“Sure I can’t get you some tea or somethin’?” Rocky asked over his shoulder.
“Uh, no, I’m—I’m good, thankth,” Daffy said, a bit distractedly. There was something surreal about this—about being in the same apartment as Rocky J. Squirrel, onetime friend to Bullwinkle J. Moose, in London of all places. He was perfectly friendly, perfectly polite, especially when Daffy introduced himself not as Daffy Duck, thurely you’ve heard of me but as My name ith Daffy Duck, I work at the Magnuth Inthtitute and then wondered why that sounded so odd. He still hadn’t figured that part out. But Rocky had invited him in and was now flitting about the kitchen—literally—getting things for tea.
He hadn’t even known Rocky drank tea.
“You sure? It’s just—you look a little jumpy is all,” Rocky said.
“I thought I thaw coming in—” Daffy broke off. The police weren’t actually after him, it was fine. Everything was fine. He’d be back at the Institute shortly and…there was nothing to worry about. “Never mind. It’th nothing.”
“Okay, if you’re sure.” Rocky shrugged and made himself a cup of tea, then zipped over and sat opposite Daffy at the table. For several moments, they just sat there.
Finally, Rocky asked, “So—what was it you wanted to talk about?”
“Uh…” Daffy actually had no clue, now that he thought about it. All Hexxus had said—and he was still coughing sludge two days later; Jonny had made a crack about needing to quit smoking and then offered to share his cigarettes, which Daffy had surprised them both by accepting—was that Rocky might talk to him. He wasn’t even sure about what. To cover up his confusion, he said, “You’re…Rocket J. Squirrel, right?”
“Golly, nobody calls me Rocket. Just Rocky is fine.” Rocky smiled at him.
“Right, right.” Daffy swallowed. “I’m from the Magnuth Inthtitute.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“Oh—right. I, uh…” Daffy hesitated. “Look. Cardth on the table, right? Hexthuth thent me.”
“Hexxus? Oh—gosh, that big smoke guy?” Rocky’s smile slipped slightly. “He’s a real mess, he is. Is he a friend of yours?”
“No—no, he thayth you’re clother to ‘my lot’ than hith,” Daffy said slowly. “I’m jutht…trying to get information. Thomething utheful. I guethth you’re involved in…” He waved a hand vaguely. “All of thith?”
Rocky gave him a look, but only said, “Hey, last call for that cup of tea.”
Daffy hesitated. “Sure, yeah, okay. Thteady my nerveth.”
Rocky fetched down another cup and prepared a second cup of tea. “One lump or two?”
“I think I’ve had enough lumpth thith week, thankth,” Daffy said dryly.
“Of sugar, I mean. I’m not gonna hit you on the head or anythin’.”
Daffy shook his head. “None, but I’ll take a thplash of milk if you have it.”
Rocky dutifully splashed a little milk into the cup and handed it to him. For several minutes they simply sat opposite one another, sipping at their tea. It was possibly the best tea Daffy had ever tasted, but he didn’t really want to start with the small talk. At the same time, now that he was here…he didn’t know where to start.
Finally, he blurted out the first question that came to mind. “What happened to Bullwinkle?”
Rocky sighed heavily and set down his cup. “Gee…and here I was tryin’ so hard to be polite.”
Suddenly, with a rush of wind, the kitchen, the flat, and everything in it except Daffy and Rocky vanished, and they were free falling through a cold, open void. Far from making him flail and scream like in a cartoon, he found himself frozen solid as his chest squeezed like in a vice. He couldn’t see the ground below them, or what had happened to anything; he only knew that he was falling, and at a great rate, and that when he did hit the ground it was going to kill him on impact. Some tiny panicked part of his brain reminded him that he was a duck and could theoretically fly, but he hadn’t tried in probably sixty years and he didn’t know if he could anymore.
“Hard to ask nosy questions at terminal velocity, isn’t it?” Rocky said conversationally from where he was sitting on nothing, legs crossed, holding his cup of tea like nothing was happening. “The air really doesn’t leave your lungs like you think it’s gonna. I mean, I know you’re still sittin’ down, you know you’re still sittin’ down, but whether your body knows it when you hit the ground…huh. Well, I haven’t decided ‘bout that yet.”
He sighed. “All I’m askin’ for is a little privacy. Is that too much to ask? Well, I guess it is from your people. We’re a lot alike, you and I, you know? What good’s the height, the terrifying draw of gravity, unless you really know what you’re lookin’ at? Maybe I’ll let you live, let you drag yourself back to your den, but gee whiz, you need to learn some respect.”
Daffy gaped at Rocky. Even if he’d been able to speak, sheer choleric rage might have choked him into silence at that. Rocky didn’t seem to notice and simply sipped at his tea. “Bullwinkle, huh? Always about the moose. I was there first, you know, but everyone always asks about Bullwinkle, just ‘cause the network decided he was the star. No matter how far I go, I can’t get away from him. The funny thing is that the story isn’t that interestin’, really. The original Bullwinkle died real young, back in 1985, but nobody noticed ‘cause we’d been off the air twenty years by then. When we did that movie fifteen years ago or so, it was his son who played the role. Betcha didn’t know Bullwinkle was married, did you?
“Betcha also didn’t know he died. I did. Even back then, I worried about it, you know? Hokey smokes, Toons don’t die, everybody knows that. I thought you could only really die if your cartoons were vaulted, or forgotten. But there he was, dead of gettin’ his head smashed in, they said, and us only out of syndication for a couple of years at that point. I got to thinking about it real hard. Thought about death an awful lot for a Toon like me. Made it hard to get any work even if I’d been lookin’ for it. Instead I was lookin’ for the truth. How does death work? What happens when you die? What is there for a Toon after this world?
“I started seein’ ghosts. Not the cartoon kind, neither. Real ghosts. Or more specifically, a ghost. I thought it was Bullwinkle at first, but the shape wasn’t right. It looked almost like a cloud, like one of those puffy ones that’s probably a picture but you can’t be sure what it’s supposed to be. One night there was a real bad storm, and I saw it standin’ under one of the trees, wavin’ at me, and…I knew it was tryin’ to claim me. I realized, all of a sudden, that all my research and lookin’ into stuff had called it to me. It was after me, and if I didn’t do somethin’, it was gonna get me.
“That’s when I started travelin’. Tryin’ to get as far from Frostbite Falls—which is actually in Minnesota, did you know that? That wasn’t a gimmick—as I could. I’d pick up and move, go as far as I could fly, settle down for a bit. Maybe do some research, maybe not. But it kept findin’ me. It never actually hurt me. I wasn’t even sure it wanted to. ‘Course, I know why that is now, but back then all I felt was the fear. I would see it standin’ under a tree or down a dark alley or in a cemetery, just wavin’ and beckonin’, and I’d run a little further.
“I don’t remember how I found out about the books, actually. I think I was just lookin’ for somethin’ to read. Somethin’ to occupy my mind. This one was a copy of Where the Red Fern Grows, looked like a special bindin’, and I felt like I could use a good cry, so I bought it. The story was a little different than I remembered, though, and…well. I got lucky, I guess. The dogs were more interested in someone else when they turned up and started chasin’, and I got away unhurt. Got rid of the book before I moved on, though. The important thing was that I’d found out there was a whole other world out there. There was somethin’ out there that might save me, might protect me from a past so dark I could hardly see it. But even then I knew the Hunt wasn’t for me. I’m a prey animal, you know? Might be nice to turn the tables, but that’s not really my nature.
“Next one I found was The Boneturner’s Tale. Picked it up in a waterlogged library basement, deposited it in another. I tried playin’ around with it, a little, anyway, but there wasn’t really anythin’ I could pull out of myself to make that thing leave me alone, and tryin’ to reshape things…it got awful dark awful fast. I did learn somethin’, though. Learned I could actually kill if I had to. That came in handy.
“Tried goin’ back to Frostbite Falls for a while, an’ while I was there, I found one that looked kinda promising, at least at first. It was called Brimstone Butterflies, and it just made itself right at home on my bookshelf. I figured it couldn’t be that bad, ‘cause it was addressed ‘To Boris, love Natasha’ an’ I thought, even if they were the bad guys in the show, if they’d had the book it might be useful, you know? I don’t think Boris ever read it, though, ‘cause it…it wasn’t nice. I kinda felt bad about it, but, you know, most people got out of Frostbite Falls before it completely burned down, and the ones who didn’t, well, it’s not like they had anybody to miss ‘em. Nobody’d thought about any of us for a real long time.
“Funny enough, it was when I had to stop movin’ that I found it. I got a call not long after the fire, sayin’ they wanted to make a movie about Bullwinkle and me gettin’ pulled into the real world. They said they were gonna use the destruction of Frostbite Falls as part of the movie. I said I’d do it. I needed the money ‘cause I had to rebuild, and I thought it would be a distraction from thinkin’ about dying all the time. I didn’t like the script at first. They made this whole part of the plot about me not bein’ able to fly anymore, and if I wasn’t Rocky the Flying Squirrel, what was I even? My skin got tight just thinking about it, and between that and the ghost, I was pretty cranky. I did the part, though, ‘cause I really needed the money and I didn’t want anyone else to take my place. It was still hard, an’ I was still havin’ trouble with it, so one day I just stormed off the set and took myself to a used bookstore in the area.
“We were filmin’ in New York that week. I don’t know what I expected to find in a shop that specializes just in mystery books, but there it was, tucked into a back shelf. It was called Ex Altoria—From the Heights. The owner didn’t even know how he’d got it, he said it wasn’t the sort of thing he usually sold. I remember jokin’ with him about havin’ a real mystery in his shop, and he laughed. I insisted on payin’ him for it. I wasn’t sure it’d really be mine if I didn’t. But it was meant to be mine. The thing followin’ me might’ve been part of Terminus, but the shape it took more rightly belonged to the sky. And the sky is always where I felt most at home. I knew whatever was in that book, it could chain me to that feeling forever.
“I don’t remember much about that night. Funny, isn’t it? A night so important and I don’t really remember much but the feeling of falling. But I remember it was during filming. I think the script called for me to learn that I was still me even if I couldn’t fly, somethin’ like that, but that thing was so close and it was comin’ on the set, and I don’t think anyone else saw it, so I jumped into the arms of that vast emptiness, and I flew again. I changed the narrative of the script. They must’a liked it, ‘cause they kept it in the movie, but the important thing was that I was free, an’ I even managed to bind my tormentor to the book. That’s…well, that’s it, really. The movie was a flop an’ I could get away easy, so after that I just embraced my new life. I gladly feed that which feeds me.”
Rocky blinked and sat up a little straighter. A funny grin crossed his face. “Huh. That was kinda nice, actually. I don’t usually get to make big speeches. That was a fun change.”
The rushing wind, the swallowing void, vanished abruptly. Daffy gasped for breath as he, somehow, didn’t flatten against the seat like a pancake and accordion off into the wall afterwards as Rocky returned them to where they had been—where, from what he’d implied, they always had been—seated at his kitchen table.
“Time for you to go, then,” Rocky said cheerily.
“I—you—” Daffy floundered for the right words. You’re despicable didn’t feel right, even if it was what he was expected to say.
“Gee, Archivist.” Rocky set his cup down and stared at Daffy seriously. “Take my mercy and leave. You’ve touched somethin’ few ever walk away—”
A knock on the door interrupted him. He frowned in that direction. “I thought you said you came alone?”
“I did,” Daffy protested weakly. He remembered his earlier thoughts, about suspecting someone was following him…but they couldn’t be, could they?
Ignoring him, Rocky got up and crossed over to the door. Daffy didn’t dare turn to look as he opened it. “Can I help you?”
“Private detective,” a familiar voice said. “Have you seen Daffy Duck lately?”
Daffy stood up so fast he got lightheaded and spun around. “Bathira?” he gasped.
Sure enough, Basira stood on the threshold, wrapped in a stereotypical tan trench coat and looking uncomfortable. She nodded to him. “There you are. Your boss sent me to get you. Said you can come back to the Institute now.”
“Oh. Uh. Thankth?” Daffy set the teacup gingerly on the table and looked at Rocky. “Um, thankth for the tea, and the…advithe?”
“Take care of yourself, Archivist,” Rocky said gravely. “Someone’s got to.”
“Gee, thankth,” Daffy muttered. He stomped out of the flat to join Basira, and Rocky shut the door firmly behind them.
Basira jammed her hands in her pockets and eyed him sideways. “Find out anything interesting?”
“I don’t know,” Daffy admitted. “How did you know I wath in there?”
“Been canvasing about for a couple of days. Must’ve knocked up every Toon in London. There’s a registry, you know.”
“There ith?”
“Yeah. Toon Act 1950. Any Toon seeking to make permanent residence in the United Kingdom outside of Trumptonshire or Sodor, it has to be made known to the local government. You used to have to be an official to access that list, but it’s specifically exempted from the protections of Section Forty-One of the Freedom of Information Act.” Basira shrugged. “There aren’t that many Toons in London that don’t work for the Institute, and none of them knew where you were, but Bugs had heard you were asking questions of some of the other Toons and asked if I’d come find you.”
Daffy was silent for a moment. Several aspects of that bothered him, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what. “Tho it’th back to the Inthtitute now, then?”
Basira nodded. “He said you probably had enough information to be getting on with and you were cleared to come back.”
“Yeah. Sure. Thankth, Bathira.” Daffy sighed. “Did he thay anything about Foghorn Leghorn?”
Basira frowned. “No? He’s not registered in London. Was he visiting?”
A chill ran down Daffy’s spine as he realized Bugs had—somehow—kept Basira from knowing about Foghorn Leghorn’s murder. Who else had he kept from knowing? Surely it would have been in the papers if it had got out. Was that what he’d meant by give me a few days to clean up? What else could possibly be happening?
He didn’t voice any of that, though, only said, “Thomething like that. I think he wath trying to live off the grid. Not sure where he’th at now, though.”
Well, it was true, he thought. He didn’t know where Foghorn Leghorn was…in body or in soul.
He just hoped it was someplace better than where he’d left him.