“Easy-peasy,” said Rosie Rightly, trying to usher Beatrice through the gate. Beatrice dug her feet in a little. “Only, you forget it’s there sometimes. Silly to have a gate here anyway. There’s only one city in all the whole Big Bah-Ha, and nothing beyond it. Nothing. Nothing. So why keep anyone out? Everyone wants in, don’t they? Why shouldn’t they?”
When Beatrice glanced uneasily at the sky, Rosie Rightly patted her hand. “They’re okay. The Gacy Boys live here. They belong to the Gray Harlequin. But sometime he lets them out to eat.”
“What do they eat? If there’s nothin’ outside Chuckle City.”
Rosie Rightly’s pink mouth formed a great big O. Then she stretched her lips over a toothy grimace and said, “Haven’t had one like you in a while. You’re one of those sparky-smarts, ain’t you?! That’s great! Only maybe it’d be better if you wasn’t. Not that you can help it. But come on!”
She slipped her little hand, gloved in pink net, her fingernails painted with sparkly green glitter, through Beatrice’s arm and tugged her through the open gate. Beatrice almost backed out again as the first wave of heat licked her face.
What she saw stopped her deader in her tracks.
Every building in Chuckle City was on fire.
Diodiance combat-crawled through the weeds for a better look. Seemed all clear, so she signaled the A-Okay to Tex, who slouched into a squat in the overgrown hydrangea behind her. Further down the road, Granny Two-Shoes lay in the gutter with Sheepdog Sal sitting “guard” nearby. Granny had her binoculars, so she saw what was about to happen, but it was too late to warn them, and besides—wasn’t it what they all wanted? So she watched, but did not set Sal to barking.
Diodiance strained her senses and took stock of the scene. Cardboard house—empty. Blue lawn chair—vacant. Emissary at the eastern gates—defected.
A worm of a scant of an inch closer. Adjust the thornstick sheathed in her belt loop. Squint. Sniff. Wipe nose on sleeve. Glance again.
The Flabberghast’s hut was an old refrigerator box with a green-and-gold silk sari thrown over it. Icicle lights all the colors of a crayon box dripped from its edges, the unplugged prongs dangling in the wind. Come dusk they’d light up. No one knew why.
Sometimes a frayed edge of the sari flapped aside, showing a palatial foyer just beyond the front flap. Marble halls. Portraits. Tapestries. Vases. The Tall Ones lived in two worlds at once, Beatrice used to say. Or more.
Pounding fist to dirt, Diodiance whispered, “It’s a wash.” Then, louder, so Tex could tell the others, “Ain’t even a left-handed shadow to wave us hello! Granny? Sal? Tex, come on out here. No need to sneak. Flabby ain’t home.”
Tex emerged from his blind, brushing leaves from his hair. Granny rode up on Sal’s back, clutching her fur like a mane. She dismounted beneath the arched entrance of the gravy yard, with its creakily swinging sign that said welcome to hillside in cut out letters.
Having seen what was to come from way back in her gutter, Little Granny Two-Shoes was the only Barka who did not jump when a great voice shattered the silence.
“Good afternoon, children!”
That voice was like a Slinky toy going downhill, like shouting into a well after someone fell in, like a piece of expensive caramel melting in a slant of afternoon sunlight. It was a voice that made Diodiance pirouette, and set a rigid scowl upon Tex’s brow. Sheepdog Sal began to bark. Little Granny Two-Shoes scratched her just beneath the jaw.
“By all the skulls of Arlington National Cemetery!” cried the Flabberghast. “If it isn’t the Barka Gang!”
They all turned to look. Banana-yellow shoes rocked about his feet like dinghies. Up. Legs as long as stilts and thin as straight pins in their loose white silk trousers. Up. Past a coat of sweeping peacock feathers, a vest of red brocade, a fine lawn cravat. Up, and up, and up to his white-painted face, his long black mouth, his long black eyes, those curls of flaming orange hair peeking out from beneath a sequined derby hat.
“And how may I help you?” asked the Flabberghast politely.
“Beatrice is dead,” Tex blurted before Diodiance said something happy and solicitous.
“Ah.”
“We need her stuff for a death rite. We’re pretty sure you have it.”
“I see. Yes. That might prove…problematic.”
Tex stepped forward with fists up, to show the Flabberghast the meaning of problematic, but Diodiance shoved him to the side before he got too close. He fell against Sheepdog Sal’s flank, and Sal turned to lick his wrist. Granny Two-Shoes took his hand in hers, and this more than anything stopped Tex from launching himself at the Flabberghast.
The Flabberghast gave no sign of noticing this altercation. His gaze had meandered beyond the Barka Gang. Beyond the black iron gates, a few of the Tall Ones left off their endless feasting and began to drift curiously toward them. The white lights on their shoulders flickered and burned.
The Flabberghast put a long white hand on top of Diodiance’s head. Blissfully, she leaned in.
“Allow me to offer armistice and hospitality. Come with me into my hut. As per the edicts stipulated in the original bargain between vestigial Homo sapiens and the Tall Ones, I shall not harm a single split hair on any one of your heads till the day you are marked to die. We must speak further of your Beatrice, but the situation is far too complex for casual graveside chatter. While I do not doubt my colleagues would find our forthcoming conversation stimulating, as civilized people, we may exercise the right to exclude whom we will from our private affairs. Do not you agree?”
“Ain’t goin’ in your stinky old house,” Tex muttered.
“Fine,” Diodiance snapped at him. “Stay outside, you cowardbaby. That’ll get Queen B her death rite quick enough.”
“Aw, Di!”
Granny Two-Shoes, who still held his hand, now squeezed with intent. Tex allowed her to tug him into the cardboard hut after Diodiance, with Sheepdog Sal trotting behind, and the Flabberghast following last.
The first thing they saw, after the marble-floored foyer itself, was her skin.
It hung from one blank wall, stretched out and tacked there with silver nails. They knew the skin belonged to Beatrice because her hair was red. Not orange-red like the Flabberghast’s. Red like when a fire dies.
“Beatrice!” Diodiance screamed. This time Tex did punch the Flabberghast. Right in the knee.
The Flabberghast stumbled against a small table that held, among other things, a flensing tool and a familiar brown loafer (a scuffed size six, women’s) all under the coating of gray dust that comes from crunching bones. He hit the table’s edge and his peacock coat snarled him. Searching for purchase, his hands closed on air. This close up, he was not graceful. Not like he’d always seemed, sitting out in his blue lawn chair with his legs stretched before him like unfurled fire hoses.
Diodiance flinched against the wall, shielding Granny Two-Shoes with her body, Tex at her side, Beatrice’s skin at her back. Granny Two-Shoes saw something on the floor and bent to pick it up. Beatrice’s slingshot.
This put the Flabberghast between them and the door. He stood very still now, arms hanging loosely at his sides.
“You killed her!” Diodiance said. It wasn’t a sob, and it wasn’t a growl, but it was something like both.
“I do not eat the living,” said the Flabberghast.
“You killed her and stripped her flesh and ate her bones.”
The Flabberghast splayed one hand over his stomach. His diamond teeth gleamed and glinted, as if a spotlight in his belly shone up and out his throat, through his lips, casting rainbows all around him.