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I Hate Halloween 2011
If the only thing that happened during Halloween was that people messing around with the occult messed around with the occult, then there would not be too much of a problem. After all, there’s only so much occult to go around, and generally the efforts of a bunch of confused amateurs only collide with each other. If a dozen people perform sacrifice rites to make themselves rulers of the world everything tends to get tangled up in itself, and you end up electing the governor of Texas or something.
No, the problem with Halloween is that the surge of magical energy ends up amplifying the powers, the senses, and the appetites of those who are already in tune with the rhythm of the outer spheres. Now, normally the word appetite is accompanied by a great deal of wink-wink nudge-nudge innuendo due to its implications, but when it comes to werewolves, vampires, sirens, goblins, gargoyles, dust bunnies, tooth fairies, and everything else that hides in little kids’s closets, this is normally accompanied by a large amount of time in the coroner’s office sorting the right remains into the right bins.
Of course, when you expect something like this, all sorts of people can take advantage of your expectations.
In Chicago the biggest divide comes between the south side and the north side. Inside the city the south vs. north boundary is often considered one of economics, the south side is poor, the north side is rich. Fundamentally you would suppose that the city’s elder denizens would separate along the same lines. After all, the vampires are as old money as you can get without being a re-incarnation of King Midas (who lives in Las Vegas anyway), whereas the act of splitting out of your clothes once a full moon and running around in the wilderness tends to divorce you from any attempt at living the high life.
But vampires, especially the local Dancescu clan, abhor what humans call “old money”. For one thing it’s difficult to explain where the family collection of Rembrandts came from without being able to explain that whole thing about getting ol’ van Rijn totally drunk one night. And for another, vampires, who know that everyone else is an inferior being, tend not to see any need to hobnob with the jet set. Not to mention the fact that some vampires prefer to live in regions inhabited by people who won’t be missed by the authorities if they...disappear. Of course, these days if those same people don’t reappear in about two days I’m usually knocking on the Dancescu door, so that isn’t as much benefit, but vampires are creatures of habit.
Meanwhile werewolves love the more affluent suburbs. Officially this is because the large yards give them more space to run through when they are...letting themselves go. Unofficially I suspect its because those large yards, and large houses, are often filled with dogs and cats. Domestic pets can sense the presence of werewolves, even if most werewolves are too fast to see, and it drives them fucking nuts. For some reason werewolves find this hilarious. If you’ve ever been in a house where suddenly the dog, either inside or outside, starts going crazy, chances are that a werewolf just passed by and is snickering about it quietly in the bush nearby.
So the unofficial rule is that the vampires, and their various affiliates inhabit the southern side, while the werewolves inhabit the north side. All of them stay away from the various ethnic enclaves that have grown up throughout the city, the gargoyles, the leprechauns, the garden gnomes, the sirens, the tooth fairies, the Cubs fans, etcetera. The problem of course is that there’s no good definition of where “south” ends and “north” begins, and so Halloween generally becomes a giant debate over geography, carried out by other means.
About three hours before the Halloween surge starts, everyone gets called into the big meeting room, and we get our assigned patrol sectors Normally it looks like an outbreak of measles over the north-south line, with a few catch-all groups to the rest of the city. This time I think Charity had just painted the map red.
“As you can see,” she began, “We’re a little short-handed this year.”
“Just like every other year,” Daren said despondently in the background.
Charity ignored that, “And we’ve got a lot more problems to deal with then normal. The entire city’s lit up. The only good news is that the vampire-werewolf feud may be a bit down this year. Both sides have agreed to keep it off the streets.”
“And you believe them?” Raven’s voice came from somewhere in the back of the room.
Charity nodded, “I have every reason to believe that they’ll keep their word.”
“They were fighting in the streets last week,” Raven pointed out.
“Considerably more then just fighting,” Charity said, “in fact, things went so far that the werewolves concocted a plan to poison the water supply. Not with much, just about a part per million of garlic, enough to make all the vampires feel a bit under the weather.”
She looked down at the papers she was holding and frowned, “Curiously, the vampires also had a plan to poison the water supply with a similar amount of silver particulate. Both plans seem to have succeeded. As such, I anticipate little trouble out of either of them.”
“You’re welcome,” I muttered under my breath. She glared at me.
"You don't look very appreciative," I noted.
"I'm not," she said.
"You're just jealous that you didn't think of it first," I said.
"No, I'm bothered by the fact that you managed to execute a scheme that even tangentially involved the city's water supply," she said. I shrugged and ignored her. You would think that my access to the water supply would be the least of her worries.
“But the entire country is a bit short-handed this year. Something about the economy. Also a giant robot on the loose in Nebraska,” and this with a hard look at Gate, who was trying to look innocent while also trying to gloat. It didn’t work very well.
“Fortunately, Coordinate has decided to send us a bit of help,” Charity said, shuffling the papers again, “Apparently there’s been another labor dispute. We’ve raided the offices of the International Union of Reality-Challenged Scientists, and we’ve managed to confiscate the army of assault troops that they were putting together. Units from that army will be deployed to assist us.”
“Which means what?” Daren asked.
“Um...about fourteen hundred clones of William Shatner.”
There was silence for a tense moment. Then, in the back of the room, Raven raised her hand, “Does Coordinate hate us?”
“Judging by the available evidence I would have to say yes, yes they do.”
That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the meeting, up until the point where she was handing out individual assignments to task force groups, which I noticed that I was not in.
“I can’t help but be unnerved by this,” I said, as she finally got around to me.
“That’s good, because I want you unnerved,” she said, “I need you to go out to Rosemont and go to the forest preserve there and talk to Silvermane.”
I gave her a deadpan look, “Really?”
“Yes, really, because I know that you are the only one of us who, um, well...you know, I just realized. I’m your boss. I don’t actually have to complete that sentence.”
“And you’re sending me alone?” I complained.
“Take some of the Shatner clones with you,” she shrugged.
Which left me outside the meeting room with nothing to do but to talk to Raven and Sam, both of whom were standing in the hallway. Neither of them looked particularly happy, but by the time you get up to Halloween you kind of expect that.
“I don’t like this whole clone thing,” Sam was saying, rubbing her hands together, “I mean, they’re people too. Is it all right to just treat them as things? I mean, if we prick them, don’t they say ‘ouch’?”
“Actually, they don’t,” I said, “They don’t feel pain.”
“You know about this?” Raven asked.
“I read the reports,” I shrugged, “Apparently they’re still having some problems with their quick-cloning techniques. Something’s not working too well. They ended up basically making them into vegetables and having to program them off of Priceline commercials and Star Trek clips on Youtube.”
“Wait, you’re telling me that a bunch of mad scientists didn’t manage to scrape together a full DVD set of the original series?” Raven asked.
“They did, but every time they got one, it got stolen,” I said.
“Figures,” Raven shrugged.
"Uh...at least they're good at fighting?" Sam suggested.
"Considering the age he was at when they cloned him, I wouldn't bet on it," I warned her, “Just remember, whatever you do, don’t tell them that you need to work out a deal."
“I’ll just tell ‘em that Klingons are around. That’ll distract ‘em,” Raven said.
---
You might think that the parking lot to a large, heavily forested, dark, unlit region would be bulging on a night like Halloween. After all, what could be more in the infantile spirit of the season then then going out and engaging in a number of very naughty tricks in a dark, scary wood with a companion of the gender of your choice? Apparently silk sheets. Kids these days are pretty damn spoiled if you ask me.
I would like to say that the trip there had been pleasant. It would be a lie. For one thing, I had to drive in Chicago, which is a bit like grinding one of your fingers off in a meat grinder. For another, my car was full of people who would not shut up.
“Captain’s log, supplemental,” the clone in the passenger seat said as he stepped out onto the asphalt, “We have arrived at our final destination, a small, wooded area-”
“Oh, shut up,” I snapped, entirely out of sorts with this sort of thing. I had been listening to it for an hour already. They had already eaten all the carpet in the back of the car.
“Where is this Silvermane?” left rear passenger clone asked.
“I don’t know. Silvermane’s a bit odd. I expect he’ll come to us eventually,” I said. Hopefully he remembered that we were coming. There were times when he forgot trifles like that.
“I’m sure we can work out a deal,” clone three said.
There was a rustle in the bushes and something stepped out of the copse of trees, shedding a layer of branches and falling leaves as it did so. It was difficult to see exactly what it was, as the moment it emerged it turned into a streak of pure silver in the moonlight, a bolt of lightning discharged carelessly in the middle of the clearing, dancing past us like we were standing still. Only Shatner clone two moved, folding up under the impact, flying backwards, and staring with mute incomprehension at the giant wound that had been ripped through his chest. Then he fell, still.
“He’s dead Jim,” clone number one said emotionlessly. Apparently they really were not affected by anything around them that did not fit into their programming.
“For Christ’s sake,” I grumbled, turning back to where the lightning had solidified into solid form, “Somebody had sex with a clone of William Shatner?”
To the human eye it would seem impossible for a creature who is basically a very large, very spry horse with a melee weapon strapped to its head to shrug, but Silverman managed it in an elaborate gesture that sent the moonlight rippling down his glistening fur. Unicorns always glisten in the moonlight at night. Even if you meet them in a completely sealed room, as long as its nighttime and no magic is involved, somehow there will be a crack in the wall and moonlight will stream down onto them. Even if there’s no moon. Even if the wall was solid only a few minutes ago. Unicorns have done more damage to park drainage tunnels then erosion, earthquakes, and radioactive mutant badgers combined.
“Anyway, what did you want to see me for?” I asked.
Silvermane reared up, mostly because I think unicorns can’t help rearing up whenever they turn, posed poetically for a few moments and then turned and trotted into the bush, clearly expecting me to follow.
“Captain’s log, supplemental. We are following the trail of the creature who took the life of-”
“Oh shut up,” I grumbled.
Silvermane did not lead us far, in fact at the beginning I didn’t think he was leading us anywhere because he paused in a large clearing that looked like the sort of place where people who think they’re clever dump their garbage. It was littered with debris. It took me a moment to realize that most of the debris was, in fact, ceramic, and that one of the pieces was very clearly head-shaped. It also had a very funny hat.
“Oh no,” I groaned.
Unicorns are a race basically obsessed with two things, chastity and the purity of nature’s wildness. Garden gnomes, on the other hand, are a small group of ceramic figurines who like things that grow in straight lines, and wear a phallic symbol strapped to their heads. It’s a match made in either hell or Las Vegas.
(An astute observer might point out that unicorns also have a phallic symbol attached to their heads. This theory has been touted before as a possible reason for why unicorns display many tendencies normally considered to be schizophrenic. However, like the question of how a species so dramatically committed to chastity can manage to reproduce, this question has been relegated to the category of unsolved questions. Not unasked questions, because it has been asked many times, but unsolved, because for some reason the answer always seems to involve a massive stab wound somewhere in the chest region).
“What were they doing here?” I asked. They weren’t supposed to be here. The forest preserves were supposed to be off limits.
Silvermane made another gesture to indicate that what they had been doing was being crushed into extremely fine powder under the influence of his sparkly hooves.
“All right, I’ll go talk to them,” I grumbled.
Silvermane nodded and graciously allowed us to leave the preserve without his attendance, which was good because I did not feel myself up to being gracious about anything. I understood now why Charity had sent me out to talk to Silvermane, because if she was going to send anyone to deal with the Garden Gnomes, it was going to be me. What I did not understand was why she couldn’t have warned me about it. Probably worried that I would find some way to weasel my way out of it. She was probably right too.
So it took me a moment to realize that there was someone standing next to my car. Since it was Halloween one could be forgiven for thinking that he was wearing a costume, but I knew that he always dressed like this. White lab coat, thick glasses, unkempt hair, it was always the same.
“Well, well, well Doctor Brenner. What business do the Mad Scientists have with me?” I asked.
“Reality-Challenged Scientists,” Brenner snapped.
“Whatever,” I shrugged. I don’t have to be politically correct to people who try to blow up the world about once a year.
“It shouldn’t surprise you to know that we arranged to be warned every time one of our shock troops was killed,” Brenner glanced at the body of the dead Shatner clone. It was already decaying into sludge, “I simply came out here to observe the process.”
“The head of the local Union came out to watch a clone melt?” I asked.
“I am a scientist. I have a duty to record the results of our experiments for the purpose of Science! Besides, I have a vested interest in rapid cloning,” Brenner squatted down next to the decaying clone, scraping a tiny bit of it into a sample bottle.
“Uh-huh,” I said, suspicious.
“Just try not to get too many of them killed. It took a lot of work to produce that batch,” Brenner snapped, as the three of us remaining got into our car, “Without performance data, all that work will be useless.”
“Right. Ask me if I care,” I said, and shut the door.
---
Very few people try to enter a garden supply store at night. Oh, there are always the occasional robber or two, but there’s not that much to steal in a garden supply store. Except gardening equipment, and who wants that? And also, to enter the grounds of even an open-air nursery uninvited is to court a threat that most mere thieves are impotent against. Because no sooner had I finished closing the door to the very large outdoor supply yard and turned back, then I found myself surrounded by garden gnomes.
They were everywhere, on top of the piles of garden tiles and the stacks of orange clay pots, balanced on timbers and fencing, perched on top of the gaudy artifice of uninstalled fountains. I turned my eyes from them for a moment and then turned back to look and found that they had spilled down the edges of the stacks of goods and several of them were now standing on the floor, much closer then they had been. Sightless ceramic eyes were now plastered all around me. Sighing, I turned back to the Shatner clones, who I had left outside the iron gate.
“Stand back,” I said. They moved back.
“Stand farther back.” They moved again.
“Look, stand behind that bench,” I pointed, realizing that anything modeled on the personality of the Youtube version of Captain Kirk was likely to need very explicit instructions on avoiding danger. By the time I turned back from that, the gnomes had made it almost up to my feet.
People in this situation are inclined to think that the garden gnomes are moving. This isn’t true. The entire idea is ridiculous. After all, what is a garden gnome besides a piece of poorly crafted ceramic or plastic, assembled in a factory in some third-world country and brought here to satisfy the kitschy desires of America’s suburban population? Something like that can’t think, can’t talk, can’t move. It has no ability to. It is only a statue. At best it shares association with other things due to its shape. It is like a chime resonating with the beating wings of a butterfly half a world away, or a tin can on the end of a very, very long string.
Anything else, any perception of motion or hostility, is simply a dream. Unfortunately, knowing this doesn’t help you if you ever find yourself in this situation, because it’s not your dream.
Reaching out carefully, trying not to think about what was going to happen, I touched the nearest garden gnome.
In Dread R’lyeh, the body of some indescribable, incomprehensible, sleeping creature spasmed about three feet in the air.
The shock of actually making physical and mental contact with an Old One overflowed the metaphysical holding capacity of the world and manifested itself as a bolt of lightning that earthed itself directly into my spine. Any living thing within about a hundred meters would have died instantly, painfully, unless adequately protected, or, due to certain circumstances largely beyond my control, they happened to be me.
This was why you made contact with the ancient, indescribable mind that controls garden gnomes in a lot empty of people. This was why they always acted through non-living statues that could not be overwhelmed by the sheer presence. This was why I always ended up with this job.
Somewhere in the darkness a sleeping mind stirred just a tad. The shape and focus of the dream changed. It no longer dreamed of a horde of interchangeable minions. Instead it dreamed of an eye opening, its eye opening, looking out, seeking out, reaching out with its presence to touch the being in front of it.
“Do that and I’ll poke your eye out,” I warned it.
The presence considered that. It sleepily considered all its dreams of mortals, who tossed and turned and writhed and swept their way past its dreaming roots like so many autumn leaves around the trunk of a sleeping oak. Then it reached out anyway.
The first one had been a lightning bolt. This one was more like a tornado, except that instead of a cyclone of wind it was a cyclone of aetheric lightning. Had it been confined to the physical realm instead of the metaphysical, it probably would have leveled everything in about six city blocks in every direction. There was a distinct taint of ozone in the air anyway as some of the discharge burnt over into static electricity and earthed itself in anything made of metal.
“I bet that hurt,” I said conversationally.
There was a scent of burnt flesh, despite the fact that there was no flesh to burn and the sense that something, now diminished by the equivalent of a medium-sized tactical nuke, was drawing back. There was also the sense of something feeling slightly hurt at its situation.
“Oh don’t come crying to me. I warned you,” I said.
There was a sense of petulance.
“Do I have to kick your ass?” I asked.
The Old One considered this possibility to. Old Ones, for all their indescribable power, are profoundly vulnerable. For one thing, they’re asleep. They stay asleep because they have to stay asleep, because otherwise they can’t fit. Old Ones are a concept, an elementary thought, a four-dimensional peg nailed into a three-dimensional hole. The universe simply isn’t large enough to fit their consciousness inside of it. It’s like fitting an elephant inside a phone booth, except this phone booth won’t explode comically. Only their dreams can fit inside the universe. At the same time, because their bodies are stuck in this reality, they’re mortal. They can be hurt. They can be killed.
And they can’t leave.
Because as much as the Old Ones would hate to admit it (and they don’t admit it, even in the darkest, twisted recesses of their cathedral-sized hearts), they need humans. They are the embodiment of some part of the human psyche, some piece of our dreams that knows that their are awful horrors sleeping just beneath the surface of our reality, and so there are. The Old Ones themselves believe, or profess to believe that they are old, immutable, unchangeable, the same as they were back before the universe was broken and they could fit inside entire. It is all a lie. It is all a dream.
Old Ones believe themselves aloof from the humanity that created them. Separate from the dreams that birthed them. That the flighty interests and changing nature of the humans who gave them birth have no effect on their eternal, immutable, fundamental existence. That they are as they always were, and that the already-fading fads of mortals are of no concern to them.
Those of us who know them know better.
“Are you quite done?” I asked.
The gnomes began to move. Or rather, they didn’t begin to move. The Old One had dreamed of them in one place. Now it dreamed of them in another, formed up in ranks, forming shapes that, if examined individually, appeared eldritch and arcane, until you saw the entire formation spread out before you.
LOL WUT
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I groaned.
Old Ones like to believe themselves immortal and immutable, unchanged by the flow and change of human dreams. There exists evidence to the contrary.
“You’ve been bothering the unicorns,” I said.
The gnomes moved again: LOL UN1CRNS WUT
“You know what I’m talking about.”
THEY 1N MY G4RD3N BR8N MY 9N0M35
“I hate the internet,” I said.
Then I thought about that some more, “Wait, they came into your...garden?”
LOL YES
Which did not make any sense, because the only way from the forest preserves to the garden centers where the Garden Gnomes tended to congregate was via streets. Streets are made of asphalt. Sidewalks are made of concrete. If unicorns hate plants growing in straight lines as some sort of abomination to nature, you don’t want to know what they think of concrete sidewalks. The chance of Silvermane, or any unicorn managing to cross about three miles of city in order to spend their time smashing garden gnomes was...remote...at best.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
UN1CRNS HORN MK HOLES LOL
If you’ve ever had to deal with someone who has just woken up from sleep and is only temporarily visiting the land of the upright before returning to slumber, you know that they can be rather stupid. Old Ones are like that all the time.
“Can I see the broken ones?” I asked.
The gnomes turned into a giant arrow, pointing into the back of the garden center. I followed it.
To be honest, there’s not much you can tell by looking a bunch of smashed gnomes. Truthfully, I was not entirely surprised that Silvermane was being blamed for this mess. After all, unicorns, for all their foibles, are embodiments of the power of all things harmonious and righteous, and extradimensional abominations lying sleeping in their own pocket dimension are hardly good and righteous. The fact that Old Ones like things to grow in straight lines doesn’t help things much.
But several of them were especially smashed. Not crushed, but shattered. Unicorns don’t smash things like that, they step on them. It looks different. For one, even though the pieces are still in a circle, the circle tends to be smaller.
I looked up. There was no roof here yet. It was outdoors. The tarp that apparently was supposed to cover this place in winter had not yet been erected. Above it was open to the skies.
“This wasn’t crushed,” I said, mostly to myself, “It was dropped.”
I looked up some more. Belatedly it occurred to me that if unicorns were upset at the fact that garden gnomes were essentially the manifestations of divine OCD, that there were others who might be offended at the very idea of moving statues making a mockery of sculpted life. I thought about that for a moment.
“So you never actually heard the unicorns take the blame?” I asked.
EYE DUN T4LK 2 UN1CRNS
I looked down. I sighed, “Look, I’m going to go have a word with someone. Try not to give me a good reason to com back here for a bit, will you?”
LOL
I left the garden center, cursing to myself, waiting until I was out of the gate before picking up my cell phone.
“Yes?” Charity asked, sounding annoyed.
“I think I’m going to go have a word with Tavella.”
“Again?” Charity asked.
“Why? What else has she done?” I asked suspiciously.
“Raven and Sam were just over there. Something about dive-bombing centaurs or something. Look, there’s a lot going on tonight and-”
“Yeah, I think I’m seeing a pattern here,” I said, sighing and rolling my eyes. Then I looked down. There were two bodies lying there, twitching. Apparently they hadn’t stayed behind the bench. Well, I suppose Kirk wouldn't have either.
“Also, I think I just ran out of Shatner clones,” I said.
“You’re not the only one. You people are using them like they’re going out of style.”
“I don’t think that a clone of William Shatner programmed with Priceline commercials ever was in style,” I said.
“I’ll send some new ones with the next person to go by Tavella’s place. It’s sort of busy out there today.”
“It’ll probably get worse,” I said. I had a bad suspicion about this whole thing.
---
If there is anything that Chicago has a lot of, it’s abandoned buildings. I mean, every city has abandoned buildings, but sometimes Chicago seems to have more then its fair share, with the wreckage and ruins of warehouses, factories, packing plants, and railway depots stretched out as far as they eye can see. They are also in a constant stage of being reborn into other, different, re-purposed structures. It’s not Detroit for God’s sake.
Several of them, layers of graffiti aside, are in remarkably good shape. Some of them are rather gothic in architecture, suspiciously so really. This particular one looked like it had come out of the mind of an architect whose only exposure to reality was through gothic novels of the most inane sort. It was literally festooned with figures and figurines, carved creatures more numerous then any horde that had ever guarded a medieval cathedral.
Inside, with the moonlight coming through a few holes in the ceiling, it was much the same, the sense that once upon a time there had been something grand here, the intricate panolpy now marred by blank spots where heraldic crests and overdone figures of knights riding into battle had toppled into the embrace of gravity. The rest of the story was told by the mounting spirals of rusting, ill-fitting pipes that were on the verge of collapse, the remains of industrial equipment judged too worthless to bother removing from the walls. You got a good look at it as you made your way up the rickety fire stairwell, the shattered ruins of what had once been an empire.
At the top of the stairwell the door had been levered open, and the decay of one of the hinges made it unlikely that it would ever close again, letting me out into the cool night air and the pool of moonlight on the roof. From here it looked like the architect had expired in a aneurystic flurry of creativity, the last gasp of a fevered brain raised on Gothic novels beyond the ken of even the most flamboyant set designer for a Batman movie. Everything was decorated. Everything was a panorama of gargoyles, lining up like pigeons along the walls, staring out into empty space. Several hunched on the chimneys that had once linked the furnaces of the factory below to the world.
The nearest one, bulky, huge, with wings that draped down to the surface of the roof, opened her eyes, “Please speak quickly. I am almost to the end.”
“And what happens in the end?” I asked.
“Harry Potter realizes that his love for Jack Sparrow is simply passing infatuation, breaks out of his abusive relationship, and returns to his one true love, Cloud Strife, for solace,” Tavella said.
I declined from commenting on that. Gargoyles are the world’s consummate storytellers. Most of that comes from the fact that Gargoyles aren’t just nocturnal, they’re thautournal - they tend to hibernate unless there’s a surge of ambient magic. And instead of proper hibernating, which usually means sleeping, they simply sit there in a stupor, frozen in place. And if you can say anything about sitting in one place for three or four weeks at a time, seeing the same scenery, watching the same space, only mustering up the occasional burst of energy needed to snack on a passing pigeon, it’s that it’s really, really boring. So gargoyles pass the time by composing stories in their head.
Gargoyles are probably the world’s best storytellers, the most imaginative and inventive. Well, among gargoyles. Because, if you haven’t noticed, a huge amount (the majority) of human literature finds itself obsessed with ideas of sex and romance, the havoc it wreaks in daily routine, the changes it inspires in ourselves. Gargoyles understand this, but at some level they simply don’t comprehend the role that mating takes in human society. Gargoyle reproduction simply doesn’t work that way. One mark of their superiority in storytelling is their ability to write stories about romance, or sex, that are in any way relatable to species without a girsel-gran.
(And no, I am not explaining what that is, or how it works. It would take me ninety minutes and a chalkboard whose surface extends into at least four dimensions).
So gargoyles huddle on the roof and compose fiction for humans, to be shared on the internet, in the same fashion that humans do, because after about a thousand years you’re desperate for something new, and the internet is still shiny enough to hold their attention. They’re still not very good at it.
“Have you been harassing Garden Gnomes?” I asked.
Tavella sighed, “Honestly, you humans. Always it is one thing or another. Just now, are you fighting with the centaurs? Now, are you fighting with the Garden Gnomes? No, we never fight, no matter how many times we are attacked, unless we are truly threatened. Even when the tooth fairies come and-”
“Wait, you’re having problems with the tooth fairies?” I asked.
“Yes. They come in the daytime to vex us. It is very...frustrating,” gargoyles can pronounce the word ‘frustrating’ with a great many more sharpened teeth in it then a human can.
“Have you seen them?” I asked.
“No. But we recognize their magics. Who else attacks you with teeth thrown from the sky?” Tavella shrugged.
“Someone who can throw teeth,” I grumbled. Well, wasn’t this shaping up to be grand? “Look, sorry to bother you. I’ll be on my way now.”
“Yes, do go. I need to post this tonight,” Tavella closed her eyes and returned to her meditations.
I got halfway down the stairs when I met Daren and Gate on their way up, followed by two Shatner clones. The clones were arguing about hotel prices. Daren looked unhappy, but he always looked unhappy. Gate looked unhappy too. He never looked unhappy. I took that as a bad sign.
“Charity said you might be here,” Daren sighed, like this was the end of the world or something.
“Charity says a lot of things, but it’s good that she can remember what I just told her,” I said.
“We were supposed to bring you some more Shatner clones, but they didn’t fit in the car,” Daren explained.
“Don’t bother with that. What are you doing here?” I asked.
"We're hear to negotiate a deal," said one of the clones.
"Shut up," I said automatically.
“Something about leprechauns,” Daren shrugged, “Apparently they’re complaining that someone’s been divebombing them.”
“Except they haven’t seen anything,” I filled in the blanks.
“Well, yeah, that’s usually how it goes.”
I glanced at Gate, wondering if he was here because of divine providence, or if Charity suspected that I would have need of his services. I gave up that line of thought quickly - Charity plays her cards so close to the chest that you would have to skin her alive to see them.
“Do you have a map of the disturbances tonight?” I asked.
Gate pulled the wrinkled map out of his pocket. There were red dots. A lot of red dots in sort of a blotch around the city. I wasn’t interested in that though. I was interested in where the red dots weren’t. And there was one spot conspicuously empty.
“Okay, stop what you’re doing here. I want you to meet me at Millennium Park in about one hour,” I tapped the map, thinking to myself.
“But Charity-” Daren began.
“Blame it on me,” I said, chewing on the distinction between necessity and disaster. Well, necessity was probably going to win out this time, “And Gate, I want you to bring Daisy.”
“Really?” Gate’s face brightened into the Megawatt range.
“Yes. No matter how much I regret it later, yes, really,” I sighed. I had promised myself before that I would never let Gate use Daisy in public. Well, promises are made to be broken.
“Charity’s not going to like that,” Daren predicted, gloomily.
“Blame it on me. She can’t fire me anyway,” I said, and went off to find the car.
---
I managed to get to Millennium Park about two hours early instead of the one I thought I had, which gave me a lot of time to stand in the dark and be happy about the fact that I had managed to excuse myself from running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Daren and Gate arrived about an hour later then I intended, because of traffic and a rogue parade of ghost mammoths. That meant that they only beat the squealing of wheels as a convoy of black cars pulled into the park by about five minutes.
Charity burst out of the passenger side door of the first car in the convoy, nearly dislodging it in the process, and stomped over to where I was huddled in my jacket against the hood of my car.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Because I can read a map,” I said.
There was a moment of very tense silence.
“You’re about to make a sexist joke, aren’t you?” Charity asked quietly.
“No. But you’re about to think up a dozen of them while you’re wondering what I’m going to say next,” I told her smugly. That would hopefully teach her for sending me out to deal with Garden Gnomes. I hate Garden Gnomes.
Raven, Sam, and Alice had meanwhile managed to pop out of their respective cars and were exchanging notes with Daren and Gate. I suspect the outcome of the notes was a collective decision that the two of us were probably insane. They were probably right.
Chairty’s eyes slid to the massive eighteen wheeler attempting to hide behind a lamppost, “I see you brought that out too.”
“She might come in handy,” I shrugged. Strangely, Charity’s burning irritation only served to warm me in the brisk autumn night.
“Anyway,” I said, as dozens of Shatner clones poured out of their vehicles, lining up on the street under the moonlight, and the lights illuminating the pedestrian bridge above, “I may be here, but I still don’t know why exactly-”
There was a crack above us. I looked up.
The steel supports holding up the pedestrian bridge were starting to fracture. Even as I watched, they snapped apart, the bridge simply rolling down like a log going over a waterfall. Where the bond should be below, the Shatner clones stared upwards in dull incomprehension. Then they were blotted out of existence by the impact of several tons of steel and concrete.
“You dropped a bridge on them?” I asked, somewhat in disbelief, “Really Brenner?”
The giant flying saucer that had been hiding behind its own invisibility shield should have been too high up and too far away for him to hear me, but I figured that at this point Brenner had turned on his microphones. He seemed to have, because in response to my question the sky flared and a giant piece of gleaming metal shaped vaguely like a manhole cover appeared in the sky. The edges, open to the night air, were crowded with white-coated scientists.
“Of course,” Brenner complained, coming to the fore, “It is poetic justice.”
“It’s a stupid imitation of a stupid idea,” I countered.
“Well, I see that you’ve figured it out. I must commend you on your efforts,” Brenner crossed his arms across his chest. You could barely see that from down below in the park.
“It wasn’t hard,” I complained, “I mean, smashed gnomes? Thrown teeth? Where’s the magic? Where’s the maelstroms of spells and lightning and all that stuff that these guys like to throw around? That didn’t look much like a magical war. It smelled of mad science.”
“Not MAD! Reality-impaired!” Brenner howled.
“I’m mad,” one of the scientists on the saucer volunteered.
“Quiet you!” Brenner shouted. Then he turned back to me, “Of course, I suppose my own presence tipped you off.”
“It helped,” I admitted.
“But still, it is now too late. Now the whole city is in the midst of war with each other-”
“-except the gargoyles,” I pointed out.
“They don’t count! They just sit on their ass all day! But the rest of the city, they are all at war. Soon their vaunted supremacy will be wasted away, and the world will have no choice but to bow to our power, to the power of Science!”
“You know, even if it is a fairly lame evil plan, you still shouldn’t give away all the details up front,” Charity said.
“But I haven’t. Why do you think I invited you here today? Why do you think I led you here? Because this is part of the trap,” Brenner held aloft some sort of remote control, “Now you are within our grasp! It is over for you. Good-bye!”
He pushed the button. To the south there was a fountain of sparks that rose about six stories in the air before petering out in a shower of ozone. Otherwise, there was nothing.
“I should note that I figured this whole thing out about two hours ago, after I lost the last of my Shatner clones. You haven’t been able to track me since then,” I said, “Which I’ve spent wandering around the park with a pair of insulated wire cutters. I don’t think that next button works either.”
Brenner grabbed the control in a fury and hurtled it down to the ground, “Then, if you will think you are so smart, you will feel the power of Science!”
In the distance, hidden amidst a copse of trees, something stirred, shaking its way free of the constraint of cold branches and piled leaves. A massive head rose out of the foliage and let out a bellow through a mouth filled with rank upon rank of glistening teeth. Then another appeared, and another, and another.
"That's new," I admitted.
“Now, you shall perish at the hands of our army of cloned Tyrannosaurus Rexes!” Brenner shouted to the heaves as the dinosaurs broke out of the trees, stomping our way. One of them caught sight of me and twisted its head, as if observing, before letting out a bellow that was loud enough to ruffle my jacket.
“This is the power of Science!” Brenner howled above the thunderous drumming of massive feet tearing into the ground, “Science is placing the power of the gods in the hands of humans, of putting nature at our call for the purpose of taking over the world!”
Gate jumped on top of the cab of the semi, raising one fist in pure anger, “That’s not Science!”
His voice, probably powered by religious outrage, managed to make it over the thundering of the herd of angry carnivorous dinosaurs, “The purpose of Science is to help us protect the Earth through the power of Giant Robots!”
Beneath his feet the semi-truck trailer began to transform. Charity and I both did the requisite craning of the head as we watched it unfold from horizontal to vertical, pausing only when it had gotten about three stories up.
“He’s added more rocket launchers to that thing since the last time I saw it,” Charity noted conversationally.
I winced back from a wave of heat, “Laser eyes too.”
A cloned dinosaur screamed as part of its skin was boiled off.
“I told you we should have gone with robots, but Nooooooo,” one of the other scientists could be heard complaining, “it had to be clones, you said. Clones are so much cooler then robots-”
“Shut up!” Brenner howled.
“So I was going to let the two of them debate this point for a while,” I said, gesturing to where Gate and his giant robot Alice were explaining the facts of thermodynamics to an unurly Tyrannosaurus.
“You, you, you have pushed me beyond my boundaries,” Brenner was really getting into it now. If he had carpeted the top of his flying saucer he would have been chewing it by now, “I will show you the power of Science!”
“You keep using that word,” I said, “I do not think it means-”
“Shut up!” Brenner howled. Something was happening to his flying saucer as it lowered down to the earth, a ramp appeared out of it, a glowing bridge of light.
“I admit! Cloning Shatner was a mistake! He never understood the true power of science! But there was another, a clone whose power was so great that even one of them might be enough to conquer the world. I didn’t make one of them though! I made hundreds! I made thousands! I made an army!”
The light shining down the bridge was almost intolerable now.
“Now! Come face the true power of Science! Face my army of clones of Leonard Nimoy!”
The light faded somewhat. There was a man standing in the light. He was tall and thin, with dark hair. There was a coffee cup in his hand.
He was also alone.
“The others wanted to tell you,” he said, in a very, very familiar and very deep voice, “that they are simply too awesome to take part in your crackpot scheme to take over the world. They already left. And now I intend to join them.”
With that he hopped down off the ramp and disappeared into the park.
“What? Why? Where?” Brenner was almost spluttering now. Then he appeared to recover himself, “All right! That does it! All of you, prepare for battle!”
An enormous arsenal of comically oversized and complicated gadgets appeared on the side of the saucer.
I turned around. Raven, Sam, and Alice were all standing there, watching me expectantly.
“All yours girls,” I gestured at the flying saucer with my thumb. The three of them were gone before I could blink. Ignoring that, I began to walk off.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Charity asked, her voice dangerous.
I paused, as a winged Stegosaurus, now covered in flames, crashed into a tree, “I’m going to go find a donut. Then I’m going to eat the donut. Then I’m going to avoid filling out the Environmental Impact form.”
“Oh no you aren’t,” Charity said, “You’re going to get me a donut. You're going to bring me that donut. You're going to watch me eat that donut. And then you’re going to fill out the Environmental Impact form yourself.”
There was an explosion as a gun the size of a small car turned into a blast of flame the size of a reasonably large hot air balloon.
I sighed, “How about we both go get a donut. Then we punch each other in the face for a while until we both decide to delegate the Environmental Impact Form to Raven.”
Charity turned to watch as a cluster of trees exploded into flames completely unbidden, “Same as last year then?”
“Yeah.”
“Works for me. But no pumpkin donuts this year. C’mon, let’s go.”
No, the problem with Halloween is that the surge of magical energy ends up amplifying the powers, the senses, and the appetites of those who are already in tune with the rhythm of the outer spheres. Now, normally the word appetite is accompanied by a great deal of wink-wink nudge-nudge innuendo due to its implications, but when it comes to werewolves, vampires, sirens, goblins, gargoyles, dust bunnies, tooth fairies, and everything else that hides in little kids’s closets, this is normally accompanied by a large amount of time in the coroner’s office sorting the right remains into the right bins.
Of course, when you expect something like this, all sorts of people can take advantage of your expectations.
In Chicago the biggest divide comes between the south side and the north side. Inside the city the south vs. north boundary is often considered one of economics, the south side is poor, the north side is rich. Fundamentally you would suppose that the city’s elder denizens would separate along the same lines. After all, the vampires are as old money as you can get without being a re-incarnation of King Midas (who lives in Las Vegas anyway), whereas the act of splitting out of your clothes once a full moon and running around in the wilderness tends to divorce you from any attempt at living the high life.
But vampires, especially the local Dancescu clan, abhor what humans call “old money”. For one thing it’s difficult to explain where the family collection of Rembrandts came from without being able to explain that whole thing about getting ol’ van Rijn totally drunk one night. And for another, vampires, who know that everyone else is an inferior being, tend not to see any need to hobnob with the jet set. Not to mention the fact that some vampires prefer to live in regions inhabited by people who won’t be missed by the authorities if they...disappear. Of course, these days if those same people don’t reappear in about two days I’m usually knocking on the Dancescu door, so that isn’t as much benefit, but vampires are creatures of habit.
Meanwhile werewolves love the more affluent suburbs. Officially this is because the large yards give them more space to run through when they are...letting themselves go. Unofficially I suspect its because those large yards, and large houses, are often filled with dogs and cats. Domestic pets can sense the presence of werewolves, even if most werewolves are too fast to see, and it drives them fucking nuts. For some reason werewolves find this hilarious. If you’ve ever been in a house where suddenly the dog, either inside or outside, starts going crazy, chances are that a werewolf just passed by and is snickering about it quietly in the bush nearby.
So the unofficial rule is that the vampires, and their various affiliates inhabit the southern side, while the werewolves inhabit the north side. All of them stay away from the various ethnic enclaves that have grown up throughout the city, the gargoyles, the leprechauns, the garden gnomes, the sirens, the tooth fairies, the Cubs fans, etcetera. The problem of course is that there’s no good definition of where “south” ends and “north” begins, and so Halloween generally becomes a giant debate over geography, carried out by other means.
About three hours before the Halloween surge starts, everyone gets called into the big meeting room, and we get our assigned patrol sectors Normally it looks like an outbreak of measles over the north-south line, with a few catch-all groups to the rest of the city. This time I think Charity had just painted the map red.
“As you can see,” she began, “We’re a little short-handed this year.”
“Just like every other year,” Daren said despondently in the background.
Charity ignored that, “And we’ve got a lot more problems to deal with then normal. The entire city’s lit up. The only good news is that the vampire-werewolf feud may be a bit down this year. Both sides have agreed to keep it off the streets.”
“And you believe them?” Raven’s voice came from somewhere in the back of the room.
Charity nodded, “I have every reason to believe that they’ll keep their word.”
“They were fighting in the streets last week,” Raven pointed out.
“Considerably more then just fighting,” Charity said, “in fact, things went so far that the werewolves concocted a plan to poison the water supply. Not with much, just about a part per million of garlic, enough to make all the vampires feel a bit under the weather.”
She looked down at the papers she was holding and frowned, “Curiously, the vampires also had a plan to poison the water supply with a similar amount of silver particulate. Both plans seem to have succeeded. As such, I anticipate little trouble out of either of them.”
“You’re welcome,” I muttered under my breath. She glared at me.
"You don't look very appreciative," I noted.
"I'm not," she said.
"You're just jealous that you didn't think of it first," I said.
"No, I'm bothered by the fact that you managed to execute a scheme that even tangentially involved the city's water supply," she said. I shrugged and ignored her. You would think that my access to the water supply would be the least of her worries.
“But the entire country is a bit short-handed this year. Something about the economy. Also a giant robot on the loose in Nebraska,” and this with a hard look at Gate, who was trying to look innocent while also trying to gloat. It didn’t work very well.
“Fortunately, Coordinate has decided to send us a bit of help,” Charity said, shuffling the papers again, “Apparently there’s been another labor dispute. We’ve raided the offices of the International Union of Reality-Challenged Scientists, and we’ve managed to confiscate the army of assault troops that they were putting together. Units from that army will be deployed to assist us.”
“Which means what?” Daren asked.
“Um...about fourteen hundred clones of William Shatner.”
There was silence for a tense moment. Then, in the back of the room, Raven raised her hand, “Does Coordinate hate us?”
“Judging by the available evidence I would have to say yes, yes they do.”
That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the meeting, up until the point where she was handing out individual assignments to task force groups, which I noticed that I was not in.
“I can’t help but be unnerved by this,” I said, as she finally got around to me.
“That’s good, because I want you unnerved,” she said, “I need you to go out to Rosemont and go to the forest preserve there and talk to Silvermane.”
I gave her a deadpan look, “Really?”
“Yes, really, because I know that you are the only one of us who, um, well...you know, I just realized. I’m your boss. I don’t actually have to complete that sentence.”
“And you’re sending me alone?” I complained.
“Take some of the Shatner clones with you,” she shrugged.
Which left me outside the meeting room with nothing to do but to talk to Raven and Sam, both of whom were standing in the hallway. Neither of them looked particularly happy, but by the time you get up to Halloween you kind of expect that.
“I don’t like this whole clone thing,” Sam was saying, rubbing her hands together, “I mean, they’re people too. Is it all right to just treat them as things? I mean, if we prick them, don’t they say ‘ouch’?”
“Actually, they don’t,” I said, “They don’t feel pain.”
“You know about this?” Raven asked.
“I read the reports,” I shrugged, “Apparently they’re still having some problems with their quick-cloning techniques. Something’s not working too well. They ended up basically making them into vegetables and having to program them off of Priceline commercials and Star Trek clips on Youtube.”
“Wait, you’re telling me that a bunch of mad scientists didn’t manage to scrape together a full DVD set of the original series?” Raven asked.
“They did, but every time they got one, it got stolen,” I said.
“Figures,” Raven shrugged.
"Uh...at least they're good at fighting?" Sam suggested.
"Considering the age he was at when they cloned him, I wouldn't bet on it," I warned her, “Just remember, whatever you do, don’t tell them that you need to work out a deal."
“I’ll just tell ‘em that Klingons are around. That’ll distract ‘em,” Raven said.
---
You might think that the parking lot to a large, heavily forested, dark, unlit region would be bulging on a night like Halloween. After all, what could be more in the infantile spirit of the season then then going out and engaging in a number of very naughty tricks in a dark, scary wood with a companion of the gender of your choice? Apparently silk sheets. Kids these days are pretty damn spoiled if you ask me.
I would like to say that the trip there had been pleasant. It would be a lie. For one thing, I had to drive in Chicago, which is a bit like grinding one of your fingers off in a meat grinder. For another, my car was full of people who would not shut up.
“Captain’s log, supplemental,” the clone in the passenger seat said as he stepped out onto the asphalt, “We have arrived at our final destination, a small, wooded area-”
“Oh, shut up,” I snapped, entirely out of sorts with this sort of thing. I had been listening to it for an hour already. They had already eaten all the carpet in the back of the car.
“Where is this Silvermane?” left rear passenger clone asked.
“I don’t know. Silvermane’s a bit odd. I expect he’ll come to us eventually,” I said. Hopefully he remembered that we were coming. There were times when he forgot trifles like that.
“I’m sure we can work out a deal,” clone three said.
There was a rustle in the bushes and something stepped out of the copse of trees, shedding a layer of branches and falling leaves as it did so. It was difficult to see exactly what it was, as the moment it emerged it turned into a streak of pure silver in the moonlight, a bolt of lightning discharged carelessly in the middle of the clearing, dancing past us like we were standing still. Only Shatner clone two moved, folding up under the impact, flying backwards, and staring with mute incomprehension at the giant wound that had been ripped through his chest. Then he fell, still.
“He’s dead Jim,” clone number one said emotionlessly. Apparently they really were not affected by anything around them that did not fit into their programming.
“For Christ’s sake,” I grumbled, turning back to where the lightning had solidified into solid form, “Somebody had sex with a clone of William Shatner?”
To the human eye it would seem impossible for a creature who is basically a very large, very spry horse with a melee weapon strapped to its head to shrug, but Silverman managed it in an elaborate gesture that sent the moonlight rippling down his glistening fur. Unicorns always glisten in the moonlight at night. Even if you meet them in a completely sealed room, as long as its nighttime and no magic is involved, somehow there will be a crack in the wall and moonlight will stream down onto them. Even if there’s no moon. Even if the wall was solid only a few minutes ago. Unicorns have done more damage to park drainage tunnels then erosion, earthquakes, and radioactive mutant badgers combined.
“Anyway, what did you want to see me for?” I asked.
Silvermane reared up, mostly because I think unicorns can’t help rearing up whenever they turn, posed poetically for a few moments and then turned and trotted into the bush, clearly expecting me to follow.
“Captain’s log, supplemental. We are following the trail of the creature who took the life of-”
“Oh shut up,” I grumbled.
Silvermane did not lead us far, in fact at the beginning I didn’t think he was leading us anywhere because he paused in a large clearing that looked like the sort of place where people who think they’re clever dump their garbage. It was littered with debris. It took me a moment to realize that most of the debris was, in fact, ceramic, and that one of the pieces was very clearly head-shaped. It also had a very funny hat.
“Oh no,” I groaned.
Unicorns are a race basically obsessed with two things, chastity and the purity of nature’s wildness. Garden gnomes, on the other hand, are a small group of ceramic figurines who like things that grow in straight lines, and wear a phallic symbol strapped to their heads. It’s a match made in either hell or Las Vegas.
(An astute observer might point out that unicorns also have a phallic symbol attached to their heads. This theory has been touted before as a possible reason for why unicorns display many tendencies normally considered to be schizophrenic. However, like the question of how a species so dramatically committed to chastity can manage to reproduce, this question has been relegated to the category of unsolved questions. Not unasked questions, because it has been asked many times, but unsolved, because for some reason the answer always seems to involve a massive stab wound somewhere in the chest region).
“What were they doing here?” I asked. They weren’t supposed to be here. The forest preserves were supposed to be off limits.
Silvermane made another gesture to indicate that what they had been doing was being crushed into extremely fine powder under the influence of his sparkly hooves.
“All right, I’ll go talk to them,” I grumbled.
Silvermane nodded and graciously allowed us to leave the preserve without his attendance, which was good because I did not feel myself up to being gracious about anything. I understood now why Charity had sent me out to talk to Silvermane, because if she was going to send anyone to deal with the Garden Gnomes, it was going to be me. What I did not understand was why she couldn’t have warned me about it. Probably worried that I would find some way to weasel my way out of it. She was probably right too.
So it took me a moment to realize that there was someone standing next to my car. Since it was Halloween one could be forgiven for thinking that he was wearing a costume, but I knew that he always dressed like this. White lab coat, thick glasses, unkempt hair, it was always the same.
“Well, well, well Doctor Brenner. What business do the Mad Scientists have with me?” I asked.
“Reality-Challenged Scientists,” Brenner snapped.
“Whatever,” I shrugged. I don’t have to be politically correct to people who try to blow up the world about once a year.
“It shouldn’t surprise you to know that we arranged to be warned every time one of our shock troops was killed,” Brenner glanced at the body of the dead Shatner clone. It was already decaying into sludge, “I simply came out here to observe the process.”
“The head of the local Union came out to watch a clone melt?” I asked.
“I am a scientist. I have a duty to record the results of our experiments for the purpose of Science! Besides, I have a vested interest in rapid cloning,” Brenner squatted down next to the decaying clone, scraping a tiny bit of it into a sample bottle.
“Uh-huh,” I said, suspicious.
“Just try not to get too many of them killed. It took a lot of work to produce that batch,” Brenner snapped, as the three of us remaining got into our car, “Without performance data, all that work will be useless.”
“Right. Ask me if I care,” I said, and shut the door.
---
Very few people try to enter a garden supply store at night. Oh, there are always the occasional robber or two, but there’s not that much to steal in a garden supply store. Except gardening equipment, and who wants that? And also, to enter the grounds of even an open-air nursery uninvited is to court a threat that most mere thieves are impotent against. Because no sooner had I finished closing the door to the very large outdoor supply yard and turned back, then I found myself surrounded by garden gnomes.
They were everywhere, on top of the piles of garden tiles and the stacks of orange clay pots, balanced on timbers and fencing, perched on top of the gaudy artifice of uninstalled fountains. I turned my eyes from them for a moment and then turned back to look and found that they had spilled down the edges of the stacks of goods and several of them were now standing on the floor, much closer then they had been. Sightless ceramic eyes were now plastered all around me. Sighing, I turned back to the Shatner clones, who I had left outside the iron gate.
“Stand back,” I said. They moved back.
“Stand farther back.” They moved again.
“Look, stand behind that bench,” I pointed, realizing that anything modeled on the personality of the Youtube version of Captain Kirk was likely to need very explicit instructions on avoiding danger. By the time I turned back from that, the gnomes had made it almost up to my feet.
People in this situation are inclined to think that the garden gnomes are moving. This isn’t true. The entire idea is ridiculous. After all, what is a garden gnome besides a piece of poorly crafted ceramic or plastic, assembled in a factory in some third-world country and brought here to satisfy the kitschy desires of America’s suburban population? Something like that can’t think, can’t talk, can’t move. It has no ability to. It is only a statue. At best it shares association with other things due to its shape. It is like a chime resonating with the beating wings of a butterfly half a world away, or a tin can on the end of a very, very long string.
Anything else, any perception of motion or hostility, is simply a dream. Unfortunately, knowing this doesn’t help you if you ever find yourself in this situation, because it’s not your dream.
Reaching out carefully, trying not to think about what was going to happen, I touched the nearest garden gnome.
In Dread R’lyeh, the body of some indescribable, incomprehensible, sleeping creature spasmed about three feet in the air.
The shock of actually making physical and mental contact with an Old One overflowed the metaphysical holding capacity of the world and manifested itself as a bolt of lightning that earthed itself directly into my spine. Any living thing within about a hundred meters would have died instantly, painfully, unless adequately protected, or, due to certain circumstances largely beyond my control, they happened to be me.
This was why you made contact with the ancient, indescribable mind that controls garden gnomes in a lot empty of people. This was why they always acted through non-living statues that could not be overwhelmed by the sheer presence. This was why I always ended up with this job.
Somewhere in the darkness a sleeping mind stirred just a tad. The shape and focus of the dream changed. It no longer dreamed of a horde of interchangeable minions. Instead it dreamed of an eye opening, its eye opening, looking out, seeking out, reaching out with its presence to touch the being in front of it.
“Do that and I’ll poke your eye out,” I warned it.
The presence considered that. It sleepily considered all its dreams of mortals, who tossed and turned and writhed and swept their way past its dreaming roots like so many autumn leaves around the trunk of a sleeping oak. Then it reached out anyway.
The first one had been a lightning bolt. This one was more like a tornado, except that instead of a cyclone of wind it was a cyclone of aetheric lightning. Had it been confined to the physical realm instead of the metaphysical, it probably would have leveled everything in about six city blocks in every direction. There was a distinct taint of ozone in the air anyway as some of the discharge burnt over into static electricity and earthed itself in anything made of metal.
“I bet that hurt,” I said conversationally.
There was a scent of burnt flesh, despite the fact that there was no flesh to burn and the sense that something, now diminished by the equivalent of a medium-sized tactical nuke, was drawing back. There was also the sense of something feeling slightly hurt at its situation.
“Oh don’t come crying to me. I warned you,” I said.
There was a sense of petulance.
“Do I have to kick your ass?” I asked.
The Old One considered this possibility to. Old Ones, for all their indescribable power, are profoundly vulnerable. For one thing, they’re asleep. They stay asleep because they have to stay asleep, because otherwise they can’t fit. Old Ones are a concept, an elementary thought, a four-dimensional peg nailed into a three-dimensional hole. The universe simply isn’t large enough to fit their consciousness inside of it. It’s like fitting an elephant inside a phone booth, except this phone booth won’t explode comically. Only their dreams can fit inside the universe. At the same time, because their bodies are stuck in this reality, they’re mortal. They can be hurt. They can be killed.
And they can’t leave.
Because as much as the Old Ones would hate to admit it (and they don’t admit it, even in the darkest, twisted recesses of their cathedral-sized hearts), they need humans. They are the embodiment of some part of the human psyche, some piece of our dreams that knows that their are awful horrors sleeping just beneath the surface of our reality, and so there are. The Old Ones themselves believe, or profess to believe that they are old, immutable, unchangeable, the same as they were back before the universe was broken and they could fit inside entire. It is all a lie. It is all a dream.
Old Ones believe themselves aloof from the humanity that created them. Separate from the dreams that birthed them. That the flighty interests and changing nature of the humans who gave them birth have no effect on their eternal, immutable, fundamental existence. That they are as they always were, and that the already-fading fads of mortals are of no concern to them.
Those of us who know them know better.
“Are you quite done?” I asked.
The gnomes began to move. Or rather, they didn’t begin to move. The Old One had dreamed of them in one place. Now it dreamed of them in another, formed up in ranks, forming shapes that, if examined individually, appeared eldritch and arcane, until you saw the entire formation spread out before you.
LOL WUT
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I groaned.
Old Ones like to believe themselves immortal and immutable, unchanged by the flow and change of human dreams. There exists evidence to the contrary.
“You’ve been bothering the unicorns,” I said.
The gnomes moved again: LOL UN1CRNS WUT
“You know what I’m talking about.”
THEY 1N MY G4RD3N BR8N MY 9N0M35
“I hate the internet,” I said.
Then I thought about that some more, “Wait, they came into your...garden?”
LOL YES
Which did not make any sense, because the only way from the forest preserves to the garden centers where the Garden Gnomes tended to congregate was via streets. Streets are made of asphalt. Sidewalks are made of concrete. If unicorns hate plants growing in straight lines as some sort of abomination to nature, you don’t want to know what they think of concrete sidewalks. The chance of Silvermane, or any unicorn managing to cross about three miles of city in order to spend their time smashing garden gnomes was...remote...at best.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
UN1CRNS HORN MK HOLES LOL
If you’ve ever had to deal with someone who has just woken up from sleep and is only temporarily visiting the land of the upright before returning to slumber, you know that they can be rather stupid. Old Ones are like that all the time.
“Can I see the broken ones?” I asked.
The gnomes turned into a giant arrow, pointing into the back of the garden center. I followed it.
To be honest, there’s not much you can tell by looking a bunch of smashed gnomes. Truthfully, I was not entirely surprised that Silvermane was being blamed for this mess. After all, unicorns, for all their foibles, are embodiments of the power of all things harmonious and righteous, and extradimensional abominations lying sleeping in their own pocket dimension are hardly good and righteous. The fact that Old Ones like things to grow in straight lines doesn’t help things much.
But several of them were especially smashed. Not crushed, but shattered. Unicorns don’t smash things like that, they step on them. It looks different. For one, even though the pieces are still in a circle, the circle tends to be smaller.
I looked up. There was no roof here yet. It was outdoors. The tarp that apparently was supposed to cover this place in winter had not yet been erected. Above it was open to the skies.
“This wasn’t crushed,” I said, mostly to myself, “It was dropped.”
I looked up some more. Belatedly it occurred to me that if unicorns were upset at the fact that garden gnomes were essentially the manifestations of divine OCD, that there were others who might be offended at the very idea of moving statues making a mockery of sculpted life. I thought about that for a moment.
“So you never actually heard the unicorns take the blame?” I asked.
EYE DUN T4LK 2 UN1CRNS
I looked down. I sighed, “Look, I’m going to go have a word with someone. Try not to give me a good reason to com back here for a bit, will you?”
LOL
I left the garden center, cursing to myself, waiting until I was out of the gate before picking up my cell phone.
“Yes?” Charity asked, sounding annoyed.
“I think I’m going to go have a word with Tavella.”
“Again?” Charity asked.
“Why? What else has she done?” I asked suspiciously.
“Raven and Sam were just over there. Something about dive-bombing centaurs or something. Look, there’s a lot going on tonight and-”
“Yeah, I think I’m seeing a pattern here,” I said, sighing and rolling my eyes. Then I looked down. There were two bodies lying there, twitching. Apparently they hadn’t stayed behind the bench. Well, I suppose Kirk wouldn't have either.
“Also, I think I just ran out of Shatner clones,” I said.
“You’re not the only one. You people are using them like they’re going out of style.”
“I don’t think that a clone of William Shatner programmed with Priceline commercials ever was in style,” I said.
“I’ll send some new ones with the next person to go by Tavella’s place. It’s sort of busy out there today.”
“It’ll probably get worse,” I said. I had a bad suspicion about this whole thing.
---
If there is anything that Chicago has a lot of, it’s abandoned buildings. I mean, every city has abandoned buildings, but sometimes Chicago seems to have more then its fair share, with the wreckage and ruins of warehouses, factories, packing plants, and railway depots stretched out as far as they eye can see. They are also in a constant stage of being reborn into other, different, re-purposed structures. It’s not Detroit for God’s sake.
Several of them, layers of graffiti aside, are in remarkably good shape. Some of them are rather gothic in architecture, suspiciously so really. This particular one looked like it had come out of the mind of an architect whose only exposure to reality was through gothic novels of the most inane sort. It was literally festooned with figures and figurines, carved creatures more numerous then any horde that had ever guarded a medieval cathedral.
Inside, with the moonlight coming through a few holes in the ceiling, it was much the same, the sense that once upon a time there had been something grand here, the intricate panolpy now marred by blank spots where heraldic crests and overdone figures of knights riding into battle had toppled into the embrace of gravity. The rest of the story was told by the mounting spirals of rusting, ill-fitting pipes that were on the verge of collapse, the remains of industrial equipment judged too worthless to bother removing from the walls. You got a good look at it as you made your way up the rickety fire stairwell, the shattered ruins of what had once been an empire.
At the top of the stairwell the door had been levered open, and the decay of one of the hinges made it unlikely that it would ever close again, letting me out into the cool night air and the pool of moonlight on the roof. From here it looked like the architect had expired in a aneurystic flurry of creativity, the last gasp of a fevered brain raised on Gothic novels beyond the ken of even the most flamboyant set designer for a Batman movie. Everything was decorated. Everything was a panorama of gargoyles, lining up like pigeons along the walls, staring out into empty space. Several hunched on the chimneys that had once linked the furnaces of the factory below to the world.
The nearest one, bulky, huge, with wings that draped down to the surface of the roof, opened her eyes, “Please speak quickly. I am almost to the end.”
“And what happens in the end?” I asked.
“Harry Potter realizes that his love for Jack Sparrow is simply passing infatuation, breaks out of his abusive relationship, and returns to his one true love, Cloud Strife, for solace,” Tavella said.
I declined from commenting on that. Gargoyles are the world’s consummate storytellers. Most of that comes from the fact that Gargoyles aren’t just nocturnal, they’re thautournal - they tend to hibernate unless there’s a surge of ambient magic. And instead of proper hibernating, which usually means sleeping, they simply sit there in a stupor, frozen in place. And if you can say anything about sitting in one place for three or four weeks at a time, seeing the same scenery, watching the same space, only mustering up the occasional burst of energy needed to snack on a passing pigeon, it’s that it’s really, really boring. So gargoyles pass the time by composing stories in their head.
Gargoyles are probably the world’s best storytellers, the most imaginative and inventive. Well, among gargoyles. Because, if you haven’t noticed, a huge amount (the majority) of human literature finds itself obsessed with ideas of sex and romance, the havoc it wreaks in daily routine, the changes it inspires in ourselves. Gargoyles understand this, but at some level they simply don’t comprehend the role that mating takes in human society. Gargoyle reproduction simply doesn’t work that way. One mark of their superiority in storytelling is their ability to write stories about romance, or sex, that are in any way relatable to species without a girsel-gran.
(And no, I am not explaining what that is, or how it works. It would take me ninety minutes and a chalkboard whose surface extends into at least four dimensions).
So gargoyles huddle on the roof and compose fiction for humans, to be shared on the internet, in the same fashion that humans do, because after about a thousand years you’re desperate for something new, and the internet is still shiny enough to hold their attention. They’re still not very good at it.
“Have you been harassing Garden Gnomes?” I asked.
Tavella sighed, “Honestly, you humans. Always it is one thing or another. Just now, are you fighting with the centaurs? Now, are you fighting with the Garden Gnomes? No, we never fight, no matter how many times we are attacked, unless we are truly threatened. Even when the tooth fairies come and-”
“Wait, you’re having problems with the tooth fairies?” I asked.
“Yes. They come in the daytime to vex us. It is very...frustrating,” gargoyles can pronounce the word ‘frustrating’ with a great many more sharpened teeth in it then a human can.
“Have you seen them?” I asked.
“No. But we recognize their magics. Who else attacks you with teeth thrown from the sky?” Tavella shrugged.
“Someone who can throw teeth,” I grumbled. Well, wasn’t this shaping up to be grand? “Look, sorry to bother you. I’ll be on my way now.”
“Yes, do go. I need to post this tonight,” Tavella closed her eyes and returned to her meditations.
I got halfway down the stairs when I met Daren and Gate on their way up, followed by two Shatner clones. The clones were arguing about hotel prices. Daren looked unhappy, but he always looked unhappy. Gate looked unhappy too. He never looked unhappy. I took that as a bad sign.
“Charity said you might be here,” Daren sighed, like this was the end of the world or something.
“Charity says a lot of things, but it’s good that she can remember what I just told her,” I said.
“We were supposed to bring you some more Shatner clones, but they didn’t fit in the car,” Daren explained.
“Don’t bother with that. What are you doing here?” I asked.
"We're hear to negotiate a deal," said one of the clones.
"Shut up," I said automatically.
“Something about leprechauns,” Daren shrugged, “Apparently they’re complaining that someone’s been divebombing them.”
“Except they haven’t seen anything,” I filled in the blanks.
“Well, yeah, that’s usually how it goes.”
I glanced at Gate, wondering if he was here because of divine providence, or if Charity suspected that I would have need of his services. I gave up that line of thought quickly - Charity plays her cards so close to the chest that you would have to skin her alive to see them.
“Do you have a map of the disturbances tonight?” I asked.
Gate pulled the wrinkled map out of his pocket. There were red dots. A lot of red dots in sort of a blotch around the city. I wasn’t interested in that though. I was interested in where the red dots weren’t. And there was one spot conspicuously empty.
“Okay, stop what you’re doing here. I want you to meet me at Millennium Park in about one hour,” I tapped the map, thinking to myself.
“But Charity-” Daren began.
“Blame it on me,” I said, chewing on the distinction between necessity and disaster. Well, necessity was probably going to win out this time, “And Gate, I want you to bring Daisy.”
“Really?” Gate’s face brightened into the Megawatt range.
“Yes. No matter how much I regret it later, yes, really,” I sighed. I had promised myself before that I would never let Gate use Daisy in public. Well, promises are made to be broken.
“Charity’s not going to like that,” Daren predicted, gloomily.
“Blame it on me. She can’t fire me anyway,” I said, and went off to find the car.
---
I managed to get to Millennium Park about two hours early instead of the one I thought I had, which gave me a lot of time to stand in the dark and be happy about the fact that I had managed to excuse myself from running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Daren and Gate arrived about an hour later then I intended, because of traffic and a rogue parade of ghost mammoths. That meant that they only beat the squealing of wheels as a convoy of black cars pulled into the park by about five minutes.
Charity burst out of the passenger side door of the first car in the convoy, nearly dislodging it in the process, and stomped over to where I was huddled in my jacket against the hood of my car.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Because I can read a map,” I said.
There was a moment of very tense silence.
“You’re about to make a sexist joke, aren’t you?” Charity asked quietly.
“No. But you’re about to think up a dozen of them while you’re wondering what I’m going to say next,” I told her smugly. That would hopefully teach her for sending me out to deal with Garden Gnomes. I hate Garden Gnomes.
Raven, Sam, and Alice had meanwhile managed to pop out of their respective cars and were exchanging notes with Daren and Gate. I suspect the outcome of the notes was a collective decision that the two of us were probably insane. They were probably right.
Chairty’s eyes slid to the massive eighteen wheeler attempting to hide behind a lamppost, “I see you brought that out too.”
“She might come in handy,” I shrugged. Strangely, Charity’s burning irritation only served to warm me in the brisk autumn night.
“Anyway,” I said, as dozens of Shatner clones poured out of their vehicles, lining up on the street under the moonlight, and the lights illuminating the pedestrian bridge above, “I may be here, but I still don’t know why exactly-”
There was a crack above us. I looked up.
The steel supports holding up the pedestrian bridge were starting to fracture. Even as I watched, they snapped apart, the bridge simply rolling down like a log going over a waterfall. Where the bond should be below, the Shatner clones stared upwards in dull incomprehension. Then they were blotted out of existence by the impact of several tons of steel and concrete.
“You dropped a bridge on them?” I asked, somewhat in disbelief, “Really Brenner?”
The giant flying saucer that had been hiding behind its own invisibility shield should have been too high up and too far away for him to hear me, but I figured that at this point Brenner had turned on his microphones. He seemed to have, because in response to my question the sky flared and a giant piece of gleaming metal shaped vaguely like a manhole cover appeared in the sky. The edges, open to the night air, were crowded with white-coated scientists.
“Of course,” Brenner complained, coming to the fore, “It is poetic justice.”
“It’s a stupid imitation of a stupid idea,” I countered.
“Well, I see that you’ve figured it out. I must commend you on your efforts,” Brenner crossed his arms across his chest. You could barely see that from down below in the park.
“It wasn’t hard,” I complained, “I mean, smashed gnomes? Thrown teeth? Where’s the magic? Where’s the maelstroms of spells and lightning and all that stuff that these guys like to throw around? That didn’t look much like a magical war. It smelled of mad science.”
“Not MAD! Reality-impaired!” Brenner howled.
“I’m mad,” one of the scientists on the saucer volunteered.
“Quiet you!” Brenner shouted. Then he turned back to me, “Of course, I suppose my own presence tipped you off.”
“It helped,” I admitted.
“But still, it is now too late. Now the whole city is in the midst of war with each other-”
“-except the gargoyles,” I pointed out.
“They don’t count! They just sit on their ass all day! But the rest of the city, they are all at war. Soon their vaunted supremacy will be wasted away, and the world will have no choice but to bow to our power, to the power of Science!”
“You know, even if it is a fairly lame evil plan, you still shouldn’t give away all the details up front,” Charity said.
“But I haven’t. Why do you think I invited you here today? Why do you think I led you here? Because this is part of the trap,” Brenner held aloft some sort of remote control, “Now you are within our grasp! It is over for you. Good-bye!”
He pushed the button. To the south there was a fountain of sparks that rose about six stories in the air before petering out in a shower of ozone. Otherwise, there was nothing.
“I should note that I figured this whole thing out about two hours ago, after I lost the last of my Shatner clones. You haven’t been able to track me since then,” I said, “Which I’ve spent wandering around the park with a pair of insulated wire cutters. I don’t think that next button works either.”
Brenner grabbed the control in a fury and hurtled it down to the ground, “Then, if you will think you are so smart, you will feel the power of Science!”
In the distance, hidden amidst a copse of trees, something stirred, shaking its way free of the constraint of cold branches and piled leaves. A massive head rose out of the foliage and let out a bellow through a mouth filled with rank upon rank of glistening teeth. Then another appeared, and another, and another.
"That's new," I admitted.
“Now, you shall perish at the hands of our army of cloned Tyrannosaurus Rexes!” Brenner shouted to the heaves as the dinosaurs broke out of the trees, stomping our way. One of them caught sight of me and twisted its head, as if observing, before letting out a bellow that was loud enough to ruffle my jacket.
“This is the power of Science!” Brenner howled above the thunderous drumming of massive feet tearing into the ground, “Science is placing the power of the gods in the hands of humans, of putting nature at our call for the purpose of taking over the world!”
Gate jumped on top of the cab of the semi, raising one fist in pure anger, “That’s not Science!”
His voice, probably powered by religious outrage, managed to make it over the thundering of the herd of angry carnivorous dinosaurs, “The purpose of Science is to help us protect the Earth through the power of Giant Robots!”
Beneath his feet the semi-truck trailer began to transform. Charity and I both did the requisite craning of the head as we watched it unfold from horizontal to vertical, pausing only when it had gotten about three stories up.
“He’s added more rocket launchers to that thing since the last time I saw it,” Charity noted conversationally.
I winced back from a wave of heat, “Laser eyes too.”
A cloned dinosaur screamed as part of its skin was boiled off.
“I told you we should have gone with robots, but Nooooooo,” one of the other scientists could be heard complaining, “it had to be clones, you said. Clones are so much cooler then robots-”
“Shut up!” Brenner howled.
“So I was going to let the two of them debate this point for a while,” I said, gesturing to where Gate and his giant robot Alice were explaining the facts of thermodynamics to an unurly Tyrannosaurus.
“You, you, you have pushed me beyond my boundaries,” Brenner was really getting into it now. If he had carpeted the top of his flying saucer he would have been chewing it by now, “I will show you the power of Science!”
“You keep using that word,” I said, “I do not think it means-”
“Shut up!” Brenner howled. Something was happening to his flying saucer as it lowered down to the earth, a ramp appeared out of it, a glowing bridge of light.
“I admit! Cloning Shatner was a mistake! He never understood the true power of science! But there was another, a clone whose power was so great that even one of them might be enough to conquer the world. I didn’t make one of them though! I made hundreds! I made thousands! I made an army!”
The light shining down the bridge was almost intolerable now.
“Now! Come face the true power of Science! Face my army of clones of Leonard Nimoy!”
The light faded somewhat. There was a man standing in the light. He was tall and thin, with dark hair. There was a coffee cup in his hand.
He was also alone.
“The others wanted to tell you,” he said, in a very, very familiar and very deep voice, “that they are simply too awesome to take part in your crackpot scheme to take over the world. They already left. And now I intend to join them.”
With that he hopped down off the ramp and disappeared into the park.
“What? Why? Where?” Brenner was almost spluttering now. Then he appeared to recover himself, “All right! That does it! All of you, prepare for battle!”
An enormous arsenal of comically oversized and complicated gadgets appeared on the side of the saucer.
I turned around. Raven, Sam, and Alice were all standing there, watching me expectantly.
“All yours girls,” I gestured at the flying saucer with my thumb. The three of them were gone before I could blink. Ignoring that, I began to walk off.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Charity asked, her voice dangerous.
I paused, as a winged Stegosaurus, now covered in flames, crashed into a tree, “I’m going to go find a donut. Then I’m going to eat the donut. Then I’m going to avoid filling out the Environmental Impact form.”
“Oh no you aren’t,” Charity said, “You’re going to get me a donut. You're going to bring me that donut. You're going to watch me eat that donut. And then you’re going to fill out the Environmental Impact form yourself.”
There was an explosion as a gun the size of a small car turned into a blast of flame the size of a reasonably large hot air balloon.
I sighed, “How about we both go get a donut. Then we punch each other in the face for a while until we both decide to delegate the Environmental Impact Form to Raven.”
Charity turned to watch as a cluster of trees exploded into flames completely unbidden, “Same as last year then?”
“Yeah.”
“Works for me. But no pumpkin donuts this year. C’mon, let’s go.”
no subject
The Shatner clones reminded me a bit of the Trilby clones in Yahtzee's Trilby/Chzo Mythos games, only funny rather than horrifying.
no subject
Since you have to get up early, aren't you allowed to wake Jeff?