The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy Read online

  Hulme did not deign to answer, but instead punched buttons on his phone, receiver already held to his ear. “Hello, Security? This is Professor Hulme. Please send over a squad car to deal with some intruders—”

  Lucas felt the situation spiralling out of his control. What had gone wrong? No one was following his plan. These unbelievers appeared unfazed by Saintly auras. Earlier, Lucas had imagined this moment as his invincible triumph. But nobody seemed to know their lines in the script he had mentally written. Desperate to regain the upper hand, Lucas shouted a command:

  “Barbara, stop him!”

  The phone receiver clattered to the desktop, although Hulme’s hand still remained closed. And although the man’s mouth continued to move beneath his beard, no sounds issued from it. Something seemed wrong about Hulme’s whole appearance, in fact. He seemed flattened, subject to ripples racing across a body rendered insubstantial. And when Hulme turned sideways to look imploringly at Doctor Garnett, he disappeared completely.

  Lucas realized instantly what Saint Barbara had done. “You’ve reduced him to two dimensions!”

  Barbara exhibited an immodest pride. “Euclidean, my dear Watson. The quickest and neatest solution to your request.”

  The thinner-than-paper Hulme was vapouring about the office in a dither, appearing and disappearing randomly as he alternately displayed his remaining visible dimensions or accidentally angled them away from the observers. Meanwhile Garnett had shot to his feet in alarm.

  “I don’t know what you’ve done to Owen, you popish madman! But I won’t let you get away!”

  Garnett lunged at Lucas, who darted one side in a narrow escape. “Hubert, help!”

  The newest addition to the Astronomy faculty suddenly flopped to the rug, unable to stand. His limbs had been replaced with smaller complete copies of his entire body. Where his hands and feet should have been, Garnett now boasted scaled-down versions of his own head. And the limbs of these bizarre appendages consisted of even smaller bodies, and so on and so on till Lucas’s eyes glazed over.

  A chittering noise of the infinite heads all complaining at once overlaid the macro-assaults coming from the original Garnett mouth. Lucas sagged down into Hulme’s chair. Hulme would certainly not be needing it, for the flat professor had accidentally slipped into a closed desk drawer through a slit.

  “You’ve fractalized him?” asked Lucas wearily. “Rendered him self-similar?”

  Hubert grinned. “Precisely. A little something I picked up while peering over Mandelbrot’s shoulder one day.”

  Lucas heard a siren then. Hopelessly, he opened the drawer into which Hulme had vanished. The papery savant shot out like a jack-in-the-box, causing Lucas to surge wildly to his feet.

  At that moment Britta Hulme strode gaily into her husband’s office, spotting her transformed husband in a moment of deceptive substantiality.

  “Ready for an early lunch, dear? We need to hurry if I’m not to keep Simon waiting—”

  The filmy ghost of her husband silently beseeched his wife for help. His weird anxiety finally registered on the dense woman.

  “Are you feeling all right, dear?”

  The sight of Owen shaking his head was not something Lucas would have chosen to view or to retain in memory. The professor’s head seemed to snap in and out of existence as it rotated through one plane after another. For nausea-inducing properties, the display rivalled Saint Barbara’s earlier demonstration of her past misfortunes with an executioner’s axe.

  Britta screamed with operatic violence. Lucas opened his mouth to reassure her, but she screamed again. And again. And again—

  Her fourth scream possessed less volume. The next even less.

  Britta was shrinking. Dwindling while retaining her perfect proportions, her voice dopplering to insignificance, she passed the size of a child, a cat, a mouse, a bee, a midge, then vanished utterly.

  “I assumed you’d want her silenced,” Saint Barbara explained matter-of-factly. “So I recalled some interesting corrollaries in a paper by Stephen Smale from the Journal of Nonlinear Dynamics about strange attractors with a flowline sink leading down to the Planck level—”

  Before the loquacious Saint could finish her explanation, various exclamations from the gathering crowd of horrified people at the office door interrupted her.

  Lucas was covered in a stinking sweat. His mind roiled like the surface of a fractal sea. “We have to get out of here,” he husked.

  Pleasant sunshine fell upon Lucas and the two Saints, and a mild breeze played with Lucas’s damp hair and ruffled the Saintly robes. Higher-dimensional transit had its definite advantages during emergencies.

  However, they were not out of the woods yet. Having parked alongside his Vespa, the Campus Security squad car was just disgorging its officers.

  The lead cop resembled the cult film director, John Waters, except possessed of a mean scowl. “Where’s the trouble, sir?”

  “Up – upstairs.”

  The other rent-a-cops studied the two Saints suspiciously for a moment, until Lucas mastered himself enough to offer a pretext for their uncouth looks. “My, ah, my visiting friends are old hippies, officer. They teach at, um, Berkeley. West Coast, Mother Earth, nature worship, all that bosh. Those halos? You know the lightsticks kids use at raves? Of course. You understand, I’m sure.”

  The cops grunted and raced off toward the growing noisy disturbance inside Blackwood. At the outer entrance of the building they met the immovable bulk of Pisky Wispaway, clad in a hideously checkered tentlike shift. A brief, Robin-Hood-meets-Little-John-on-the-log-bridge struggle for passage occurred, from which Pisky emerged victorious. She waddled as fast as she could toward Lucas, her costume jewellery rattling like a bead curtain in a hurricane.

  Before his large lady friend could arrive, Lucas turned to the saints.

  “Can you undo what you did to those three people?”

  “Of course,” said Barbara.

  “I really don’t know if we should obey his orders any more,” quibbled Hubert. “After that awful lie he told the police. Old hippies indeed!”

  Lucas fought not to yell. “It was only a venial sin! I’ll confess it as soon as I can and do whatever penance the priest assigns!”

  “Well, in that case then—”

  Barbara sounded a practical note. “You realize that as soon as your opponents are restored to normality, they’ll accuse you of all sorts of horrid things. It’ll be just like the nasty scene when my father heard about my conversion.”

  “I know, I know, but I’ll deal with that somehow. Just put them right.”

  The Saints nodded to each other, blinked once, then chorused, “Done.”

  Pisky joined the trio now. Her flushed face showed nothing but sympathy and concern for Lucas, mingled with some natural curiosity directed toward his strange companions.

  “Oh, Lucas, whatever is the matter? Did you and Owen get into a fight?”

  “Yes, I fear we did, Pisky. I simply showed up on his doorstep with proof of the certainty of his eternal damnation unless he repented, and he reacted badly. I confess that I was forced to defend myself.”

  “How dreadful! Lucas, I was so worried about you! I’ve been thinking over all my deep feelings for you all night long, and I just want you to know how much I admire your principles. You can do no wrong in my eyes. I’m so proud of you for standing up to Owen!”

  Pisky gripped Lucas’s arm and leaned her bulk against him. He experienced a claustrophobic sensation akin to what the Princess’s pea beneath a thousand mattresses might have felt. Grateful enough for Pisky’s declaration of alliance, he nonetheless sought gently to extricate himself.

  “Ah, well, yes, thank you, Pisky. I did not emerge victorious alone, of course. I had the help of these two Saints. Allow me to introduce Saint Barbara and Saint Hubert, Heaven’s mathematical experts.”

  Hubert took Pisky’s hand and kissed it genteelly like the courtier he once had been. “Charmed, madame. Your voice r
eminds me of Empress Theodora’s.”

  Barbara returned no handshake, but only a somewhat frosty verbal greeting, smoothing her robes across her trim waist rather ostentatiously. Lucas thought to detect a certain flattering jealousy in his female protector, but could not concentrate now on what otherwise might be a stimulating opportunity.

  Such pleasantries, however strained, instantly terminated the next moment, as the Hulmes and Professor Garnett appeared on the steps of the Blackwood Building, backed by a force of concerned bystanders.

  “There they are, officer! Arrest them!”

  Lucas hopped upon his Vespa and cranked its motor into sputtering life. “Pisky, we’ll continue our interesting discussion later. I have to flee immediately, until I can figure out how to clear myself of these ridiculous charges.”

  “I’ll come with you, Lucas!”

  Before the mathematician could protest, Pisky hoisted her skirts and swung her leg over the passenger seat of the tiny machine, engulfing it. The Vespa sank down upon its rear tyre so far the front wheel almost rose from the ground, in partial mimicry of the Lone Ranger’s steed.

  “Pisky, please—”

  “Go, Lucas, go – they’re running toward us!”

  Lucas goosed the throttle and the protesting, overburdened bike moved off at a pace barely faster than a jog. The Saints, in fact, easily kept abreast on foot, without supernatural exertions.

  “This is no good!” wailed Lucas. “Hubert, Barbara – can’t you get us away any faster?”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t know! I just want us to fly off!”

  The Saints fell back and put their heads together to whisper as they ambled. Lucas caught snatches of their dialogue:

  “– cosmological constants –” “– numerical in nature –” “– don’t believe we’d be contravening –”

  Their pursuers had almost caught up when the Saints finished their intense discussion. Hubert began to lecture. “You are aware, perhaps, of the universal force designated “Lambda’—”

  Lucas could actually hear Owen Hulme’s angry growls amidst the crowd noise. “Whatever you’re going to do, for God’s sake just do it!”

  Why was the ground falling swiftly away from beneath the Vespa? Had the Saints opened up a crevasse in the earth? Had Lucas been gulled all along? Were Barbara and Hubert actually demons, perhaps, finally taking their tormented victims down to Hell? Lucas felt no sensation of falling, though, smelled no brimstone. Instead, he realized that he was ascending, rising into the air. The ground remained fixed.

  The Vespa was flying, its front wheel pointed toward the sun.

  Pisky was squeezing Lucas so hard around his midriff that he could barely breathe. “I didn’t believe, I didn’t believe! But now I do, now I do!”

  Lucas turned to look downward over his shoulder. The agitated mob had come to a dead stop, their upturned faces fixed in slack-jawed amazement on the bouyant bike and its incredulous riders sailing off into the sky, the levitating Saints alongside like pilot fish.

  Before they got much higher, Lucas heard a guy on the ground say, “Hey, I can see right up the broad’s robe! She’s buck naked underneath it!”

  Barbara’s face darkened. “Why, you ill-mannered spawn of a toad! Let’s see how you like your guts twisted into a Möbius strip—”

  “No, don’t!” ordered Lucas, and Barbara obeyed, although she continued to grumble.

  As the bike soared higher and farther away without mishap, Lucas gradually relaxed, as did Pisky. His natural scientific curiosity reasserted itself enough to have him ask, “How does this flight qualify as a mathematical miracle?”

  Hubert appeared proud of their accomplishment. “Our first step consisted of suspending the commutative and associative laws for tensor operators. Once quantum inertias failed to group, we next altered the numerical value of Lambda – the force that controls the expansion of the universe – in a small pocket around you, resulting in directed antigravity. The whole cosmos is based on just six numbers, you know. N, E, Omega, Lambda, D, and Q. Now, take Q for instance—”

  “I appreciate the beauty of the theory, Hubert. But where are we headed?”

  “That is entirely up to you, sir. I suppose we could perch out of sight atop a cloud. It’s what we Saints are commonly thought to do, after all.”

  Now Pisky spoke. “Oh, Lucas, they really are Saints! I thought you were just joking. How wonderful! And to sit on a cloud and look down on the Earth – I’ve dreamed of such a romantic thing since I was just a little girl back in Piscataway.”

  Lucas sighed, and gave his consent. The Vespa speeded up, and before too long pierced the lowermost cloud layer. On the far side, the bike halted above the fluffy sunglazed and shadowed terrain, a pasture of purple and gold.

  “Step off,” said Barbara.

  Lucas regarded the feisty Saint warily. Would she play a deadly trick on him for thwarting her revenge on the Peeping Tom? Yet what choice did he have but to trust her?

  Pisky settled his doubts by dismounting first. She sunk into the clouds up to her ankles, but no further.

  “A slight local alteration in the values of N and E—” began Hubert.

  Now standing on the cloudstuff, Lucas walked to the nearest edge, accompanied by Pisky. They looked over tentatively at the patchwork Earth, a quilt of browns and greens stitched by roads.

  “It’s so beautiful,” cooed Pisky.

  Saint Barbara snorted. “Anything gets old after a millennia or two. Even love, I suspect – though I couldn’t say for sure,” the female Saint wistfully concluded.

  Pisky grabbed Lucas’s hand fervently. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I’d like enough time to find out, though.”

  Lucas gently disengaged himself. Such idle talk would be pleasant enough, if all else were well. But his current troubles filled Lucas’s mind to such a degree that he could spare no attention for Pisky’s romantic babble. And yet some subtle hook in her speech lured his thoughts along possible lines of salvation.

  Inspiration struck Lucas. “Time! Of course! Can you two somehow—”

  Hubert sighed. “Here it comes again. Reverse time? Naturally. Strictly a mathematical phenomenon. Actually, that old dodge is the way we get out of most fixes.”

  “I can’t tell you how bored I am with that tiresome tactic,” complained Saint Barbara. “If only mortals had a little more imagination. Now what if we altered the Sun’s radiational output—”

  “No! I don’t care about imaginative solutions! I just want my old life back. But I need to keep my memories of all this, so that I never let my pride and piety get the better of me again.”

  “Easy enough. Okay, get ready—”

  Pisky surprised everyone by intervening. “Stop! I don’t care if I have to lose all memories of this glorious moment in order to help Lucas. But could I ask one favour of you?” The big woman looked down bashfully and kicked a divot of cloud. “Could you make me skinny? Even if only for a minute? Please?”

  The Saints conferred again: “– reverse Banach-Tarski –” “– conformal mapping into the lemniscate–”

  Saint Barbara turned to address the other woman with a certain condescending sympathy. “All right, dearie, just close your eyes.”

  The transformation of Pisky Wispaway pulled an involuntary grunt from Lucas. Her figure seemed to implode in an organized fashion, while the checkerboard pattern of her dress morphed to a horseshoe-crab-shaped pattern out of a Saupe and Pietgen textbook. Stripped mathemagically of nearly two hundred pounds, she also lost her oversized altered dress and undergarments, which slipped off to pool around her feet, leaving her clad only in strings of beads. A most attractive daughter of Eve, the newly svelte naked Pisky hurled herself into Lucas’s arms. He surprised himself by clutching her eagerly.

  The Saints regarded the pair of mortals affectionately.

  “Get ready for time-reversal,” said Hubert.

  Barbara leaned in to kiss Lucas’s c
heek. “You were one of my nicest clients.”

  “Speak kindly of us to God in your prayers,” said Hubert. “We can always use another letter of recommendation to our Employer.”

  In a blink, the mortals disappeared.

  Hubert turned to Barbara. “Well, another assignment satisfactorily completed.”

  “I thought this one turned out much better than that botch you made of Fermat’s Last Theorem. ‘No room in the margin’, indeed.”

  Hubert sniffed. “And what of your little cold-fusion debacle?”

  Barbara winced. “I’ve improved over time.” She offered her arm for an escort back to Heaven, and the linked Saints walked away over the cloud-tops.

  “That, I believe,” offered Hubert, “is God’s plan.”

  * * *

  Lucas Latulippe envied his conflicted peers. The war in their bosoms between faith and scepticism allowed them to pursue their scientific careers with a certain useful level of doubt in both arenas. Unlike Lucas, they were not always looking over their shoulders warily, nervous about the possibility of inconveniently real miracles.

  But after several years of freedom from Saintly intervention, Lucas had learned to tamp down his unease. Frequent prayers beseeching God to provide an uneventful daily existence helped. And of course, having a beautiful, slim, loving wife like Pisky would make any man’s life quite happy.

  And, after all, they were the only couple they knew whose marriage had literally been made in Heaven.

  BROADWAY BARBARIAN

  Cherith Baldry

  A former teacher and librarian, Cherith Baldry first became known for her series of children’s books, Saga of the Six Worlds, but she has since established herself as a writer of intensely human fantasy stories, many with Arthurian settings including her novel Exiled from Camelot (2000). This story takes us into the wonderful world of Damon Runyon

  One evening along about seven o’clock, I am seated in Mindy’s restaurant wrapping myself around a portion of beef stew, and thinking of this and that, and especially where I will find the scratch to bet on a hot prospect tomorrow, when who should bob up but three characters as follows: Harry the Horse, Spanish John and Little Isadore.