Fourth Bear (2 page)

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

The neighborhood
in West Reading that centers on Compton Avenue is similar to much of Reading’s prewar urban housing. Bay windows, red brick, attached garage, sunrise doors. The people who live here are predominantly white collar: managers, stock controllers, IT consultants. They work, raise children, watch TV, fret over promotions, socialize. Commonplace for Reading or anywhere else, one would think, aside from one fact. For two decades this small neighborhood has harbored a worrying and unnatural secret: Their children, quite against the norms of acceptable levels of conduct…
behave themselves and respect their parents.
Meals are always finished, shoes neatly double-bowed and cries of please and thank you ring clearly and frequently throughout the households. Boys’ hair is always combed and cut above the collar, bedrooms are scrupulously clean, baths are taken at first request, and household chores are enthusiastically performed. Shocking, weird, unnatural—even creepy. But by far the most strenuously obeyed rule was this: Thumbs are never, repeat
never,
sucked.

“We used to call this neighborhood ‘Cautionary Valley’ in the old days,” said Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt to Constable Ashley. “Where vague threats of physical retribution for childhood misdemeanors came to violent fruition. Get out of bed, play with matches, refuse your soup or suck your thumb, and there was something under the bed to grab your ankles, spontaneous human combustion, accelerated starving or a double thumbectomy.” He sighed. “Of course, that was all a long time ago.”

It had been twenty-five years ago, to be exact. Jack had been only a mere subordinate in the Nursery Crime Division, which he now ran. Technically speaking, cautionary crime was “juvenilia” rather than “nursery,” but jurisdictional boundaries had blurred since the NCD’s inception in 1958 and their remit now included anything vaguely unexplainable. Sometimes Jack thought the NCD was just a mop that sponged up weird.

“Did you get any prosecutions back then?” asked Ashley, whose faint blue luminosity cast an eerie glow inside the parked car.

“We nicked a couple of ankle grabbers and took a chimney troll in for questioning, but the ringleader was always one giant stride ahead of us.”

“The Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man?”

“Right. We could never prove he snipped off the thumbs of errant suck-a-thumbs, but every lead we had pointed toward him. We never got to even
interview
him—the attacks suddenly stopped, and he just vanished into the night.”

“Moved on?”

“I wish. Ever met a Cautionary Valley child?”

“No.”

Jack shook his head sadly. “Sickeningly polite. A credit to their parents. Well mannered, helpful, courteous. We wanted to battle the Scissor-man and his cronies with everything the NCD could muster but were overruled by the local residents’ committee. They decided not to battle the cautionaries lurking in the woodwork but instead
use
them. They pursued a policy of ‘cautionary acquiescence’ by promulgating the stories and thus ensured that their children never had cause to accidentally invoke the cautionaries.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course. Believe me, once the hands really
do
grab your ankles when you get out of bed or the troll up the chimney
does
try to get you for not eating your greens, you make damn sure to do everything your parents tell you. But they’re still here,” added Jack as he looked around, “waiting in the fabric of the neighborhood. In the stone, earth and wood. Under beds and in closets. They’ll reappear when someone is leaning back on their chair, being slovenly, not eating their soup or—worst of all—sucking their thumb.”

They fell into silence and looked around, but all was normal. The summer’s night was cool and clear and the streets empty and quiet. They had been parked on Compton Avenue for twenty-five minutes, and nothing had appeared remotely out of the ordinary.

Things at the Nursery Crime Division were looking better than they had for many years, Jack admitted to himself. The success of the Humpty Dumpty inquiry four months earlier had placed himself and the NCD firmly in people’s consciousness. While not perhaps up there among cutting-edge police detection such as murder, serious robbery or the ever-popular “cold cases,” they were certainly more important than traffic or the motorcycle-display team. There were plans to increase the funding from its ridiculously low level and add a permanent staff beyond himself, DS Mary Mary and Constable Ashley.

“What’s the time?”

Ashley glanced at his watch.

“10010 past 1011.”

Jack did a quick calculation. Eighteen minutes past eleven. It was binary, of course, Ashley’s mother tongue. He generously spoke it as ones and zeros for Jack’s benefit—full-speed binary sounds like torn linen and is totally unintelligible. Ashley had no problem with English or any of the other twenty-three principal languages on the planet; it was the decimal numbering system he couldn’t get his head around. He was a Rambosian, an alien visitor from a small planet eighteen light-years away who had arrived quite unexpectedly along with 127 others four years previously. Every single one of the 70 billion or so inhabitants of Rambosia were huge fans of Earth’s prodigious output of television drama and comedy, and Ashley had been part of a mission to discover why there had never been a third series of
Fawlty Towers
and to interview John Cleese. But when the mission got to see just how much filing and bureaucratic data management there was on the planet, all 128 elected to stay.

Ashley had been in uniform for two years as part of the Alien Equal Opportunities Program and had found himself, after much reshuffling, at the Nursery Crime Division, where he could do no serious harm. His real name was 1001111001000100111011100100, but that was tricky to remember and even harder to pronounce. Get the emphasis wrong on the seventh digit and it could mean “My prawns have asthma.” He was about five feet tall with slender arms and legs that bent both ways at the elbows and knees. His head was twice the width of his shoulders, with big eyes, a small mouth and no nose. The UFO fraternity
had
got an alien’s appearance pretty much right, which surprised them all no end. His police uniform had been especially tailored to fit his unique physique, with a special elasticized girth, as Rambosians had a tendency to swell and contract depending on atmospheric pressure.

“So,” continued Jack, “ten minutes to go. What stories do Rambosians use to terrify their children into behaving themselves, Ash?”

“Vertical stripes, mainly.”

“Why?”

Jack watched Ashley think. Due to the Rambosian physiology of a translucent outer membrane filled with a blend of gelatinous liquid, Jack really
could
see his mind working. “Amorous linguini” was how one unkind observer put it—but that wasn’t far wrong.

“It’s the linear uniformity in the vertical plane,” Ashley explained with a shiver, and turned a darker shade of blue. “We don’t much fancy bar codes, railings or pinstripe suits either. Mind you,
horizontally
we have no problem with any of them—which is why we like to wear our pinstripes perpendicular to the norm.”

“I always wondered about that,” replied Jack slowly. Conversation was never easy with Ashley. There really wasn’t much in common between humans and Rambosians—except for a passionate interest in order and bureaucracy. During his lunch hour, Ashley could often be found indulging in his hobby of “carspotting,” which is like trainspotting, only with cars. On the weekends Rambosians would cluster around one of the town’s many vehicle-number-recognition cameras, where they’d all get a bit tipsy reading the binary data stream. Other than that they lived their own lives and didn’t say very much. That was the thing about aliens that no one ever really expected. They’re a bit dull.

The walkie-talkie crackled into life. “Jack, are you there?”

It was Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, Jack’s number two at the Nursery Crime Division. They had been together since the Humpty affair, and although there had been a few hiccups in the early days, they now got on well. She didn’t know why she’d been allocated to the NCD but was glad that she was. Despite its being a career black hole and the butt of many station jokes, she felt somehow that she
belonged.
She didn’t know why.

Jack picked up the radio and keyed the mike. “NCD-1 in position front of house. All quiet.”

“I thought I was NCD-1,” replied Mary over the airwaves. “I’m in the front line today.”

“No, you’re NCD-2. Ashley’s NCD-3, and Baker and Gretel are NCD-4 and -5.”

“I should be NCD-3,” cut in Baker. “I’ve been working part-time at the division longer than anyone.”

“Shall we stick to names?” asked Mary. “It’s going to be a lot easier.”

“Whatever. Spratt at front of house, nothing to report.”

“Good,” replied Mary. “We have thumb reentry in T minus? five minutes.”

This time there’d be no escape for the Scissor-man.

Inside the house Mary was briefing Conrad’s parents for the last time. They stared at her anxiously, but with both Jack and Ashley at the front and Gretel and Baker at the back, it seemed as safe a sting operation as they could make it.

“Your backs are to be turned for Conrad’s thumb to go in at 2330,” explained Mary as she checked her watch. “At the same time he should lean back on his chair, refuse to eat his soup and play with these matches. I’ll be in the closet and on the radio, so if we can’t catch the Scissor-man before he reaches the house, I’ll give the thumb-out order and Conrad aborts all actions. Do you understand?”

Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman looked at each other and then at Conrad, who at seventeen was old enough to understand the risks. Like many of the children in the area, he had lived in a condition of understated terror for so long that he now barely noticed. He had never had a brush with the cautionaries himself; the presence of Roland Snork in the neighborhood was enough for most children. Roland’s face was frozen in an ugly grimace because the wind
had
changed while he was making a face, and although the thirteen cosmetic surgeries had alleviated the problem somewhat, he was one of the more obvious warnings to uncautionary behavior. But if all went well, children like Roland wouldn’t suffer a lifetime of humiliation for a few injudiciously made faces. The parents of Cautionary Valley had banded together and unanimously voted for normality. For surly, grunty teenagers who dropped their clothes on the floor and stared vacantly out from behind lanky, unwashed hair. For untied shoelaces, messy rooms, homework left until the last moment, inappropriate boy/girlfriends and unregulated nose picking. For brooding silences, funny smells in the bathroom, hours spent on video games and ignored calls to the dinner table. It all seemed so normal, so
blissful.
They had phoned the police, who gladly batted it down the line to the Nursery Crime Division.

“We’re happy to go ahead, Sergeant,” said Mr. Hoffman with a dryness in his throat. “There are methods other than terror to instill discipline. We want to be like normal families, where threats of mutilation and a sorry end to achieve good behavior are met with a sarcastic, ‘Yeah, Dad, like way to go—you’re such a zoid, like, y’know. Tight.’”

He sighed deeply and turned to his son. “Conrad? Are you happy to go ahead?”

The boy nodded his head enthusiastically.

“Yes, Father,” he replied good-naturedly, “if it is for the good of everyone. Would anyone like a sandwich or a cup of tea?”

“No, Conrad. There’ll be no more tea making for you after tonight.”

“Are you sure? I could bake you all a cake, too—and then play the piano for your entertainment before taking the dog for a walk and repainting the spare room.”

Even Mary found him a bit creepy. She didn’t have any children of her own—unless you counted her collection of ex-boyfriends—but children to her were meant to be something a little more than mindless automatons.

The Hoffmans hugged each other nervously, but when Mr. Hoffman shook Mary’s hand, she noticed that his left thumb was missing.

“I was one of the first,” he muttered sadly, following her gaze.

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived. A life half lived is fear lived in half. A life half feared is fear half lived.”

Some people have a way with words, but Hoffman wasn’t one of them.

“What exactly
is
the Scissor-man?” asked Mrs. Hoffman, who found the idea of characters from cautionary tales made flesh and blood a little strange, as well she might.

“We call them PDRs,” explained Mary. “Persons of Dubious Reality. Refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence, and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are
particularly
mindless. They do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done—and it’s our job to stop them.”