by Paul Glennon
“What’s weird?” his father asked, saving Norman the trouble.
Norman looked from his mother to his father and back again. Between them on the wall was that painting of wolves in the wild. He found it impossible to look at now without a slight shiver. He took pains to avoid their eyes.
“Conran’s really losing it now,” his mother replied.
Conran was the author of her novel. Norman was used to seeing that name in big silver letters on the well-worn paperbacks that were usually to be found face down on the coffee table.
“The last few books have been weaker than usual,” she said. “He seemed to have no new ideas and was just recycling old ones, but now he’s really lost the plot.”
Norman could hide his interest no longer. “What do you mean, Mom?”
“Well, you might like it actually now, since you’re into Dora’s books,” she replied teasingly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said, in a voice more hurt than he had intended.
“Detectives Darwin and Rorschach are on the trail of this serial killer called the Magpie, who, by the way, sounds a lot like the Bower Bird killer from the first Darwin and Rorschach novel. Anyway, when they arrive at the crime scene, you’re expecting the usual gory stuff that impressionable young boys like you don’t need to know about yet. Instead they come face to face with…here, let me read it to you.”
She grabbed the paperback again and opened it at the page she’d last dog-eared. She read clearly and brightly in a tone that was awkwardly familiar to Norman. This was the voice that had read to him for years, the voice that had repeated the strange magic of foxes in boxes and told him the stories of borrowers and magicians and friendly giants. It was so strange now to hear it cheerfully relating the following scene.
Rorschach winced as he hoisted his thick limbs out of the car. The tension bandage the doc had given him was useless. The slightest movement tormented his cracked rib, and this getting in and out of cars, it was like breaking the thing all over again. Darwin saw the grimace on his partner’s face but knew better than to ask about it or offer sympathy.
“Suck it up, Rorscho,” the smaller man said. “It’s game time.”
Rorschach only glowered back.
“Who called this in?” he asked as they flashed their badges and edged through the growing crowd of bystanders.
“Beat officer, just finishing his rounds. Called it in about an hour ago.”
“And we’re just hearing about it now?” Rorschach growled.
Darwin shrugged. They had reached the band of yellow police tape that stretched across the mouth of the alley.
“Anyone touched the body?” he asked the uniformed cop who guarded the entrance.
“No, sir,” she replied. “The crime scene techs are waiting for you.”
Darwin nodded. This was the way it was supposed to go, but it seldom did. Some eager Sherlock six months out of the Academy always thought he could solve the crime in the first five minutes. The smaller man did his best to lift the yellow tape high enough for his big partner to duck through painlessly, but the big man still had nearly a foot on him. Darwin read the curse on Rorschach’s lips as he ducked under.
“Where’s the vic?” Rorschach asked hoarsely, his voice taut with impatience and lingering pain.
“Over there behind the dumpster.” The uniformed officer pointed.
The two detectives turned the corner at the same time. Neither said anything at first. Darwin reached into the inside pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a stick of gum. Rorschach rubbed his hands over his eyes in tired disgust.
“What the heck is this supposed to be?”
The thing that was waiting for them there behind the dumpster looked back at them with big, bored brown eyes, stomped a hoof and exhaled condensation from its nostrils into the cold city air.
“Where the heck did this come from?” Rorschach demanded.
“What?” Darwin deadpanned. “You’ve never worked with the Police Pony Squad?”
“Did he really say ‘heck’?” Norman’s father asked smugly when his mother had put the The Magpie down again.
“I think Norman probably has heard the actual word he used before, but he doesn’t need to hear it from his mother’s mouth,” Meg Jespers-Vilnius replied with a smirk.
“Is it really a pony?” Norman asked, a quaver in his voice betraying his anxiety.
“Apparently a very well-behaved Shetland,” his mother answered.
“What happened to the body—the ‘vic’?” Norman’s father pronounced the word “vic” with a fake gruff New York accent.
“Gone, disappeared,” his mother replied, ignoring his mocking tone. “And according to the book, there’s no way in or out of the alley. There’s no way someone could have moved the body and put a pony in its place without crossing the crime scene tape.”
“Ah, well, clearly you’ve got a corrupt cop there. Isn’t there always a corrupt cop in these things?” his father continued cheerfully. “I’ll bet it’s the woman officer. She’s probably got some pony thing—posters and little pink pony ceramics all over her apartment. She’s the notorious Pony Killer.”
Norman’s mother replied with her “are you done?” look, but it didn’t take the smirk off his face.
“All right, Norman,” she said, as if suddenly remembering. “Bedtime.”
Norman lay in his bed awake as long as he could. This wasn’t getting better at all. So far all he’d done was mess up kids’ books. That somehow seemed semi-okay. But now his book problem had spread to adult books. That had to be worse. People would surely start to notice now. It would get on the news. It would get back to him somehow. Norman imagined the creepy librarian pulling a concerned face while denouncing him on the TV: “Well, there was this one kid…”
Fretting about someone from the book fraud squad knocking on the door kept him awake, which was a good thing, because he was more afraid of falling asleep than of being caught for book-wrecking. This wasn’t like the other times. He was afraid to go into an adult book. His mother wouldn’t even let him read it. It couldn’t be a pleasant place to visit.
He couldn’t be transported into The Magpie anyway, Norman told himself. He hadn’t actually read any of it. To go into the book, Norman reasoned to himself, you have to actually read. Another argumentative voice in his head wondered if it was enough to have heard someone else read it to you, but he worked hard to dismiss the suggestion. Even if being read to could bring on the weirdness, surely you’d have to hear more than just a page. That’s where Norman wanted to leave the argument being waged in his head. He told himself that he was confident and that nothing would happen, but anyone watching might have asked why he was lying in bed fully dressed, wearing not only his shoes, but also his jacket.
Waking up standing up is as surprising and uncomfortable as it sounds. Norman’s first sensation was of falling backward, and by the time the reflexes to lock his knees kicked in, it was already too late. A lesson from karate class whispered to his body. He tucked his chin in and brought his arms in close, ready to slap out and break his fall. It was a good thought, but he needn’t have bothered. The pony cushioned his landing.
Norman made more noise than the pony, letting out a muffled “whaaa…wmph” as he fell and his breath was knocked out of his lungs from the contact with the animal’s flank. The little horse merely turned and snorted. It was, if this was possible for a horse, an amused kind of snort, exactly like the involuntary snigger Norman’s so-intellectual father let out when he surreptitiously watched TV blooper shows. The pony, on the other hand, didn’t seem embarrassed by his amusement. There was a glint in his big brown eyes, as if he enjoyed the odd bit of human stupidity every now and then.
“Hi,” Norman said, pushing himself up from the pony’s side as gently as he could. “I’m Norman.”
The creature smiled with his eyes. If he was half as surprised to find himself lying in a dirty city alleyway behind a stinking dumpster
as Norman was, he was doing a very good job of hiding it. He lay there casually, legs folded underneath him on the pavement, head back against the graffiti-covered brick wall, his breathing steady.
“I, ah…I don’t speak horse,” Norman explained apologetically. “I mean, I can’t do that gypsy thing. One of my friends can, but…well, she’s not here. At least I don’t think so.”
The pony nodded its shaggy head and exhaled a cloud of condensation from its nostrils. Overhead, the morning sky was as overcast and grey as the pony’s coat. This was not a foal, like Serendipity. It was a fully grown pony.
“Are you the missing pony from Serendipity’s stall that everyone seemed to have forgotten?” Norman asked, not really expecting an answer. “Sorry about the wolves…” Norman didn’t have to hear the pony’s thoughts to feel the calm power as the animal rose in one smooth motion to his feet. It was as if he knew the policemen would be coming around the corner at that moment.
“What the hell?”
Norman’s mother hadn’t read Rorschach’s words accurately. The fat man said a lot worse now, too. The gist of his angry rant was that he’d like to know who thought it was funny to pull a stunt like this, when the good people of the city were out there murdering each other. Once this was off his chest, he stormed off to find someone to hold responsible and berate. “You deal with the kid,” he told the smaller guy as he left.
Darwin remained where he was, a few yards distant, both hands in his jacket pockets, studying Norman and the grey pony with an inscrutable look on his face while he chewed gum. Then he strolled nonchalantly around the alley examining it disinterestedly, removing one hand from the pocket of his leather jacket only to rattle a fire-escape ladder while his eyes followed its steps up to the rooftop.
Apparently satisfied that the fire escape could not be successfully navigated by a horse of any size, Darwin turned to Norman and asked in a cool, nasal voice, “That your horse, son?”
Norman realized that he was standing close to the pony, his finger buried in the animal’s grey mane, as if trying to reassure himself. He shook his head no in reply to Detective Darwin’s question, and they were silent again.
Norman’s mother definitely wouldn’t have repeated the curses that the uniformed policewoman swore when she and Rorschach came around the corner and saw a shaggy grey pony and an eleven-year-old boy standing where a murder victim had previously lain in a pool of blood.
An hour later, Norman was sitting in an interrogation room at the police headquarters. It was exactly like every interrogation room he had ever seen in a TV police drama, bare and dingy, with just four metal chairs separated into pairs by a peeling Formica table. Norman was seated on one side of the table. Rorschach sat diagonally across from him. The other two chairs were empty. Darwin leaned against the wall in the corner, chewing gum. So far their interrogation hadn’t amounted to much. They had brought Norman an orange juice and a chocolate chip muffin and chatted back and forth between themselves about the case.
“I had a word with the boys down in the mounted squad about that horse,” Rorschach told Darwin, as if he was just making idle conversation.
“They reckon it escaped from the circus or something? We get any calls about stolen ponies?” Darwin asked.
“Naw, they said it probably wasn’t worth stealing. That old pony has seen better days. It was probably headed to the boneyard anyway.”
It was all Norman could do to remain silent, but he saw Darwin watching him from the corner and knew they were trying to get a reaction.
“It’s the darndest thing, they say,” Rorschach continued. “All the horses down there are acting weird since they brought that grey one in. They’re all skittish and refuse to be saddled up. Not one of them will look that grey horse in the eye. It’s like the king of horses has arrived at the stables.”
It really was difficult not to interrupt them and tell them why. Norman only stopped because he knew they wouldn’t believe him. He just sat there and looked at the wood-grained Formica while he sipped his sugary juice and nibbled the dry, machine-dispensed muffin. It was depressing food, but it suited the situation.
They’d asked him a dozen times already for the names of his parents and his home address. Norman didn’t even know what world he was in, never mind what city. His street, his house and his parents probably didn’t exist in this book. As an excuse, Norman just repeated what he’d seen on TV cop shows.
“I need to see my lawyer first.”
Rorschach was getting more and more frustrated with this answer.
“For the hundredth time, kid, you don’t need a lawyer. You’re not being charged with anything. We just need to call your parents. They’re probably worried about you.”
Norman avoided the big man’s eyes and concentrated on picking the last few muffin crumbs from the crinkled wax-paper baking cup on the table. His parents probably weren’t worried about him, but they should be.
“Listen, we’ve already called Child Services. If we get your phone number now, we can have your parents here before they send a social worker over. Otherwise you’re looking at a group home for the night.”
Norman just shrugged. There was a knock at the door. Darwin, standing against the wall by the doorway, turned the knob and pulled the door open a few inches without taking his eyes off Norman at the table. The door was pushed open the rest of the way from outside, and a tall, awkward figure shuffled in. He was dressed in black with a crumpled suit jacket and with a pair of running shoes at the end of his long legs. As he tried to close the door behind him, he juggled and nearly dropped a stack of books and file folders. Darwin reacted quickly to catch a yellow file folder sliding off the top of the stack. The clumsy new man scowled, as if it was Darwin’s fault. He managed to get his pile of papers to the desk without further incident and sat himself noisily in the chair next to Norman.
“Fuchs, Child Services,” he said, by way of introduction, nodding first to Norman, then to the two police officers opposite.
“Okay, then, Fuchs, maybe you could explain to your client here that he’s not in any trouble,” Rorschach continued. “He’s not under arrest. We just need to get in touch with his parents so that we can get him home.”
Fuchs opened the yellow file folder in front of him, answering without looking up from it. “Mr. Norman’s parents are out of the country at the moment,” he said officiously. “I’ve spoken to the administrator at his boarding school and arranged for someone to pick him up. They’re very worried about him. Seems they lost track of him on a school trip to the Met.”
Rorschach and Darwin looked almost as surprised as Norman by this news. Norman stared at Fuchs as the man from Child Services slid the yellow folder toward him. There was something familiar about this Fuchs character. How exactly did this person know half of his name, and why had he made up this story about his parents, a boarding school and some place named after a baseball team? Norman couldn’t help following the stranger’s long, pale finger to the top page in the folder open in front of him, a sheet of neatly typed text. Norman read it to himself.
There was something familiar about this Fuchs character. How exactly did this person know half of his name, and why had he made up this story about his parents, a boarding school and some place named after a baseball team?
Exactly what Norman had just thought! Shocked, Norman scrutinized the stranger’s face again. Where had he seen him before? This was about as weird as it got.
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Norman. Is that a first or a last name?”
Norman and the Fuchs character spoke up at the same time.
“First,” Norman blurted out, glad to be able to answer a question.
“Last,” said the Child Services man.
Rorschach turned incredulously to the still silent Darwin, who shrugged just slightly.
“Okay, then, Norman Norman, maybe we could ask you a few questions before this person from your school gets here.”
Norman gave a hes
itant nod.
“So you wandered off from your school group and ended up in that alley,” the detective began.
Norman kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk. It was just that he had no idea what to say.
Rorschach pushed on impatiently. “When you got there, was the alley empty?”
Norman looked to Fuchs for some guidance, but the man merely crossed his arms and regarded him with a curious raised eyebrow, as if he was mildly interested in the answer.
Rorschach repeated the question. “Was the horse there behind the dumpster when you entered the alley?”
Finding no answer in Fuchs’s face, Norman peered down at the file folder, but Fuchs’s narrow white fingers were spread out flat to cover the entire page.
“Was there police tape across the front of the alley when you went in?” There was an edge of frustration now to Rorschach’s voice. “Yellow tape that says ‘POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.’ Was it there when you entered the alley?” Norman gulped. To his surprise, he found himself on the verge of bursting into tears.
The big detective didn’t seem to notice. He kept pressing his questions. “Did you see anyone else enter or leave the alley while you were there?”
Frightened a little bit now by Rorschach’s tone, Norman looked desperately to Fuchs for some clue as to what to say or do. The Child Services representative wore an amused expression on his face, like someone who’s watching a movie he’s seen before and knows that the good part is just coming up. A motion of his hand brought Norman’s eye back to the page in front of him. Fuchs had exposed the top half of the page. Norman read the sentence just above Fuchs’s finger.