The Boy Detective Fails (18 page)
At school the following day, Gus Mumford is alarmed to see the seat in front of him is empty. He looks around the room nervously, staring up at the clock, turning to watch if Miss Gale is going to explain, but no. The school bell rings and class is started. Miss Gale asks the class to please take out their spelling workbooks, and
still
the seat before him is unused, the soft bald scalp now a soft fuzzy glow of a memory. Gus Mumford panics and a voice somewhere in the back his throat begins to gurgle. He raises his hand and, as is the case, Miss Gale ignores the small, prodigious fingers there waving so near her face; instead she calls upon Arthur Allen who, out loud, perfectly spells “hemorrhage.” Morning classes continue like this: Gus Mumford growing frantic, stirring in his seat, scratching at his desk, watching the classroom door for some signal, some sign, until finally the lunch bell rings and the third-graders, in a uniform burst of chaos, scuttle to their brown-bag lunches. Gus Mumford, hands nervously balled into their most comfortable form—fists—stalks up to Miss Gale’s desk, slamming a single note hard against the wood, glaring up at the dark-eyed woman who has, for so long, offered only question, question, question after question, the answers of which Gus Mumford already knows. Here, scribbled dramatically in pencil, is a question Gus Mumford would like to ask, and after Miss Gale’s eyes dart down to read it, she is truly surprised by what is being asked, and so, forgoing her usual treatment of the boy, answers rather affectionately: “Oh, he’s ill again, I’m afraid.”
Gus Mumford’s face does not change. He mumbles a small sound—like the saddest sigh of all time, ever, escaping from a weak heart several thousand miles away—and then, after the sound has risen and dissipated, his head grows heavy and hangs down, and Miss Gale’s cruel hand is somehow gentle on his neck.
“He had to go back to the hospital. I don’t think he’ll be rejoining us, I’m afraid.”
It is that day that nearly every third grader in the world gets crippled. The poor young dears must bear the brunt of Gus Mumford’s unending rage, and he works his way through the playground at recess, torturing, assaulting, maiming. Blood, tears, broken fingernails line the jungle gym, four-square court, sandbox. Boys, girls, small, short, tall, lanky, skinny, fat. Charlie Evans sipping his milk through a straw loses a tooth as he is smashed in the face by what may be either a wrecking ball or Gus Mumford’s right fist; Lindsay Scottworth somehow loses a pigtail; after that sad day, it seems poor Bobby Cohen will never walk in a straight line ever again.
Hidden beneath the front porch later that afternoon, Gus Mumford holds the prominent citizens of Ant City close to his heart, whispering, “Now I have nobody. Now I have no one.” He lays there staring at the strange movements of his remaining, segmented friends, quite sure that in their cavernous exploits they are attempting to spell out a message, which, in the boy’s mind reads:
WE STILL LOVE GUS
.
At work, the boy detective is wary: He watches for signs of the masked women. Throughout the day, he looks for a sinister shadow creeping down the aisle between cubicles and is relieved when it is only the youth from the mailroom delivering that week’s new mail. Everything seems to be going fine until Billy returns from the washroom and finds that a small business card has been left for him on his seat. As expected, the card reads:
BEWARE: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Quickly, he disposes of it, running it through the paper shredder. The rest of the day is spent waiting to take his next pill and listening for strange foot-steps creeping from behind the curtain of impending doom.
Another strange message has arrived for the boy detective; he discovers the white envelope beneath his door upon returning to Shady Glens that evening. Billy looks down the hall, but no, there is no sign of who may have delivered it. It is again, addressed, in small black handwriting, that simply says: “To the boy detective!” but now an exclamation point has been added. Billy gently opens the letter, slipping his finger beneath the fold, glancing at the marks in the shadowy hallway light. Again, inside is a single piece of yellowed paper which simply reads:
D-11
9-16-19-19-6,
23-19-12-8-26-12, 16 21-12-12-11 6-22-2-25
15-12-19-23.
The boy detective stares at the note, turns to see if he is being watched, then gently folds it and hides it under his bed.
Dear reader, here you can help the boy detective. Match the code D11 with the decoder on your ring to help solve this mystery.
After midnight that evening, when he knows he will not be able to rest, the boy detective pulls himself to his feet, puts on his cardigan and tie, and goes off in pursuit of the cause of his coworker’s mystery. He hurries off toward the bus stop, knowing the abandoned amusement park will be the destination of this late-night search. As he waits for the bus, he wonders. He wonders if the young lady in pink might be on the bus tonight. He is disappointed when it arrives and he sees it is almost completely empty and no one is wearing pink.
The boy detective suddenly realizes Professor Von Golum is sitting across from him on the bus. Though it is quite late and the old man, as a matter of his age, should be back at Shady Glens resting in his bed, it is only a moment before the Professor stands, retrieves a silver raygun from inside his white hospital robe, and points it at Billy menacingly.
“It is all as easy as this,” the old man mutters. “You will be felled, at last, by my immobility ray.”
Billy’s heart goes cold in his chest.
“Any last words, detective?” the villain asks with a sneer. The town lights flash by their faces as Billy deliberates. The boy detective nods then, opens his mouth, and, instead of speaking, leaps, knocking the weapon from the old man’s clawlike hands.
“Oh God, you broke my wrist,” the Professor gasps, holding the fractured limb to his chest. “Oh God, I think you really did.”
The bus driver, now aware of the conflict, hits the brakes, the two combatants falling atop one another, and Billy, securing the raygun, dashes off the bus, his heart pounding, his hand sore, his red face showing his grave embarrassment.
It is through the abandoned amusement park that the boy detective creeps. Having done his best to ignore the mysterious incident of the young man who disappeared from the Mammoth offices; having tried to disregard the certainly nefarious threats of the masked women who quickly escaped into the van marked with the faded letters “Property of Gotham Amusement Park,” Billy quietly steps forward. He follows the strange darkened path past the Jolly Roger roller coaster—now only a wire catastrophe, its schooner-shaped cars leaning crowded against a crushed snow cone machine—then past the great Unicorn Carousel—the gentle animals now mostly dismembered, their horns having been stolen by mean-spirited vandals long ago—further still past Dead Man’s Curve—with its ornate miniature Studebakers wrecked upon one another—to a spot deep inside the park where he stops and listens to the strange recording of a high-pitched voice he now recognizes:
“It’s always twilight for lovers … It’s always twilight for love …”
The sound echoes from the Twilight Tunnel of Love rising ahead, the daring shape of a man-made mountain overgrown with false japonica and ivy, a glowing red heart still active, twinkling with sequins above the narrow cavelike entrance.
Quietly, he hustles over the fallen red velvet ropes, over the sturdy chain-link fence erected to prevent exactly this kind of trespass, and into a lovely swan-shaped car, the ride still cycling, whether by mystery or malice or simply wind, the crooner’s voice growing louder as the opening approaches and the ride jerks and jolts Billy into absolute darkness.
From out of nowhere and lit only by the enormous holes which have grown along the opening of the man-made mountain, a silvery cupid’s arrow hurtles toward Billy’s head. He ducks and the cherubim’s pointy arrow narrowly misses his neck. The ride bustles along up and over a pink-colored waterfall, crashing down past Lover’s Leap. A pair of gigantic mechanical lips open and close up ahead as the swanshaped car draws deeper into the cave. Hurrying off the ride, he finds a small, dimly lit catwalk. There in the dark he can hear the sounds of people at work: the shuffling of feet, the subdued tone of mumbles so familiar to his own work environment that creeping through a small opening he is not surprised to find a very familiar-looking office—gray cubicles, greenish carpeting, and a small army of well-dressed and professional-looking women, some in business suits, some in skirts, all in black canvas masks. Billy, spying from behind a row of empty desks, listens as the strange creatures answer their ringing phones, the hum of the Tunnel of Love’s theme song still echoing from above somewhere, barely audible among the busy jostling of confidential whispering, pencils on papers, fingers on typewriters.
From what he can tell, it is indeed an office of some kind, and what these masked women are selling is a kind of uncanny extermination service. The paperwork piled high in stacks beside Billy makes it clear: They are in the business of making other people disappear. Two of the lovely masked henchwomen walk past Billy whispering, their soft black high heels marching away. Billy creeps down the empty aisle and stops, finding himself staring down at a pair of glossy black Mary Janes. Looking up, he sees a masked woman in a blue suit who immediately begins shouting. The boy detective discovers he is carrying Professor Von Golum’s immobility raygun and, without hesitating, presses the snub nose of the weapon against his adversary’s neck.
“Who is in charge of this nefarious scheme?” the detective asks.
“That would be Margaret,” the masked woman whispers. “But she’s in a meeting.”
Forcing his quarry through what looks like a lobby, the boy detective thrusts open a meeting-room door and aims his weapon at the tall masked woman at the head of the table.
“What kind of sinister plot is at work here?” Billy asks.
The masked woman, Margaret, rises and tilts her head back, laughing.
“There is nothing sinister here to speak of,” the masked woman says, suddenly standing. “What we do here is a professional service for our paying customers.”
“I do not understand,” the boy detective says.
“We vaporize people.”
“You
vaporize
people?”
“Using a totally scientific approach, we are fashioning a world free of puzzling personal relationships, where one’s heart is never broken, where a harsh word is never spoken. At your inclination, people who hurt you are simply made to disappear. The mysterious, bewildering nature of love is thus made predictable, tempered, and pleasing.”
“I see.”
“For once, this complicated problem of human emotion is solved quite easily—with an end to the grave panic of unrequited desire and the indecent butterflies of high anxiety.”
“I like the butterflies,” Billy whispers.
“Pardon me?”
“I
like
the butterflies.”
“The world must come to understand that love is chaos. We have found a simple solution to a mystery that for centuries has been mankind’s undoing.”
“I believe you have made a terrible mistake here,” Billy says, shaking his head. The room is very silent then. He pushes his bifocals against his face and frowns. “What you’re doing seems very awful to me.”
“Well, you’re a weak fool, obviously. Prepare to be easily forgotten,” Margaret hisses. She turns to two of her masked cohorts and points at the boy detective angrily. “Doris, Veronica, please show our guest here how quickly we do away with unwanted annoyances.”
The boy detective feels himself begin to tremble as the room starts to spin. Doris, her name monogrammed in cursive white on her gray dress, seems to be the tallest in the room full of masked women. She nods and stands, clutching at the fake purple flower pinned near her bosom, taking aim on Billy’s stricken face. Veronica, another underling with dark hair in a brown business suit, her name also stitched in cursive letters, follows the order, but then stops.
“Pardon me, Margaret?” Veronica whispers, her hand raised nervously. “I was wondering …”
“Yes?”
“I don’t feel very appropriate doing this.”
“Excuse me?” Margaret asks.
“Well I just don’t feel it’s all that appropriate just vaporizing anybody. I mean, well, some of us have been talking, and well, we think … we think what we’re doing may not be absolutely right.”
“Pardon me?” Margaret asks.
“We think maybe we made … some mistakes here,” another masked woman in beige whispers. Her name, stitched in white lettering, is Gayle. “Like a month ago. The man with the beard. That … was a terrible mistake.”
Nearly all of the masked women begin to nod their heads.
“And the woman, with the long red hair. That was an awful mistake as well,” Veronica says.
“I don’t recall that particular case,” Margaret says angrily. “I don’t recall
any
mistakes.”
“Then there was the pet dog. I believe that was our fault,” Gayle says.
Margaret’s hand begins to curl up into claws.
“We just don’t like what’s been done. We just didn’t know how to mention it to you,” Veronica says. “But we don’t believe we ought to do this anymore.”
The boy detective begins to nod, too, and slowly begins to lower his weapon.
“You don’t like what’s been
done
?” Margaret whispers. “You think this is all a
mistake
?”
The masked women all nod their heads slowly, turning to each other in agreement.
“You weak fools,” she says. From above the din of the bustling office, Margaret stands. “You’re all fools,” she whispers. “Terrible, spineless, fools. I’m not sorry for what I’ve done. The world is utter chaos and I refuse to live in that way.” Margaret then opens her purse and lifts out a glowing white plastic flower.
“No, please,” Billy says. “Put that down.”
“No.”
In a flash, Margaret the masked woman raises the plastic flower and, amid shouts of protest, fires the strange vanishing ink upon her own chest, so that immediately and without ado, she vaporizes. It is very awkward for all the masked women as the puff of smoke, their former friend, escapes into the air. Billy does not know what to say or do. After that, it is very, very quiet in the room.