King Dork

fire. Long live Justice and the

American Way.

Regards,

Tit

So Tit was a person? “Tit lib friday”—an appointment at the library with Tit? And someone was dead? And it had something to do with Superman?

The note was dated 6/31, but the six was heavily and awkwardly inked and clearly had originally been a five.

My first thought, influenced no doubt by having been watching Rosemary’s Baby with a Black Sabbath sound track, was that the little parallelogram of letters might be a magic charm or spell of some sort. And maybe “thrown into the fire” alluded to the burning of witches or something like that?

Or perhaps the charm was an element of some kind of death spell, a spell that had apparently worked, if the reference to the “dead bastard” was any indication. You send this magic parallelogram to someone, innocently disguised as an ordinary note, and soon after seeing it, the person dies. Except that that would mean that my dad would have been the one who died. But of course he had died, only not for thirty years or so. Maybe he’d received the note as a kid but hadn’t actually looked at the evil parallelogram till six years ago. Or the death spell had a built-in delay, a kind of long fuse.

And now I had seen it, too. I started to calculate, wondering how long I had. . . .

I got a little creeped out. Then I realized that was nuts.

Getting a grip, I looked at it again. Perhaps it was the 114

kind of puzzle where you search for words and circle them.

But all I could find were things like “fux” and “yum,” and none of them were even in a straight line like they’re supposed to be. There was “mmmmm” running diagonally from the upper left to the lower right. All that stuff reminded me of Fiona somehow. But that was the only intelligible thing about it.

It didn’t take me too long, though, to realize that it was probably a code. Then it took about twenty minutes of staring at the note and thinking about the CEH library to develop what I thought was a pretty good theory about what sort of code it was, and how it might work. But several solid hours of scribbling yielded only gibberish. Either I was totally on the wrong track or I was missing something. I even swallowed a bit of my pride and phoned Sam Hellerman to see if he had any ideas. But there was no answer at Hellerman Manor.

I eventually had to admit defeat. I closed my notebook and settled into an uneasy, half-asleep night of fretting about Tit, the dead bastard, zombies, pod-hippies, Halloween, witchcraft, my dad, my mom, murder, Sam Hellerman, Mia Farrow, Little Big Tom, Amanda, Black Sabbath, Paul Krebs, Roman Polanski, Anton and Zena LaVey, Matt Lynch, Nostradamus, Mrs. Teneb, Superman, Dr. Dee, Elvish, Klingon, Brighton Rock, Fiona, and Jane Gallagher. It was exhausting. When I finally dropped off, I had a dream that I solved the code and that the revealed message suddenly made it clear how it all fit together perfectly as part of a single story that explained everything. But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what it was.

Ordinarily, I’d have immediately run, not walked, to Sam Hellerman with Tit’s mysterious note. He hadn’t been too in-115

terested in my dad’s teen library when I’d told him about it.

He only liked science fiction and fantasy. Basically, if a book didn’t have a map of somewhere other than earth in it, he couldn’t see the use. He had a point, but then, he didn’t have a mysteriously deceased dad to investigate. I had tried to tell him how great Brighton Rock was, but he had just rolled his eyes.

Tit’s note would have been right up his alley, though, and I’m sure he would have been able to help. He’s a clever guy.

However, things were a bit strained between us because of the Fiona situation, and because of—well, something was going on with Sam Hellerman, something hidden from me. It wasn’t just that he was being a dick about Fiona and hanging out with hippies. He was also acting weird toward me in general, kind of distant and secretive.

Calling him had been my first impulse upon finding the note. But of course, he had been out. Later, when I asked him where he had been, he said, “Visiting my grandma,” which I didn’t believe for a minute.

A thought struck me.

“Hey,” I said. “If you ever happened to be somewhere like another party or something and you happened to see Fiona there, you’d—you’d tell me, right?”

He just looked at me like I was the most pathetic creature he had ever seen. Which was well within the realm of possibility, especially since Sam Hellerman didn’t get out much.

He was also evasive when I probed for the story behind the new Hellerman/drama hippie nexus.

The first thing he said was “I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition.”

“Nobody,” I said blankly, “expects the Spanish Inquisition,” supplying the required response but continuing to stare 116

at him as though to say “there is a time for quoting Monty Python and a time for choosing another path.”

Then he said: “trust me, you don’t want to know.” Then, after watching me continue to stare at him for some time, he cleared his throat and claimed that, actually, he was considering going out for drama and trying out for The Music Man.

I allowed my expression to change from “your feeble attempt at false jocularity will never succeed in changing this subject” to “who exactly is this moron and why is his Sam Hellerman impression so laughable and unconvincing?” He finally said, lamely: “There is a thing called hanging. It’s not a big deal.” And he asked me what my problem was, though I don’t think he expected me to answer. He added that it