Black & White Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  “May the goddess be with you on your journey.” Adolfo inclined his dark head and, with a final, worried glance toward Lea, severed the connection, and the mirror went dark.

  “Great,” Sebille groused. “All we have to help us is a bad riddle.”

  Lea frowned. “That’s not fair, Sebille. He was only trying to help.”

  The sprite shook her head. “I’m going to go make tea…”

  The ancient television kicked on. The small, square screen filled with the loud sound of electronic static.

  We all shared a look.

  “Well, this is it,” I said, my voice breaking on the last word.

  Grym reached out and clasped my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “We’re going to find them, Naida.”

  I nodded, my eyes suddenly burning with tears. “Look, you guys, I really don’t want…”

  “Zip it,” sayeth the sprite. “We’re coming. You can’t stop us.”

  I gathered myself up and glared at them. “I’m the Keeper. This is my job. None of you should come. It could be dangerous and…” My stern tone was all but obliterated under the tears sliding down my cheeks. “I can’t lose you all too.”

  “We’re coming, Naida,” Rustin said, giving me a sad smile. “We don’t want to lose you or the troublesome trio either.”

  “Besides,” said Sebille, “You’re not the boss of me.”

  I snorted out a laugh before I narrowed my gaze on her. “Actually, sprite, I am the boss of you.” I grabbed the never-ending slice of pie artifact off Shakespeare’s desk. It was one of two Andrew of Mayberry artifacts I had. I hadn’t been able to find the never-ending plate of chicken dinner artifact. I was pretty sure Hobs had that tucked away in his hidey-hole.

  “Not really,” Sebille responded. “I just let you think you are.”

  Grym chuckled and I glared over at him. But I didn’t try to argue the point. Everybody in the room knew she was right.

  The static sound abruptly dropped away under the familiar sound of that whistling theme song.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  It was time.

  I turned to my friends with a plea in my gaze, determined to try one more time to talk them out of entering the artifact. I blinked in surprise as I saw Sebille step into the monochrome sphere, Rustin right behind her.

  Lea and Hex were already there. Hex looked no different except for her eyes which were a non-descript dark gray. Lea’s poodle was gray, her skirt black. And her pretty blue eyes had turned a pale gray.

  With a whoosh of silvery magic, Sebille’s fiery hair dulled under the color-stripping energy, followed by her neon green dress and red and black striped stockings. Lastly, I watched her Wicked Witch of the West shoes go dull, fading to charcoal gray.

  When I tore my gaze away from my assistant, I was shocked to see that Rustin had also bleached to grays and blacks, his handsome face looking a sickly gray. With his normal black hair, it was slightly less startling than Sebille’s transformation had been, but it was disturbing enough to make it hard to breathe.

  Grym offered me his hand. I glanced up at him, his caramel gaze focusing a question in my direction. “Ready?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. Taking hold of his warm hand, I stepped over the curved line into a monochrome world.

  The silvery magic tickled against my skin as it washed over me. As it sifted away, I looked down to find my hands white and my clothing shades of black and gray. Beside me, Grym chuckled softly. I turned to find him examining his hands and arms. That was when I realized the new color scheme was very close to his color in gargoyle form.

  He lifted a black gaze to me, and it made me shiver. Even as a gargoyle, Grym’s gaze would normally be a warm golden brown. Without even that little bit of color, the change felt dangerously permanent.

  “We should all cross together,” Rustin said, “So we don’t get separated inside.”

  I felt my eyes go wide. I hadn’t even considered that. He was right. It would be easy for us to be shunted off to different black and white television shows. Though the familiar characters of Andrew of Mayberry made me believe the show could be the only destination.

  Moving together, we grabbed each other’s hands and, with a final look and a nod, we stepped close to the artifact as a united front.

  For a moment, nothing happened. In fact, it went on for long enough that I frowned, starting to worry that our attempt to crash the 1960s would fail.

  But then I felt a strange tingling in my lower extremities. By the time I realized something was happening and glanced down, my legs were gone up to my knees.

  Well, not gone, precisely. More like fractured into millions of tiny, sparkling motes dancing around beneath me in a vaguely leg-shaped form.

  The tingling spread so quickly I barely had time to panic as my entire body was consumed into tiny pieces of light. As the energy reached my head, I opened my mouth to scream, and the sound never emerged. With a flash of near-painful electrical energy, I became air. My very last terrorized thought clung to the emptiness for a split second and then dissipated in a flash.

  Disappearing into mist.

  6

  If you Cain’t swim, What was you Doin’ in that Pond?

  Sound returned first, a cacophony of terrified screaming, that grew gradually louder as light and movement re-entered the picture.

  That was when I realized I was falling.

  I mentally flailed my arms, only to recognize I had no arms. A beat later they were back, but I had no legs to catch myself as I saw the grainy, taupe-ish landscape far below rushing up to meet me.

  The sensation of being totally out of control was probably what had multiple screams reverberating across the countryside. In a total reverse to how my body had turned into television snow, it quickly reassembled itself as I fell.

  By the time I reached the colorless grass beside the gray and silvery pond, I was fully formed again. I wish I could say that helped when I landed. It didn’t cushion the fall. Not one little bit. And I slammed into the hard, dusty ground with the force of a freight train smacking a brick wall.

  The plate filled with never-ending pie landed on my stomach, unharmed and not even dusty.

  Stupid pie. If I got out of the current mess, I was never eating pie again. I placed the plate next to me and lay there a moment, trying to catch my breath.

  I’d landed hard enough to knock all the wind out of my lungs, slicing off the warbling scream I hadn’t even realized until that moment had been tearing the silent fabric of the pastoral spot into shreds.

  I lay there, a melodic and familiar whistling playing across my inner ears, and tried to take inventory of all my battered parts.

  Two more heavy thumps sent dust into the air around me. The landings were followed by soft groans that mirrored my own.

  A distant splash brought my gaze snapping open as my brain finally kicked in. Somebody had literally splash-landed into the small but picturesque pond that was only a few yards away.

  I scanned the mounds of monochrome flesh around me. Who was missing? “Where’s Lea?” I groaned. “And Grym,” I added, shoving painfully to my feet.

  “Hey!” a deep voice called out.

  I turned to find Grym treading water pretty far out on the pond.

  “Hey!” he screamed again. “I can’t…” His dark head disappeared beneath the silvered surface of the water, his flailing hands the last to disappear. With a start, I realized what he’d been about to say.

  I took off running, ignoring the stiffness of my joints and the sharp slicing of residual pain from my fall. “Grym’s in trouble,” I yelled to Sebille and Rustin. I spotted a small rowboat on the shore and veered in that direction.

  Something niggled in my mind about that tidy looking boat, but I was too worried about Grym to try to lock the thought down. The gargoyle was splashing around in the water, sending a prodigious amount of liquid into the air around him as he struggled to keep his head abov
e the surface.

  Rustin reached the boat before I did and started shoving it toward the pond. He glanced at me. “You’d better stay here. I’m not sure how much weight this thing can hold, and Grym’s heavy.”

  I bit back an argument, giving the flat back of the small boat a shove that I hoped would send it well out into the pond.

  “Isn’t that the boat from episode two?” Sebille asked.

  I frowned, wondering if I should tease her for having watched the shows. I settled for a quick glance in her direction to arch an accusing brow.

  She shrugged. “I was working in there when they were watching it. It was oddly compelling.”

  A shout went up, ripping my attention back to the pond. Grym had disappeared again. I took two steps toward shore before Sebille grabbed my wrist, stopping me.

  “He’ll pull you under, Naida. You’re not strong enough to help from the water.”

  Rustin had reached the spot where Grym had last been. He bent over the side of the boat, shouting Grym’s name.

  “We have to do something,” I told the sprite.

  She nodded, her expression pinched. Her eyes went wide and she scrunched her face again.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, leaning hopefully toward the pond as Rustin tugged an oar off the boat and shoved it into the water.

  “I can’t…”

  A large form broke the surface of the water and Grym dragged air into his lungs. I could hear him gasping all the way to shore. He was clutching the oar Rustin had dipped into the pond and Rustin was putting everything he had into trying to pull him toward the boat.

  “Kick your legs,” Rustin ground out, his voice breathless with effort.

  Beside me, Sebille’s bony frame had gone still.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Look, he’s got a hand on the side of the boat.”

  But Sebille didn’t relax. “Hurry up and get back here, Rustin,” she called out.

  I turned to look at her as Rustin started rowing, a dripping Grym huddled miserably in the front of the boat. “Why do you look like somebody just cut your braids?”

  Sebille’s fingers automatically found the fringe at the bottom of one braid and she frowned. “Did you ever watch the second episode?”

  I shook my head a little too quickly. Sebille’s brows lifted. It was so strange seeing the generally brightly-hued sprite with black hair and eyebrows and pasty white flesh. Well, the pasty part was kind of normal, but her freckles were gray dots across her cheeks instead of their usual warm brown color.

  “You’re lying.”

  I wasn’t lying. Not really. I hadn’t actually seen it all the way through, I missed the little three-second close at the end. “I caught glimpses of it as I passed through the library, that’s all.”

  She shook her head, her light-gray gaze sliding toward the pond, filled with worry.

  I turned to see how they were doing, expecting them to be near the shore. But they were still about ten yards out. Worse, they seemed to be struggling to get closer.

  Grym had taken over the oars and Rustin was on his knees in the bottom of the boat, flinging water out with his cupped hands. “What’s going on?” I asked the sprite.

  “That boat has a leak in it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I exclaimed, realizing as I yelled at her that I’d known it too, on some level. That had been the niggle in my mind when I saw the boat onshore.

  “I’m telling you now,” Sebille yelled back. “It’s not like we had a choice. Grym was going to die out there if we didn’t do something.”

  She was right and I was being an itch with a B. “I’m sorry.” I wrung my hands together. “But we need to help them.”

  Sebille’s eyes went wide. “It’s too late for that.”

  My head whipped around just as the boat sank below the surface, sending Grym back into the water and Rustin with him.

  I gave a little shriek and ran toward the pond, my gaze locked on the frantic splashing around Grym.

  Rustin’s head burst from the water a beat later. Unbelievably, he was laughing. I thought he’d lost his mind.

  Then he stood up.

  Grym stopped flailing around and stared at Rustin for a moment before a crooked grin split his wide, handsome face. “Oh.”

  Rustin burst into new peals of laughter, offering the embarrassed cop a hand up.

  A moment later, they pulled the boat from the water and overturned it on the shore to drain the water from the bottom.

  I turned to Sebille, a sense of foreboding filling me even before I saw that she was still frowning. “What’s wrong, sprite?”

  She opened her mouth to answer but didn’t get the chance.

  “Stop right there, thieves!”

  We turned to find a scrawny, bug-eyed cop in a pale gray uniform with an extra-wide belt slung where his hips would be if only he had them.

  He focused an antique-looking gun on us in two shaky hands, his hat wobbling from the quaking. “Take your paws off that there boat, ya rascals.”

  I couldn’t help it. I grinned. “Barney Fiff, I presume?”

  The man blinked in surprise, the gun wobbling in my direction. “Don’t try your whiles on me, Jezebel. I caught ya red-handed. You rascals are goin’ ta spend some time in the Mayberry jail.”

  Jumpin’ Jezebels! I muttered unhappily. It was going to be really hard to find the troublesome trio from a jail cell. Unless…” Hey Deputy Fiff, you haven’t by any chance seen a frog, a cat, and a hobgoblin around here, have you?”

  Fiff’s buggy eyes narrowed in accusation. “What is that, one of them citified jokes? A frog, a cat, and a…” His eyes narrowed to slits as he contemplated the last one. “Hobbyglobin, walk into a place of inebriation and lawlessness…”

  I sighed. If the deputy thought having the terrible threesome in Mayberry was a bad joke, he was less clueless than I’d assumed.

  Next to me, Sebille snorted.

  Fiff turned his glare to the sprite, and his googly eyes widened. His mouth falling open, Fiff ogled her as if he thought she was something from the fiery depths of Hades.

  He could actually have been right about that.

  “How about a pretty woman with a spunky ponytail?” I asked the jittery lawman. “Have you seen her? She should be easy to spot. She’s wearing a really weird skirt with a poodle on it.”

  Fiff twitched and jittered. “You ain’t gonna distract me with your nonsense, Missy.”

  Dripping wet, Grym strode forward, big hands raised as the wobbly gun slid in his direction. “I’m a cop too, Deputy Fiff.” He held up his hands as Fiff got noticeably more upset by his movement. “I’m just going to show you my badge.” Grym slowly reached for the badge he kept in his shirt pocket and frowned. From the look on his face, I figured he’d either left the badge in his other shirt, or it had fallen out in the pond. “I seem to have lost my badge in the water…”

  Got it in two.

  Fiff’s eyes nearly popped out of his face. “Sure ya did. I didn’t fall out o’ no turnip truck yesterday, Mister.” The deputy whipped the gun toward the road, where the world’s biggest car sat waiting in all its monochrome majesty. “Now git, you four. You have a date with a jail cell.”

  I grabbed my plate of pie, and we started toward the car. I don’t know why the others followed the deputy’s instructions. Even if he managed to fire the gun, he’d probably miss us all and somehow shoot his own foot. But I kept thinking about that blind squirrel getting the nut thing.

  I was pretty sure I was just the nut to get in the way of a badly fired bullet.

  The trip from countryside to town was ridiculously short. Television sitcom short. Lasting only about forty-five seconds. The streets looked much as I remembered them from my few times checking out the show. Sigh… Full disclosure. I watched two entire episodes before I forced myself to walk away from it. I told myself I was just spending quality time with the trio. But they’d been glassy-eyed in front of the television, totally ignoring me.
The truth was that Andrew of Mayberry was oddly addictive. Even after I’d forced myself to turn away and return to my work, I’d found myself listening to the quaint dialogue from afar. I’d even left the dividing door open, so I could listen when I was in the bookstore. And I was pretty sure I’d heard Sebille whistling the theme song once or twice as she worked.

  I wondered if all that was part of its magical charm. Did it reel you in with some kind of allurement spell and then hold you captive until it could suck you all the way inside?

  I shuddered, drawing a questioning gaze from Sebille.

  “I’m worried about Lea,” I told the sprite in lieu of trying to explain my thoughts about the artifact.

  I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t because I’d have to reveal my guilt in watching the show when I’d claimed I hadn’t. I just didn’t think the front bench seat of the enormous police car was the right place for it.

  At least the wobbly deputy had finally put his gun away. Apparently, he didn’t think we were going to overwhelm him as he drove us to jail.

  In his world, I was sure he was probably right.

  But in my world…

  I leaned forward and peered past Sebille to the deputy. “What exactly are we going to jail for?”

  He turned a theatrically shocked look on us, his lips flapping like a landed fish. “What for? You folks can’t really be that clueless.”

  Apparently, we could. “I’m serious. We’re new in town and we just want to find our friends.”

  “Did you or did you not take Sheriff Andrew’s personal and private property and attempt a water escape?”

  I stared at him a moment, fighting to keep from impersonating my own brand of fish. “Um.”

  “We meant no harm. We were simply trying to rescue our friend,” Rustin said from the back seat. Wayyyyyy back there. I decided I could fit four of my cute little beetle bug cars into the Mayberry-mobile.