Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Much of her free cottage time she spent feeding the arctic or vested hummingbirds (Archilocus cardiganii) who survived the winters there by feeding on warm polar bear earwax. The bears were frequent visitors to the candy-cane slag. Santa’s Own Whippet Lancers had the job of killing the creatures if they became too bothersome. An officer in this fine old elf regiment always presented any dead polar bear earwax to Mattie, who’d put it out in a warm bowl for the hummingbirds, watching through the frosty window as the tweedy little things fed. Alicia’s bodyguard, the Bucket Brigadiers, square-jawed, hefty men who seemed built out of blocks of ice, were avid hummingbird watchers, too, and soon came over with their binoculars.

  Some called Phrygia twice blessed. Its detractors called it “Left-Over Land.” The inhabitants lived in utter darkness. But every unpredictable now and then, as if a mighty door had swung open, the entire kingdom was bathed in light and then, abruptly, fell back into darkness.

  Sometimes the great door that brought the sudden light would stand open too long, as if by an indecisive opener, and the ice-people and their dwellings would begin a slow terrible melt. Then the daring Bucket Brigadiers risked their lives rushing around in red wagons with bells ringing to throw buckets of ice on the sweating people and homes. The House of Fröst had enlisted these brave Brigadiers as special bodyguards to the royal family.

  Brigadiers spoke as if through mouthfuls of ice cubes. When Mattie, deep in furs, came out to join them she soon learned their language, communicating with them by maneuvering her denture around in her mouth. They told her the vested hummingbird was their clan totem and spoke, in their innocent, block-headed way, of a golden age when the little things serviced men’s ears as well as polar bears, just as the razor-billed bunion bird (Pedes rasa) tended sleeping humans’ feet and the tweezer-tweezer bird (Nostriles etuia etuia) wove its elaborate hanging nests made from human nose hair.

  The factory door swung open. Mattie’s old friend Captain Berg of the Bucket Brigadiers greeted her with a click of his square heels and ushered her into a large dim workshop illuminated by a small fire burning under an iron cauldron in a distant corner. Berg’s men were working with long-handled pitchforks to feed the fire from a pile of coal, hockey sticks, twigs, and high hats, and the cauldron from bins of carrots, snowman heads, and what looked like hat sweatbands. A heap of discarded scarves lay nearby.

  When Mattie asked what they were doing, Berg explained how centuries ago King Jack XII, unhappy that the ice people never aged while he, their king, did and would one day die, had turned to alchemy to right this injustice. One night as Jack worked in his laboratory, Snowbanks Avalanche, Snowmansland’s ambassador, entered by way of a secret entrance the king had provided so plenipotentiaries could approach him privately should the need arise. Jack groaned inwardly. Prosperity had made the snowmen overbearing and haughty. And Avalanche was the worst of all, swaggering around, high-hatting everyone and looking down his carrot nose at everything and being generally much too big for his buttons. When Avalanche started in on another of his pompous insistences that Phrygia repay its substantial debt to Snowmanlandia, Jack lost his temper, grabbed his Viking battleaxe from the wall, and severed the snowman’s head from his body.

  Now not even a king can murder an ambassador. To destroy the evidence of his crime, Jack put the head, carrot nose and all, into a pot which he brought to a simmer over a coal fire made from Avalanche’s haughty eyes, superior smile, and pompous buttons, intending to eat up the last trace of his crime. He was about to add the ambassador’s high hat to the fire when he remembered how famous warriors often made drinking mugs from their enemies’ skulls. So when the stew was cooked, Jack poured it into the high hat and ate it down. It was a tasty dish and the salt from the hat’s sweatband cut the carrot sweetness. Afterwards, watching the hat burn up in the fire, Jack felt a sudden lightness throughout his body as though a whole decade of years had been lifted from his shoulders. He ran to the mirror and found the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes had faded almost completely away. King Jack had accidentally found his sought-after potion.

  The next day, Phrygia invaded Snowmansland. Hard-packed though it was, gallant General Plowright Winterbottom’s snowman infantry was no match for the ice people’s army. Afterwards Jack looted the battlefield for snowman stew ingredients, which he cooked and put up in kegs so he could prolong his own life and those of his descendants.

  When Berg was done Mattie gestured at the bins. “But the snowmen are extinct,” she insisted. “These are only replicas.”

  Berg shook his head and told Mattie how, lame and exhausted, the fleeing snowmen reached a large Indian encampment below the tree line where they were received warmly. The Indians even gave them old ishuki sticks to hobble around on.

  But when spring came, the snowmen vanished, leaving behind as gifts for their hosts their carrot noses, bits of coal, and high hats—which the Indians particularly treasured. The Indians told stories around the campfire about the Palefaces, as they called the snowmen. Every winter after that, the Indian children built new snowmen who also vanished in the spring. Centuries later, when Commodore Jacques Cartier arrived with French settlers, the Indians thought the Palefaces had returned. They were disappointed when the new arrivals were still there when spring came. By then their children had taught the French children how to build snowmen, too.

  Berg ended his story with this simple Phrygian moral. “Nothing’s extinct that lives on in the hearts of children.”

  God bless him, thought Mattie with a shake of her head. Then she asked, “If you’re here, then so is Queen Alicia, right?”

  Berg’s oath of loyalty to his queen prevented any reply, not even for old time’s sake. So Mattie said goodbye and left the building, not knowing what to do next.

  Father Christmas was waiting for her outside. “If you know the rink rats, maybe you know the Dancing Pig lady,” he wondered out loud. When she cocked an eye he explained, “We patrons of the Walsingham Hotel call it the Dancing Pig.” He told her how a couple of nights ago he’d changed out of his clerical garb and gone to the Dancing Pig for a couple of beers. On his way in, he’d noticed these two large types dressed in loose white dusters standing outside in the shadows. Later he asked Sean, a waiter there, who they were. Sean called them rink rats and said they’d first appeared last December when a certain lady took a room there, and she’d just checked in again.

  Queen Alicia of Phrygia, a tall, blue-eyed Scandinavian, sported high cheekbones and a large bump of conviviality. Boredom, in fact, first brought her to the North Pole. Her kingdom’s single fireplace was in the palace throne room, where she always had to sit alone, for none of her retainers dared approach so close to the fire. So she taught herself how to run a movie projector and had movies shipped in from Hollywood. When the war interrupted her supply, in need of amusement, she decided to pay a visit to her North Pole neighbors.

  Alicia was an immediate hit with Santa and the Elf Council of Elders. They all loved to drink and dance and tell stories. Alicia had wonderful ones to tell about her gloomy kingdom and its gloomier inhabitants. As Alicia’s visits multiplied, Santa and the elder elves grew more captivated, hanging on her every word and following about after her. Was it the woman’s perfume, which Mattie thought smelled of parsnip? The carousing continued long after Mattie went to bed. But the next day the old elves seemed sprier than ever, while Santa’s ho-ho-ho veered more and more toward a teenaged hee-hee-hee.

  Anyway, last October the divorce decree finally came through. Invited to stay for the marriage festivities, Mattie chose to leave with her small cadre of loyal elves.

  Remembering how Alicia’s cocktail hour came early, Mattie set out that afternoon for the Walsingham’s ladies-and-escorts beverage room. Separate men’s and ladies-and-escorts rooms was a custom Mattie and Al encountered on a stopover in Toronto before their honeymoon visit to the North Pole. (The sub-tundra railroad’s Flying Snowman Express arrived and departed from a platform in
a forgotten corner of the basement of Union Station.) The city had decided there’d be much less trouble if men drank beer in one room and ladies and their escorts, if they had them, in another.

  Mattie found her rival alone at a corner table reading a Hollywood fan magazine and sat down across from her without ceremony. Alicia looked up in surprise. “How’d you find me?”

  “A present from Father Christmas.”

  Alicia gave a careless shrug. “No matter. I meant to look you up anyway. Maybe we can do some business. But first I’ll bring you up to date. The Elf Council of Elders, a gaga bunch themselves if I ever saw one, has declared Santa incompetent by reason of acute adolescence.”

  “Snowman stew?”

  “Clever girl,” said Alicia. “Men and elves love the stuff. Get them started and they’ll do anything to keep it coming. So now I control the Toy Works, the kriskringlite, everything. But I’ve got places to go and I travel light.”

  “So?”

  “So how’d you like almost everything back and Santa in the bargain?”

  “What’s the ‘almost’?”

  “We’ll get to that,” said Alicia. “Listen, when I was a teenager I used to do inky-dinky-spider up and under my daddy the King’s chin and he’d crow like a baby and drool and drool. The Fountain of Youth overflowing, that’s drool for you. When he got so he couldn’t handle the antidote anymore I gave him the injections myself right in his royal butt. Then one day I decided it was queen time for Alicia. So I let Daddy drool himself to death.” She paused. “By the by, Santa loves inky-dinky-spider.”

  “Antidote?” asked Mattie.

  “Thought that’d get your attention,” smiled Alicia. “Yes, King Jack found the antidote for inky-dinky-spider bite in one of his musty old alchemy books. It’s a compound to ward off acute childishness combining the bitterest of the bitter, the taste of window pane on a child’s tongue when he isn’t allowed to go outside and play, the smell of dusty curtains, the sight and sound of other children playing outside. It comes as a dry powder. I brought along more than enough.” She slid a small envelope across the table. “All you have to do is dilute it with children’s tears, which are never in short supply.”

  Alicia smiled. “As for snowman stew, I never used the stuff myself except for a dab behind my ears to drive the boys crazy. I call it Eau de Ponce de León.”

  “Oolala,” came a voice. Mattie looked over at a nearby table where a short man and woman wearing trench coats were sitting. She recognized Nutkin’s pint of face staring from beneath his bushel of doll-face wig and Bodkin hiding behind an underbrush of fake beard. Mattie’d told her elves she was coming here to confront Alicia. They’d wanted to go with her. But she’d said no. They’d followed her anyway.

  As she watched, a waiter came by with a tray of draft beer and replaced Nutkin’s empty glass with a full one. A hand reached out from Nutkin’s midsection and drew the glass in. A moment later an empty glass reappeared and Tiny Timkin’s voice belched, “God bless us every one.” Christmas had officially arrived.

  Alicia continued, “I used up the dregs of King Jack’s snowman stew on my first few visits to the North Pole, spiking everybody’s drinks. But I knew where to get more. Daddy’d been sickly as a prince. One year the royal doctor advised a milder climate for the winter. So he was sent south to Toronto where his health did, in fact, improve. Come March, Daddy set out for the train station and his journey back to Phrygia. As he waited at a curb for the traffic light to change he was surprised to hear the gurgle of snowmen’s voices in the water running beneath the dark ice scabs in the gutter. Their happy goodbyes and hopeful see-you-next-years told Daddy where he’d find more snowman stew whenever he needed it.”

  Mattie blinked. Had Captain Berg hit it on the button?

  “So for the last two winters,” said Alicia, “I’ve been sending a flat car of Brigadiers down to harvest Toronto’s snowmen, following down later to make sure the brew was right. You’ve got to be careful not to over-sweatband it. Anyway, now I’ve enough to handle the people where I’m going.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “I want to see action, be in the thick of things,” said Alicia.

  “The war, you want to enlist?”

  Alicia tapped her magazine. “Hollywood. What’s Joan Crawford got that I haven’t got? So here’s the ‘almost’ in our deal. I keep fifty-one percent of the kriskringlite mine. She who controls the tinsel, controls Tinseltown. You get Santa and everything else.”

  Desperate to get to the North Pole and bring Al back from the brink of drool, Mattie quickly took Alicia up on her offer. She rose quickly and said goodbye.

  “No goodbyes,” insisted Alicia. “I’ll soon be appearing in a movie theater near you.”

  That same evening Mattie settled up her Toronto business by convincing the Westerlys to employ Father Christmas’s snowdrifters as winter bodyguards for the snowmen at a living wage and with knitted scarves and mittens thrown in.

  The next morning, the inky-dinky-spider bite antidote secure in one of her suitcases, she and the elves boarded the Flying Snowman Express. Alicia had said it might take six months of injections to return Al to normal. With each shot of the antidote in his butt Mattie intended to recite, “Grow old with me. The best is yet to be.” Fortunately she could leave the ugly little butts of the Elf Council of Elders to the tender mercies of Nutkin, Hopkin, Bodkin, and Timkin.

  Copyright © 2010 by James Powell

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  Fiction

  MR. BO

  By Liza Cody

  Bloody Brits Press, which is dedicated to bringing more writers from the U.K. into print in the U.S., will be releasing their edition of Liza Cody’s Gimme More just days before this issue goes on sale. Liza Cody is not a terribly prolific writer, and that may explain why she hasn’t become better known yet in the U.S., but she is one of the best. Her eleven novels have all been published to rave reviews, and her short stories, as readers of EQMM know, are equally good.

  My son Nathan doesn’t believe in God, Allah, Buddha, Kali, the Great Spider Mother, or the Baby Jesus. But he be-lieves passionately in Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, and, come December, Santa Claus. How he works this out—bearing in mind that they all have superpowers—I don’t know. Maybe he thinks the second lot wears hotter costumes. Or drives cooler vehicles, or brings better presents. Can I second-guess my nine-year-old? Not a snowball’s hope in Hades.

  Nathan is as much a mystery to me as his father was, and as my father was before that, and who knows where they both are now? But if there’s one thing I can congratulate myself on, it’s that I didn’t saddle my son with a stepfather. No strange man’s going to teach my boy to “dance for Daddy.” Not while there’s a warm breath left in my body.

  I was eleven and my sister Skye was nine when Mum brought Bobby Barnes home for the first time. He didn’t look like a lame-headed loser, so we turned the telly down and said hello.

  “Call me Bo,” he said, flashing a snowy smile. “All my friends do.”

  So my dumb little sister said, “Hi, Mr. Bo,” and blushed because he was tall and brown-eyed just like the hero in her comic book.

  Mum laughed high and girly, and I went to bed with a nosebleed—which was usually what happened when Mum laughed like that and smeared her lipstick.

  Mr. Bo moved in and Mum was happy because we were “a family.” How can you be family with a total stranger? I always wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare. She had a vicious right hand if she thought you were cheeking her.

  Maybe we would be a family even now if it wasn’t for him. Maybe Nathan would have a grandma and an aunt if Mr. Bo hadn’t got his feet under the table and his bonce on the pillow.

  I think about it now and then. After all, some times of year are special for families, and Nathan should have grandparents, an aunt, and a father.

  This year I was thinking about it because sort
ing out the tree lights is traditionally a father’s job; as is finding the fuse box when the whole house is tripped out by a kink in the wire.

  I was doing exactly that, by candlelight, because Nathan had broken the torch, when the doorbell rang.

  Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman in a stylish winter coat with fur trimmings. I didn’t have time for more than a quick glance at her face because she came inside and said, “What’s up? Can’t pay the electricity bill? Just like Mum.”

  “I am not like my mother.” I was furious.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “It was always way too easy to press your buttons.” And I realised that the strange woman with the American accent was Skye.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, stunned.

  “Hi, and it’s great to see you, too,” she said. “Who’s the rabbit?”

  I turned. Nathan was behind me, shadowy, with the broken torch in his hand.

  “He’s not a rabbit,” I said, offended. Rabbit was Mr. Bo’s name for a mark. We were all rabbits to him one way or another.

  “Who’s she?” Nathan said. I’d taught him not to tell his name, address, or phone number to strangers.

  “I’m Skye.”

  “A Scottish Island?” He sounded interested. “Or the place where clouds sit?”

  “Smart and cute.”

  “I’m not cute,” he said, sniffing loudly. “I’m a boy.”

  “She’s your aunt,” I told him, “my sister.”

  “I don’t want an aunt,” he said, staring at her flickering, candlelit face. “But an uncle might be nice.” Did I mention that all his heroes are male? Even when it’s a woman who solves all his problems, from homework to football training to simple plumbing and now, the electricity. I used to think it was because he missed a father, but it’s because you can’t interest a boy in girls until his feet get tangled in the weeds of sex.