Fool on the Hill (39 page)

“What I don’t understand,” Doubleday was complaining, “is why they can’t find somebody else to take care of this.”

“Busy night,” Hollister reminded him. Rand Hall drifted by on the right. “Half the town’s crocked.”

“Screw in hell with that,” replied Doubleday. “I just want to change these damn—”

(“ . . . help me . . .”) “—pants.”

“Did you hear that?” Hollister said, suddenly alert.

The second scream came a heartbeat later. Hollister braked and swung a hard right, driving down the sidewalk between Goldwin-Smith and Lincoln Halls; Doubleday’s hand dropped to the butt of his nightstick.

“Eyes sharp,” said Hollister, as they passed the Blue Light Phone and entered the Quad, headlights cutting a swath across the snow. The scream had cut off, and they could not be sure where it had come from.

“There!” Doubleday shouted, pointing. “Go left!”

In the southwest corner of the Quad, two figures lay one atop the other, partially covered by some sort of white sheet. They might almost have been lovers, but Doubleday saw differently. Beating the crap out of a rapist, he thought as they drew near, would just about even out his night.

The rapist seemed unperturbed by the patrol car’s approach. Ignoring the siren, the top figure bent lower, flexing arms that seemed unnaturally pale.

“My God, is it a woman?” said Hollister.

“Couldn’t be,” replied Doubleday. He was out of the car first, nightstick in hand, bellowing as he ran forward: “Hey! Hey, you son of a bitch!”

The Rubbermaid looked up and froze Doubleday in his tracks.

Sweet Jesus those eyes—

Doubleday dropped his nightstick in the snow. He took out his service revolver. Grinning, the Rubbermaid released Jinsei—who drew a ragged, painful breath—and stood up.

“Don’t you move!” Doubleday demanded shakily, leveling the gun. “Don’t you dare!”

The Rubbermaid took a step; Doubleday emptied the revolver into it. The bullets punched six neat holes in the mannequin’s leather bodice, exiting out the back. Unaffected, the ‘Maid kept coming, catching Doubleday by the wrist and collar, hoisting him into the air like a bale of hay.

“Jesus shit!” cried Doubleday, airborne. The Rubbermaid tossed him playfully back in the direction of the patrol car. He landed hard on the hood, his right arm connecting with the front windshield, breaking both. He rolled free, dropped onto the ground in a heap, and lay still.

Nattie Hollister had not been idle. She stood at the rear of the car, struggling to get the trunk open. The key stuck in the lock, refusing to turn. Grin still firmly in place, the Rubbermaid came forward as if to help her, hands flexing.

“Bastard!” Hollister swore. Thus rebuked, the key gave in and turned; the trunk lid sprang open. Hollister groped inside, flicking the safety off the shotgun as she drew it out.
No need to worry,
she thought.
If this baby isn’t loaded, the city’ll pay for your funeral.

She raised the gun. Aimed. Pulled the trigger.

It was empty.

The Rubbermaid plucked the weapon gingerly out of her grasp and
threw it aside. Hollister tried to duck away but the mannequin had her by the neck. They danced, the white sheet whipping around them both.

Then with a rocking thump Hollister found herself pinned up against the side of the patrol car, a single hand at her throat holding her motionless. With her own hands the lthacop beat at her assailant, but she might just as well have struck at a stone wall. The Rubbermaid drew back its free arm, making its intention plain by forking two fingers.

Hollister, who had once had the misfortune to see a man blinded with the jagged neck of a beer bottle, first widened her eyes in alarm and then shut them tightly. She drove both fists into the mannequin’s midsection, succeeding only in badly bruising her knuckles. The Rubbermaid held her steady for the finger thrust; Hollister struggled to the last, wondering how it would feel.

And at his Writing Desk Mr. Sunshine, who had done nothing but watch for the past fifty-seven minutes now shook his head, said “No, the fat cop maybe but not this one, too good a Character to lose just yet,” and Wrote,

and Rasferret the Grub shuddered as a great weariness came upon him, his present limit reached, his magic exhausted by the night’s activities.

The Rubbermaid’s eyes dimmed, its iron strength weakened.

“Gah!” Hollister gasped, jerking to the side with a last effort. The Rubbermaid’s arm shot forward, punching a hole in the patrol car passenger window just inches to the right of Hollister’s head. And there the mannequin froze, all life going out of It, its eyes dull glass once more. The white sheet caught in the wind and flew away down the Quad.

Her mind areel, Hollister withdrew fully from the Rubbermaid’s now rigid embrace, giving it a good stout kick with her boot. The ‘Maid fell over easily, the forked fingers trailing against the side of the car, making a sound like nails scratching at the side of a coffin, begging to be
let out once more.

Near silence followed, broken only by the moan of the wind and Hollister’s own shivering as she tried to cope with her shock. The New Year was thirteen minutes old; the killing hour was over.

THE NEXT DAY

I.

The Ithaca Police had a pretty depressing New Year’s Day. Beyond the actual prevention of crime, what are the meat and bones of law enforcement if not the apprehension and conviction of a perpetrator? And how is any sane cop supposed to cope when everything is provided as easily as a gift—witnesses, physical evidence, the “perpetrator” safely in custody—yet still there can be no conviction, no closing of the case, because the facts add up to an impossible occurrence?

Exhibit A was the Rubbermaid itself, shown by a preliminary lab examination to be nothing more or less than a life-size plastic doll, no regular store-window dummy but custom-made, yet lacking any internal or external mechanism that would allow it to move under its own power. Its eyes, glass beads embedded in the plastic of its face, might reflect light but could not glow on their own. Its legs and arms, though attached to the torso with ball swivels that allowed it to be posed somewhat, could not, again, move on their own, and in any case its fingers were rigid and unjointed—they could not grasp objects. Most certainly the Rubbermaid could not wield a weapon, much less commit murder.

Other evidence—and there was a lot of it—said differently. Just for starters, no less than five witnesses, two of them patrol officers, had either seen or heard the Rubbermaid in action, doing just those things, like walking and wielding, that it couldn’t do, that were impossible for it to do.

Then there was the physical evidence, a trail of hearty demolition that began with the shattered glass cases in the Tolkien House Mathom-Hole and ended with the battered patrol car and Doubleday’s broken arm. In between were a fair number of identifiable bootprints in snow and earth, as well as the extensive damage to the White Library. The north bay window had been knocked inward, leading to the logical question of exactly how the perpetrator had reached it from outside, as it was not readily accessible from the
ground, at least not to your typical human vandal. Likewise, the destruction of the White Library door—in a single blow, apparently—would seem to have required superhuman ability. And though broken glass lay everywhere, not a single drop of blood or skin scraping could be found, though there were a few shavings of plastic, a few shreds of white silk.

The bruise-marks on Jinsei Chung’s neck, sustained during her near-strangling were of the proper size and shape to have come from the mannequin’s hands, if a mannequin were capable of attempted strangulation (which of course the Rubbermaid was not). And when, acting on the last babbled words of the Chung girl before she was put under sedation, police searched Fall Creek Gorge and dredged up the body of one Miles Elijah Walker, alias Preacher, they discovered several black hair strands clutched in the frozen hand of the corpse. Not human hair. Synthetic. Walker’s cause of death was determined, not surprisingly, to be injuries sustained during a fall from the suspension bridge, but someone had given him a fair working over before he plummeted. The coroner’s report would indicate that the instrument involved in these earlier injuries might well have been the iron-shod mace found lying on the floor of the White Library, wielded with considerable force.

Oh, it was a headache of a day, all right. Hollister and Doubleday—he with his freshly-set arm in a sling—filed their reports on the incident, took care of a few other related matters, and then slipped away to a bar to see how much Scotch they could put down before passing out. Quite a lot, it so happened.

The story that appeared in the papers was a patchwork meld of fact and fiction: an unknown assailant of considerable strength (the police press release did not specify, but most of the newspapers assumed the assailant to be male) had gone amuck on the almost deserted Cornell campus, murdering one person and hospitalizing another; the names of the victims had not yet been released. (One name that did make the news was that of Rhetta Woolf, the head librarian at Uris, who had by a lucky fortune been down in the lower stacks and out of harm’s way when the intruder came through; she claimed to be quite shocked by the whole thing.) Two city police officers had chanced upon the scene of the second assault. In an attempt to apprehend the attacker one of the officers was injured; the attacker escaped. End of story. There was no mention of the Rubbermaid, wrapped up neatly in a large baggie and stored in the basement of the station house along with the other evidence, evidence which indicated against all logic that there was nothing more to be done. Not unless the laws of the state were changed to allow a mannequin to stand trial.

Just as well, though, that the community believe the killer to be still at large. Undoubtedly there would be pressures on the department to solve the case as soon as possible, but the news might also make people more careful. A positive side effect indeed, since if logic and rationality could be suspended once, there was no reason why they shouldn’t be suspended again, and soon.

II.

Hobart was alive.

Two sprites riding squirrelback from the Beebe Lake celebration to their homes had discovered him by chance, half-buried in a snowbank and frozen just as near to death as one can get without passing over. Neither magic nor medicine had been able to revive him; taken to a warm healing warren within the walls of the Straight, he slept in coma.

The wreckage of Puck’s biplane was discovered at first light. The surviving Rats, following Rasferret’s orders, had disposed of the bodies of their fallen comrades, and the sprites were left to conclude that the crash had come about through simple misadventure. A more careful examination of the hangar, the biplane, or the wound in Hobart’s shoulder might have suggested another possibility, but the Little People are not given to detective work.

Hobart’s survival was considered a miracle. Puck’s chances were thought to be slim indeed, and of course if he had faded there would be no corpse. In accordance with custom, then, a search of seven days would be conducted, and if he had not been located by the end of that time he would be officially given up as dead. Unofficially, in the minds of those closest to him, he might remain alive a good deal longer; loved ones of the deceased had been known to keep hoping for years, even decades. Such was the burden of a race whose bodies did not remain to rot.

Zephyr divided her time evenly that day between search duty and attending Hobart’s bedside. She kept remarkable control of herself throughout the morning and afternoon, but broke down shortly after sundown, laying her head across her Grandfather’s chest in a sudden outburst of sobs. The intensity of her emotion seemed to reach him, and he stirred the slightest bit, uttering one word before drifting back into comatose slumber.

“What Hobart?” Zephyr half begged of him. “What did you say?”

She thought the word on his lips had been
eyes
,
whatever that might mean, but she was wrong. Hobart, or whatever prophecy spoke through him, had referred to a time.

Ides
,
he had said.
Ides.

AN EYE TO THE IDES

The three Architects, vacationing Cornellians all, met to conspire in a Greenwich Village café on the sixth of January. The name of the place was Fischer’s Angry Serpent, only too appropriate since the Architects were conspiring about this year’s Green Dragon Parade, more specifically the Parade’s main attraction, the Dragon itself. Larretta Stodges, the Mastermind, held in her hand the August
Sun
editorial mocking last year’s Dragon, which had collapsed miserably not ten yards from its starting point. Larretta eyed her companions solemnly.

“This year,” Larretta said to them, “this March, we’re going to blow their plebian journalist minds. Our class is going to have the best, most exciting, most talked-about Dragon in the history of the event.”

“History?” queried Curlowski, the lowly one. “Who cares about history?”

“Think about it,” Larretta appealed to him. “The greatest success following on the heels of the greatest failure. Redemption for the College, immortality for us. We’ll be like gods. Just think about it.”

Curlowski thought about it; it still did not impress him. This was only to be expected, for Curlowski was very much like a tack, sharp but not terribly deep. Concepts on the level of immortality and godhood were beyond him, though when it came to calculating the stress on load-bearing members, he had no peer.

Modine, the third Architect, was not like a tack. He was, like, a total sex maniac. Beneath the table he had a hand on Larretta’s thigh, stroking. She let the hand stay but rapped it sharply across the knuckles with a steel T-square any time it strayed too close to an erogenous zone. It was all right; Modine had extremely resilient finger joints.

“So . . .” Modine said, after a particularly nasty knuckle-rap. “What this
uber
-Dragon
going to be like, ‘Retta baby?”

“Call me that again and you die,” answered Larretta. “Now I figure first off we want a big Dragon, huge, hulking, blot-out-the-sun kind of big . . .”

“On no,” Curlowski interrupted. “Size was one of the major factors in last year’s fiasco; they built it too big, and that threw off the balance.”

“Which is exactly why we have to have an even bigger Dragon,” she explained to him. “Your job is going to be to see to it that the suspension and balance are just right this time, while still giving us the maximum size possible. That’s how you impress people, Curlowski, by succeeding and superseding where others have failed miserably.”

“All right, I get the picture. What else are you planning to include in the structural design?”

“Wings,” said Larretta, raising her arms. “Huge green wings that really move instead of just hanging there.”

“No, wings are a bad idea. Wings catch the wind, that rocks the whole structure, and you’ve got another balance problem on your hands.”

“You’ll deal with it, Curlowski.”

“I’ll deal with it. Right.”

“One more thing, the most important of all: our Dragon is going to breathe fire.”

Curlowski dropped his glasses: “
Fire?
”

“Fire?” echoed Modine, actually withdrawing his hand. “Just a minute, isn’t the fire bit supposed to wait until the end of the Parade, when they torch the whole monster?”

“It’ll be great,” said Larretta. “The Dragon will be rolling along East Avenue toward the Engineering Quad, engineers all lined up to throw snowballs or mudballs, and all of a sudden
, foom!"

“I think
foom!
violates the Campus Code of Conduct,” Modine warned.

“Not to mention the rules of practicality,” added Curlowski. “You’re talking about a construct of wood, canvas, and papier-mâché. How is that supposed to breathe fire without igniting itself?”

Larretta Stodges shrugged. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I really don’t know. But we have until mid-March to figure it out . . . right?”

Modine nodded, looking a little nervous. After a brief hesitation, so did Curlowski.

In the end, they figured it out just fine.