The Imaginary Corpse, page 20
What the heck kind of monster am I dealing with?
“Wrrbrr,” Frieda says, “this is Tippy.” She gestures in my direction. “He is a good friend of mine, and he wants to ask you some questions.”
Wrrbrr looks at me with those marker-dot eyes, and I get dizzy at the fear I see there. It’s a face built for smiling that’s still figuring out how to show what they feel now, the face of someone who had the joy slapped out of their hands while they were still playing with it. I want to hug them and take them home and offer them some of Spiderhand’s cookies.
“Hi,” I say, with ashes in my mouth. “I’m Detective Tippy. What’s your name and pronoun?”
Frieda clears her throat. “Her name is–”
“I asked them,” I say, barely talking my eyes off Wrrbrr.
Frieda’s mouth goes quiet, but her eyes glow red.
The blobby little Friend looks at Frieda, at me, face scrunched up as they try to make the hardest decision. When they speak, it’s in a breathy little whisper, like air escaping from a party balloon.
“I’m Wrrbrr,” they say, a little roll to the ‘r’s that Frieda didn’t quite nail. “And… and…” They scrunch up their face again. “What’s a pronoun, please?”
So, so many cookies. “When I call you something besides your name,” I say, triple-checking it sounds simple without sounding condescending, “the words I use are pronouns. For some people, it’s he, him, and his; for some it’s she, her, and hers; I know a few it and its, some ze, zir, zirs.”
Wrrbrr again takes a questioning look at Frieda. “Um… I’m… that second one. I’m a she. Like Bonnie.”
I’m guessing Bonnie is her person, but I’m not sure she’s in a position to explain. “Pleased to meet you, Wrrbrr. How are you doing?”
“Scared!” she admits, with the ghost of a wail.
If I can’t pull off cookies, maybe I can try committing violence against everyone who ever hurt her. “What has you scared? Do you want to talk about it?”
“The Man,” she wheezes. “The Man who came for her when the other Man, the real Man, came.”
The real Man. My rage is cooled courtesy of the chills running up my spine. “Was he a man in a long, dark coat?”
“Yes!” Wrrbrr yelps.
Frieda glowers at me, eyes stop-sign red. I give her just enough glance to let her know the complaint has been noted.
“Listen, Wrrbrr,” I say. “I’m a detective. Do you know what a detective is?”
“Yes!” she says. “I – I read about you. Or people like you. You find things that are missing.”
She can read, and she can read at an advanced enough level to have read detective fiction. That doesn’t jive at all with the age range I’m guessing this half-formed Idea came from, which means either I’m missing my guess, or Frieda’s had her stashed in Santa Erzulie longer than I thought.
“So, Wrrbrr, detectives don’t just find things. Detectives also stop bad people. People who make things go missing. I’m…” About to scare you more? “I’m trying to stop the Man in the Coat.”
Wrrbrr’s eyes go wide and hopeful.
“And I’m hoping you can help me.”
Scratch the hope, mark up some fear. Wrrbrr’s head/body/thing shakes side to side in the universal gesture of half-conscious denial. “I… I don’t know if…” She slides backward, pressing herself flat against the floor. “I don’t think I can help…”
“If you can’t, that’s okay,” I say, as quiet and as soft as I can manage while every inch of me is on fire with worry. “But if you can, that’s great.”
“Um. Ask, please? I want to help.”
“Great.” I straighten my shoulders, check my tone in my head. “The Man in the Coat. When did he come for Bonnie?”
Wrrbrr squishes herself flat again. “A long time ago.”
“Do you remember how long?”
“A little over four months,” Frieda says. Her eyes are fading to an annoyed pink.
Three months, three weeks, two days, eight hours… “Okay. That’s,” – the words I dam up are ‘what I hoped to hear’ – “Do you remember the place you came from? The place Bonnie put you in?”
“The Space Kingdom,” Wrrbrr says. “I’m a space knight.” Her pride is the most painful thing I’ve heard yet today.
“Really?” I say.
“Yes,” Wrrbrr says, beaming, the black streak of her mouth suddenly shiny with primary-white teeth. “The youngest space knight!”
“That’s very impressive,” I say. It probably actually is, but better to act like it either way. “What do space knights do?”
She frowns. “They, um…” She stops for an uneasy breath. “Space knights defend the Space Kingdom, and all three moons, and the peanut butter swamp and the spoon people.”
“Against who?”
Confusion creases Wrrbrr’s face again. “Against – the fork people,” she says. “And the people in the nasty underpants.”
“The nasty underpants?” I almost giggle at the raw hate in her voice.
“Yes. The Nasty Party’s storm stupors.”
Oh. That’s a dark twist. “You fight the Nazi – Nasty Party, you say?”
“I used to,” she says, again confused, and more than a little pained. “But then… then…”
Her mouth winds up into an actual spiral, and the surface of her body starts to undulate. Detective stuff reads it as nerves.
Freedom Frieda lays one gentle wing on Wrrbrr. “It’s okay,” she says. “You’re okay.”
“But I failed…” Wrrbrr says.
I’m not crying.
“There was nothin’ you could do,” Frieda responds, eyes rocketing deep into blue.
Still not crying.
I wait for Wrrbrr to regain her stability before I continue.
“It sounds like you’re very courageous,” I say, to a warning look from Frieda.
“Queen said I was the bravest,” she boasts. “Because I have the most to fear.”
“That makes total sense,” I say. “Do you have a sword or any other symbol of office?”
“I have…” If that color is what I think it is, Wrrbrr blushes. “I have Star Power.”
“That’s very impressive,” I say, piling on the amazement. “What does Star Power do?”
Wrrbrr quivers for a second, afraid to meet my eyes. “We can put up stars as shields, or, um, fly around on shooting stars. We can summon the Star Sword or the Star Cannon.” The way she says it makes it sound like the best thing ever. “And we can look at the stars, and, um, and we can know the future.”
Know the future. There’s my opening. “Okay,” I say. “Do you think you could use the stars to learn something for me? Or maybe you already know it.” I make it sound like that would be the most impressive thing of all.
Wrrbrr grows a tiny bit taller. “What?” she asks. “What?”
Frieda is less looking daggers at me and more throwing entire silverware drawers with her face. I weather the judgment, and ask:
“Do you think you and the stars could help me get to the Space Kingdom?”
Wrrbrr’s mouth drops open. “What?” she squeaks.
Frieda goes back from pink to red, her beak clacking in warning.
“No pressure,” I say, lying. “No pressure at all, Wrrbrr, but – if you can get me back to the Space Kingdom, I can look there for – missing things. Hidden things.”
“Clues?” Wrrbrr snuffles. Her colors have gone paler, her eyes bigger to match her mouth.
I nod. “Clues.”
Her face shifts backward on her body, moving as far away from me as possible. “What clues, please?”
“It sounds like – I’m so sorry, but–” if you mess this up, Tippy, you are such a jerk “‒it sounds like you were one of the first to be attacked. If you can get me there, I might be able to figure out how to stop this.”
Wrrbrr grows a head and neck again, this time so she can shake it. “It’s not safe there,” she says, voice quivering.
“What kind of not safe?” I ask, and immediately regret it.
I deserve the blazing stink-eye I get from Freedom Frieda. When that terrible question comes out, Wrrbrr pancakes against the ground, huge eyes watching me like I might be about to explode. She shakes side to side again, less like she’s saying no and more like she’s gelatin that just got knocked off the counter.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I–”
“The Man is there,” Wrrbrr whimpers from the floor. “He stayed. He looked for me. He’s still looking for me. If I go back, he’ll come after me!”
I step toward her, and am blocked by the looming bulk of Freedom Frieda.
“It’s alright, Wrrbrr,” she says. “You don’t have to talk to him about the Space Kingdom.”
“I want to help!” Wrrbrr says. Her voice is cracking around the edges. “I really do, please, I really want to help–”
“I know, sweetie,” Frieda says, shifting into her knowing mother voice as she turns around. “And you’ll be able to help one day.”
“I want to go home…” More than the edges are cracking.
Frieda’s back arches. “I know, Wrrbrr. I know.”
“I’m a space knight,” Wrrbrr near-whispers. “A space knight is supposed to be brave, and nifty, and… and…” And then her voice is nothing but cracks.
Frieda picks Wrrbrr up, cradling and shushing her as she walks the whining, whimpering little jelly drop back into the hallway. Or that’s what my detective stuff tells me while I’m examining every detail of the floor.
The part of me that’s screaming isn’t as loud as the part that’s thanking the stroke of bad luck. Getting shut down is frustrating, getting stopped just shy of possibly cracking this case hurts at my core, but the thing that makes me feel the worst is how afraid I am. Not for poor Wrrbrr, but for myself.
Frieda comes back down the hall with the mechanical care of a parent trying not to wake a baby. She comes into the living room, eyes blazing like the noonday sun, and crosses her wings as she regards me with disgust.
“What were you thinkin’?” she hisses.
“This case threatens the entire Stillreal,” I say. “If there’s a lead I can pursue–”
“You don’t help the Stillreal if all of us are sufferin’ the entire time you’re workin’,” Frieda spits. “Wrrbrr has gone through enough.”
That stings. “We’ve all gone through a lot–”
“We didn’t go through it that young,” Frieda says.
All the fear, frustration, and pain wells up in me as I consider her very true statement, and the pressure pushes the absolute worst possible response out of me.
“I know you exist to take care of us,” I say, “but keeping one Friend hidden away doesn’t fix what the Man in the Coat did to your guests.”
Frieda rears up, wings unfurled, eyes so bright they turn the entire apartment red. She hesitates, pulls her wings back in, and looks at me with one eye red and one eye sapphire blue.
“I know you’re hurtin’,” she says. “So I forgive you.”
I start to respond, but–
“Now get out.”
She’s not about to brook another shot from me, no matter how witty it is. So I look out the window, find a trashcan sitting at the mouth of an alley, and admit defeat.
I land back in Playtime Town in Boss Raccoon’s alley. There’s no sign of him or the Worst Cat, but the piles of strangely cute garbage are disturbed in a way that makes it look like they left in a hurry. I look around the lifeless alley, and I have to wonder if they left, or were killed.
I have to fix this; none of us should have to think like that. The fear comes back to me when I remember what that means, given Frieda won’t let Wrrbrr help me.
I have to go back to the Memory Reefs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Tippy, did you forget what a plan looks like?”
I take another sip of the tea Spiderhand has brewed for us. This one tastes like peppermint and rose petals. “If I had, how would I know?”
Miss Mighty takes a deep, centering breath, and sits back down at the table. “I barely pulled you out of there last time, and that was only because Spidey pulled off a half-terrible plan in the first place.” She waves an annoyed hand in his direction, and balks when he enthusiastically waves back.
I can’t help it, I crack a grin. For a second, anyway. “Look, Mighty, I don’t like it either. But a lead is a lead is a lead.”
“Because that attitude has done well for us so far,” she mutters.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
That takes her off-guard. “What?”
“You don’t like my idea,” I say. “That makes sense. This is absolutely a very bad idea. We won’t be anywhere either of us knows well, we won’t–”
Spiderhand stops me with an ornate series of finger motions. If I had a shade besides yellow I would blush.
“Sorry – Spiderhand knows the area alright. Sorry Spidey.” I nod at his ‘it’s okay’ finger-dance. “Point is, I know. It’s the riskiest risk we could take.”
“And you know I am all about that,” Miss Mighty says. “But I need to know why we’re doing it.”
That may be the most subtext I have ever heard from Miss Mighty. I shake out my stitched-up body, and get ready to do what detectives are terrible at: telling secrets. “When you were down there… you saw the whales?”
“It’s kind of hard to miss whales.”
“Of course.” I don’t rise to the bait, not even for play. Now is not the time. “The octopi called them memory whales. They stored all their creator’s memories. Ones she hadn’t had yet, and all the ones she’d had–”
“The night she was attacked…” says Mighty, trailing off. “You think the whales might have her memory of the attacker. The Man’s person.” She gives me a crooked smile. “This is why we’re friends.”
“Thanks,” I say. “So yeah,” I continue, clearing my throat. “We have no idea how much of a mess it is down there, but if we’re going to solve this–”
“We are.”
Spiderhand agrees, too. I’ve got something in both my eyes.
“Anyway. It’s this, or we start combing through individual teacup pieces looking for a clue.”
Miss Mighty grimaces. “I’d rather get punched.”
“What else is new?”
Miss Mighty smirks, and bows her head in admission of being one-upped. “I’ll take you back to the Memory Reefs,” she says. “I wish we had a plan that was more of the good kind of exciting, but if you think this is the best way to get this handled, I trust you.” She lets out another sigh, slumps down in her chair. “Jesus, your job sucks, Tippy.”
“Lately? Yeah. Our job does suck.”
Miss Mighty snorts. “After we solve this case, I’m buying you like six dozen of whatever ludicrous excuse for beer you drink in Playtime Town.”
I smile, and let this brief calm wash over me. “We drink root beer.”
Miss Mighty shakes her head. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Because you’re actually one of the smartest Friends I know?”
“If you make me blush, I’m going to invert your face.”
“It’s nice to know you care. Spidey?”
Our local hand perks up, fingers curled into worry and anticipation.
“You good to go?”
He considers for a second, and hand-nods. I look at Miss Mighty, but she’s already holding onto his pinky finger and smiling at me like I’m a slowpoke. I love-hate my life.
Spiderhand concentrates on the teacups sitting out on the table, still smelling of mint, roses and so much sugar, and thinks us straight back to the white-gold ocean floor. Detective stuff says the floor has some new irregularities, but before I get moving, I look to Miss Mighty again. She nods and swims a few strides straight up, taking a sentry position while Spiderhand and I get to sifting through the sand.
The nearest irregularity in the floor is a deep tan color, long and lumpy. I’m already pretty sure I know what it is, enough so that I’m shaking when I dig it free. It’s a tool belt, like the one Plug left behind, but the color of the one Cable was wearing.
Dang it.
Miss Mighty whistles from above, points once she has my attention. I follow the point, and see Spidey, his hangdog gesture locked in place, holding up a screwdriver just like the one I saw in Breaker’s belt. That puts a little extra oomph into my search. I make a gesture that I hope Mighty and Spiderhand read as ‘try to find the other one.’
Mighty raises herself up a few more meters, taking a broader survey of the area. Down on the floor, I check outward in a spiral, pawing at every odd patch of color in the sand. I’m looking for leather, buckles, or the other bits I saw dangling off the cherry-colored octopus’ belt, but I get to the edge of the cell-caves without finding anything. The weight on my chest doesn’t go away, but it does get a little lighter.
I check the caves that served as our jail cells: empty. I swim the length of the outcropping the cells are built into: nothing there, either. I consider a second check of the caves, maybe even a sixth or seventh… but however I’d prefer today goes, in the end, I know I have to check inside their bigger cousin.
I find it difficult to even approach the opening of the big cave. I have to stop every other step to take full stock of my surroundings, make sure no towering monsters in barnacled coats are ready for batting practice. The inside of the cave has gone back to normal, no divots, no silty water, no signs of us nearly dying in the dark. I gulp, and I step a little bit further into the darkness. When nothing in the cave moves, I do the really foolish part of my investigation.
“Hello?”
Still nothing to hear, see, or smell. That’s got me more jangled than I expected. I back out of the cave, and start wadding up and throwing away ideas about what to do next. And as if on cue, Spiderhand comes shooting past me, flailing in absolute horror.
