“It went like this…”

“I went over there once and made a record,” I muttered. Then I handed the tablet to Daisy to read because it made sense in a weird and twisted way that a Pygmy Goat wearing a blackout suit, with a spycam and glitter unicorn horn on her head should read aloud. “Eye spy this,” I sighed.

She held the tablet in her hooves and read.

“Aloud, please.”

Daisy’s voice isn’t what you might expect from a talking Goat. I endowed her with Meryl Streep’s voice, circa 1985, for I had an idea that she’d talk a lot and thought that a nasal Goatish bray might get irksome pretty damn quick.

“If I must,” Daisy said. She began to read.

“‘Whilst detoxing from one of the many many many substances that the Boss and I are addicted to, we (from here, I) charged an old flip phone and converted it into a time machine. You see, since Other Earth was my invention, I figured that I’d go there and have a look around. Since I am a Pen whose limitations are only those set by my imagination, I am free to travel to any place of our invention, and at any time of its existence without having to lamely ‘imagine’ doing such. Yet for the sake of a plausible narrative, I changed the old cell in the Boss’s junk drawer into a time machine for the hell of it–disregarding the possibility of time travel paradox, and my belief that you should not be able to travel back in time to a point where you did not exist. Regardless, I knew about the monsters from being in the Boss’s mind and wanted to see what Other Earth was like before they came about. After so much abracadabra and tapping my heels together, I departed from the body I used to share with the Boss and wound up just outside a parking lot of a cocktail lounge at Globe, Arizona 13 November 1946.“

“Smartly, I took fifteen bucks of pre-1946 currency with me. I’d raided the Boss’s old money collection, justified that it had to be at least half mine; I figured it was better to be authentic than in jail for counterfeiting in the distant past of another dimension. Of course I could have sprung myself from such a predicament with a quick edit, but where’s the art in that?’”

“Fifteen smackers for just you and only fourteen for the three of us?” Gwen kvetched, for it had been at least five minutes since her last complaint.

“Never mind that, Daisy, please continue,” I said.

“Seems like a valid point to me,” Daisy said.

Renfield was about to add something, and the entire distraction would have blossomed as a full debacle until I promised (and yet have done) to retroactively edit the sum stated a few pages ago to an even fifty (leaving out the fact that the serial numbers on all the two dollar bills were repeated as many times needed to reach the sum).

After that had been fixed, I asked Daisy read on:

Silence.

“Um, aloud again, please.”

“If you say so”:

“‘I’d researched the idiom of the day by ingesting a Humphery Bogart marathon on Turner Classic Movies. The only item I had difficulty with was what to wear. I never sport a dress, and the way I see it never includes 1946 Other Earth. Still, I could hardly expect to blend in if I arrived in sweats; it posed a problem until I leafed through a couple of film magazines of the era and discovered stars like Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn often wore mens suits. Then I found a photo from the late thirties in which Carole Lombard was at a Halloween party dressed as a gangster. She wore a cream colored fedora tipped at a jaunty angle, a pinstriped loose-fitting “zoot suit,” black shirt and white tie. Now, nature has seen to it that nobody will ever confuse me with Carole Lombard. But since I’m 4’-11” and the movie hoods of the day were three-footers like Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, the ensemble appealed to me and I put together one just like it.’”

“Hey,” Renfield complained. “You do remember how I’m dressed?”

“Duh,” I said.

“Yet you feigned surprise for the readers when you saw me, although you knew this get up was in Wardrobe and had worn it before.”

“I beg to differ,” I said. “I did not deceive the readers. Different times have different standards for taste, morality and the truth. It’s all pretty much minute to minute–especially in Saragun Springs.”

Renfield did that little thing with her eyes; I figured she was mentally filing what I’d just told her “For Later.” She then smiled sweetly at Daisy and said, “Please continue, darling.”

This time I had to give Daisy a little nudge because she was again reading silently, and because I am the sort of Pen who often works a gag to death. Fortunately, it was getting close to the end of my narrative.

“‘You have to be highly specific when dealing with a time machine. Leave it any chance to eff with you and it will. I can either text on or speak into my flip phone time machine. “OK time machine,” I said, “send me back to the day on Other Earth when the monster thing began. But nowhere inhospitable to human beings, nor into a post, nor have me materialize right out in the open for everyone to see, nor have me seated atop a hatching monster egg…”

“‘My list of prohibitions went on for a while. But upon temporarily exhausting my collection of little paranoias, I finally pushed “Send.” I materialized just outside of the parking lot of a cocktail lounge in Other Earth’s Globe, Arizona on a Friday night. No one saw me pop into being except a Coyote mama and her two puppies. My time machine had found it amusing to place me between a mother Coyote and her issue. I do not know what the Other Earth world record is for sprinting from a mother Coyote into a cocktail lounge, but I’m certain I gave it a good challenge that night.

“‘Guess what? Saying “Hey sis, gimme a highball, and make it snappy” didn’t fly back in 1946 the way it does in old movies, that’s what. A rather surly dame (who had no customer skills whatsoever) gave me the finger via a pretend scratch of her nose and blew cigarette smoke in my face. Although I was delighted to be in a civilized place in which smoking was allowed indoors, I lit up and blew smoke right back at her. We might have gone fist city if I didn’t lay a “fin” on the bar and told her to pour me a rye and one for herself. It improved her manners.

“‘I had never ordered a “rye” before. I’m guessing it’s the stuff left over at the bottom of the barrel after all the good whisky has gone to heaven. Imagine what lighter fluid combined with molten sandpaper that some bastard had first taken a piss on might taste and feel like and you’ll be pretty close. The rye got belligerent with my esophagus, lungs and attitude. Fortunately, what was rapidly degrading into a potentially ugly situation between me and the barmaid was averted when a rather pleasant and mutually squiffy man and woman approached me at the bar and asked me to join their party for a martini.

“‘Now, I must pause for a second to reaffirm my stance against plagiarism. I will write the most absurd, self destructive thing that comes to mind before I’ll knowingly poach ideas or Fictional Characters from other authors, living or dead. I also hold disdain for “sampling” or “fan fickshun.” But there, with the gamma effect of the poisonous oozings scraped from the bottom of the bottom rye barrel boiling the usefulness out of my innards, I needed to meet Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles, the sophisticated husband and wife sleuths from Hammett’s Thin Man; for only Fictional Characters of their stature had the power to prevent me from feeding the bar wench’es face to the Mama Coyote.

Nick and Nora, however, didn’t stay long. After one martini they and their little dog departed. But in that time they had introduced me to an advertising exec named Durwood Stevens, who was hard at work on the “PDQ Pilsner account” and a deranged looking yet oddly attractive woman named Professor Dagmar, who was wearing a white lab coat, which had PROPERTY of LOS ALAMOS clearly stenciled on the back of her collar.

Poor Durwood. I happen to be a leading authority on 40s and 50s American beer companies. I also collect original advertising from that era. Name it, I’ve got it: Hudepohl, Piels, Ballantine, Rhinelander, Blatz, Hamms–I’ve got posters and various bits of swag from them all–even a life-sized “Brewster the Goebel Rooster.” My scholarship in the field is vast, thus I knew that the PDQ Pilsner Brewing Company had keeled over dead in 1946, its only year of existence. The problem stemmed from the fact that the PDQ slogan, “Hey bartender, make mine PDQ” didn’t get past the censors. Although their initials “PDQ” stood for “Piedmont, Daly and Quince,” the grouping is and was popularly known as a shortcut for “Pretty damn quick.” Couldn’t even infer damn or hell and such on the radio back then.

Yet nobody had a problem with the beer’s mascot “Pie Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon.” In the very few illustrations of Peety extant he is extremely intoxicated–in one he is not only shown drunk, but he’s speeding away in a stolen PDQ truck, blazing past an elementary school, tossing samples to the kids.

All thoughts of monsters left my head. Although the idea of going back in time and adding to my collection has crossed my mind, I never do it because even a Pen Name can’t bring items home from the past and not cause templar displacement. Yet I admired the doodle Durwood was doing on a placemat to such an extent that I carelessly laid my flip phone on the table and asked him to let me have a closer look at the drawing.

“What on Earth is this?” Dr. Dagmar asked, picking up my phone.

“No, no, no, don’t press that,” I said, quickly reaching out, dropping the artwork.

“You mean like this?” she said, with a sinister smile on her face.

I instantly materialized in the present, at my office, minus my phone….”

I smiled at the team. “Your mission is to go back to Other Earth and retrieve the picture I dropped. Use your collective charm to get it from Durwood, when that fails, bribe him with the money.”

“You mean you don’t want us to get the other flip phone time machine from Dr. Dagmar? That might prevent the monster infestation,” said Gwen.

“Right?” Both Renfield and Daisy chimed in with that.

“Under normal circumstances, I’d pull the Mysterious Ways card from the bottom of the deck. But since I need your cooperation, let’s just say that the monsters have a union of their own and let the subject of peremptory monster eradication go–I mean, who amongst us wants to deny a monster his/her/its right to be? Provided that they be at a suitable distance.”

FC’s have a strong common bond, no matter who has created them. I had pulled a different card from the bottom of the deck. Anyway they would have arrived at a Pro Monster stance if given time to choose such; I merely ushered the idea forward.

The FC’s exchanged soulful looks that did not include me, but I knew that a silent unanimous consent had been arrived at when Gwen put the cart in gear and continued the drive to the Spring.