Fredric_Brown_-_Night_of_the_Jabberwock.PDF by a

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Language: eng
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Published: 2011-09-16T13:18:18+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

“First, the fish must be caught.”

That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it.

“Next, the fish must be bought.”

That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it.

Maybe you won’t believe that I could have forgotten that, but I had. So much had happened between the time I’d left my house and the time I returned that it’s a wonder, I suppose, that I still remembered my own name, and Yehudi’s.

Ten minutes before twelve and we were due there, he’d said, at one o’clock.

“You have a car?” I asked him.

He nodded. “A few doors down. I got out at the wrong place to look for street numbers, but I was close enough that I didn’t bother moving the car.”

“Then somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes will get us there,” I told him.

“Fine, Doctor. Then we’ve got forty minutes yet if we allow half an hour.”

The woozy spell was passing fast, but I refilled his gla ss this time without refilling my own. I wanted to sober up a bit

– not completely, because if I were sober I might get sensible and decide not to go, and I didn’t want to decide not to go.

122

Smith had settled back in his chair, not looking at me, so I looked at him, and wondered what I was doing even to listen to the absurd story he’d told me about Vorpal Blades and the old Wentworth house.

He wasn’t the escaped lunatic, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a screwball, and that I wasn’t a worse one. What the hell were we going to do out there? Try to fish a Bandersnatch out of limbo? Or break through a looking-glass or dive down a rabbit hole to go hunting one in its native element?

Well, as long as I didn’t get sober enough to spoil things, it was wonderful. Crazy or not, I was having a marvelous time.

The best time I’d had since the Halloween almost forty years ago when we– But never mind that; it’s a sign of old age to reminisce about the things you did when you were young, and I’m not old yet. Not very, anyway.

Yes, my eyes were focusing all right again now, but the mistiness in the room was still there, and I realized that it wasn’t mistiness but smoke. I looked across at the window and wondered if I wanted it open badly enough to get up and open it.

The window. A black square framing the night.

The midnight. Where were you at midnight? With Yehudi.

Who’s Yehudi? A little man who wasn’t there. But I have the card. Let’s see it, Doc. Hmmm. What’s your bug number? My bug number?

And the black rook takes the white knight.

The smoke was definitely too thick, and so was I. I walked to the window and threw up the bottom sash. The lights behind me made it a mirror. There was my reflection. An 123

insignificant little man with graying hair, and glasses, and a necktie badly askew.

He grinned at me and straightened his necktie.

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