Black & White Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  I reluctantly turned away from Grym, trudging along behind the sprite as she hurried around the corner and we caught up with the others.

  “Follow me,” Aberdeen said. He hobbled through the smoky air, his big boots clomping against the ground and his wispy gray hair floating around his head. We kept to the smoke for as long as we could, though we were all choking from it by the time we stepped out of Lea’s yard.

  It had been good cover and, when we took off running across the open grass leading to the little playground down the street, I felt exposed and vulnerable.

  My gaze kept sliding toward the sky, where clouds still roiled angrily high above us. The gods of the artifact world were still agitated.

  That wasn’t good for us.

  Aberdeen reached the merry-go-round and stepped onto its wobbly surface, grabbing a curved handle in the center as it moved out from underneath him. He motioned frantically for us to join him.

  I stared at the play structure, frowning. “What are you doing? This is no time to play.”

  The guy truly was crazy.

  Aberdeen shook his head. “Just do as I tell you to. Hurry. I feel something in the air.”

  He was right. As soon as he said the words, I realized the pressure was building again. Whatever had pelted us from the clouds before was gearing up to do it again. With no better ideas myself, I stepped onto the merry-go-round with the others. Aberdeen nodded toward the cats. “Somebody had better hold them.”

  “Why?” I asked, reaching for Wicked.

  Lea bent to pick up Hex just as the structure began to move.

  “Hold on!” Aberdeen said.

  As if his voice had called for more attacks, the ground a mere ten feet away exploded upward, sending dirt and rock into the air above our heads.

  We covered our heads as best we could while still holding onto the structure. Grym grabbed the handles on either side of Wicked and me and bent over us as hard clumps of dusty dirt pinged against the pocked metal surface.

  And then I no longer noticed the falling debris. Because the world had begun to spin fast enough to pull the breath right out of my lungs. And my stomach smacked up against my spine.

  It seemed to go on forever, and when it finally slowed, we were in a different place entirely.

  In fact, for a moment, I thought maybe we’d gone back home.

  The structure squealed to a stop and we all stood there, eyes half-wild as our bodies adjusted to the sudden stillness after being literally whipped into a frenzy.

  We were standing in some kind of a massive room with concrete floors and dark walls covered in cloth. There were no visible windows and the only lighting was spare. Small lights arrayed along the floor, seemingly only geared toward keeping someone from walking into things, not really meant to illuminate.

  Enormous shapes surrounded us, bent and misshapen objects that I couldn’t identify. And across the large building, three-walled, open film sets dotted the space.

  I recognized the Sheriff’s Office from Andrew of Mayberry as one of the sets. And next to it down a short distance, was an old western town, complete with two horses whose reins had been thrown over a tie bar in front of the faux buildings. The equine heads were lowered and their jaws busily churned through the hay someone had provided at their feet.

  A man lounged in a wooden rocking chair near the horses, a long piece of grass dangling from between his lips. I recognized Otis. He must have left Lea’s with the wizards. He stared calmly in our direction. No longer seeming bothered by the buzzing he’d been driven nearly mad by before.

  “Where are we?” I asked Aberdeen.

  He walked away from us, heading toward Otis with a wave for us to follow. “Come on. I’ll introduce you around.”

  We followed him through a pair of swinging doors in the building where Otis lounged, into what looked like a Saloon.

  Otis silently stood as we filed inside and brought up the rear.

  Aberdeen was waiting for us at the front of a small group of people. He nodded toward the two wizards standing nearby. “You’ve met Wiz and Zane.”

  We all nodded a

  t the two supernormals.

  “And Otis,” Aberdeen said, pointing to the man leaning against the door frame.

  Otis scanned a slightly hostile look over us.

  “Let me formally introduce myself,” Aberdeen said. “My name is McDonald. You can call me Dugan.”

  I felt my eyes go wide. “You’re Mrs. Foxladle’s friend?”

  He nodded. “Nice lady. She told you about me?”

  “Mrs. F told Naida about the television artifact,” Grym said, frowning. “When she and Sebille went to collect it, they discovered you were missing.” He cocked his head. “You’re not human, are you?”

  Dugan laughed. “Leprechaun.” He did a little dance, earning himself a pair of rolled eyes from Wiz and Zane.

  I scanned a look over the rest, recognizing the short, rounded physique of a gnome and a man whose unusual hairiness probably meant he was some kind of shifter.

  Aberdeen pointed to the gnome. “That’s Alec.”

  Alec the Gnome waved in our direction.

  “And Peter.” He grinned. “Wolf shifter.”

  “Peter Wolf?” Grym asked, his expression amused.

  Peter shrugged. “What can I tell you, my parents had a sense of humor.”

  Rustin crossed his arms over his chest. “We’re all supernormals.”

  I blinked. He was right. “This artifact only pulls supernormals inside?”

  Aberdeen, er, Dugan, nodded. “And it only keeps the ones who it can force to assimilate. These other poor schlubs you see moving around the place have totally lost themselves to the world. They likely don’t even remember ever being outside.”

  A keen sense of sadness filled me at the thought. I glanced at Lea and found her frowning. She’d been heading in that direction herself. Thank goodness I’d had the never-ending pie artifact. Which made me wonder aloud. “How?”

  Dugan looked at me, a question in his light-gray gaze.

  “How do they make people assimilate so completely? And why haven’t you all done it?”

  “Food,” Alec responded. “The only food they provide is at the diner. Everyone who eats at the diner is slowly poisoned into forgetting.”

  I looked at Lea. “You think you ate there?”

  She looked as if she was trying to remember. “I think I might have once or twice over the last couple of weeks.”

  Time clearly passed very differently in Mayberry. Lea clearly perceived her time in faux Mayberry as having been a lot longer than the few hours I’d experienced.

  “But how have you survived?” Rustin asked the small group.

  “By hook or by crook,” Dugan said. “Our magic actually works some in this hidden space. Only a very limited amount. We’ve basically given up using it except to create food and water to survive while we try to find a way out of here.”

  “The fish in the pond are safe,” Otis added from behind me. “We eat those.”

  I glanced at him, understanding blossoming. Suddenly the filleting knife and all the fish parts littering the area around the culvert made total sense.

  I swung my arm around. “What is this place?”

  “The Behind the Scenes,” Alec said, grinning. “It’s beyond everyone’s notice because it’s inherently outside of the reality they know.”

  “We have some leeway here,” Dugan said. “Being invisible is part of that. Having limited power is another part.”

  I thought of the never-ending pie plate and wondered where it had gotten to. Had it been blown up in Lea’s house? I could call it back to me, but I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. “I tried to use my keeper magics outside and it made a horrendous noise,” I told them.

  Dugan winced. “Yeah. We heard.”

  “Just about scared the troll to death,” Alec said. “It took him right back to his feral roots for a while.”

  They all glanced at
Otis and I had an “Ah ha!” moment. A bridge troll. No wonder he’d claimed the culvert and painted it with symbols. “He’s been trying to make a bridge out of here, hasn’t he?”

  Dugan nodded.

  Flushing with embarrassment, I asked, “Do you think my magic would do the same thing here?”

  Shrugging, Wiz said, “None of our magics make that kind of ruckus. “They either work or they don’t. No fuss. No noise.”

  “Naida’s magic is intrinsically dangerous to this artifact,” Lea said. “There are apparently protections against it.”

  We fell silent, everyone probably thinking over the possibilities and limitations that information implied.

  “We’ll need to make sure we’re ready to move before we risk her using it then,” Peter said.

  “What exactly do you have in mind?” Grym asked.

  “We need to find the heart of the artifact,” Dugan said. “The heart is the key.”

  “The heart?” Lea asked, frowning. “Like a real, beating heart?”

  They shrugged. “We’re not sure. We’ve been trying to figure that out but haven’t had much luck so far,” Otis said from behind us.

  “That’s where we were hoping you could help,” Dugan said. “We thought maybe you could use your keeper energies to locate the thing’s heart. But if you can’t use them without creating an end of the world scenario…” He shook his head, looking defeated.

  “Someone has to know where the heart is,” Rustin said. “It might be buried in the collective memory somewhere. Maybe all we need to do is ask.”

  They looked surprised at the idea.

  The simplest solution is sometimes the last one anybody considers.

  “Do you really think they’ll tell us?” asked Zane petulantly.

  Rustin shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

  “But who’s going to ask them?” Dugan asked, frowning. “They know all of us on sight.”

  I looked around at my friends. “Lea’s out, she’s been too high profile, and they might believe she’s turned on them at this point.” The attack at her home no doubt indicated that. “Grym and I are out for the same reason.”

  Rustin winced. “I’m afraid I might have painted a target on myself in town.”

  “What did you do?” Grym asked.

  Sebille sighed. “It was my fault. Some little old lady came up to me and started to tell me about all her aches and pains, and I told her I didn’t care and to get lost.”

  Compassion, thy name is NOT Sebille, I thought, grinning.

  “The old lady stood in the middle of the street and kept grabbing my arm to tell me about some pain that went all the way down her back, over her hip and down her leg,” Sebille appeared thoroughly disgusted. “I told her I had no idea why she was telling a complete stranger about her imaginary pains and that if she didn’t stop hanging out in the middle of the road she was going to have some real pains to worry about.”

  “Emma,” the entire Behind-the-Scenes group said in unison, nodding their heads knowingly.

  “Oh Sebille,” I said, fighting a smile.

  Sebille shrugged. “That old woman threatened to hit me over the head with her purse.”

  “So far it sounds as if you were the problem, not Rustin,” Grym said.

  Rustin grimaced. “Yeah. It was her up until the next minute. I kind of…accidentally…hit the old lady with her own purse.”

  I felt my eyes go wide. “You what!?”

  Sebille snorted.

  “It was an accident,” he insisted. “I grabbed the purse to keep her from hitting Sebille with it and somebody started screaming, Thief! Thief! behind me. When I whipped around to deny it, the purse accidentally hit the old lady in the belly. She made this breathless kind of ‘ugh!’ sound and started toppling toward the ground.”

  Wiz and Zane were hysterical by this point in Rustin’s story, holding onto each other to keep from falling down.

  Dugan glared at Rustin. “You struck Emma? She’s just a harmless little old woman.”

  Rustin frowned. “Yeah, well, the big guy running after me with the baseball bat wasn’t harmless or little.”

  I covered my mouth to hide a grin. “What did you do?”

  “I ran!” he said as if I were totally stupid. He glared over at the sprite. “Of course, Sebille was nowhere to be seen at that point. Nobody even remembered she’d been the one to start the fight.”

  “I didn’t start the fight,” Sebille objected with clear outrage. “The old lady did.”

  Rustin just shook his head.

  “That’s why you were hiding out by the culvert?” I asked, appalled.

  Rustin looked ashamed. The sprite was high-fiving the wizards.

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” Lea said, her lips twitching. “We’re considering putting Sebille out there to speak to…people?”

  Sebille glared over at her. “I can people if I have to.”

  “Clearly,” Alec said, snorting out a laugh.

  “Look,” the sprite said in a weak, very belated defense of her own actions. “I’m not a compassionate person. People who know me know this. But if I’m going to be asking about the heart of Mayberry, that’s not a good segway to, ‘Look at this hairy wart on my left big toe.’” She nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Ergo, I’ll have no reason to punch anybody. It’ll be fine.”

  Nobody else looked convinced. But I sighed. I didn’t see that we had much choice. “Okay. So how do we want to play this?”

  “Easy,” Grym said. “She’s a reporter from the big city, come to town to find out how the rural half lives.”

  Lea frowned. “Which big city?”

  We all looked around. Nobody had any idea where Mayberry was supposed to be. Finally, Dugan said. “It won’t matter, lass. All ya have ta say is the Big City. These folks aren’t used ta askin’ a lot of questions.”

  “Fine,” I said, feeling as if it were anything but fine. “Let’s get her ready to play the part.”

  Sebille’s eyes went wide. “Ready? I’m ready now. What do you mean, get me ready?”

  I let my lips turn up in an evil grin, just to tweak her a little. I told myself I was doing it to pay her back for being mean to sweet old Emma. But I strongly suspected it was really because I could. And because it gave me an evil kind of delight.

  14

  Me and my Pardner are Lookin’ to Wet our Whistles

  Sebille clung to the pristine brick of the alley wall. Her light gray eyes were huge and fathomless behind the thick glass of the wire-rimmed spectacles. The cotton dress had a tab collar and short sleeves with cuffs that jutted out in points from her skinny arms. I’d never seen Sebille’s arms before. As far as I knew, she’d only ever worn sleeves so long they usually covered her hands.

  I could see why she covered them. They were spindly and pale, like balcony uprights that had been formed on a lathe.

  But it wasn’t the spindly bare arms that were the most entertaining…or horrific…depending on whether you were looking at it from Sebille’s perspective or everybody else’s. The dress fit her slim form tightly at the waist and then flared outward like a cloth explosion. It rounded away from her middle like a toadstool, stopping a few inches above the skinniest ankles I’d ever seen.

  As far as I was concerned, the folded white cotton socks inside the Mary Jane shoes were just icing on the cake.

  I gently shoved the sprite, putting a little muscle behind it as she continued to cling to the wall like a barnacle on a whale. “Come on, Sebille, time’s wasting.”

  “I look ridiculous.”

  I bit back on the urge to agree, knowing it wouldn’t help us get her out there any faster. “You look like you belong, which is a good thing.”

  She clutched the tiny notebook we’d dug up from Behind the Scenes and gave me a mulish look. “I think you should do this,” she told me. “You’re better at peopling than I am.”

  Nobody could deny it. However, that wasn’t saying much. “We’ve
already discussed this, Sebille…” Multiple times. “I’ve been burned. They’ve already pegged me as a hostile. You’re it. You’re all we’ve got. Now put your big girl bloomers on and get in there. And whatever you do, don’t eat the food.”

  Sebille expelled a breath that almost blew me over with its intensity, and then whipped around the corner and headed for the Mayberry Diner half a block up.

  I turned to Grym. “She’s engaged.”

  He nodded and signaled to Wiz and Zane, who were in charge of monitoring the cameras inside the diner.

  I’d learned with horror that most of the buildings inside the artifact had cameras for interior shots. But the guys had assured me the ones at Lea’s had been disabled, as had Dugan’s. They’d sensed she might be a rebel like them and Dugan had been working on bringing her over.

  Grym and I were supposed to stay close in case Sebille needed us, but Dugan, who’d been an electrical engineer before he retired, had rigged Sebille’s illegal cell phone to work as another camera eye, thus taking it offline as far as the artifact was concerned ─ or online, depending on your perspective ─ and giving us an eagle-eye view into the diner.

  We settled down into a little niche formed from a side door into the alley, watching as Sebille exploded into the diner as if someone had shot her from a gun. She stopped just inside the door, blinking like an owl behind the thick glasses.

  “This is gonna be great,” I told Grym. “I wonder if I can get a copy of this before we leave.”

  He shook his head, but his lips twitched and I knew he was enjoying it at least as much as I was.

  The woman behind the counter looked up and smiled widely. “Hello. Sit wherever you’d like.”

  Sebille stood stiffly for a moment as if stymied by the instruction, and then walked toward the counter. “I…”

  The waitress wiped a damp cloth over the counter and raised perfectly sculpted eyebrows, waiting.

  “I…”

  The woman’s smile dimmed. She shook her head. “Are you all right, honey? You look a little pale.”

  “Hehehe,” I said.

  Grym didn’t comment.

  Suddenly Sebille seemed to shake off her terror. She stuck her hand out. “I’m Rosalee Reportage. I’ve come all the way from the Big City to speak to people in this quaint small town. I wonder if you’d be willing to answer some questions for me.”