The Imaginary Corpse, page 5
I open my eyes. The Man in the Coat is walking away down the hall, completely unperturbed.
“Hey!” I shout, to no reaction. “Hey!”
The Man in the Coat steps around the corner, and his booming footsteps disappear completely. I get about two steps before the world tells me it’s time to sit down and stare.
The Man in the Coat is gone, traveled to another Idea. Spindleman is gone in a much worse way. All that’s left is a Smile House full of shocked Friends, and a single loose drill bit where our newest neighbor used to be.
Friends can’t die – not really, not permanently – but reminding myself of that isn’t bringing the mental swelling down. This feels wrong. This is wrong.
The other Friends file back my way, tip-toeing and peering around each other. I hear Focred’s old plasma-axe sizzling the nearby air molecules, feel the change in the T-rex’s stance that tells me she’s primed to bite. I hear the Sadness Penguins all huddled together, their footsteps a concerned little drumbeat on the floorboards. I turn toward them, and look into the field of expectant eyes.
“What happened?” burrs Focred.
“Where’s the new kid?” growls the T-rex.
I draw myself up to what height I’m capable of. I’m scared. But the Tippy they need right now isn’t the scared one.
“Don’t worry,” I say, holding my voice girder-steady. “Detective Tippy is on the case.”
I feel the tension zip out of the room as soon as I speak. There’s been a murder, and that’s scary, but now here Detective Tippy is to investigate it. To set it right.
I pick up the drill bit from where it’s fallen, and turn it over in my paw. It smells like Spindleman. I know because sniffing it makes me want to shudder.
“But what was that?” asks Focred, zir fingers fidgeting against the haft of zir axe.
The honest answer is terrifying. So I smile. “Another monster who thinks the world’s their bed.”
One of the Sadness Penguins signs a question to me: Will the new Friend be back?
“Probably soon,” I say. “Listen, I need to analyze this…” I make a big deal of nonchalantly flipping the drill bit up in the air. “You all go and get tucked in. I’ll handle it from here.”
The other Friends take their turns nodding and assenting, Focred the most hesitant of all of them, but however much they resist, they all go. Every one of them hesitates before they go through their front door, looking back at me with an unsettled expression. Yeah, me too, folks.
I look again at the place where the fight broke out, leaning hard on my detective stuff. But there are no clues here, no sight, smell. Nothing my heart can pass to my brain while it takes a break. My stuffing is tied up in knots.
Friends can’t die. We can be already dead, like Lloyd and Rocky, the vampire couple in the Terrible Old House. We can even be dead for a while, like King Max Courage of Pluto after he fought the Steel Serpents. But we don’t stay dead. Even in the Ideas where murder does exist, it happens according to set parameters, and it’s never really permanent. Yes, it’s violent, but no one is really hurt in the end. Trust me, we’ve asked the victims.
But this…
Everything about this is wrong. No; it isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that my detective stuff hasn’t seen anything like it before. And while that’s true of a lot of things in the Stillreal, this feels different than just another new Idea. This feels new, and at the same time very, very old…
I shake my head, and fail to clear it. Between this and the rain in the same day, my head is a mess. I’m not going to figure anything out just sitting here, and I’m not going to get more awake and aware by burning the midnight oil. I need to take this drill bit back to where I can concentrate on it, and if that doesn’t get me a lead, then I need to come back here tomorrow when Spindleman’s back. Its testimony should tell me the real shape of this case.
I walk downstairs, head back to my apartment, and try to get some sleep.
I don’t succeed.
CHAPTER SIX
Morning hits sooner than I’d like. I peel myself out from under the covers, roll out of bed onto the pile of root beer bottles, and check on the drill bit from last night. It’s still on my night-stand, still in existence, and that in itself is a clue. And not a good one.
I take a deep breath, swig some root beer from the flask in my desk, and head out for Smile House looking my bedraggled best.
Police tape is plastered over the House’s mouth. I duck under it with my heart in my stomach. The tape is normal, but I can’t get over how abnormal the rest of it feels.
The Sadness Penguins, Focred, and the T-rex are clustered on the eighth floor landing; the Penguins huddled close together, the other two standing with their shoulders slumped, all staring at the blank patch of floor where Spindleman died last night. My accelerating pulse finally gets me to breathe.
There’s another drill bit on the floor, a little ways down the hall from where ‒ from the site. There’s another one resting against the opposite wall; a screw a little ways down the hallway; a small piece of leather strap and a buckle over there…
My head is spinning. I feel Focred and the Sadness Penguins looking at me as I march toward the apartment Golem Jones picked out for Spindleman. My detective stuff is shouting that something is incredibly wrong, but I’m not letting myself make the connections yet.
The doors of Smile House are hung with the names of the Friends who live there. Doomster the friendly bed monster. Regina the T-rex. King Max Courage of Pluto. And a blank door that should say ‘Spindleman.’
Why is it blank? Why would the idea reset to…this? Please, no…
I’m a detective, but I’m also a dinosaur; when thinking fails, I tend to back it up with headbutts. I put my head down and get ready to go straight through the door to the juicy clues inside, but I’m stopped by a booming call of “Hey!”
The voice comes from all around me, vibrating floorboards and creaking doors and other wood-and-stone noises, all knit together to form a beleaguered tone.
“Were you really just going to break down my door?” the voice asks, doubt teetering on the edge of rage. Only Smile House can manage that perfect mix of tired, mad, and scared.
(Not every building in the Stillreal is intelligent. Just some of the really old ones.)
“I’m sorry,” I say from the brink of panic. “I just ‒ I have this feeling that something is–”
“Wrong?” the House interrupts. “Something is always wrong somewhere,” it mutters, punctuated with the angry bang of a door.
“Of course,” I say, softening under the pressure of my guilt. “But I mean, my detective stuff says this is something really, really big, and–”
“And it’s a case. And you’re Detective Tippy. Which means you will do absolutely anything to get at the next clue. Including breaking my doors.”
That stings, but I have to let it go. There’s no point in being offended when Smile House cuts to the core of you. It’s in a perfect position to see the best and worst of a whole lot of Friends.
“It’s about your new resident,” I say. “The nightmare. The drill-monster.”
“Spindleman,” the House sighs in a chorus of rattling windowpanes. “I figured, given the door you’re attacking.”
“It died last night,” I say.
Smile House goes silent, a loaded, nerve-grating stillness that fills the entire building. I hear footsteps coming down the hall, over a half-dozen sets of them, walking with a dull lack of energy.
“Can you please open the door?” I say.
The windowpanes rattle again. “I can… but you won’t like it.”
“I get the feeling I’m not going to like anything about today.”
Smile House sighs, shaking the doors in their frames. It sounds like it pities me, and I think that hurts most of all.
“Thank you for not breaking down my door,” it says.
It opens. I see everything I need to see in about three seconds, but it takes another thirty to finally stop denying it.
The room is furnished with a plain white easy chair, a plain white couch, a TV with big rabbit-ear antennas. There are some dishes stacked up by the sink, and every surface is either white drywall, wood grain, or silver metal. I know this look, because it’s the look of every other apartment in Smile House before someone starts living in it. There are no photos. No paintings. Not even any stains on the beige carpet. Nothing unique, not even the tiniest thing. And Spindleman was here overnight…
If an Idea stops being exposed to an outside Friend, it stops warping around their presence. It doesn’t take long for it to go back to normal. Like, say, a single night. But there are still those screws and drill bits in the hallway…
That’s when I get it. Immediately followed by me wishing I didn’t.
Spindleman didn’t come back to its new home. It stayed where it died.
I back out of the apartment. Only my detective stuff keeps me from bumping into Focred, standing at the front of the crowd of onlookers clustered by the open door.
“I told you,” sighs Smile House.
Focred tries to ask a question, but ze’s busy looking terrified. The Sadness Penguins offer me a hug.
The empty room, the shattered bits, the way Smile House is talking. The clues all point to one conclusion: Spindleman is actually, really, truly dead. And I just let the clues reset while I slept off some silly little rain.
“Detective?” asks the House. The note of concern is the last straw.
I walk back toward the stairs without a hug or an answer or a backward glance. I get downstairs as fast as I can without running. It won’t do Smile House’s residents any favors if they have to watch their best hope for justice and reason cry.
I know I get downstairs because my detective stuff warns me I’m about to blunder into police tape. I stumble backward, arch up into my I-meant-to-do-that pose. The tape’s been strung up over the door of Smile House in every conceivable direction, which means that not only are the police here, but they’ve been here for a while. How long was I upstairs? I shake off the question and walk out onto the sidewalk, almost smack-dab into the police.
Playtime Town has precisely two police officers, Officer Hot and Officer Cold. Hot is the good cop: a potbellied campfire with a permanent grin and giant ping-pong eyes, topped with a police cap. Officer Cold is less nice: a spindly icicle sculpted into a uniformed patrolman, his ticket pad always out and at the ready. Hot is mid-questioning, bouncing between Spiderhand, Golem Jones, Rocky, and Lloyd. He’s got the energy to deal with all of them, but only enough for them, which means I get to talk to Officer Cold. It’s my lucky freaking day, I guess.
I swallow the tennis ball of fear in my throat, and do some mental stretches in advance of Cold’s usual onslaught of derision. I’ll probably get a ticket for something, probably be told the Chief is howling for someone’s head over this case, probably hear about how detectives like me are scum…
“Detective Tippy,” Cold says as he bow-legs up to me. His crystalline face is drawn with stress. “What happened?”
“New nightmare,” I stammer. “Um. A new nightmare moved in yesterday, and – it was – killed?”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“Because I can’t be sure,” I snap back. I need to get on my game with my comebacks, or this is going to be a miserable experience. “Another new Friend attacked it with a bat, and it just… vanished.” The tennis ball is back.
Officer Cold’s brows slide up his icy forehead. “So the Friend with the bat took it somewhere?” The tremor in his voice says he knows my answer.
“No, it vanished.” I shake my head, shuffling back through last night’s clues. “There was a pop.”
“Pop?”
“Yeah, like when the wind blows through the space between your ears too fast?” I’m starting to get my rapport back, at least. “The guy beat Spindleman to death right in front of me.”
Cold taps at his ticket pad. “How can you be so sure this Spindleman is dead?”
“How does the ice you’re made of not melt?”
“That’s just how it is.”
“Exactly.”
Cold gives me a grimace. “So when will it resurrect?”
“That’s the problem,” I say. There’s no point in comforting him. “I don’t think it will.”
It’s impossible to miss the silence that comes in the wake of that statement. I can feel Hot’s lineup of suspects and witnesses looking at me in a half-dozen flavors of horror. They heard me. Of course they heard me.
Cold raises a casual eyebrow. “Friends don’t just die, Tippy.” His snide edge is kind of comforting; a dose of normal in all this weird.
“That’s why I’m on the case.”
“What case?”
“The one I just opened.” I know I should be nicer to Officer Cold, but I’m running short on anything except panic right now, and I need to conserve.
Officer Cold looks down at his pad. Tap, tap, tap. “This man with the bat, how was he dressed?”
“All black. Big long coat, wide-brimmed hat–”
“Could you see his face?”
I squint up at Cold. “Um. Not really?”
“Christ.” From what I hear, that’s the worst swear word Cold knows. “Were there any other witnesses?”
“The guy kicked in the door of Smile House and then chased Spindleman screaming around the eighth floor, so, yes?” I could just tell him about Focred and the Sadness Penguins, but where’s the fun in that?
Officer Cold sighs. “You wait right here,” he says, with a stern gesture toward the pavement. “We’re bringing you in for questioning.”
“Can I get a reason for that, Officer?”
“Because your story is the most pungent line of nonsense you have ever tried to sell me, and when you consider what you’ve already been dealing–”
“Yeah, yeah.” He’d keep going if I let him. “See you soon, Mr Congeniality.”
Cold taps on his pad again, disappears under the police tape, and I’m left to watch Officer Hot trying to talk to the giant eye-robot that lives downstairs from me, just in case maybe being a giant eye-robot meant she saw something important.
I don’t like Officer Cold. He’s callous, hidebound, and nasty. But today he’s extra-special. He was brief, he was acidic, and he barely stopped to verbally fence with me at all. He’s being too mean, too much like the Cold all us Friends think of when we think of him. It’s a performance, the kind of performance you put on when you’re worried.
Under normal circumstances, I’d blow Officer Cold off, make him come to my apartment to fish me out. These circumstances are anything but normal, though, so I sit and wait for my arrest like a good little triceratops. I need to know exactly what Cold is worried about, and I need to know if I can help. The little mysteries are just as important as the big ones.
See, I don’t always come off looking so bad.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Officers Hot and Cold throw me in the back of their midnight-blue armored car, along with Golem Jones and Rocky. Their presence tells me Hot and Cold are really reaching for suspects. Golem Jones is an almost-literal pillar of the community; at worst, he might have tried to give the murderer a bed for the night. And Rocky is so nonviolent he drinks pig blood from a carton so he doesn’t have to look at it. This isn’t a lineup, this is blindfolded darts.
I try for conversation, but Cold is on top of it, knocking on the barred window behind the front seat every time I say the word “Hello.” Talking is pointless anyway, with how stunned the others are. Rocky is taking it worst of all, long black hair hanging in front of a face that would be tear-stained if he could shed tears. Being a monster is rough to begin with, I can’t imagine how he feels about an actual killing. Before I can think of a way to check if he’s okay, we make it to the Police Station, where an apologetic Officer Hot frog-marches us out of the van, through the main office, and downstairs to the holding cells.
“Just doin’ the job,” he insists as he crams Jones and Rocky into the first cell, next to the Snitching Snipe’s garbage-and-pine-needle nest. The Snitching Snipe is a squat, filthy puff-ball of a bird with unblinking, red-rimmed dinner plates he calls eyes.
“Just doin’ the job,” Hot says again, a little lower, as he steers me down the hall to the interrogation room.
Whatever the creator’s plan for the interrogation room was, regular use for the interrogation of nightmares has shifted the room pretty significantly: it’s a cavernous, mint-green chamber with a steel table in the center, covered in enough straps to restrain any Friend regardless of limb count. The buckles stare at me accusingly as Hot shoves me into a bolted-down chair.
“Straps,” Cold says, with a gesture toward the table.
Two of the straps shoot down off the table like hungry cobras, and wrap around me, buckling my forepaws in place. Officer Cold paces in front of the one-way glass for a few seconds, then starts in on his usual opening questions, scratching at his fresh new legal pad. Officer Hot hovers behind him, fidgeting in every direction at once.
“Name for the record?” Cold asks.
“Detective Tippy.”
“Occupation?”
“Detective. Tippy.”
Cold glowers at me over his notepad. This is the way it goes every time we talk. The detective tweaks the cops’ noses, the cops treat the detective like either a suspect or garbage, everyone leaves happy. Sort of. This part, at least, feels normal.
“Why were you at Smile House at the time of the murder?” Cold says the word ‘murder’ like it’s in another language.
“I heard someone break in, and I know Smile House’s residents aren’t really well-equipped for violence. I figured I’d give them a hand.”
Cold watches me, dubious. “I understand you witnessed the incident?”
And here we have the lovely corner Cold’s hoping to back me into – he wants proof I was somehow involved. This is some Olympic-quality reaching. “Yes.”
“Can you describe what happened?”
The memory flashes back to me, and my stomach does its best to escape via my nostrils. I clear my throat, put on my finest monotone, and get down to the unbiased reporting. Cold scribbles on his notepad while I tell them about Spindleman begging and screaming, about the Man in the Coat making his dramatic entrance, about watching Spindleman get beaten to death with a baseball bat at the top of the Smile House stairs. I’m impressed with myself. I’ve never told such a horrible story with so little detail.
