WHAT THE BUTLER SAW ......
GETTING INTO A JAM
SUSPECT #2
Zelda reluctantly followed Jeeves' flickering, wavering candle down, down, down the dank and musty steps, into a fathomless damp darkness populated by ...... Zelda shuddered as her overstimulated imagination filled the gloom with unknown figures of menace and terror. Would these steps never end? Would she ever see the light of day again? What the fark was Nekokami doing in the MR catacombs .... tonight of all nights?
Zelda stumbled and nearly fell flat on her face as she abruptly stepped off the final step onto the cellar floor.
"Careful there," chirped a familiar voice as friendly hands helped her regain her balance.
"SneakySnake" exclaimed Zelda. "What are you doing here? Tonight? At all? Don't you live Down Under? How did you get here?"
"Dis-donc, ça descend jusqu'où au juste, cet escalier ??"
SneakySnake adjusted her kitty jammies, yawned, and explained. "Well, tomorrow I was over visiting Marc, who was throwing one of his super parties. I had one too many ZCD's and stumbled into Adrian's lab to have a kip on some folded lab coats. I guess I accidentally hit the wrong buttons or levers, or something, on that glowing machine -- I was only trying to dim the lights so I could catch some shut-eye -- and next thing you know I was sitting in Colonel Alex's office! On his desk! Boy, was he cheesed at the skid mark I left on it."
She paused to lick what looked suspiciously like strawberry jam off her fingers, and continued.
"Well, he had that snooty manservant of his, Jeeves, ... have you met Jeeves yet Zelda? ... drag me out of the study into what Colonel Alex laughably called the MR dungeons. It's really a broom closet with no lock on the door. I was SO zonked on the ZCD's and I guess cosmic jet lag ... I didn't notice the door was unlocked until just now."
"Oh Hi Jeeves," she chirped, noticing the dark-clad manservant standing behind Zelda in the shadows, "No hard feelings, right? What day is it anyway?"
"It is today," stiffly replied Jeeves, stung by her uncomplimentary description of his magisterial bearing. "It has been today all day long, and will continue being today until tomorrow occurs."
SneakySnake blinked twice, swallowed the last of the suspected strawberry jam, blinked again, and said "Right." She then wandered off into the darkness, sucking her thumb and humming "The Teddybears' Picnic."
*cough* "If you would just step this way mum" murmured Jeeves deferentially, discreetly reveling in having rid them of the noxious antipodean presence. Zelda's brain had stopped even trying to work sometime during Jeeves' explanation of temporal dynamics. She allowed Jeeves to lead her to a bright red enameled door, tucked in between two massive stonework groins. As Jeeves leaned forward with candle in hand to rap smartly on the door, Zelda noted what appeared to be a chocolate hand-print on the door panel above the brass door knob.
"Encore un indice, là ? Ou bien celui qui s'occupe du donjon n'est vraiment pas une fée du ménage ?"
"Go away, I'm asleep" shouted Nekokami through the closed door. "You must be a bad dream. Go away or I'll pinch myself and wake up."
"Nekokami, please open your door. It's Zelda!" pleaded the flummoxed French detective wanna-be. "I need to talk to you."
..... "WHO?"
"Zelda! It's Zelda! Please open up -- it's freezing cold out here!"
..... "I don't believe you. Zelda lives in Paris. What would she be doing here tonight? How would she get here? The storm closed down all the airports. Did she swim over?"
"Tell her Jeeves, .... please, .... tell her I'm Zelda and I'm really here."
.... "Jeeves is out there too? Why didn't you say so! Come on in!"
The shiny red door abruptly opened, revealing a softly candle-lit room with dusky pink walls and no windows. Zelda was snared into a sticky embrace "Zelda! It is you! What brings you to our soggy shores? How did you get in the building tonight? Look at you! You're a mess!"
Nekokami drew Zelda over to a low divan, and dismissed Jeeves "You can go back to the Colonel, Jeeves, Zelda and I are going to have some girl talk!"
"Very good madam," murmured the obedient servant, and Jeeves once again melted into the shadows, closing the door behind him.
"Have a donut Zelda! Watch out for the runny chocolate and that strawberry jam Pshrynk just insisted on adding to a perfectly good chocolate iced masterpiece."
"Pshrynk .... Neko ... I'm afraid I have some terrible news. Pshrynk is dead! In the kitchen. Apparently struck in the head with a large jar of strawberry jam. Tonight! Jeeves and I found him .... again." Zelda choked out in a quavery voice, spewing a gentle cloud of donut crumbs into the air.
"Dead! Pshrynk dead! Impossible!" Nekokami retorted sharply. "He was alive and well when I left him in the kitchen, watching kennyc doing unspeakable things to that poor chicken. Did you kill Pshrynk tonight? Why Zelda, why?"
Zelda sank under the weight of another unfounded false accusation, and replied "No, for the last time, I did NOT kill Pshrynk. He was dead when I found him. But Jeeves did see and hear YOU arguing with Pshrynk earlier tonight - in the kitchen - where I found his battered body!"
"Oh, poor Zelda, we were just discussing what's the best thing to smear on a donut. I had just finished icing a sumptuous cake donut with creamy chocolate when Pshrynk tried to add strawberry jam! Imagine the desecration of pure chocolate with jam! I shouted (it was storming you know) No! Watch out with that jam! That's no way to decorate a donut. Get away from me with that jar!"
"Mouaif, ça pouvait être pire, au moins il a pas sorti les crevettes !"
"That irritating man kept trying to spoon jam onto my donut, and it was so dark in the kitchen that we both got totally smeared with the sticky stuff. And then he dropped the jar! I left at that point, yelling at him at the top of my lungs, and asked Jeeves to clean up the mess in the kitchen. I brought my chocolate donuts back here and have been napping all night."
"Here, have another donut! You're looking quite pale Zelda. Are you feeling all right? Did you catch a chill out in the rain? Maybe you've developed a fever and have become delusional. That's it! You imagined the whole thing. Shadows can be deceiving during a storm, you know. "
Zelda was indeed shivering, partly from the cold but mainly from the cold realization that her fragile grasp of reality was slipping even further .... further than she could ever have imagined. What was going on in this madhouse tonight. Why were her friends accusing her of murder? Who was the real murderer? What was Jeeves' role in all of this? She did feel a little flushed. Maybe, .... just maybe this was all a feverish ... and very detailed ... hallucination?
Zelda lifted a hand to feel the temperature of her allegedly fevered brow and promptly smacked herself in the head with the paperback book still stuck to hand. Her sodden spirits surged as she realized -- this book was real! And covered with jam, which had glued all the pages together so that the book once again inexplicably opened in the middle at page 202. The jam had soaked thoroughly into the pages, completely obscuring the text except for the last line on the page and .... gasp! .... two lines scribbled by Pshrynk on the bottom of the page!
"Look!" shouted Zelda, trying to pry Nekokami's attention from the box of donuts, "here's the book I removed from Pshrynk's dead hand! Call Jeeves back! He'll tell you where I found it!"
Neko rang the bell to summon Jeeves as Zelda peered nearsightedly at the gluey page. Crossing her eyes as she tried desperately to decode the writing, Zelda could only (maybe) discern:
___ ___ ______ do __?
___ ________ ___ ___ it.
__ ___ ___ of ____.
Just then Jeeves' thunderous knocking at the door startled her so badly she dropped the book -- of course it landed face down -- onto the carpet.
Zelda dropped to her hands and knees, frantically trying to peel the sticky missal from the carpet as Jeeves entered the room.
"On sait bien que la tartine tombe toujours du côté beurré, visiblement ça vaut pour la confiture aussi..."
"Hi Jeeves, I think Zelda needs some help cleaning her mess off of my carpet." Neko explained, sounding rather put out by this wanton wasting of perfectly good jam.
"Permit me madam," said Jeeves, inserting one white-gloved fingernail under the edge of the book and gently peeling the pulpy mass up from the carpet. He lifted the book free of the carpet with a sickly squelchy sound and gingerly handed it back to Zelda. Alas, page 202 had stuck to the carpet so firmly that it was now completely covered with a opaque coating of carpet fuzz, jam, dog hairs, a small white chicken feather, and a large dollop of milk chocolate.
"I'm afraid you will be held liable for the replacement cost of that book by the MR lending library staff" commented Jeeves as he fastidiously changed into a new pair of spotless white gloves. As he tucked the soiled pair into his slacks' pocket, Zelda noted a small red stain on the side of Jeeves' otherwise flawlessly starched white shirt next to his suspender clip. Before she could tell if it was jam, Jeeves had re-buttoned his jacket and inquired "Will that be all madam?"
"No Jeeves, that will NOT be all" stormed Zelda, who then stood up, looked at Jeeves, and nearly fell down again. "Montsnmags! What are you doing in ... mtravellerh's .... Nate's ... DaleDe's .... whoever's suit? How many times is this going to happen to me? What's going on?"
[What indeed is going on?]
[Is Zelda suffering from the toxic effects of mixing wine and donuts on an empty stomach?]
[How much will Zelda be charged for the ruined book?]
[Has MR been invaded by Oz?]