by Gahan Wilson
‘I know you’d rather I didn’t,’ I said, guiding him carefully down the center of the hallway so he wouldn’t get close enough to a wall to start banging on it and injure himself, ‘but I really have to congratulate you on keeping your trap shut back there. I couldn’t even hear your teeth grinding until we cleared the doorway.’
‘Shut up,’ he said.
Ashman had hurried out after we’d left and he joined us just as we entered the special elevator. He looked pale and a little confused.
‘What do you think,’ he said as we were lowered to the other floor of the special section, ‘is the president crazy, or what?’
‘I think most sane people probably stopped running for office a while back,’ I said, keeping my protective hold on Bone while we made our way into the apartment that had been set aside for the two of us, and Ashman followed.
‘Okay,’ I said to Bone, with my arm still around him. ‘Here we are, all safe and sound. If I let you go now will you promise not to start kicking things?’
He didn’t bother to give me an answer, just pulled his way loose and over to a chair by the window and sat. I watched him take a few deep breaths and reassemble his parts before I said, ‘So what do you want to do about it all?’
‘I’ve read the folder on that awful place,’ he said almost calmly, tugging at a dewlap. ‘I’ve even memorized the map, as per the inked-in instructions. I understand there’s some ghastly hostelry on the premises.’
‘There is,’ I said. ‘They claim it’s the motel of the future.’
Bone shuddered.
‘I’m sure their pessimism is fully justified,’ he said, then looked up at Ashman. ‘I assume the president is going to take this idiotic risk almost immediately?’
‘The day after tomorrow,’ Ashman said. ‘With no announcement. It’s to be a surprise visit so far as the public is concerned. And, of course, we’d like to think it’ll be a surprise to these other people, though there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance of that.’
‘Very well,’ Bone said. ‘Let us establish ourselves there tomorrow morning. We’ll leave here at 7:00 A.M. I’d appreciate it if you’d make the arrangements. I have absolutely no plan as to how we’ll proceed, but perhaps something will come to me if I sleep on it. Now go away, please.’
Athenee and I had a dinner at a respectable restaurant which was almost good enough to make up for lunch, and during the meal and for quite a while after we continued on with ironing out the personal stuff we’d started before, including repair work on some serious mistakes we’d both made which I don’t see any point in going into, and that naturally worked us around to making a couple of pretty serious promises, and only after we’d done all that and exchanged a number of longish looks and touches to show we’d meant the promises did we start on business.
My first reaction when she offered to come along was to get protective and insist she stay away, but the more she went on about how she probably knew her father’s modus operandi better than any other human on earth, and how she would have the edge on everybody else in spotting him in whatever disguise he’d cooked up for the occasion, the more I began to figure the protective mode was pretty much out of date and had probably never applied to Athenee in the first place, so by the time we realized we were keeping the restaurant open it had been decided she’d turn up in the morning and come along with us.
I expected a little resistance from Bone when I sprung it on him in the elevator going down—I’d saved it for the last moment because I didn’t want to give him a chance to build up a head of steam—but he didn’t give me any fight at all.
‘I assume you have her waiting in that infernal limousine?’ he said, and when I admitted I did he nodded. ‘She is a clever woman and I have often thought it fortunate for humanity at large that she balked at taking up her father’s ways. By all means let her join us. I would even consider any plans she has to offer; Morpheus’s inspirations to me last night were rather sketchy, save for a sensible notion to traverse the exact path of the presidential expedition, employing the precise transportation planned. I’m sure it will be quite an ordeal.’
But she had no suggestions and neither did Ashman, who was also waiting in the limo, though of course his agency had set in motion the usual security routines which we all assumed would not be sufficient, considering the opposition.
Bone got settled in a window set, taking his usual firm grip on the strap, then just sat and stared blankly into space, ignoring vision and things like that in order to find out what his waking mind could do with the problem. He kept that up without a break until we emerged from the clump of toll booths on the other side of the river and came within full sight of the statue of Quacky the Duck, which was, I have to admit it, a moment I’d really been waiting for.
‘Good heavens,’ he said, after a moment of silent glaring, ‘it’s far worse than I thought.’
‘Really something, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Notice how it seems to be waving its wing at you, personally, like it says in the folder?’
‘Rubbish,’ said Bone.
‘Well, I guess a thing like that is always a subjective call,’ I said. ‘They say if you spread out Quacky’s coat it would cover two football fields, and that the beak could hold a four-door family car, which, of course, could then hold a family. Pretty soon we’ll be close enough for you to hear it singing the “Lucky Duck” song.’
We were driven in through a special side road which I hadn’t seen before, and at first I figured it was because Waldo World rated a group trying to save the life of the president of the United States even higher than a reporter from Folks’ Magazine, but when we pulled up in front of the main entrance to Elf Castle and I saw Art Waldo himself pacing back and forth at the foot of the big white stairway in front of the building with his public-relations man Frank Nealy reduced to a mere background figure, I began to suspect there might be some other motivation, and when I got a close look at the eager expression on Waldo’s face, I knew what it was. So, as a bunch of small people in elf suits were having trouble opening the doors of our limo because Waldo kept getting in their way trying to peer inside of the passenger compartment, I leaned toward Bone and passed him my deduction from the corner of my mouth.
‘Waldo wants something from you,’ I said. ‘Something special. I can tell it.’
‘What?’ asked Bone.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But he wants it very, very much. He can’t wait to ask. Look at the way his hands keep sort of clutching in your direction.’
I stepped out before Bone, both to give him strategic little tugs because getting out of limos isn’t easy at any age but gets harder as you get older, and to fend off Waldo’s pawing, which I anticipated and which came.
‘Mr Bone?’ said Waldo, speaking eagerly over my shoulder. ‘Mr Enoch Bone?’
Bone blinked at him as he emerged into the bright sunlight.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is I. And you’ll be Mr Waldo.’
‘Yessir, that’s me, sir, Art Waldo. Welcome to Waldo World, Mr Bone! I’m sorry about the circumstances; it’s really awful that someone would want to harm the president, just awful, but it’s a great pleasure meeting you, all the same!’ He stopped shaking hands with Bone, maybe because he realized he was the only one doing the shaking, but that didn’t slow him down. ‘I’ve admired you since I was a little boy, sir. I don’t mind saying that you’ve been a lifelong inspiration to me.’
‘Thank you. I’m very touched,’ said Bone, guardedly, with a sidewise glance at me. ‘And now that you’ve met me, there’s something you want to ask of me. Am I right?’
Waldo goggled at him, astounded.
‘Amazing!’ he said. ‘Remarkable. You probably even know what it is!’
‘Do put it in your own words, Mr Waldo,’ said Bone.
‘You’ve deduced it! cried Waldo, astounded. ‘You’ve guessed! You already know I want to do you as a cartoon character!’
Bone stared at him.
‘I’ve dreamt of it for years, sir!’ said Waldo. ‘Of course I would never do it without your permission. Never! Would you give it, Mr Bone?’
Bone took a deep breath, then let it out with a smile. You never know where he’ll land.
‘Mr Weston, here,’ he said, with a little wave, ‘has written down some accounts of my doings. I have read them and I think they would convert admirably into animated cartoons. Why don’t you talk with him about it, once we’ve done with the business at hand?’
Waldo clapped his hands and turned to me and I gave him a great big grin.
‘I think Mr Bone would animate very well,’ I said. ‘My first thought is that you could draw him as a bloodhound; that way you could take full advantage of all those wrinkles. But I’ll have other suggestions once I get the spare time to give the matter some more serious thought.’
‘I’m glad to meet you, Mr Weston, as John Weston,’ Waldo said. ‘And don’t feel bad about that Folks’ Magazine business. It got the editors thinking and they’ve decided to do a cover story on me, after all! I hope you’re up to another tour of Waldo World on our way to History Hall. This time we’ll do it in the Quackycart we’ve specially adapted for the president! See how the duck’s neck leans back? See how the wings reach up and cover the passenger space? It’s the only Quackycart in the world which is both totally enclosed and bulletproof!’
‘Extremely thoughtful of you, Mr Waldo,’ rumbled Bone. ‘I shall appreciate any concealment possible while riding in this vehicle.’
Without any more help from the elves, at Bone’s request, we entered the Quackycart and I saw that Debbie was once more at the wheel, but this time she was silent since Waldo himself was doing the honors as guide.
‘We’re following exactly the proposed presidential route,’ said Waldo, sitting next to Bone. ‘I’ve even instructed Debbie—she’ll be driving tomorrow—to time it according to the schedule we intend the president to follow so you’ll really get the feel of it. The actual start won’t be much later than now in the morning, only forty-five minutes, since of course we want the unveiling of our President Parker to make the twelve o’clock noontime news. Are you ready, sir?’
Bone nodded grimly, braced himself, and the Quackycart started off with a ducky little honk since Debbie was sparing us nothing. We started off down All-American Avenue on what was essentially a rerun of what I’d already seen, but Waldo worked in some side trips with a lot of stuff that was new to me thrown in.
‘This is the Haunted Graveyard, our newest ride,’ he said, pointing as we glided by a rugged, rocky hill covered with shaggy artificial cypress trees and a thick scattering of moldering, mossy, simulated tombs and gravestones. ‘After a funeral where you get buried alive, you and your family roll through it in little coffins, and there’s ghosts and ghouls and dead bodies ranging from the Victorian era through the Roaring Twenties and going all the way up to a contemporary group of corpses ranging from infants to old folks, which we will keep supplied with clothes and toys representing the latest, up-to-date fads—we’ve only just installed a dead punk-rock group, for example—and there’s a nest of giant worms, and a pack of monster graveyard rats, and at the end you get dug up by Burke and Hare, the famous body-snatchers, and believe me they’re historically accurate in every detail, we’re very careful about things like that. A lot of parents worry about their children seeing spooky stuff but I say nothing gives kids a better boost than a good, old-fashioned scare. Heck, I even think it helps them grow a little!’
I was happy to see us make a closer pass by the Ducky Nests than we’d made on my previous excursion since that gave me a chance to watch Bone make fists on his cane and grind his teeth at the cute, fluffy little ducklings as they frolicked with one another and winked at us, and we saw a lot of other swell stuff I’d missed before including the Lunar Village, which Waldo told us NASA might use as a trainer, and the Dinosaur Den, whose whole outside was a heap of giant bones, and the Witch’s Wood, which looked like something built to punish naughty children.
Unfortunately we didn’t stop at any of that, but trundled straight on to History Hall where Debbie parked our Quackycart in a special parking space directly before its entrance on the Plaza of the Past, which had just about every famous date in American history worked into its concrete so that you could push little Neddy in his stroller over the signing of the Constitution, have a minor family spat atop the sinking of the Lusitania, and spill your ice cream all over the invention of Fulton’s steamboat.
— 14 —
HISTORY HALL was a big, spread out, domed building designed to impress and belittle the viewer, and if it gave the funny feeling you’d seen it before, that was because it was an expert filching and shuffling together of bits and pieces of some of the most famous buildings in the world, and if you were curious, you could buy a guidebook for two dollars which would identify each and every part and impress the fourth-grade schoolteacher I think I mentioned earlier.
By the time you climbed up to its row of huge bombproof, airtight double doors by means of an outside staircase, bigger on purpose than any in Washington, D.C., you were one hundred percent awed, as you were meant to be, but that was only a softening up for your first stunned view of its interior, which did what it could to put all existing capitol buildings and cathedrals to shame by soaring as high as it could without collapsing back in on itself, and by using every swanky wall covering its designers could think of, from chunks of the Sistine Chapel to tiles from the Taj Mahal to smoky paintings of hunters on a simulated cave wall.
The place had been declared off limits to tourists for that morning, so a lot of kids would have a pretty unconvincing story when they got back to class, and footsteps echoed very impressively as Waldo walked us around, pointing out heroes and villains, people I’d never heard of before and people I’d heard of too often, and as I watched Henry the Eighth eat a chicken leg, or looked up to see Lindbergh wave from the cockpit of his plane, or was pointed at by Jesse James’s six-shooter, I realized I was feeling increasingly creepy.
I hadn’t been able to pin down why at first, but then it slowly dawned on me that most of these people were dead and all of them were absent. We were really alone in a great big empty hall full of gadgets built to trick us into thinking a whole lot of great folks had shown up for the party.
Probably the basic weirdness of this place is what spooked its designers and confused them into being solemn when they just meant to be serious, and that’s why History Hall didn’t succeed in looking like the grand, uplifting public monument it was pretending to be, but only the world’s biggest and all-time most impressive funeral parlor, which is what it really was.
Of course the effect was heightened by Dr Schauer’s being there, going around straightening historical sleeves and neckties and curls like an undertaker gussying up his corpses while he smiled at all of us sympathetically. Nealy told me quietly that Schauer was definitely not going to be at the actual ceremony tomorrow since the public-relations staff had agreed firmly, down to its last member, that he was a little too creepy for public consumption, even if nobody was up to admitting it openly.
The President Parker Waldobot stood on a special platform which had been built for the reception, and it was run through the whole routine planned for tomorrow with Waldo rehearsing his part as the host and Ashman standing in for the president while Schauer sort of lurked beside them making sure that the Waldobot turned and winked at the audience, just the way Pat Parker would have done, after asking the president if it had seen him someplace before, and to be sure its expression of sincerity was completely authentic when it ended the ceremony by taking Parker’s hand it its and telling him in a deep, vibrant voice: ‘Mr President, I can’t tell you how proud and yet humble I’ll be to represent you here at Waldo World!’
That done, and leaving behind a picked team of Ashman’s men to carry out a final, careful going over of the place, we all piled back into our Quackycart and were whisked to the Motel o
f the Future, a big, shiny pile of hundreds of terraces with rows of stainless-steel banisters in front of silvery, one-way windows concealing rooms which you got to via exterior elevators zipping smoothly through glass tubes.
All that was pretty slick, but it wasn’t the future part; the future part was that you never saw another human being, outside of the other guests, because the whole staff was automated, from the bellhop machine that rolled out and took your luggage and had a little slot in its side for tips, to the receptionist machine that checked you in after it had asked you in a kindly voice if you’d had a nice trip, all the way to the brightly colored little machines that purred in to clean your room and turn down your bed and put a foil-wrapped mint on your pillow before they wished you good night.
I expected Bone to hate the whole thing, and he did start out by saying a few unkind things about it, but when the little room-service machine brought him a pot of his favorite tea along with his favorite biscuits he made a little quip about the future being nowhere near as bad as he’d anticipated and from then on I never heard a complaint out of him.
We spent the rest of the afternoon making plans and arranging ways to carry them out, using Bone’s room as our headquarters, and when Bone and Ashman and Athenee and I met with Waldo for dinner in the Restaurant of the Future atop the Motel of the same, Bone actually chuckled at a little joke the automatic maître d’ made seating us, and that led to my telling Waldo how much Bone liked the place, and that led to Waldo promising to give Bone a home-service machine which would be especially programmed for his tastes and residence.
Waldo was very interested in the Mandarin and the Professor and Spectrobert, not only because Bone figured it was more than likely we would be dealing with them the next day, but because it struck him they would make good Waldobots for a scary corner in History Hall.
‘I like it,’ I said, and turned to Bone. ‘The Mandarin should be using one of those torture instruments of his with flowery names.’