Daffy hadn’t realized he was getting dependent on his glasses until Miss Piggy had them taken away. They weren’t real, or at least he hadn’t thought they were—just a prop from a cartoon, and his character hadn’t even needed them, since he was a spoof of Clark Kent, who famously just wore them for a disguise—but when she had deftly plucked them from his face and flung them away, the world had dissolved into a Gaussian blur. A part of him had hoped his eyes would go back to normal after a while without them, but it had been…however long it had been…and he still couldn’t see worth a dickey bird.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was being fattened like a lamb for the slaughter…or a goose for the Christmas feast. She’d trussed him up and hung him upside down from a hook dangling from the ceiling of this creepy warehouse filled with wax figures, and not very good ones, and she or her assistants—mostly Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker—kept coming by to pull him down, pin his arms, rip off the gag, and shovel a mixture of corn and what tasted like meat down his throat. Daffy knew that corn was what you traditionally fed ducks you were fattening up to eat, obviously, but the meat was there for production of muscle and bulk. A rapid, high calorie diet would lead to increased weight gain quickly, or at least it ought to. Daffy also knew, however, that she wasn’t going to eat him. He wasn’t altogether sure she could eat, come to think of it. That didn’t mean she didn’t know people who could.
Still, he wasn’t being bulked up for meat. Or at least, he thought grimly as he swayed in the darkness, hoping in vain to fray something loose, they weren’t trying to bulk him up for meat. Miss Piggy was getting increasingly more frustrated that he wasn’t gaining weight like she wanted him to, and periodically used him as a punching bag in anger, at least for a minute or two. He knew he needed to be bigger in order for her to make him into a proper dress, or costume or whatever, for the Unknowing; he was no gorilla, that was for sure. But for some reason, the corn and meat wasn’t having the desired effect. He still felt about the same size he’d always been.
If this was a cartoon, he thought, he’d have reached an appropriate weight by the end of the first feed, his belly distended and bouncing. Obviously the rules were different here. Daffy didn’t know if it was because they were following Muppet rules or—no, he suddenly realized, it wasn’t that at all. They were following the rules of the regular world. But Daffy was larger than your average duck. Maybe it was just taking longer to have an effect than it would if he were three pounds and barely aware of what went on around him.
At least his feathers felt like they were in good condition.
It was raining. Again. Still. Daffy was pretty sure it had stopped since he’d been there, and it had to have been at least a few days—he’d lost count of how many times he’d been woken, ungently yanked from his position, and force fed when he involuntarily opened his beak to cry out from the pain of the blood rushing from head to feet. His lungs had barely recovered from Hexxus’ kiss, or so it felt like, so this was an added torture. At least he was alone for the moment.
As the thought crossed his mind, the weird, echoing laughter he knew all too well suddenly rang through the space, and there was the sound of a new door opening. There was a weird, vaguely blue blur in front of him, topped with a smear of red—well, bottomed, from his perspective—coming ever closer.
“Oh…oh…oh, Archivist. What have you done now?” Woody’s voice sounded positively gleeful. “It’s almost sad to see you like this.”
Daffy groaned. His beak was still tightly bound shut, and Miss Piggy had had the foresight to shove something in the end to keep him from talking anyway, so he couldn’t manage actual words. Woody didn’t seem to care. “Almost.”
He reached forward. Daffy made a muffled noise of alarm as the blur came extremely close to his face, but after a moment, it pulled back, and Daffy realized he could see. He blinked hard as his eyes settled down and he realized that his glasses were settled on his face. He was still upside down, but at least he could see again.
Woody was grinning at him, his eyes spiraling with the same madness as usual, but he spoke in a perfectly conversational tone of voice. “I’ve made my decision. I’m going to kill you. It’s earlier than I wanted, maybe, but…that’s life. Your life.” He laughed. “Before I do, though, I want you to understand. Even if it is against my nature.”
He reached forward again and, with a swift yank, ripped the gag away from Daffy’s beak. He gasped with relief, gulping in air that didn’t taste of cloth and despair. Well, maybe a little despair, but at least not as imminent.
“Ask your questions,” Woody said.
Daffy blinked at him, momentarily speechless. Finally, he managed, “What?”
“Ask,” Woody repeated.
There were a lot of potential questions Daffy could have asked. He mentally scrabbled for the most important one. “How did you find me?”
Woody smirked. “The Eye watches, and the Stranger conceals, but me? I lie, Archivist.” He laughed again. “I’m the throat of delusion incarnate. They can’t hide you from me.”
That opened up a whole bunch more questions. Daffy decided to save them for later. “What do you have to do with the Unknowing?”
“Oh, that? Nothing,” Woody said carelessly. “Except that I want it to fail.”
"Tho…tho why are you here?” Daffy asked. He would have gestured if he’d had the hands for it.
“I already said it was to kill you,” Woody replied.
“But…” Daffy wriggled and managed to set himself swaying gently, which really didn’t help matters much. “But why?”
“Because I don’t want the Theater to win,” Woody replied immediately. “And I don’t want the Archives to, either. Killing you…it’s the best of both. And, of course, there’s revenge.”
“Revenge?” Daffy repeated incredulously. “What did I do, thteal your parking thpathe when we were invethtigating the dithturbanth in the factory or thomething?”
“That wasn’t me.”
“I wath thtanding right nextht to you!” Daffy said, frustrated.
“No,” Woody said, slowly and carefully. “You were standing right next to Woody.”
“I—what are you talking about?” Daffy shouted.
“Quiet, Archivist,” Woody said, his voice suddenly sharp. “The cramped coffin sings loud, but not loud enough to drown out screaming.”
Daffy instantly subsided. Woody seemed pleased. He listened for a second to make sure no one was coming, then continued, “The Woody you lived in the same neighborhood as was not me. When that Toon was Woody, I was something else, and now I am Woody and that Toon is gone.”
Daffy’s head hurt. Remembering to keep his voice low, he asked, “Tho…what, you became him?”
“No more than he became me,” Woody said, which wasn’t an answer. “It’s pretty uncommon that anyone I take finds their way into being me, but it does happen. And Woody had help.”
“What happened?” Daffy asked.
Woody’s eyes lit up. “Oho—a statement! Is your recorder running? Better go catch it! Say the words, Archivist.”
Daffy was even more confused, but he wasn’t about to admit that. Instead, he swallowed and spoke as clearly as possible. “Thtatement of…Woody. Taken direct from thubject. Date…”
“The last day of the Archivist’s life,” Woody supplied cheerfully.
Biting back a sigh and suppressing the urge to roll his eyes, Daffy merely said, “Thtatement beginth.”
Woody leaned casually against a nearby stack of crates. “Where is the beginning? How far back should I go? To the beginning of me? Centuries? Millennia? How do you define the start of your being when in some ways you always have been? Time is difficult to form. Woody Woodpecker, though, he’s easier to keep track of. He was created. He lived. And he should have died. But before that happened, he went to work for the Magnus Institute—that ivory tower keeping its prisoners ignorant in pursuit of…knowledge. A dungeon full of idiot watchers. And Woody Woodpecker was no exception.
“When he was between the theater and the small screen, he lost a colleague to something like me. His name was Wally, but those in power just called him…loony. I don’t know if he was or not. Certainly he wasn’t a Warner Brothers Toon. But it doesn’t matter. He lost track of what was real and what wasn’t, and he was so afraid that the world didn’t actually exist that to make it so was almost nothing. Woody was there when he was taken, but he never quite got over what he saw. Or didn’t see. He heard about the Magnus Institute from a fellow mourner at a funeral, and he fell into its waiting arms, where it led him to Emma Webster. The Archivist.”
Woody sounded less and less like the woodpecker Daffy had always known and more and more like an unknowable eldritch being as he spoke. “Even being what I am, I’ve almost never seen anyone so adept at distorting the truth as Granny. Woody was protective of the frail old woman he believed her to be. So…so delicate. So forgetful. So gently wise. He cared for her. He trusted her. And she fed him to me. She made him me to destroy our transcendence. And she did…not…hesitate.
“Poor Woody. He was like you, you know. He had been…shaped to be a zany, greedy agent of chaos, tormenting those who would attack him, and yet somewhere along the line he started to be the one things happened to instead of the one happening to others. The difference was that he hadn’t always been like you off camera. He was a screwball, and he did resent being pigeonholed into the butt of the jokes somewhat. But for all that, he truly did care. So when she told him they were going to Russia, he went right along with it. He believed her when she said she needed him because of his past, because of those he’d worked with before. Never mind that penguins don’t live in Siberia. And maybe if he’d taken the time to do a little research, he’d have known there was no such place as Zemlya Sannikova. But he had no reason to doubt her. After all, Toons so often go places that aren’t on any map, don’t they?
“Even when they arrived at Dikson, by the edge of the Kara Sea, and they were picked up by a quiet sea captain called Ephraim Långstrump…even then he trusted her. It wasn’t like he’d never been somewhere cold before. After all, he had starred with Chilly Willy for so many years, traveled to the Arctic so many times, that this was hardly unusual. Do you know what he worried about?” Woody laughed—his usual trill, but, somehow, converted into a minor key. “He worried about Granny. About this poor, fragile old woman who’d never been so far north before. Surely she wouldn’t be able to handle the temperature. But she was like iron, and walked with a purpose she’d never shown on any of her cartoons—not that he’d ever worked with her before the Institute. The colder the seas got, the colder her eyes became. Then, at last…then he began to be afraid. He didn’t ask again where they were going. It wouldn’t have mattered. But he did ask why. There was a great evil, Granny said, and Woody was going to help fight it.”
Woody’s face grew pensive. “Am I evil, Archivist? Is a thing evil when it just obeys its own nature? When it embodies its nature? When that nature is created by those who revile it? One would think a Toon would be more likely to sympathize, to ask those questions. After all, what was it Jessica Rabbit said all those years ago? ‘I’m not bad—I’m just drawn that way.’ If a drawing is evil, is that the fault of the drawing, or the pencil, or the artist? Well, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe Granny believed I was. Woody certainly did. He believed everything she told him.
“And it was me they sought. Me, and the others of It Is Not What It Is. Our Great Twisting. The Worker of Clay had labored for decades on that contorted, impossible edifice of doors…and stairs…and falsehoods…and smiles. A thousand staring morsels stood, and not one of them believed themselves sane to look upon it. And in the very center, the door that would open to all the places that were never there, was me. I use the term ‘apotheosis’ not because it’s correct, or because I want to see you try to pronounce it, but because I can only show you its truth when we are in the corridors.
“And that is what Woody and Granny found when they set foot on Sannikov Land, which does not exist and never did. It’s not like Wackyland where the last of the Dodos live, or like the seas between London and Pepperland, or even like a set built in an afternoon for a cartoon and dismantled as if it never was before sundown. It did not exist before they arrived and did not exist when they stood upon it, and they couldn’t be sure of that. Except…except they were sure, each in their own way. Granny was sure it did not exist, but she also knew it was there. And Woody was sure it did exist, because Granny would not have brought him somewhere that did not. It was warm, and feeling its reassurance beneath his feet was the last time poor, doomed Woody knew comfort. They walked through the green jungle of that forever elusive polar island, and up the gentle mountains that can never have a name. And at the top, they found us through our spiraling laughter. And they saw us in all our twisted glory.
“You think you cannot go mad, you who have seen so much. You think that a Toon can accept anything it sees as the truth. And you’re right, of course. The mind does not shatter like a plastic marker, Archivist. It’s more like a kneaded eraser—soft and malleable, able to return to its original shape, even if the marks of what it brushes against might stay behind. You would have been hard pressed to convince Woody he hadn’t gone mad, though. What he saw was nothing he’d ever seen outside a cartoon, and not even a cartoon he’d ever been in. But it was simply that what he saw with crystal clarity could not be real.
“But Granny? She never hesitated. She didn’t waver. She never gave any hint that what she saw was anything less than what she expected. Her mind wasn’t one that had room for doubt. She stared at us carefully, her eyes scanning for something that was my heart. Looking for my door. And she found it.
“Maybe I should have realized what was going to happen when I saw those two lonely figures walking towards me. But I can’t tell you the existential joys of finally…becoming. Of an entireness finally crossing the threshold into your self. I was so ecstatic in my completeness that I didn’t even hear my door creak open. Because Granny had told Woody how he could stop us. She had told him to walk through a door. And even with so much of his mind shutting down and panicking, he trusted her. He went inside, and he closed the door behind him. In the end, all he really needed was a little…direction. And a script.
“Because that’s what Granny gave him. I don’t know where she got it, or if she somehow wrote it herself, but there it was. A script. A script to me. It didn’t make a lick of sense, like it had avoided one too many passes with an editor, but once he was inside, all Woody had to do was go line by line and he knew exactly which twists and turns to take, which doors to open, which mirrors to shatter. Until he reached the last page, and the script called for him to become me.”
Woody’s eyes darkened. “Even sharper than the joy of becoming is the agony of being remade. To have your who torn bloody from your what, and another crudely lashed into place. To become Woody. And to do so at such a crucial point in our Twisting, in our becoming…well, of course it destroyed it. The impossible altar collapsed. The Worker in Clay tore out his veins to dissolve himself in the crimson mud. The others of us were cast to all the places that aren’t. Some have still not found their way out again. And somehow, some way, Granny was back on that boat before Sannikov Land once again never existed. And all that was left was me. Woody.” He laughed bitterly. “Wearing my failure as the very fabric of my being. Reduced once again to feeding on the unsuspecting and confused. That is what I am. My very existence tied to my pointlessness.”
Daffy took a deep breath as he felt the statement come to an end. Oddly, he felt fuller than he had after being stuffed full of corn. “You don’t have to have a point to have a point,” he muttered, then pushed that movie out of his mind. “But you…you never tried to take revenge on Granny?”
“She knew how to protect herself. She knew what she was creating.” Did Woody sound disappointed or not? “Besides, killing her wasn’t as important. She wasn’t as good an Archivist as you.”
That sounded like a compliment, but it felt like a threat. Daffy managed to swallow. “Tho…why not kill me before?”
“I’d hoped you would stop the Unknowing first and destroy the workings of I Do Not Know You,” Woody said with a shrug. “Instead, here you are, and you might make it happen faster. So, better your death happens now.”
Daffy bit back a whimper. “Ithn’t there any way I can thtop you from killing me?”
Woody laughed again, and this time it definitely sounded fractured. “If you scream loud enough, the Theater might take notice of me, but…I promise you will die far more pleasantly with me than you will with them.”
Daffy thought of the way Miss Piggy looked at him. “Right.”
With another swift slice of his beak, Woody severed the ropes binding Daffy to the ceiling; he dropped unceremoniously to the floor and lay there for a minute, slightly stunned as the blood rushed back to his feet. Woody, for a wonder, gave him a few moments to recover and let him get to his feet on his own, then nodded. “Good. Right this way.”
He bowed dramatically, sweeping one arm forward. As he did so, a yellow door appeared in front of him, creaking ominously. Daffy almost expected to see a pair of cartoon eyes with heavy brows scowling at him from the top of the frame, but other than the fact that it was yellow, and hadn’t been there previously, it was…normal.
“Open it,” Woody said. “Open it and this will all be over.”
Daffy stared at the door for a long moment, then sighed. He was a coward, but it wasn’t like he had any other choice, did he? With a shaking hand, he reached out and twisted the door, then yanked it open…or tried to.
It didn’t budge.
“What the…?” Daffy narrowed his eyes. He twisted the knob again, then jiggled it, then yanked on the door with all his might. It didn’t budge.
“What’s the matter, Archivist?” Woody asked.
“The door’th locked,” Daffy grumbled.
“It’s not,” Woody told him.
Daffy twisted and rattled the knob a few more times, then decided to give it the ol’ Looniversity try, as they said. Grunting with the effort, he braced his feet against the door and pulled on the knob as hard as he could. Had this been a Toon door, it would have drawn out the length of his body before abruptly snapping back into place and sending him tumbling beak over tailfeathers into a heap on the floor. This door, however, simply remained inert.
He dropped to the ground, panting with effort. “Why ith it locked?”
Woody stopped looking amused. “It can’t be.”
“Well, you try it, then,” Daffy snapped.
Woody rolled his eyes and twisted the knob. His irritation gave way to confusion, then concern, as his efforts brought no success.
“Tha-tha-tha-that’s not—” he began. Suddenly his eyes widened. “Oh. Oh, no.”
Before Daffy could even begin to formulate a question, Woody threw back his head and screamed. It was a scream worthy of Mel Blanc recording in an empty warehouse—loud, agonized, echoing off the walls until it faded away. And as it faded, so did Woody, leaving Daffy standing alone and shaking before a wooden yellow door.
If you scream loud enough, the Theater might take notice of me, he remembered. Had that been loud enough?
The sound of an opening door almost gave him a heart attack, but it was the door in front of him creaking open, not one behind him—although doubtless someone was coming. The figure that stepped out was not Woody. Instead, it was a tall, gangly, vaguely doglike individual with slightly bucked teeth that didn’t quite fit in the mouth anymore and eyes much less normal than he’d seen them last.
“Do you want to come in?” Max asked.
Daffy gaped. “Wha—? Maxth? Maxth Goof? But—but—Woody—”
Max shrugged. “Woody’s not me. Not now.”
“What happened?” Daffy asked.
“He got…distracted. Let feelings that shouldn’t have been his overwhelm me. Lost my way.” Max’s face looked pensive.
“And now…you’re Maxth?” Daffy felt like he was trying to grasp a very slippery rope.
“I don’t know. I never know, really.” Max tilted his head to one side. “Do I need a name?”
Daffy slumped. “I thuppothe not.”
Max gave Daffy a small, crooked grin. “Max is better than Woody.”
For a moment, Daffy was tempted to believe, but one look at that face and he knew it had been a kindness that the great George Goof wouldn’t remember he had a son. He only felt sorry for PJ and his family. “But he’th gone.”
“Yep,” Max agreed, and there was maybe a tinge of regret in his voice. “So’s Woody. There’s only me.”
“That’th what I thought.” Daffy sighed. “Okay.”
Max jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Do you still want to leave?”
“Are you thtill going to kill me?” Daffy countered.
“Nah. That was Woody’s thing, not mine.”
Leaving would probably be smart, but Daffy had never been one to do the smart thing right off the bat. “Tho what do you want?”
Max frowned. “I don’t know. Max liked you, so…there’s a lot to consider. But I’ll help you leave.”
Daffy stared at the door, then at Max. “Thay, wait a minute. You’re the Dithtortion, the—the Liar. How do I know thith ithn’t a trick?”
“I mean…if it is, what are you going to do about it?” Max pushed the door a little wider.
“Well. When you put it like that.” Daffy sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Exthpedition ho. Let’th go.”