The Invisible Girl

by Laura Ruby

  Peter Paul opened his mouth and then shut it again, having wisely decided to can it.

  “Like I was telling this monkey here, after my wife left me, I was dating this girl. She was a nanny to a rich family. Liked to tell me all sorts of stories about them. I didn’t think much of her job till she told me about the weird baby she was watching. Said that the kid would disappear every once in a while. That she’d put the baby in her crib and the next time she looked in, the baby would be gone. She thought she was going crazy, but I knew what was what. That baby was The Wall. I wanted to get her while she was still young, so I could shape and mould her into a nasty—but invisible—little criminal.”

  “Charming,” Sol said. “Go on.”

  “We went to the rich guy’s house.” He looked blearily at Sol and Bunny Bloomington. “Your house.”

  “Sol,” said Bunny. “What is he talking about? What does he mean?”

  But Sweetcheeks was on a roll. “I waited until you went shopping one day. We broke into the service entrance of the building, disabled all the alarms and picked the locks. I am an excellent lock picker.”

  “I’m sure you are,” murmured Solomon, his face growing red with anger. The normally pale and mild-mannered Bunny looked as if she might leap out of her chair and choke the life out of Sweetcheeks herself. They did not, thought Gurl gratefully, seem like people who didn’t want their own daughter.

  “We overpowered the nanny,” Sweetcheeks was saying. “Oh, not in the way you think. We overpowered her financially. We gave her some bucks and sent her back to Russia. Then we brought The Wall to a safe house. She was mine for three whole hours.” Sweetcheeks laughed. “Can you believe it, monkey? Three hours. We bought her a crib, put her inside it, she went down for a nap and then poof! She disappeared. My men and I got on our hands and knees and patted down every inch of the room, but we couldn’t find her. We thought she’d fallen out of a window and died or something. Anyway, that was the end of my big plans.”

  “How tragic for you,” said Solomon Bloomington through clenched teeth.

  “Or so I thought. Just a few days later I heard through one of my men that a homeless woman passing by the safe house had heard a baby crying. She found the baby inside. She fed it food from the Dumpsters behind an Italian restaurant for a few days, but then she decided she couldn’t keep it after all. So she brought the baby to an orphanage. By the time the cops got wind of this story, she couldn’t remember which orphanage she’d brought the baby to and the cops didn’t believe her anyway. My dumb luck.”

  “Dumb,” said Solomon. “Yes.”

  “A few months after that, my father, Tommy ‘The Trigger’ Grabowski, got sick. I thought he was on his deathbed, so I told him how I’d kidnapped The Wall and how I lost her. He laughed and laughed, and told me I had feathers for brains. That I hadn’t been paying attention to the old gangster stories like I was supposed to. That I was a moron if I thought that the most valuable thing that Solomon Bloomington possessed was The Wall.” Sweetcheeks shook his head sadly. “No, my father never loved me. But I showed him. I went to visit this man called The Professor. You’ve heard of him?”

  Solomon Bloomington nodded. “I thought he was just a myth.”

  “No, no myth. Real. Lives in an apartment below a dry cleaner’s. Lots of cats.” Sweetcheeks screwed up his face in disgust. “I went to ask him about The Wall and he knew what I was talking about all right, but he was more trouble than he was worth. And the map he gave me was useless.” He shook his head violently, as if reliving a particularly disturbing memory. “But none of that matters. I’m here now. I’ve got The Wall. And I’ve got the pen. I can rewrite history any way I want to. I can write my own future.”

  “You don’t have a pen,” said Peter Paul Allen. “You have a monkey.”

  “And a gun, fool!” snapped Nathan Johnson.

  “I don’t have a pen?” said Sweetcheeks. He looked at the monkey and then at Solomon Bloomington, as if unsure to whom he was telling his story. “What’s going on?”

  Gurl, who had remained invisible through the entire story, reappeared. “You were going to take me back to your lair, remember? Now that you have the pen and everything.”

  Solomon Bloomington gasped. “Georgie? Is that you?”

  Georgie, thought Gurl. Is that me?

  Sweetcheeks pouted and pointed at Peter Paul. “He said I didn’t have a pen.”

  “Does anyone have a pen to give this guy?” said Nathan Johnson.

  Everyone except Solomon Bloomington and Gurl frantically checked their pockets.

  “No,” said Peter Paul glumly. “No pen.”

  “Rats,” said Iggy Fleishman, backing away from the microphone.

  “I know,” said Peter Paul. “All the guy wants is a pen and we don’t have one.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Iggy said. “I was talking about those!”

  He pointed out into the street. Far below the racing Wings, in the middle of the road, a manhole cover had been pushed aside. The Sewer Rats of Satan had grown tired of hiding in the bowels of the city and sprang from the depths like a thousand hungry demons.

  Chapter 27

  Unzipped

  AT THE SIGHT OF THE giant rats, the crowd began to panic, screaming and flying in every direction. The rats ignored them, streaming instead towards the parade floats that had been moored alongside Central Park.

  What now? thought Bug, trying to muscle his way through a pack of racers who had no intention of letting him win the race and, oddly, no intention of letting him get out of the race. Hot Pink Unitard, flying somewhere around Bug’s ankles, viciously pinched Bug’s calves. Silver Unitard elbowed Bug in the gut and earned a nip from Noodle, who did not take well to hostile elbows. Above him and below him, racers kicked and slapped, trying to get ahead.

  The pack rounded another corner and flew back towards the main stage. Through the throng of flying fluorescent bodies, Bug could see Sweetcheeks on stage, brandishing a gun—and a monkey?—at several other people, including Gurl. And Bug saw something else too: The Professor, half hidden by the foot of the museum steps. What was he doing here?

  But there was no time to think about why the rats wanted to get to the balloons so badly, and no time to think about The Professor. Bug had to get Gurl away from that stage before his stupid, horrible father did something really stupid and horrible.

  The racers careened towards the main stage and Bug could hear Sweetcheeks’s voice above the din.

  “I’m tired of this monkey talk!” Sweetcheeks said. “Oooh! Who’s that guy? He’s got a funny zipper face!”

  Just then Gurl caught Bug’s eye. “Bug!” she yelled. “Look out!”

  Something huge and heavy slammed into him from behind, scattering the pack of Wings every which way and sending Bug into a tumbling roll. Noodle howled as Bug tried to right himself and hang on to her at the same time.

  Bug turned around to face his attacker. There he was, Odd John, looking more freakish than ever, hanging in the air like some sort of creepy, zipper-faced bat. He grinned, gnashing his teeny teeth, and took a playful swipe at Bug, which Bug barely evaded. Hissing, Noodle clawed at John’s hand, erasing the terrible smile and replacing it with an angry grimace. For a moment John simply glared at Bug, but then he seemed to relax. He reached up and pulled the tab on his zipper. John unzipped his face and then his whole body.

  Bug could not move, could not even make a single sound, for what emerged from the Odd John suit was the oddest thing he had ever seen. First came the head, the long spiky beak (with teeth!) and the alligator eyes—more alligatorish than an actual alligator—then, as the suit slid down like a discarded Halloween costume, the brown leathery wings that fanned out like a gargoyle’s. The body, which managed to be both birdlike and manlike at the same time, ended in huge yellow feet, each capped with flesh-rending talons. The suit dropped away, falling to the ground below.

  Every fairy tale, every horror story flooded Bug’s mind at the si
ght of the creature. He was a lizard, a pterodactyl, a griffin. He was a flying museum exhibit, a nightmare.

  Clicking his fearsome, tooth-ridged beak, Odd John zoomed towards Bug. Bug rocketed upward. Up and up he flew, the odd monster hot on his heels. Still cradling Noodle, unable to use his arms, Bug kicked his legs frantically, scissoring into the sky until he’d cleared the top of the nearby buildings. He glanced down and saw that he was pulling away from John, almost free, when John surged up, clamped down on one of Bug’s feet with his beak and shook him like a field mouse.

  Several things happened at once: Bug screamed, bit his tongue and punched himself in the nose.

  It took him a few seconds to realise that he had also let go of Noodle.

  His foot in a vice and blood filling his mouth, he watched in horror as the little cat plummeted, mewling, towards the earth. Bug smashed his other foot down into the bird’s face, once, twice, three times, until the beast let go. Like an Olympic diver, Bug jackknifed at the waist and shot past the beast, zooming after the falling cat. He darted through the swarm of confused Wings as if he were a fish navigating through a coral reef. He could see the main stage coming up fast, Noodle a few feet beyond his fingertips, Gurl’s terrified face just below. Gathering all the strength that he had, Bug thrust himself forward and dived under the cat. He felt all four paws land on his back, the claws sinking into his flesh and tiny needle teeth gripping the back of his neck.

  “Bug! Stop!” Gurl screamed.

  Bug stopped, one inch between his face and the stage.

  Noodle unhooked her claws from his flesh and jumped off his back, while Bug opened eyes that he hadn’t realised were screwed shut. Placing both palms on the ground, he pressed himself to his feet, while Noodle pranced around him, mewing enthusiastically to her saviour. Sweetcheeks stood before him, holding the gun. Next to him stood the large, leathery bird, which must have landed the same moment that Bug did.

  Sweetcheeks blinked at Bug and at everyone else in amnesiac confusion, as if he had no idea where he was and who they all were, until the Odd John monster plucked the monkey from Sweetcheek’s hand, threw back its head and swallowed.

  For a moment everyone on the stage was silent, staring at the bird who had been Odd John. Sweetcheeks shook his head and his eyes cleared.

  “Well. That was a clever trick,” Sweetcheeks said, smiling tightly at Gurl. “You nearly made me lose my mind.” He turned to Bug. “I’m impressed, Sylvester. Quite a performance. Wasn’t it, John?”

  John clicked his beak, staring at Noodle. Noodle licked her paw and rubbed it over her ear.

  “I can see now why you want to be a Wing so badly,” Sweetcheeks continued. “And that’s something I’m willing to discuss as soon as we take care of business here.”

  “I’m not discussing anything with you!” Bug snarled.

  “Sylvester, be reasonable. You are who you are. Even if you can fly. Now get over here before you get hurt.”

  “No,” said Bug.

  “Sylvester!”

  “I don’t think he’s interested,” said Solomon Bloomington. “So, what do you plan to do now? Sooner or later someone is going to notice what’s going on up here.”

  “Who? Them?” said Sweetcheeks, flicking his gun at the people in the audience, who were buzzing about like wasps disturbed by a bear. “The Sewer Rats have scared them all away.”

  “You only have one gun and one…er…bird. You can’t kill all of us.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Sweetcheeks. “I certainly can kill all of you. I’ve got a bumblebee balloon with all of your names on it. All I have to do is tell my men to burst it. Now Mr Bloomington”—Sweetcheeks turned the gun on Gurl—“you give me that pen or you’ll watch your daughter die.”

  “Daughter!” Bug blurted, his buggy eyes practically bugging out of his face. “What do you mean, ‘daughter’?”

  “Stay out of this, Sylvester,” his father said.

  Bunny Bloomington began to weep and Solomon patted her back. “I wish I could give you the pen.” Sol looked at Gurl. “I would give you anything you wanted to get my daughter back.”

  “So then give it to me!”

  “I can’t,” said Solomon. “I don’t have it.”

  “Stop lying! You have it.”

  “He’s not lying.” A funny little man with green hair hobbled up the stairs and across the stage, walking as if his trousers chafed and shoes pinched him (which they will if you haven’t worn them in fifty years).

  “You!” said Sweetcheeks. Odd John shrank back against his boss.

  “Me,” said The Professor calmly (and soberly).

  “But you don’t leave your apartment!”

  “Not usually, no,” said The Professor, tugging at the legs of his slacks. “Solomon doesn’t have the pen.”

  “Who has it?”

  The Professor shrugged. “I do.”

  “Where is it? Give it to me! Or I’ll kill all of these people!”

  “Oh?” said The Professor. “With what? I think the bee has lost its sting.” He gestured to the street behind him, to the floats. The Sewer Rats of Satan had chased off all Sweetcheeks’s men and surrounded the float protectively.

  Sweetcheeks’s lovely face turned purple. “Those dirty rats are helping you?”

  “I promised them a little something,” said The Professor. “Something only I can give them.”

  “Great,” said Sweetcheeks. “So I’ll just kill you.”

  “Well, that would be stupid,” said The Professor. “Since I’m the only one who knows where the pen is. Then again, people are a stupid lot.”

  Sweetcheeks’s eyes flashed with fury. “Then I’ll torture it out of you. John?”

  John flapped his fearsome wings but didn’t move.

  “He’s scared,” said The Professor, hooking a thumb at Noodle.

  “This time there’s only one cat,” said Sweetcheeks. “Why should Odd John be afraid? You’re not even wearing that housedress with those big pockets.”

  “Who needs a housedress?” The Professor said. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a white kitten.

  Sweetcheeks frowned. “Fine, so now you have two.”

  “Really?” said The Professor. He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a black kitten. “That’s three.” He put the kittens on the ground.

  The large bird flapped his wings harder now, whipping up a breeze on the stage.

  “Calm down, John,” said Sweetcheeks. “They’re just babies. And you’re a grown-up…dinosaur…bird…thing!”

  The Professor patted his pockets. “I think there’s at least one more,” he said. The Professor hooked a finger into the front pocket of his shirt. “Ah. Here they are,” he said. There was a loud, thundering, shuddering crack, like the sound of a dam bursting, as a wave of kittens suddenly poured from the pocket. Kitten upon kitten—black, white, striped, tortoise, grey, orange, calico, short-haired, fuzzy, fat, skinny, mean, friendly, scruffy, sweet—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of wriggling, sharp-eyed, needle-clawed kittens. This mewling, howling tsunami leaped at the leathery bird, attaching themselves like tiny biting burrs. John tried to fly but only got a few feet into the air before the weight of the kittens sent him crashing to the stage in a great fuzzy heap.

  Sweetcheeks howled with rage, pointing the gun at The Professor, then at Solomon Bloomington, then at Gurl, then at Bug. “This city is mine!” he yelled. “It belongs to me!”

  “No,” said Bug, his voice tired. “I don’t think so.”

  Sweetcheeks looked around, realising that he couldn’t overpower so many people (and so many kittens). He reached into his own pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a half-filled red balloon. “You’ll be sorry,” he said and threw the red balloon to the ground. Instantly, a cloud of black dust filled the air and everyone’s eyes.

  “Gurl,” said Bug, coughing on the black dust. “He’s going to get away. He’ll disappear into the crowd.”

&
nbsp; Gurl grabbed his hand. “Come on.” She pointed towards the sky. Bug shot into the air, pulling Gurl along. Gurl thought she heard Bunny Bloomington scream, “No! Don’t go!”

  Once they were free of the black cloud, they looked down over the masses of people. “There!” said Gurl. “I see him.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t see us,” said Bug.

  “Right,” said Gurl and the two of them vanished. Sweetcheeks’s signature golden hair was easy to follow as it bobbed through the throngs of flying, floating and hopping people. The gangster looked over his shoulder as he ran, but as it seemed no one was on his tail, he soon slowed, moving casually and confidently through the crowd. Bug and Gurl flew after him, overshooting his position to land in front of him, popping into sight.

  Sweetcheeks drew up short as Bug snatched the gun from his hand. “What?” he said. “You two again! How did you…?”

  “I’m a Wall,” said Gurl.

  “I’m a Wing,” said Bug.

  “Yes,” Sweetcheeks said. “Of course you are. And it looks like I was wrong about the flying.” He smiled a sick and oily sort of smile, like an advertisement for smiling. “And I’m glad about that. You are one amazing flyer. I mean that, Sylvester. Do you mind if I call you by your given name or would you prefer Bug?”

  Bug eyed him warily. “Bug’s good.”

  “Bug then,” Sweetcheeks said. “Listen, I know you’re upset with me. And I understand that. I’d probably be upset too. But we can help one another. All three of us. Now that John is…um…indisposed, I could use a Wing like you. And we both know how useful your little friend might be,” he said, tipping his golden head at Gurl. “What do you say?”

  Bug took a deep breath. He crooked a finger and a Sewer Rat shambled over to Sweetcheeks.

  “Hell. Oh,” said the rat. Before Sweetcheeks could think to move, the Rat took hold of Sweetcheeks’s arm, clicked his sharp teeth and swayed back and forth in a sort of rat purr.

  Sweetcheeks tried to tug away from the grinding, swaying Rat, but its grip was too strong. “Get it off me!” said Sweetcheeks.