“Are—are you the Archivist?”
Daffy looked up and saw himself.
Not literally, of course. He wasn’t staring at his doppelganger or a stunt double or the result of a glitch in a film reel. The figure before him wasn’t even a duck, but a vaguely doglike individual with slightly bucked teeth. But that was just…physical trappings. The drawing, if you would. What he saw was someone clinging to the thin edge of reality, someone questioning everything they’d ever known and begging to be seen. Someone who was being haunted and tortured and just wanted one person to understand what he was going through.
“Yeth, I’m the Head Archivitht,” Daffy said, getting to his feet. There was something familiar about—oh, of course. “You’re a Goof, right?”
“I’m—yes,” the figure said uncertainly, then gathered himself together and said, more strongly, “Goof. Yes. Max Goof. That’s me. I am Max Goof, I’m—”
“The Goofy’th thon.” Daffy remembered him now. He’d only met him once, when he’d still been teaching at Acme Looniversity and they’d got up a skateboarding team that had competed against a couple of different universities in an X-Games event, including State College. Max had offered to give Plucky some tips after his first disastrous run, and Daffy had spent almost fifteen minutes patiently—and, in the end, vainly—attempting to convince Plucky that it wasn’t condescending and that being good at something right away wasn’t the only way to become the best. In the end, Max had come in first, Buster Bunny had been the only Loon to medal with a silver, and Plucky had been dead last in the rankings. “I didn’t know you were in London. Have a theat. Did you come to make a thtatement?”
Hope flared briefly in Max’s eyes, but he nodded as he took a seat. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s—that’s why I’m here. They said I could talk to you and…they said if anyone could make what happened make sense, it would be you.”
“I’ll do my betht,” Daffy said. He was surprised—and a little suspicious—that anyone would put him in the role of “making things make sense”, but he was willing to give it a go if that was what Max needed. “Hold on, let me get the recorder thet up. Do you want thome coffee or tea or thomething?”
“No. No…I’m fine.” Max slowly reached for a piece of paper.
Daffy got out the reel to reel recorder and began threading it. It was…becoming less and less convenient to do it this way, and honesty, he probably ought to go with just using the regular shoebox recorder all the time, but it was useful to him if Porky and the others didn’t know he still had that, so he persevered. As he did so, he became aware of a scratching sound and, looking back over towards Max, he saw that he was attempting to draw some kind of map on the back of a statement form.
Clicking on the recorder, Daffy began. “Thtatement of Maxthimilian Goof, regarding…uh, how would you dethcribe it?”
There was no answer. Glancing over, Daffy realized Max was still attempting to draw something. He prompted him. “Mithter Goof?”
Max jerked his head up and blinked at him, obviously startled. “Oh—what?”
“Your exthperienthe,” Daffy repeated. “How would you…thummarithe it?”
“That’s just it. I’m trying to draw you a map, but it doesn’t…it doesn’t work.” Max sounded bewildered, almost pathetic.
“Right.” Daffy decided to do his best with what he could glean from Max’s appearance. “Thtatement of Maxthimilian Goof, regarding a new door in a houthe he wath buying. Thtatement recorded direct from thubject, firtht of October, two thouthand thixthteen. Thtatement begins.” He waited, but when Max just kept scribbling, he prompted him. “Mithter Goof?”
“There were no left turns,” Max said. “Look, none.” He threw the pencil down and waved the paper at Daffy, too fast for him to see. “It doesn’t make any sense. It wasn’t a spiral, because you could move forward—I mean, that’s mostly what I did, but the hallways didn’t get any shorter like they were going towards a center and they only turned right, you couldn’t turn left, and that doesn’t make any sense. Look at it.”
“Maxth,” Daffy began. Obviously using the last name wasn’t getting through.
“Look at it!” Max insisted.
Daffy sighed and took the paper, studying it. “Yeth, I thee. Thith map doethn’t make any thenthe, even by Toon thtandardth.”
“After a few turns—” Max began.
“It becometh a methth of impenetrable lineth, yeth,” Daffy interrupted. “Can you thtart at the beginning, pleathe? Give me thome contextht. Tell me how it all got thtarted.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Max said plaintively. “There wasn’t a door and then there was.”
Daffy simply raised his eyebrows pointedly at him. That seemed to be enough. Max took a deep, steadying breath and began properly. “I…never really wanted to be in showbiz. Not like my dad was. It’s only a little bit that I could never compete with the old man, that I’d always be ‘the son of Goofy’, and maybe a little that I would never be able to get a role that wasn’t…well, like he’d had. Mostly, though, it was that I didn’t actually enjoy it all that much. I mean, Goof Troop wasn’t fiction, except that they scripted a few interactions between Dad and Pete, made up the backstory for them, and obviously Spoonerville wasn’t in Ohio, it was a suburb of Toon Town. But the show—having a camera following you around almost all the time when you’re going through the awkward years, it sucks. Thank Walt, Dad listened to me when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said to not do the show anymore. I think they were considering a show that starred the Petes instead, but PJ—my best friend, Peter P. Pete Junior—begged his dad, too, and, you know, for whatever other issues Pete had, he was a pretty decent dad when it counted. A Goofy Movie was real, more or less, and so was An Extremely Goofy Movie four years later, but…well, they were kind of dramatizations rather than in real time, based on Dad’s recollections and the news reports.
“I never told Dad that I hated doing them. Partly I hated the fame, partly I hated the brutal set work—it was better when we did the first one because I was still under eighteen, so there were rules about how long I could be on set and how many days I could work in a row, but the second one was awful—and I wasn’t experienced enough to know how to deal with directors. Dad was there to advocate for me as best he could, but…Dad wasn’t a kid when he started in films, you know? I actually don’t know if Dad ever was a kid. You know, not a lot of Toons…they’re mostly adults, and even the ones that are kids mostly stay kids. PJ and Bobby and the Duck triplets and I are the only ones I’ve ever seen actually…age, and the Ducks didn’t age that much, all things considered. They keep rebooting, too, so…anyway, you get the idea. Dad didn’t realize what a toll it was taking on me, I don’t think. And he loved being in the spotlight again. He’d spent so long playing second banana to Mickey and Donald, it had been ages since he got a starring role, but the contract for the movies specified I had to be there, because they were meant to cap off the show. So I put up with it for him.
“After that, though, I was done. Dad understood, or at least he said he understood, and then he got the chance to be in that video game—that was such a big deal for him, you have no idea. And since he’d just graduated with his college degree, he threw himself into his work. I stayed in college, did my skateboarding—yeah, that was real, too—studied, and eventually graduated in 2004. Dad, uh…Dad was kind of surprised when he found out I’d actually graduated with a business degree, instead of one in Theater or Communications or anything like that, but he said he was proud of me, no matter what. I believed him, too. My dad is a great guy, and I know he loves me. I know it.
“All the same, I, uh—I knew I couldn’t stay. Dad had moved back to Toon Town proper after I went to college, and he’d started running the speedway the year before I graduated. He asked me if I’d like to come in with him as a partner, but…I couldn’t. In the first place, one of the things he’d emphasized when we started making the movies was that we were costars and colleagues and coworkers on set and family off set, and we had to keep those separate, but if we were running a business together I knew it would be a lot harder, because I would have to bring some things home and even if I got my own place it would still strain things. In the second place, I—I didn’t want to spend my whole life being Goofy’s son. Not because I don’t love him. I do. I’m proud to be his son, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. But there’s an—an expectation in Toon Town when you’re related to a star, you know? The Duck triplets are stars in their own right, and they’ve gone back and forth from their Uncle Donald to their Uncle Scrooge, so they’re not so much tied to that. And they like it. But me, I don’t—I just wanted to be me, and I wanted to be me quietly. Living in Toon Town I would never be able to get away from the spotlight, whether I wanted it or not. So I—actually took a job as a junior manager at the Ink and Paint Club, at least for a little while. It was sort of going downhill fast, so I knew it was only going to be temporary, but I figured having something on my resume other than valet at the House of Mouse might help me out getting a job outside of Toon Town.
“It was Brad—Bradley Uppercrust III—who told me about the job, actually. He, uh, it’s not like we stayed in touch—he really was that much of a jerk—but his father was a shareholder in the Ink and Paint Club, and he came along for a meeting right before they made the decision to close and saw me struggling after my boss with an armful of files. He made some snide remark about wasting my potential and how pathetic it would be when I lost my job, and he made a comment about a skate park that was looking for a manager. But then he added that it was in London, and he laughed, along with his cronies. Obviously he thought there was no way someone like me, whose father was so painfully square and had even just been a low level employee, could afford a trip to the United Kingdom.” Max actually managed a thin smile at that. “Bradley didn’t watch movies with Toons in them, you see. They were too crass for his taste. He had no idea who my father was. Not that I was going to ask him for money, but…I mean, Dad didn’t act for the money, he always said, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have it. And even though the Coogan Act only requires fifteen percent of a minor’s earnings be saved, and even that wasn’t a law until 2003, Dad put all of mine in a trust and never touched it once. I had plenty, is what I’m getting at. So I sent in my application. I didn’t expect much, but apparently my degree, combined with my experience at the Ink and Paint Club—as basic as it was—plus my actual skateboarding pedigree, gave me an advantage, and I got the job as the manager at the Botley Bowl Skatepark, beginning January of 2005.
“Dad was originally going to come with me to help me move, but they unexpectedly announced they were going to start the motion capture for Kingdom Hearts II and he had to go to Japan for that instead—I mean, they had a studio in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t doing that game—so I did it on my own. It wasn’t so bad, actually. I flew in, spent a night in London—I’d originally thought I was going to end up in a hotel, but it turned out Dad had got a line to the Rabbits—he and Roger knew and respected each other from the old days—and they insisted I stay with them for a couple days. They even helped me move out to Oxford. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. It’s about an hour outside of London, maybe a little bit further by train; it’s more known for academia than for athletics, honestly, but it’s not bad. Anyway, I found a flat out there, got moved in, and took up my position at Botley Bowl. There’s been a small skate park that was just the one bowl since 1991, but just before Bradley saw the thing about the job, they built a bigger, more elaborate indoor structure. The bowl is free, but the indoor park charges admission, and that’s what I was there to run.
“There aren’t as many days off in running a skate park as you might expect, especially an indoor one, so I usually don’t go home for the holidays. Didn’t. Dad came out to visit me a couple of times, but, well, about a year after I moved out there they started up a preschool show he’s got a recurring role in, and—I guess you’ve never done work for preschoolers, have you? Well, little kids, really little ones, don’t understand holidays, so there are a lot fewer breaks in those seasons. And when they did get breaks, they were usually filming something else. I think I’ve only seen him a couple of times since I moved out, but it’s—it was okay. We kept in touch, you know? Letters every week, a call once a month—that was hard to coordinate at first, I mean, there’s a seven hour time difference between here and California, but it turns out Black Lion is closed on Mondays, so I could call him after I got off work Sunday nights and know he wouldn’t be on set, and it didn’t matter how late we talked because I didn’t have to get up early the next morning. It wasn’t the same as having him there, but it was okay. I kept in touch with PJ as best I could, but, well, he’s not in showbiz either, and his schedule is a lot more restrictive, so it’s mostly been letters. I was the best man at his wedding about five years ago, but that was the last time I saw him, until recently.
“I…didn’t realize I was in a rut. Not really. Not until I did get a call about…two months ago, maybe, from a number I didn’t recognize, but it was a Toon Town exchange, so I answered. It was PJ, first time I’d heard his voice in five years, and he sounded excited and scared all at once. He had…kind of a lot of news. First of all, his wife had finally finished everything necessary to, uh, become his husband instead. Second, they’d just found out they were going to be parents—his sister was pregnant and didn’t want kids, so they were going to adopt the baby once it was born. He wanted me to be the godfather. And while we were being excited about that, he accidentally let slip that he’d just lost his job. He’d been teaching at our junior high, and…well, it was a little more, uh, traditional than he thought. They said they didn’t have a problem with rebooted Toons, you know, but if he wasn’t rebooting the relationship, too, they didn’t want the kids exposed to that. Like, what year is it, man? He said he was okay, that he still had some of his money from his acting days, but I know his dad did the bare minimum under the Coogan Act, and he didn’t have top billing, so it wasn’t going to be much to begin with. I offered to let them move in with me, and PJ was all for it. He started asking about bedrooms, about the schools, about all that sort of thing.
“I…lied. I admit that. The thing is, I was still living in that original flat in Oxford—one bedroom, one bath, one combined sitting room and kitchen—and I hadn’t really done anything with the place either. But I told PJ I had a three bedroom house, great school district, easy walking distance from the shops, the whole nine yards. He said it sounded great. Meanwhile I was frantically searching real estate listings, looking for something that matched up with what I’d said. Turned out there was one that fit the bill perfectly. Most real estate in Oxford is kind of expensive and this was no exception, but heck, I could afford it, right? I hadn’t exactly spent much of my earnings from the acting days, except to get to London in the first place, so I figured, what the hey. Once I got off the phone with PJ, I went on the website and made an appointment to view the house the following Monday.
“The house was on a street called Hill Top Road, kind of off by itself. There are lot of really impressive houses on the road, and maybe the walking distance wasn’t as great as I pretended it was, but it wasn’t terrible. I’d managed to snag pretty much the last available appointment to see the house, at around ten in the morning, so I woke up, had my breakfast, and put on my best suit. I practiced talking a few times to make sure I wouldn’t let out a laugh at the wrong time, then set off to meet the real estate agent. The whole way up the street, I found myself imagining our life there—sitting on the porch with PJ and his husband, playing in the yard with my godkid, maybe even convincing Dad to come out for the holidays more often. It was…it was a good imagining, and I was in a really good frame of mind when I got to the house and rang the bell.
“The door opened. I assumed that who was standing there was the last person who’d seen the house, and I apologized and said I thought my appointment was for ten. The response was that it was, and that I was right on time, and that I must be Max and I should come in. I asked if this was some kind of joke. See, I knew the name of my real estate agent who was supposed to show this house, and I may be a pretty liberal guy, but I knew that whatever this guy at the door’s name was, it was not Helen Richardson.
“He smiled…at least I think it was a smile. It…look.” Max took a deep breath. “I might be a Toon, but I didn’t…grow up around Toons. Not to that extent. I don’t necessarily know all the rules about Toon behavior. And I’ve been in Oxford for long enough that I’m a lot more familiar with the human world than the Toon one. But that smile was way, way bigger than should have fit on his face. He was a bird, and…his head was one color and his body was another, but even now, I can’t actually tell you what those colors were. I remember his beak, though. It wasn’t like a normal bird’s beak. It was bone. Old, weathered bone, like a human bone, and it was sharp. I can’t swear there wasn’t blood on it, but I can’t swear there was, either. Anyway, he said that Ms. Richardson had been unexpectedly called away, but he knew the house perfectly well and could show me what I was looking for. Then he laughed. It sounded familiar, but also…not, weird and a little unsettling, honestly. And again he said to come in, and we could begin. Maybe it was stupid, but…I figured, well, a Toon’s gotta work, you know? So I went in.
“I…I don’t remember much about the tour, honestly. I remember he showed me everything I was looking for, and the house was…perfect. But I would swear he never spoke. Not once, the entire time. Still, somehow I…knew what he was getting at. We were almost done and I was about ready to make an offer when I noticed a door. It’s…it’s not that there was anything unusual about it, except for two things. One was that it was yellow, a color that was so out of place in the house of neutrals that I couldn’t not notice it. And the other was that, I will swear on Walt’s crypt, it was not there before. We’d passed through this room three times, it was the main room in the house, and I would have seen it if it had been there before. I know I would have. I couldn’t possibly have missed it.
“He must have seen me looking at it, because he stopped, and he stood right next to it and asked me if I wanted to see what was there. He didn’t touch it, though. I—a lot of things are fuzzy, but I know he never touched it. What happened next…it was all me. I stared at it for a long time, I don’t even know how long, and then I made up my mind and reached for it. I think I was half convinced it would turn out to be fake, you know? Like in the cartoons where there’s a painted door or tunnel or whatever, and the person trying to be tricked goes right through it and the person trying to do the tricking doesn’t. I touched the knob and I turned it, and the door opened right away. I didn’t even have to push it. And instead of—instead of stairs to a basement, or a closet, which are the only two things that should have fit in that space, there was a long windowless hallway. It was lit by electric lamps every…maybe ten feet or so, and the walls were papered over in this swirling green pattern. The carpet was the same color as the door, maybe a little faded, and there was a thick black rug running down the middle of it that curved ever so slightly to the left in the distance as the hallway did. On the walls were mirrors, or what I thought were mirrors anyway, but…well, some of them were, but most of them were pictures of the hallway at a bunch of weird angles.
“I don’t remember stepping through the door. I really and truly don’t. One minute I was staring at this hallway, the next minute I heard the door close behind me with a click. I spun around, but all that was there was this huge mirror, no handle on that side. I was staring at my own reflection, but it was…”
Max stared at the tape recorder for a couple of seconds. Just before Daffy prompted him, he said in a low voice, “I had a nightmare once, when I was fourteen, that I was turning into my dad. That part of the movie was kind of accurate, except that the trigger wasn’t laughing like him in front of Roxanne, it was because we’d just had a big party, I don’t even remember why, and every single person had made a comment about how much like my dad I was. In the dream, I remember staring at myself in the mirror, modeling some new outfit, and then the colors shifted, and my face got longer and stretched out until I looked exactly like my dad. That was what I was afraid of, not becoming someone uncool or whatever, but losing myself. When I looked in that mirror…it was like that in reverse. While I watched, every single thing I have connecting me to my dad—the teeth, the ears, the shape of the head, even my hands—shifted and warped and…distorted until the person looking out at me had no connection to George Goof whatsoever. It honestly scared me worse than anything else had so far.
“I pulled out my phone. My mind was a little muddy, but I think I wanted to open the camera app and just…check and make sure the mirror was weird. Like a funhouse, you know? Except I was definitely not having fun, but…you know, I don’t think anybody actually enjoys those places. Anyway, when I opened it up, the screen was just another picture of that hallway. I couldn’t even find any buttons, or any of my apps, or anything like that. I sort of connected to the thought I’d had before, about the painted doors and all that, and I rationalized that you never see the Road Runner come back through the tunnel after it’s painted on, so I was the trickee and the bird with the bone beak was the tricker. I started walking. I couldn’t really do anything else.
“I don’t know how long I walked through there. It didn’t make any sense. The hallway curved imperceptibly to the left, but there were all these hallways going off at right angles. I kind of avoided them at first, because I figured a straight line was the way to go, but I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I finally tried one. It was…the same sort of thing. Mirrors and paintings that reflected everything around them, but when I turned to go back—I must have got turned around, somehow, because I was in a different corridor, with more branching halls going off to the right. And the colors kept…shifting. Like the animator couldn’t keep track of what colors they had been using before and couldn’t look at previous cells for whatever reason, like they’d scrapped the sets and redone the scenery from memory and didn’t remember they hadn’t used blue or purple or red or whatever last time. The rugs kept changing, too. Maybe if I’d been in more cartoons…but I hadn’t and I wasn’t used to it and it made me feel like I couldn’t trust my eyes.
“It felt like I was wandering for days, but…I never got tired. I never got hungry. I slumped down in despair a few times, but I don’t think I actually slept. I was close to giving up when…I saw a figure. It was stood way off in the distance, and it looked almost birdlike, but when I got closer I saw it was anything but. Its body was thin and limp, and when it moved, it—you’ve seen those animation tests for characters that move like rubber? That’s how it was moving. And it was coming towards me fast. All of the pictures on the wall now showed this thing, but all of them distorted it kind of differently. In all of them, though, you could clearly make out the beak as the same, bulbous and sharp and made of old bone.
“I looked around in desperation, trying to find a way out. The thing was getting closer, and then I heard that weird, unsettling laughter again. It was just on the edge of familiarity, but it was warped and distorted and seemed like it was coming out of all of the mirrors at once. And then I saw it—one mirrored frame that didn’t have this creature in it. It seemed like a desperate shot, but it also seemed like my only hope, so I threw myself at the frame.
“And just like that, I was out. Busy street. Bright daylight. And the accents—I realized I was in America, somehow. Someone asked me if I was okay, and I looked up, and it was a Toon. I was in Toon Town. I…I didn’t know what else to do, so I asked if they knew where Dad was. They looked at me funny, but told me where to go. He’s between gigs, they said, and the speedway closed down three years ago, but he’d be at home. So I went.” Max made a small, choked sound. “And he didn’t—it’s not that he didn’t recognize me. He did. He knew who I was, but…he said I wasn’t actually his son. He was really gentle about it, but it was too much, and I passed out. I came round in the hospital and PJ was there, and thank God, he knew me, he remembered me, he accepted my apology for lying about the house and said it was okay, we could maybe go in halves, but—but he agreed with Dad. He ‘reminded’ me that Goofy didn’t have a son, had never been married, that I’d been some…distant cousin or other whose pushy showbiz mom had shoved him into acting, trying to capitalize on the Goof fame and name, and that since I was the same age as PJ they cast me in the show, but that I was always acting. He was pretty worried about me, actually, and I—I couldn’t get him to believe me.
“They kept me there for a couple weeks, until the doctor was assured I was hydrated and in good health and…mentally better. They didn’t put me in the crackerdog ward, luckily, but they thought I might have some kind of amnesia, so I was in a memory care unit. They tried to ‘jog my memory.’ PJ came to visit me every other day…Dad never did. I was getting more and more upset, but for whatever reason, nobody was ever going to believe my word against Goofy’s, so finally I pretended I agreed with them and they let me go. When I left, they gave me an envelope, and there was a letter from Dad. He’d paid for my ticket back to London because he felt bad, it said, that he’d upset me. PJ hugged me and said he and his husband would be here as soon as the baby was born and safe to fly, and…and I got on the plane. I got home, and the first thing, the first thing I did was go to my desk and find my letters. And they’re all there, every last one of them, every letter Dad sent me, and the handwriting is the same as it is in the letter I got at the hospital, but…but nobody believes me and I don’t know why.” Max rubbed a hand over his face. “The second thing I did was call the real estate agent and reschedule that tour. This time I actually met with Helen Richardson. She was kind of annoyed that I’d flaked out on my first appointment. I didn’t argue with her, but I did spend the whole tour looking for that yellow door again. Never found it. Made an offer on the house, got the keys three days ago, called PJ to let him know. I’ve been looking for the door ever since, hoping—hoping that maybe I could go through it, go back the way I came, and come out and Dad will remember me as his son again. If that’s the only thing wrong, maybe it’s not so bad, but…I didn’t want to be the son of Goofy, but I never didn’t want to be my dad’s son.”
He was silent for a moment, then sighed. “I haven’t found it, though. And I’m maybe obsessing a little, and…I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. I had to drop PJ’s set of keys in the mail this morning—I should have done it days ago, but I was trying too hard to find the door—so I thought, well, maybe if I came to you, you all could make some sense of it.”
“Perhapth we can,” Daffy said, with a bit of difficulty. His mind was battling with itself. Max…he knew the kid’s name was Max Goof, knew he was related to Goofy, but did he actually remember—had he made the connection? Or had he just assumed, like everyone else, that…had he even thought about it? No, he had, he’d called Max Goofy’s son when he arrived… “We’ll do thome digging and thee what we can come up with.”
Max raised his head, and there was something almost like hope, mingled with desperation, in his eyes. “You believe me, then?”
“I…yeth,” Daffy said, then repeated more strongly, “Yeth, I think I do. One latht thing…the bird you mentioned. You thaid you didn’t know hith name?”
“I’m sorry, I—I think he mentioned it, but…” Max flapped a hand helplessly, indicating his confusion.
Daffy hesitated briefly. “It wathn’t…Woody, wath it?”
“Woody! Yes! That’s it!” Max slapped a hand on his thigh. “Do you know him?”
“Maybe.” Not yet, but Daffy would get to the bottom of it if it was the last thing he did. “We’ll make thome inquirieth and get back to you. Thank you for your time, Maxth.” He hesitated, then added, “And…I’m not exthactly clothe to—to your dad, but Donald and I were friendth, onthe. I’ll thee what I can do to help jog hith memory.”
“Thank you,” Max said softly. He rubbed his eyes and got to his feet. “I guess I’ll just…leave you to it, then.” He turned, opened the door, and left.
Daffy sat still for a moment, then raised his voice. “Ralph!”
A moment later, the door in front of him opened, and Ralph Wolf poked his head in. “You called, boss?”
“I jutht had a thtatement from thomeone who claimth they met your ‘Woody’,” Daffy told him.
Ralph came fully into the office, looking interested. “Woody? The distorted Woody?”
“The very thame.” Daffy’s hand strayed towards the recorder. “I don’t think we re-recorded your thtatement on him, did we?”
Ralph’s brow furrowed in obvious puzzlement. “Did we need to?”
“It wath one of the tapeth that went miththing when Prentithth attacked.”
“Oh. Huh. Well, we can record it again if you want, I guess, but I haven’t seen him since then.” Ralph scratched his head as he spoke.
“And you can’t think of anything elthe?” Daffy prodded. “Nothing you might have miththed latht time?”
“Don’t think so, no.”
Daffy frowned at him. “What are you working on?”
“Just straightening up the Busted Section,” Ralph said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “It’s a mess. You haven’t been as thorough with it since you came back, you know.”
“Oh. Uh. Right.” Daffy tried not to be embarrassed. “Sorry. Uh…let me know when you’re finished with it. I want you to take point on thith one.”
“Yep. Will do.” Ralph whistled cheerfully as he stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him.
“Do you even know they’re lying to you?” a new voice said, sounding amused.
Daffy leaped to his feet. Standing next to the door, where he’d obviously been hidden by it when it was open, was…was a bird. Daffy couldn’t quite peg the species, and the colors weren’t…right. He tried to cover up his confusion. “I’m thorry, I didn’t—can I help you? Thith plathe ith off limitth.”
“I don’t agree with you,” the bird said, as casually as though this were an ordinary conversation.
“That’th not your call,” Daffy snapped. “Who let you in here?”
“Let?” The bird laughed. It was an eerily familiar laugh, a five-note arpeggio repeated once and followed by a staccato trill, but at the same time it felt wrong, warped and twisted and in a minor key when it ought to have been a major key. It tickled something in Daffy’s brain, even as it made it want to leak out his ears. “Sorry, but that isn’t how this works.”
Daffy stared at the bird, which should have been red and blue. “You’re…him.”
“Yes.”
“Woody.”
Woody Woodpecker, or something that looked incredibly like him, inclined his head towards Daffy, an almost malevolent grin curling at his beak, which—as both Max and Ralph had said—was made of old, yellowed bone. “That’s sure a real name.”
Daffy swallowed against a sudden fear. His hand strayed towards the recorder again. “Are you here to…” He gulped. “Kill me?”
Woody’s smile grew impossibly wider and definitely sharper. “No.”
That was less comforting than he would have expected. “Then why are you here?”
Woody shrugged. It was an eloquent and fluid shrug and seemed to have little to do with the way Woody’s arms were connected to his shoulders. “I’m simply collecting what is mine, Archivist. The one who enters my domain.”
“Maxth…” Daffy said, mesmerized. “You…you own thothe hallwayth?”
“What a fascinating question.” Woody seemed to consider that. “Does your wing in any way own your beak? In any case, it doesn’t matter. The wanderer has had a brief respite, but it’s over now.”
The word respite was not one Daffy thought he’d ever heard Woody Woodpecker say, but then, it had been ages since he’d seen him—save a short attempt at a comeback in the late nineties, early aughts, he hadn’t worked since the seventies. He rallied himself and spoke with a triumph he didn’t fully feel. “You’re too late, buthter. He’th—he’th gone.”
Woody laughed again, that weird, distorted version of his signature laugh. “Yeah. Gone. Did you notice what door he went through?”
“Of courthe I did,” Daffy said indignantly. “He went right through that…door…there…” He trailed off as his eyes fell on the wall where the door Max had left through was—had been. “Wait…”
“There’s never been a door there, Archivist,” Woody said gleefully. “Your mind plays tricks on you.”
“Let him go,” Daffy demanded. Fear was beginning to choke at him again.
“No,” Woody said simply.
Anger momentarily overtook the fear. Max Goof was a good kid, a brave kid, and he didn’t deserve to be tortured by something like this, and Daffy wasn’t going to stand for it. “Get him back here.”
Woody laughed a third time. It was grating on his nerves. “Are you going to attack me?”
“Oh, you’d better believe—“ Daffy began, winding up his arm to punch this obnoxious bird right in his smug beak. Before he could even start to swing, though, quicker than a thought, Woody darted in and stabbed his beak into Daffy’s other hand as it rested on the table, hard enough that the tip thunked into the wood of the desk before he drew it back. Daffy yelled out in pain and lost his momentum as he reeled back, clutching his injured and bleeding hand to his chest.
He hadn’t known he could actually bleed.
“Jutht who in the Tham Hill are you, anyway?” he demanded.
“Oh, I’m not a who, Archivist. I’m a what.” Woody bared his teeth. Only a Toon bird had teeth like that beneath a beak, but Daffy had never seen teeth so sharp in a bird. “A who calls for a degree of identity I can’t ever maintain.”
“So you’re not…really Woody?” Daffy managed.
Woody—it was easier to keep thinking of him that way—shrugged again. “Is anybody really anyone?”
“What are you talking about, you daft Toon?” Daffy snapped.
Woody’s eyes definitely used to be green, but Daffy couldn’t tell what color they were supposed to be now. “I’m talking about myself. I’m not used to it, so sorry if I’m not very good at it.”
Daffy laughed, a little breathlessly and without much humor. “Tho you jutht dethided to turn up here and thtab me?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” Woody said, as if that was a normal conversation opener. “I intervened to save you before. I’m…interested in what happens to you.”
“Yeth, well, thankth for the thour perththimmonth, couthin,” Daffy grumbled. His hand hurt like hell, and he wasn’t actually sure if there was a first aid kit anywhere in the Archives. “And you thtill haven’t told me why you bothered in the firtht plathe.”
Woody tilted his head to one side, but not in a way that looked comfortable, or particularly as if he had neck bones. “I’m normally neutral, sure, but the loss of this place would have unbalanced the struggle too early. I’d like to see how it progresses.”
Daffy had never heard Woody Woodpecker use words like that, which lent credence to the possibility that this was just something using his form to get Daffy’s trust, which made him trust it less. “You make it thound like there’th thome kind of…war going on.”
“Then I won’t say anything else for now.” Woody gave an eerily soft version of his usual laugh. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your ig-NO-rance prematurely. Goodbye, Archivist.”
He turned around and touched the door, which suddenly didn’t look right, and went to open it. Daffy realized he was leaving, and that he was leaving him with way more questions than answers. “Wait—“ he shouted, then yelped in pain as the sudden reach for the door strained his hand. He clutched it to his chest again and looked up. The door was starting to close.
“Woody—Woody!” he shouted, but it was too late. The door creaked closed, leaving only the mocking echo of Woody’s staccato laughter in his ears.
Daffy screwed up his face in pain and hissed through his teeth. “End recording,” he snapped, slapping at the reel to reel recorder with his free hand.
This was going to be a problem.