“That would be annoying,” I admitted.
“I have one with me,” Chester said, “and I forgot.”
“One what?”
Chester took his jacket off and dug deep into his right-hand pocket, past the ripped-out bottom and toward the back of the jacket lining. He pulled out his hand with a grandiloquent gesture, a long, silver tube clutched in his fist. “This!”
“So that’s what happened to my pocket telescope,” I said.
“Your pocket telescope went back to Captain Video with the Decoder Ring,” Chester said, squinting at his toy. “This is a microfax reader, complete with about thirty books. Including....”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Not, by any chance, the collected works of Chester V. J. Anderson?”
“That, too,” he admitted. “You’ll have to try it. It’s so much easier than lugging around that briefcase you always manage to accidentally have with you.”
“That’s unfair,” I said. “I used to carry around a copy of your book of poems until you borrowed it from me.”
“I remember,” Chester said. “You used to read it to every girl you were trying to take to bed. I don’t think it’s right to use my poetry to make your girls.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Considering some of the things you’ve used....”
“Wharf!”
“I was just kidding.”
“This thing’s stuck—it won’t go on. Could the batteries be dead?”
“They haven’t invented electricity yet in this world. You know that nothing exists until after it’s been invented.”
“Make this work,” Chester said, handing the tube to me. I looked it over for a minute and then unscrewed the back section where the battery and bulb were, exposing the focusing lens.
“Hold it up to the light.”
Chester took it back. “It’s very dull,” he complained, “and the wrong book’s in the viewing field.” He twiddled with the selector ring. “Ah, the action’s mechanical. Here we are now: Philosophy and Divination, Ancient Chinese, for the use of. A little fine tuning, and we arrive at forty-two, forty-three, forty-four! Coming to Meet. Hrmph. The Judgment. Of course, how could I forget?”
“What does it say?”
“‘The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.’ It speaks of a bold girl who lightly surrenders herself, and thus seizes power.”
“Or perhaps necklaces,” I suggested.
“Nine in the fourth place,” Chester continued, reading the comment on the first moving line. “‘No fish in the tank. This leads to misfortune.’”
“Huh?”
“Nine in the fifth place: ‘A melon covered with willow leaves. Hidden lines. Then it drops down to one from heaven.’”
“This is no time,” I complained to a nameless Ancient Chinese Sage, “to be vague.”
“That brings us,” Chester said, “to the hexagram created by the changes: number eighteen, Ku, or Decay.” He twisted the control ring.
“Decay. Swell. Cheerful book you’ve got there. What does it mean?”
“It’s your reading,” Chester pointed out.
I glared at him. In my best singsong voice, I intoned:
I do not love thee, C. V. J.
Why this should be I cannot say.
But this I’ll tell thee every day,
I do not love thee, C. V. J.
“I’ll control my grief,” Chester said. “Here we are: ‘Work on what has been spoiled has supreme success. It furthers one to cross the great water. Before the starting point, three days. After the starting point, three days.’”
“That’s it?” I asked.
Chester shrugged. “There’s a lot more. Try this: ‘Thus the superior man stirs up people....’ What was that?”
It sounded like the people were stirring up. From somewhere outside our door was coming the sound of milling people, slamming doors, stamping feet and angry voices. “I don’t know,” I said. “Did you order breakfast sent up?”
“I lack your vast experience with hotels,” Chester said, slipping his jacket on and walking gingerly to the door, “but that doesn’t sound like room service to me.”
“You may be right,” I admitted. I finished dressing and joined him at the door. “Take a look. Anything in sight?”
Chester peeked around the door. “No. They must be in the main room.”
“Let’s go see,” I suggested.
“I don’t like the sound of it,” Chester said. “Maybe we should stay here.”
“If they’re after us we’re at a dead end here. Outside we have more room to maneuver.”
“I suppose so,” Chester said, stepping aside. “Go ahead, I’ll be right behind you.”
“Someday I’ll have to get a working definition of ‘manager’ from you,” I said. I went out into the hall and started tiptoeing toward the closed door to the main room.
“All of my definitions work,” Chester said, taking up the rear.
“Close the door,” I whispered. The noise got louder as we approached, and we could make out individual voices.
VOICE 1: They did it. Of course they did. They must have done it. Who says they didn’t?
VOICE 2: We really should give them the benefit of a doubt. Hold them for trial. Then hang them. It’s only right.
VOICE 3: Suppose they didn’t do it?
VOICE 1: You saying they didn’t do it? You in it with them?
VOICE 3: I guess you’re right. They must have done it.
VOICE 4: Come on, you two, what’d you do with the jewelry? You may as well tell us. We’ll get your boyfriends out here as soon as the marshal arrives.
VOICE 1: Why wait for the marshal? Let’s string ’em up now!
VOICE 2: Dirty sneak thieves. Give them a meal and a place to sleep, and this is how they pay you back. Sneak thieves. In the night, when a man’s sleeping. Taking your goods. It’s a crime. [I think this was Robin.]
CHESTER: (Whispered) Are they talking about us?
MICHAEL: (Whispered even lower) Who else?
CHESTER: (Whispered) What do we do? It sounds like they’ve got Dorothy and Sylvia out there.
MICHAEL: (Whispered) Rescue them, of course.
CHESTER: (Whispered) How?
I had to admit it was a good question. I had no idea.
VOICE 1: Let’s go in there and get them.
VOICE 3: We’d better wait for the marshal.
VOICE 1: You afraid of them?
VOICE 4: Let’s get them. You watch these two.
VOICE 3: Right. I’ll watch the girls. You go in and get them.
There was a clatter of feet approaching the door. Chester and I flattened ourselves against the wall as the door opened. We stayed hidden by the open door while the angry crowd clattered by.
“What now?” Chester whispered.
“We split. Come on.” I went around the door and out into the main room. Chester was right behind me. Sylvia and Dorothy were in straight-back chairs in the center of the room. A thin, wizened little man, who I remembered was named Falkenburg, stood over them holding a broom. “Have you got them?” he asked.
“Got them,” I snarled, “we are them.”
He raised the broom as I ran toward them. “Don’t you touch me. Help! Help!”
“Come on,” I called to the girls. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sylvia butted the little man in the stomach before I could reach him, and he sat down on the floor with a surprised look on his face and no air in his lungs. We raced through the room and out to the corridor. We had almost made it to the stairs before the baying of the hounds started behind us. Down the stairs, past startled chambermaids and early-rising guests, we made it to the lobby. The sounds of pursuit increased behind us.
“Stop them! Halt! Grab them, somebody!”
“Yo! Tarrah! Yoiks! After the fiends!”
“Ouch! Get off my foot!”
“There they go—out the door. Get them!”
Chester, suiting
word to need, had picked up the cry, further confusing the people we passed. “Stop!” he yelled, waving at nobody in front of us. “You can’t get away with it! Evil will out! Halt! Desist! Birch, birch!”
Then we were out on the street, running. The question—which I didn’t have enough breath left to ask—was, what next? Sylvia and Dorothy were skipping right along beside us, in much better shape than either Chester or I. It was still early enough so that the streets were deserted except for us and the madding crowd close behind. Chester yelled, “Quick....” MARP
“What?” Our friends were only about twenty yards behind, and closing fast. A loud blast of sound from somewhere ahead had cut off Chester’s words.
“...must take off all our....” MARP
“What?”
“Take off your clothes!” MARP
MARP
P H E eee E P !
“What?”
“Why?”
MARP
“Hurry, [MARP PHEeeeEEP]...ask questions. [MARP] later. Just do it. Take off all your clothes.” Chester ripped off his jacket, still running, and flung it to the side, then started struggling with his vest.
“I see,” Sylvia yelled. “Of [MARP] course.” She stripped the buttons from the front of her dress, gathered the skirt around her head and lifted. For a moment she looked like a fleet-footed crimson flower with a slim, white stem.
“SYLVIA!” Dorothy yelped. “What are you doing?” It seemed to be the first thing about the morning’s proceedings that had upset her.
“Disrobing, Dorothy dear,” Sylvia panted, leaving her petticoat to settle in the dust behind her.
“Well!” Dorothy yelled.
“You do it too,” Sylvia called.
“Well. It certainly will cut down wind resistance,” Dorothy yelled back. She did a sort of quick double-turn without cutting her running speed, and somehow had divested herself of her dress. Her outer and under garments seemed to be somehow connected, as they all came off as a unit and she continued down the street unadorned and fleet as a young, white-skinned gazelle.
“Now,” Chester called, “just stop running and take everything else off.” He sat down on the curb and started on his shoes and socks. “You too, Theodore Bear.”
I was, I noticed, the only one with any substantial amount of clothing still on. I had ripped off my jacket, but was hesitating about my trousers. Not from any residual modesty, but because of a two-part problem. Part one: how to manage the technical maneuver of divesting myself of pants while in full flight. I hadn’t seen how Chester managed it; I was watching Sylvia. Part two: I had a strong reluctance to give up the contents of my pants pockets. After all, you could never tell when a bunch of credit cards and a set of keys to an apartment that didn’t even exist in this time line would come in handy. I have an innate reluctance to part with anything I’ve had with me for a long time. I still have my very own appendix.
The Horde was approaching. Chester and the girls were just about devoid of clothing, and it looked like I had become the mob’s target. I stopped running and whipped off pants and shirt, tripping in the process and ending up flat on my back in the street, wrapped in a tangle of cloth.
“Quick,” Chester yelled, “do something obscene!” He grabbed Dorothy by the hands and pulled her up and started prancing about in the street like an overweight frog. After a few seconds of panic Dorothy realized what was happening and joined in the dance: the gazelle and frog gavotte, for mixed pairs.
Sylvia raced to my aid, pulling off my shoes and socks and unraveled me from my clothes. “My,” she said, “the life of a circus girl certainly gets interesting sometimes. Kiss me.”
I did. Her lips tasted of honey: Wild thyme honey. Our pursuers had reached us now, but they didn’t seem to know it. They milled around for a while looking for us while we danced amongst them, and then split up into different groups and went off in various directions to find us. My foot was stepped on three times while they searched.
“Very clever, I grant you,” I told Chester, as we sat on the edge of the sidewalk watching the last of the mob rigidly marching off into the distance. “A touch, a distinct touch. I’m glad it worked. Like you said, there are none so blind....”
“The second monkey,” Chester said. “See no evil.”
“I’m chilly,” Dorothy said. “Can we put our clothes on now?”
“What next?” Sylvia asked. “That was fun.”
“We gather up our clothes,” Chester said, fishing under the sidewalk ledge for his shoe, “and get on board that train before they bring out the bloodhounds or something equally as drastic.”
“Right. What train?”
“The train that was going Meep at us a few minutes ago.”
“I should have guessed,” I said. “And you’re right: whatever else we’re going to do, we’d better do it away from here.”
“Excuse me for a minute,” Sylvia said. She got up and headed across the street.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“If we’re going to take a train, there’s something I should do before I get dressed.”
“I won’t even ask,” I assured her retreating, er, back. While she was gone Chester, Dorothy and I got dressed. Our clothes were trampled a bit from being walked on, but otherwise fine. Sylvia was back inside of three minutes and dressed inside of four, but I had my memories.
The train turned out to be four cars and a coal-burning engine, complete with cowcatcher and high-hat smokestack. As we walked into the red-brick station house, the train pulled out.
“Come on,” Chester said, breaking into a trot.
“There’ll be another,” I told him. “Running is undignified.”
“There they are!” someone yelled from across the platform. “Let’s get them!”
We ran. Without too much trouble we caught up with the last car and pulled and pushed each other aboard. A small black cloud of runners behind us gave up the chase a few seconds later and just stood there shaking their fists and yelling at the retreating train.
The conductor came out onto the back platform with us, blue uniform neatly pressed and brass buttons shiny. “What,” he asked, speaking as if he was afraid his mutton-chop whiskers would fall off if he wiggled his face too much, “do those persons on the track want?”
“They came to see us off, my good man,” Chester pomped at him. “Our former students, they are. A bit of jolly fun.”
“Bouncy, I call it. Distinctly bouncy. Tickets please.”
“Ah, yes,” Chester said, feeling about the pockets of his vest, “tickets, of course.” He was doing his W. C. Fields bit. “Tickets. Yars. I believe, my good man, that we have left them beside our seats. If you will allow me....” He tried to shoulder his way past the conductor.
“You haven’t any seats,” the conductor pointed out. “You just got on board. I saw you running for the train.”
“Yars. That’s true. How silly of me to have made such a mistake. I wonder what I could have done with the tickets.” Chester turned to me. “Melvin, my lad, perchance did I give you the pasteboards to hold for me? I disremember what I did with the ducats.”
“No, Uncle Hiram,” I said. “I haven’t seen them.”
“Could be,” the conductor suggested, “you never bought no tickets no how. Could be.”
“I think that’s it, Uncle,” Sylvia said sweetly. Chester turned to glare at her. “Here,” she told him, pulling a packet from her décolletage “is the money you asked me to hold for the tickets.”
“I did?” Chester asked. “I mean, I am? You have?” He took the wad of money that Sylvia was thrusting at him and turned to the conductor. “I, ah, seem to have been mistaken. We have not, as of yet, purchased our tickets. Here, my good man; remove the correct sum from this petty cash and leave us be.”
Eying us suspiciously, the conductor took his time in sorting out the required amount from the roll of bills. Then he handed what was left of the roll back to Chester and reached into his ba
ck pocket for the ticket book. Opening the worn, black leather case, he carefully selected four tickets and slowly unfolded them to their full eight-foot lengths. With his punch poised, he stood regarding the tickets. “All the way?” he demanded. We nodded. In a sudden tympani of motion, he put about eight punches in each ticket and handed the bunch to Chester. “I suppose,” he said mournfully, “you’ll be wanting receipts.”
“No, thank you. We shall not require them.”
The conductor wasn’t going to get caught that way. “I’ll have ‘em for you in a second,” he announced, continuing to firmly block the door. With a square, thick-tipped pencil, he proceeded to write our four unintelligible documents on four copies of an all-purpose form. The form was ruled off into six areas, which he filled in with a combination of demotic writing and astrological diagrams. Each area had a printed heading, as follows:
1. Name of Passenger or Type of Livestock :
2. Destination or Cause of Disturbance:
3. Yardage, Roughage, Breakage or Cost of Dinner:
4. Estivation or Religion:
5. Excuse:
6. Disposition: (check one)
accepted [ ] rejected [ ] eaten [ ]
“Thank you,” Chester said, taking the forms. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate all you’ve done for us.”
“Only my parameter,” the conductor stated, and went back inside the car.
“Well,” I said, watching the little dot that was the town of West Mutton recede into the horizon line. “We made it, so far.”
Chester rolled the thirty-two feet of tickets and thrust them deep into a jacket pocket. “God is just,” he said.
“Just what?” I asked.
“Just watching.”
Sylvia held my arm. “Let’s go inside,” she said. It’s....”
B
L
I
P
CHAPTER FIVE
It felt like an earthquake hitting a rollercoaster. We were all thrown against the guardrail and then back against the inside door. The floor bucked and heaved. A loud screeching was almost drowned out by what sounded like the inside of a waterfall. I clung as hard as I could to the large emergency brake wheel and Sylvia had one arm around my left arm and the other around my neck. Chester was kind of sideways, spread out against the guardrail, with Dorothy wrapped around one leg.
The Unicorn Girl Page 7