EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK

by Gahan Wilson

  ‘Same here,’ I said. ‘I haven’t used this thing because I just didn’t want to know for sure you were dead!’

  ‘You’re covered with blood!’

  ‘You’ve got good binoculars,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you the details later, but, for now, it wasn’t fatal. I’m heading for the Pirate Galleon with Waldo, if he tags along, because I understand that’s where Ashman and Spectrobert and the president ended up. Any news?’

  ‘Merely more confusion,’ said Bone. ‘No sign of the Mandarin, but that flying violet splotch is on the prowl, so be careful. I’m entirely alone up here. The agents ran out of the place, every man jack of them, hell-bent on avenging the death of their leader and the recapture of their president.’

  ‘I’ll leave this gadget open on your channel,’ I said. ‘Call out if you see anything interesting.’

  Now and then amongst the stone people we came across a rare flesh-and-blood dead body from either Ashman’s or Spectrobert’s armies, shot and killed before the gas spewed out. They started getting more numerous as we approached the galleon, and there was a regular heap of them when we got into the shadow of its hull.

  Outside of our breathing there wasn’t a sound except for the occasional flap of a sail or a kind of soft whisper the wind made going through the rigging. I carefully wiped my hands on my jacket since they’d suddenly become a little sweaty, got a firmer grip on my gun, and we were halfway up the gangplank when I froze because, mixed in with the wind sounds, I heard someone softly calling my name, but saying it Jean.

  The ship’s railing was a long row of seagoing Spanish nightmares carved in wood and painted in gold, and she was looking down at me from between a scaly dragon, and a merman with a trident.

  ‘There’s no one else,’ she said. ‘No one alive.’

  I hurried up the gangplank and she hurried to me, and we held each other close, just to make sure we were both really there.

  ‘I thought you were dead, too,’ she said, after a while.

  ‘They kept missing the vital parts,’ I said. ‘How about you? How did you ever manage to keep alive in this place?’

  ‘I saw my father rushing through the crowd with his men and called his name,’ she said. ‘He swerved over to me, killing two people with his broadsword doing it, swept me up, and the fighting brought us here.’

  Still holding her, I looked around.

  ‘A pirate galleon’s meant for slaughter, at that,’ I said. ‘It looks just right covered with bodies and blood.’

  ‘It sounds mad, but I really believe the place inspired them all,’ said Athenee, ‘both sides. It was an incredible battle. My father and his men won it—they were, after all, the pick of the world’s assassins—but the others fought marvelously well. Mr Ashman alone must have taken half a dozen with him at the end. You’ll miss finding him if you don’t look up.’

  Ashman was slumped in the rigging, but he had a foot each on two others tangled in it beneath him, and still had a hammerlock on the dead man who’d stuck the final knife in his chest. It’s how it would have looked if Errol Flynn had lost to Basil Rathbone.

  ‘Good for you, George,’ I said. ‘You died a hero.’

  ‘I never knew his Christian name,’ said Athenee.

  ‘We never used them with one another after our first meeting,’ I said. ‘I suppose it’s because we were a couple of tough guys.’

  ‘He was a nice man,’ said Athenee. ‘I liked him. I’m glad he died not knowing he’d been fooled.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Come over here,’ she said.

  She led me around a huge mast and there, sprawled half upside-down over an open chest filled with phony jewels, was the body of President Pat Parker.

  ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘We blew it.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ said Athenee. ‘Watch this.’

  She grabbed a capstan to brace herself and kicked Parker hard in the side of his gut, which made him immediately sit up, smile broadly and say, just a little too quickly and too high in tone, ‘It’s a real honor to meet you folks!’ before he fell back with a thump and a rattle.

  ‘My father figured out how to do that,’ she said. ‘It took him a dozen kicks to do it, and he enjoyed each one of them better than the last.’

  ‘It’s a Waldobot,’ I said. ‘Ashman got himself killed saving this goddam machine!’

  ‘And my father went to a great deal of trouble kidnapping it,’ said Athenee. ‘He thought he was double-crossing those other two by stealing the president for himself, but they were too clever for him and used his own double cross to double-cross him. I can tell you, John, it made him madder than I ever saw him before, and I have seen him mad quite a few times, I can assure you.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘So, that’s why he used the gas,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why the gas,’ she said. ‘He gave me a mask and put on another, none for anyone else, and then he opened the canisters. He’d planned to do it anyhow when he’d escaped, since he told me he always hated this place, its jolliness mainly, I suppose, but now he did it just to kill his partners.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked her. ‘I suppose he got away again?’

  She looked at me.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t leave, not this time. He’s over there, waiting for you, on the other side of the ship.

  He was standing by the golden railing, leaning on it with his black gloves, looking out at Manhattan across the Hudson. My gun was suddenly in both my hands, pointing at the black silk covering the back of his skull, but Athenee touched my shoulder and quietly pointed out the streak of stone-gray skin showing between his mask and the collar of his cape.

  ‘He was looking out at the city,’ she said, ‘telling me what he had planned to do with it, when I plucked away his gas mask. He turned, and there was a moment when he could have killed me, but then he looked back across the river exactly as you see him.’

  I came closer to him. I had been this close to him only twice before, once when he almost killed me.

  ‘I never saw his face,’ I said.

  ‘I may be the only surviving person who has,’ said Athenee. ‘I was seven, I think. I came across him in his study. He was absorbed in the floor plan of a building. I could have looked at him longer, I suppose, but the sight of him set me screaming and he noticed me.’

  I reached up and placed my hand gently on the back of his mask.

  ‘He always respected you, John,’ she said. ‘He hated you, of course, but he always respected you.’

  I let my fingers rest on the smoothness of the black silk just a little longer, then lifted them slowly from it and let my hand fall empty to my side.

  ‘It’s more than you’d have done for me, you old bastard,’ I said, standing back. ‘But what the hell, I’m a nicer guy than you were, so it figures.’

  Then the intercom started buzzing and I hauled it out.

  ‘Yes?’ I asked.

  The little speaker clicked and Bone’s voice said, ‘I’ve just seen that absurd Waldo creature scuttle off the ship, but now I’ve lost sight of him. He’s probably ducked into one of his blasted secret tunnels.’

  ‘Damn!’ I said. ‘I’ll give you the details later, but the wrap-up is that he switched presidents on us during the ceremony. Athenee’s with me and she’s alive, she’s all right, but Ashman and all his men are dead and I’ll fill you in on the details later. Spectrobert is dead, too, really and truly, and I’ll fill you in on that, too, but I was sure you’d want to know. For now, we’ll head back to the hall and see what we can do.’

  ‘No,’ said Bone. ‘Leave the ship as quickly as you can, but stay on the dock, preferably in a cleared area.’

  We’d just stepped off the gangplank when I heard the chopping of a helicopter growing steadily louder and looked up to see a scrunched-up version of Quacky the Duck flying toward us in the clear blue sky.

  ‘You are looking at the world’s only Quackycopter,’ sai
d Bone, over the intercom, ‘and I am in it. As you see, we are heading for a landing by your side. Enter the instant we land and, with luck, your boarding may go unobserved.’

  I turned to Athenee, who was staring up wide-eyed at the smooth descent of the Quackycopter’s fat white bottom.

  ‘As you work with him through the years,’ I said, ‘you’ll come to learn he’s always full of surprises.’

  — 17 —

  I HAULED A SLIDING DOOR OPEN, we clambered in, and I hadn’t finished slamming the thing shut before we were sloping off into the air so fast it wasn’t two seconds before the Pirate Galleon looked like a pretty golden toy.

  ‘The miracle of flight,’ I said, gazing down at it. ‘You wouldn’t believe how horrible that thing looks close up.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt,’ said Bone, who was squatting behind the pilot’s seat, holding the barrel of an automatic rifle on the neck of our old friend Debbie, who was doing the flying, since apparently she could work wonders with anything that looked like a duck. ‘Please follow my example and sprawl upon the floor so that you are not easily visible through the windows. The purple splotch is extremely active.’

  ‘Hi, Debbie,’ I said, squatting down, and she shot me a quick, mean look, like the sharp-toothed Foxine did in Goldilocks. Bone waited until we’d got settled and then began to speak.

  ‘I suppose it would be best to start by explaining our present situation,’ he said. ‘I did not allow myself to be entirely idle after the agency’s men dashed off to bare their steel, but involved myself in a variety of activities, including a careful examination of the aerie atop Elf Castle. Needless to say I found yet another secret panel, this one reached by manipulating unicorn horns and wizards’ staffs carved into the paneling, and discovered a second hidden elevator whose buttons gave one the interesting option of rising one story higher.’

  ‘There was another hideaway above the dining room?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I could not resist looking into the matter,’ said Bone, refusing to be hurried, ‘so, after arming myself with this formidable rifle from the agency’s stock, I took the elevator up and found myself in a well-equipped hangar, cleverly hidden from the eyes of the curious by a festoon of gargoyles, containing this Quackycopter.’

  I squinted as a bright, quick flash of purple light poured in from the windows.

  ‘Be sure to keep yourselves low,’ said Bone. ‘It’s watching this thing carefully, though I don’t think it can see you.’ He cleared his throat and continued. ‘In any case, I had barely taken in the implications of the helicopter when the elevator doors closed and I heard it descend. I climbed into this machine at once and when Miss Debbie, here, took her present place I put this gun by her jugular, where you now see it, and this quite naturally led into a longish talk which has resulted in our present arrangement.’

  ‘Which is?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I have promised not to kill her, she has given me some very useful information and will deposit us at a rear entrance to History Hall to which she’s handed me the key.’ He reached into a pocket and waved a rectangle of silvery plastic. ‘Once the key has opened the door she will be free to leave, though I have strongly advised her, for her own safety, to wait outside for whoever emerges triumphant from the struggle which will surely follow.’

  He slipped the plastic back into his pocket and ducked slightly at another bright flash of purple.

  ‘As to that,’ he said, ‘while we were observing the presidential parade from atop Elf Castle, the purple splotch spent considerable time appearing and disappearing outside the windows—teasing the agents, I suspect; it seemed to lose interest in the place once they’d charged off to battle—but not before I had the opportunity to take a number of revealing instant snaps.’

  He fumbled in another pocket, spread some photos of the purple whatsis out on the floor of the Quackycopter, and waited for us to examine them. I saw he’d made little circles on their centers around what first seemed only to be a kind of smudgy, pale blur.

  ‘What’s this fuzzy business?’ I asked. ‘The thing’s canopy? Some kind of rocket flare coming from its side?’

  ‘Dismiss all such mechanical images from your mind,’ said Bone, resting his finger on the largest pale area of the blur, ‘and imagine that to be an enormous forehead. An ominously familiar forehead.’

  I studied it for a moment.

  ‘And those two dark blurs beneath as deep-set eyes,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Bone.

  ‘It’s the Professor,’ said Athenee. ‘Painted by Seurat.’

  ‘You have him.’ Bone nodded approvingly. ‘That is not a vehicle at all, but a kind of window in space, and the Professor is looking out at us from inside of it. Do you recall, Weston, those extraordinarily interesting notations we came across in his little hideaway under the Thames?’

  ‘All that stuff on the blackboard in his study?’

  ‘Precisely. I transcribed them, at some risk, before the river flooded the place, and when I had an opportunity to study them again at a more leisurely moment, I realized they were nothing less than profound speculations bearing on the possibility of projecting three-dimensional matter through a five-dimensional continuum. The material has created quite a stir whenever I’ve presented it to experts, and I suspect the Professor is now in a position to make some very interesting additions to those original formulae.’

  The floor of the Quackycopter slanted and I saw the dome of History Hall spreading out beneath us. We went down like a rock, then landed like a feather in the side street where Waldo had led me through the gloomy garden; only this time Bone, after pressing the handle of the rifle into my hands without taking it off Debbie’s neck for a second, headed straight for the rear of the Hall, then turned and waved us on after he’d opened a small door in its high, white wall.

  Athenee hopped out and I followed, looking back every other step as I ran just in case Debbie had a gun hidden somewhere, but I’d barely made it to the door before the Quackycopter’s blades spun faster and it began to lift.

  ‘Immediate flight,’ murmured Bone, shaking his head. ‘Her very worst option.’

  He’d barely got that out before the purple splotch popped into view and sent out a nasty, spinning, yellow beam which began by making the Quackycopter glisten as though it was covered with spangles, and finished by turning it into something shrunken and black which was too light to fall in one chunk, but drifted apart in curly bits and pieces.

  ‘Now we know why they never found a trace of that fighter plane,’ I said, but nobody was listening because both Bone and Athenee were smarter than I was and had already gone inside.

  The tunnel was even simpler and tougher than the ones Waldo had taken me through on the way to Schauer’s workshop. The walls were nothing but stainless steel, as was the ceiling, with a thin line of fluorescent light running the length of its center, and the floors were something black and hard which gave good traction.

  There was a brand-new element in the décor, though, in the form of gray stone bodies frozen in various positions: some of them standing at their posts, some flat on the ground with their weapons or other equipment spilled out in front of them. So either this place wasn’t as climate-controlled as the Hall of Presidents, or, more likely, somebody had been dumb enough to open a door at just the wrong time in order to see what was happening, and had found out.

  We made our way down a long straight hallway, ducking around or stepping over bodies, until we reached a stainless-steel door with another of those brass handprints. We’d barely stopped to study it before the three dead, gray-skinned guards standing by it indicated they were not dead at all by aiming their weapons at our heads, and the door slid up and open to reveal the tall, bent figure of our old acquaintance, the Professor, who smiled and gave an amused little shrug.

  ‘It’s so easy to ignore cadavers,’ he said, ‘especially when there is such a plentitude of them!’

  He watched the gray guards take
away our weapons, then made a little nodding bow, waved his long, pale fingers at the room behind him, and stepped back into it to let us enter.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ he asked, watching us carefully as we did it, his head swaying from one of us to the other, his eyes glinting like shiny black glass in their deep sockets.

  The room took up the same hospital-green coloration as Dr Schauer’s place, and was laid out in the same efficient way, with lots of tidy shelves and neatly labeled panels. A high green curtain faced by a line of chairs cut off the view of the rest of the room after about ten yards.

  ‘Rather different from your usual cozy,’ said Bone, looking critically around him. He pointed at the curtain. ‘I suppose your dimensional toy is hidden behind that?’

  The Professor started slightly, then he raised the mats of spiderwebbing he used for eyebrows and gave a wicked old grin.

  ‘Of course you would have anticipated it,’ he said, chuckling, then he frowned. ‘I’ve long suspected the London calculations were not erased in spite of my clear orders!’ He reached out with his pale, bony fingers to grab a handful of air, crushed it, and muttered: ‘I was right to let the fool drown.’ Then he grinned again, waved at one of the gray guards, and the curtain started to open. ‘Do be my guest, Mr Bone. You are admittedly not a bona fide member of the scientific community proper, but I can think of no one more capable of appreciating the diverse possibilities of this device. Pray do examine my toy, as you style it.’

  It was an open half dome, laid out like a hybrid between an airline cockpit and the control cabin of a spaceship. A large, high-backed seat faced the open O of a circular panel whose walls were crowded with a mass of complicated instruments. Behind this central chair, obviously the pilot’s seat, a curved row of four smaller chairs was mounted to a raised black arc of flooring which formed the gadget’s outer edge.

  ‘The dark, circular aperture the controls are ranged around functions both as a viewing port and, when reached by those steps, as an exit,’ said the Professor, walking over to his machine with his hands clasped behind his ancient, black Prince Albert coat.