EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE DUCK Read online

  EVERYBODY’S

  FAVORITE

  DUCK

  GAHAN WILSON

  EVERYBODY’S FAVORITE DUCK

  ISBN: 9781553102366 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553102373 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Calabash Press (an imprint of Ash-Tree Press)

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  First electronic edition 2012

  First published 1988

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2012

  Everybody’s Favorite Duck © Gahan Wilson 1988, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  EVERBODY’S

  FAVORITE

  DUCK

  — Prologue —

  THE WHOLE OF LONDON swam in a great, green fog, a proper pea souper, the sort of fog the old town had not known for years and years and thought itself done with forever.

  Children wondered at it, astounded, and tested the bitter, oily taste of it with their tongues; sentimental older folk’s eyes watered, not just from chemical irritation, but from wistful nostalgia brought on by memories of bygone fogs of their youth which had been this thick and this vile, and by recollections of the wonderful and awful things, which had happened in those romantic, long gone, murky swirlings.

  Older British books dealing with mysterious themes often lovingly describe such fogs and thereby innocently mislead contemporary readers of romantic inclination, especially Americans and Japanese, until their hopes are dashed by hotel porters or taxi drivers regretfully assuring them that nowadays, sir or madam, such fogs never happen.

  But now it was happening, and moment by moment growing more spectacularly thick and opaque, and though it might be delighting tourists and children and old folk, it was causing considerable confusion and dismay in official circles.

  Government vehicles were everywhere, detecting and recording various aspects of the phenomenon: Droplets were being blotted up to see which colors they would turn to when treated with reagents, other droplets were being teased into test tubes for later evaluation, and many pins were being stuck into many maps.

  It would only be far later, after a wide variety of computers stuffed with data on the fog had been brought on-line and shared their contents, that baffled officials would have their chance to puzzle long and fruitlessly over the numerous, simultaneous fires, private and industrial, which produced the smoke which had then conspired with the very odd, not to say, strange, atmospheric conditions only just that moment prevailing, to create the fog.

  Nor did it do much more than confuse officialdom further when another computer told it a little later on that the fires were mostly of suspicious origin; nor was it of any aid to learn there had been a mysterious, sleek aircraft of an entirely unknown design flying over London minutes before the fog developed, since no computer or bureaucrat ever learned that that aircraft had been there for the sole purpose of seeding the upper atmosphere with sparkling ice crystals containing strange chemicals in order that the glorious fog might begin.

  And of course no one in officialdom ever so much as dreamed that the whole thing had been done just for old time’s sake.

  A burly chauffeur in an ominous dark uniform with shiny iron buttons and disquieting insignia subliminally suggestive of various sinister military organizations of the past marched smartly to the rear half of a long Rolls Royce, which gleamed with a ghostly, fishy luster under a thin coating of the fog’s droplets. Very respectfully, the chauffeur opened the car’s rear door; very warily he moved back so as to be out of the occupant’s way.

  An extremely tall, extremely thin man in an Astrakhan hat and a long cape with a high fur collar unfolded himself in a smooth, serpentine undulation, stepped out of the car, and sniffed the fog with the loving appreciation of a true connoisseur. His desiccated face was Oriental, shriveled as an Egyptian mummy’s, and owned a queer calmness which suggested a Buddha—but a suspect, devious Buddha, whose followers would undergo strange and occasionally fatal enlightenments.

  The fog he’d sampled exited soundlessly in two thin, smoky lines from his nostrils, a dragon’s exhalation, and as he gave a satisfied cat’s blink, his eyes somehow managed to pick up a stray shaft of light even in this dank gloom and shoot a yellow-green gleam back into the surrounding darkness.

  He stepped across the sidewalk so that he stood before the entrance of a sooty Victorian building whose wet, dirty bricks glistened like pudlets of dried blood which the fog had once again made moist. Mounted across the front of the building, just above the first story, a series of large, elaborate wooden letters caked in peeling gilt combined to read: MADAME GRIMMAUD’S WAX MUSEUM.

  The tall man reached out a long, bony finger and pressed a button set into the wall by the side of the entrance. Almost immediately the door was opened by a tiny but dangerous-looking man in a black burnoose who cringed at the sight of the visitor and backed away from his path, retreating with the careful, high steps of a spider since his rearward path took him over the swollen bulk of a large dead man sprawled belly-up on the floor and dressed in a guard’s uniform with ‘Grimmaud’s Museum’ sewn in gold on its cap and over the corpse’s heart.

  With no hesitation, walking with the confidence of one in a familiar place, the tall man crossed the large main room of the establishment. He entirely ignored the many wax effigies of the powerful and celebrated displayed in splendor on roped-off platforms and kept his full attention fixed on an ominous, stone-rimmed entrance at the rear of the hall.

  Mounted above the door of that entrance was a solemnly gaudy Gothic sign in bold black letters, lit as mysteriously as possible by a purposely flickering lamp. The sign read first: L’OUBLIETTE, and then, beneath, THE DUNGEON OF HORROR. The outer corners of his nearly lipless mouth lifted briefly in a kind of smile as he passed through the entrance and padded his way down a winding flight of steps.

  Doughty British laborers of bygone years had labored long and hard to make those steps look as though they might descend to the deepest bowels of an ancient Bavarian castle, but, in fact, they spiraled down to a singularly bizarre basement which was the very commercial heart of the Grimmaud establishment.

  To be sure, the wax museum prided itself on its excellent likenesses of the respectable folk upstairs, and did its very best to have effigies of all the latest politicians, actors and, of course, every single member of the royal family on hand, but the denizens of this dark, stuffy, depressing room were what really pulled the tourists, international and domestic. Ever since old Madame Grimmaud herself had escaped the French Revolution and started the business with sullen, gory figures sculpted by her own thin hands, this basement, or others like it, had given the place its real reputation.

  Here, in this gloomy, dusty place, which now and then shook faintly as the train in the Underground roared by beneath it, lurked grim wax statues of notorious murderers of the past and present, sometimes with the very things they had used to murder and mutilate, the same knives and roped c
hairs and nicked hatchets. Here, too, were on display the grisly devices which so many of these rascals had eventually encountered: the nooses which had strangled them, the guillotines which had chopped off their wincing heads, and the iron chairs they’d been chained in as they roasted.

  The tall man paused at the foot of the stairs and studied the back of a gaunt, elderly party who had arrived before him and was interestedly prodding a wax dummy tied in frozen agony upon a supposedly authentic rack of the Inquisition.

  Aside from a cobwebby fringe hanging dismally from its rear, the huge, bulging head of the old man toying with the tortured dummy was entirely bald, and its unwholesome skin suggested the pallid flesh of a squid grown pale from hiding too long in clouds of its own ink. When the old man slowly turned, guided by that sure and certain instinct given to creatures talented in sneaking, the face of that ominous head was shown to be just as pale, save for the remarkably dark pits around its sunken eyes. The old man studied the new arrival from beneath the enormous bulge of his pale, bald forehead in a studiously cold, scientific manner.

  ‘You are late,’ he said, after a longish pause, regarding the tall man with a peculiar waving motion of his head.

  ‘No,’ said the other, in a harsh, sibilant whisper, ‘you are early. I have never met you yet but that I have not found you lurking in wait.’

  ‘Of course there’s no sign of the Frenchman,’ said the other irritatedly, turning back to the rack and giving its handle a little tug, which made the dummy creak. ‘But then the people of that nation have no appreciation of the value of time whatsoever.’

  ‘I have been here all along, English,’ said a deep voice from a dark corner, and the two others turned at a stirring of old chains in one of the dark, dusty corners of the room just in time to see the graceful appearance of a large man dressed in impeccable evening attire.

  There was no visible flesh about him, save for his burning eyes, for his high-domed head was entirely and neatly covered by a tailored black-silk mask which disappeared under the immaculately white wings of his shirt collar with a tidy ascot fold, and his large, long-fingered hands were hidden under faintly gleaming gloves, also of black silk. As they watched he sauntered further into visibility, letting them see he’d acquired a horrendous antique mace from one of the exhibitions.

  ‘I could have killed you any number of times, Professor. With this, for instance,’ he said, twirling the mace idly and easily in spite of the fact it must have weighted at least fifty pounds. ‘I could have splattered your celebrated brains on the floor of this filthy place. Your mangled body would have made an excellent exhibit.’

  ‘For your sake, it is just as well you didn’t try,’ said the old man at the rack, showing his yellowed teeth in a very nasty smile, ‘as I have made certain arrangements—which, no offense, gentlemen, I see no point in revealing to either one of you prematurely—to ensure that any such ill-advised move would be both unsuccessful and fatal to yourselves.’

  From the toss of his head it seemed the man in the mask had found no difficulty in framing an appropriate reply, but the tall man with the cape stilled both his companions with a regal sweep of his hand.

  ‘No bickering, gentlemen!’ he spat. ‘You forget our purpose. Or is this convocation feckless? Have we gathered here to change the world, or are we merely met in combat? Do you join me, or do you die?’

  The two men glared fiercely up at him with a combined menace of appalling force which would have caused most recipients to fall on their knees and beg for mercy, but the tall man only studied the others thoughtfully for a moment, then made a tiny bow and spread his long-taloned hands palms-forward in a gesture of truce.

  ‘Excuse me, I have the habit of command. Perhaps I spoke too forcefully,’ he said, lowering his voice, with some difficulty, down to a guttural whisper. ‘We are—all three of us—too used to having our own way. I do not wish to demean your talents or denigrate your dangerousness. If I did not think of you as my equals I would not have suggested this meeting in the first place.’

  The two others relaxed, just a little, as the other continued.

  ‘I chose this room for our historic meeting as it most singularly evokes the past, very much including our own, and is full of lessons for us all.’ He paused and tapped his fingertips together. ‘By the way, speaking of things nostalgic, did you enjoy the fog I had put on? I thought it might induce in us an appropriately ruminative mood.’

  After a moment of silence, the man at the rack gave its handle another tweak which wrenched the dummy into an even more frightful contortion.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I confess I did. Quite thoughtful of you to arrange it. Standing in it, just outside the museum, I was taken back to the time my organization succeeded in removing the crown jewels from the Tower of London. We had them all, you know, down to the last scepter and globe! For two whole weeks. Of course the public never knew of it. I hadn’t thought of that in years. We committed real crimes back then, the sort of stuff these tacky swindlers operating nowadays daren’t dream of!’

  He sighed and reached down to fondle a curl or two of the dummy. Meanwhile the man in the mask had rested his mace at the base of the guillotine and was gazing thoughtfully up at the rusty streaks on its slanting blade.

  ‘Oh, but you could kill gorgeously when there were fogs like that,’ he murmured. ‘Bon gré mal gré, and no one the wiser. Once could improvise delightfully. Yes, I liked it very much. Merci beaucoup. And you were wise to have chosen this hall of murder and pain as our meeting ground, Mandarin. There is much here that touches us all.’

  He strode over to another side of the room, circled his huge, black-gloved hand around the neck of a bearded dummy, and plucked it from its stand.

  ‘We called this one “The Gnawer,” after the gargoyle on Notre Dame, because he was terrible with those he killed,’ he said, gazing at the dummy’s eyes as Hamlet had gazed at Yorick’s skull. ‘He was hanged because they caught him chewing through the neck of a little whore when he should have been following my orders and watching a certain box at the Opera. He cost me a lot of money, this one; he ruined a highly satisfactory plan.’

  He hurled the dummy brutally to the floor so that its wax head shattered and the pieces skittered in all directions liked panicked crabs.

  ‘It’s true, what you say about this place,’ said the man at the rack. ‘How we’re all of us involved in these displays. Take that group of dummies over there representing a heap of charred cadavers, the ones who were come upon one morning in what was left of the House of Lords. They got that way botching the installation of an explosive apparatus of my own invention which, had it been properly placed and activated and operated, would have forced the government to hand me over a fortune. I must say it does give me some small satisfaction to see their agonizing deaths so graphically depicted.’

  The tall man on the stairway nodded.

  ‘Like yourselves, gentlemen,’ he hissed softly, ‘a quantity of my past endeavors are represented here by former associates and enemies rendered in wax with varying degrees of mediocrity. I even see a few infernal devices of my making, or simulations of them. But they are not cause for pride, no cause at all, because of course, they represent failures, gentlemen, failures!’

  He strode down into the room and stalked from dummy to dummy, striking one on the shoulder so the dust rose in a puff from its coat, knocking another’s rat-chewed moustache askew on its lip with a hard slap, giving a third a contemptuous shove in the back which caused it to topple and split open on its own ax.

  ‘These murderers and thieves are here because they were all caught, gentlemen, their crimes all went awry, and not a few of their blunders endangered ourselves!’ He paused, standing by the fallen image of a more than ordinarily notorious strangler and crushed its mad stare into its grimy, pale face with slow, sure pressure from his slippered foot, then continued in a calmer tone. ‘Speaking for myself, it is only a matter of luck our own likenesses are not displayed here for
the ignorant to gape at.’

  The stooped man at the rack nodded grimly.

  ‘I must confess I have had the selfsame thought on previous visits to this establishment,’ he muttered softly.

  The masked man broke off the head of a hunchbacked figure with a loud, startling pop.

  ‘This one almost did such a thing to me,’ he snarled.

  The tall man started slightly at this and raised one of his bony talons thoughtfully.

  ‘Most interesting you point out that particular villain, as he bears most particularly on an important aspect of what we are here to discuss,’ he said. ‘That person’s failure to kill a courier passing through the Gare de Lyon nearly led to your arrest, is that not so?’

  The eyes of the burly man in black bore through the holes in his mask with increased intensity.

  ‘That is true,’ he said.

  ‘He did not kill that courier because I had paid him a higher price to kill another one here in London,’ the tall man said; then, as the man in black was somehow standing next to him with his gloved hands nearly at the tall man’s throat: ‘Please understand I intended you no harm. Only later, when the failure of your plan to steal the train containing the gold was announced in the press, did I realize I’d placed you in mortal danger.’

  After a significant pause, the man in black lowered his hands.

  ‘I have done the same for you,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘The Invalides business, for instance. That little trap under the dome was set for the agents de police, not for yourself. On my word, I had no idea you were even interested in the place at that time.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said the tall man, and then, turning to the ancient at the rack: ‘As you must believe me, Professor, when I assure you——’

  ‘That the poisonous spiders I encountered when unrolling that papyrus were not intended for myself but for the greedy Dr Benson,’ the other finished for him. ‘Of course I recognized your touch and have held the incident against you ever since. Very well, but then you must accept that mine in the Thames which annihilated your motor launch was pure accident.’ When he saw the tall man nod he continued: ‘I take your point. We have inadvertently caused one another a great deal of bother down through the years. It would simplify matters considerably if we could manage to avoid stepping on the others’ toes.’