The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy Page 12

  Starveling bowed imperceptibly. “Sir,” he said, “the fiendish criminal who so cunningly struck down Lord Blackhat in his prime has . . . er . . . has not done it yet. There would appear to be no crime.”

  “Nom d’un cochon! Merde! It is I who have been murdered, and I will know the reason why!”

  “I say, the game’s afoot, what?” marvelled the Colonel. “This is a new one.”

  The VR system, making the best of it, was seen to be maintaining two versions of Dix: the angrily gesticulating one, and an evident corpse slumped among the dessert plates and port glasses on the great oaken dinner-table.

  Climbing with some difficulty out of her character as a bright young debutante, Felicity said: “This is the spare you talking, right? The machine analogue you programmed in. So the real you’s gone to sleep in the VR tank or something. So what?”

  The sleuth twirled his moustache with a flourish. “Mademoiselle will kindly employ her little grey cells. Chester Dix does not ‘go to sleep’ during an investigation. Archons of Athens! There has been foul play.”

  “All right, all right, game’s over,” snapped the Hon. Nigel. “Terminate. Terminate. If something’s happened to Chester we need to go realside and take a look. Sorry to spoil the fun, everyone. Terminate, terminate. – Why the hell isn’t it terminating?”

  “A thousand pardons. I have taken the small liberty of activating a, how you say, a gamma-gamma override. No one shall be permitted to leave Shambles Hall until this mystery she is solved.”

  He stalked haughtily from the room.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Felicity.

  “Anyone for tennis?”

  “That’s not funny, darling,” said the Hon. Nigel, shivering in a chill like interstellar space. They were using the racquets as improvised snowshoes and had made it almost half a mile down the empty white lane. Although (as the Professor had pointed out) the benefits of reaching the police station in the village were extremely unclear, it seemed something that had to be tried.

  “While the snow lay round about, Deep and crisp and eeeven,” Felicity chanted. “Cut off, indeed. It’s not six inches deep anywhere.”

  Then they rounded a corner of the sunken lane and met an infinite wall that somehow hadn’t been visible before, rising forever, the colour of the dark behind one’s eyelids.

  “That’s what I call cut off,” said Nigel gloomily.

  “That’s what I call shoddy programming,” said his companion.

  The suspects gathered in the library while the detective was occupied taking plaster casts of the strange new footprints he had found leading down and back up the snow of the carriageway.

  “I don’t understand,” said the Duchess.

  “Then I shall explain the situation to you as though you knew nothing of it,” the Professor began.

  The Hon. Nigel broke in hastily. “It’s obvious. Chester dropped out of the gamesmaster link – that was when everything sort of quivered – and this bloody stand-in program of his took over. We’ll need to give it some kind of solution to get out of this. Someone will just have to confess.”

  They cut cards for it, and the mysterious stranger lost.

  “But I still don’t even know my name,” he whimpered.

  “Constraint of the scenario,” said the Professor helpfully.

  The Hon. Nigel fiddled irritably with the carvings on the library’s old oak panelling, and one of the wooden roses sank into the wall at his touch. At once a tall case of Agatha Christie titles swung aside to disclose a secret passage.

  “Oh f –” Nigel began before the scenario constraints stopped him. “I mean, oh dash it all.”

  “I am in fact Lord Blackhat’s identical twin brother, with our close resemblance disguised by plastic surgery,” the supposed stranger said with growing confidence. “In my extensive travels in South America I acquired a quantity of an arrow poison compounded from tree frogs and almost unknown to science. This I planned to administer in the special Stilton cheese reserved for Lord Blackhat, who unfortunately took the precaution of exchanging his plate by sleight of hand with that of the person next to him, the unfortunate sleuth Chester Dix. Meanwhile I had established an alibi with a fake telephone message from Warsaw, actually my confederate speaking on the extension phone in the butler’s pantry. Now I see you are hot on my trail and my only option is to confess. It’s a fair cop.”

  “An amusing fantasy,” smiled the detective. “But you have failed to explain the singular incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

  “What was the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime?”

  “It was spelt backwards.” The great sleuth looked momentarily confused. “Ah. Never mind that. There is one fatal error in your story, my friend. I have examined the body minutely. You know my methods. It is clear that the unfortunate victim has suffered a cerebrovascular accident, a stroke. Not, I fancy, a little-known arrow poison . . .”

  “He’s got access to the ship systems,” Felicity whispered. “That’s what happened to poor old Chester. I always thought he must have fiddled the physicals, you know, to get passed for this trip.”

  “Natural causes!” said the Hon. Nigel, pouncing. “There has been no murder. The case is closed.”

  “That, of course, is what the killer would like us to think. We are dealing with a very clever criminal, my friends. I see half of it now – but only half.”

  “Oh . . . botheration,” Felicity paraphrased.

  A loose group had formed around the glittering Christmas tree in the great entrance hall. “If we all committed suicide . . .” the Duchess suggested vaguely.

  “Would just go non-interactive,” Lord Blackhat grunted. “Used to like that bit the best, drifting round like a ghost and watching you all hash up the investigation.”

  “Then the case might never be solved,” said the Hon. Nigel. “Would the scenario terminate if it recognized an insoluble problem?”

  Felicity pouted. “God knows. Well, only God and Chester.”

  “Dammit,” said the Colonel, “one of us will just have to be caught red-handed. No time for more fooling around. Got a starship to run.”

  “Ah, a second murder!” Nigel snapped his fingers. “Time to draw lots again.”

  “Ought to be me who’s bumped off,” said the mysterious stranger. “The person suspected of the first murder should always be the second victim. It’s part of the classic unities.”

  “No. Build-up was for Blackhat,” rumbled the Colonel crustily.

  The Duchess sighed and broke the seal on a fresh pack of cards.

  “Oh!” cried Felicity in synthetic alarm as the library door creaked open. “Oh! I was just passing by and happened to pick up the knife, forgetting everything I know about not touching anything at the scene of the crime. . . . Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?”

  (The silver fish-slice had been an awkward choice of weapon, but Nigel thought it rather picturesque. “It’s more of a blasted blunt instrument,” Lord Blackhat had groaned irritably as he expired.)

  The great detective took in the scene at a single hawk-eyed glance.

  “No,” said Felicity. “It’s no use. This huge bloodstain on my dress . . . the six witnesses in the corridor outside who will swear that no one but myself has entered this room since his lordship was last seen alive . . . I can’t conceal my blatant guilt from you.”

  Alternately puffing at a huge pipe whose stem curved like a saxophone and sipping at a rummer of priceless old liqueur brandy, the sleuth made his way along the floor on hands and knees. Then he rose and touched a place in the panelling. The secret door opened on well-oiled hinges.

  “Burn and blister me! Not quite a locked room after all, I fancy. Now I have just one question for you, my dear girl. Whom are you shielding?”

  Felicity pronounced a word under her breath.

  Shortly afterwards: “Is there not,” said the Professor with a certain academic distaste, “a criminal device known in the lite
rature as a ‘frame’? Now what I propose . . .”

  Starveling the butler made a pathetic corpse in his pantry. He was only a program construct and not a live player, but the Hon. Nigel had felt a pang of real remorse as he did the deed and arranged the evidence.

  “I done it. I can live with myself no longer. Farewell cruel world. Tell the maid to decant the ’49 port for Boxing Day,” the investigator read aloud to the suspects. “Very determined of the fellow to write all that in his own blood on the table, after shooting himself through the heart. Using a disguised hand, too.”

  “Ah,” said Nigel guiltily.

  “Yes, what the murderer forgot was, firstly, that yellow stitchbane is not yellow at all but a pale mauve . . . and secondly, that Starveling was left-handed.”

  Nigel gave a muffled exclamation, laden with even more guilt.

  “Fortunately my snuff-box is invariably charged with fingerprint powder . . .” To an accompaniment of impatient shufflings, forensic science proceeded on its remorseless way.

  “No! There must be some mistake!” cried Nigel unconvincingly.

  “God, Captain, you’re a lousy actor,” Felicity whispered.

  “Satisfactory. Most satisfactory. And what do we deduce from this exact match between the prints on the automatic and those of the Hon. Nigel Scattergood? Why, of course, that he must have handled the gun innocently at some earlier time, else he would have taken care to wipe it clean!”

  The Colonel made some feeble suggestion about double-bluff, but the sleuth was happily launched on a flight of deductions about the unknown murderer’s careful manipulation of the gun in a wire frame that left the prints undisturbed . . .

  “We’re being too rational,” said Felicity. “This imitation Chester is soaked and saturated in detective stories just like the real one. We can’t out-subtle him.”

  “Thanks so much, darling,” said the Hon. Nigel with venom. “Thanks for explaining that things are utterly hopeless.”

  “Ah, but if we could use the ship-system AI it could fudge up a super-clever pattern that any Great Detective would fall for.”

  “If, if,” grunted the Colonel. “If pigs could fly we could all make a getaway on porkerback, if we had some pigs.”

  “Wait,” said Felicity. “As he would say – when you’ve eliminated all logical solutions you have to try something that’s stark raving bonkers. Duchess dear, where’s the ouija board from our séance on Christmas Eve that gave us all those thrillingly sinister and atmospheric warnings?”

  After prolonged searching the apparatus finally came to light under a pile of anonymous letters.

  “This is ridiculous,” complained the Hon. Nigel as the planchette began to slide across the lettered board. Under all their fingertips it moved uncertainly at first, then with more seeming decision. “Is it spelling anything out?”

  “L-O-G-I-N,” said Felicity. “That looks promising. Now we’re going to need a lot of pencil and paper.”

  They were busy through the small hours, placing a wild variety of clues everywhere the Astral Intelligence had advised.

  Bleary-eyed and feeling hungover, the Hon. Nigel lifted the silver cover of the largest dish on the sideboard. It contained, perhaps inevitably, red herrings. He settled for bacon and egg. The others were already gathered about the breakfast table, and after an early-morning hunt for evidence the world-famous sleuth was clearly ready to hold forth.

  “This has been one of the most baffling and complex cases that I have ever encountered. Even I, Chester Dix, with my sixteen heraldic quarterings and unparalleled little grey cells . . . even I was stretched to my deductive limits by the satanic cunning of this crime. But now I have the answer!”

  Felicity led a discreet patter of applause.

  “What first drew my attention was that the seemingly false alibi with the phonograph record of the typewriter was a clever decoy. Second came the realization that when the tween-maid glimpsed the clock through the window of the supposedly locked room, she saw the clock-face in a mirror . . . producing an error of timing that has literally turned this case upside down. Next, the drugged cigar-cutter . . .”

  The breakfast party found the thread a little hard to follow: there was mention of the legendary Polar Poignard or ice dagger that melted tracelessly away, of a bullet misleadingly fired from a blowpipe and a hypodermic filled with air, while disguises and impersonations were rampant. Keys were ingeniously turned from the wrong sides of doors, and bolts magnetically massaged. In the end it seemed on the whole that Lord Blackhat himself was the villain, having faked his own murder and posthumously blackmailed Starveling into doing much the same.

  “Didn’t quite follow the bit about the murderous dwarf hidden under the cover of the turkey dish,” said the Colonel.

  Felicity explained that that notion had been seen through by the detective as a diabolical false trail. She thought.

  “And so, ladies and gentlemen, you are all free to depart. Merry Christmas!”

  “Merry Christmas! I’ve never looked forward so much to boring old shipboard chores. Until next year –” said Felicity, and winked out. The others followed suit.

  Alone again in the great dining-room, deep in the ship-system’s bubble memory, the sleuth smiled a small, secret smile. He moved to the telephone and lifted the receiver. “Get me Whitehall 1212. Inspector Lestrade? . . . I have solved the mystery at Shambles Hall. Yes . . . In the end I deduced that, unprecedentedly, every member of the house party conspired to commit the original crime. The method, I fancy, was suffocation – it was their good fortune that the victim suffered a stroke when part-asphyxiated. All of them were in it together. The ingenuity of their false clues proves it. Sacre bleu, they think me a fool! Being outnumbered, I lulled their fears most beautifully by announcing the solution they wished. They will return here – do we not know that the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime? – and we shall set a trap. . . . Yes. Yes, that murderous gang will not find it so easy to escape Shambles Hall next Christmas!”

  STEPHEN SKARRIDGE’S CHRISTMAS

  Frank R. Stockton

  ’Twas Christmas eve. An adamantine sky hung dark and heavy over the white earth. The forests were canescent with frost, and the great trees bent as if they were not able to sustain the weight of snow and ice with which the young winter had loaded them.

  In a by-path of the solemn woods there stood a cottage that would not, perhaps, have been noticed in the decreasing twilight, had it not been for a little wisp of smoke that feebly curled from the chimney, apparently intending, every minute, to draw up its attenuated tail, and disappear. Within, around the hearth whereon the dying embers sent up that feeble smoke, there gathered the family of Arthur Tyrrell – himself, his wife, a boy, and a girl.

  ’Twas Christmas eve. A damp air rushed from the recesses of the forest and came, an unbidden guest, into the cottage of the Tyrrells, and it sat on every chair, and lay upon every bed, and held in its chilly embrace every member of the family. All sighed.

  “Father,” said the boy, “is there no more wood, that I may replenish the fire?”

  “No, my son,” bitterly replied the father, his face hidden in his hands; “I brought, at noon, the last stick from the woodpile.”

  The mother, at these words, wiped a silent tear from her eyes, and drew her children yet nearer the smouldering coals. The father rose and moodily stood by the window, gazing out upon the night. A wind had now arisen, and the dead branches strewed the path that he soon must take to the neighboring town. But he cared not for the danger; his fate and heart were alike hard.

  “Mother!” said the little girl, “shall I hang up my stocking to-night? ’Tis Christmas eve.”

  A Damascus blade could not have cut the mother’s heart more keenly than this question.

  “No, dear,” she faltered. “You must wear your stockings – there is no fire – and your feet, uncovered, will freeze.”

  The little girl sighed, and gazed sadly upon the blackening c
oals. But she raised her head again and said,

  “But, mother dear, if I should sleep with my legs outside the clothes, old Santa Claus might slip in some little things between the stocking and my skin; could he not, dear mother?”

  “Mother is weeping, sister,” said the boy, “press her no further.”

  The father now drew around him his threadbare coat, put upon his head his well-brushed straw hat, and approached the door.

  “Where are you going, this bitter night, dear father?” cried his little son.

  “He goes,” then said the weeping mother, “to the town. Disturb him not, my son, for he will buy a mackerel for our Christmas dinner.”

  “A mackerel!” cried both the children, and their eyes sparkled with joy. The boy sprang to his feet.

  “You must not go alone, dear father,” he cried. “I will accompany you.”

  And together they left the cottage.

  The streets were crowded with merry faces and well wrapped-up forms. Snow and ice, it is true, lay thick upon the pavements and roofs, but what of that? Bright lights glistened from every window, bright fires warmed and softened the air within the houses, while bright hearts made rosy and happy the countenances of the merry crowd without. In some of the shops great turkeys hung in placid obesity from the bending beams, and enormous bowls of mince-meat sent up delightful fumes, which mingled harmoniously with the scents of the oranges, the apples, and the barrels of sugar and bags of spices. In others, the light from the chandeliers struck upon the polished surface of many a new wheelbarrow, sled, or hobby-horse, or lighted up the placid features of recumbent dolls and the demoniacal countenances of wildly jumping jacks. The crop of marbles and tops was almost more than could be garnered; boxes and barrels of soldiers stood on every side; tin horns hung from every prominence, and boxes of wonders filled the counters; while all the floor was packed with joyous children carrying their little purses. Beyond, there stood the candy-stores – those earthly paradises of the young, where golden gumdrops, rare cream chocolate, variegated mint-stick, and enrapturing mixtures spread their sweetened wealth over all available space.