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Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

Page 12

by I. J. Brindle


  “You first.” Pagan shivered, her pleather no match for a Grantham winter.

  Pagan had insisted that they bring the snakes with them so the Pfeff couldn’t take them for collateral for their canceled show. It seemed kind of weird that she was more obsessed about getting her snakes out of the theater than she was about figuring out how to get their families back. But then, thinking about her family, maybe it wasn’t that weird.

  “You guys were top of my list,” Balthazar admitted. “How about you? Do you guys have any enemies? Other than my family, obviously.”

  “No one,” Pagan said. “You guys are it.”

  “Just us?”

  “We used to have more,” she said defensively. “We used to have tons. It just got too hard to maintain them all, especially when my parents started fighting with each other. All the others began to feel kind of neglected and started drifting away.”

  “So why did you pick us?”

  “We didn’t,” Pagan said. “Stan did.”

  “Our stage manager?”

  Pagan nodded. “He showed up at our penthouse just after we had gotten fired from another theater for cannibalism and told us about this gig.”

  “Cannibalism?”

  “People so don’t understand art. Anyway, the point is, he was the one that told us about this job opening.”

  “There was no opening. That was our gig.”

  “Trust me, my family wasn’t happy about it, either,” Pagan said. “But beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Please, you guys are hardly beggars.”

  “Shows how much you know,” Pagan snorted. “The car, the clothes, the penthouse. My great-aunt paid for all of that. She’s a financial wizard. But she cut us off a couple months back when Moms refused go into the family business. Why else would we have been desperate enough to go after your pathetic dinner-theater gig?”

  “I thought you were just mean.”

  “We are.”

  “I don’t think you’re that mean.”

  “You only say that because I’m your only friend left in the world,” Pagan said, giving him a pitying look.

  “Still, we are in this together.”

  “Only until we get our families back,” Pagan said. “Then we’re enemies again.”

  Turning the corner, Balthazar saw his house up ahead. Huge and ruinous, it had never looked more beautiful. But he saw something else as well, someone else, to be precise, propping her big, sunshine-yellow three-speeder, Buttercup (the name stenciled onto the side), against a lamppost.

  “Oh crap,” Balthazar groaned. “It’s my social worker.”

  “I got one of those assigned to me, too,” Pagan said grimly “after the CN Tower incident. Yours is prettier.”

  “She’s still evil.”

  “The pretty ones always are. You have to get rid of her.”

  “Balthazar!” Ms. McGinty cried, breaking into an ear-to-ear grin as she spotted him. “Perfect timing! I wanted to come check on how you and your uncle are doing. I haven’t heard from him since he picked you up in the park. Is he treating you okay? My office got kind of a strange call from some neighbors—the Pigstranglers, is it? What do you have there? Oh my,” she said, peeking under the tarp. “Are . . . those snakes?”

  “Plus a few lizards and a tarantula,” Pagan said, narrowing her eyes. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Ms. McGinty said. “These poor things are ectothermic, they can’t regulate their own temperatures.”

  Inside the terrariums, the snakes’ vibrant scales had turned a disturbing dullish gray color, and they were hardly moving.

  “They’re starting to brumate,” Ms. McGinty said.

  “Bru-what?”

  “Like hibernation, except for reptiles,” Pagan said unhappily. “Only they’re not as good at it as bears are, so they don’t always wake up.”

  “They’re going to be fine,” Ms. McGinty said firmly, picking up a terrarium. “We just need to get them inside and warmed up. After that, we can discuss what you two kids are doing out in the freezing cold with a cart full of snakes and spiders. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Pagan said, thrusting a terrarium into Balthazar’s arms.

  “I thought you wanted me to get rid of her,” Balthazar whispered.

  “After we get the snakes inside,” Pagan replied, nodding.

  “Who goes there?” a voice cried from inside as the three of them struggled up the front steps, arms full of terrariums. Then the door swung open, and there, towering above them, was Ignatius in full welding attire. “What took you so long?”

  “You must be Ignatius Fabuloso, Balthazar’s uncle, yes?” Ms. McGinty blinked. “I’m Gita McGinty, Balthazar’s social worker, and I was just coming by to—”

  “You’re his social worker?” Ignatius spluttered, pointing at her with his blowtorch. “Shame on you, Balthazar, there’s not a single wart on this woman!”

  “Wart?” Ms. McGinty said, confused.

  “In fact,” Ignatius continued, peering at her even more closely, “you’re actually quite pretty in that earthy, crunchy, possibly don’t-shave-your-armpits way. Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “No, never mind, I’m sorry, you’re very cute but the timing is all wrong. You’ll just have to come back later.”

  The door slammed in their faces.

  “Is he okay?” Ms. McGinty frowned.

  “Actually—”

  “He’s fine,” Pagan said quickly. “He’s just . . . kidding. If you’d excuse us one minute . . .” Her eyes shooting daggers, Pagan followed after Balthazar as he went to retrieve the spare key from under the dead hydrangea bush. “I can’t believe you just let your social worker see that,” she hissed. “The guy’s certifiable! Do you want to be taken into protective custody?”

  “Protective what?”

  “If your parent or guardian isn’t deemed appropriate, your social worker has the legal right to take you away from your family and stick you in one of those foster families that locks you in the basement and feeds you cat food. What is this, like, your first time with Child Services?”

  “Actually, yeah,” Balthazar said.

  “Oh,” Pagan said. “Well, that would explain it. So this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to get Little Miss Sunshine to help me carry in the rest of the terrariums, and then nail her with some emo touchy-feely crap.”

  Balthazar stared at his ruthless companion skeptically. “You can do that?”

  “Sure,” she shrugged, pulling a tearful sweetie-pie face, then dropping it like a hot coal. “It’s called acting. Meanwhile,” she continued, “while I’m doing that, you are going to get your uncle to change into normal-people clothes, hide all the obviously hazardous stuff in your house and start pretending you two have a functional relationship. Capiche?”

  Balthazar nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Your best? Houdini help us, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  25. The Gloaming

  The sharp, cold ache shot from Balthazar’s bandaged thumb up his arm as he twisted the spare key in the lock and moved into the front hall. “Uncle Ignatius?” he called out, kicking off his boots. “We need to talk!”

  No answer.

  “Coo-coo,” Rover oodled down at him from the chandelier.

  “Hey, girl, did you see which way Uncle Crazy-Pants went?”

  Rover gave him the same oblivious look she always did. Then, blinking a round pink eye, she flapped off down the hall in a flutter of milky-white feathers.

  When he caught up with her again, she was in the workshop, perched on top of a battered, pieced-together old door, which was balanced precariously in the middle of the room, surrounded by power tools and rusty saws like some kind of public-service announcement about hazardous conditions for kids. It was a door, Balthazar recognized, that had been put together from the old scraps in his uncle’s car.

  “Uncle Ignatius?”

  Still no sign
of him.

  He stared at the door in annoyance. It didn’t look very stable or well-balanced just standing up there in the middle of the room like that. He was about to grab it and drag it over to the wall when he heard voices coming from around the other side of it.

  “Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice,” Ignatius was saying.

  “Yew?” a sour voice retorted. “We dinna come here to meet with you. You tricked us here by impersonating a member of our fellowship. A crime worthy of a severe cursing, yew impudent pup.”

  Suddenly the memory of the crotchety old Scottish guy came flooding back.

  Balthazar walked quickly around to the other side of the door, but when he got there the voices had flip-flopped so that they were now coming from the side where he had just been.

  “Go on, curse me, then, Angus McAnguson,” Ignatius was now saying from the other side of the door. “Send the fleas from a thousand highland cows to infest my chest hairs.”

  Confused, Balthazar walked back around to where he had just been, only to find that the voices had flip-flopped once again.

  “How did you . . . get another one of our doors?” another voice said, creaking and rustling like thick branches in a heavy wind. The Riddle Lady from the police station!

  “Good question, Daphne,” Ignatius replied. “I didn’t. I just fixed my old one you lot so rudely destroyed. Restoration magic happens to be a Fabuloso specialty.”

  “Not . . . exactly stable . . . ,” she observed.

  “Our doors are for magicians only,” an amused, whistling, unfamiliar voice said.

  “I am a magician,” Ignatius retorted stiffly.

  “A stage magician,” the old Scotsman returned sourly. “Yew are not Magi.”

  “Why,” added the Riddle Lady, “are we here?”

  “That,” Ignatius said, “is the question.”

  Quickly Balthazar circled the door three more times, the voices flip-flopping each time. How were they doing it? Some strange kind of ventriloquism or . . . then he noticed the rusty keyhole and these strange, wispy, misty bits squiggling out of it. Carefully blowing away the weird mist, Balthazar leaned over and put his eye to the keyhole.

  If this had been an ordinary door, what he would have seen on the other side was Frankie’s busted skateboard, a corner of the moth-eaten semi-flightless Turkish rug, and a big clump of dust bunnies under the radiator.

  Instead what he got when he looked through was a huge eyeful of nothing. Not the ordinary, boring kind of nothing-to-do nothing or the strange rubbed-out nothing in that weird parakeet’s eyes, but a whole different kind of nothing. A bright, full-seeming, infinity of nothing.

  Then, as Balthazar’s vision adjusted, he slowly began to make out forms. His uncle. The skinny, one-eyed old Scotsman. The gnarled, stump-legged Riddle Lady. And another equally ancient person he had never seen before—crinkle-eyed and gappy-toothed, with a long white beard decorated with brightly colored metal birds, and a metal bird claw where his right hand used to be. Also floating in this strange, vast space were three more doors: one peach-colored and hospital-ish, one crooked, wooden and outhouse-ish, and the third just a raggedy pair of tent flaps.

  “You refused to believe me when it killed my brother,” Ignatius was saying to the Bird Man. “Well, guess what, Mede? Now it’s back. Look,” he continued, pulling the baby-food jar out of his pocket with a triumphant flourish, “I have the proof!”

  The three old people stared at the jar for a moment in confused silence.

  “Gloaming spawn,” Ignatius continued. “Found them in my nephew’s dove.”

  “The jar,” Mede observed in his funny whistling voice, “is empty.”

  “Yes, of course it’s . . . ,” Ignatius said, then looked at the jar, confused. “Empty? Well, yes, of course, naturally it would be,” he continued. “The Gloaming is parasitical in nature, so of course it wouldn’t be able to survive any length of time in our world without a host. If anything, that’s just further proof.”

  “Crying wolf again,” Angus snorted. “We’ve wasted enough time investigating yer bogus claims.”

  “Sweeping them under the carpet, you mean.”

  “We understand you’re upset about your brother,” Mede said gently. “But he was attempting a very dangerous magic . . . deadly magic. We found no evidence at the Fantasticum of the Gloaming.”

  “Because I burned it down! There was nothing left!”

  “And this Monsieur Paraqueto you sent us chasing after? There’s no record he even existed,” Mede continued.

  “Proof right there! Magicians are disappearing all over the place. And what about the book I showed you?”

  “Oh, right,” Angus said, nodding sarcastically, “tha’ book of holes.”

  “Which is what the Gloaming does,” Ignatius said. “It eats away at stuff.”

  “As do . . . bookworms,” Daphne pointed out.

  “You don’t understand—”

  “We understand very well what the Gloaming is.” Mede cut him off, the gentle whistle gone, replaced by a core of steel. “It is what first brought us together and what claimed the lives of so many of us. Each one of us almost died facing that chaotic, evil force, but in the end we eradicated it. At great personal cost. But we managed it. We have saved the world and earned our peace.”

  “That’s just what it wants you to think,” Ignatius shot back. “That’s why it’s waited until now. Until you are all old and senile and have your heads so far up your own skirts you can’t even see what’s going on right under your big bony noses.”

  “Kilt!” Angus thundered, the sound of bagpipes welling up from deep within his nasal passages. “It’s a kilt!”

  A sudden rattle at the outhouse door interrupted them. “Grandpa,” a high Scottish child’s voice piped up from the other side, “yew almost done then? Ah super need to wee!”

  “Ah’m not done yet,” Angus bawled back.

  Mede shook his head. “I’m sorry for your loss, Ignatius. Truly I am. I had a family once of my own. Several, as a matter of fact, but—”

  “Ach, this is a waste of time, this is,” the old Scotsman said. And with a dismissive honk from his long nose, he started hobbling toward his outhouse door.

  “Waste of time, is it?” Ignatius shouted after him. “So is that why you’ve been hanging about my family’s house, then?”

  “Different matter,” Angus said quickly. “Unrelated.”

  But the other two were already turning toward him, curious points of light stirring in their rheumy old eyes.

  “Angus McAnguson . . . was here?” Daphne ruminated. “Before . . . ? In-ter-esting . . .”

  “Same as yew, Daphne,” Angus retorted sharply. “Don’t act the innocent.”

  “I saw some signs as well,” Mede admitted. “Guess that makes all three of us, then. All no doubt looking for the same thing.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ignatius demanded.

  “An apprentice,” Mede said. “Someone who carries a spark of True Magick to train in the ways of the Magi before it is too late. We are none of us as young as we used to be.”

  “Well,” Ignatius said, puffing up a bit, “if that is what you’re here for, I don’t see why you didn’t just ask. So what’s in it for me, exactly?”

  “Not yew,” Angus snorted disgustedly.

  “My boy,” Daphne sighed. “He had such a sweet face. I thought I had heard his name in a breeze, but then . . . he could not answer. My hearing aid has been acting up, and the wind likes to tease. . . .”

  “My charts also indicated a boy,” Mede said, nodding. “But then with my gout—”

  “Ah knew the second ah saw him he wasn’t the one,” Angus interrupted sourly.

  “And yet,” Mede continued, “we are all talking about the same boy, are we not?”

  “You mean . . . the one that is . . . ,” Daphne rustled, “peeking through . . . the key . . . hole?” Pinching her gnarled thumb and forefinger together, she made
a sharp tugging gesture.

  Feeling the tug at the front of his shirt, Balthazar tried to jump back. Too late. A strong, invisible force was pulling his shirtfront into keyhole. And the harder he struggled, the more firmly the invisible fingers tugged, pulling more and more of his shirt through the keyhole until, whoosh, the rest of him got pulled through after it, boots, buttons, thermos and all.

  And then there he was, standing on the other side—in that weird vortexy space, surrounded by his uncle and the three grumpy, super-old people.

  “Him?” Ignatius protested. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  It was too much to take in. Way too much. “W-we have to get back before my social worker comes,” Balthazar stammered. “She’ll be here any sec . . .” He trailed off. The second hand on his old wristwatch, the cool wind-up kind that had belonged long ago to G-5, had stopped moving forward and was vibrating in place, fast as a hummingbird’s wings.

  “Time hasn’t been invented here yet,” Mede explained kindly, “so it doesn’t pass.”

  “The Void,” Daphne sighed. “Our greatest . . . discovery.”

  “Nothing,” Ignatius translated. “Apparently, when you get to their exalted station in life that’s the only thing worth focusing on.”

  “Not nothing,” Mede corrected him. “A place of pure potential. The truth before illusion.”

  A knock at the peach door interrupted the conversation. “Bingo tournament starts in five minutes, Miss Daphne,” a chipper voice called through the door.

  “Could he be . . .” Daphne asked, smiling at Balthazar, “an emissary . . . from the future? The one to carry our knowledge . . . into the next century?”

  “It is an interesting coincidence that we were all brought here today,” Mede said. “With the boy . . .”

  “And me,” Ignatius pointed out. “Don’t forget who called you here.”

  “Pure coincidence,” Angus snorted.

  “There is,” Daphne said, eyes drifting up to the curl dangling over her rumpled forehead, “. . . no coincidence.”

 

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