Ben Hansen
“Hugh? No!” Ben answered after a pause which not even the most restrained author could limit themselves to calling “lengthy.” “I said 'who'! As in, 'my friend who could never possibly be mistaken for a private detective, that would be crazy, ha ha ha. Ha.”
He knew as he said it that the lie was feeble, but the accumulated stresses of being forced to dodge decapitated Dutchmen, watch the dissolution of ultimate players' faces and play fecal hopscotch in an extremely small window of time had worn down Ben's mind to the point where it was the best he could come up with. He resigned himself to letting the deformed deception escape his lips and closed his eyes, waiting for the refutation which was inevitably to come.
It didn't.
After what felt a decade of delay, Ben hesitantly opened an eyelid in mingled fear, quickly supplanted by disappointment as the revealed eyeball reported back to the brain that he was the only one in the “room.”
Thanks to the walls obligingly not existing the rest of the hideout took less time than expected to search, but Ben was still unable to locate his counterpart.
Ben scratched his head, unsure of what had gone on or when during his ruminations, and decided the best move would probably be to take a nap. In all the misadventures the pair had taken, Ben figured that Hugh hadn't died yet, and hence he decided to trust that fate would probably keep him so until whatever gruesome karmic force kept bringing them together would next pull out its gruesome karmic finger.
Satisfied by this completely self-servient logic, Ben let his eyes roam to a section of planking by the trunk which he judged to be Musken's bedroom, by the rough outline of a human in the carpet of befoulment. Only after carefully making his way along what he tried to imagine as an elevated arboreal floor covered in sticky brown lava did Ben realise that his height meant that getting horizontal would likely lead to getting covered in a little lava himself. Lacking a way to compress himself to Musken's dimensions, Ben had to curl up within the outline to avoid more cushioning than he would like, but failed to keep from shifting a few remnants over the edge into the green gloom below as he shifted himself. Grimacing, Ben resolved to look up how best to tell a drycleaner “I need everything on my person to be washed twice, dried, burned and identical copies located” in Guyanese as soon as he could extricate himself from the excrement. If he could somehow talk his way into a hotel after that, he told himself, he would make damn sure that any maids assigned to his room would regret it.
“Psst.”
“Yeah, they definitely will be,” Ben muttered, trying to tell his body not to roll over in the night.
“What?”
“What?”
“That's what I – never mind. Up here!”
Ben opened his eyes once again to see, almost directly above him, the welcome figure of Hugh, hugging the tree's main trunk like a severely mislocated koala.
“Hugh!” he cried, sitting up with such relief that yet more of the surrounding refuse was knocked awry. “Where did everyone go?”
“You sat there trying to think about how to answer Muskens so long that we... kind of just got on with things,” Hugh answered. “Well, Muskens got on dragging me into the elevator, while I got on with trying to wheelbarrow walk backwards without putting my hands in anything.”
“Didn't you try to resist?”
“I would have loved to, but when you're trying to avoid touching the majority of the branches up here... well, you can imagine. It worked out in my favour though.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, when we got to ground level I started climbing up the tree as fast as possible. He tried to follow me, but I was the only one whose hands weren't covered in shit. Would you mind, by the way...?”
“Oh, sure.” Ben gingerly made his way to the trunk and assisted Hugh to the branch. Hugh's sensations of frustration and horror were respectively piqued by the discovery that spending so long clinging to the tree had left him unable to lower his arms and the discovery that the marks left about his torso by Ben's assistance had left him unwilling to.
As one, they turned to face the elevator platform, where the rope was resolutely making its way towards the canopy with all the grim potential that the threat of a custard powder manufacturer could bring. As one, they made their way toward more even ground. As they moved Hugh cast about for something he could throw but found himself surrounded by only puerile disappointments, while Ben prepared to engage his preferred self defence technique of cringing and begging to be allowed to depart to keep Little Ben from becoming an orphan.
Despite their preparations, however, they were left utterly unprepared to deal with the contents of the elevator. As it ground to a halt and the doors opened, our her- our champ- our protagonists were shocked to see it disgorge a limp Muskens carried fireman-style by none other than Charles Isidro Abendalak, who'd clearly adopted the pose to better carry a mass of mechanical menace that Ben and Hugh's expert eyes could precisely identify as “gun.” The gun appeared to to be stippled with an odd brown polkadot pattern, as did the rest of Abendalak's attire.
“Are you the ones tossing all the turds down this tree?” Abendalak asked, dispensing with the pleasantries in favour of what he clearly considered more pressing concerns.
“No!” Ben replied, his responses sped up somewhat thanks to being unburdened by the creative weight of assembling an untruth. “Um. Maybe. They're not ours.”
“I fail to see how that improves matters,” Abendalak replied. Keeping his gun, attention and Abendalak pointed towards the duo, the detective strode towards them with a murder glinting in his eyes.
That glint may be what saved Ben and Hugh, as it kept their would-be assaulter from looking down. As the detectives cowered before the other detective's advancing glower, one of the many obstacles Muskens had left dotted about the tree found itself beneath both Abendalak's notice and his boot. It chose to make the ultimate squishy sacrifice, slipping out off the edge of the bough and taking the foot with it. Ben and Hugh had a moment to be fascinated by Abendalak's capacity to do the splits, albeit unintended, as the foot was followed off the edge by Abendalak's thigh, torso and eventually hat, accompanied immediately by all the body parts associated with Muskens and a handful of things that had once been included within them.
“Oh,” was all Hugh could think to say, a sentiment with which Ben agreed heartily.
“I, uh, guess we should go down and see what happened to them?” Ben suggested a few minutes later, after their hearts had given up experimenting with speedcore stylings and returned to their lo-fi standard.
“Not a bad idea,” Hugh mused. “Maybe we can find something in their pockets.”
“Do you really think they'd be carrying something we can use to get any sort of payment for this case?” Ben asked. “I'm not sure we'll find much to bring Muskens back to his glasshouse at this point.”
“No idea,” was Hugh's determined reply, “but I'm going to make damn sure we've left no pockets of their wallets untouched just in case.”
“Good luck,” came a voice from below. “I already checked Mosgrove's and all he had was an IOU made out to a Peter Ogtrop.”
The pair looked at each other in shock.
“You look,” Ben said. “You know I'm scared of heights.”
“You always pull this when it's your turn,” Hugh said pettishly.
“Yes, that's basically how being afraid of heights works in these situations.”
“I could be afraid of heights too, you know.”
“Could you look though? Just this once?”
“After the last thirty times?”
“Ahh, so you're an old hand at it!”
A few minutes of arguing and a handful of paper-scissors-rock contests later, Hugh resigned himself to looking over the edge, secured to the platform by Ben holding his belt with one hand. Ben's other covered his eyes.
He dimly made out the figure of Abendalak dangling over the void beneath the branch, holding onto a small offshoot with one hand. In his other, he held the suspended Muskens by the back of the collar. Muskens didn't appear to be in the best position from an asphyxiation standpoint, though he wasn't complaining. The gun, unseen in either hand, could be distantly heard bouncing from branch to branch below in staccato opposition to that one adage about children.
“Oh, hi there!” Hugh said, in lieu of a more useful comment.
“Hello,” Abendalak called up. “Is there any chance we could trouble you for a hand? No pressure, but I am holding your meal ticket right now.”
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