The Timeless Tale of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  “Erased,” Bob sighed.

  Randy nodded. “Exactly. We’ve been investigating these vanishings for quite some time—hence all the late nights at work.”

  I nodded as though I’d noticed, but the truth was, ever since Jenny half moved in1 and Randy had taken up the apartment across the hall, I hadn’t been much bothered about when Randy came home. I was busy.23

  “So last week I was called in to tail these two mobsters, on what I thought was a completely unrelated case. See, we’d had a tip that they were making a drug pickup on the wrong side of Thriller—you know, near the old elementary school. So I followed them: Noodles Corleone and Spot.”

  “Not Spot the Dog?” Jenny gasped.

  “I’m afraid so, yes. He’s taken up a nasty Kibbles ’n Bits habit—the pure stuff. You can only get it straight from the Real World.”

  I knew things sometimes seeped into Fiction from the Real World. There were the occasional details—Starbucks, for one. We had plenty, mostly in Romance and Realistic Fiction, which was farther east toward Nonfiction. It’s packed with mini-malls and big-box stores. Dreadful place. Some characters even popped into Fiction on holiday from Nonfiction—last year it was a big deal when the Queen of England decided to come to Fantasy for high tea. But the difference was these things had all been written about. They made their way into Fiction through Nonfiction, as a sort of written version of their Real World self, or by simply being written into a fictitious story—hence all the Starbucks in Rom Com.

  They all looked pretty “shiny,” which in Fiction is what we call things that are currently being written about. We’re just a little brighter, more vivid, more detailed than the rest of this world. I’ve been dull before, of course, when my series first ended and I was trapped in my room for two weeks because I wasn’t sure how to turn the doorknob, and then again last year after The Fantastic Fable of Peter Able, which surely you know all about. But those are pretty much the only modes we have here in Fiction—written or unwritten. Shiny or dull.

  To have something straight from the Real World, though . . . That was something else entirely. I’d heard rumors of such things—illegal things like Kibbles ’n Bits, weird products like something called Febreze (which wealthy people here collected, displayed in glass cases and the like), and, if I wasn’t much mistaken, my backstory. There could be no other reason it had felt so out of place. I glanced over at the drawer, almost expecting it to be emitting an otherworldly glow from the cracks, but no, it was just my regular, old, dark wood desk.

  “Are you done with the exposition?” Randy asked.

  “Almost.”

  You see, in Fiction we know about the Real World, of course, as a sort of vague and indescribable place, from which we all come. I never thought I’d see something so . . . unedited, so unpublished—but there it was, in my drawer. I glanced over, almost expecting it to be emitting an otherworldly glow from the cracks . . .

  “Peter, now you’re just repeating yourself. We don’t have time for this,” Randy said. He began to pace the narrow space between my desk and bed. I’d seen this before. Randy was going into Detective Mode.

  “So I tailed ’em, Peter! I tailed those goons to the wrong side a Thriller, but they didn’t stop there, no! They were on a fast track to the east side, see? The flimflammers hightailed it straight through RF, they were in a bent car, see? Gassed it to a dive all the way out east. Tried to dump the flivver and fade, but I was on ’em like—”

  “Why are you talking like that?” Jenny asked.

  He looked up, seemingly surprised to see us peering down at him—and to find himself crouched on the floor making a gun shape with his fingers.

  “Sorry,” Jenny said. “Only it’s kind of hard to understand you when you’re rolling around on the ground and hiding under the desk.”

  Randy stood up and smoothed out his pants.

  “Right. So the drive ended up taking hours. Days. I’ve no idea how long I drove—the scene kind of . . . at one point. But they didn’t stop, so I didn’t stop. Toward the end, the road got pretty empty, so I put a clever Disillusionment Charm on the car so they wouldn’t see me.”

  “Ah, Randy, I don’t think you can say that here,” Bob said, looking around the room furtively, as though there was a Taboo one the word—

  “Or that, Peter. Sorry, copyrights, you know.”

  “Right then,” Randy said, swinging his arms awkwardly. Copyrights in Fiction. Always a touchy subject. “So I put a charm on the car so that they couldn’t see it and just kept on driving. I didn’t make it home for nearly two days—I’m sorry if I worried you, Peter.”

  I told him it was okay but to never to do it again, while trying to figure out when this trip possibly could have happened.

  “We’d been driving through a patch of Nonfiction for about an hour—a rather boring area, honestly, mostly desert, the occasional clump of cacti. When out of nowhere, the desert just faded—it was like driving through thick mist, but there was no ground, no sky. Then just as suddenly, I found myself back on the road but completely surrounded by a market! It was a good thing my reflexes are better than yours, Peter,” he added, shaking his head ruefully, “because the mobster’s car had stopped right in front of mine in the middle of the road. There was no going anywhere—the streets were crammed with people, open-air stalls of every color, donkeys whose backs were piled high with handwoven blankets, quilts, children running around shirtless trying to sell jewelry. It was all so . . . alive! So vivid! I tell you, Nonfiction keeps it real, Peter.

  “So I parked my car behind Spot and Noodles and got out. It was so crowded, I didn’t worry about them noticing me. I was more worried about losing them in the crowd! I stayed close on their heels, but it was hard. People kept coming up to me, offering to sell me things, offering to buy things, and—”

  “Sorry, what?” I asked. “Offering to buy things?”

  “Oh yeah, characters from Fiction don’t often make it over to the market in Nonfiction. They wanted my jacket, my glasses—offered me top dollar for my hat,” he added, pointing proudly to the space above his head.

  “Soon, though, the streets started to empty out a bit, and after a few minutes, I found myself following the two goons through an alleyway. Gone were the smells of spices and leather—this place smelled off. Just wrong. And it was getting darker and darker—and I don’t just mean the sky above, which had suddenly changed to nighttime.”

  “Like it does when you walk through Thriller?” Jenny asked.

  “Yes, but here there weren’t even stars or the green moons from Sci Fi to brighten things up. Here it was just black.

  “Before it was totally dark, though, I saw a street sign saying ‘Black Market.’”

  Jenny gasped, Bob dropped about a dozen leaves, and I, well, I was trying to fit five Gobstoppers into my mouth without choking.

  “WharstheBlMMmmmhmmm?” I asked.

  Randy, who was well accustomed to my eating habits, having lived with me for a year, explained that the Black Market was a place that had been talked about for centuries—ever since the beginnings of books. It was the place where Out There met Here; where Reality seeped into Nonfiction, which then spread into Fiction. (The more west you went, the more fictitious things got. Fantasy, of course, extends pretty far west, but even farther there were things like Fairy Tales, Mythology, and Celebrity Memoir.)

  Of course nobody really knew much about the Black Market, and those who did know weren’t the sort of folks who were likely to talk about it. But it had long been suspected that the Black Market was where the illegal items from Out There seeped into our world—as to how, exactly, no one knew. The problem was the Black Market tended to change locations every so often, so for centuries, it had been hard to nail down.

  “I actually hadn’t expected the goons—sorry, Spot and Noodles—to guide me directly to the source of the stuff. I’d thought they just had a pickup in Thriller.”

  “So what did you do?” Jenny asked.
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br />   “Well, I got the hell out of there! After all, I was alone, didn’t have any way to contact the precinct, and I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. But I traced my steps back into the market, the regular market, mind, and did some digging around. Nobody wanted to talk to me once they figured out I was a detective from Fiction—which I probably shouldn’t have told them first thing, now that I think about it.

  “But eventually I found a stand at the end of an alleyway selling these really peculiar-looking night vision goggles. Kind of like the ones that are so popular in Steampunk, you know?”

  I rolled my eyes. A Steampunk neighborhood had sprung up on the outskirts of Sci Fi in the past few years and was just getting bigger and bigger every day. They’d never done anything to me, really—they all just seemed so impractical.

  “After talking to the vendor, I learned that the goggles were used for the Black Market, one entrance to which was on the other side of the long, dark alley behind the stall. I bought some goggles and went down the alley.”

  “By yourself!” Jenny gasped.

  “Yes, by myself, Jenny. No one ever said the life of a detective was an easy one . . .” Randy tried to raise one eyebrow suavely. He blinked hard a few times and gave up.

  “Well, as I went down the alley, the noise from the market faded. It got all, kind of, I don’t know, odd, and then I came across this one stall—after some other ones, you know. It was busy in there too. But dark. Smelled odd, did I say that already?”

  “Hang on, Randy,” I said, sensing the Black Market might not be the kind of thing easily described in dialogue. “I have an idea.”

  * * *

  1 We’ll get to that later

  2 Baking

  3 Jenny had recently decided that we needed more hobbies to enjoy together. Apparently, we were going to like baking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Randy walked down the alleyway. With each step, it got darker and darker. At the end of the narrow street, a sign: “Black Market.” It was written in crude, almost childlike writing. It was eerie.

  He took a deep breath and stepped out into the larger area beyond. Through his night vision goggles, he saw the world in glowing greens and blacks, making it all the more alien. But even without distorted vision, he would have felt it—the presence of all those items from Out There. It was rather like suddenly finding yourself on LSD without knowing you’d taken any. Or so Randy had heard.

  “Peter, for the record, I want to say that heavy acronym use is not something I recommend”—he looked up and raised his voice a bit—“for anyone under the age of twenty-five. Twenty-two minimum.”

  “Who’s he talking to?” Jenny asked

  “Never mind,” I said, having removed the Gobstoppers from my mouth. “I want to see how this panned out.”

  On both sides, the street was lined by the backs of buildings, blocking it from the rest of the market. In front of these, stalls, tables, and booths were packed side by side—though unlike the colorful market beyond, there was no screaming advertisements of the products being sold. In fact, many of the products were not even on display. The people merely watched as patrons passed by, many of whom wore scarves, face masks, or full burkas to hide their features. All wore goggles.

  Randy walked down the road, which turned out to be very long, at first merely observing the people milling about. There were fewer than he’d seen in the other part of the market—most were walking by themselves silently, but some were less conspicuous. He spied a Gingerbread Man who moved from stall to stall, asking each vendor for something in a low voice. He was shaking violently and seemed distressed that no one had what he was looking for. There was a centaur moving dazedly through the market, slack-jawed, bumping into people. No one said excuse me; no one spoke at all. And then, out of the corner of his eye, Randy spotted someone so vile, so villainous, that no one in Fiction dared speak his name. You know who we’re talking about.

  Randy quickly averted his eyes from the tall figure and kept walking, head bowed. He dared not approach any of the vendors, lest he give himself away. But once he was far enough away from that guy we don’t name—so vile, and copyrighted, is he—he lifted his head and watched as others did. A squat goblin that he recognized from Fiction Academy walked up to one of the stalls and muttered something to the vendor. She left and returned with a tightly wrapped cloth parcel. It could have been yellow or blue or red—in this light, it was just a slightly glowing green.

  She looked around and then unwrapped a portion of the parcel, revealing some sort of brush—it was bristly, round, and attached to a long plastic stick. Randy moved a bit closer on the pretext of looking at some of her other products—the ones that were on display. They lay on the table in between her and the goblin. Randy edged toward the narrow end of it.

  “Bed Bath & Beyond Toilet Brushes. Price Upon Request.”

  He’d never heard of such a thing—clearly these were items largely left unmentioned over in the World of Fiction. But he didn’t like them. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but they just felt wrong—it was almost as though he could feel their presence, rather than just see them. They smelled so . . . plastic.

  He thought the woman was eyeing him suspiciously—though it was hard to tell with the night vision goggles, so he pointed at the products, gave her a thumbs-up, and moved along.

  He kept walking; the street seemed to go on and on. The booths that displayed their products had mostly odd household appliances—lots of bathroom cleaners and things too specific to make their way into Fiction, like an Abe’s of Maine microwave or an Acme Tools hammer. Nothing terribly harmful. Just out of place in this world.

  Finally, after about half an hour, he spotted Spot and Noodles. They were nearly a hundred meters in front of him, stopped in front of a booth on the left side of the street. Randy didn’t want to lose them—but he didn’t want them to see him either. With just seconds to make up his mind, he turned to the booth on his right, which was openly selling scarves from the Real World. He hated the thought but hastily grabbed one labeled “Anthropologie Moonflower Scarf,” paid more than he’d spent on clothing in a year, and wrapped the strange thing around the bottom of his face, leaving only a small gap for his nose.

  He still had Spot and Noodles in his sights and hastily made his way toward them. But just as he was nearing, they disappeared through the back door of a building. It was the first Randy had seen of a building being used in the market. It was then he realized he might be dealing with much more than illegal Kibbles ’n Bits. This building surely must house something very large, very dangerous, very secretive, or all three.

  Seeing as though the guard in front of the door was itself all three—a giant three-headed dog wearing night vision goggles on all three of its heads and, to be discreet, three headbands with cat ears—Randy could only imagine what was behind those doors. Luckily, Randy knew Cerberus quite well; he’d arrested him once before in Greek Mythology for continuing to shout out people’s pasts, presents, and futures, despite their protestations. And for eating a few demigods as well.

  Randy also happened to know just the way to subdue him.

  Hold that thought.

  “Peter—what the hell?” Jenny asked as the room faded back into focus. “We were just getting to the good part!”

  “I know, but we’ve been in my bedroom this whole time, and I was just thinking, Shouldn’t we change things up a little bit? You know, change of scenery?”

  There was a general grumbling of ascent, so we made our way out of my bedroom, down the short hall past the bathroom, and into the living room. Since Randy had moved into the apartment across the hall, the living room had lost a little of its charm. The floors were still the same scuffed wood I’d had since moving in, the worn leather armchair was the same (if not a bit more worn), as was the old, pilled green couch, but many of the fluffy white accent pillows and pictures he’d added were gone, decorating his apartment instead. He’d left the blue-and-green striped rug, though
.

  There was a lot more Jenny stuff in its place—her red sneakers next to the couch, a black jacket draped over its back, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate on the coffee table . . . So it was just charming in a different way.

  Since we’re out here, I may as well give you a tour of the rest of the apartment. It’s just two bedrooms, so—

  “PETER.”

  I wasn’t sure who’d said it, but it seemed like time to get back to Randy’s story. We settled in—Randy and I on the couch, Jenny on the chair, Bob next to the floor lamp to her right—and the room slowly faded away . . .

  He still had Spot and Noodles in his sights and hastily made his way toward them. But just as he was nearing, they disappeared through the back door of a building.

  Whoops.

  Randy also happened to know just the way to subdue him.

  That’s better.

  Unfortunately, the only thing known to stop Cerberus was live meat. Randy didn’t happen to have any wild game on him at the moment, but then he remembered something . . .

  He walked straight up to the three-headed dog, whose heads all swiveled in his direction, the mane of snacks around his neck—

  “There is a mane of snacks?”

  “Snakes, snakes. Sorry,” Randy grumbled. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”

  . . . the mane of snakes around his neck all hissing menacingly.

  “Hey, Randy. Can’t let you past, you know.”

  “Yes, yes, I figured as much, Cerberus. How are you doing? New job?”

  “Yeah, they let me out of the pen for good behavior. I’m still on probation, so they check in to make sure I’m doing well—holding down a job, staying out of trouble, just keeping my noses clean, you know.”

  “Yes, well, you look great. I’m glad to see that you’re doing so well. Though—and I hate to say it—there was this fellow down the way.” Randy pointed behind him down the alley. “He said something about . . . about your mother.”