“The firefighter just sort of nods to him, and I realize for the first time this guy’s saying something. Not loud, but intensely. I mean, this was years ago, so I don’t remember exactly, but it definitely involved the words ‘cleansing fire,’ ‘all shall be ash’, and the name Asag. I found out later that was a Sumerian fire demon, but at the time I assumed it was from a cartoon. I reckoned suspicion of arson was probably about right, and Spencer agreed. I offered to be the one to arrest him, maybe talk him down. Still thought he might be a Toon at this point, and thought he was either really into method acting or he’d gone what Uncle Roger used to call ‘crackerdog’, and either way I thought I was the best choice. Spencer disagreed, though. Said if he was a Toon I knew how to restrain him better, so he’d do the talking. There’s part of me that still feels guilty I didn’t fight him harder on that, but I went to cuff him. You know as well as I do it’s…not hard to cuff a Toon. I mean, they can’t just slip out of them, whatever people think—only when it’s funny—so I didn’t think it would be that much of a challenge.
“As I was putting them on, though, there was this sudden, intense pain in my hand. It was just as I touched the metal to close them; it was incredibly hot. I took a welding class once, ages ago, just on a whim, and made the mistake of forgetting that just because the metal isn’t glowing red doesn’t mean it isn’t scorching hot. It was that same burn, too intense for your mind to process for a second, then all your nerves fire at once. It hurt, is what I’m saying.
“That was actually the point I made the mistake, or at least I think it was a mistake. I’m…look, cops swear, all the time. I certainly wasn’t afraid of a few bad words, and even then I used them all the time. But for some reason, I found myself yelling the phrase Uncle Roger always used, the one he said Grandpa Eddie used in the first case they worked together—‘Holy smoke, he’s not a Toon!’
“And just like that—the heat stopped. I can’t explain it. Maybe it was just that I’d managed to get the cuffs all the way on before it got too bad and jerked my hands back, but all I came away with were some badly blistered fingers. The man smirked at me and…winked, like we were sharing some secret, and nodded to me, then leaned forward and whispered something in Spencer’s ear. I didn’t hear what he said, but Spencer went completely pale. He was badly shaken, and I had to drive us back to the station after we got the guy into the car. He…wouldn’t tell me what he said.
“Our arsonist’s name was Diego Molina, and I was right, he wasn’t a Toon. He was assistant curator at some Mexican museum, come over with a loan to the Natural History Museum, but they hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks. He didn’t say much in questioning, though his English was clearly fine. Unfortunately, the arson case collapsed pretty quickly, so we had to just slap him with the assault charge and let him walk with a pretty hefty fine. Spencer didn’t exactly help matters by getting himself suspended. The only thing Diego Molina had on him when he came in was a little book bound in red leather. They caught Spencer in the evidence locker trying to destroy it with a Zippo lighter. I never saw him again. They told me he killed himself when he got home. Apparently he’d somehow filled the bath with boiling water and just…got in. Official story was that he’d somehow done it using a kettle, which…was just about the weakest cover-up I ever heard.” Basira sighed heavily. “Anyway, after that happened, and I explained about my burned fingers, they gave me my very first Section Thirty-One. That was kind of my fault too, actually. There were no witnesses to me having declared Molina wasn’t a Toon other than him and Spencer, so I might have got away with pretending he was when they asked me, but I decided to be honest. Sergeant asked how I was so sure, and I said it was because the cuffs hadn’t glowed red. You know how much Toons love the clichés. But there was no sign that metal was hot until I touched it. Ergo, not a Toon. They had to agree with my logic, and hey presto, I got sectioned.”
“I thee,” Daffy said. He searched for another thought, but could only repeat, “I thee. How many…uh, potentially paranormal inthidentth do you invethtigate ath a polithe offither?”
“None,” Basira said bitterly. “No one says the P-word. Not ‘paranormal’, not ‘supernatural,’ not even ‘spooky’. The words you look out for are ‘weird’, ‘strange’, ‘odd’, and if you hear the phrase ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at’, then yeah, you’re not getting much backup. And I got it worse. I finally came clean about Uncle Roger just to get them to knock off the ‘Tooner’ stuff, and it worked, but it meant everyone in the department knew I had experience with Toons. There aren’t a lot of them in London, you know, but there are a few, and not all of them are upstanding citizens like you and the staff here.
“It’s mostly false alarms, to be honest. We get called to a lot of bad drug trips, animal attacks, and mental health breaks. Those are the ones that have the potential to sound weird initially. And of course when actual Toons are involved, sometimes things can get a bit off kilter. That was actually at the center of my next Section Thirty-One call, but that didn’t happen for…almost another four years.
“July eighteenth, 2014. I remember because it was the hottest day of the year, and the air con in the squad car wasn’t working that day, so we were really suffering. It was me and Alice Tonner, who…everyone calls her ‘Daisy,’ but I’ve never been able to get her to tell me why. Anyway, Daisy was sectioned for years before I was even on the force. She never really talks about her experiences; takes Section Thirty-One very seriously. The most I could get out of her was that she was originally sectioned for something she called ‘spider husks’. The way she described it, she’d found a bunch of things like shells, the sort crabs leave behind when they grow, but I could never quite work out if they were meant to be people-sized husks of spiders, or spider-like husks of people. And Daisy never seemed like she wanted to clarify. She also mentioned vampires once as well, but I’d been talking about that cartoon with the red monster—”
“Goththamer?” Daffy asked.
“Yeah, that’s him. Anyway, she said something about vampires after that, but I reckoned she was joking about it. Probably.” Basira rubbed her face. “So anyway, this call we were heading for Kensington. It had originally been for the ambulance, but then neighbors reported gunshots, so we were called in, and we had a very strange call with the paramedics. They specifically refused to confirm there was a gun on the scene, so we didn’t send in an armed unit. They were still on standby, but something in the paramedics’ report made them think they should wait until we got there. The building was pretty run down for Kensington. Still nicer than my house, but, you know. The paramedics met us at the door. The lift was out, so they showed us up the stairs.
“On each floor I saw faces peering out the cracks in the door. They must have been the neighbors who heard the gunshots. We…we carried up until we reached a door that was already open.” Basira swallowed hard. “Just before we went in—there was this little girl. She had these huge, scared eyes, and something made me stop. Maybe I was going to tell her she was safe, I dunno. But she waved me down, and when I bent over, she gave me this stick. She said it was for fighting off the monsters and if they’d got ‘Mister Dreamer’ it was her fault. I promised her it wasn’t, but it certainly made me more worried about going in, especially since the lights were off. The paramedics confirmed they had all been smashed.
“The windows had all been painted over, and it was like a boiler room in there. But even in the gloom, it was…it was clear there was a lot of blood around. A lot of blood. But it didn’t…smell right. Blood’s coppery, usually, but this all smelled like something chemical, like…turpentine. And as soon as I smelled that, I knew what it meant. This guy, whoever he was, was a Toon.
“I…kind of relaxed, at first, actually. Told Daisy it was probably all right, that it was a Toon, but I said it quietly. Then we got a torch on the ‘victim’. He was sat in an armchair in the middle of the room, and it was clear he’d been shot in the head multiple times at close range. He was male, humanoid, youngish, although that doesn’t necessarily mean anything with Toons. You know, depended on how long it had been since he was actively working, I guess. And if there were kids in the building, that could count. Age was hard to guess from what was left of his face, though. Daisy spotted the gun next to him and walked over to retrieve it, all the while asking me how normal this was, how often Toons bleed, ‘cause, you know, everybody knows you can’t kill a Toon. I told her what I’d learned from Uncle Roger—that the longer Toons spend on this side of reality, the closer they get to following its rules. I was starting to expand on that when I heard Daisy scream. The Toon was moving, trying to gurgle something through what was left of his jaw. He was reaching for the gun. Daisy leapt for it, but it was right next to him and she missed. The Toon raised his hand, pointing the gun towards the mess that was what was left of his head. Daisy grabbed the gun before he could pull the trigger, but he was stronger than her. Or maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was just still Toon enough to get the jump on her.
“I knew—or thought I knew—what was going on then. He’d gone crackerdog. Uncle Roger told me that it’s what happens to Toons who…mostly Toons who live in the human world but work in the Toon world, or vice versa sometimes. They’ve still got one foot in one world and one foot in the other, and going back and forth between the two worlds drives them a bit crazy. They forget what’s real and what isn’t, and the stress can literally tear them apart. I reckoned this Toon was in that state, and I wanted to bring him back. So I called him Mister Dreamer, like the little girl had said, and I said she was worried about him and he should let us help, and I held out the stick. I swear I was just trying to—it was good procedure, and nine times out of ten it would’ve been the exact right move. Maybe it still was, I dunno. But either way, he…calmed down, for just a second, and let go of the gun, and took the stick. I was just about to tell the paramedics they could take him, there’s a doctor at Orpington who specializes in Toons, when Daisy yelled. I turned back around, and…the Toon, Mister Dreamer, he looked at me—I swear he looked at me—and he gurgled out, ‘For the monsters.’
“And then he…he bashed his own brains in with the stick. He didn’t move again after that.
“It…wasn’t right. I told Daisy on the way back to the station. Sticks that kill monsters don’t work on people that hand them out, that’s not how it works, and if he’d truly gone crackerdog he wouldn’t have believed it would work on him anyway, so wouldn’t have tried. She said I was probably right, me knowing so much about Toons and all, but she also said she didn’t want to fill out another damned Section Thirty-One form. So we just…took care of the paperwork on our end. Simple Toon suicide, nothing to write home about. Stuck with me, though. I thought about going to talk to Dad or Uncle Roger about it, but I didn’t want to bring that to them, it’s a lot worse than the sort of thing they deal with. Besides, I’d had a fight with Dad a couple years before that because I didn’t want to quit the force and go work for him, and I hadn’t spoken to him since. Still haven’t. So I just…let it go.”
“I guethth that’th pretty eathy to do,” Daffy said. He held up a hand at Basira’s glare. “Not let thingth go. I’m talking about…thweeping it under the rug. Thaying it’th not actually a Thection Thirty-One cathe, ethpecially if there’th a Toon. I’m gueththing thothe might be your only two exthampleth?”
Basira nodded, another single jerk of the head. “Officially, the only other one I’ve had is yours.”
“Why ith that? Why would Granny’th death be conthidered a thup—a weird event?” Daffy tried not to look too hungry for the answer. If there was some sort of clue, some kind of hint as to who or why she had died…if maybe it had been something paranormal after all…
Basira’s response dashed that hope before it could fully take root. “I mean, we’re investigating it as a murder because that’s what it is, but you guys are basically an automatic Section Thirty-One, so I’ve got almost no help on this. Maybe that’s why I wanted to come and make a statement, you know? I can’t talk to anybody about this stuff, and then I come here, and you’ve got all these…boxes of other people’s experiences. It’s…I dunno. I’ve been meaning to come by ever since that call-out.”