Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  Ignatius fell silent. The silence roared around him and Balthazar like an ocean.

  “So,” Balthazar said, “What happened then?”

  “I left,” Ignatius said, his voice thick with disgust. “I didn’t see it. But as I was walking away, I got another flash of that bullet blasting through someone’s head, and I suddenly realized the truth of what I had been seeing the whole time. That head wasn’t mine, it was my brother’s.

  “I turned and ran with everything I had back to the theater. What had I allowed to happen? The bodies were like a forest as I fought my way through the crowd. ‘Benjamin! Stop!’

  “But it was too late. A sudden sharp crack snapped through the air. The bullet went right through his head, leaving a terrible, dripping hole where his face had been. But remarkably, horribly, Benji’s body continued to live. They kept him like that in the hospital for six days, his body suspended in a nest of wires and tubes, heart beating, organs functioning, brain flatlined.

  “Of course I hoped for a miracle. Eventually talk turned to the miracle of life that his still-living organs might bring to other people. Everyone was in agreement except me—but I had also completely lost my mind at that point, so no one was listening to what I had to say. On the seventh day I woke by his bedside to find the bed was empty. He was gone. They denied it, but I knew they had taken him off to be cut up and used for spare parts. The Fantasticum was mine.”

  Ignatius fell silent again.

  “What did you do then?” Balthazar asked at last.

  “I went back to the theater,” Ignatius replied, “with a can of gasoline. The magnificent old building went up like kindling. I planned to die on the stage. Like my brother had. But as the roof was falling in around me, I lost my nerve and escaped. I would have forgot if I could, but these . . . ,” he said, holding up his damaged hands, “are a constant reminder of my cowardice.

  “For days, weeks, months I wandered in self-imposed exile, hiding from family and friends, constantly on the move in a futile attempt to escape what I had done. Then, quite by accident, in a shadow-puppet theater in a Moroccan flea market, I stumbled upon a strangely familiar story. A fairy tale about creatures called the Empty Ones and the dark, chaotic magic they carried inside them. An evil vampire magic that lured in magicians with promises of greatness, all the while secretly feeding off their magic, eating away their past, present and future until there was nothing left of them at all. A dark force with only one desire—to devour all living magic and return the world to the chaos and nothingness which are its domain. ‘Gloaming’ was what the puppet master called it. Watching this puppet play, I felt a cold stab of recognition. But it was only a fairy tale, the puppet master insisted, fobbing me off like I was crazy. A story for children.

  “And so my great search began. My obsession. To find out everything I could about the Gloaming. A quest that took me to all four corners of the earth. Egypt with its ancient coffin-texts and death scrolls. The oúfos and voodoo death curses in Haiti. The forbidden Hungry Ghost scrolls of Japan. Burning through my money, my health and my sanity, the list of forgotten magicians on my arm growing longer and longer, until I wound up back here, many years older, broke and alone, nothing but my old car to my name.”

  “You think the Gloaming took my family?” Balthazar shivered.

  “Not on its own. The Gloaming can’t exist in this world without a host. Someone is using it. Or it is using them.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now you to go to bed.” Ignatius waved him off as he rose creakily to his feet. “You’re giving me a headache. Here.” Reaching into his jacket again, he pulled out a greasy tube of Neosporin. “Put this on the pigeon’s scratch and make sure the patient is resting comfortably.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To ruminate,” his uncle replied, grabbing a bottle of cooking sherry off the counter as he stumbled out of the kitchen.

  Gently cradling Rover in a makeshift Tupperware nest, Balthazar made his way out of the kitchen and past his uncle “ruminating” in front of the staticky old TV—a foul, mushroomy smell wafting off of his corn-covered feet, and his mouth dropped open in a sawing snore.

  “Uncle Ignatius?” he said, giving him a gentle shake.

  “Sausage,” his uncle mumbled in his sleep, snapping his yellowed teeth at Balthazar’s hand. “My sausage!”

  His uncle would be fine sleeping there, Balthazar decided.

  Carefully he took the empty sherry bottle from Ignatius’s damaged hand and covered him with an old woolen throw, then moved away quietly.

  Exhaustion clung to Balthazar’s body like a cement unitard as he stumbled down the long hall to his bedroom. Turning into his room, he set Rover’s nest up on a column of encyclopedias and, brushing the soggy debris off his bed, curled up on the driest patch he could find. But when he closed his eyes, sleep would not come. His pecked thumb ached and his eyes kept popping open to stare at the hole in his ceiling.

  Some annoying fruit fly of a memory was buzzing in his head, a naggy, niggly feeling that there was something he had seen today, something important, something he needed to remember. He closed his eyes. What was it? Something about . . . Something . . .

  Log # 373

  Mwa ha ha. Well, our evil plans worked and we now have stolen from our subpar enemies a gig at a gross, fly-infested dinner theater with no decent vegetarian options on the menu. Woo-hoo.

  We are back at the hotel now and the pyrrhic (look it up) nature of this victory is sinking in, as are Mom and Dad’s hangovers from all the cheap champagne they stole from the Magic Mansion’s cellars. They are giving each other unspeakably filthy looks. And their moods aren’t being helped by the fact that Moms has just learned that her appeal to overturn her latest rejection by the International Brotherhood of Real Stage Magic has been denied. Which we all knew would happen because it happens every year and because everyone knows the IBRSM is a stuck-up, chauvinist old-boys club. But Moms has always been a sucker for clubs that won’t have her. She will feel better after she screams dad’s head off. She’s just waiting until Blake gets off his Skype interview with that cheesy German teenybopper magazine. Hence my earplugs and why Humphrey and I have just locked ourselves in the bathroom. We like to plan ahead.

  Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Only, with my life, the more I examine it, the less it feels worth living. So I have decided not to write any more about all the horrible things my family has done, is doing and is likely to do in the future. Instead, I am going to examine other things that are less depressingly predictable. Today’s subject: that weird necklace I found under the stage today that Blake stole from me.

  WEIRD NECKLACE I FOUND UNDER THE STAGE

  OBSERVATIONS:

  • The chain is real gold and therefore expensive. I can tell it’s real gold because of its glossy, soft sheen and also because it is not giving Blake the rash any metal except gold gives him.

  • The pendant at the end of the necklace is squashed like it’s undergone some kind of impact, and it is made of a dull, heavy metal.

  • The pendant is freaky cold and is giving Blake a big ugly splotch of frostbite on his chest where it is touching his skin through the unbuttoned part of his cheesy black satin shirt.

  • Blake can now suddenly make fire come out of his fingertips, which he couldn’t do yesterday (plus it’s copying my magic, which is wrong and unfair).

  • The pendant is rightfully mine because Blake stole it off me.

  • Moms and Dad yelled at me for being a tattle-tale, when Blake’s the one’s who stole.

  INFERENCES:

  • Even though the metal lump is ugly and squashed, someone values it, because they put it on an expensive chain.

  • The necklace possibly belongs to that weird guy under the stage, because I found it where I saw him before.

  • The pendant is unnatural, because there is no way normal metal would stay this cold for this long.

  •
The pendant is improving Blake’s magic, which is unfair because I’m the one who found it.

  • My parents don’t love me.

  PREDICTIONS:

  • We will get kicked out of the hotel because Moms and Dad have started fighting too loud and we’ve already been warned twice by the front desk.

  • I will develop stomach ulcers at some point in the future.

  I WONDER:

  • If my life will suck forever.

  • If I fill it with towels, will this bathtub will be comfortable enough that I can sleep here until morning?

  • If that stupid Fabuloso boy’s dove is okay. It would be sad if it died.

  16. A Houseful of Secrets

  When Balthazar next opened his eyes, it was morning. His dad’s favorite opera, The Marriage of Figaro, was blasting through the house and warm pancakey, turkey bacony smells licked at his nose like a friendly pup. They were back!

  “Mom! Dad! Fanella! Franky! Freddy! Gaga!”

  All the way down to the kitchen he kept shouting, until the entire house was ringing with their names, mixing in with the booming opera singing, “Feee-ga-ro, Feeee-ga-ro, Feegaro-Feegaro-FEEEEEEE-GAAAAAAA-ROOOOOOOO!”

  “Dad!” he shouted, skidding into the kitchen.

  But it wasn’t his dad. It was his uncle, Ignatius, waltzing around in a cherry-blossom silk dressing gown and singing loudly as he flipped pancakes in impressive arcs and curlicues. His pungent odor was gone, his nostril hair trimmed, his stubble shaved and his hair washed and sleekly pomaded. Balthazar almost didn’t recognize him.

  “Is . . . is that my mom’s dressing gown you’re wearing?”

  “This old thing?” Ignatius said, fingering the silk gaping open across his glistening carpet of grizzled chest hair. “I just borrowed it while I did some laundry. What do you think?”

  “Too small.”

  His uncle nodded critically. “Yeah. Cheap silk, too. Have a seat.”

  Wielding his spatula expertly, Ignatius flipped a stack of fluffy, golden-brown pancakes onto a chipped plate, and then two perfectly crisped squiggles of turkey bacon.

  “Wait for it,” he ordered, swatting Balthazar’s hand away as he reached for the plate.

  Furrowing his brow, Ignatius glared at the plate until it rose shakily off the counter. Rising and dipping, the plate floated unsteadily toward Balthazar, the pancakes sliding back and forth like a snowboarder in a half-pipe. Almost there, almost there. Then SMASH, the whole thing came down hard on the table in front of Balthazar, the plate shattering into a thousand little pieces.

  “Bit out of practice,” his uncle grunted in displeasure. “Anyway, there you go.”

  “Actually, I’m in more of a cereal mood,” Balthazar said, reaching the Cheerios and Ovaltine down from the cupboard.

  “Fine,” Ignatius sniffed, sweeping the wreckage over to his side of the table. “All the more for me.”

  They ate for a while in silence, Ignatius staring at Balthazar and Balthazar doing his best to ignore the unpleasant crunching sounds the plate-shard-sprinkled forkfuls of pancake made as his uncle chewed them up.

  “So,” Ignatius said, picking a bloody shard of Corningware out of his gums, “enemies?”

  “What?”

  “Enemies,” he repeated, producing a notebook and a gnawed, splintery ballpoint pen with an elegant flourish. “What enemies does your family have?”

  “Well, there’s the Fistulas,” Balthazar said. “The Fistulas for sure. They were there that night, too.”

  “The Fistulas?” Ignatius said with a mocking laugh. “Those toothless poseurs? What did they do? Pleather them off to Pleatherville?”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “I’m only laughing to keep from crying at such a ridiculous suggestion. Who else do you got?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. . . .”

  Enemies weren’t a big topic of conversation in the Fabuloso house.

  “Come on,” Ignatius urged impatiently. “Spit it out.”

  “Well, there’s our neighbors, the Hogsthrottles.”

  “Pathetic busybodies. Next.”

  “The theater critic, Clythe Clissold. He hates us.”

  “He’s a theater critic. That’s his job. Come on. I make more enemies buying toilet paper.”

  “Rose Pfeffenfucher,” Balthazar said, feeling a bit desperate by this point.

  “The Pfeff.” His uncle’s eyes widened. “Ah yes, now there’s a woman to be reckoned with. But ask yourself, what had she to gain from the entire act disappearing in the middle of a show? Leaving her on the hook to refund all those tickets? No, no, she’d gnaw her favorite money-counting thumb down to a bloody nub before she’d knowingly put herself in that position.

  “Kid’s as useless as hair on a frog. Think!” he commanded himself, banging his head hard on the table. “Think, think, think!” Then he leaped to his feet and, with a flutter of cherry-blossom silk, disappeared off down the hall.

  When Balthazar caught up with Ignatius again he was in the library, up on one of the squeaky old ladders, pulling his way along the upper rows of books with his powerful arms like an orangutan on roller-stilts.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” Ignatius snorted, coming to a stop right above Balthazar. “Aha! Found you,” he exclaimed triumphantly, pulling a crumbly old book off the shelf. Descending several rungs, he blew off the dust from the top of the pages and presented the cover to Balthazar: The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek: A Functional Analysis of the Order and Articulation of NP Constituent in Herodotus. “So what do you make of that?”

  “Noun phrases?” Balthazar frowned. “I don’t see how . . .”

  “Precisely!” Ignatius said, triumphantly flipping the book to reveal a secret compartment. Swishing his finger around inside the hole, he pulled out a simple gold ring. It was smooth-looking at first, but as it caught the light, Balthazar noticed a series of strange runes engraved into the band.

  “Humph,” Ignatius grunted, tossing it aside. “Useless.” And with a heave of his arms, he went shuttling off down the shelves.

  There were forty-two secret-compartment books in all, each containing some small marvel—a flaming salamander’s egg, a pocket watch that told jokes instead of time, a jeweled mechanical dragonfly, a tiny suitcase containing a full set of neatly folded, well-worn clothes, etc, etc. But nothing Ignatius was looking for.

  Finished with the library, Ignatius moved on to the rest of the house. New to Balthazar, these secret compartments were clearly no secret to his family. A slide-away panel was stuffed full of Fanella’s bad love poems. The creaky bottom step in the back stairwell concealed the twins’ bug-out bag, filled with smoke bombs and other survival essentials. Gaga had hidden her black cigars (which she claimed to have given up) in the hollow, moth-filled bust of G-5 Fabuloso. And the special anniversary champagne Mrs. Fabuloso had bought as a surprise many years ago but then lost was in the newel post at the base of the grand staircase. “Vinegar,” Ignatius pronounced it after a deep swig.

  It was hard for Balthazar not to feel a little outraged. Was he the only one in his family who didn’t have secrets?

  “Pathetic!” Ignatius groaned. “All these great hiding places with nothing decent hidden in any of them! Useless, useless, useless!” He banged his head against the wall. Which was starting to seem like kind of a thing with him.

  “There’s still the one in the den,” Balthazar said.

  17. Paper Cuts

  “Den? Since when do the Fabulosos have a den?” Ignatius grumbled, a goose egg swelling up on his forehead as he followed Balthazar through the silver-less silver room and the cancerous old smoking room into the tattered East Wing. “What are you now? Some suburban sitcom family? Oh,” he exclaimed as Balthazar stopped in front of a closed oak door, “you mean the study.”

  “No,” Balthazar said, carefully opening the door, “I mean the den.”

  “Faust’s foot fungus! What is that?” Ignatiu
s demanded, gesturing at the menagerie of intricately folded paper origami animals filling up the study—perching on shelves, pasturing on the old Persian rug, fluttering around the crown moldings. Not just a few, but hundreds. Delicate moths, serene cranes, ambling hedgehogs, strutting peacocks, cats, dogs, horses, foxes, sheep, wolves, roosters, squirrels, snakes, ducklings, bison, camels, monkeys, penguins, giraffes, walruses, armadillos, lions, tigers, bears and a capering little piglet.

  “Bills,” Balthazar said, grimacing—every single bill that Mrs. Fabuloso had ever folded into an origami animal and sent scampering or soaring off instead of paying. But while the paper critters had seemed cute at first, they became less so as their numbers grew, all clamoring to be paid, becoming more and more aggressive with each passing bill cycle.

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell your parents not to play with their debts?” Ignatius tsked.

  “All the time. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Carefully Balthazar moved into his parents’ office, tiptoeing gingerly through the rustling origami minefield toward the massive oak desk in the middle of the room. Step, freeze; step, freeze.

  He had begun to pull out the front drawer, when “SQUEEEEEEEE!”

  Turning around, he saw his uncle frozen in the middle of the room, a curly paper pig tail wriggling under his right boot. Only with no pig attached to it. “Oops.” Ignatius winced.

  “Squeeeeeeeeee!” the tailless piglet squealed, running in circles around the room. “Squeeeee! Squeeeeeeeee!”

  Then the rest of the paper animals started to join in, whipping themselves up into a blinding blizzard of unpaid debt.

  “Owwww!” Ignatius howled, swatting away at the paper swarms like Godzilla versus the Japanese army. “Paper cuts!!”

  And they were going at Balthazar, too, slicing at his hands and plastering themselves over his face until he could barely see or breathe.

  “Take that!” Ignatius cried, grabbing up an old seltzer bottle. A powerful stream of water hit Balthazar in the face, blasting away the smothering papers. “And that and that!” he cried, spraying back the paper hordes with a wide arc of water. “And . . .” The gush of water wilted, then gurgled out in a few sad little spit bubbles. “Retreat!”