"Good evening to you, sir."
Iron-Spine Owens spun on his heel and went on his way, whistling an aimless tune, his hands resting relaxedly behind him. It was not until he was eight blocks away that he suddenly realized he had just totally violated the Iron-Spine character he had created for himself and maintained all these years. With just a few choice words this lone, bearded man had taken Owens firmly in hand, and in moments had him rolling over and playing dead. And Owens hadn't minded!
Owens whistled softly in awe. "I don't know just what that man has going for him," he said, waiting for the light to change at the corner of Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, "but whatever it is, I wish I could bottle it and sell it. I'd sure as hell make me a fortune." A woman with a dachshund on a leash looked curiously at the police officer mumbling to himself, and walked quickly away, shaking her head.
Arthur walked briskly through the park, the soles of his shoes slapping with satisfying regularity against the blacktop. A cyclist sped by him in the opposite direction and didn't even afford him a glance.
Arthur felt his pores opening, his senses expanding to drink in the greenery around him. This was something to which he had an easier time relating. This wood-and-leaf forest was something that came far more naturally to him than the brick, steel, and concrete forest that loomed all around, hemming in the park at all sides. This brought back pleasant memories of home....
Home? What was home to him now? He had no friends, no loved ones. No family. Only descendants, and even they were completely screwed up. Held in high esteem by the modern British, Arthur had in his day actually fought against the ancestors of the modern-day Englishman. But a lot could be forgiven and forgotten in over a dozen centuries, he decided.
Camelot long gone, lost in the mist of time and memories.
Gwenyfar . . . how are they spelling it now? he wondered. Guinevere, yes. His queen, long gone.
He had survived. All were gone, but he had survived. Or were they? None of the others had been locked away in an enchanted cave all this time, of course ... had they? But no, that was impossible. Only Arthur and Merlin had survived, and Merlin would certainly have told Arthur if any of his latter-day companions were still with them. Wouldn't he?
So lost in thought was Arthur as he made his way through the park that he failed to notice the two men lurking in the bushes.
Men might be too charitable a word. With their wild manes of black hair and their equally scraggly beards, they were of an indeterminate age. They, and others like them, were the primary reason that people rarely walked along in Central Park at night.
Once upon a time there had been three of them. Much of what was real and what was not floated in and out for the trio, and there had only been a handful of things that they agreed upon that absolutely, truly existed. Artificial stimulants headed the list, followed by money.
Then came superheroes- after all, in the whole world there had to be at least one, somewhere. And right after superheroes came Marx Brothers films. Everything else, from the name of the president to fast food, was nebulous in what passed for their minds. In honor of the one group of actors who absolutely truly existed, the three took the names of Chico, Groucho, and Harpo. Fortunately they did not have a fourth in the group, so nobody had to be Gummo. Unfortunately, somewhere in the intervening years Harpo disappeared into the ozone. They were never sure just where he went. They were just sort of wandering around one day and realized that he was gone. They adjusted to it, but kept their own respective names, partially out of homage to their vanished partner but mostly because, after a great deal of thought-searching, they could not manage to remember what their original names had been.
The taller one, Chico, stood slowly, disentangling his beard from the snarl of the branches.
"There he goes," he murmured. "You see him?"
Groucho nodded and chewed on the remains of a two-day-old stale pretzel. He stood as well, coming just to Chico's shoulder. He wiped his large nose expansively with his shirtsleeve but said nothing. Talking had never been his strong suit. Also, he wasn't so sharp on conscious thought either.
They were dressed quite similarly, in dark sweatshirts and tattered jeans with holes in the knees. Chico was also wearing battered basketball Keds and a thin windbreaker. In his social strata this alone was enough to qualify him for the best-dressed list.
Chico said, "Look at him. Like he's got the whole world for his oyster. He must have enough on him to keep us goin' for a few days, at least. Geez, he must be from out of town. C'mon."
He and his partner, or what there was of him, stepped out of the bushes. Chico looked down and scowled. "Who told you not to wear shoes, you idiot. Geez, aren't your feet cold?"
Groucho looked at him blankly. "Feet?"
The two ill-equipped, ill-advised, and generally just plain ill muggers found themselves quickly at a disadvantage. Their intended victim was walking quite quickly, and they felt compelled to remain in the background. The general intention was not to he spotted by the victim until it was too late.
The reason this didn't work was twofold.
To begin with, it was almost impossible to sneak up on King Arthur. The warrior's sixth sense he possessed warned him that several bad-intentioned but inept gentlemen were pursuing him, but he made no effort to ward them off. They seemed harmless enough.
Then there was their own paranoia. They insisted on taking refuge behind trees and shrubbery every time they thought, even for a moment, that they might be detected. These brilliant attempts at camouflage consisted of noisily rustling bushes or tripping over projecting roots. Such endeavors were usually accompanied by colorful profanity and frantic shushing. Arthur smiled but did nothing to discourage them. In a perverse sort of way he was very curious as to how they would react to the events which would shortly transpire.
At one point Groucho and Chico were almost within striking distance, but almost out of nowhere a police car materialized. It prompted them to dive headlong into the bushes to avoid detection. When the police car drove on past, they emerged cut and bleeding, and Groucho wiped at his nose and asked if they could go home now.
"That's it," growled Chico. "We're endin' this right now."
They scuttled ahead but found, much to their chagrin, that they had lost their quarry at the fork in the road. Trusting to his luck, which had not served in good stead for over a decade, Chico pulled his partner to the right and walked as quickly as he could.
Farther on down the road, Arthur watched from the shadows, and when he saw them coming, stepped back out onto the path. If they had guessed wrong, he'd been prepared to clear his throat loudly to guide them on their way. He began to walk, paused momentarily and cast a glance over his left shoulder. There was the expected crash and curses as the two leaped into the bushes once again. Arthur laughed to himself. He hadn't had this much fun in centuries.
The road angled down, and within a few more moments Arthur stood at the edge of Central Park Lake. His nostrils flared. He could smell the magic in the air, like a faint aroma after a barbecue. It was a pleasant scent, a familiar one. After all, he had lived with it for more years than any man could rightly expect to live.
He looked out across the lake and waited. It would be here, he knew. It had to be. All he had to do was wait....
The stillness of the night air hung over him. Faintly he heard an ambulance siren, or perhaps a police car. Closer, he felt the small animal life all around him. The creatures of the woods had tensed as well. They, too, sensed it.
Arthur let his breath out slowly and mist filled the air in front of him. It was chilly, rapidly approaching thirty-two degrees-the point at which water freezes.