Babayaga

Of course, this was no musical comedy. He remembered his fallen friend Bemm. While he had not known the young man well enough to be able to guess what Bemm felt about their peculiar metamorphosis, he did know how Bemm had responded to the crisis, standing right beside him, wholeheartedly jumping and following him through the streets, seizing hold of every house pet and rodent’s belly with panache and gusto, both of them swinging like magnificent twin Tarzans through this immensely unpredictable and oversized wilderness. Too bad what had happened, it was tragic really, but Vidot had long ago learned one must not grieve too hard for the loss of comrades in action. The battle of life rages constantly on, and while Bemm was gone, Vidot had been fortunate enough to survive. Ah yes, he thought, and now I am once again in control of my own destiny. All I really have to worry about now is time, and time simply happens whether we worry about it or not.

At that moment his journey took a very sudden and dramatic turn. Momentarily lost in his philosophical reflections, Vidot was caught unaware when the plump and delicious little mutt upon which he rode was suddenly plucked up and shoved against the dog walker’s chest, trapping him by pressing him snugly against the fabric of the owner’s wool coat. Vidot squirmed, but the pressure was tight and he could not get loose. He heard a door slam and felt them ascending a staircase. He counted five flights until he heard the keys rattle as they entered an apartment. Vidot was not particularly worried, he was sure that this was only a temporary detour, and when the dog needed to go out again, as small dogs often do, he would once again be free. It was a setback, to be sure, but he did not believe it would impact his race against the clock. What happened next, though, was as vexing and disturbing as it was utterly astounding.

Released from the owner’s tight grasp, Vidot had every intent of immediately leaping free, hoping to find a high perch from which to survey the situation. Instead he found that, bizarrely enough, the dog was being held down beneath a white hood made of what appeared to be old parachute fabric. Stranger still, leaning over the mutt was a fat-faced man with a pair of spectacles made of magnifying lenses, who possessed the largest, greenest eyes Vidot had ever seen. The man’s pupils looked enormous and distorted behind the lenses; Vidot felt as though two immense tropical planets were descending down upon him. The man’s fat fingers busily worked through the fur, in a deft and practiced manner. The sight was so bizarre that Vidot found himself frozen with fear, cowering behind a follicle of dog hair like a frightened soldier crouched behind a cannon-blasted tree. But the all-seeing big-eyed man quickly found him, pouncing upon him with the tweezers and almost crushing him as he lifted Vidot off the prone beagle, dropped him into a test tube, and firmly corked the top. The man handed the test tube to his accomplice, a woman many years past young who, as she stared into the vial to make sure he was alive, appeared vaguely familiar to Vidot. As he tried to place her in his memory, she placed him on a rack on a high shelf surrounded by a long row of other fleas trapped in their own tiny vials.

Vidot looked down and watched as the man and the dog remained wrapped up together in the fabric, clearly a method designed to make sure no flea escaped. The man, hunched over his work, removed the fleas one after another and handed each bottled captive to his assistant, who then lined them up next to Vidot. Soon there were more than twenty test tubes on the rack, each one possessing a single flea. But to what end? What were they up to? Were they some odd variety of home scientists? Microbiologists? Curious collectors? Culinary experimentalists? The detective had no solution. Finally, the jowly man emerged from his labors, freeing the little dog to his food bowl and neatly folding up the parachute tent.

It was when the man took off his magnifying spectacles that Vidot realized with a jolt exactly who his captors were. What a strange and startling coincidence. It was Billy and Dottie, the theatrical English pair who had so transfixed and thrilled him with their carnival flea circus when he was only a boy. Now, thirty years on, here they were again, still busy at the old game. Vidot immediately began hopping about in his test tube, immensely thrilled by the wonder of it all.