The Fourth Bear

“I mean ‘No’ as in ‘No, I don’t think she’d go out with you.’'

“You might have paused for thought or something,” said Baker in an affronted tone, “or been ambiguous—to save my feelings, y’know.”

“Sorry. You ask a question and I answer it,” replied Gretel, who had a reputation for directness that sometimes didn’t sit well with higher authority. “I’ll tell you why. Remember that time you sneezed on her?”

“It wasn’t just her.”

“I know. It’s just that girls don’t really like that sort of thing.”

Baker nodded slowly. He’d suspected for a while that they might not. Still, he never thought it really fair to have a girlfriend, since he had only six months to live. The thing was, he’d had only six months to live for over thirteen years now.

“Hmm,” said Charlie, half to himself, “I think I need a doctor who’ll give me a year to live.”

“Do you like it here?” asked Jack to Ashley. They were leaning on the car but still keeping a close lookout on the front of the house.

“Here, in this street?”

“No, Ashley, this planet.”

“Most agreeable,” replied Ashley happily. “The filing is excellent, the sitcoms top- notch and the bureaucracy to die for. But far and away the best feature is your digital mobile phone networks. We can taste the binary data stream in the air. It gives your cities a favorably congenial atmosphere—to you, something like the bouquet of a fine wine.”

Mary was beginning to get a bit uncomfortable inside the closet, and she looked at her watch with increasing frequency, willing the hands to move faster so they could all go home. She shifted to get more comfortable, the door swung shut, and there was a soft click.

“Blast!” she muttered as she gently pushed at the door. It was no good. It was shut fast.

“Jack,” came Mary’s embarrassed voice over the walkie-talkie, “I’ve just locked myself in the closet and I can’t see the kitchen anymore. Can we abort?”

Jack looked around. The street was empty and quiet. He had said they’d go to midnight, and he liked to be good to his word.

“No,” he said to Mary over the radio as he walked through the garden gate.

“Sir,” came Gretel’s voice over the airwaves, “it’s just a thought, but my mother told me never to hide in closets in case… I was locked in.”

Jack looked around again. It had been quiet before, but now it seemed somehow even quieter. There was no distant hum of traffic, nothing. It was as though Cautionary Valley were suddenly an island, cast adrift from the rest of Reading and the world. He’d felt it before in the same place twenty-five years earlier. He shivered with the onset of a cold breeze, and his breath showed in the night air.

He brought the radio to his mouth and whispered, “He’s here.”

He signaled to Ashley to stay put, ran in a circuitous route to the front door and entered the house. When he opened the kitchen door, he stopped short, as there was a small conflagration on the kitchen table. The matches Conrad had been playing with had caught fire with an impossibly bright flame and were now rapidly burning a path up the table to where the boy sat, rooted to the spot with fear. They’d thought of this, and Jack killed the fire with a handy extinguisher, opened the closet door to let Mary out, then barked to Conrad, “The thumb—back in!”

In his panic the boy had stopped sucking his thumb, but now he obediently did as he was told. No sooner was the thumb in when the back door was flung violently open, and before Jack and Mary could even blink, a wild-eyed figure in crimson trousers leaped in brandishing a giant pair of gold scissors. With expert precision the tips of the scissors closed around Conrad’s thumb, and the Scissor-man would doubtless have snipped it off and been gone again in a flash if Jack hadn’t shouted, “HOLD IT!”

The Scissor-man froze. His bloodshot eyes darted toward Jack with a mixture of fear and insanity. He looked gaunt and pale, with an untidy shock of nicotine-stained hair; a tailor’s tape measure hung from the pocket of his bottle green jacket.

“DCI Spratt,” continued Jack as he held up his ID, “Nursery Crime Division. You’re under arrest. Step away from the thumb.”

The Scissor-man glared at Jack, then at the thumb, then at Mary. His eyes twitched, and his long, bony fingers clasped the outsize scissors even more firmly. Jack could see that the tips of the scissors were clasped around Conrad’s thumb; the flesh was white where the blades held it tight. Even the slightest pressure would take it off.

“I’m not kidding,” said Jack slowly in his best authoritarian voice. “Drop the scissors. We can plea-bargain this down to possession of an offensive weapon.”

“Snip!” snarled the Scissor-man, a wild grin on his lips revealing several rotten teeth. “Snip-snap! The thumbs are off—alas, alack!”

He tensed, ready to cut.

“Cut that thumb off and you’re doing serious time,” said Jack, hoping against hope that the others would initiate phase two without him. They should know what was going on; his finger had been pressed tightly on the “transmit” button since the Scissor-man had so dramatically entered the kitchen. “Put down the scissors and we can talk.”

In reply the Scissor-man made a wild snip in Jack’s direction, then returned the scissors to clasp Conrad’s thumb. The whole movement took less than a second, and Jack didn’t know what the madman had done until he saw that his tie had been neatly severed and was lying on the floor at his feet. If it came to a fight, they were in trouble. But at that moment, as Conrad’s continued relationship with his thumb was looking at its most precarious, the floodlights came on in the front garden and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. The Scissor- man screamed in rage and shock. On the lawn outside were six more children, all waving at him with their thumbs in their mouths.

Jack and Mary didn’t waste a moment. With the Scissor-man momentarily distracted, Mary jammed her walkie-talkie in the jaws of the scissors as Jack pushed Conrad out into the hallway. The Scissor-man glared at Mary, gave an unintelligible cry and severed the radio in two with a metallic snick before bounding out the front door—and straight into a pit covered with a sheet of painted brown paper in the front garden. In a vain attempt to save himself, he had let go of his precious scissors, which flew through the air in a graceful arc before embedding themselves in a tree.

As the Scissor-man snarled and snapped and whined in the pit, jumping up and trying to scrabble out, Mary and Jack ran into the front garden at the same time as the neighbors appeared to take their children home. It had been an excellent plan and, unlike many other excellent NCD plans, it had worked.

“Have we missed something?” asked Baker as he and Gretel appeared from the back garden, where they had seen the grand sum of precisely nothing. Jack nodded toward the pit, where the Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man cursed at them in the most loathsome language imaginable.

“He looks kind of puny without the scissors, doesn’t he?” said Jack as they all stared down at him. “I’ll toss you for who gets to put the cuffs on.”

Just then the Scissor-man stopped yelling and screaming, as he had suddenly noticed a small, accidentally self-inflicted cut on his hand.

“Snip!” he said to himself in dismay. “Cut myself—bad—wrong! ”

“How apt,” murmured Jack. “Mr. Red-Legg’d Scissor-man… you’re nicked.”

3. St. Cerebellum’s

Most outdated secure hospital: St. Cerebellum’s, Reading. This woefully inadequate and