The walkie-talkie crackled into life. “Jack, are you there?”
It was Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, Jack’s number two at the Nursery Crime Division. They had been together since the Humpty affair, and although there had been a few hiccups in the early days, they now got on well. She didn’t know why she’d been allocated to the NCD but was glad that she was. Despite its being a career black hole and the butt of many station jokes, she felt somehow that she belonged. She didn’t know why.
Jack picked up the radio and keyed the mike. “NCD-1 in position front of house. All quiet.”
“I thought I was NCD-1,” replied Mary over the airwaves. “I’m in the front line today.”
“No, you’re NCD-2. Ashley’s NCD-3, and Baker and Gretel are NCD-4 and -5.”
“I should be NCD-3,” cut in Baker. “I’ve been working part-time at the division longer than anyone.”
“Shall we stick to names?” asked Mary. “It’s going to be a lot easier.”
“Whatever. Spratt at front of house, nothing to report.”
“Good,” replied Mary. “We have thumb reentry in T minus? five minutes.”
This time there’d be no escape for the Scissor-man.
Inside the house Mary was briefing Conrad’s parents for the last time. They stared at her anxiously, but with both Jack and Ashley at the front and Gretel and Baker at the back, it seemed as safe a sting operation as they could make it.
“Your backs are to be turned for Conrad’s thumb to go in at 2330,” explained Mary as she checked her watch. “At the same time he should lean back on his chair, refuse to eat his soup and play with these matches. I’ll be in the closet and on the radio, so if we can’t catch the Scissor-man before he reaches the house, I’ll give the thumb-out order and Conrad aborts all actions. Do you understand?”
Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman looked at each other and then at Conrad, who at seventeen was old enough to understand the risks. Like many of the children in the area, he had lived in a condition of understated terror for so long that he now barely noticed. He had never had a brush with the cautionaries himself; the presence of Roland Snork in the neighborhood was enough for most children. Roland’s face was frozen in an ugly grimace because the wind had changed while he was making a face, and although the thirteen cosmetic surgeries had alleviated the problem somewhat, he was one of the more obvious warnings to uncautionary behavior. But if all went well, children like Roland wouldn’t suffer a lifetime of humiliation for a few injudiciously made faces. The parents of Cautionary Valley had banded together and unanimously voted for normality. For surly, grunty teenagers who dropped their clothes on the floor and stared vacantly out from behind lanky, unwashed hair. For untied shoelaces, messy rooms, homework left until the last moment, inappropriate boy/girlfriends and unregulated nose picking. For brooding silences, funny smells in the bathroom, hours spent on video games and ignored calls to the dinner table. It all seemed so normal, so blissful. They had phoned the police, who gladly batted it down the line to the Nursery Crime Division.
“We’re happy to go ahead, Sergeant,” said Mr. Hoffman with a dryness in his throat. “There are methods other than terror to instill discipline. We want to be like normal families, where threats of mutilation and a sorry end to achieve good behavior are met with a sarcastic, ‘Yeah, Dad, like way to go—you’re such a zoid, like, y’know. Tight.’”
He sighed deeply and turned to his son. “Conrad? Are you happy to go ahead?”
The boy nodded his head enthusiastically.
“Yes, Father,” he replied good-naturedly, “if it is for the good of everyone. Would anyone like a sandwich or a cup of tea?”
“No, Conrad. There’ll be no more tea making for you after tonight.”
“Are you sure? I could bake you all a cake, too—and then play the piano for your entertainment before taking the dog for a walk and repainting the spare room.”
Even Mary found him a bit creepy. She didn’t have any children of her own—unless you counted her collection of ex-boyfriends—but children to her were meant to be something a little more than mindless automatons.
The Hoffmans hugged each other nervously, but when Mr. Hoffman shook Mary’s hand, she noticed that his left thumb was missing.
“I was one of the first,” he muttered sadly, following her gaze.
“A life lived in fear is a life half lived. A life half lived is fear lived in half. A life half feared is fear half lived.”
Some people have a way with words, but Hoffman wasn’t one of them.
“What exactly is the Scissor-man?” asked Mrs. Hoffman, who found the idea of characters from cautionary tales made flesh and blood a little strange, as well she might.
“We call them PDRs,” explained Mary. “Persons of Dubious Reality. Refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence, and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless. They do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done—and it’s our job to stop them.”
“Are you sure the Nursery Crime Division is up to it?” Mrs. Hoffman added, mirroring a strongly felt suspicion within the community that the regular force wasn’t taking their concerns seriously.
“Of course,” replied Mary confidently. “Only two months ago we successfully detained a ghoulie, a ghostie and a long-legged beastie.”
“And the bump in the night?” asked Mr. Hoffman anxiously.
“What about that?”
“Ah,” returned Mary, scratching her chin thoughtfully, “no, the bump got away—but I’m sure you would agree a seventy-five percent success rate in that particular operation was a very good result indeed.”
Constables Charlie Baker and Gretel Brown-Horrocks were waiting in the back garden, covering the house from the potting shed in case the Scissor-man came from that direction. Unlike Ashley, Mary and Jack, Baker and Gretel were occasional members of the NCD, brought in only when the need arose. Baker had been designated a D-minus in “public social skills” owing to his acute hypochondria and was used only for internal duties within the Reading Central police station.
“Want some Vicks?” he said to Gretel, offering her the small bottle after trying in a most noisy and unpleasant fashion to clear his sinuses, which seemed to be incessantly blocked with possibly the finest cold viruses that natural selection had managed to create.