The Pun Detective Heads to His Headquarters! (Part 6)

Once we were out of the bathroom, the office wasn’t three steps away. No wonder I’d been found so easily. The school’s FPI base of operations was right next door to the boys’ bathroom on the second floor of the Old Building. We came to a stop just outside the door.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. So they say, anyway. What they don’t tell you is that a journey of a single step also starts with a single step. Compared to the twists and turns my life had taken since yesterday, this short journey was a breath of fresh air. Seriously, I felt like I had walked about 500 miles since yesterday afternoon, and that I would likely have to walk 500 more before this was all through. I guessed the exhaustion was finally starting to set in, because I felt like I could fall down right then and there, in front of the door.

“What’s wrong, dude?” asked Greg. “You look a little blue. Down in the dumps?”

You could say that.

“Blue? Nah. I think he looks kinda green. You gonna be sick, Wallace?” Evan pried his face off the phone screen for a second and spared a rare glance my way, and I silently thanked him for the concern. Talking to us was one thing, but looking was another. It took a lot to pull his eyes away from the world inside his game. The only reason I didn’t thank him out loud is that for just a second I knew from the churning sensation swirling my gut into a whirlpool that if I opened my mouth, there was going to be a lot more than just words coming out.

“I’m fine,” I lied. Truth was I felt like I’d been strapped to the seat of a roller coaster upside down. I breathed deep. I could feel my intestines twisting like a sickly sea snake. That was when I realized I was starving. My stomach was so empty it was a vacuum. Those few bites of my semi-dismantled sandwich at lunch yesterday were the last I’d had, more than 24 hours ago. At least that explained why my gut felt like a crater lake of roiling acid. And the worst part? Lunch was almost over already. Getting some food in me was going to have to wait until later.

Thinking about food reminded me though: what was Lily doing here in the first place? She said she had been waiting on standby — whatever that meant — in the room we were standing outside of right at this very moment. Which meant that she hadn’t been helping in the cafeteria today.

“That was only a temporary role,” she said when I asked her. “Now that we have an active RED” — in other words, me — “at school, I must carry out my true prime directive optimally.”

And that meant I was stuck with her.

She looked right at me then. “My prime directive, Boss,” she said for some reason, “is to assist you.” Just in case I had forgotten, which I hadn’t.

I bet she thought I was just trying to buy time with all the questions. After all, we were right there in front of the office. The only thing standing between me and the responsibilities foisted on me was an old wooden door, its surface rivered by the deep wedges of age. Well, this was called the Old Building for a reason. The place really was old. It was hard to believe that this used to be the only building at school.

Just as I was about to push the door begrudgingly open, something else caught my eye. Attached to the wall besides the door was a curious sheet, hanging by the cool, steadfast cling of a single strip of scotch tape. It was a piece of 8.5x11. Written on it in marker in big, loopy, curlicue letters was:

Wallace Wade

Radioactive Equivoque Detective

It was official. I sighed. The most disappointing thing about all of this was how easy it had been for them to ensnare me. I was an easy mark, a sitting target. No wonder I’d spent my entire life getting suckered into things like this. Maybe it was my destiny.

Speaking of destiny, if it was Lily’s to become even more human than she already was, she really didn’t seem to have too much farther to go. “This handwriting of yours looks really human,” I told her. Now I really was just stalling for time. It was true though. The way she had written my name and title on the sheet looked a lot like a normal teenage girl’s writing, if a little sloppy and unpracticed.

“Hm?” Her face made her look like she didn’t know what exactly I was talking about. Then, like she’d been hit with ripples of realization, she went, “Oh, this isn’t my handwriting.”

All of a sudden, she was holding a pencil and a small slip of paper. Where she’d gotten it from was anyone’s guess. Maids have a lot of pockets.

She scratched something on the paper and showed it to me. It was the same as the makeshift plaque next to the door:

Wallace Wade

Radioactive Equivoque Detective

Only instead of big, looping, curly, the letters were small and jagged, angular enough to put an eye out, probably, if you got too close. I made sure to keep my distance just in case.

“This is my handwriting,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Then who wrote this?” I said. The first piece of paper with my name on it, the one next to the door, hung, limp and still, off of the strip of tape.

“Kingcipal Wade, I would imagine. Your grandfather.”

Great. There I went again, opening my big mouth. Why oh why had I even asked? The knowledge that grandpa’s writing could’ve passed easily for a girl my age’s made my skin crawl, like a million billion baby spiders bubbling just beneath the surface. Why? Beat the heck outta me. All I knew was that it creeped me out.

Once we stepped inside the room, my daydreams of a high-rise penthouse really did go poof. As a matter of fact, so did I as I hit grime so thick it was airborne. I could practically see the comic-book sound effect (POOF!) as I walked right into what was more a wall of dust than a cloud. When was the last time anyone cleaned this place? Curious, I ran a finger across the top of a nearby cabinet. It was one of those tall metal ones and was one of the only pieces of furniture in the room. In seconds, my fingertip was a wooly gray, dense with dust.

I was beginning to feel bad for Lily. She said she had been waiting in here, which meant she’d likely been drenched in this gray thickness of neglect, just like everything else in this room was. Somehow, she’d kept her uniform spick and span though.

The invisible grit in the air was so bad it was tickling every hair in my nose, pricking each one ever so slightly, in just the right way to provoke a lethal-sized… ah… oh… no… ah...

“Ah…”

“Oh god,” I heard Greg say. He sounded far away.

“Ahhhh…”

“Uh oh! Brace for impact!” Evan said, cupping his hands over his phone to protect it from the particles I was about to accelerate.

“AAAAAHHHHHHH…”

“Oh no,” said Lily, with all the vim of a deflated balloon.

“AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’m not gonna sneeze after all. My bad.”

Greg and Evan reprimanded me to the tune of “You almost gave me a heart attack, dude!” and “Don’t you hate when that happens?”

Evan was right. There was no other feeling quite like the lingering prickle of a sneeze unsneezed and left to languish in your nose, like a cactus that died before it ever even got the chance to prick anyone with its spikes, which, I imagined, was really all cacti lived for. But hey, it was better than being responsible for kicking a dust hurricane into motion. In a room like this, a single sneeze would’ve been enough to set off a tidal wave of dry, dusty grime.

Lily spoke, flat: “Bless you—”

“Huh? Oh no, I’m not gonna sneeze actually.”

“—for not turning this place into a dust blizzard.”

Oh. Well in that case, you’re welcome. The way she’d said it was a little odd. Maybe her speech patterns needed a bit of recalibrating, I thought. It was a shame. She had her comedic timing down pat.

I realized soon enough that dust wasn’t the room’s only defining feature though. So was dim.

Lots and lots of dim.

Because it was dark.

And I mean really dark.

What little light filtered in through the cloudy windows on the far side of the room clung desperately to the dust-thick air, and, maybe it was just me, but it made the room smell rubbery and old, a flop of wet shoe leather in olfactory form.

It took me a second, but I soon realized that it wasn’t just dark.

It was also light.

Then dark.

Then light again.

Then dark again.

And so on, like a little kid playing a stupid game or prank, fingering a light switch up and down again and again. The light kept alternating back and forth, dim then bright, dim then bright.

The source of the flicker, I noticed a second later, hung above my head. When I spied what was causing it, I almost hung my head. There, in the center of a ceiling so gnarled and lined with crevices that it unbelievably made the room look even older than it was, dangled a single lightbulb, sans lampshade, coming unscrewed, and sputtering out what little light it could in that state. Desperately. Like light weighed a metric ton and it was trying to shed as much as possible to keep from coming fully unscrewed and falling. The result, for us standing underneath, was flutter, butterfly flaps of dim and dimmer.

Kind of like how my life was going at the moment, only without the moments of bright at all: dim, and getting ever dimmer by the minute. Grandpa’s ugly mug once again appeared in my mind, sunglasses blocking out half his face, hair fast fleeing his forehead, rasp like he was jawing a big wad of gravel. “Life sucks and then you die.”

The end of The Pun Detective Heads to His Headquarters! (Part 6)!
To be continued in Part 7!