The Timeless Tale of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  He let his words trail off meaningfully, though I couldn’t see why. It seemed pretty straightforward to me. Maybe mispunctuation?

  “All right, you two. You go off and get your books now, and we’ll catch up more sometime soon. And Jenny—” She looked up at him as we both scooched our chairs back from the table. “I’m happy to see you got that Love Conflict happily resolved. If Peter gives you any trouble, you come and see me. I like him, but I’m not above teaching anyone a lesson who messes with your heart.” He gave her what was probably supposed to be a paternal smile.

  “I can hear you, you know.”

  “Right you are. All right, off with you two. I’ll see you around.”

  Since Jenny and I had already had our “meeting” with the new headmaster before buying our books, the rest of our visit at the bookstore took only about fifteen minutes. I gathered the needed supplies for my two conflict classes (textbooks for both Person vs. Self and Person vs. Person and, for some reason, a copy of Metamorphosis), for my new basic Spellwork class (a cauldron, a new wand, and, to my embarrassment, an Intro to Spellwork textbook), and for my Bio 201: Creatures of Sci Fi class (two more textbooks, a notebook, and a small plastic box, which upon opening, contained several vials of what looked like different types of antivenom).

  New supplies1112 13in hand, we headed to the school’s café next door, mostly because I just wasn’t ready to head home to put on my apron yet. As we sat at the table outside, sipping our drinks (mine a Mystery Mug, which I think was really just a hot chocolate, and Jenny’s, a Fairy-tale Frappe, a bright blue iced coffee topped with a heaping pile of whipped cream, marshmallows, and rainbow sprinkles), something strange happened.

  “. She looked like she’d been trying to get my attention for quite a while.

  “What?”

  In response, she pointed into the sky to the north.

  It was the Bat Signal.

  Needless to say, we ditched our half-finished drinks and ran across campus. Personally, I’d never met a comic book hero before, and if he showed up, I just wanted to get a glimpse of him. Once we found ourselves directly beneath the glowing symbol, just on the north side of the main building, we found a clump of tall, blue, and rather feathery bushes and crawled behind them. We waited.

  “Peter and Jenny,” someone growled from behind us. We whipped around, backs to the fluffy bush, and there was Batman.

  “Actually, it’s Bateman,” the man said. He was wearing a black leather suit, black boots, and a mask covering everything but his eyes and mouth area, with long, pointed black ears on top. The most striking thing, though, was his coloring. He was shiny, like Jenny and me, clearly being written somewhere, but unlike Jenny and me, he was . . . bright. The small patch of skin on his face we could see was a solid, uniform tan, no blemishes or imperfections; his lips were perfectly bowed, his chin a painted-on cleft. That’s really what it was . . . he looked painted. He was a cartoon.

  Batman pointed something small and plastic, sort of like a garage door opener, behind him and clicked it between his fingers; the Bat Signal disappeared from the sky.

  “Actually, Peter,” he growled again, “like I said, it’s Bateman. And that’s the Bate Signal. You can’t say the other thing here.” Beneath his mask, his eyes darted around nervously, perhaps looking for Dach-shund.

  I’d never heard of a Bateman in Comics, which was clearly where this guy was from. Even his shadow looked too solid, too filled in.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked as the man who I was still pretending was Batman sat down opposite us in the grass. He reached toward his left hip and produced three small glasses, then pulled a flask from his left boot and filled them.

  “It’s just butter bee—OUCH!” he bellowed. Dach-shund had bit him square on the arm and then fell to the ground in a panting heap. She’d clearly just run across town.

  “Guess you can’t say that here either. Okay, well, it’s not that alcoholic, so drink up. It’s good.” He handed us the two small glasses. I threw mine back, eager to impress Batman—

  “Bateman.”

  But Jenny just smelled hers cautiously.

  “How do we know we’re supposed to trust you? You draw us over here with this symbol—which now that I think about it, its ears were too long to be any kind of bat.” At this, the man touched his ears self-consciously, patting them down. “And you know our names already. I mean, someone out there is trying to kill Peter. How do we know it’s not you?”

  These were all good points. I was starting to wish I hadn’t finished my drink so quickly.

  “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Bateman said in his deep voice. It was kind of hard to understand. “Long John gave me a heads-up when you two left the bookstore to shine the signal; he said you were always looking for trouble and would come running.

  “I know your names, Jenny, because Peter is enrolled in my Person vs. Person class this semester. A subject that I know all too much about . . .” He looked away. I allowed him his Moment and then asked if this was because he was really Batman.

  “No, Peter. It’s Bateman. I’m new in the genre, but believe me, I’ve already had my share of Person vs. Person conflicts. There was the Prankster, Bother, Feline Fem, Half Face . . .”

  “These comics sound really bad,” I muttered to Jenny.

  “Last week I had a day off from fighting crime in Gotham—it’s not copyrighted, look it up,” he added, though I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. “So I decided to get ahead on some things for the school year. I put together the supplies lists, got my classroom set up, and drew the conflicts for each student out of Long John’s hat.”

  I shuddered at the memory. Last fall, Long John had us each draw our own conflict from his magical and completely disgusting and smelly pirate’s hat. Mine had simply read “Assassination.” It wasn’t the best way to start the school year.

  “So you don’t have to draw your own conflict out of the hat?” Jenny asked.

  “Oh no, that would just be Long John’s flair for the dramatic,” Bateman replied in his own unnecessarily dramatic deep voice.

  “Peter, when I pulled your conflict, though, I was concerned. Most people’s will say something like ‘James and Matt have a falling out,’ or ‘Professor Uk and a centaur fight over who gets to teach the creatures class; one of them loses an eye.’”

  “Is that true?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is, yours wasn’t like that. It just said, ‘? kills Peter.’ Long John suggested I meet with you before classes start Monday, see if you might have any insights. Do you know anyone named??”

  “???”

  “No, I mean one?.”

  “Was that a question?”

  “?.”

  “Peter, what I think he’s asking is if you know anybody named ‘?’.”

  “Oh!” I said, happy to have it straightened out. “No, no, I don’t.”

  Bateman put his cartoonlike gloved finger to his lips, thinking. I awkwardly passed the little cup from one hand to the other, and Jenny absently scratched Dach-shund behind her ears, staring off in the distance. Context, you know.

  “Damn. I was hoping you’d have some ideas—because as you might have noticed, your conflict, it sounds pretty final. I’m going to try to help you as much as I can. For now, though, just know: I believe in Peter Able. I believe in Jenny. I believe in Gotham City.”

  “Really?” Jenny said, rolling her eyes.

  “What?” he growled. “What? He didn’t say exactly that. I can use similar quotes, okay?” Bateman then got up, and with a swirl of his black cape, he was gone.

  Jenny curled up next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. She hardly ever cried, but I felt just one warm tear fall onto my arm. Bateman was right, my conflict sounded pretty final. In case you’re wondering, yes, it crossed my mind that this conflict probably had more than a little something to do with whoever had tried to get ahold of my backstory, and that yes, I still had the
ability to change the backstory myself, if I wanted. But that was more of an inner struggle—and we hadn’t gotten to Person vs. Self yet.

  “Excuse me,” a voice growled from the other side of the bushes. I turned and Bateman’s gloved and cartoonlike arm was sticking out of the bush, palm open. “Can you please give me my cups back? They kind of go with the belt, you know. Hard to replace.”

  I placed the two little cups in his palm. He pulled his arm back through the bushes, then punched it through again, empty, and said, “Thank you,” using his closed fist as a hand puppet.

  * * *

  4Please see The Fantastic Fable of Peter Able for more details.

  5 Fantasy is the genre where I live. It’s huge, and I admit I’ve only really seen the neighborhood surrounding my apartment—the bright, colorful houses lining the smooth river rock streets, the trees of blues, greens, yellows, and purples dancing or swaying or just being still, depending on how they’re feeling. There are always fantastical creatures milling about: a herd of centaurs who you can spot every morning out on an early jog, blue northern pixies, goblins, elves, the occasional giant lumbering through, damsels in distress, boy and girl wizards, and of course, the neighborhood dragon, who is generally tethered up near my bedroom window. And that’s just near campus, where all the genres converge. As all the genres do, Fantasy widens and reaches far back from Fiction’s center near my house, far up north, where you’ll find Boarmoles, one of the less prestigious of the wizarding schools. It’s surrounded by mountains—both metaphorical and not, the Symbolic Slopes, and creatures like Snow Giants, flying reindeer, and yetis, who, surprisingly, tend to winter in Nonfiction.

  6 Just beyond Fantasy lies the Sci Fi genre. Here, the shiny metallic-looking streets are lined with black, reflective glass towers—hundreds of floors tall. Cyborgs, robots, aliens, and time travelers mill about, and no matter what time of day, you can always spot the two moons in the sky, glowing an eerie green. Oh, and it tends to rain acid here.

  7 Unless, of course, you count the one, lonely street of Romance that stretches between Fantasy and Sci Fi. No one really knows why it made itself a home over here, miles away from the rest of Romance, but the little street is one of my favorite around. Just at its entrance, on the corner of Fantasy, is the best bakery in Fiction, Pip and Pop’s. The whole street smells like baking apples, and everything here is bathed in a sort of rosy glow.

  8 Mystery is one of the most mysterious genres—I say one of the most, because, surprisingly, Romance is right up there with it. Here, the streets are paved with rough, irregular cobblestones. The air is slightly warmer, at least warmer than in Thriller and Sci Fi. There seems to be a constant flow of foot traffic through the area, people carrying mysterious boxes, going from shop to shop, some boasting signs selling “secrets” or “who knows what.” It’s all very mysterious.

  9 Alongside Mystery runs Thriller, which, as you can imagine, is one of the most horrifying genres . . . Well, aside from Horror, which as you might have guessed, is quite close by. Thriller is always dark, cold. The roads are smooth and paved, graffiti and blood cover the walls, and the sounds of screams and sirens bounce off the brick walls and down the alleyways.

  10 Yes, of course there’s a Horror genre too. There is literally every genre of fiction in Fiction, and new subgenres (like Steampunk, for instance) are constantly popping up, meaning Fiction is ever-changing and ever-expanding. Then there’s Nonfiction to the east, but I think we’d better get back to the story by now, don’t you?

  11 In case you were wondering, Jenny’s supplies were a Person vs. Self textbook, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an Advanced Spellwork textbook, the Bio 201 books, notebook, and plastic box, and an Intro to YA textbook, for which I made fun of her mercilessly. And then she made fun of my taking an introductory Spellwork course. And then we didn’t talk for about three minutes, just sipping our drinks looking in opposite directions.

  12 You’re right. I’m just wasting time at this point in order to avoid baking.

  13 Well, then don’t read the notes if you don’t want to.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Believe it or not, the whole Long John/getting our books/Bateman scene had taken up a good three or four hours, so by the time we got back to the Detective building, it was already midafternoon. We went into the plain brick building, and after walking straight to Randy’s old training office, we both realized that we didn’t know where Randy’s new office was. So we spent an additional thirty minutes or so meandering through the halls, with their buzzing fluorescent lights overhead and old, dingy tile floors, as they all seemed to look exactly alike, until, finally, we came across a door labeled “Randy Potts: Lead Detective.”

  Hesitantly, I knocked once and opened the door, expecting him to be angry for having had to wait so long, but instead, he hardly seemed to notice us coming in. He was sitting at a large wooden desk—the size of which would have taken up his entire previous office—staring bleary-eyed at a paper on top of a stack of many. The desk was covered with files, envelopes, and grainy black-and-white photos. In one corner, there was a large, dusty typewriter; just next to this, his wand, and on the other side of his desk, a photo of Randy’s kids, Brent and Molly, which, yes, for some reason was facing the doorway.

  “But that can’t be right,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head, “Who would care about killing her off? She’s never done anything to anyone . . . Unless it’s in some text outside of her story . . . An author dedication? An overlooked epilogue . . . ?” He lifted his thin glasses from his face, placed them on top of the pile of papers, and rubbed his eyes.

  “Randy, are you okay?” I asked, my hands on the back of one of the two chairs facing his desk. He looked up and blinked. “Peter, what are you doing here? I thought you and Jenny were getting your books.”

  “That was like four hours ago,” I said. “We got caught up with Long John, who’s the headmaster now, and then we met Mr. Bateman, who basically told me I’m going to be killed by?.”

  “Sorry,” Randy said, rifling through the papers, glasses once again perched on his nose. “Did you ask me a question?”

  “Never mind. What’s going on in here?” I said, gesturing at the table.

  “Oh, everything it seems.” He sat back in his chair and sighed. “I came in to talk to Ivor and Terrill about not giving any more information away to the press, as this investigation is ongoing. They understood, and I’m pretty sure we won’t have a problem with that again. Only when I got into my office, I found all of this on my desk,” he said, gesturing angrily at the pile of papers.

  “Reports on more missing persons—Cinderella, Pinocchio, Aladdin, Peter Pan . . .”

  “A lot of Disney characters,” Jenny noted.

  “Yes, well, it’s a public domain thing. More than that, though, it seems that there have been several reports of lost identities this morning—characters just wandering around, unsure who they are or convinced that they’re somebody else entirely. Aphrodite was seen on a small street in Sci Fi less than an hour ago, stark naked, convinced that she was actually Venus.”

  “Isn’t that about right . . . ?” But Randy didn’t seem to be listening to me.

  “Peter, it looks like whoever is causing the disappearances has cottoned on to our scheme, and he’s either going through the wardrobe and retrieving the backstories himself, or getting someone else to do it for him. He’s not only erasing characters now but appears to be toying with their minds. I’ve been racking my brain here, trying to figure out what all of these characters have in common.” Randy picked up his wand and pointed it toward the blank brick wall behind his desk. With a flick of his wrist, the wall was replaced with a large whiteboard, covered in sticky notes, photos, and lists of character names, surrounded by their details in a sort of flowchart. Some of the characters’ details connected—for example, Aladdin and Peter Pan were both Disney rebels—but more often than not, the board was filled with question marks.

  “As you can see,
” Randy said, standing up, “there have now been eleven disappearances: Bill the Banana Tree, the three fairies, Gorndalf, the Romance couple, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Aladdin, and Peter Pan. Mr. X also ordered the backstories for the Wind in the Willows mouse, Frog, the Gingerbread Man, Ms. Wilkinson, and . . . well, you, Peter.” Randy gave me an apologetic shrug. He then turned back to the board, pointing at each name with his wand as he spoke. “And now, we’ve had three reports of mistaken identities: Aphrodite, Alice, and the latest, Daphne the Wizard.”

  “What! We just saw her this morning,” Jenny exclaimed. “Also, Randy, I really think you need to take Aphrodite off your list.”

  Randy waved a hand impatiently. “Okay, two confused characters this morning then. That’s”—he did a quick calculation—“eighteen backstories taken from Out There. And those are just the ones we know about.”

  “And I doubt it’s going to stop anytime soon,” I added, helpfully.

  “Right,” Randy said, rubbing the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “So what I need to figure out is what these sixteen characters have in common, why someone would want to mess with them specifically, who that someone might be, where that someone is, and how to stop him or her from hurting anyone else.”

  “Or killing them,” I noted.

  “Thanks, Peter.”

  “Is there anything we can do to help out?” Jenny asked. I shot her a Look, but she ignored me.

  “You know what, Jenny, I think there is. If you two aren’t busy, can you please help me comb each of these sixteen characters’ books for any details I might be missing? Anything they might have in common, any minor characters who might pop up in more than one story? For example, I’ve found that there is a cricket who appears in The Wind in the Willows, Frog and Toad, and Pinocchio who might be the same one—though I can’t find him in any of the other books.”