Kitman Versus The Squirrels

A novel. With some squirrels in.

<< Chapter 11 >>

In Which A Paradoxical Discovery Is Made.

"And I felt the lightest possible touch upon my ankle," I said again.

"Maybe," said Kathleen to her brother, "they're not home."

Kitman rang the bell again. "No...if they'd gone out they'd have — ah, someone's coming."

"Ankle?" I said.

During an arts-and-crafts program designed by the Abelton Park Board of Education to waste two weeks of my summer vacation after third grade, I had made a necklace out of acorn cups for a certain person, only to discover that I lacked the courage to give it to her. It was at this moment languishing somewhere in my closet at home. Suddenly this seemed to be less of an unresolved issue.

There must have been some indication of my thought process on my face, because the Kathleen at issue suddenly said "Oh, um — however did you escape?"

"I forget," I said, just as the front door opened. A head popped out and looked up at us: a head that, in its way, resembled a scoop of pistachio mint ice cream with huge chocolate chips for eyes and a pair of Nilla Wafers stuck in the front. Or maybe I was just hungry.

"Oh, hello!" said Noel (for it was he).

Talking ducks have a peculiar and intense reality to them. If being transported to an alien world fails to flap you; if true and terrifying tales of profound personal peril as told first-hand by the person who gave you a valentine in third grade¹ leave you unboggled; well, there's nothing like a good talking duck to break through your blaséity, and Noel is excellent.

"Gik?" said Kathleen.

I had expected the sort of "Gik" that encompasses a sort of "Good grief, is that a talking duck, does it bite, have I gone mad, oh dear" reaction. This, however, was a "Gik" more along the lines of "Oh my goodness, it's a talking duck with eyes like a golden retriever puppy, I'll never buy another plush toy again" — which was fine with me.

"Hello, Noel!" said Kitman heartily. It had to be heartily. "May I present my sister Kathleen, and of course my friend whatzisname."

"Charmed," said Noel, shaking hands with Kathleen quite thoroughly. He also tilted his head and blinked at her, with predictable results. "Hello, you," he said to me. "And what brings you by? Strange and terrible things, I hope?"

"All too accurate," said Kitman. "Is Mr. Mider in?"

"Yes and no," said Noel, opening the door wider. "You'd better come in, and I'll rustle up some tea."

He settled us into the sitting room, which looked almost exactly as it had the last time we'd been there except for some new paintings on the walls.

"Recognize that scene?" said Kitman, nudging me and pointing at an icy planetscape rendered in reddish black, bluish black, and black.

"Mm," I said.

"So, how did you escape from the unseen monster?" said Kathleen, once Noel had disappeared from view down the kitchen hallway.

I pointed at Kitman.

"Oh, don't be that way," she said. "Do I take points off people because they're easily distracted?"

"I don't know," I said. "Does she, Kitman?"

"Does who what?" said Kitman, staring at a particularly disturbing portrait that I hoped wasn't from life until I remembered what the alternatives were.

"Just tell me what happened," said Kathleen.

 • 

It was early evening and we were standing in Kitman's bedroom. Then I, at least, was sitting in Kitman's bedroom, unshoeing myself to check my ankle for fang marks or tentacle burn or a new eyeball. Thankfully it was unmolested, but my sock was now sticky, damp and ammonia-scented, and I swiftly peeled it off and threw it at the trash.

"Well!" said Kitman. "That worked." And he closed the cover of his vaxillator with a snap.

"That," I said, "was entirely too close! I thought you said we'd be safe!"

Kitman blinked down at my desocked form and deposited the vaxillator atop his bureau. "We were!" he said. "Are you familiar with the Bernoulli principle?"

"No," I said. The vaxillator slid off the bureau and onto a chair.

"How about the Leydenfrost effect?" said Kitman, opening his drawer of odd socks and rummaging through it.

"No," I said. The vaxillator slid off off the chair and onto the floor.

Kitman threw me a clean sock. "Well, then," he said, picking up the vaxillator and placing it atop the bureau, "you'll have to take my word for it. But trust me, you're never safer than in close calls. If you don't like plaid I've got paisley."

"Plaid is fine," I said, and watched Noel watch me put on a sock.

"That's really weird," he said admiringly.

"If you liked that," I said, "watch me tie my shoelaces."

He did.

"Wow!" he said.

Kitman picked the vaxillator off the floor, put it in with the odd socks and closed the drawer. Then he went over to his microfridge and pulled out three bottles of Dr. Pepper, which he distributed equitably. "I propose a toast," he said, "to an unqualified success."

"Success?" I said. "We don't seem to have come out of the experience with anything but questions."

Noel coughed, a sound which called to mind someone choking quietly on a harmonica.

"Well, yes," I said, "and very nice you are, too, but I meant in the crude material sense."

Noel coughed again, looked off at nothing in particular (a difficult feat in Kitman's room) and pulled something out of his inside jacket pocket. It was a book, cloth-bound in red.

Kitman spilled his Dr. Pepper onto my other sock. "Is that what I think it is?"

It had the word DIARY printed in gold on the front.

"So it is!" said Kitman. "Where—?"

"The window seat had a hinge at the back," said Noel. "I had a peek in while you were in the study and, well..."

"Excellent, Noel!" said Kitman, opening the sock drawer again. "I mean, shame shame," he added, putting one hand over his eyes and picking at random with the other. "We shall certainly have to return it to its rightful owner, after we carefully examine it to determine who that is, of course." He threw me another sock: tartan, with individual toe compartments.

Tartan with — "Kitman, this is mine!" I said.

"Oh, is it? Well, good. Now let's have a look at that diary."

It did have daily entries — each page was headed with the words "Voonrise" and "Voonset", followed by times — but in point of fact it was more what people call a book of days, and contained as much or more in the way of doodles and sketches as in words.

The first page contained a credible rendition of a sailing ship in the middle of a desert, with the cryptic notation "Third stair down, 2:45 PM". On later pages we found, among other things, the Taj Mahal rendered all in black; a pyramid, rising from a forest of palm trees; what looked like the Los Angeles Public Library tower with a very large antenna or lightning rod sticking out of its top; much to Kitman's financial delight, an altar almost buried in your basic treasure mix of jewels and coins¹; and, most disturbingly, a 7-11 with a poster in the window advertising "Still Only 25 Cents" Slurpees.

"I would say 'interesting', but that would be a redundancy," said Kitman.

All the drawings had times noted, along with notations like "Fifth stair down" or "Three feet forward, one foot left". The inside front cover of the book contained a table of all the times sorted by location, and the inside back cover had all the locations sorted by time.

"I've seen something like these before," said Kitman. "There were some times written on the desktop paper. With calculations."

"Would you like to...explain?" I said.

"Not a clue — though if it was me I'd say he was looking for periodic cycles. But we need more data."

"I need —" said Noel, and stopped.

"Need what?" said Kitman.

"Um," said Noel, waving his empty Dr. Pepper bottle in the air.

"A refill?"

"No..." said Noel. "The opposite."

"--Oh," said Kitman, and addressed the issue.

We sorted out some domestic issues at that point.

"Shall we hang the hammock in the guest bedroom?" I said to Kitman, while Noel was otherwise occupied. "He can have the bed."

"After you've been in it? Certainly not," said Kitman. "No, there are plenty of empty beds in this house. Granted, I wouldn't want to put him in Ken or Kevin's either, and it would be presumptuous to put him in my parents's bed. Which leaves —"

 • 

"You put him in my bed?" said Kathleen, in swiftly decreasing amplitude as Noel had just walked in with a tray of teacups.

"We changed the sheets," said Kitman quietly.

"Before and after," I said.

Noel set the tray down. "That's rice milk," he said, pointing at a small purple cow creamer. "And your choice of sugar or honey. We're all out of lemons, but there's a lime in the fridge if you want to try that."

"I was just telling Kathleen how you stayed in her room," I said.

"Yes," said Kathleen. "He was."

"I liked your room," said Noel. "It made me feel so...vindicated!"

Kathleen blinked. "Vindicated?"

Noel sat down and folded his hands together, and looked Kathleen in the eye. "Did he tell you about my brother?"

"No..."

"I had," said Noel, "a notebook."

"Yes?"

"You see," said Noel, twiddling his opposable thumbs, "I used to read...books, of a certain kind. I'd go to used book stores, and library book sales, and come home with shopping bags full of things like The Golden Nectar Of Universal Enlightenment, or Astral Travel For The Intellectually Moribund, and they were almost always books by people with time on their hands. No imagination, let alone insight.

"But sometimes, there would be something that seemed right. Something that seemed real. And I'd add it to my notebook. It took years to fill it. Page after page. I read lots of books to do it. All cross-referenced and indexed..."

"Think Will Cuppy crossed with Charles Fort," I said.

"Or Newton Blackspring?" said Kathleen.

"And then my brother found it," said Noel. "He was very impressed, in a way."

"Hence the business card," I said.

"So do you see?" said Noel. "After all those years of collecting bits and pieces of a larger world, wondering what it would be like to live in it, there I was, in a giant's bed in a giant's room, with walls covered in...Huggy Bunny wallpaper."

"—I've been meaning to change that," said Kathleen. "Actually."

"Don't!" said Noel. He clasped his hands together and closed his eyes in delighted recollection. "It made it so right! Aliens and interdimensional travel and strange and terrible occurrences, that's just madness, but Huggy Bunny wallpaper — I just felt so real I could hardly stand it."

"Goodness gracious me," said Kathleen.

Noel sighed happily. "To wind up at the mercy of giants, and find that there's just so much of it..."

"Um," said Kitman, "what?"

"You gave me breakfast in bed!" said Noel.

"We did?" said Kitman.

"Only Continental," I said defensively.

"The first day, yes!" said Noel. "But the second day!"

"Oh yes," I said, remembering.

"He asked what I would like for breakfast," said Noel. "And I asked for garlic onion rings, and I got them! Me!"

Kathleen gave me the eyebrow raised and fixed. I shrugged and was quietly glad he had forgotten about the Nutella.

"I always wanted garlic onion rings for breakfast," said Noel. "My mother said it wasn't, you know, normal...

"But enough about me — what brings you here?" he asked.

So I told him.¹

"Oh dear," said Noel. "That's bad. Mr. Mider's in the basement and I have no idea when he'll be back."

"Huh?" said Kathleen.

"I don't think he'll mind if I use the library," said Kitman. "And of course, you won't mind if I pick your brain?"

"Not a problem," said Noel.

"I say again, huh?" said Kathleen.

Kitman stood up and grabbed his teacup. "Do your duty, Major," he said to me. "I'm going to go see what I shall see."

 • 

Noel was eating garlic onion rings for breakfast with unseemly ecstasy when Kitman stepped through the door. He was noshing on a plate of synthetic sausage, synthetic eggs and synthetic bacon, as is his wont; one of these days he's going to have a psychosomatic heart attack.

"Noel," he said, "how would you like to go home?"

Noel froze in mid-bite. "Do I have to?"

"Well, not as far as I'm concerned," said Kitman, "though I dread explaining you to my parents, but in the truth in advertising department I have to admit that the planet you're on is not ideally suited to you. A lot of people who look like me would happily eat a lot of people who look like you, which you might find offensive."

"But he can talk," I argued.

"That does score in his favor," said Kitman. "I've never heard of people chowing down on a plate of parrots. But the option of going home would be handy, just in case. I mean, I'm no authority on haute cuisine."

"Okay, how?" asked Noel.

This was Kitman's signal to explain, and he did, a task which of course began with tuning forks and resosignatures and which ended with the clipping of electrodes to Noel's ears. (Did I mention he had ears? Little stubby ones.)

"Okay, that's it," said Kitman. "Give me a few hours to do the math and we can all drop in on your home universe."

Which, in due time, we did — and that was when things got odd.

It was dark, and someone was snoring.

"Perhaps we came at a bad time," whispered Kitman.

I turned my head to speak to Kitman and felt something brushing my hair. I reached up and discovered that it was the ceiling, after getting my hand tangled in a set of wind chimes along the way.

"Where are we?" I said.

There was a short patter of flip-flop-clad feet, followed by a click. This proved to be the sound of a bedside table lamp being turned on, and was followed by the distinctive squeaking noise of a duck being surprised.

The duck was Noel, but this was not as meaningful a clarification as you might think, as beside the bedside table was a bed, and in the bed was, well, Noel, who, being sound asleep, was not surprised at all...