Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective Read online

  “Why are you giving this back?” I asked, tears dampening my fur, “I don’t want this as me. I want this as Hatbox. I want to be Hatbox again, so I’m going to get the lingam and I’m going to get myself back. Stop torturing me!”

  “This is not torture,” said the right breast, “we are imparting wisdom. Wisdom that you will end up needing.”

  “What if I don’t want it?”

  “You’ve passed the point at which it would have been your choice. And I am truly sorry for that.”

  The hand grabbed me again and raised me to the right breast.

  “Eat up, Hieronymous James Plush and be nourished.”

  Lightness. Stars. Dizziness. A child playing detective. A child dragging me downstairs. A child holding me at night, every night. Holding back words because I’m not permitted to say them. Holding back anger at being left out in the mud and then being violently scrubbed. Garbage in an alley, I stand up and I scream. I begin to grow up, standing three feet high, unafraid of language, angry, angry, angry. A gun, a fedora, a bottle of gin, answering questions for any who needed them answered. Making short work of anyone who got in the way. Awful things. Lies, crooked cases, double crosses. Deviant sex, unnecessary violence, an abused chauffeur and nobody to answer to but me. And why should I answer to anybody? I’m the baddest teddy bear in town. The others get dragged downstairs, covered in mud, abandoned, not me. I’m nobody’s toy. This city is my plaything. The world is my plaything and it will be mine. A greenskinned monk, a strange book, a chance to get back at the man I hated most. Almost too easy. But of course it was. Wasn’t anybody better than Jimmy Plush.

  This time I threw up the milk. I couldn’t stand the things that were inside of Jimmy Plush. There was no reason anybody should have to. Made me want to leave right away so I could get to killing the bastard and making sure only Hatbox remained.

  “Thanks, ma’am…ladies? Whatever I call you. I’ve made my decision now. Hatbox lives and Plush dies today. No need the world should have to deal with that teddybastard.”

  “You’re unarmed,” said the left breast.

  “Very risky.”

  “You need a weapon.”

  I shook my head.

  “I only need my hands to bring him down.”

  The right breast contradicted me.

  “He knows what you know. He knows how you fight and he has a fullgrown man’s body to fight with.”

  “He is a clever and dangerous opponent.”

  “I cannot let you take him on unarmed.”

  A ladder of doll arms extended down from her sex.

  “Grab hold of the arms.”

  “Climb the ladder.”

  “Claim your gifts.”

  “Claim your power.”

  “Become the man who will survive.”

  “Or the bear.”

  “Or the bear, yes, or the bear.”

  The giant hand set me down at her feet again.

  “Go ahead, climb into my womb.”

  I had more reason to trust her than I had most people. As much pain she might have caused, she caused it by telling the truth which is something I didn’t tell myself very often. My commitment to finding it for others was usually a professional necessity and most of the time when I did, it was because I’d end up finding my way back to somebody’s door that I already felt was worth kicking down. She had filled me with serenity and fear and hope and confusion and clarity. I climbed the doll arms knowing that ahead would probably be more of this. At the top, green Plush lips parted and I was once again someplace else.

  But where? It looked like Nero City but everything was sort of a silhouette. Silhouette buildings, silhouette cars, silhouette whores against silhouette lampposts, silhouette mothers with silhouette strollers with silhouette babies inside them. I felt tall, fleshy and sad. I knew this feeling. This was Charles Hatbox. I was Hatbox again, walking down these shadow streets. I opened up my wallet as I approached a silhouette girl’s lamppost.

  “How much for a good time?”

  She put her hand on her chin.

  ‘Bsssppppspsspsssbssssp,” she whispered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bssssppssssspbsbbbssbbbsppsppp,” she whispered.

  “Can you speak louder.”

  “Sppppsspspsppsspsppspspspspppspspspsp, sppbbspsspbh, shhhhspsspsp,” she replied, no louder than before.

  Suddenly, a great shadow loomed behind her, holding up a big shadowy sledgehammer. I tried to shout “look out”, but the words never left my mouth. I reached into my pocket for my gun but found only a tunafish sandwich and a copy of Tarzan of the Apes. The sledgehammer came down, pounding her into inky pulp, but I didn’t care. I walked away from the crime scene to find a game of three card monte.

  On that, I fared a bit better. There was a shadow man with a shadowy table but the cards on it were real. I laid down five dollars. He shuffled them around, then told me with a gesture to pick one. I picked the one in the middle. Had to be the one. There was a smiling teddy bear face on it. An arrogant, patronizing, evil smiling teddy bear face. I laid down another five and we played the game again. The one on the left. Had to be the one on the left. Smiling teddy bear face. Five dollars. One in the middle. Smiling teddy bear face. Five dollars. One on the left. Smiling teddy bear face. Five dollars five dollars five dollars teddy bear…I shook myself from inside, told me to end this. As I fought for control, I…Hatbox…I dropped more and more money. I was starting to hear tiny laughter from the teddy bear on the card. At last, I managed to pull away from the three card monte game, running down the black identical streets to find my home.

  In the middle of a shadowy slum was a perfectly solid tenement which I knew I resided at. I did not feel proud to reside here but don’t remember caring much that I had at one point. I walked past many identical dingy apartments, until I came to my dingy apartment. A skinny Dalmatian ceased pondering his empty dish to approach me.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you worthless shit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jimmy Plush killed me. Sent the meat to your girlfriend. She sold it to Halperin.”

  “I’m really sorry, dog,” was all I could think to say.

  “Doesn’t bring me back, does it?”

  There was a cowboy sitting on my couch, dribbling blood out of his mouth. His face was more hollow than the dalmatian’s, he looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  He tried to stand up, but ended up rolling onto the floor, where he started crawling toward me.

  “Feed me! You son of a bitch! Feed me! Feed me!” the cowboy shrieked. I backed away, seeing no option but to hide in the tiny bedroom. I knew I had nothing for the dog or the cowboy and I knew that they had every right to blame me for the state they were in.

  I locked the bedroom door, thinking I can breathe easy, but heard a breathy feminine voice beg.

  “Feed me, feed me, feed me, oh god, feed me…”

  Lying on the bed dying was a purple skinned alien princess, skeletal and demanding, her spacebreasts all the more big, round and obscene compared to her tiny, dying body. She crawled off the bed and onto the floor to pursue me. I had to open the door again, to get away from her, even if it meant having to deal with the cowboy and the dog. I ran for the front door, kicking clawlike starving hands and grasping paws away from me as they closed in.

  Kicking them aside, I reached the hallway and knocked on my neighbor’s door for help. A starving man in a spacesuit answered, I could barely see his face since his helmet’s faceplate was splattered and obscured with blood. He reached out to me, mumbling into his helmet. I knew he wanted to be fed. These were my unwanted children, the creations of my hack imagination (and my dog) having to live only on the meager hopes of the worst pulp writer who ever lived. I was a man who could not even dream right.

  They were closing in on me now, the only place that I could possibly think to hide was in the elevator. I got in and they did not even try to follow. On the wall of the elevator, there w
as one big button: it was a green teddy bear’s face, glowing and whispering secrets with its vibrations. I pressed it and as it should have, the elevator started to rise and rise and rise…

  The elevator door opened into a green fleshy cave. I was Jimmy Plush again. Or I was Hatbox-Plush. Whatever. I was no longer Charles Hatbox. It felt like a relief for once. I’d forgotten what my life had been like. Spending time as a crime-solving teddy bear who was hated all over town could do that to a guy. All the weak heroes, all the vulnerable fantasies and all the lost possibilities hadn’t occurred to me. Why should they have? Life was as bad as it could get. Dodging bullets, returning fire, fistfights with gangsters and freaks, journeys into magical tombs weren’t signs of success by any measure of the word. It didn’t matter, did it? I’d be a man again. Dammit. This was so confusing. I screamed at the top of my little teddy bear lungs. If I had lungs. Somebody screamed back.

  “Not so goddamn loud!” said a voice from deeper in the cavern.

  “Hello?” I shouted.

  A short, squat green man in a monk’s robe, a man I’d seen when the right breast showed me Jimmy Plush’s life, hobbled in on a cane.

  “You? Hmm. I’d been expecting the other one.”

  “He’s probably off stealing the lingam.”

  The green monk shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  Since I hadn’t expected a tiny green monk here in the womb of the giant teddy bear goddess, I decided I should probably find out what he was doing here.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  He looked at me as if it were a ridiculous thing to ask, as if any man on the street could answer the question for him.

  “It should be obvious.”

  “Maybe I’m slow. Tell me.”

  “I’m the high scholarpriest of the Martian Teddy Bear Goddess, Sekharun.”

  Sekharun, huh? Sounded good.

  “Pretty name.”

  The scholarpriest laughed.

  “Beyond that. In our language it means Arbiter of Transcendant Joys.”

  “Your language being Martian?”

  “Yes. The task that brings me joy is to guard the treasures that are supposed to be here.”

  “So you guard the lingam?”

  “No, sometimes I go to the outside world to spread stories of the lingam and the glories of Mars, but I do not guard the lingam. It’s not supposed to be here. I only guard treasure that’s supposed to be here. The computosphinx guards the lingam. Only the wisest of men may pass without being torn to shreds by its wrath.”

  “So what treasure do you guard?”

  He made a face.

  “Whatever’s supposed to be here.”

  As he said this, a large golden chest appeared. He examined it for a couple of seconds, mumbled something to himself then sat down and entered a deep meditative trance for a minute.

  “This is yours,” he said upon awakening.

  “Alright. Is there something I need to do?”

  “Why would there be something you need to do? Didn’t I say it’s yours?”

  “But aren’t you supposed to guard the treasure that’s supposed to be here?”

  “Why should I guard it? It’s yours.”

  I still couldn’t help but think that this monk was not particularly good at guarding things. But, that didn’t matter. I opened up the chest. There was a curved sword, some sort of zapgun and a pair of grey, wool pants inside.

  It was a nice gesture on the part of the goddess, but I felt sort of lost again.

  “What are these?”

  The monk looked inside the chest.

  “Well, from the looks of things, an enchanted scimitar sacred to Osiris, a Martian disintegrator ray and a pair of wool trousers. All things you need. Very good gifts.”

  He was right about that. If anybody needed a Martian disintegrator ray, it was me. The sword looked expensive, too. Still wasn’t sure about the pants. I never wore pants because I never had anything to…I felt a heaviness between my legs. A familiar but foreign heaviness. A happy new heaviness that made me feel complete. I cried tears of joy when I discovered that from now on, I would need to wear pants and barring the vaults of particularly depraved collectors, I was the world’s first anatomically correct three foot tall teddy bear.

  “See,” said the monk, “very good gifts. The goddess provides. You should put on those pants.”

  I did. Gladly. They were a perfect fit. Not that I would expect pants manifested by the cosmos to be anything but. Magic sword, raygun, manhood. I felt ready for just about anything. I wasn’t even bothered by the giant hand that reached through the soft, cushiony green…oh. Considering how I’d come in, I should have known what this cavern was. The knowledge was beautiful and disturbing at the same time. I sat down in the palm of the hand and let it lower me back down through the womb, which it did, but it set me down somewhere else entirely.

  Another one of those big sandstone chambers. Boy was I getting tired of big sandstone chambers. You’d think Martians would be more creative. Apparently, they thought the best thing Earth had to offer was sandstone. Well, they had to be fond of sand anyway to decide that Egypt was the best place to build their tombs. In this particular sandstone room, I found something unique: bits of shattered metal wings, shattered metallic lion parts and some high tech space teddy bear’s head. Its mouth opened and closed, repeating “Why? Why? Why?”

  This must once have been the fierce computosphinx—then Jimmy Plush was already headed for the lingam chamber. I drew the sword and raygun and ran ahead.

  The chamber beyond the computosphinx glowed gold, a welcome change from sandstone and in here were statues of gods I’d heard of before, gods without teddybear heads, a god with a crocodile head, a goddess with a lion head and a tall, kingly god. Would have been a beautiful place if it wasn’t for Jimmy Plush in the body of Charles Hatbox with a huge, mummified penis in his hand. Not something I wanted to see. Just plain disturbing first of all and secondly, it meant that Plush had the artifact he wanted. For once I didn’t waste any time with banter. I took aim with the Martian disintegrator and hoped it disintegrated teddy bear bastards in pulp writer bodies. It let out a green laser beam that hit Plush square in what used to be my chest.

  And nothing happened.

  “Damn cheap space garbage…” I mumbled.

  “The disintegrator’s fine, Hatbox,” said Plush, “but you’ve forgotten that when we were in Atlantis, I was showered in magical radiation, the kind of magical radiation that would repel Martian lasers. Or have you forgotten that Atlantis was founded by aliens of Venusian extraction?”

  Damn. Professor Svenson would have known that. I wish I could’ve saved him from those rhinos.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll find some way to kill you, Plush.”

  He laughed contemptuously.

  “With that Martian pigsticker of yours?”

  He reached into his trenchcoat and pulled out a spiky, red sword.

  “This sword is forged of adamantine coral by Atlantis’ finest swordsmith.”

  There was only one thing I could say in response to that.

  “En garde, you bastard!”

  I lunged with the scimitar and he parried. I went in for a punch with my offhand only to find there was a knife in his. He thrust into my palm, spilling some stuffing. He laughed again, a haughty Errol Flynn laugh that should never have come out of Charles Hatbox’s mouth.

  “Ha! First blood.”

  Since my palm was already cut and in pain, I really didn’t have anything to lose from grabbing the blade, nothing but more cotton. It was worth it to take hold of the knife and toss him over my shoulder using the Chinese fighting arts. He flew a couple feet, hit the ground and I’m sure spilled a little blood of his own. I turned just in time to avoid getting stabbed in the back as he got to his feet, surprised to find that there was only a small bump on his head. Guy must have really known how to fall.

  “I’m impressed. Nice work…
for a teddy bear!” He surprised me with a particularly aggressive lunge, one I almost couldn’t parry. He surprised me again with a kick in the chest. I had less luck with the kick than with the lunge and flew back a few feet. I was dazed, so by the time I got to my feet he had closed the distance and he was ready for me. He smiled a smile I had never known my former face was capable of. Damn. I hope I never looked that vile when I smiled at people.

  “This is the end, Plush. I’ve brought you here to finish you off, to cut out my own heart so I can work the lingam. I couldn’t very well cut out my heart when it was in my body could I? And there were so many things you’d done to me that needed paying back. Dragging me through the mud, tossing me down the stairs…this is going to hurt so much worse than getting tossed down stairs…”

  I closed my eyes expecting decapitation, feeling that this must surely be the end of the line. I opened them when I heard a “swoosh” and a “thud”, to see that the chauffeur I had thought dead had not been killed by the grilled cheese sandwich birds and had come out of nowhere to knock Jimmy Plush to the ground with a flying kick.

  “Dishonorable Mister Plush, the time has come for revenge!”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Plush, rising to his feet.

  The Chinaman leapt at Plush, preparing to kick his head clean off but it was not to be. Plush was quick on the draw with his Atlantean Disemboweler pistol, the pistol he had fired at Captain Von Frankenstein when the undead pirate had decided that Plush was too vile even for him to side with. I did not close my eyes as the gun ripped Chang’s intestines out of his body. The least I could do was witness his grisly death.

  In the next few moments, three factors worked against Plush: first of all, Atlantean Disemboweler pistols only carry two shots, second of all, his hatred of the Chinese made the whole spectacle mesmerizing and hilarious to him and third of all, I was small fast and angry. Scimitar drawn, I leapt at the laughing sadist, slicing into his legs. He bled. He stumbled. I hacked. He bled. He stumbled. I hacked. He hit the floor. I jumped on his stomach.