The Wonderful Baron Doppelgänger Device

by Eric Bower

  Sort of.

  As I pulled myself onto Geoffrey, I somehow managed to slide underneath his saddle instead of on top of it, and I got stuck. As I struggled to free myself, Geoffrey must have thought that I wanted him to start riding in a circle, which he did. My arms and legs were flailing as I tried to free myself, and I accidentally kicked the horse in the backside, causing him to buck and whinny, and then to run. As Geoffrey ran across the desert, I found myself getting more and more squashed by his saddle, which was squeezing me like an accordion. Finally, I managed to wiggle my way out of it, but when I did, I fell off the horse completely. One of Aunt Dorcas’s bootlaces got caught in one of Geoffrey’s horseshoes, so as the horse continued to gallop, it dragged me along, my head bouncing off every rock and scraping across every prickly cactus, until Geoffrey finally calmed down and trotted over to my parents.

  Shorty ran up and untangled my bootlace from the horse, helped pick some of the cactus spikes from my eyes, and then grabbed the Gänger-Doppel Device from my father.

  “This is the real W.B.,” she announced as she pointed to me. “I’d bet all the tulips in Tallahassee on it.”

  She pointed the Gänger-Doppel Device at B.W. and pressed the button.

  My mother and father held their breath and turned away, just in case they were about to witness their only son being turned inside out. A bright green light shot out of the Gänger-Doppel Device and hit B.W., transforming him back into himself.

  “I never liked you,” he growled at Shorty, once his true identity had been revealed.

  “Really?” said Shorty with a frown. “But I always liked you.”

  “You did?”

  “Hah! No. I always knew you were an evil little jerk! You tried to convince us to turn the real W.B. inside out, even though you’d still be exposed as an impostor!”

  “Oh, come on!” B.W. snapped angrily. “Can the rest of you honestly say you’ve never been so frustrated with W.B. that you wanted to see something really terrible happen to him?”

  Shorty opened her mouth to disagree, but then paused. M and P started to disagree as well, but then stopped and quietly cleared their throats instead. No one seemed to be in a hurry to defend good old W.B. In fact, everyone was trying really hard not to make eye contact with me.

  “Seriously?” I said to my parents and my purported best friend. “You’re siding with a murderous maniac over me?”

  “I’m not a murderous maniac, you fool,” B.W. replied as he rolled his eyes. “I was planning on escaping before anyone had to die. I knew that Mr. Baron would never use that device on either of us without knowing for certain who the real W.B. was. He can’t even bring himself to kill a moth.”

  “That’s because he’s afraid of them,” said M. “W.B. is too.”

  Shorty looked at me as though I was insane.

  “You’re scared of moths?” she asked.

  “No, I just find it disturbing that they look like ghost butterflies. Shorty, quick! Lasso B.W. before he gets away!”

  She whipped out the rope that she wore tied around her belt, and used it to quickly hogtie B.W.’s arms and legs before he could get away. As she did, M and P ran up to me and hugged me tightly.

  “I’m so happy to have my son back,” M said as she kissed me on top of the head.

  “So am I,” P told me. “Though I must warn you, you might not want to go around dressed in nothing but your long johns, son. I’m sure they’re quite comfortable, but there are ladies present.”

  I picked up Aunt Dorcas’s large dress from the ground. It was terribly stained and practically torn to shreds. I hoped she wouldn’t be too upset about it—but then I remembered that it was Aunt Dorcas, which of course meant that she would be upset about it. I would try to make it up to her, though. Maybe I’d put another hardboiled egg in her closet.

  “Well, I suppose we can go home now,” said M. “I’m sure the real W.B. must be starving.”

  She was right. The mere mention of food made my mouth water.

  But before we went back to the Baron Estate, there was something I needed to show everyone first. It was what I had discovered when I had my brain sneeze earlier, the brain sneeze that I had held in by covering my brain nose and brain mouth with my brain hand.

  It wasn’t often that I knew something that no one else did, so I was going to take my time and enjoy explaining it to everyone.

  “Before we go home,” I announced, “I have something to show you all, which will most likely shock you. P, will you please look at the records within the Doppelgänger Device, the ones that tell you who the device has copied recently?”

  P looked at M and shrugged his shoulders, before looking into the eyepiece in the center of the invention, and reading the strange and complicated equations that only made sense to a mind as strange and complicated as my father’s.

  “Hmmm . . . it says that the last three people the device was used to copy were W.B. and Rose Blackwood. Huh. And it recently copied someone else as well, though the device is having difficulty defining who that person is . . .”

  “That’s right!” I exclaimed. “The Doppelgänger Device was used on Rose so she would be blamed for the explosion at the Pitchfork Fair. B.W. had to get me out of the picture to continue his evil plan, but he also wanted to get Rose Blackwood out of the picture as well. He wanted her to go to jail for the rest of her life.”

  “Why would he want that?” M asked.

  B.W. squirmed on the ground and grunted in annoyance.

  “Because,” I said as I took the Gänger-Doppel Device from Shorty, “he needed to have revenge.”

  “Revenge?” Shorty asked. “Why would B.W. need revenge against Rose? What did she ever do to him?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I told her. “But she did do something terrible to his father. And his father is the one who’s been helping him.”

  I heard B.W. groan from his place on the ground.

  “I can’t believe a dunce like you actually figured it out . . .” he muttered.

  “His father?” M frowned. “Who is his father?”

  I smiled.

  “B.W.’s full name is Belford Eustace Nigel Egbert Doolittle Ignatius Cattermole Threepwood Whitestone.”

  “The Third,” P added.

  “His initials spell out BENEDICT. And his last name, Whitestone, sort of sounds like the opposite of—”

  “Blackwood,” M gasped. “His father is Benedict Blackwood!”

  “How clever of you to figure that out, W.B.!” P cried, and then his smile faded as he stared at me suspiciously. “In fact, it sounds a bit too clever. Are we certain that you’re the real W.B.?”

  “But that’s impossible,” Shorty argued. “Benedict Blackwood is locked up in prison!”

  I shook my head.

  “He must have broken out of prison. In fact, I’ll bet he used the Doppelgänger Device to transform himself into someone else, so he could sneak out of prison without anyone realizing he was gone! Is that true?” I asked B.W.

  B.W. sighed as he nodded his head.

  “Yes. I pointed the device at one of the deputies in the prison, and then I pointed it at my father. I switched their bodies, and then called the other deputies, and told them that Benedict had attacked the deputy. They locked up that deputy, and set my father free. It was a brilliant plan, and I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you, W.B.”

  “Where is Benedict Blackwood now?” P asked.

  For a moment, B.W. didn’t speak. He cleared his throat and looked up to the sky, as though he was thinking very carefully about his answer.

  “Far, far away from here,” he finally said, though it was easy to see that he was lying. “You’ll never find him. And it doesn’t matter if you lock me up in the world’s most secure prison, my father will find a way to break me out. You can never beat Benedict Blac
kwood.”

  “Oh no?” I asked, pointing the Gänger-Doppel Device at Geoffrey.

  “No, not my horse!” P shrieked. “You’ll turn him inside out! Then it’ll be impossible to brush his lovely hair!”

  But it was too late. I had pressed the button. The green light shot out and hit the horse, which immediately transformed back into the person who he really was.

  “Oh dear,” said M as she quickly looked away.

  “Yikes,” said Shorty as she put her hat over her eyes.

  It was Benedict Blackwood, wearing nothing but a horse’s saddle over his nethers.

  Something Much Worse Than “Camptown Races”

  Because I’m a gentleman, I handed Aunt Dorcas’s torn dress to Benedict Blackwood, so he would have something to wear. He took it from me, and as he did, he reached out and grabbed the Gänger-Doppel Device as well.

  “Hey!” I said, feeling like a fool as I stood there in my long johns. “I didn’t tell you that you could have that!”

  “I’m a criminal, you fool!” he snapped. “I do whatever I want to do!”

  He slipped on the dress and pointed the Gänger-Doppel Device at us. We held up our hands in surrender, except for B.W., whose arms were still tied together.

  “And now I’m going to get rid of you all, one by one,” Benedict Blackwood told us as he placed his finger on the button of the Gänger-Doppel Device. “I just need to decide which one of you I’d like to shoot first . . .”

  “Shoot them?” B.W. said with a frown. “Why do you need to shoot them?”

  “Why do you care?” I asked him. “You were about to throw me off the edge of that cliff a few minutes ago.”

  “Yes, but I gave you a chance to live,” B.W. told me. “Remember? I knocked you out and put you on that cross country train so I could get rid of you peacefully. I didn’t want you to die. I was being nice.”

  “He’s right, W.B.,” M said.

  “That actually was pretty kind of him,” Shorty agreed. “I mean, it’s probably as kind as a villain can be.”

  “You should be thanking B.W.,” P told me.

  “I’m not going to thank B.W.!”

  “Son,” Benedict Blackwood said as he turned to B.W. “I know you’re new to this villain thing. But we aren’t supposed to care about who we shoot. That’s what makes us villainous. Understand? Nobody matters except for us.”

  B.W. shrugged.

  “Fine,” he said. “It just seems stupid to waste Mr. and Mrs. Baron’s talents for inventing. They could be very useful to a brilliant criminal. Think of all the great inventions they could make for us.”

  Benedict thought about that for a moment.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I could use those brainy fools to invent all sorts of great weapons for me. I’d be unstoppable. But I can shoot the other two, right?”

  “Well . . .” B.W. said slowly. “You might not want to shoot Shorty either. I don’t like her, but she’s remarkably strong for her size. In fact, I’ve seen her make a grown man cry just by patting him on the back. With a bit of training, she could become a very useful member of your criminal gang. And no one would ever suspect her of being a villain. She could get away with anything.”

  “Good point,” Benedict Blackwood agreed. “No one ever expects a cute little kid to be a villain. Alright, I won’t shoot her either. But what about him?”

  He pointed at me. B.W. looked at me and frowned. So did everyone else.

  “Well, W.B. isn’t particularly strong,” B.W. began. “And he isn’t particularly clever, or talented, or knowledgeable, or even very pleasant to be around. But . . . yeah, I suppose you can shoot him.”

  Benedict smiled as he pointed the Gänger-Doppel Device at me and started to press the button.

  I winced and covered my face, peeking through my fingers and hoping that being turned inside out wouldn’t be as painful as it sounded. And maybe there would be some benefits to being inside out. I wouldn’t need to get haircuts anymore, for one thing.

  Come to think of it, that would probably be the only benefit.

  But before I could be hit by the green light from the device, the sound of a gunshot rang through the air. The Gänger-Doppel Device flew out of Benedict Blackwood’s hands and landed several feet away.

  “Good shot, Deputy Buddy!” M cried.

  I looked over and saw Deputy Buddy Graham and Rose Blackwood on a pair of black horses. There was a smoking gun in Buddy’s hands. The deputy shrugged sheepishly as he looked at my mother.

  “Actually, it wasn’t,” he told her. “I was aiming for his head.”

  Several other deputies arrived and arrested Benedict Blackwood. As he was dragged away in chains, he screamed about how he was going to have his revenge on me and my family once and for all, which I suppose was meant to frighten us. But it was pretty hard to take him seriously while he was wearing Aunt Dorcas’s ripped up dress. He certainly looked quite silly wearing it without the pointy boots, which were still on my feet. The boots completed the outfit.

  My mother and father listened as I explained to them in detail how Rose was a victim of Benedict and B.W.’s evil plan. I told them that Benedict had posed as his sister and entered an exploding pie in the contest under her name.

  “I should have known it was Benedict,” Rose said as she shook her head. “Not only is he the evilest person I’ve ever met, he’s also the most talented baker. The man would have been a first class pastry chef if he hadn’t gone into crime. Any pie of his was bound to win first prize at the contest.”

  “But how did you prove Rose’s innocence?” M asked Deputy Buddy. “You couldn’t have known about the Doppelgänger Device, and how Benedict used it to pose as his sister.”

  “Did you find the sign-in sheet for the baking contest?” I asked him with a grin.

  “Nope,” Buddy said with a wink. “I found something even more convincing. Little W.B. here told me that it would be almost impossible for me to find the sign-in sheet at the Pitchfork Desert Dump, so he suggested that I just pick up a few of Rose’s old pies instead, the ones that she’d thrown away after baking them. They were quite easy to find. They were the stinkiest things at the dump.”

  “Oh, goodness,” M said, her face turning a bit green. “You mean the rejected pies that smelled so awful that they made the wallpaper in the kitchen peel off?”

  “Yup,” said the deputy. “W.B. suggested I bring them down to the hospital and show them to my father. Pop took one look at them, and after throwing up his lunch, he realized that Rose couldn’t possibly have baked that delicious pie. Woo-wee those pies smelled awful! They smelled like a gorilla’s dirty underpants. Actually, they smelled worse than that. They smelled like if a sickly bat vom—”

  “That’s enough, Buddy,” Rose interrupted crossly. “I think we all get the point.”

  “Right,” Buddy said. “We realized that the real Rose had entered a pie in the contest that we’d mistaken for a disgusting joke. My father thought someone had put some goat plop in a pie tin for a laugh, but that was actually Rose Blackwood’s entry. Once we figured that out, Pop declared that Rose should be freed from jail with a full apology.”

  “Speaking of apologies, Rose, can you ever forgive us for doubting you?” M asked. “We would love to have you come back and work for us again. We can’t afford to pay you very much, but we can start giving you credit for some of the inventions and devices that you’ve helped us build. That means you’ll get a percentage of everything we sell.”

  Rose’s wide grin told her that she’d be thrilled to come back and work for my parents. And I was pretty thrilled about that too. Home hadn’t felt quite like home without Rose. I missed having her at the Baron Estate.

  Actually, home hadn’t felt quite like home without me there either. I missed having me at the Baron Estate as well.

  “Well, I don
’t think Rose will be worrying about money,” said Deputy Graham. “She’s offered to accompany me on the monthly trips to the Pitchfork Desert Dump to throw out the town’s trash, and so I’m going to split the payment with her fifty/fifty.”

  “It looks like everything worked out quite well for all of you,” B.W. said sourly. “How lovely. Now, can someone please untie me?”

  “Oh, pipe down,” said Shorty, as she stepped on his head. “You should be locked away in jail too. You tried to kill W.B.”

  “True,” said B.W. “But I also kept my father from shooting all of you with that horrible invention. You’d all be inside out if it weren’t for me.”

  M, P, and Shorty thought about that for a moment.

  “I guess,” said Shorty.

  “I suppose that’s true,” M said with a nod.

  “He did save us in the end,” admitted P.

  “That’s right, I did save you,” said B.W. “So please untie me. Everything can go back to the way it was before, just like you suggested earlier, W.B. I’ll go back to my life, and you can go back to yours. Just give me what I deserve.”

  “What do you think, W.B.?” Rose asked. “You’re the one who B.W. tried to kill. I think you should decide what happens to him.”

  Everyone seemed to think that was fair, even Buddy.

  “Alright, we’ll let the kid decide,” said the deputy. “What should we do, W.B.? Should I arrest him, or should we set him free?”

  I stared at B.W., who stared back at me blankly. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He was much smarter than I was, which meant that this might have been some sort of trick. If I freed him, he might try to break his father out of prison, and then they would both come after me and have their revenge. After all, if he was clever enough to tinker with my parents’ brilliant inventions, he could probably invent something pretty dastardly on his own.

  But then again, he had saved my parents and Shorty from the Gänger-Doppel Device, and he tried to get me out of the way without hurting me, which meant that he probably wasn’t all bad.