He headed down the stairs, but stopped halfway and turned back. “Oh, and Mr Maguire?”
“Yeah?”
“You might want to brace yourself.”
4.
Colt Carver was a compelling speaker with a natural charisma that easily matched his brother’s. That wasn’t all they shared, either. As soon as he’d seen Colt, Tobey Maguire had spotted the similarities between the two men. They had the same lop-sided grin, the same sparkle in their eyes, the same tousled hair.
There, though, the similarities ended. Because while Cal had a fully functioning body, Colt was merely a head with a foot sticking out at the bottom.
This had not escaped Tobey Maguire’s notice.
In hindsight, his first reaction – drawing back in fright and shouting, “Jesus Christ!” at the top of his voice – had been the wrong one. It was insensitive, he knew that now.
To his credit, Colt hadn’t made a big deal about it.
“You’re a head,” said Tobey Maguire, who was still too shocked to attempt being tactful. “You’re a head on a foot.”
Colt’s eyes darted down, then he screamed in horror. “Aaaaargh! What happened? What have you done?” he shrieked. “What have you done to me?!”
Tobey Maguire danced frantically on the spot, flapping his arms in panic. “Wh-what? It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”
Colt grinned. “Sorry. Just messing with you. You’re right. I’m a head on a foot.”
“But… But… I mean…”
“Why am I a head on a foot?” said Colt.
Tobey Maguire nodded dumbly.
Colt shuffled around in his chair. He smiled ruefully as he stared off into empty space. “Back when Cal was… ooh. Six? Seven, maybe? He used to tell the other kids he was one half of conjoined twins,” Colt explained. “Course, we called them Siamese Twins back then, but, you know. Times change.”
“Crying shame. Perfectly good description,” said a voice from under Colt’s desk. If anyone else heard it they didn’t let on.
“And was he?” asked Tobey Maguire. “A conjoined twin, I mean?”
“Of course he wasn’t,” said Morgan Freeman, who was standing over by the window, his eyes darting uneasily across the street outside.
“The other kids were totally freaked out. Cal loved it,” Colt continued. “He told them my name, explained how I’d been cut off his back when he was a year old, and said I now lived in a box under his bed.”
“And did you?” asked Tobey Maguire, who was having some difficulty keeping up.
“No,” said Colt. “No, I wasn’t real. He made me up.”
“Right,” said Tobey Maguire. “But…”
“But now I’m here, yes,” said Colt. “Because this – Carverville – it’s inside Cal’s mind. I’m not really Colt Carver, he’s not really Morgan Freeman, and you’re not really Elijah Wood.”
“Tobey Maguire,” corrected Tobey Maguire.
“Hmm?”
“I’m not Elijah Wood,” said Tobey Maguire.
“Exactly. That’s what I just said.”
“No. I mean, I’m not Elijah Wood. I’m Tobey Maguire.”
Colt looked him up and down. “You sure?”
Tobey Maguire nodded. “I’m sure.”
“OK. Well, if you’re sure,” said Colt, then he rolled forward off his chair and thudded onto the floor.
“Oh God,” Tobey Maguire gasped, covering his mouth with one hand. “Did he die?”
A moment later, Colt hopped out from beneath the desk, apparently none the worse for wear. To his shame, Tobey Maguire felt his skin crawl as the smiling head on a foot drew closer. His every instinct screamed at him to kick the fonking thing through the window, to get it as far away from him as possible, but he fought against them all and kept both feet planted firmly on the floor.
“Now, son, I’ve got a question for you,” said Colt. “Namely, how come your arrival here in town coincides so neatly with the only murder in Carverville history? That seems like quite the coincidence.”
“What? I didn’t do it,” Tobey Maguire protested. “I was with him the whole time.”
“He was,” Morgan Freeman confirmed. “He’s got a theory I thought you’d want to hear. Tell him about the Mindraper, son.”
Colt frowned. “The what?”
“Cal told me about it,” said Tobey Maguire. “He said he was fighting it. Out in the real world, I mean. He said there was a chance we might get Mindraped.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” asked Colt, shifting uncomfortably on his foot. “What does that involve?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t imagine it’s anything pleasant,” said Tobey Maguire.
“It’s going to pick you all off, one by one,” said the squirrel. He was sitting in Colt’s chair now, his clawed feet up on the desk. “It’ll chew all you Bohunks up and spit y’all back out again in pieces. You mark my words.”
“What do you know?” demanded Tobey Maguire. Colt hopped around and watched him storm across to the desk and lean over it on his fists. “Do you know what it is? The Mindraper?”
“Who is he talking to?” asked Colt.
Morgan Freeman shook his head. “I have no idea. Seems like he’s addressing your chair.”
“Sure, I know what it is,” the squirrel said. “Same as you do. It’s death. Death for all of us. It’s gonna rip right through this here curry-muncher’s brain that we’re all residing in, and eat up all his memories. You, me and all of us included.”
“Oh God. Seriously?” Tobey Maguire squeaked.
“Mr Maguire,” said Colt. “Conrad was a childhood friend of my siblings and I, and I don’t appreciate you messing around when I’m trying to get to the bottom of his death.”
Tobey Maguire stared at the empty chair for a few moments, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again, then turned.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “But I think we’re in trouble.”
“We’ll get to that in due course,” said Colt. “What can you tell me about Conrad’s last few moments? Did he say anything? Did he give you any clue as to what had happened?”
“No. No, just ‘hello’.”
“‘Hello’?”
“Yeah. Yeah, he just kept saying ‘hello’ over and over.”
“Just ‘hello’?”
Tobey Maguire nodded. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“Oh,” said Colt. His face turned several shades paler. As his face made up about eighty per cent of what Tobey Maguire could see of him, this did not go unnoticed.
“Are you OK?” asked Tobey Maguire. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You should sit down.” He winced. “I mean… Can you even…? Know what? Doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything.”
“It’s her,” Colt whispered. “After all these years, it has to be her.”
“Her who?” asked Morgan Freeman, turning his back on the window.
Colt took a steadying breath. He looked like he might fall over any minute. Then again, he probably looked like that most of the time.
“The kids eventually got tired of hearing about me,” he said. “Tired of Cal’s stories about his freaky amputated brother under the bed. They stopped being creeped out.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “So that’s when he told them about her.”
Morgan Freeman’s voice seemed to echo in the silence that followed. “Her?”
“Wait,” said Tobey Maguire. “You said you and your siblings knew Conrad. Plural.”
“A sister,” said Colt. “We… we had a sister. Val Carver. She was a flesh-eating mutant who lived in the attic.”
Tobey Maguire threw up his arms. “Of course she was.” He looked up and raised his voice. “Seriously, what is wrong with you?”
“Hello. That was the only word she ever learned. Hello. You’d hear her whispering it late at night. Even from the box under the bed. Hello.”
Tobey Maguire felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He imagined it was caused by his Spider-sense, and not jus
t because he was scared shizzless.
“That was all she ever said?” asked Morgan Freeman.
“Yep. That was it,” Colt confirmed. He shrugged, which was fonking impressive, given the shape of him. “Well, that and ‘I’m going to suck your eyes out through your ass’. Just those two things.”
“Jesus,” Tobey Maguire whispered.
“I guess I knew she had to be in here somewhere,” said Colt. “But why show up now?”
“The Mindraper,” Tobey Maguire whispered.
“Bingo, Bootlips,” said the squirrel. “That thing’s dredging up the meanest and baddest parts of the big guy’s brain and turning it all in on itself. It’s strapping his subconscious into a goddam suicide vest, and we’re all gathering at the marketplace.”
“What does that even mean?” Tobey Maguire asked.
“It means we’re all fonked, boy,” said the squirrel. “It means we’re all fonked.”
“Hello.”
Tobey Maguire, the squirrel and Morgan Freeman all froze. Colt sort of froze, too, but balance issues meant he had to shuffle from foot to the same foot to stay upright.
“Who said that?” Tobey Maguire whispered.
“Wasn’t me,” said Morgan Freeman. “Colt?”
“Nuh-uh,” said Colt.
“Hello.”
A sudden movement by the office door made Tobey Maguire cry out in fright. He spun, folding the forefingers and middle fingers of each hand into his palms while keeping the others extended. As he did, he instinctively made a fsssswwwsss sound, much to the amusement of the squirrel, who was now over by the door.
“Did you just try to web me up, Chi-chi?” he snorted. “You do know you’re not actually Spider-Man, yes?”
Tobey Maguire quickly lowered his hands. “Don’t sneak around like that,” he warned. “You almost gave me a fonking heart attack!”
The squirrel said something in reply, but it was drowned out by the sound of breaking glass and then, a split-second later, by the sound of breaking Morgan Freeman.
A long serrated blade erupted through the five-time Oscar winner’s chest, then jerked upwards through his neck and jaw. It eventually got stuck halfway up his nose but by then, Tobey Maguire reckoned, the damage had probably been done.
“I guess I’d better… get busy living… or get busy dying,” said Morgan Freeman, although the hole in his throat and the knife embedded part-way through his skull meant it came out as a largely intelligible ejection of grunting and saliva.
Still, the thought was there.
“Jesus Christ!” cried Tobey Maguire.
“I don’t think so, kid,” said Colt.
“Hello,” whispered a voice through the now gaping hole in the lower half of Morgan Freeman’s face. For a moment, Tobey Maguire thought he could see an eye glaring at him through the wound, but then the knife was pulled free and the fleshy void flapped closed.
By the time Morgan Freeman hit the ground, the broken window showed nothing but the street beyond.
The killer was gone.
5.
Colt rushed to Morgan Freeman’s side and pressed his tongue against the Driving Miss Daisy star’s ravaged throat.
“What the fonk are you doing?” Tobey Maguire asked, visibly recoiling.
“What does it look like?” Colt asked, pulling his tongue back inside his mouth.
“It looks like you’re licking Morgan Freeman’s neck!”
“I was taking his pulse,” the sheriff explained. “But it’s no good. He’s dead.”
Tobey Maguire nodded. He didn’t need to see a coroner’s certificate to know Morgan Freeman was done for. His throat was hanging in ribbons, and half his face was inside-out. He couldn’t have got any deader if he’d tried.
“This was no accident,” said Colt.
Tobey Maguire blinked. “Well, yes. I mean… obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“Someone put a big knife through his head.”
Colt nodded. This made him fall over. Tobey Maguire helped him back up in awkward silence.
“That’s my conclusion, too,” Colt agreed. “But who would have done such a thing? And why?”
Tobey Maguire looked back over his shoulder at the squirrel. It shrugged.
“I thought you said it was your sister?” Tobey Maguire said.
Colt frowned. “Did I? When?”
“It’s started,” said the squirrel. “The brain’s eating itself. The memories are being gobbled up.”
“A minute ago,” Tobey Maguire said. “Val Carver. You said you had a sister who only said—”
“Hello.”
The voice came from beneath the floorboards this time, a sharp sudden ejection that hissed up through the gaps.
“Elijah,” Colt whispered.
“Tobey.”
“Sorry?”
“Forget it. What is it?”
“Fetch me my gun.”
“Your gun?” Tobey Maguire spat. “How the fonk can you use—?”
The blade stabbed up through the sole of Colt’s foot and out through his left eye socket. It wasn’t the worst thing Tobey Maguire had seen – those Spider-Man 3 reviews had been unusually harsh – but it was definitely in the top five.
“I can see it,” Colt gargled. “I can ssssssee it.”
No fonking wonder, Tobey Maguire reckoned, what with it sticking out through his retina like that.
“In y-your…”
The final word was lost in a series of damp wheezed and splutters.
While Colt was technically still alive, Tobey Maguire made the executive decision that it was pointless trying to help him, so turned and fonking legged it towards the door as fast as his legs would carry him. As he did, the sheriff’s office collapsed around him like a house of cards, the walls concertinaing into themselves as the roof evaporated into mist.
By the time he made his final frantic dive through the doorway, there was no doorway to dive through, and he just lunged through empty space instead.
Outside, the destruction continued. Carverville was crumbling. The undertaker’s and the general store had both slipped into a widening crack in the ground, so only their upstairs windows and roofs were visible. Dark clouds marched relentlessly across the blue sky, casting the whole place into deepening shadow.
Tobey Maguire watched in mute horror as half a dozen people tumbled out from inside the saloon, then immediately became dust on the swirling winds. He coughed and choked as the ash hit him in the face and snagged at the back of his throat.
“Hello,” came the whisper, the word rising almost tunefully at the end. “Hello!”
“Fonk off and leave me alone!” Tobey Maguire cried, throwing himself into cover behind an old hay wagon. “This isn’t real. None of this is real!”
“Ah, but you ain’t real either, Abbo,” the squirrel said. He was squatting on the ground a few feet away, relentlessly holding eye contact as he pinched off a loaf. “You’re just as make-believe as any of this stuff.”
“Do you mind not looking at me while you’re…” Tobey Maguire’s mind raced. “Wait. Wait, what did you say?”
“What’s the matter, Teapot? Shizz in your ears?”
“I’m just as make-believe as any of this stuff,” said Tobey Maguire.
“Right.”
“Which means it’s just as make-believe as me.”
“Yeah.”
“Which means it is me.”
The squirrel hesitated. “To be honest, I think you’re reaching there…”
“We’re all the same. Everything in here, it’s all just brainwaves or memories or… I don’t know. Mind stuff. Me, you, Morgan Freeman, Colt, the ground, the sky, the saloon, the—”
“Alright, alright, I get it,” said the squirrel. “We’re all the same. Woohoo. What’s your point, Sooty?”
Tobey Maguire inhaled deeply through his nose, then stepped out from behind the wagon. He flexed his arms, and what was left of Carverville seemed to flex with the
m.
“My point is, this is all in Cal’s imagination, and since we’re part of Cal, then it’s all in our imagination, too.”
The squirrel blinked. “You’ve lost me. What does that mean?”
“It means you were wrong, you racist fluffy-tailed fonk,” said Tobey Maguire. He folded his middle and forefingers in against his palms. Two jets of sticky webbing plastered the squirrel to the side of the wagon.
“I am Spider-Man!” cheered Tobey Maguire. He punched the air. “And I am going to rape the Mindraper.”
“Jesus,” said the squirrel.
Tobey Maguire winced. “Yeah. That came out badly. I’m not actually going to… I meant I’m going to, you know, defeat it.”
“Then why did you say you were going to rape it. I mean… wow.”
A ball of webbing hit the squirrel in the face, silencing it. “Shut the fonk up,” said Tobey Maguire, then he stepped fully out into the street and raised his voice to a shout. “Face me, Mindraper. Face me and die!”
6.
The wind rose into a hurricane that punched Tobey Maguire in the face. He staggered, off-balance, but somehow stayed upright as the gales buffeted and berated him.
“Is that the best you can do?” he hollered.
A flying brick hit him in the face.
“Ow! Jesus!”
“OK, that was better,” he admitted. “But if that’s all you’ve got, then—”
Tobey Maguire choked on the rest of the sentence as eight tiny knives embedded themselves in his thighs. He looked down, screamed briefly, then stumbled back into cover behind the wagon.
The knives were all primary colors, and seemed to be modelled on the swords from the board game Pop Up Pirate. They’d have looked quite fun, he thought, had they not currently been hilt deep in his flesh.
“How’s everything working out for you, Ace of Spades?” asked the squirrel, who had managed to chew through the face webbing.
“They’re not real. They’re not real,” Tobey Maguire whispered.
“The knives or your thighs?” the squirrel asked.
Tobey Maguire had meant the knives, but either one applied.
“Because the knives sure look pretty real. Painful, too. That right, Beanbag? They painful?”
Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz: Collected Short Stories Page 22