. A place where dreams came alive. The second you stepped through the doors, you could feel yourself stepping into something bigger than yourself. And that’s how it was with us three brothers, too. Your father’s looks, my genius, and Benjamin’s . . . well, let’s just say Benjamin’s unique flair, all weaving together to create something way bigger than the sum of our parts. The Fabulous Fabuloso Boys. We were hardly more than teenagers when our parents died in an ice-fishing accident, a tragedy which would have destroyed a lesser act, but we pushed on through our grief and became bigger than ever. We could have been huge. We were right on the cusp. Then the inheritance issue came up. . . .”

  “Inheritance?”

  “Of the Fantasticum. According to the family trust, only one Fabuloso can inherit the Fantasticum—the inheritor, in the case of multiple potential heirs, being determined by tontine.”

  “Tontine?”

  “A duel of stage magicianship,” Ignatius explained impatiently. “Winner take all.”

  “Sounds kind of . . . weird.”

  “No more weird than the family business going to the ne’er-do-well eldest son, or some demented old lady naming her cat as her primary beneficiary. Ours was actually more normal than most. Officially, the tontine was to make sure whoever inherited the Fantasticum was the best person for the job. But the real reason was even more practical: publicity. For generations, potential heirs had built up epic rivalries in the public eye while secretly determining in advance who the winner would be. This time would have been no different if it wasn’t for your dad falling in love.” Ignatius spoke those last words, “falling in lo
ve,” like another person might have said “falling into a fit of homicidal rage.”

  “The plan had always been for your dad to win the tontine and take over the running of the Fantasticum. He had the looks, the people skills and the requisite intelligence—if not much more—for the position. But he was in love and didn’t want the responsibility of running a theater. He wanted to flit off to Eastern Europe with his new bride and live the Bohemian life. Busking on street corners, dinners at 11 p.m., a new town every week . . .”

  Balthazar tried to picture it. “Dad and Mom? Seriously?”

  “That’s not that point. The point is . . . not that I blame them or anything, but they did kind of ruin everything. Taking off on their hippie honeymoon tour and sticking me with the burden of running the theater.

  “But anyway off they went and there I was, up in the tiny accounting room toiling over the Fantasticum accounts when Benji came in with the most stupid question I had heard from him yet.

  “So, have you thought about who should win the tontine?” Benji asked me.

  “Who do you think?”

  “Well,” he said, twisting his hair around his finger, “obviously if Ferdie was here it would be him. But since he’s gone, I thought I rather might like to.”

  The idea was so absurd I couldn’t help but laugh. Not only was Benji’s magic the weakest of all of ours, he had never shown the slightest interest in the business end of the operation.

  “I’m as good as you!” he insisted. Even though he was in his early twenties, Benji was still the baby of the family and our parents’ death had hit him hardest of all. If your dad had been around he would have found some other way to prop him up. But my brain didn’t work that way. And as Benji looked at me with that bruised, spoiled expression of his, all I could see was a vortex of need that would swallow up the Fantasticum and everything our family had worked so hard for for so many generations if I didn’t put my foot down.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped.

  And I was foolish enough to think that would be an end of it. The tontine was still a month away. Plenty of time for him to work this stupidity out of his system.