Temporary Monsters (10 page)

Chapter Thirteen

The door was flung open with such force that even Bruno was thrown to the ground. Lenny fell on top of the large man as two shadowy men in raincoats stepped into the game room. The Dimm had returned.

Lenny took a deep breath. He was shaken but not hurt. Bruno groaned beneath him, where he had cushioned Lenny's fall.

What were the Dimm doing here? After the rhyming rats, Lenny was sure he'd see his Terrifitemps team on the other side of that door. But he saw only the Dimm, clad in raincoats and shadows.

“How dare you interfere!” Foo shouted as the two moved silently into the room.

One of them strode up to Foo. The shadows followed, obscuring the game consoles to either side. “We do apologize. This would have been over long ago, if not for the nature of our subject's power.”

“There is no doubt now this Lenny Hodge is the one,” the other added from his position by the door. As if to prove the Dimm's point, Lenny heard the distant sounds of the buffalo chorus singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

“No more World War One fighting songs?” Swami Phil smiled beatifically as he tapped his foot to the buffalo chorus. “They've started singing Americana!”

“We need the man who brought them here.” The Dimm who had confronted Foo turned to regard Lenny and Bruno, both just pushing themselves off the floor. “Lenny Hodge, you cannot escape your destiny.”

The swami stepped forward to block the Dimm's path.

“Pardon me, but what exactly
is
Lenny's destiny?”

“And who might you be?” asked the Dimm by the door.

“I am Swami Phil,” he said with a slight bow. “I know the secrets of the East. Also the secrets of the West and South, although there's not as much call for those. I'm still working on the secrets of the North. A fellow has to have a hobby, after all.”

The Dimm's shadow crept across the swami. Phil's smile faltered ever so slightly. “The short answer,” he added quickly, “is I am the greatest seer I know, and whatever is going on with this fellow”—he waved both hands at Lenny—“is completely beyond me.”

“We have no need of swamis. If you would step aside?” Both Dimm grunted as one, as if dismissing the swami from further consideration. Then the shadow men turned toward Lenny. “You have no means of escape.”

The Dimm glided in Lenny's direction. No one moved to stop them. The Dimm towered over everyone. They grew more direct, more powerful. Even their shadows were longer than before. They paused, side by side, half a dozen paces from Lenny.

“You have eluded us before. We can take no more chances.” The two spoke as one. “We were forced to call in our supervisor.”

Lenny looked up to see—something else—walk through the door.

If the Dimm were difficult to see, their superior was entirely beyond comprehension—a rolling mass of darkness that Lenny found impossible to focus on. His gaze kept shifting elsewhere, to Sheila and the swami, quaking with apprehension, as if they saw death; to Foo, red in the face, as if he might explode with anger; and finally to Bruno, who reached inside his vest to pull out a gun.

“Please,” a voice boomed from within the darkness. “No more interference.”

Bruno wasn't listening. He aimed his snub-nosed revolver and fired three quick shots. All three bullets disappeared in the darkness that might be the supervisor of the Dimm.

The voice once again came from within the total lack of light. “We are sorry it has come to this.”

Bruno gasped, a sudden look of panic in his eye. He turned his head to Foo. “Master,” he began, “I—” But his voice was choked off as he was lifted from the floor. He thrashed in midair, his face turning blue as he gasped for air. His eyes closed, and he was tossed to the floor.

“He will recover,” the voice boomed from the darkness. “This time!”

Lenny glanced down at the large man. Bruno had passed out, but he was still breathing.

“We do not kill people,” the unseen supervisor continued. “Unless, of course, it is necessary.”

The darkness swirled about the entry to the room. “Now, Lenny Hodge, you must accept your fate. My operatives, P79K43 and 8Y87G4, have brought me here, because they are incapable of securing you for our purposes. Therefore, I will finish the job.” The darkness rolled in Lenny's direction. “Prepare to be enveloped.”

Foo studied the empty blackness before him. “You are displeased with your subordinates?”

The darkness hesitated a moment before answering. “No matter how much you train them—”

“Say no more.” Foo nodded in agreement. “Your underlings will always disappoint you.”

“Dad!” Sheila called. “How can you say that? Bruno almost died for you!”

Foo only sighed. “It's always
almost
, isn't it?”

“And you two!” the darkness rumbled. “I do not pay you to stand around. Do not forget, we have a second task.”

One of the underlings turned and glided toward Sheila. The young woman glared at his approach.

The thing in the raincoat stopped a foot before her face. “You cannot hide from the Dimm. Where have you hidden the first day cover?”

For the first time since Lenny had found her in Foo's lair, Sheila looked truly alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

“We were there, at Lenny Hodge's living area, only a minute too late. The Dimm know all.”

Sheila seemed stunned into silence.

Really?
Lenny thought. He remembered looking at his stamp collection and realizing the most valuable stamp of all was missing. Sheila was the thief? That surprised him as much as anything that had happened since he'd started this job. Sure, Sheila said she wanted to kill him. But he never thought she'd mess with his stamp collection.

Foo responded for his daughter. “Ah, so there is something you want as well? Perhaps we can make some compromise.”

“The Dimm let nothing deter them from their goals.” The darkness boomed dismissively.

“As you should! But you haven't really taken a look at my organization. It's one lean, mean fighting machine! Both of us want to rule the world. Perhaps we could even talk—merger?” He sidled over to the darkness, talking in a subdued voice.

Lenny backed slowly away from the discussion. So now they both planned to capture and kill him. And that was pretty much all that was happening. Shouldn't his gift be kicking in just about now? He thought again about what the mysterious S had told him. He had to be proactive about these things, and help his gift along. Maybe he could find a secret passageway of his own.

Bruno groaned and shook his head, blinking at the ever-changing lights on the games nearby. Everybody else in the room was watching Foo and the black void. They had forgotten about Lenny.

Maybe this was his gift after all.

The darkness raised its voice loud enough for all to hear. “We have no need of your death traps and doomsday devices!”

Foo took a step away from the void. It continued, “We will find out where this Lenny gets his strange abilities. But be assured. We are under strict orders. We only dissect him as a last resort.”

“Dissection?” Foo raised a single eyebrow.

“We only want to learn his secrets,” the chief Dimm explained. You can have him back when we're done. Or, at least, whatever pieces remain.”

Foo nodded, resigned to Lenny's fate. “Then I suppose Sheila will have her revenge, if only from a distance.” He glanced at his daughter. “Although I think we all would have preferred the reptile room.”

Enough of this! Just because this void with a booming voice wanted to take Lenny didn't mean he had to give himself up. Lenny dodged around the nearest game console, which sported a steering wheel and made revving engine and squealing brake noises. He headed for the opposite corner of the room.

“And where do you think you're going?” the rolling darkness asked. “There is no escape. My reach is everywhere.”

Lenny backed away through the maze of gaming machines. The darkness pursued him.

Something fell with a resounding crash.

“Ow,” the darkness remarked. “You're only delaying the inevitable. Surely, my cloak of darkness can obscure my surroundings a bit, but your strange power shines through it like a beacon. “It will only take a moment to be enveloped.” The void rolled forward. “Once you're absorbed, you won't feel a thing. Well, unless we have to do that dissection. But rest assured, we start out by cutting off the smallest little bits. You'll barely notice some of them are gone.” Something else crashed to the floor. “Ow! Of course, if you are stubborn about your secret we will need to dig deeper—”

The void was interrupted by yet another crash. “Who put these machines so close together? Please remain still, Mr. Hodge. Moving will only prolong the agony. The supervisor of the Dimm is above such petty physical concerns.”

Lenny slowly continued to back away, past a mechanical horse and a pinball machine playing some jaunty TV theme. He was careful not to trip on any of the mechanisms himself, then half hid behind a sign reading
EVERYONE WINS AT SKEE BALL!

Two more crashes in quick succession. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Shouldn't there be a pathway? Are these machines on wheels? What sort of sadist set up this room in the first place?”

As if to answer the Dimm's question, a single machine voice rang out from amid the games.

“Pong!”

Chapter Fourteen

“Ow!” the darkness cried again.

The answering word rose from the forest of consoles.

“Pong!”

Then, from another corner of the room.

“Pong!”

All the machines began to beep and chatter, as if urging the Pong machine onward.

“Beep click click beep,”
a console to his left announced.

“Korgar,”
a pinball machine to his right replied.

The sound bounced on from game to game.

“Beep beep honk beep.”

“Kung Fu Fighter!”

“Beep de beep de beep beep beep!”

“Pong!”

Lenny's gift had been working all the time. The games would give him a chance to escape. He slid between a Whack-A-Gator and a Ms. Pac-Man.

“Help me, Dimm!” the dark supervisor cried. “We cannot allow our prey to escape!”

“Certainly sir.” One of the two raincoated Dimm approached on Lenny's right.

“Our pleasure!” The other swung through the game consoles to Lenny's left.

The beeping noises grew ever louder.
Beep honk bleep jingle.
A male voice shouting, “Play Blackjack!”
Beep ayooga beep beep crash.
It was the sound of triumph, a battle cry for gaming consoles everywhere. And, above it all, that one repeated word:

“Pong! Pong! Pon
 . . .” The cry faded as quickly as it had come.

“I just had to find the plug,” the void said. “Now if Mr. Hodge would kindly remain still? It is time for me to envelop and be gone.” A great darkness reared up before Lenny.

With another great boom of wood hitting wall, the door to the game room flew open one more time.

Lenny hadn't realized somebody had closed the door in the first place. He was still very happy to see who stood on the other side.

“You go no farther!” Karnowski the Ghost Finder declared. “Terrifitemps is here!”

“See?” someone insubstantial added. Lenny squinted and made out the nameless ghost from the pit.

“I told you I could find this place again!” the ghost continued. “They don't call me—well, actually, they don't call me anything.”

Foo stared at the newcomers with an angry frown. “Is my secret lair a secret to
anybody
?”

“You will give us Lenny now,” the Baron added, “or I will release the rats.”

“And I will befuddle you with my legions of spirits,” Karnowski said.

“I will use my mental powers to discern and foil all of your plans,” Lenore added.

“Ignore them!” the dark void commanded from the other side of the room. “Our only priority is the capture of Mr. Hodge!”

“Yes sir!” one of his underlings barked.

“We live to obey,” the other remarked. The two Dimm pushed forward to either side of their leader. Lenny found himself pinned in the corner, with only half a dozen game consoles between him and the encroaching darkness.

The Baron howled and waved his cape. “Come, my brethren!”

Lenny recognized the gray carpet sweeping across the floor.

“Watch out!” Swami Phil called.

“Ewww!” Sheila remarked with disdain. “Rats? I won't put up with rats. Here! I'll kick them away with my pointy toes.” The rodents squealed as she did just that. “I knew these fashion heels would serve a purpose!”

Karnowski raised his closed fist high in the air. “Attack, O spirits!”

“Oooooooh!” the nameless ghost moaned. Other, fainter groans and shrieks gathered around him.

Bruno waved his gun around. “Boss! Who do you want me to shoot next?”

Foo pointed past the Dimm. “Plug anybody who tries to take Hodge from the room.”

“Oooooooooh?” the ghost tried again. More shrieks, more groans, but, even without the Pong machine, they had trouble being heard over the incessant game console chatter.

“Lenny!” Lenore shouted. “Don't lose hope. We'll get to you somehow!”

“You do not steal my victim from my lair!” Foo was so angry he didn't notice the rodents scurrying inside his robes.

“I have had enough of outside interference. Lenny Hodge is going to die when and where we decide!”

“Now that's the Daddy Foo I remember!” Sheila cried out as she kicked a rat across the room.

“Ignore these people!” the booming void demanded. “Ignore these games, and ghosts, and rodents, and anything else they throw at us. The Dimm will not be defeated!”

“As you say, Wise One,” the Dimm on the void's left answered.

“Right on the money with that one, Chief,” the other Dimm echoed.

“Would you mind,” asked Bruno, a pleading tone in his voice, “if I shot a few vermin?”

“
Ooooh?
Ooh ooh ooh?
Any
body?” The ghost paused to wipe nonexistent sweat from his nonexistent brow. “Boy, this is a tough room. I knew I should have brought my chains!”

“Come, my rats!” the Baron cried from where he stood just inside the door. “Scamper as though your very lives depend upon it!”

“Come, my spirits!” Karnowski added with verve. “Chill these souls. Show them what it means to be truly dead!”

“This isn't working as well as I had hoped,” Lenore admitted. “We have to find a distraction. Where's a werevole when you need one?”

“Listen!” Swami Phil called above the constant din. “Aren't the buffalo getting closer?”

Lenny listened. Yes! He could hear it, too. There, just beyond the gaming beeps and ghostly moans, a great chorus admired the Yellow Rose of Texas.

“We must take him now!” Even the void was beginning to sound desperate. “Hold Mr. Hodge firmly. He must be enveloped for the good of the Dimm!”

The two Dimm in raincoats lunged forward to grab Lenny as an even louder crash than any he had heard before came from directly behind him.

Everyone froze.

Lenny coughed as he turned around and got a face full of dust.

“Be careful, my minions!” Foo called from the middle of the room. “My advanced air-filtration system will soon show us just what has happened.”

Lenny heard the whoosh of giant fans as the view went from impenetrable to slightly hazy in a matter of seconds. The wall behind him was gone. In its place stood another wall, a tall, furry wall composed of over two dozen buffalo, crammed side by side along the entire length of the new opening.

And the buffalo sang:

Swanee, how I love you, how I love you

My dear old Swanee,

I'd pay the world to see . . .

“Singing buffalo?” Lenore asked. “Now,
there's
a distraction!”

“It is impressive,” the swami agreed. “And I don't think we've heard their full repertoire.”

“It will do you no good, Mr. Hodge.” Irritation crept into the void's voice. “Envelopment, dissection, it will all still go according to schedule. But now we'll have musical accompaniment.”

“Oh yeah?” Lenny started, but could think of nothing else to add. Like many of the things that happened around him, the bison chorus was strange and spectacular and pretty much totally passive. Stampeding buffalo he might be able to use; singing buffalo, not so much. The jaunty chorus did make Foo's secret lair a bit more cheerful, though.

“Lenny?” Sheila asked. “So
you
brought the buffalo?”

He was startled by her question. How could he explain a power he didn't really understand?

“Kind of—I suppose so—yeah,” he finally admitted.

Sheila sighed and shook her head. “You know, until this minute, I could never admit to myself how strange you really were.”

“Lenny?” Lenore stared hard at Sheila. “This is your old girlfriend.”

He found himself genuinely surprised. “Huh? How could you know that?”

“Our files on you are very extensive,” Karnowski explained.

“They did not mention that she was in league with Foo,” Lenore said.

“His daughter, actually,” Lenny added.

Karnowski grunted. “Our files are not extensive enough.”

“Did the files tell you why we broke up?” Sheila demanded. “Did the files tell you that Lenny loved his stamp collection more than me?”

That wasn't true at all, Lenny thought. How could Sheila ever make that comparison? Then again, he could remember very few screaming arguments with his first day covers.

“No,” Lenore replied, “our files tell us about the real Lenny Hodge.” Her stare became even harder than before. “Sheila? That is your name, right? You'll never know what you lost when you left Lenny. You'll never know what you had. Lenny's in a safer place now. With Terrifitemps, we'll see to his happiness in ways you could never imagine.”

Lenny realized he was smiling. He really liked when Lenore said something supportive like that. He hadn't had that many people really try to understand him. He wondered—with that mention of happiness—if she was speaking for herself, or for Terrifitemps?

He glanced to his right and saw the void rearing up before him. Why was he thinking about Lenore when he was about to be cut into little pieces?

But, rather than enveloping him, the Dimm supervisor spoke. “We have already spent far too long in the pursuit of Lenny Hodge.” The darkness twisted about. “Foo. Perhaps we can come to an agreement. What do you want from this individual?”

The criminal mastermind smiled with great satisfaction, as if he had been waiting for someone to ask this very question. “We simply wanted to destroy all of Terrifitemps to clear the way for our total global synergy. Lenny just seemed like a particularly strong piece of the puzzle.”

“Such a pitiful goal,” the void rumbled in response, “when the Dimm could offer you so much more.”

Foo paused to stare at the floor for a moment. He sighed and looked up at his daughter.

“I'm sorry, Sheila, but a quick death, or at least a quickish death for Lenny, seems terribly shortsighted. Rather than continue this discord, I believe we should not further hinder in the Dimm's examination—and dissection.” He waved vaguely at the void. “You may take him. We will not stop you.”

“Finally!” the swirling darkness cried in triumph. “If you two would hold him?”

But the void's subordinates hesitated. The room was suddenly very quiet. The bison had finished their song.

And then, from the middle of the herd:
“Uno, dos!”

And the buffalo began again.
“La-la-la-la-la la bamba!”

The room shook as the bison tapped their right forehooves in time. The menacing void stumbled backward.

“Y arriba arriba!”
the bison continued.

“Do I hear music?” a cheerful voice cried out.

Something large and blue materialized in their midst.

“Bob?” Lenny asked.

“Bob the horse!” another dozen voices called as one. It seemed that just about everyone knew the pooka. Lenny could swear he'd even heard Bob's name uttered by a couple of the game consoles.

Bob grinned at everyone in the room. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys! I haven't had anybody to talk to in, like, forever!”

“What is this final annoyance?” the void demanded.

The two Dimm exchanged shadowed glances.

“You don't know Bob?” both asked as one.

“And I don't want to know him, either.” The void was growing irritable. “Will these distractions never end? Stop him from getting any closer!”

Bob cantered about, midair. “Here I was, dancing to a cha-cha beat. Those Latin rhythms are the best! One, two, one-two-three. And then where do I end up? Nowhere! I was in the middle of the Big Empty!”

“I can't concentrate!” the void rumbled. “Get him away from me!”

“What was that you said, Boss?” one of the Dimm replied.

“It's getting awfully difficult to hear with all this noise, Your Honor,” the other one added.

“La-la-la-la-la la bamba,”
the buffalo chorus added.

“I wonder who got me into this in the first place?” Bob continued cheerfully. “He could use a good talking to! And I'm just the pooka to do it!”

Lenny saw Swami Phil quietly back out of the room.

“Enough!” the void insisted. “I need you to deal with that blue thing so I can get back to enveloping.”

One of his subordinates shook his shadowy head. “I'm sorry sir. I can't hear you over all that singing. What thing that blew in here are you talking about?”

“Nothing that blew in!” the void insisted. “I'm talking about that blue horse!”

“You will get hoarse if you keep shouting like that,” the other Dimm agreed. “I don't think we can talk in here at all, Boss. Maybe we can have this conversation out in the hall.”

“The hall it is,” the first junior Dimm agreed all too readily. He called out to the void: “We'll meet you whenever you're done doing whatever you need to do in here.”

The two Dimm nodded cheerfully and made a pronounced detour around Bob as they ran for the door.

Bob barely seemed to notice. “I don't know where I'd be without your buffalo singers. The minute I heard ‘La Bamba,' I knew I was going home!”

The void thrashed about in midair. “Where did they go? No matter. I don't need any help from my underlings!”

Bob whinnied cheerfully. “I really owe you one. Lenny, we're going to be best friends forever!”

“La-la bamba, la-la bamba!”

“I was enveloping victims before they were born!” the void shouted at no one in particular. “I can take a little pressure. I'll show them what a supervisor can do!”

Bob the horse cocked his head to one side, as if only now noticing the void. “What's up with this guy?”

Lenny shouted a brief description of the whole enveloping/dismemberment scenario as best he could over the singing buffalo, who were now keeping time with both forelegs.