Barney MacDonald Meets the Men in Pink

Barney MacDonald got out of the car and slammed the door in disgust.  It had taken him two hours longer than it should have to find this place.  The funeral had been last week, and nobody else had known about this house, not even his parents.  Why his grandparents had left it to him, he had no clue.  He was more interested in why his father, aunts, and uncles all were kept in the dark about it!

            Why had it taken so long?  His GPS kept suggesting roads that it turned out his car couldn’t safely navigate.  Or that didn’t actually go where it thought they did.  On top of that, he had a thirty-year-old photo, the wrong street name, and two different house numbers.  Not to mention it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  Barney couldn’t figure out how the lawyers could be so lazy.

            There was another reason that he now faced: there hadn’t been a driveway, mailbox, or even a sign.  So he was parked on the shoulder of the road, hoping the fog that was developing wouldn’t cause an accident.  He looked through the trees at the old house, double checked with the photo in his hand, and decided he really did have the right place.

            It took a few minutes for Barney to navigate the front yard; there was no path and he was a city-boy.  The grass was waist high.  At least it was where there was still grass.  Most of the yard was taken over by trees and shrubs, not to mention thorn bushes.

            He paused at the bottom of the front steps.  They didn’t look safe.  He closed his eyes for a second, took a deep breath, and started up.  The boards creaked and bent alarmingly, but he didn’t go through.  Barney fumbled with the key ring until he found the one tagged ‘front door’.  For a second he thought he had the wrong key because it didn’t go all the way in, but with an unwise application of extra force it slid the rest of the way.  The lock was a little stiff, but he got it to turn without snapping the key.

            The door needed quite the shove to get it open.  When it finally gave way, he fell to his knees inside.  As he lurched back to his feet, he thought he heard something moving in the yard behind him, so he looked.  A petite girl with cherry red hair cut in a bob was sitting cross legged on the back of a buck.  She looked straight at him, and he could have sworn he heard her say “shit.”

            Something grabbed his ankles and yanked him off his feet.  Barney hit the floor hard, and his breath was knocked out.  He was dragged backwards into the dark house with alarming speed.  He took a crack to the head and blacked out.

            When he was next aware, everything was dark.  Gradually his eyes adjusted, or maybe the moon came out from behind a cloud.  He was wrapped from his toes to his neck in some sort of sticky rope.  Multi-coloured rope, to be exact.  And the thing that was moving?  It was a giant spider on the ceiling.  No, it was on the floor.  Barney was hanging upside down.

            The spider had an eight-eyed human head with furry fangs hanging from his mouth.  Clown makeup covered the face, and a colourful wig seemed to be grafted to the top of its head.  All eight legs ended in human hands and protruded from a clown costume.

            Barney didn’t know whether to scream or laugh.

            The blood rushing to Barney’s head was starting to hurt when there was a lot of noise and he was blinded by bright lights.  As his vision cleared, Barney could see half a dozen old men in pink dresses firing on the dazed clown-spider.  He had fallen to the floor and now felt his bonds being cut.  It was the red-haired girl.

            Barney didn’t even say thank-you: he just bolted.

            It was dark outside and he was now in the back yard.  He was having trouble thinking clearly, though, and just ran away from the house.  His limbs weren’t working right and it was more of a stumble than a run; he tripped over something and caught himself on a tree.  Barney gave up on flight for the moment and sat down.

            He nearly jumped out of his skin when he was tapped on the shoulder.

            “Gordy is sorry for tripping the Master,” said a bearded toddler.

            Barney rubbed his eyes.  The thing was still there.  How much weirder could this night get?

            “Gordy saw Master go into the house; Gordy was hiding from the spider-man what took his kin.  Is Master okay?”

            “You’re Gordy?”  He got a nod.  “Why do you call me master?  My name is Barney.”

            “Gordy calls you Master because Master is owning the house Gordy is sworn to.”

            “So I inherited you, too?”  Another nod.  “What are you?  Not human, I hope.  Dwarf, gnome, Halfling … Leprechaun?”

            “We is biggest of the little people.  Not dwarf.  What is Halfling?”

            “Never mind….”

            “Uh, hi there.”  Barney looked up from Gordy the not-dwarf.  The redhead was coming toward him.

            “Hi?  Mind telling me who you are?  What is going on here?”

            She stopped a few feet away and sat down facing him.  She took a deep breath before she started talking.  “My name is Millicent Brody, an independent contractor who often works with the Men in Pink.  They were once part of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but their work became more and more secret until they started operating completely independently.  Their purpose is to eliminate monsters such as that poor clown.”

            “Poor clown?  That was a man-spider thing that was probably planning on eating me!”

            “Two months ago he was just a middle-aged man who earned a bit of extra money making kids laugh at parties.  He was performing at a girl’s birthday party when he decided to do a simple trick he often did with pets.  But this girl’s pet was a tarantula, and it died during the act.  She wished he knew what it felt like to be a spider, and poof!  He became what you saw in there.  If it had only been his appearance that had changed, he would have been taken somewhere safe to live.  But no, he developed a taste for children.  The Men in Pink underestimated him and he got away from us three times.  Two days ago he attacked an elementary school, and I was sent to track him down.”

            “So why do they wear pink dresses?”

            Millicent choked back a laugh, a smirk on her face.  “Budget cuts,” she said.  “They should be done cleaning up now.  Normally you’d be in a cage on your way to headquarters to be interrogated and your memory modified, but today they’re letting me deal with you.”

            “Nice of them, I suppose.”

            “You have no idea.  Now, what were you even doing here?”

            “My grandparents died in an accident two weeks ago.  I inherited a house my father had never heard of, and neither had his brothers or sisters.  Today was the first day I could get out here to check it out.”

            “Poor thing.  Would you like me to stay while you check it out?  I’m guessing you’ve never encountered gnomes before either.”

            “Yeah, I think I would like that, actually.”

            Together he and Millicent went inside, Gordy following behind happy that he had a Master again.