35

Jessica’s City College mythology prof, a Toon named Cackleberry, was the spitting image of Humpty Dumpty. “What can I do for you, Mister Valiant?” he asked. The single overhead light in his tiny office made his shell-white noggin glow.

“I’d like some information about a student of yours. Jessica Rabbit.”

Since he didn’t have a neck, he nodded from the groin, rapping his chest against his desk in the process. I thought I might wind up with one professor, scrambled loose, but he must have been made of sterner stuff than your normal hen fruit, since he survived the impact without a hairline crack. “Ah, yes, Jessica Rabbit. A beautiful and charming woman. She’s a model, you know. Does auto and toothpaste commercials. The only real celebrity I’ve ever had in my class.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.” He twisted his body side to side, rapping hard against both arms of his wooden chair. The way he knocked himself around, I hoped his group medical plan covered reassembly—and by something better than all the king’s men. “She’s a bright student. Straight A’s. Especially interested in magic lanterns. I gave her a most comprehensive reading list on the subject.”

“She tell you why she’s so interested in them?”

“She mentioned something about writing a book.” Cackleberry stirred some sugar into a cup of instant coffee, removed the spoon, and idly tapped it against his forehead. I stood back to avoid the splatter, but he came through in one piece again.

“What exactly is a magic lantern?” I asked.

“In simplest terms, it’s any lantern possessing a genie,” answered Cackleberry. “The most common legend concerns a lantern in which a Toon wizard imprisoned his mortal enemy. The wizard cast a spell over this enemy, forcing him to grant three wishes to anyone reciting the proper magic words.”

“Could these wishes be for anything?”

The professor nestled into his chair, the way he would have if a hen had suddenly sat down on top of him. “Within certain limitations. While the genie could make you rich, it could not grant you all the money in the world.”

“What about causing somebody to love you? Could the genie do that?”

“Most assuredly.” The professor put his hands behind his head. His shirt pulled open, and I saw a swatch of color on his chest which could have been either a tattoo or some dye left over from Easter.

“This lantern sounds like a nice trinket to have around.”

“In the beginning, yes, it was. According to legend, it performed splendidly for such wealthy and powerful potentates as Kubla Khan and King Solomon. Unfortunately, the imprisoned genie eventually found a way to circumvent the wizard’s intentions. It began to throw in what we moderns call a ringer, most often in the form of a time limit. Say you wished for wealth. You would get it. But after perhaps a year or two, the spell would dissolve, and your fortune would fritter away. The same with love, power, whatever you’d asked for. The person who made the wish would have his good life come crashing down around him and never know why.”

“Could he remake the wish?”

“Yes, up to his three wish limit.” Cackleberry pushed his spectacles up and perched them on the top of his head, but they kept slipping off the backside so he finally gave up, removed them completely, and laid them on his desk. “According to the legend, most wishees used their three wishes quite rapidly and did not have any left to correct things when the genie’s trickery came to light.”

“What became of this lantern?”

He shrugged. At least I think he shrugged. Since he didn’t have any shoulders, there was really no way to tell for sure. “Legend has it that someone destroyed it.”

“How do you do that?”

“It’s not nearly as simple as you might think.” He crossed his hands over his breast pocket. “First of all, you must be pure of heart. Above the temptations of ordinary mortals. You must call forth the genie, best him in hand-to-hand combat, and drown him in the sea. Not the easiest of tasks.”

“What about the magic words that get the genie to appear? What are they?”

Cackleberry tamped some tobacco into a long pipe specially curved to follow the line of his stomach. “The words have been irretrievably lost. Even the old legends fail to specify them.”

“Would they have been printed somewhere on the lantern itself? Say inscribed on the bottom?”

“Possibly, but highly unlikely. It would have made the lantern too easy to operate. Although there are stories to the effect that this is how it was done. Thousands of years ago unscrupulous merchants painted bogus incantations on common teakettles and passed them off as magic lanterns, an event which gave rise to the Persian custom of inscribing simple platitudes onto the bottoms of such objects.”

“Could anyone who knew the magic words use the lantern?”

“Yes, although naturally the lantern would not work for humans.”

“It wouldn’t? Why not?”

“Because it only worked for bona fide Toons.”

That tracked with the message on the scroll, the part about great tragedy resulting should this fiendish device ever fall into the hands of a Toon. “Did Jessica ever show you a photo of a teakettle and ask you if it was a magic lantern?”

He scratched his head, or maybe his ear, or maybe his neck. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact,” he said.

I handed him the Alice in Wonderland picture I had lifted from the library book. “Is this the teakettle she showed you?”

He put on his glasses and studied the photo. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the one. In fact this is the same photo of it, although hers was still in the book.”

“What did you tell her about this teakettle? Is it a magic lantern?”

He looked at me strangely, and then he laughed. “You’re spoofing with me, aren’t you? Just the way Jessica was. Of course, that teakettle isn’t a magic lantern. How could it be? There is no such thing as a magic lantern. Never has been, and never will be. The magic lantern is a mythological object. Everyone knows that.”

I stopped by to see my friend the scientist, the one I’d asked to analyze the teakettle.

He gave me his report. It was a common teakettle, plain and simple. Made out of ordinary iron. It contained traces of nothing more exotic than orange pekoe tea.

Next I called my friend in the police department. He had completed his check of Rocco and Dominick DeGreasy. It was pretty much as Carol had said. They had grown up dirt-poor in a crummy neighborhood. They had come out of left field in the business world. One day nobody had heard of them, the next day they owned the biggest cartoon syndicate in town. Everybody had chalked if off to a combination of good judgment, luck, and the judicious application of raw muscle. I was about to hang up when my informant threw in the kicker.

“Got to hand it to them,” he said. “They’re doing a great job of crossing the line.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“According to their birth records,” he said, “both Rocco and Dominick DeGreasy are bona fide, humanoid Toons.”