Well here's my present for Nella. A ficlet with everyone's favourite werepoodle.
Failing
by Numbuh 0xFF
Dedicated to Nella. Happy birthday!
It was a drizzly miserable day in November. The kind where it simply doesn't pay to get out of bed. When even sunlight is all gritty, musty and unclean. In short, a rather unpleasant day altogether. And it was about to get worse.
The summons always came in odd hours. At first Ulric though that his...
benefactors were in a different timezone. Perhaps on one of the poles or in deep space. Now, he assumed the unfortunate timing was simply there to throw him off-balance. It was the kind of thing they would do. True to form, at a shade past four he was awoken from fitful dreams by the clear, cold and inexplicably alien knowledge in his mind. He had to be at a certain place at a certain time where he would receive further instructions. He could have refused. They never elaborated on what exactly would that entail but he got the impression that it would be singularly unpleasant. Still, by and large, it would be preferable to the position he was in now. Lying helpless somewhere in the woods as dusk fell and rainwater pooled in the hollow below his head.
He could have refused. But he didn't. Instead he got out of his bed and padded silently to his dresser. It was but a moment's work to dress and the work of a few more to get himself armed. As his hands moved by long accustomed habit depositing various ingenious devices in clever hiding places he stared in the mirror, his eyes unfocused and disinterested. Having finished that, he sneaked to the corridor and left the treehouse keeping silent only out of habit -- all the others were well acquainted with his nocturnal habits. The meeting place was not far and he would walk hoping that the cold would clear the cobwebs of sleep from his mind. It made him numb instead.
Miskatonic Elementary was hardly a cheery place in the best of circumstances; all the re-modelings during the years obscured and distorted the original style (if, indeed, there ever was one!) so much that all that remained was a grab-bag of architectural oddities -- misshapen classrooms, their geometry subtly
wrong and twisting dank corridors disturbingly organic in their layout. The place was
old, too. Mr. Pickman, the art teacher, claimed that the place had a long history before becoming a school. At one point, he claimed, it was an insane asylum -- though he was smiling when he said it. Or at least the corners of his mouth were turned up and his teeth were showing. Needless to say, it looked forbidding at 05:00 AM.
Still, Ulric was glad to arrive and get out of the chill biting wind. He shook the rain out of his overcoat and slunk furtively down the corridors. You never knew what you might run into in one of Miskatonic Elementary's winding hallways. Could be a feral pack of hamsters -- escaped from years of captivity in Mr. West's biology class and hungry for revenge. Could be the entrance to the fabled Lost Classroom of class 3e. You could even, if fifth-graders were to be believed, meet yourself coming the other way. Still he managed to reach his destination without meeting anything more disconcerting than a shadowing lemma[1]. He made his way into the library checking first if the chief librarian, its unquestioned ruler, was present. He was not, and Ulric breathed a sigh of relief. Explaining why he was here some time before daybreak to Mr. Alhazred's manic, beady-eyed stare that always seemed to look just past your left ear was not a prospect he relished. Emboldened by this stroke of luck he strode briskly to a dingy bookshelf in a remote corner, removed
Unaussprechlichen Kulten from it's resting place, opened it and pushed the large button right in the middle of page 137. The floor shuddered and heaved for a while and then a scuffed patch of wall-paneling to his right melted away revealing an arched doorway. On it, someone stuck a large handwritten note reading:
Kids Next Door
Emergency Base #1138
Absolutely No Adults Past This Point!!!
We MEAN it!
Confidently, Ulric walked trough the door and past the array of increasingly nasty traps and pitfalls (designed to give credence to the 'We MEAN it!' bit). Beyond was a small room stuffed with what KND Global Command though would be needed in an emergency redoubt. Candy mostly. A few light arms. And, leaning against a far wall and slightly battered communications console. He sat in front of it and waited. He had a few minutes more and would use them to gather his thoughts.
He never quite figured out how they knew. Or what it was that they wanted from him. They contacted him out of the blue one day and explained how they could turn his life into living hell with just a few words spoken into the right ear. They also explained how they might refrain from doing so if suitably...recompensed. They assured him, at great length, that this was just clandestine activity to help the cause of kids everywhere but blackmail is blackmail no matter how you dress it up. Either way, he had no choice. Or so he told himself when he woke in the middle of the night tormented by dreams he could never quite remember.
The screen came to life interrupting his melancholy musings: a sheet of pale fire in the gloom of the emergency base. And a pleasant girl's voice spoke up:
"This is Control."
That's how it started. Every time. Same three words. Same voice -- pleasant but with a hint of ice under the sunny exterior.
"Wolfe here."
The voice of Control continued immediately while the display changed into drifting abstract shapes.
"You are required to go to the supplied coordinates in subgrid epsilon near Arkham wood. Nearby is an old house and in it is a book. In approximately thirteen hours someone is going to attempt its retrieval. You will prevent this using any means necessary. You will under no circumstances have any contact with the book yourself."
"Who will attempt to retrieve it?"
"That is irrelevant to your task. You must simply stop this person, whoever it may be."
"And what's in the book?"
"Again, irrelevant. Focus on the task."
"But--I don't understand..."
"Understanding is not required! Only obedience."
The screen went dead and the clattering teletype produced a slip of paper bearing the promised coordinates.
He could have refused then. Could have smashed the terminal, tore up the paper and told Control to take a long walk off a short pier. Could have went home and pretended it was all a bad dream brought on by too much bacon. But he didn't. He accepted. He didn't say yes exactly but he refrained from saying no. At the time he thought that was the only choice he had. Now, in the fading light of a dull sky he saw, with the piercing clarity of the truly desperate, that he did have a choice all the time. But he didn't take it. Worse luck. He shifted into a slightly less uncomfortable position letting more water, dark, slimy and cold, seep into the hollow. His teeth began to chatter. And to think that scant hours ago his biggest problem was boredom.
Of course, his team-mates would swear that he couldn't
get bored. Not him. Not Ulric Wolfe. He'd just sit there chewing the same piece of gum for hours on end doing nothing. The difference is that then he could think freely -- planning, daydreaming or simply letting his imagination run wild. But in that wood, waiting for whomever is coming for that book, he couldn't afford the luxury of inattention. Instead he hunkered down under an evergreen bough heavy with rainfall and waited looking at the wood. There wasn't much too see, really. Trees. More trees. Mud. He'd been looking at the same for some ten hours. Oh, look, a shooting star! How nice.
Funny. I didn't know meteors could steer. He gave the display just above his head a more focused stare and, true enough, the little pinprick of light was turning in lazy spirals. Shedding velocity. Now he got sick as a, hah!, dog every time he left the ground and space travel held the same attraction to him as a root canal but that did look quite a bit as a standard landing pattern. He turned the collar of his coat up and slunk deeper in shade. After a few more passes the pinprick grew larger and more ship-like and with a few more it was above a nearby clearing larger than life and spitting soda fizz from all exhaust ports. It hung there in just the manner large brick don't for a while and then, ever so gently, landed on the damp springy turf, barely leaving a mark. Ulric dove behind a convenient holly bush ignoring the mud splashing everywhere and then peered out carefully. He wanted to Change, badly, but he knew he'd need his higher brain functions for a while yet. So he waited.
After the fizz died out a hatched pooped open and a short, portly figure, bundled in a thick coat and wrapped in what looked like at lest five scarfs hopped out clumsily. It was followed, with a lot more grace, by an altogether more sensibly dressed figure. A boy and a girl. Damn. He was hoping it was adults. Then he could at least feel good about himself.
The bundled figure tried to speak, failed, and spent some time unwrapping scarves and shawls getting himself all tangled up in the process which elicited a high-pitched giggle from his companion.
"There!", the boy finally managed, "Here we are. On bloody Earth. Can we go home now?"
"Oh come ON Lawrence, it can't possibly be that bad!"
"Bad?! Bad?! It's Earth! It's a moist spinning rock where it either rains too much or is too hot. And you are too heavy by half. Of course it's bad!"
"And what would you prefer?"
"A nice sensibly air-conditioned room at 0.75g. And a cup of Earl Gray." he said wistfully and took a few aimless steps bumping into a low-hanging tree branch "What the crud is this?"
"Birch, I think."
"Disgusting." he glanced around "You sure you want to look? It's a miserable place, this."
"I'll be fine. Just give me my stuff and come back and pick me up in two hours. I should be done by then."
The boy shrugged, as if to display his resignation at his companion's folly, and reached into the ship taking out packs.
"Portable lab. Notebooks. Packed lunch. Camera. Sensor suite. Oooh is this kvass?"
"Yes and if you take even a single sip your life is forfeit. "
"Damn. Okay, is it all there?"
"Uhh...yeah. Pretty much. You going now?"
The boy made a face
"Oh yeas. Can keep all those nice people in the Arctic base waiting, now can I? Call me if you need something."
"So you can get out of the budget meeting?"
"That's the notion, yes."
"Sure. Bye."
"Bye."
With this the boy climbed back into the ship and took off on an impressive pillar of soda fizz. The girl stayed behind for a couple of minutes more packing her things and then, slinging her large pack on and adjusting her red hair-bow she set off stepping lightly despite the weight.
Ulric stayed behind his mind reeling. He knew who these people were! They were KND! Lawrence...didn't he meet him in Mason's shop? How was he supposed to stop her? He bit his lip in frustration and ran after her.
After a while the little forest path petered out and she was forced to slow down enough for Ulric to catch up with her. Now, as she carefully picked her way past rotting tree-trunks, he had time to watch her. She looked out of place here, he had to admit, with her blond hair and china-doll face and large, innocent eyes peering past her round spectacles. Her natural habitat would be somewhere with rose gardens covered in snow and well-lit parks, not picking her way over mud and thickets of thorny bushes. Somewhere where it snowed and snowflakes could rest on her eyelashes and melt while she laughed and...
Damn! He was getting fixated again! He shook his head, hard, trying to clear his mind and decided, on impulse, to Change, there and then. Stupid, his alternate form might be, but at least it didn't have the more embarrassing quirks of cynanthropy. He shook himself, thought of homework and
concentrated.He never tried to explain the change to anyone and he was not sure he even could. It simply required words for concepts humans didn't posses. Once, while he was staring in a millpond on a lazy summer's afternoon he came up with "A full-body sneeze where the top of your head flies clean off." Not much of a description, really, but any more would require inventing words for things like "the feeling that you are seeing with your teeth" and such.
It was over in a couple of seconds with hardly any pain -- only a nagging feeling that h should be chasing his own tail. The forest lit up in his improved vision: true he only saw black and white but that was more than compensated by the rich panoply of smells and the exact knowledge of every scrap in the girl's pack. None of it was homework. His canine mind whined but what little of Ulric remained was glad. It would make things much easier. He hoped.
He chased after her, his mind free of embarrassing thoughts but also free of any cognitive ability. It's not that he
couldn't think -- more like his, now dominant, canine side thought it an ill use of time better spent chasing things. What passed for an internal monologue in his current state went something like this:
"Goodgirl want badthing! Not hurt but chase chase! Scare goodgirl from badthing. Good!"
with perhaps an added coda about juicy homework. Maybe French. He could go for some French.
His new form found the terrain particularly easy going and he quickly outdistanced the struggling girl. He reached the house and set an ambush, lying in wait behind some bushes. The wait took several minutes which the human Ulric spent worrying like mad while his canine counterpart preferred instead to daydream about calculus homework. Finally, just when both Ulric's considered going back to fetch her, she showed up, cresting the hill using some sort of slender stick to beat aside the bushes. She paused for a moment, resting after the exertion -- the clearing was a short way off but it was all uphill and over rough terrain. As she took a swig from her canteen and readjusted her pack Ulric tensed, coiling for the leap. His human side was revolted and his canine side gleeful at finally having something to chase -- mixed together these emotions lead to a sort of nervous anticipatory glee -- dark and ugly. As she came closer time itself seemed to slow down. Every sound was magnified thousandfold, so that even the crack of a broken twig seemed a gunshot and above them all was his own heartbeat growing ever quicker and resounding like the crash of an ocean. She came another step closer and his head swam. Another and a quiver began somewhere around his heart. Another and the quiver expanded to a fever-pitch, like a small bird fighting to escape from the confines of his chest. Another and the bird grew talons...
just one more. She finally passed, unheeding, right in front of his hiding place and the quiver tore its way out lifting him, giving him wings until he leaped forward driven, it seemed to him, by pure will rather than mere muscle.
The sudden jump of the predator overpowering weaker, surprised prey. A trick literally old as the hills. And almost unfailingly successful.
There was nothing she could--
Lord, but the girl had reflexes like a mongoose!Her movements would have been nothing more than a blur to someone else but he saw it all. How she dove aside, reached for that stick, tossed it in the air and then with a smooth loop of her other hand drove it right into him. Amazing. It must be done on pure instinct. No way she could have noticed him in time. Still a stick would hardly--and then it flashed, bending and reflecting light around it oddly. He barely had time to register a rippling nausea when it struck. The shock nearly caused him to Change there and then. It was like running into a wall headfirst at full tilt. Worse. His right paw twisted in an impossible angle and he himself was hurled trough the air crashing trough the tree-branches, a thicket of brambles, some more branches and then a very final thicket. The knock robbed him of the last of his self-control and he howled once in pure animal fury before falling unconscious.
And there he was. Helpless, immobilized and probably freezing to death -- his soaked trough fur no longer able to ward of the chill of the night. And, grim as everything was, he couldn't bring himself to feel sorry for himself. He had it coming. He really did. He should have said no. He should have refused.
He should have found out her name.
Suddenly, there was a crash from the brambles -- something fairly large was approaching. He tensed cursing his rotten luck -- wasn't the day going bad enough already? He swiveled his head around with some difficulty and saw--her?
She was approaching him murmuring softly in a language he didn't understand:
"Хорошо собаке. Милая собака. Ты пострадал?"
All he could mange in answer was a plaintive whine and suddenly he felt very embarrassed. Then he felt embarrassed of being embarrassed. Then he concluded firmly that he was an idiot.
While he was busy berating himself silently, she knelt in the mud next to him and took his paw gently and tutted at the damage she caused. A few moments later his paw was bandaged and splinted and the KND quickheal she injected was already making him feel better. She packed her things away and flicked him gently on the nose murmuring:
"Будьте осторожны! Бережёного Бог бережёт."
With those words and a grin she was off holding, he couldn't help noticing, an old leather-bound book in the crook of her arm. Well, he failed. And was glad of it.
To be continued?
Footnotes:
[1] A shadowing lemma is a peculiar creature indeed. It lives in two dimensions only and feeds on mathematicians.