An English inspector realises his normally sensible city has slipped into something strange: everyone is acting like they’re trapped in a slapstick noir parody, complete with overwrought dialogue and reality bending towards the absurd. Teaming up with Sergeant Johnson, he follows the trail of linguistic chaos to its source, bracing for whatever narrative nonsense awaits them.
In true Naked Gun fashion, the heroes roll their eyes, unholster their puns, and promise to save the day … right after they stop reality from turning into a badly written crime novel.
I knew the instant she walked into my office she was bad news. A femme fatale, a tall drink of water, and smoking hot. And I knew, by the presence of those strung-together phrases, those common bedfellows in my monologue – and the very fact I was aware of my monologue – that something was so very wrong in the world.
On the way to the station earlier that day, I’d noticed a gal tailing me. I could tell this was the case by the way she leaned out from behind an oak in Ronaldson Park and later, when I went to grab a lunchtime cup of joe, the way she spied me through two eye holes cut into the Morning Herald. A tall dame. Trench coat and light brown fedora. Sunglasses in a British December. Up until this afternoon, I’d never thought of anyone as dame before, nor had I ever referred to coffee as joe. A film noir gumshoe trail in this little old city o’mine was an odd touch too. My first conclusion to jump to was cosplay. I threw on my digital wetsuit and surfed the web as soon as I got to my office but came up with a whole riptide of nothing. I dropped the incident on the duty constables and that’s when the wild tales really surfaced. Strange occurrences. Silly little instances that seemed mere eccentricities at first. Simply odd folk being odd. You see that plenty in my line of work. But it was the big picture, see? All those puzzle pieces slotting together. What a masterpiece – a whole heap of weird.
Take me for example. An English Police Inspector speaking and monologing like a private detective in the Bogart movies I’d watched as a child. That all started around about ten forty-five this morning. The one-liners, the platitudes … slowly winding up to worse. That’s when she walked in – the tall drink.
‘You’re in the wrong place, lady,’ I said, having never spoken like that before. The words in my head weren’t matching the ones slipping from my mouth. The dame, that troubled look she wore, seemed to be in the same predicament.
‘I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ she said. She reached. I flinched. It was just a purse in her hands. I sighed. She removed a lollypop, unwrapped it and began to suck. ‘You gotta help me, Joe,’ she said with sweet cherry breaths.
‘The duty constables will help you, not me. And my name ain’t Joe.’
Out of the blue, Police Sargent Johnson stormed into my office like a hurricane and blustered, ‘Bad news, boss – the city’s going ape.’
Johnson never called me boss, so I knew something was afoot. And I never said things like something is afoot, so I knew straight away Johnson was right on the button and shit had hit the fan. So why could I only smell cherry? We both looked at the dame, then each other.
‘There’s been a robbery,’ Johnson spilled, ‘and get this … the perps were wearing black and white striped jerseys, and carrying bags marked swag.’
Perps? She meant suspects, I’m sure. That way Johnson was speaking. That dame. What was going on? We ignored the woman steaming in the corner and I was growing uncertain whether she was real or not. I had my suspicions.
‘Johnson, tell me, what else has gone down?’
‘Well, now I think about it, an old man phoned to report a break-in this morning then ten minutes later, he calls back to claim it was all just a dream. Then there was a domestic abuse report. Two officers attended and the neighbour informed them it was all okay now as the woman concerned had been rescued by a well-dressed young man and, by all accounts, is now living happily ever after.’
‘That was fast,’ I said, scribbling each account in my pocketbook.
‘Right? But then it got really odd …’
‘How so?’
‘Constable Cartwright said he’d figured out what was going on and was about to inform Constable Harris when a strip light fell and knocked her out.’
‘Yes, I’d heard about that. Must have been a shock. Constable Lawson didn’t he—’
‘Get knocked out by a low flying pigeon? Yes. What’s odd is he was indoors at the time and about to tell me what he thought was—’
‘Going on, right?’ I interrupted. Johnson nodded and we both clicked our fingers in realisation and continued the conversation under the safety of my robust desk. ‘It’s worse than we thought,’ I exclaimed, ‘we must away, before it’s too late.’
We must away? This is getting worse by the second, I told myself and before I could stop the words from leaving my lips I exclaimed, ‘To the police mobile!’ knowing full well I’d used exclaimed twice already and the sun wasn’t even over the yard arm.
‘Excessive speech tags, formulaic prose appearing in thoughts, speech, and real life. Our hunch must be correct,’ I said as we left the shelter of my desk and I grabbed my hat and trench coat, though I was at a loss as to where they had come from. It really was worse than we thought, even corny objects were manifesting.
The smoking hot cherry bomb stood in the corner, all red lipstick and legs, sucking on her lollypop. I could see in those wide eyes of hers that she was but a puppet to whatever madness was unfolding. I schmoozed out, ‘Later doll,’ with a wince and rushed out with the sarge.
‘Johnson,’ I said, as we strode down the hall ‘this can’t go on, I’m already coming to the end of my tether!’
Johnson cringed. ‘Please b-b—damn it all to hell—boss! We gotta be as silent as the grave, I don’t know how much more of this I can take!’
She was right. I wondered if she’d even noticed the overabundance of exclamation marks creeping in but decided to keep schtum. If we were going to get out of this mess with our sanity, we’d have to put a cork in it where the colloquialisms came into concern. Suddenly, I was instantly all ears having spotted the alliteration in the last sentence.
It couldn’t be … could it?
Out in the mean streets was argot Armageddon. There it was again – I don’t even know what argot means but it was the perfect alliteration for Armageddon, so I felt this overwhelming urge to shoehorn it in anyway. Johnson could see something was wrong with me but kept tight-lipped, as quiet as a mouse, as a lamb. She was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. That idiom string was the last straw as I slammed the door to the car and we belted up.
‘Clunk clip every trip, boss.’
The well-meant hackneyed phrase had little effect on me, I was more concerned with the rhyme in the previous sentence that nearly went unnoticed. Like a bat out of hell I tore up the street with the sirens blaring. We narrowly missed two guys carrying a pane of glass only to go careening straight through a pyramid of boxes inexplicably stacked in the middle of the street for no apparent reason. I suddenly tensed at the tautology creeping into the narrative.
‘The whole world’s gone to pot, boss.’
I had a thought and turned on the radio – no chase music to be heard.
‘Not quite yet. We might just be in the nick of time.’
We’d both clicked as to what might be happening. A similar incident a couple years back. Apostrophes had started appearing in the most ridiculous places or disappearing altogether. Nobody knew who owned what or if there was more than one. It had driven three grammarians to madness before we finally put one and two together.
‘There’s only one place that can be the cause of this craziness, Johnson,’ I said as we turned a corner to spot a man placing his jacket over a puddle for a lady to cross. I looked to the sky. The horizon was dark with a looming cloud, a flock of starlings flying in murmuration and in the distance a bell tolled. ‘This is going to get worse before it gets better, Johnson.’
When we arrived at Harrington and Brinley’s Publishing House, Johnson ended up tasering Frankenstein’s monster which only seemed to make matters worse. I tangoed with a vampire wearing a sinisterly high collar, dancing him all the way to the lamppost I cuffed him to. Apparently, there was an invisible man but after asking the gathering crowd, it was clear nobody knew where he was last seen. Then it hit me – the horror tropes and the unimaginative puns had gotten free too.
‘I think our deductions are precise, dear Johnson,’ I said, with a cringe.
The front door to the publishing house was a chaos of folk fleeing down the steps for their sanity. I grabbed a dame by the shoulders and yelled, ‘What happened lady? Gimme the short, short version, and don’t skimp on the details.’ My efforts were wasted as she swooned and fainted. ‘Dammit, Johnson,. These prosaisms are going too far!’
We dashed in and up one floor to discover the editor cowering under her desk brandishing a blue pencil and a little white bottle in a threatening manner. ‘Get away! No more awful noir tropes, please! I have correction fluid, and I know how to use it!’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I ain’t no private dick, I’m a real dick – I mean – inspector. This is Sargent Johnson. Come out from under there, tell us what’s going down.’
‘We recently took on an intern … I told them, I told them, the mad fool.’ She shook me in frenzied hysteria and before I could stop, I’m telling her to pull herself together.
‘What? What is it?!’ I asked, painfully aware the interabangs had escaped too.
‘They were instructed to sift through the slush pile, carefully. We told them time and time again – be vigilant, you don’t know what’s in there. We keep the room locked so nothing can accidently get into print. You know. Unsolicited manuscripts, poetry, horror fiction. Even though we’ve made it perfectly clear we don’t print that kind of stuff.’
‘The standard practice is to sperate the truly terrible from the slush and take it down to the incinerator for humanity’s sake, you understand?’
‘A dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. So, what happened?’
‘The new intern. They forgot to close the door behind them. They went to incinerate the latest bad apples. They said they tripped. Manuscripts everywhere. Before they knew it, all the clichés, excessive speech tags, and rogue apostrophes had set upon them. They went mad in an instant.’
‘But all this chaos? Just from poor writing?’
‘Never underestimate the destructive power of banal hackneyed collocation, Inspector.’ She was about to say something else but there was a rumbling crash and the building trembled. Past the great glass window to her office walked an off-brand Godzilla. ‘Damn,’ she said, ‘someone’s been hording the fantasy manuscripts. How many times? We publish romance and crime fiction for God’s sake.’
A shiver took me and our eyes locked on each other. The shiver crept down my spine, a chill breath left me, the room darkened and it felt as though someone had walked over my grave.
‘Please tell me you don’t print paranormal fiction.’
‘We used to. That’s been stored away. We keep some in as it comes back to life every now and then. Argh. The damn puns are out too!’
‘Yes, I spotted one earlier,’ I said.
We scratched our heads figuring a way out of this mess and I said, ‘Right, puns are easy to deal with, they tend to attract others, so we write one down here.’ I took out my pocketbook. ‘And hide. When the puns enter the office and crowd the bait, we drop that glass on top of them.’
‘But, boss, what about all that punny smugness?’
‘The only way to fight it is to bite your lip and roll your eyes, Johnson.’ I eyeballed them hard. ‘Look, we’re a rag-tag bunch but you can do this, I-I-I believe in you.’
‘What about the paranormal tropes?’ the editor said.
‘Yeah, boss. Who ya gonna call?’ Johnson facepalmed and the editor twitched in discomfort when suddenly, the assistant editor came running into the office.
‘What now?’ the editor yelled.
‘The building – something BIG, it …’
We all spoke in unison like some corny mystery aha moment, ‘The giant monster trope!’
‘… and so there is no hope,’ continued the assistant editor, ‘for the poetry you see, it’s broken free!’ Johnson, the editor, and I gave a big sigh and rolled up our sleeves and I spoke.
‘It’s no joke and no use, it has all gone to Seuss. Secure the building, lock all the doors. Nothing else leaves, check all the floors. Not a stanza, a sonnet, nor even a triplet. We will catch this, and crop this and even cripple it.’ I paused and cringed with growing dismay, knowing it was going to be a long day.
The End
Like that? You may enjoy reading Symbionts, a collection of speculative science fiction short stories by M F Alfrey.
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M F ALFREY 