Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs

by I. J. Brindle

  “You know what spiders do when another spider dies? They eat it. If you think about it, there is something beautifully direct and practical about that,” she said, stroking the dead spider’s bristles tenderly. “Giving life and nutrients through death.”

  “Rrright,” Balthazar said in his best neutral, not-at-all-creeped-out voice, “but you’re not a spider, so . . .”

  “No,” Pagan said, scraping Humphrey’s oozy carcass off to the side of the path and covering it with a sprinkling of snow. “And I’m not planning to eat him, either, if that’s what your sick brain is thinking.”

  “Of course not,” he lied.

  30. Lair of the Humbugs

  Following the bobbing circle of light from Balthazar’s flashlight through the gathering darkness, Balthazar and Pagan made the last steep scramble pretty much in silence except for the crunch of pebbles under their feet and the soft, snuffly noises of Pagan pretending not to cry.

  Suddenly a loud thwup-thwup-thwup cut through the air as a bright beam of light sliced down at them from the dark sky.

  Flattening themselves against the cliff face, they watched as a large helicopter swooped over them, the bright light on its nose illuminating the phantasmagoric Fantasticum as it settled down wasp-like on the frozen creek. Through the vortex of snow kicked up by the prop blades, Balthazar saw the door of the helicopter swing open and two hatchet-faced magicians in matching purple fezzes step out, supporting between them a third magician, ancient and turtle-hunched, in a sweeping royal-purple cape and extra-tall gold-tasseled fez.

  “The Great Gandolfini,” Balthazar gasped. “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s the Doge of the IBRSM,” Pagan whispered. “The Grand High Humbug. Nothing gets decided without him.”

  Balthazar and Pagan waited as the three magicians got into a golf cart and drove off around the front of the theater. Then, crouching low, they sprinted across an open field of new-fallen snow toward the back of the darkly shimmering ice building. Blood hammering in his ears, Balthazar kept expecting harsh searchlights to flare on, or weighted nets to drop from the sky, or the ice to crack open beneath their feet. None of that happened. And then they were there. At the lair of the Humbugs.

  “This one’s just a fake,” Pagan pronounced, trying the first of four ice doors under the rear arcade.

  “This one, too.” Balthazar shook his head.

  It was the same story for third and fourth as well.

  “What about that one over there?” Pagan said, pointing to a little door in the farthest, most shadowy section of the arcade.

  Balthazar frowned. “Where did that come from?”

  “It’s pretty dark,” Pagan shrugged. “Maybe we missed it.”

  The door opened, conveniently, right behind a huge lightning-bolt-shaped ice column. A perfect spot for scoping out the gathering without being spotted.

  The vast lobby was even bigger on the inside than the outside, if such a thing was possible. Its impossibly high ceiling was held up by dozens of towering, intricately carved ice lightning-bolt columns, and its walls were adorned with darkly shimmering ice frescoes depicting the most brilliant moments from magic history. Robert-Houdin’s enchanted orange tree. Houdini’s vanishing elephant. Thurston in a whirlwind of playing cards.

  But even more than the lobby itself, it was the gathering of magicians that made Balthazar’s breath catch in his throat. These weren’t the usual joke-cracking, potbellied birthday hacks that his family occasionally was forced to share the stage with. These magicians, these Humbugs as Pagan called them, were truly the greatest stage magicians alive. The type of performers who picked their teeth with cities like Grantham. What were they doing here?

  “Not a woman among them,” Pagan snorted. “Sexist. And I bet you anything those coats they are wearing are real fur. These are not good people.”

  “Shhh.” Two of the Humbugs were heading right toward them, heads bowed and deep in conversation.

  “An interesting venue they have chosen for this year’s meeting, hmmm?” the taller one was remarking to his companion. His voice was soft but his was face hard and pitted like an old bone. “Do you by any chance know the identity of our host?”

  “Not I,” grunted the broader, shorter of the two, as clenched and knotted as a fist. “But he campaigned very impressively to earn the right. And to create a venue like this . . . I would say he has not yet disappointed.”

  “Perhaps,” Bone sniffed. “But I personally would prefer to have one of our own hosting.”

  “These meetings are expensive,” Fist-Face shrugged. “I for one am happy enough for someone else to foot the bill. But go if you like. I will cast your vote.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you’d be happy enough for half this room to drop dead to give you more influence,” Bone observed.

  “As would we all,” Fist-Face agreed, looking across the hall at old Gandolfini, who was eyeing them craftily. “Look, they’ve brought out more of that delicious sea-turtle soup.”

  “Sea turtle? Those are endangered!” Pagan whispered furiously as Fist-Face and Bone walked away toward a long buffet table heaped with exotic delicacies. “And, oh my God, is that a roasted giant salamander? These people are monsters.”

  But Balthazar wasn’t looking at the salamander. He was looking at their old stage manager, nibbling on the wrong end of an artichoke leaf as he whispered frantically to the Burrower perched across from him on the horns of a roasted caribou head. Oily black feathers had grown in to replace the white ones it had shed, but its blank eyes were unmistakable.

  “What is Stan doing here?”

  “Let’s find out,” Pagan said.

  “How?”

  “Like this.”

  And just like that, she was gone.

  Mr. Fabuloso and Gaga could do invisibility magic as well. They did it by turning their bodies into a kind of a screen that projected whatever was behind them onto their bodies. Fine for a couple seconds if you didn’t look too closely. But Pagan’s invisibility was different and way better—somehow pushing all vision around her like water being pushed around a rock in a stream.

  “The trick is believing deep down you really are invisible,” Pagan said, reappearing. “Easy enough with my family. If you hold my hand you’ll be invisible, too. But only for as long as I can hold my breath, so we have to hurry.”

  Which was of course the problem with real magic. It always had some bizarre, illogical stipulation connected to it.

  “Don’t worry,” Pagan added. “I can hold my breath longer than an Olympic athlete.”

  Balthazar looked at Pagan’s fading outstretched hand uneasily.

  “Or you can wait here.”

  Then, just as she about to totally disappear, he took off his icy mitten and grabbed hold.

  Her hand was comfortingly warm, a little sweaty even.

  An electric tingling started where Balthazar’s fingertips were touching Pagan’s invisible skin, then rolled over his hand and up his arm like a long glove, up and up and up, and then—whoosh!

  The feeling was . . . amazing! Somehow the properties of his very atoms must have shifted.

  Slipping out from behind the column, they darted through the sea of fur coats, fezzes and secret handshakes, zigging this way and that until they finally made it safely under the buffet table where, with a guzzling intake of air, they became visible again.

  As Pagan was catching her breath, Balthazar peeked through the slit in the tablecloth just in time to see Stan following the Burrower into a darkened corner behind the grand ice staircase.

  “Here we go again,” Pagan said, taking another deep breath.

  Invisible again, they crawled silently over to where Stan was whispering frantically to the Burrower, now perched next to him on a sharp, soot-black ice lightning sculpture.

  “And now some detective and this goody-two-shoes social worker are poking around asking all sorts of questions,” Stan snuffled. “I’m freaking out! I know . . . I know,�
� he continued, as if the silent Burrower was talking to him. “But they’re just two kids. I helped get the rest of them here. Isn’t that enough?”

  Pagan’s hand tightened around Balthazar’s. Their families! They were here.

  “What about my reward?”

  The bird cocked its head, and suddenly the stage manager’s words strangled off. Held fast in the Burrower’s rubbed-out gaze, he scrabbled at his neck. “Please, Sweetums,” he choked out, his face turning a disturbing shade of purple. “Please. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

  Blinking, the Burrower released Stan from its gaze, letting the stage manager drop gasping to the floor. A familiar prickling ran up Balthazar’s spine. The Burrower was staring right at them. Cocking its head, it let out a low, whistling tock-tock-tock.

  And suddenly they were visible again.

  “Run!” Balthazar shouted.

  “Spies!” Stan yelled hoarsely, struggling to his feet. “Stop them!”

  31. Grubbuck

  “Nothing like that has ever happened to me before,” Pagan said as they sprinted through the crowd of startled magicians. “I swear. I’ll get it back. I just need to catch my breath.”

  “No time. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Up ahead was the large column they had entered behind, but as they skidded around it there was a problem. The bug-out bag was still there waiting for a quick getaway, but the door had vanished.

  They stared at the blank wall in confusion.

  “Here,” Balthazar said, pulling two smoke bombs out of the backpack and fumbling for the lighter. “You throw yours that way, and I’ll throw mine to this side.”

  Sparking and fizzing, the smoke bombs landed in the middle of the magicians and started gushing out amazing amounts of thick, sparkly pink smoke.

  “Terrorists!” one Humbug cried.

  “Poison gas!” gagged another.

  Grabbing Pagan’s hand, Balthazar bolted across the hall.

  “Stop them,” Fist-Face shouted.

  Ducking the grabbing hands and jowly, snarling faces, Balthazar and Pagan dashed deeper and deeper into the pink smoke, changing direction so many times they soon lost any sense of where the exits were.

  “Which way?” Pagan panted.

  “This way?”

  “No, look. It’s over there.”

  Pulling away, Pagan vanished into the smoke. “Come on!”

  But a shambling, ragged figure had materialized out of the haze, blocking Balthazar’s way. A corpse of a man in a dingy red beret, with the Burrower perched on his shoulder. Monsieur Paraqueto!

  “What have you done with my family?” Balthazar shouted.

  “Grubbit,” Paraqueto muttered. “Grubbit, grubbuck . . .”

  The smoke was clearing. Over the Empty One’s shoulder, Balthazar saw a flash of curly auburn hair vanishing through one of the exits. Pagan had gotten out, then.

  The Burrower cocked its head, something wriggling in its strange, blacked-out eyes. “Tock-tock-tock,” it whistled. The sound slammed into Balthazar like a wrecking ball.

  “Grubbit,” Monsieur Paraqueto whispered, his eyes sad and his voice no more than a frozen puff of air as Balthazar fell into the empty blackness of the bird’s eyes.

  32. Cold Comfort

  “Balthazar?”

  It was his mom’s voice.

  “He’s waking up!”

  Dad!

  Each eyelid felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, but Balthazar managed to force them open. And there they were. Mom! Dad! Freddy! Franky! Fanella! Here! Alive!

  And, for that moment, it seemed like nothing else mattered. Not even the Fistulas glowering at him from a darkened corner.

  Looking around, Balthazar saw that they were in a cell carved deep into the bottom of the frozen Thirteen-Mile Creek, surrounded on three sides by gray-green icy walls studded with old crumpled bags, soda cans and a startled-looking catfish, frozen solid by the unexpectedly cold winter. On the fourth side was a wall of metal bars, with a loud pendulum clock tick-tocking on the other side.

  As he looked around, the memory of an empty voice came back to him. Cold breath whispering the dreadful features of the cell into his ear like drops of poison. Solid metal bars with a thousand volts of electricity running through them; hidden eyes and ears in the ice walls, so sensitive they could read your thoughts; punishments for rebellious thinking; rewards for cooperation. . . . As the memories came back, Balthazar saw the bars sparking and vibrating with the deadly voltage.

  “Where’s Gaga?” he shivered, looking around.

  “She’s here,” Mr. Fabuloso said.

  “Sort of . . .” Mrs. Fabuloso added sadly.

  Freddy, stumbling over his rat tail, brought Balthazar over to Gaga who was sitting in silence against the back wall of the cell, her eyes turned inward. Franky was sitting next to her, holding her hand. Lovingly, the twins straightened her blankets, kissed her withered cheeks and adjusted her battered spiky Queen of the Snowflakes headdress.

  “So cold,” Gaga muttered. “So cold . . .”

  “What happened?” Balthazar asked.

  Mr. Fabuloso shook his head. “Last thing we remember is that fog exploding across the stage, and then when we woke up here our magic was gone.”

  “Freezing cold, flat out on the ground, feeling like each part of our bodies weighed a thousand pounds,” Mrs. Fabuloso said with a shudder.

  “And even as you’re so incredibly heavy—you feel totally empty,” Fanella added.

  “And you want to kill yourself and then everyone else,” Blake seethed.

  “It’s all just so dreadfully dull and boring,” Mrs. Fistula moaned. “And the only thing you hate more than the revolting people around you is yourself.”

  “Like you’re in dis hole,” Gaga said at last. “And you are trying to get out, but de more you try de bigger de hole gets until all of a sudden it is inside you, and you are de hole.”

  The twins, pale, with runny noses and dark thumbprint smudges under their eyes, nodded silently.

  “They haven’t said a word since we’ve been here,” Fanella said worriedly. “I never thought that would bother me.”

  Even worse than the twins’ silence was the flickering dullness of them, like dying florescent light bulbs. A flickering dullness, Balthazar noticed with alarm, that all of his family had.

  “But you never told us,” Mrs. Fabuloso said, wiping her tears away. “How did you get here?”

  “I . . . well, I was trying to, you know, rescue you guys,” Balthazar admitted. “Me and Pagan. Only she managed to get away.”

  “Of course she did,” Mrs. Fistula sneered. “We didn’t raise incompetent bumblers in our family. Our kids know how to look after themselves.”

  “She got out?” Blake spluttered furiously. “That’s so not fair. Why should she get out and not me? I’m the one the public wants!”

  “You came to rescue us,” Mr. Fabuloso said quietly, looking at Balthazar like he was seeing his son for the first time. His mustache trembled. “Remarkable.”

  “He failed,” Mr. Fistula replied. “What’s so remarkable about that?”

  “You are a remarkable boy,” Mr. Fabuloso said firmly. “And I’m so proud of you. I just wish . . . I just wish I had told you that more often.”

  The tears in his father’s eyes frightened him. As did the apology. It was the kind of thing someone said in a movie just before they died of some terrible terminal disease.

  “Happy now, are we?” Mrs. Fistula hissed, lurching lopsidedly over to Balthazar in her single high-heeled shoe. “You’ve finally got what you wanted.”

  “What? This isn’t what I wanted.”

  “Sure it is,” she insisted, her hard, bony fingers clenching tight around his arm and her thin lips twisting into a harsh, insinuating smile. “We all heard you. Everyone in the theater that night did. ‘Normal? I’m the only normal one in this family! Why can’t you all try being normal for a change?’ ” she mimicked shrilly. “Well,
congratulations. You got your wish.”

  “The power of the unconscious mind,” Mr. Fistula agreed.

  Dropping his head, Balthazar felt the hopelessness of their situation settle over him like a fine layer of atomic dust, heavier and heavier with each tock of the pendulum clock.

  Looking around at the solid ice walls, he thought he saw a creepy ice eyeball looking back at him, but when he reached out to poke it, it disappeared.

  The power of the unconscious mind . . . Pagan had said something about that too . . . Pulling off his boot, he tossed it at the electrified bars. Instead of melting or sizzling to a crisp, it flew straight through to the other side.

  “What did you do that for?” Fanella demanded. “Now your foot’s going to freeze.”

  “Didn’t you see that?” Balthazar said. “It went right through the bars. They aren’t real.”

  “It went between the bars, not through them.”

  “My boot’s too big to . . .” But even as he said it, the bars were already realigning themselves to make his sister’s explanation possible, his boot charring and blackening on the other side.

  “We will never get out,” Gaga sighed.

  “Yes, we will,” Balthazar said.

  Drawing in a deep breath, he took a step toward the bars.

  Not bars, he corrected himself. Nothings. Figments. Blue sparks sizzled in the air.

  “Touch the bars and you will die,” the voice said.

  That’s a lie, Balthazar told himself. This is all a lie.

  Steeling himself, he took another step forward, the tick-tock of the pendulum growing louder and louder.

  “Balthazar!” Mrs. Fabuloso cried out. “Stop!”

  If he didn’t do it now, he’d never do it.

  So, taking a running start, he did.

  “No!” Mr. Fabuloso shouted.

  For a horrible moment, Balthazar felt his body fusing into the bars, lighting up like a Christmas tree.

  “This isn’t happening!”

  And as he said the words, the bars, the electricity, the sinister watching eyes, all of it was washed away like watercolors left out in the rain. All that was left was the pendulum clock. Grabbing it off the wall, he threw it down onto the icy floor, breaking it into a thousand little pieces. They were free!