Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (22 page)

Brianna sneezed. The ginger scent was very strong. Inside, everything was as they’d designed it: the little beds, the uncomfortable cage, the wall-built bake-oven big enough to take a child, or a very small witch. “Come on,” she said, “let’s see how it looks.”

She made her way to the little Dutch door, opened it, stepped out. Dick came out after. Brianna paused only long enough to make sure that Boaz and Jachin the barley-sugar columns were there. They were. But then, glancing around, she noticed was that all their display stands around the house, with the carefully made posters hung on them, were… different. They were, in fact, all made of gingerbread. Incredibly thin gingerbread, the laser printing on them now looking like incredibly thin icing.

Brianna’s mouth dropped open. So had the mouths of various other people. Her mom and dad, for example, who were making their way over the grass from the further parking lot. And Arthur, for another. He was standing over a gingerbread anvil…and as Brianna watched, Arthur was staring at the thing in his hands: a hand-and-a-half cookie sword, with piped icing twining around its quillons.

Arthur’s clique, too, were all staring around them in astonishment. All the tables that had been placed out in the parking lot were now gingerbread. Brianna turned around and looked at the gingerbread house.

Her eyes widened. It seemed about three times as tall as it had been. It had little castle-towers of gingerbread, with ice-cream-cone pointed roofs, dusted with icing. It had stained-glass candy windows, and ribbon-candy pennants flirting from the tops of the towers. The low afternoon sun struck it, looking unusually golden. In fact, the gym building behind it looked almost as golden, almost as if—

The scent of ginger on the afternoon air was overwhelming. Brianna looked up and gasped as she realized that the gym, and the science wing, and indeed, the body of Salem Township Public High School #4 behind it, was…

Gingerbread. It looked wonderful in the afternoon sun. In fact the way it looked was going to create a problem for Brianna, because the main body of the building stuck well up past the concealment field that would have been protecting the parking lot…

“This is now officially beyond serious,” she whispered, going cold with fear. But Dirk was looking at her with something like an odd pride.

“You don’t do anything by halves, do you?” he said. “You did a transformation on the whole place. You are
hot stuff!”

Brianna smiled at him, still terrified, but happy terrified. Then the happy fell off abruptly at the sound of the deep voice from behind her.

“So, will someone tell me exactly what we’re going to do about this?” said Mr. McAllister, the principal of Salem.

Brianna gulped as she turned to face him. He was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, looking up and over her at the main building. Mr. McAllister was never a very impressive looking man, balding on top, with kind of a beer belly under the inevitable three-piece suit. But he was (as he had to be, in this job) one of the most powerful witches in Salem, if not the state…or on the continent. He eyed the long brick façade, now faultlessly restated in brick-textured gingerbread, cinnamon-candy quarry tile, and sugar glass, and said, “It’s magnificent. If a bit… overdone?”

“I’m so sorry,” Brianna said, “I didn’t mean to—”

Mr. McAllister gave her a look. “You shouldn’t say that,” he said, “since plainly, you
did
mean to.”

“Am I in trouble?” she whispered, unable to believe that she wasn’t, as turning the whole school into an advanced confectionery structure was almost certainly going to be trouble for somebody.

The vice-principal came up behind Mr. McAllister and leaned over him (Mr. McAllister was a bit short). “The outer glamourie field is built for catastrophic overrun,” Miss Winchester said in his ear. “It caught the visible effect: the normals outside won’t have seen anything. We’re all right.”

“Very good,” Mr. McAllister said. “Brianna—”

Her insides went cold.

“You’ll be needing to see the counselor tomorrow,” the principal said. “A power surge like this typically needs a management course to help you keep it in order for the next year or so. In the meantime, please decommission this witchery, all right? Which has unquestionably won the ParaScience Fair’s award for most impressive use of mantic energies.” He looked over at Mrs. Levenson, who was shaking her head at the cookie sword and cake-gingerbread anvil, while Arthur Etchinson cursed under his breath and his clique, suppressing their snickers, slipped quietly backwards to avoid being caught outright in desertion. “Maybe the first prize, if we can finish everybody else’s judging. So please get on with taking this down, will you?”

Brianna nodded, raised her arms. Dirk reached up, and once again took one of her free hands.

Told you there’d be a moral,
he said: and he smiled at her.

Brianna blushed.

I often get people asking me whether I have any plans to do any more work in the universe set out in the novel
Stealing The Elf-King’s Roses.
For a long time the answer was “no”: that story felt as completely told as it wanted to be, and at such times it’s smart not to try to force the issue.

But then came the opportunity to contribute to an anthology about murder in fantasy. Here I have to confess to a fondness for murder mystery: my fondness for Sherlock Holmes, in his various incarnations, is almost certainly what started it. The chance to do something similar myself started me thinking, and after a while I realized that it was in the Los Angeles of the EKR universe that this story belonged…

After Rob pulled up in front of the house on Redwood, he sat there in the front seat of the car for a few moments, drinking what remained of his coffee and looking the place over. It was the only single-family house left on this block, and one of very few remaining for some blocks around in this neighborhood—almost all of the rest of the buildings here were apartment buildings now, or at the very least duplexes. As he swigged the second-to-last gulp of coffee, Rob tried to imagine what the neighborhood had been like when this house was built, fifty or even seventy years ago: wide lawns, wide new sidewalks, decorously spaced white stucco houses with red tile roofs, tidy front walks leading up to them, poinsettia and dwarf orange planted by the houses or on the lawns…

Not any more,
Rob thought. The frontages of the beige-painted terrace apartment buildings to either side of the house came up to within about two feet of the sidewalk, and the tiny strip of what could have been grass between them and the sidewalk was trampled to bare dirt. And the house that seemed to crouch between them had no lawn any more, either—just a tangle of heat-blanched goatsfoot and crabgrass, and a single incredibly stubborn patch of dusty, wilted pachysandra that had refused to die even though no one ever watered it now. The windows were all barred and curtained inside. The door had been barred too, but the black iron screen-and-scrollwork gate hung sideways off its hinges now, rammed through when the Drug Squad came through last week. Probably the neighbors had been glad to see the crack house go.
Most of them anyway,
Rob thought.
The rest of them’ll have found another source by now…

He finished his coffee, crumpled up the paper cup and chucked it into the garbage bag hanging off the cigarette lighter, then got out of the car and locked up. Rob made his way across to the front walk of the house, relieved at least that he wasn’t going to have to go through the usual prolonged explanations to the present residents of the house. Just shy of the single step up to the cracked concrete of the house’s front porch, Rob paused, gazing at the scarred paint on the door, the tiny window with the iron grille just visible inside, the newly split and splintered wood of the doorsills.
All right,
he said silently to the Lady with the Scales,
help me see what’s going to get the job done here…

The shift happened: the air got glassy clear, all the uncertainty and randomness of daily reality falling out of it in a breath’s space to leave everything unnervingly fixed. That fixity had long since stopped bothering Rob, though: he worked in it every day.

He stepped up onto the porch and tried the bell. It didn’t work. Rob knocked on the door.

A pair of pale blue eyes, a little watery, looked out that little grilled window at him. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Eldridge?” Rob said. “Mrs. Tamara Eldridge?”

“Yes?” said the soft, uncertain voice.

Ron held up his ID. “I’m Detective Sergeant DiFalco from the LAPD, ma’am. Homicide. Could I speak to you for a moment?”

“Oh! Oh, of course, just a minute—”

There followed the sound of locks and chains being undone from the inside of the door, though one last chain remained in place. The lady standing on the far side of the door peered around it carefully, looking Rob up and down. “Here, ma’am,” Rob said, and handed her his ID, being careful before he let it go to make sure that she could touch it.

She could. She held it in one hand, shaking a little, and looked down at it, while Rob looked her over and readily recognized her as the woman from the picture in the case file. Those watery blue eyes looked up at him again, and the crinkled face, framed by curly silver-white hair, smiled at him. “That’s a terrible picture of you,” she said. “It makes you look like a cartoon burglar.”

Rob had to smile, for this was an accusation he heard often enough from his buddies back at Division. They claimed Rob could display five o’clock shadow five minutes after shaving: and he did have the kind of dark craggy brawny look that suggested he should be climbing out of windows in a striped shirt with a big sack labeled LOOT. “May I come in, ma’am?”

“Certainly, just a moment.”

She closed the door to take the chain off, then opened it again. “Please come in, Sergeant,” she said, gesturing him past her into a small, tidy living room on the right-hand side.

The room was like her: neat, compact, a little worn but well kept—overstuffed chairs, and a sofa with some brassware laid out on it, on newspaper, half-polished: antimacassars over the sofa and chair backs, a worn but clean Persian rug in a reddish pattern, and curtains and wallpaper in an ivory shade. The lady herself, as she sat down across from Rob, struck him suddenly as so very frail as to almost certainly make this a wasted trip.
She’ll never buy it,
Rob thought.
She’ll throw a seizure or something, and I’ll have to come back next week. And probably about twenty times after that…

But he’d been down this road before, and patience had always won out. It would win out now. “Please sit down,” Mrs. Eldridge said. She sat there perched on the edge of a big chair done in worn red brocade, looking very proper in a rather old-fashioned pastel tweed jacket and skirt, the effect of faded elegance somewhat thrown off by the tattered “comfy” scuffs she was wearing. “I’m sorry the place is a little messy at the moment: I was cleaning. What can I do to help you?”

“We’re investigating a murder in the neighborhood, ma’am,” Rob said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you much with that, Sergeant. I don’t get out a lot: I don’t really know any of the people living around here these days. And I don’t know much about the neighbors, except that mostly they play their stereos too loud. Especially the people upstairs over at fifteen seven-twenty. I call and call their landlord, but he never does anything…” She shook her head in mild annoyance. “When did this murder happen? I didn’t see anything in the papers.”

“It’s not recent, ma’am,” Rob said. “There was very little physical forensic evidence to help us, so we’re having to do neighborhood interviews and psychosweeps to see what else we can find.”

Mrs. Eldridge looked at Rob with great surprise. “Why, you’re a lanthanomancer!”

It was the usual mistake. “No ma’am,” Rob said, “that takes a few more years of training, and some paralegal. A lanthanometer, yes.” He would have taken on a night job years ago if he’d thought he had any real chance of getting through the LMT course and making ‘mancer. But his regular work left him tired enough, and Rob was also none too sure he could make it through the entry exams. He’d made it through the lanthanometry course only because of natural aptitude scores high enough to favorably average out the rather low score on his written tests.
I like what I do well enough,
Rob thought.
So why screw with what works?

“So you can sense dead people,” she said. “That must be very interesting work!”

There was a lot more that could be said about the job, but this wasn’t the time to get into the technicalities. “Uh, it is, ma’am,” he said. “Which brings me to the reason I came. Have you noticed anything different about the neighborhood lately?”

“Well, besides the noise from next door—” She laughed a little, shook her head. “The whole place has gotten so remote. I can remember when once all the doors on this street would have been open: no one ever locked anything. If you did that now, you’d be dead in minutes.”

Rob thought of saying something, restrained himself. “And if something happens to you,” Mrs. Eldridge said, “well, you’re probably just going to have to handle it yourself, aren’t you? I remember when I fell down, right there, coming in the front door with the groceries. Nobody came to help. I had to drag myself in: it was awful.”

“Can you tell me a little more about that, ma’am?” Rob said.

“What’s to tell? I tripped, I fell down.” Mrs. Eldridge gave him a wry look. “It’s such a joke, isn’t it. ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’” she said, in too accurate an imitation of the old commercial. “But that’s all it was, dear, a fall. I got up.”

“No, ma’am,” Rob said. “You didn’t.”

She looked at him strangely. Now it would come… the part that always bothered Rob the most, but couldn’t be rushed. Without her acceptance, his work could go no further; and Rob’s memory was mercifully dulled as to how many of his cases had gotten stuck for weeks or months right here, at the point where truth met denial.