by Gahan Wilson
‘Keep looking,’ I said. ‘And grab him if you see him, and kill him if you think he’s getting away!’
Then I folded up the intercom and put it back in my pocket because you might as well drop something if you can’t do anything more about it, and because we had rounded the corner into Wally the Whale Way and History Hall had come into view.
We were passing by the Moon Village at a good clip when I heard my name being called and stepped over to the Quackycart because Ashman was leaning out of it looking worried.
‘I heard about the graveyard,’ he said. ‘Do you think that was Spectrobert?’
‘That’s how he looks when he’s not in some disguise,’ I said. ‘Understand, I’m not sure if it was him; it might have been a shadow, or the dark side of one of those cypress trees in a breeze. He can fool you.’
‘You’re not an easy guy to fool,’ said Ashman.
‘He’s managed it with me in the past,’ I said. ‘I stared at him once all night long in the Louvre and never even saw him. He’s one of the best. Can you persuade the president to get the hell out of here?’
‘I’m trying,’ said Ashman. ‘He says only after he sees the Waldobot.’
I walked along beside the Quackycart for a second or two and then I said: ‘I think that’s where it’s going to happen.’
‘So do I,’ said Ashman, then he leaned back and rolled up the window, thereby making the Quackycart once more entirely bulletproof, and I looked ahead and saw they’d cleared the great big Washingtonian staircase leading to History Hall so I trotted across the Plaza of the Past and up the steps because I wanted to have a quick look around, before the others arrived, to see if it wouldn’t make me feel a little better. What happened was it made me feel a lot worse, because the agents at the doors let me through with a friendly wave since they’d gotten to know me that morning when I’d posted them, but I knew I could have been Spectrobert wearing a perfect, foolproof John Weston disguise, the way he had that time Bone had talked about last night.
The hall itself was empty of unsimulated life except for a few agents around the edges who were also dumb enough to take me at face value, and my feet made those funny echoes you get in vacant museums and large mausoleums as I walked around glaring at the Waldobots. I rounded a clump of presidents and Teddy Roosevelt startled me by suddenly demanding that I have a bully day, and Lincoln depressed me as always, and I stared at Taft for being fat, but none of it got me anywhere, and anyhow we’d checked the bunch of them earlier.
I stationed myself by a piece of bunting on the side of the Pat Parker platform and watched the press rush in and take up positions in order to record the entrance of the president, then I watched the great man himself come in and take full advantage of the situation with teeth flashings and wavings of the hand and encouraging pats on the back of Waldo, who now looked so pale I wondered if he was about to faint, but he didn’t; he led the way to the platform with a brave little smile. The two of them, with Hewliss unobtrusively alongside, climbed the steps side by side as a kind of gasp ran through the members of the press when they saw the Parker Waldobot stir and look pleased and then grin broadly as the two men came toward it.
‘President Parker,’ said Waldo, in a thin, reedy voice, ‘it is my great honor and pleasure to present you to Waldo World’s greatest technical and artistic triumph to date. May I introduce you, sir, most respectfully, to the first of an entirely new, vastly improved line of Waldobots—President Parker!’
‘Glad to meet you, Mr President!’ said Parker, reaching out his hand.
‘Glad to meet you, Mr President!’ said the Waldobot, right back, and the two of them shook hands as the working members of the press went totally bananas trying to get a better picture of the scene than anybody else or trying to say or write down something cleverer about it since there was no doubt this was obviously going to be the world’s number-one story all the way up into the evening news unless something serious happened.
They went even nuttier when Parker and the Waldobot turned at the same moment, both with one big hand on each other’s shoulder and the other big hand waving at the crowd, both with the exact same lopsided grins and the same twinkle in their eyes, and when one photographer shouted, ‘I’ve lost track!’ it got a lot of giggles, and they blossomed out into laughs when someone else called out, ‘Which one of you is going to run for a second term?’ but when both Parker and the Waldobot pointed at each other and quipped, ‘He is!’ it started a genuine riot.
Parker and the Waldobot turned this way and that, arms about each other, both of them apparently equally skillful at giving everybody a chance for a really good picture and egging on an audience, and I looked over at Ashman and he looked over at me, and I saw Hewliss quietly move in a little closer and take a position right next to the Waldobot because none of us liked any of these goings-on at all.
Waldo stepped forward raising his arms, and in high quaver kept repeating, ‘Please listen, please listen,’ until it was quiet enough for him to say: ‘And now, in honor of our very distinguished guest, the Parker Waldobot would like to say a few well-chosen words.’
The Waldobot smiled and nodded and Parker made as if to step to one side, but the thing had slipped its arm around his waist so he couldn’t.
‘One thing I’ve learned in politics,’ said the Waldobot, grinning, ‘is that actions speak louder than words.’
Now Ashman was heading up the platform stairs with me right behind him because that was nothing like what the thing had said in its rehearsal.
‘Lookie here, now,’ said Hewliss, ‘just a goddam minute!’ and his hands moved smoothly toward the Waldobot but not quickly enough to grab it before it had pulled a gun from inside its coat and shot him full in the face and sent him twitching back, spraying blood from the huge, horrible wound that had been his face, to flip smack into Ashman with a violet reflex spasm and push the two of them in a tangle over the edge of the platform and into the crowd below, which was now two-thirds screaming people trying to get out of there and one-third reporters and photographers working frantically on the scoop of their lives.
‘They said they wouldn’t do that!’ Waldo screamed, and he grabbed the president’s shoulders and was starting to tug at him as hard as he could, but that wasn’t helping Parker get loose any more than the president’s own kickings and pummelings, because the arm the Waldobot had snaked around the presidential waist was locked there like an iron clamp, which, of course, was just what it was.
‘Stand back, please,’ the Waldobot said to me, I guess because I’d grabbed the arm that held the gun wit of dreamily. ‘I just stood here and watched them change into stone.’
That was exactly the way th both my hands. I felt a chill run through me because all there was to feel under the sleeve were cables and metal bars and somehow I’d still expected an arm, but that didn’t stop me from twisting it as hard as I could with my best come-along grip, the one that reliably makes the meanest and toughest weep—not because I was hoping for pain, I knew that damned thing would never feel pain—but because maybe I could break it.
‘I told you to stand back, sir,’ said the Waldobot, giving me an absolutely flawless President Parker smile, and it began slowly moving its arm down in spite of my very, very best efforts to keep it from happening, and all I could do was sweat and strain with all my might as I watched the barrel of the gun move lower and lower until it pointed straight at me, and then I was shot in the head.
— 16 —
THE SOUND OF SOMEONE SOBBING as if his heart would break hauled me out of the darkness into a fierce headache and a kind of dazed amazement that, apparently, I was still alive. It seemed even more incredible when I squinted down and saw all the blood on my sleeves and the front of my coat, but then I remembered rule one about head wounds which was that even small ones bleed like Niagaras. Rule two was to keep your hands off them until you had some idea of the actual damage.
I must have stirred around a little during this li
ttle training review because the sobbing stopped and I heard a scuffling coming over in my direction and there was Waldo leaning over me looking like he was seeing the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.
‘Mr Weston!’ he cried. ‘You’re alive!’
‘Yeah,’ I said, working hard to sit up. ‘I hurt, therefore I am.’
I looked around and saw the place seemed to be entirely deserted except for the Waldobots and a few figures lying on the floor, some of which looked to be Waldobots, too, and some which didn’t. Also a whole bunch of ropes were hanging from a big, round opening way up in the top of the dome which I’d never seen before. I seemed to need about five hours to take all this in but it may have been only as much as two minutes.
‘What happened,’ I asked. ‘Slowly and clearly, please.’
Waldo opened his mouth to speak and then his face screwed up and he began crying again, but that didn’t stop him from talking at the same time even if it did make parts of it hard to make out.
‘They’re crazy, like you said, Mr Weston! They’ve spoiled everything forever! Everybody’s dead! Everybody! And my pretty world is ruined! Just ruined!’
I tried to look at him carefully and that made me realize one of my eyes wasn’t seeing him, so I reached up very gently in spite of rule two and touched it, and when it didn’t hurt all that much I teased it open because it had only been stuck shut with blood and was working fine after all. Then I said: ‘Start with when I got shot. Try to go through the whole business in order with one thing after the other.’
He sat down on the floor beside me and took a deep breath and then he began to recite it like a kid in school going through a lesson.
‘You fell down and I thought it had killed you, too, like it killed Mr Hewliss,’ he said. ‘Then it started to point the gun at me and I remembered the switch at the back of its neck, just under the collar—I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before—and I turned it off and it fell down.’
He pointed up at the platform and I saw an arm hanging over its edge wearing the pinstriped sleeve of the president’s suit and holding the gun that had shot me.
‘Mr Ashman came up and got hold of the president, and some of Mr Ashman’s men crowded around them, and some started clearing the visitors out of the room, but they had a lot of trouble and there were fights.’
He looked up at the dome for a long minute.
‘It came open, up there, sort of like a flower, and those ropes tumbled out, and men started sliding down them, men with guns, and Mr Ashman and his agents started hurrying out of the building with the president, and the men who slid down started running after them and everybody began shooting at everybody else. There was a lot of blood. I never saw so much blood.’
I had grabbed hold of some of the bunting and was using it to haul myself to my feet, but I stopped sort of halfway up in an old-man pose and asked: ‘Did the people who slid down have a leader?’
Waldo’s eyes seemed to grow wide behind those glasses and he nodded solemnly.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘He was a big, tall man, all in black. It was that Mr Spectrobert. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in his costume. It’s a cape and a mask, the one he’s famous for, and he seemed to be having a fine time.’
‘Did Ashman get the president away?’
‘They went out of the door, then the others ran after them, and then I closed the side doors with the controls and locked them, and then I closed the center door by hand, and locked it,’ said Waldo. ‘I closed all the doors tight shut and then I watched them.’
‘Watched who?’ I asked, because I was getting the definite feeling I was missing something vital to his story. I was standing now, and tried a few tiny, baby steps away from and back to the platform, so I’d have it to grab if it turned out I couldn’t walk. When it seemed as if I was ambulatory I started lurching across the room toward the center doors like Boris Karloff in one of his cheaper movies.
‘You don’t want to go out there, anymore, Mr Weston,’ said Waldo, still sitting on the floor. ‘They spoiled it out there.’
There weren’t so many bodies on the floor as I’d expected, just two of Spectrobert’s bunch and one of Ashman’s agents. The rest were Waldobots. This fracas had really been hell on the historical figures.
I made it to the two center doors and leaned against one of them in order to rest a little, and I had to stare out of the window for maybe as much as half a minute before my vision cleared of bright little dancing spots and I could begin to work on grasping what was really and truly out there, and that was quite a challenge.
It wasn’t just the effects of the whack on the head the bullet from the Waldobot’s gun had given me, though I’m sure that helped, it was the difficulty in taking in the enormity of what I was looking at. I would have had trouble doing it if I’d been fresh as a daisy.
‘Tell me about it, Waldo,’ I said at last, resting my forehead on the cool glass of the window and staring out.
‘There were more of the man in black’s people outside,’ said Waldo. ‘They’d blended in with the crowd. They stopped Ashman from getting the president back into the Quackycart by blowing it up. They just blew it up and killed a lot of people doing it.’
He stood and started coming toward me and the doors.
‘People were running around,’ Waldo said. ‘All the families, all the children. Some of them tried to get in here, but I wouldn’t open the doors.’
Now he was next to me so we were both looking out of the windows.
‘Maybe I had an idea what would happen,’ he said.
He turned and looked at me.
‘I’m really a very selfish man, Mr Weston,’ he said, and he was so close to me I could feel his breath on my cheek. ‘I like people to have a nice time, that’s the main reason why I built Waldo World; it wasn’t just to make the money. But I’m really very selfish.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘So when it all started, whenever the stuff was let loose that did all this, you still didn’t open the doors, is that right?’
‘Yes,’ said Waldo, sorI’d have put it. Their skin did look like stone, maybe some kind of gray, flaky slate; the sort of stuff they carve those angel-head gravestones out of in New England graveyards. All their flesh, including their eyes, was the same dead gray color.
Everything else about them was unaffected, and of course that made it a lot worse, that really pounded it in, because all the dead stone people were wearing their brightest vacation clothes and carrying pretty Waldo World stuffed toys and the kids were holding the strings of balloons, which were the brightest things of all. One kid, close to the door, was gripping a cone full of melted strawberry ice cream which was still a bright pink and it looked especially pink where it ran across his fat little gray stone wrist on account of the contrast in colors and values.
The body of the little kid was standing, his father was in a kind of half crouch like the statue of an ape, and his mother was just a heap of stone on the ground wrapped in a lemony dress. It seemed to affect different people in different ways, whatever it was they’d let loose on them. One man wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, for instance, was pushing against the door with both hands on its handle, trying to open it the wrong way as people will do in a panic, and I wondered if I’d be able to get it open with him gripping it like that. Also I wondered if he’d be heavy or light or if he’d be solid or crumble. I found myself doing a lot of speculating.
‘It was a low, gray cloud,’ said Waldo. ‘It started from over there, by the Pirate Galleon. The group led by the man in black had chased Mr Ashman’s party to the side of the ship, and then into it. I could see them fighting in the rigging like they do in the movies and the Howard Pyle illustrations. Then there was some gray smoke, just a puff of it at first, I thought a fire had broken out, but it grew and grew—it just wouldn’t stop, Mr Weston!—and when it came over the crowd it made them move slower, like a freezing river, and you could see the color leaving everyone’s skin as
they stopped moving.’
‘The air seems clear now,’ I said. ‘How long ago was this?’
‘A half hour? I’m not sure. Not long.’
I looked up at the sky.
‘There’s a bird,’ I said. ‘See him flying up there? He’s not having any problems. I say it’s over.’
I began undoing the locks, ignoring Waldo as he scuttled back, and started pushing on the door. The man in the Hawaiian shirt turned out to be heavy, all right, but he didn’t crumble, he just swung open with the door as if he’d been carved on it. I took a deep breath right away to get it done with one way or the other, and when it turned out I’d guessed right I took another.
‘It’s okay,’ I called back inside.
Waldo was back by the platform, crouched next to the pinstriped arm and holding its hand for comfort. He peered out at me, then let go of the hand and began to tiptoe to the door while I started down the steps, working my way past some of the stone people and stepping over others. Close up to them I noticed they had a funny, chalky smell which really gave me the creeps, and every so often some sight would stop me in my tracks, such as the brass band still more or less in formation with its shiny tubas and slide trombones or, worse, a little girl in a stroller with her Quacky the Duck doll in her arms, both of them staring the same stares at me with wide, blank eyes.
Waldo caught up with me by the time I was halfway across Presidential Place and asked me where I was going and I was about to tell him when my intercom started buzzing over and over in my pocket and I clawed it out as quick as I could because of a sudden rush of hope. I yanked the little extension cord out of the thing since I’d lost the earplug it connected with during the struggle with the Waldobot—maybe it got shot up—and the voice that squawked out of the speaker was like music.
‘Weston? That is you down there, is it not? I hadn’t dared hope!’
I hurt my head grinning, because, of course, it was Bone.