If Streets Could Speak

by Aleksis Bertoni

A southern breeze carries the haze from the industrial district downtown. It flows into my mouth, mingles with the taste of my cigarette, giving it a sulfurous tang that easily overpowers the Menthol’s mint. I cough, my eyes watering, and the world suddenly plunges into a cloudy gray punctuated only by streaks of light emanating from the hills on the edge of town. I got an offer a few months back to transfer to their precinct. Apparently one of their brass was retirement age and they were looking for someone to replace him. It would’ve meant a promotion, more money, easy work, maybe even early retirement. Hell, maybe I could even get a house up there, completely free from the grit and haze of the inner city.

I turned them down. Truth is, I love this job. There’s a reason nobody retires in this precinct, and it ain’t cause of getting killed before they get the chance. Everything has a tangible feeling here; the air has texture, the streets have so many potholes that most can drive by feel alone, and the buildings take on the shady character of their residents. Bob Crumb, Sam the Eagle, the Captain, all of them have been offered desk jobs, promotion, retirement, but they still work the beat. Heroes, the lot of them. The sulfur crept between my lips again, and I fell into a coughing fit.

“You all right, partner?” asked a slightly nasal voice from behind me.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I sputtered. As I straightened up, I spotted a few droplets of blood on the sidewalk. I covered them up with my shoe. “Where to tonight, Kermit?”

“Report of a body in the alley behind the Swede’s place. We’re closest.”

“Human or felt?” I asked, dropping my cigarette into the gutter.

“A little of both, according to the chick who phoned it in.”

I cracked a smile. That’s what I loved about my beat. The crooks and sickos of Sesame Street were creative.

***

When we pulled up, the Swede was already on the corner waiting for us. His restaurant was as upscale as things got here in the slums, although that didn’t mean much, considering you could count the number of eateries without a drive-thru on one hand. He looked anxious.

“Seeyr bork deer izz der bordy,” he said, gesturing toward the alley.

“Ok, great,” Kermit replied. “Now you made sure not to touch anything, right?” I stared in amazement. How he managed to make any sense of that gibberish was a mystery to me.

“Noo der bordy izz prishteen,” he answered, giving an exaggerated kiss to his gathered fingers to accentuate his point.

“Perfect. Can you show us how you found it?” The Swede nodded several times nervously and walked ahead of us into the alley. Once he was out of earshot, I looked down at my partner questioningly. He met my gaze and got my meaning. “I spent a summer backpacking through Europe. They all sound like that there.”

I paused to consider what a conversation between two Swedes would sound like, and then suddenly felt very grateful to be born in the US. “Let’s go check out the stiff.”

The refuse in the alley was unmistakably that of a restaurant: liquefied produce, spoiled meat, and puddles of bleach gathered in the corners and spilled into our path. “So what kind of food do you serve here?” I asked the chef, trying to calm his nerves with some light conversation.

“Pork!” he replied enthusiastically. I waited for him to elaborate, but he continued to bounce along obliviously. “Other than that, do you have any specialties?” I prompted him.

“Stork!” he responded cheerfully.

“Oh, they’re kind of lean, huh? Are you supposed to eat them with your fingers, or…?”

“Fork!” he said, and I caught sight of an impish smile from beneath his bushy mustache. It disappeared as soon as we rounded the corner. It was hard to follow his gaze when his eyes were almost completely covered by his precariously situated eyebrows, but I didn’t really need the help. The corpse was positioned like a holy figure, draped in a flowing robe and seated Buddha-style amidst a pile of skinned felts and human organs. The chest cavity had been delicately cut open, the skin peeled back and its contents replaced with those of a felt. Or several felts, as it seemed. Its face (her face, as I could now see) had several dark lines running across it, fresh scars that looked like the work of an amateur plastic surgeon. Despite the hackjob done on her face and body, I could tell that she was once quite beautiful.

The Swede doubled over and poured his stuffing out onto the pavement.

“Get him out of here before he contaminates anything else!” Shouted Kermit, “And get Honeydew and Beaker!”

***

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker were the backbone of the department’s forensics team, for all their flaws. Honeydew was rather absent-minded, but was revered for his brilliant intuition. And Beaker, well…

"MEEPmeepmeepMeeepmeepmeepMEEP!" Kermit and I shared a glance before I tactfully asked: “Bunsen! Do you think you could explain that without all the, uh, scientific terms?”

“Why, of course! Going over the crime scene, we weren’t able to find any human skin cells on any of the feltoids or our Jane Doe, but we did find a lot of evidence suggesting feltoid involvement.”

At this, Kermit jumped in. “Like what? Felt fibers? Stuffing? You have to take into account the Swede’s contamination of the scene.”

“MeepmeepMEEPmeepmeepmeeeeepmeepmeep.”

Kermit and I looked at Bunsen expectantly. “I wouldn’t have put it so bluntly, Beaker. Anyway, we did the Test, and unless the Swede pulled the organs out himself, it seems there was another feltoid at the scene.” The Test was something only felts could do. Somehow they could sense each other’s recent history with objects and locations. It wasn’t specific—it could only confirm the presence of a felt, not their identity—but it was definitive. Upon hearing the results, Kermit seemed to deflate a little.

“MEEPMEEPmeepMeepmeepmeepmeep.”

We waited. Eventually, Bunsen bridged the silence. “Well, you heard him! Get on the lookout for someone who’s not afraid to get dirty. He may be a witness, or even the culprit!”

Kermit smiled. “I may know just the guy. Get your boots, kid.”

***

The city dump was infested with ferals. Most felts had a weak sense of smell and were immune to most of the diseases crawling through all this filth, so for those who were down on their luck or sick of regular society, the dump was, well, not quite a sanctuary. But it was an option. The trek through the sludge and offal was time-consuming for both of us. I was preoccupied with not getting tetanus. As for Kermit, he was painfully aware of how easily felt stains.

“You know,” Kermit spoke slowly, the rhythm of his speech matching the difficulty of each step. “There’s a rumor going around that Bunsen ain’t all he’s cracked up to be.”

“Whaddya mean? He’s cracked hundreds of cases! He’d probably have solved more if he didn’t waste all his time translating for that idiot assistant.”

“That’s-just-it,” he said with difficulty as he pulled himself over a washing machine that was home to a family of rats. “Oh, hi Rizzo. Not now, on duty.”

I stood still for a moment until I caught on to what he was saying. “Bullshit.”

“I checked out Honeydew’s old performance reviews. They were all mediocre until a few months after Beaker was hired, when he suddenly became Sherlock fucking Holmes.”

“Well, of course his performance reviews weren’t great initially—he was a rookie. Everyone gets better eventually.”

Kermit grinned back at me. “You didn’t, haha. But seriously, here’s the thing. Beaker was originally hired as a janitor. He cleaned floors and fed Honeydew home runs for years, until Bunsen got enough sway in the lab to get him hired as an assistant.”

“That’s Good Will Hunting.”

“What?” his voice echoed out from inside a concrete tunnel.

“Good Will Hunting. The one with Matt Damon and Big Bird? You just took that plot and switched the details around.”

“Never heard of it. Listen, stop wasting time and climb down here. We gotta see Oscar.”

***

Oscar, aka Oscar the Grouch, was the unofficial leader of the dump’s inhabitants. “He may seem like an asshole,” Kermit warned me, “but he looks out for his people and he’s got an army of dumpster divers and panhandlers that trust him with their lives. If any of them saw what happened, Oscar knows about it.”

The tunnel opened up through a jagged hole into a cavern the size of a trailer. The smell hinted at the cave’s previous occupation—the place had the combination of earthy and fetid smells that was unique to septic tanks. I rolled up my cuffs.

“Kermit, it’s been a long time! Who’s the meatbag?” inquired a furry green felt perched atop a throne of filth.

“He’s my partner. Look, we need to know if any of your people—”

Oscar ignored the question. “Oh, really? What happened to your old partner, the skinny guy?” I shot Kermit a worried glance. He didn’t acknowledge it.

“A human and two felts were brutally murdered out by the Swede’s place, and the Test placed a felt dumpster diving there around the same time. We need to know if they saw—”

Oscar cut in again. “I was just yanking your chain earlier. I already know how Skinny died. Does the new one know about it?” When Kermit didn’t reply, Oscar addressed me directly. “You ever heard of a Snuffleupagus? They’re not so bad, at first. They bond to you when they’re real young, act like you’re their mother, right? But they grow big, fast, and they get fiercely jealous of anyone who even gets near you, to the point where they’re willing to kill. They’re some of the biggest Muppets,” at this word, Kermit winced. “bigger even than Big Bird, so they’re strong as a fuckin’ bull and nearly impossible to kill the conventional ways. Did I mention the fact that they’re invisible to you meatbags? Anyway, a decade back one of these things bonded to your partner and since then, it’s killed off his family, his partners, even that fat pig of a girlfriend.”

“Don’t you dare talk about Miss Piggy like that.” Kermit said. The words were quiet, but the power behind them was tangible. His revolver was pointed at Oscar’s stomach.

Oscar cracked a smile. “You know where you’re standing? In this chamber is all the methane a healthy family can produce in 50 years worth of shits! You’d blow me, you, your partner, and Fozzie Bear (“Wocka wocka wocka,” echoed from somewhere deep in the cavern) to hell over some hurt feelings?” His smile fell flat. “You’re too easy, frog.”

Kermit lowered the gun and spoke slowly. “Did your people see anything behind the Swede’s place?”

Oscar raised an eyebrow, opened his mouth, then closed it again. His bravado had evaporated. He growled out: “Fozzie, get in here.”

A bear-shaped felt popped out from a side passage. “Hey everybody! You know the worst part about living in a septic tank with Oscar? It doesn’t cover up his smell!”

Kermit and I just stared blankly. “Wocka wocka wocka?” the bear continued, timidly. “Tell them what you told me,” ordered Oscar. Fozzie turned to us, sighed, and said “Your dick’s too small to satisfy me.”

“About the murders you saw, idiot!” Oscar shouted.

“Okay, okay, I’m getting to it!” The bear turned to us once again. “What I saw was no murder. It was butchery, and it was Big Bird that did it. He butchered the works of Shakespeare with his performance in—” He was interrupted by a nickel-sized hole in his stomach. Smoke danced off the end of Kermit’s revolver.

“You bastard! You could have killed us!” Oscar roared.

“Methane’s lighter than air. If there was any in here, it would have floated out long ago.” Kermit replied calmly. “Now, you wanted to tell us something, Fozzie?”

Fozzie was writhing on the floor, stuffing spilling out of the hole in his chest. “I saw a human dumping bodies!” he screamed. “The killer was human!”

Kermit and I exchanged looks. “That’s not possible. The Test confirmed that a felt handled the bodies.”

Fozzie was gasping. “She—was a human. Weird—looking, maybe, but human.”

I cut in. “Weird-looking how?”

“The face—the way she moved. Wasn’t—right.”

“Are you sure this was behind the Swede’s place?” Kermit pulled out a photo of the human victim. “This was the human, right?”

“It was both of them.” The pile of stuffing surrounding Fozzie was growing larger. He tried to scoop it back in, but it just poured out of the exit wound in his back.

“There were two human victims? Like twins?” I asked. This was gonna make the victims a lot easier to identify.

“No… the one who dumped the bodies and the dead chick both looked like—that.”

“One twin killing another.” Even better. We’d have the killer’s name by morning.

“You’re not—listening—to me!” Fozzie wheezed, his anger momentarily distracting himself from the wound. “The girl moved—like a human, the killer didn’t!”

“Ok, got it,” I replied. “Oscar, can you patch him up?”

“Not sure it’s worth it.”

“I’ll shoot you if you don’t.”

“Not sure it’s worth it.”

“Fine, don’t save him.” Kermit reasoned. “You can live by yourself in this shithole. Let’s go, partner.” We ran back up the pipe and left Fozzie to an uncertain fate.

***

“That stuff about the Snuffleupagus wasn’t true, was it?” I asked, staring out the passenger side window and trying to sound nonchalant.

“Which part?” He asked from atop the pile of dictionaries in the driver’s seat.

“How about the invisibility thing? That’s not possible, right?” I shifted in my seat. For some reason, I just couldn’t get comfortable.

“Oh, it’s possible. The way we figure it, they’re some kind of Ur-felt. That’s why we can see them, it’s like the Test. And the reason you can’t… maybe it’s because they don’t make sense to you. Other felts come in a form you can recognize—I look like a frog, other felts look kinda like humans or birds or whatever, because the felts that made us patterned us on things in your world. But Snuffleupagus, they don’t look like anything in this world. Which is why we think they’re from before. Which is why, maybe, you can’t imagine them.”

I paused. “What do they look like?”

Kermit shot me a sardonic look. “What do you care? You can’t see them.”

“Just describe them as you see them. I just want to know what’s coming.”

“It’s not…” He stopped himself. He drove three blocks before he started again. “They all look different. Some of them are really weird. Mine is shaped like a human, but it has these long fangs, purplish skin, sharp claws, and has bat wings coming out of his back.”

“So, it’s a bit like a vampire?” I asked.

“Sort of. But scarier.”

“Like the Count over at H & R Block!”

“No no no.”

“The Count sings while he does my taxes. Does your Snuffleupagus do that too?”

I turned away from Kermit stern gaze and saw unfamiliar street signs. I suddenly realized that were no longer on our way to the precinct. “Hey, where are we going? We’ve got a good lead on the victim and the killer. We should be heading back to base.”

“Something about what Fozzie said doesn’t sit right with me. We’re gonna visit some old hands who might be able to shed some light.” He says without lifting his eyes from the road. I think he is angry with me.

“Fuck Fozzie! You left him to die back there with Oscar, and now you’re acting like his word is gospel?”

“Oscar wasn’t gonna let him die. I can see the way looks at him. Besides, I’m the driver. You don’t like it, you can walk.”

“Fine,” I slumped back into my chair, defeated. “But you can at least tell me who the hell these ‘old hands’ are.”

“Let me start by saying that if you thought Fozzie was bad…”

“Stop the car. I’m getting out.”

“Shut up and listen. Their names are Statler and Waldorf.”

The Statler and Waldorf? I thought. The only beat cops ever forced into retirement by the precinct?

“The Statler and Waldorf?” I said. “The only beat cops ever forced into retirement by the precinct?”

“Those are the ones. They were forced out for more than just political reasons. From what I hear, their last case put them in deep shit with the Alphas.”

“Who?”

“They explain things better than I do. They can teach you a lot, if you can put up with their heckling.”

***

Kermit pulled up in front of an antiquated tavern. The sign above the door was long past intelligible, graffiti coated the brick, and several of the windows had been boarded up. However, it seemed that their customers weren’t the type to fret over such details, as there was barely room to stand on the inside. The only conspicuous exception was the area around a booth occupied by two ancient felts. They were watching some mixed martial arts competition on a flat screen mounted on the adjacent wall and commenting loudly about it. I looked around. All the other TVs were CRTs, and none of them were placed inside the booths. These guys got the royal treatment.

“That contestant is fighting with two different styles!”

“That’s odd. He should learn how to fight with one first!”

“DOHOHOHOHOHO!”

I gave Kermit a pained expression. He just shrugged.

“That one’s fighting style goes back a long ways.”

“Well, it didn’t go back far enough. I could still see it!”

“DOHOHOHOHOHO!”

Christ, they were worse than Fozzie. I realized they were just gonna keep going if I didn’t jump in. “Excuse me, fellas—” They turned around briefly. “You’re excused. Just promise us you’ll do that sort of thing outdoors from now on!”

“DOHOHOHOHOHO!”

Sensing my annoyance, Kermit took the lead. “Cut it out, guys. Something’s up.”

“Who’s your new partner? He seems kind of wet behind the ears.”

“Yeah, Kermit. He looks almost as green as you!”

“DOHOHOHOHOHO!”

“They may look green, but these fruits sure do smell ripe!”

“DOHOHOHOHOHO!”

“We think we’ve found a rogue Alpha,” said Kermit. The old felts fell silent. Statler, with his thick mustache, spoke slowly. “Clever human killers are often misidentified as Alphas. They don’t leave DNA or fingerprints…lazy cops say ‘Alpha’, and suddenly nobody wants to touch it. The problem goes away. Are you sure that’s not the case here?”

Kermit did the best deadpan stare his comical face could manage. “I am not a lazy cop, Statler. The Test confirmed a felt, and we got an eyewitness that says the only person doing the gutting was a weird looking human that didn’t move right. Now, are you gonna help us out?”

“Why should we get involved?” Waldorf demanded. “The last time we had a run-in with a rogue, the Alphas almost had us black-bagged. Hell, look at us! Stuck in this fucking dive for the rest of our days because the fuckin’ council of bogeymen won’t let us show our faces anywhere else! What’ll they do to us if they find out we’re helping you out on this?”

My head was spinning. I was way out of my depth here. “Maybe they’ll let you off the hook,” Kermit replied. “You know how they feel about embarrassments. If we kill the rogue instead of booking it, everyone’s happy. No more murders, no more rogue bringing attention to the Alphas.” I did a double take. Kermit was a little unorthodox sometimes, but the bad guys always got put in a cell, not a grave.

“What the fuck is an Alpha?” I asked, perhaps a little louder than was necessary. All three pairs of those oversized eyes looked around frantically before turning back and shooting daggers at me. Kermit broke the tension: “Kid, what do you know about felt castes?”

“I didn’t know there were any.”

“That’s good,” replied Waldorf, stroking his massive chin thoughtfully. “We like to keep these things private. Now, don’t go sharin’ this with your meatbag friends, but there are four kinds of felts.” My eyes widened. Three races of felts hidden from the public? Maybe the bigots were right not to trust ‘em…

Statler picked up where his partner left off. “Lifespan and intelligence vary by which caste you’re in. The lowest, Deltas, are basically socks with eyes sewn on. Dumb as rocks. They only live for a couple months. Gammas are a step above that. Basically stuffed clothes or furniture with a face and hair attached. You can train ‘em to do simple tasks and their live about as long as a small dog. For some reason, they’re better at Testing than us.”

“Us?” I prompted.

Kermit took this one. “Betas. Pretty much all the felts you see in your everyday life.”

Waldorf elaborated: “Our lifespan is comparable to that of humans, maybe a little longer because we don’t get killed as easily, and we’re comparably intelligent, too. With some differences.”

I raised an eyebrow.

Kermit obliged me once again. “We’re not so great at math,” he said with an uncomfortable smile.

“But the Count does my taxes!” I argued, “And Bunsen and Beaker are fucking scientists!”

“Honestly, the Count is one of our finest mathematical minds, and he’s still only on the level of a human accountant,” Kermit explained. “Plus, Bunsen and Beaker got to where they are only because felts have much stronger intuitions than you humans.”

“So that’s why you always make me figure out the bill? And why felts wanted separate schools?” I asked.

“Don’t be an asshole about this.” Waldorf commanded. “It’s a sore spot for us.”

“Fine, fine,” I relented. “But why keep the other castes a secret? I don’t think humans would give a damn about retarded socks or talking sofas.”

Kermit donned that awkward smile again. “We’re a little embarrassed by them. Plus, if you knew about them, you might guess the existence of the Alphas.”

The events of the last day were starting to make some sense. “No way.”

“Alphas are felts that are designed to look like human women, or near enough,” stated Statler. “They’re smart as hell and basically ageless. They’re secretive, though, and like to stay out of human affairs.”

“Why do they care? So what if we know about them?”

“What do you think might happen if people found out about a race of beautiful women that never aged?” Waldorf asked. “Slavery. Any Alpha that was discovered by humans became the pet of one great family or another until she either offed herself or managed to escape.”

“Usually by killing the lot of ‘em.” Statler added. “Listen, boy, most of these escaped Alphas join the Quorum, which as far as we can tell, is solely concerned with keeping their own existence hidden. However, sometimes their previous occupations leave them with a little too much baggage and they get kinda…off kilter.”

This was a lot to digest. So many questions… “Why do they only look like human women?”

“Because humans commissioned them. Felts make their own, so one day a meatbag figured that for the right price, maybe they could make humans, too,” answered Waldorf.

“That’s only a theory,” interjected Kermit, “Most of what they’ve told you is conjecture based on their little run-in with the Quorum.” I tilted my head inquisitively.

“The case that ended our careers.” Waldorf’s bitterness poisoned his speech. Statler just stared at the bottom of his mug. “Supposed to be a missing persons. We tracked the girl to an ice factory at the north end of the industrial district, but by the time we got there, it was already tearing itself apart. Let me tell you, you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen an Alpha’s guts—they flow like water, but they ain’t wet. They just kept spilling out, unraveling from around the bones until she looks like a deflated balloon or something. Even after that, she kept on trying to claw at her wounds until we put her down ourselves. We went back to her parents’ place to try to get some answers, but the place looked like it had been empty for years. Before we knew it, the body disappeared, anyone who didn’t keep quiet was black-bagged, and we were kicked out on our asses. And you guys are worse off than us—you’ve got a killer! You two have got to be real careful about who you trust with this one. Even if you do manage to take it down, you’ve lost anyway if word gets out about it.”

“I appreciate the advice, fellas, but we got more pressing concerns,” countered Kermit. “You guys got any idea how we can find our rogue?”

“Break a mirror?”

“Walk under a ladder?”

“Piss off a gypsy?”

Kermit stood up. “Thanks a lot. Let’s go, partner.” I gave a brief nod to Statler & Waldorf and scrambled to my feet, but Kermit was gone when I turned around. The motor was already running by the time I stepped into the cool night air.

“What’s the hurry?” I asked as opened the door of the brown Studebaker. We couldn’t have been gone for more than thirty minutes, but the leather inside had already reached equilibrium with the icy air, and it eagerly sucked the heat from my ass as soon as I sat down. “We don’t have a single lead. Let’s just go back to the station, tell everyone what we know, and wait this out.”

“Wait for what?” he asked impatiently. “Another triple homicide? Listen, kid, as soon as anyone at the station catches wind that we’re onto an Alpha, this case is over. The Quorum will want to conduct their own investigation, and the department will step off because they’re so deep in their pocket that they can’t tell when it’s noon or midnight. Now, maybe the Quorum will find the killer and bring her to justice, or a close facsimile. But in the time it will take for that to happen, more people are going to die. Right now, we’re closer to the truth than anyone else, and we gotta follow this story to the end. You with me?”

The air in the car, normally hazy with cigarette smoke and felt particles, became perfectly clear as I stared into Kermit’s eyes. “All right. Where’re we headed, boss?”

“Let’s pay a visit to Beaker.”

“But you said we couldn’t go back to the station! You said we couldn’t tell anybody!”

“Check your watch, kid—it’s one o’ clock. We’re making a house call. Besides, who’s he gonna tell?”

***

Beaker lived in a basement apartment on the border of the municipal and residential districts. Not a bad location, but you wouldn’t know it based on the state of the building. Beaker brought some of his work home, as made apparent by the chemical spills and biomedical waste containers strewn around the garbage cans. We buzzed the intercom a few times before we got an answer.

“MeepmeepMeep?” he sounded tired. I think.

Kermit didn’t bother with pleasantries. “It’s us. We need to know what you found at the crime scene.”

“MeepmeepmeepMeepmeepMEEPMEEPMEEEPMEEPMEEP?”

I hazarded a guess. “We can’t afford to bring this into the precinct. We need to take care of this one off the record.” There was silence on the other end of the line. I was inclined to give him all the time he needed, but Kermit doesn’t have my patience.

“If you don’t help us now, either we stonewall you on our info or this case gets taken out of all of our hands by the brass. If you want to know what’s really going on, this is your one chance. So, are you in?” More silence.

“Affirmative or negative, Beaker,” Kermit urged.

“…Meepmeepmeepmeep.”

Kermit brightened up. “Great! Buzz us in and we’ll give you the scoop.”

I waited until he let go of the intercom before I spoke. “How did you know?”

He smirked. “I counted the syllables.”

Two cigarettes later, Beaker was as deep in the weird shit as we were.

“So that’s what we know,” I said, taking one last drag before I threw out my third. “Now what did you guys find out at the crime scene? And, uh, write it down as you say it.”

He pulled a pen out of a mug on his counter and a shopping list from beneath a fridge magnet before taking a seat at the table and flipping over the scrap of paper. Kermit and I took positions leaning over opposite shoulders.

“MeepMeepMeeeepmeepmeepmeepmeepmeepMeepMEEPMeepMeepmeepmeep.” He said, concentrating on the paper in front of him. When he moved his hand to start a new line, I caught sight of the words

Ligature marks on wrists & ankles

I knew what that meant. “So she was held in captivity before she was killed.”

“Meep,” he confirmed, not lifting his eyes from the paper. “Meepmeep meepmeepMeepMEEPMeepmeepmeepMeep.” Under the previous line, he wrote:

Facial surgery extremely recent—still bruising under skin and very visible scars

Kermit and I shared one of our looks. “Beaker,” Kermit started, “do you think that the surgery occurred during the girl’s period of captivity?” I added hastily: “Affirmative or negative.”

“Meepmeepmeepmeep.”

“What about the felts?” I asked. “Do they have any marks indicating captivity or similar mutilation.”

“MeepmeepMEEPMEEPmeepmeepMeepmeepmeeepMEEEPMeepmeep.”

I waited until he had finished writing.

Unlike human victim, the felts had their original clothes, even wallets. Checked with Swede’s guestbook—they ate there that night.

Kermit cleared his throat. “So, the girl was prepared for the murder for weeks, but the felts were crimes of opportunity. I think this crime is all about how the bodies were arranged.”

I balked. “What, that gruesome sculpture? It’s sick, sure, but we get stuff like that all the time. It’s just crooks showin’ off, trying to make the front page.”

“I don’t think so,” Kermit replied. “For normal criminals, that’s what it’s about. But this Alpha is in hiding. She won’t risk any extra attention with theatrics like those unless it’s something important to her. Plus, I think what Fozzie said about the killer looking like the victim is significant.”

Kermit’s eye glinted. I took my cue. “So, what’s the theory?”

“I think that our Alpha was trying to copy herself. Only she didn’t know how, so she took the best guess she could: she got a girl that looked like her, cut her face until she looked like her even more, and then hollowed her out and put felt guts inside. Not a bad approximation of an Alpha, but apparently it didn’t work.”

“No kidding” I muttered.

“My guess is she’s gonna just find another look-alike and try again. And if that don’t work, she’ll find another and try again.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why is she trying to copy herself?”

Kermit shrugged. “You heard Statler and Waldorf. She’s probably on the run from some rich family or another. With a body double, she could fake her death and be free of them forever.”

I pondered this. “Alright, let’s get on the horn to missing persons. We’ll tell them that our victim’s had plastic surgery since she was kidnapped a few weeks ago. We check out any hits and then see if any of them lived near the Swede’s place. Our killer is probably hiding out in some abandoned building in between the two locales.”

Something about what I said seemed to strike Kermit as noteworthy. “Where did Statler & Waldorf say they found their Alpha?”

“Northern part of the industrial district, I think.”

“God damn it. Call the tavern and get those two to give you an address. The Swede’s set up at the southern edge of the Clacks. That’s less than four blocks from there.”

“No Alpha can resist the allure of an ice factory, right?” I asked sarcastically.

“Remember when I said that felts have a stronger intuition than humans? Well, it ain’t bullshit. Now, we’ve got a hell of a coincidence and my hunch to go on, but if you’d rather sit here and wait a week to hear back from missing persons, go for it. Me? I’m checking this one out. So either call the tavern, or give me the phone so I can do it.”

The tension was destroyed by a gentle “Meeeeeeeeepmeepmeepmeepmeepmeep” emanating from Beaker’s hunched figure. Drool trickled from the corner of his mouth.

“Fine,” I relented. “What was the number?”

***

The factory was a dilapidated wreck. Any windows that weren’t broken were coated in a layer of rust leached from its corrugated tin walls.

“Do we have a plan?” I asked, as we lifted the heavy shutter that covered the loading dock entrance.

“Shoot it until it dies.” Kermit said sagely. Good plan.

The interior was vast, and its only sources of illumination were the light of the streetlamps outside, filtered through grimy glass. We heard a noise coming from the foreman’s office—a soft whimper, muffled by the dust choking the air. The dust served to quiet our footsteps as we ascended the metal staircase, but evidently not enough.

“You can stop where you are,” suggested a sweet contralto whose source we could not place. Kermit hazarded another step. “Or not,” the voice continued, “but then I’ll have to set off the traps.”

We froze. “All right, miss.” Kermit acquiesced. “What is it you want?” The muffled cries got louder.

“I’d like you to forget this happened. I’d like you to walk out of here with memories of an empty warehouse, another dead end.” I could now pinpoint the sweet voice to within the foreman’s office, although it was difficult to be sure. It was perfectly in tune with the acoustics of the factory, and seemed to reverberate all around the dusty cavern.

“That’s not possible.” Kermit said defiantly.

“Fine. Then I’d like for you to wait there quietly while I finish my work.” The whimpering. She’d already found another doppelganger.

“You don’t have to do this!” I cried. “There are people who can protect you from your former masters!”

“Ha!” a humorless laugh boomed out from the office above us. There was a sound like someone screaming through a pillow, or from several rooms away. “None can protect me from them. They have eyes everywhere.”

“There are people who can help you!” I pleaded. “The Quorum can hide you from your enslavers! You can be free among your own kind!”

There was a pause. The cries ceased. “Just who do you think I’m running from, officers?”

My eyes locked with Kermit’s. “The humans who owned you?” I offered weakly.

Another soulless chuckle. “I got rid of most of them decades ago. I have much bigger problems than the few dregs that remain. Say, why don’t you two join me in here?”

Kermit nodded when I looked at him for affirmation. We finished our climb and stepped through the open doorway. The Alpha sat across a desk from us. Tied to its surface was the body of a young girl, surrounded my surgical tools. Her face had been cut to ribbons, and the Alpha was delicately reassembling the slivers of flesh.

“She was quite ugly when I found her, although the bone structure was about right. She’s gonna be so beautiful once I’m finished!” she said cheerfully.

Neither of us knew what to say. We let her continue. “Let me introduce myself properly. I was never actually given a name, but I suppose you can call me by human family’s surname, if you wish.”

“And that is…?” I prompted.

“Kennedy.” She looked up and smiled as she said it. She really was quite beautiful. Even wrist deep in a mutilated body, her natural radiance overpowered my sense of horror and made the scene seem cute, like she was caught stealing cookies. Even the blood droplets on her cheeks looked like freckles in the dim light, further enhancing her charm. “Tell me, what do you two know about the Quorum?” she asked innocently.

“They’re a governing body for Alphas,” Kermit answered. “They take in runaways and keep them out of the public eye.”

“Every runaway that has been taken in by the Quorum is dead. The Quorum is actually an organization run by some of the oldest Alphas dedicated to solving our reproduction problem. Every Alpha they find is used as a guinea pig over and over until it finally dies of exhaustion.”

“Reproduction problem?” Kermit jumped in.

In response, she looked out the foreman’s window. “I was built on this spot, almost a hundred years ago. My creator burned along with his workshop when one of his customers wanted the record of their business together destroyed. Not an uncommon action, or so I’ve heard. Eventually, the art was lost and the Quorum was formed to try to rediscover it.”

“How do you know so much about them?” I asked.

“Because once I had escaped my human family, I came back here. I realized that I had nothing left to live for, and I thought it would be poetic to end my life where it had begun.”

Kermit had listened patiently thus far. At last, he spoke up: “So you’re Statler & Waldorf’s Alpha.”

Kennedy smiled at Kermit. My heart burned with jealousy. “Very good, small one. Unfortunately, my own efforts and the aid of your friends was not enough to save me from the Quorum. Their doctors are very good,” she said bitterly. “Once they had me, they would cut me open, study me, and let me heal until I was well enough for another round. They violated me in an effort to get me pregnant, cut pieces out of me to run tests on, tried giving me human parts. I endured it for years and even became their longest-lasting test subject. It was awful, but one day I got the chance to escape.” Kermit and I were captivated, but she didn’t seem to notice. She continued with her work—breaking out a needle and thread to sew the girl’s new face together.

“One of the transport guards was deathly allergic to peanuts,” she added by way of explanation. “So once I was free, I came back here one last time. I’m going to get myself a body double and then I’ll give the Quorum an anonymous tip. And then I’ll be free.”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I had known in the back of my mind she was crazy, but I still wasn’t prepared for the logic-bending obsessiveness that it entailed. “How are you gonna build an Alpha when the scientists in the Quorum haven’t managed after decades of research?” I asked. Kermit shot me a warning look.

“Ahh, that’s the thing!” Kennedy said enthusiastically. “It’s because they’re scientists that they will fail. The original creators were doing this hundreds of years ago, without any of the technology that the Quorum so heavily relies on. Therefore, the answer must be fairly simple—they’re just too wrapped up in their theories to get their hands dirty and try something!” She looked up at me, her eyes glinting madly. “I’m closer to the truth now than they’ll ever be!”

“Another thing,” I asked. I knew I had a sleeping tiger in front of me, but I couldn’t help but poke it. Kermit shot me another look. There was fear in his eyes. “If you do find the answer, why use it to go into hiding? Why not just give it to the Quorum? That’s what this whole thing is about, right?”

She had nearly finished stitching the girl up. Her eyes wandered around the room as she began to come out of her delirium. When she saw Kermit and I, she started moaning. “Hush now, dear,” Kennedy cooed. “You wouldn’t want me to mistake, do you? Then you’ll be ugly all over again!” Her voice changed, lost that saccharine quality and went back to her usual rich tone. I interpreted it to mean she was talking to me. “I couldn’t do that to the other guinea pigs. If the Quorum knew the answer, they’d dispose of them immediately. Keeping them around will likely end in an uprising, and setting them free is inviting a war. At least now, death is not certain and escape is possible.” She grinned. She must think of herself as a saint, I thought.

“All done!” she exclaimed, and reached for a mirror that was resting on a nearby stool. “What do you think?” she asked, holding it up in front of the girl. She leaned forward as far as the restraints would let her. “UNNNNNHHHNHNN!” she moaned. “Oh, don’t be like that!” the Alpha chastised. “The swelling will go down, and in a week or so I’ll take out the stitches. Then I’ll give you a little time to heal up before your second operation.” She added conspiratorially:

“That one’s a doozy.”

Kermit, who had been quiet for quite some time, spoke up at this: “There’s not going to be a second operation. I don’t care what you’ve been through, but you have no right to do this.”

“So impolite! I should let you know that the traps out on the stairs aren’t the only ones in here.”

I stiffened. Kermit held his ground. “Oscar may have told you the negatives about being bonded with a Snuffleupagus, kid, but there are a few perks.” Kermit said to me, his eyes locked onto a spot on the wall behind the Alpha. I followed his gaze, but couldn’t make anything out.

“What are you talking about?” Kennedy asked sweetly. She turned in the direction we were looking.

“Gukh.”

The Alpha slowly rose into the air. Four holes appeared in her chest, through which I could see the opposite wall briefly before her innards began to spill out. It was like Waldorf said: they spilled out quickly, but kept their cohesion. Some ran through the air diagonally and spilled across something before falling back to the ground. As more of her lifeblood spilled, the object holding her up began to gain definition. Four claws held her aloft, which were supported by an arm up to the elbow. The arm changed position, and she began to rise higher, until her back was flat up against the ceiling and her fluids spilled from above to trace the features of her attacker. It was big. The back of its skull protruded a good six inches too far. Its face was smooth, without any protrusions for eyes or ears or a nose. There was only a mouth, which was opened both vertically and horizontally to show the outline of a lower jaw divided into two massive lower mandibles. Not like the Count. Not one bit.

I suddenly felt Kermit shaking me. How long had he been doing that? “Grab the girl, kid! Let’s get out of here!” I ran to the desk and lifted the girl beneath her neck and thighs, careful not to stare at the road map between her chin and forehead. As soon as I had gotten her off the desk, the Alpha slammed onto it, pinned through her left shoulder by a gore-defined claw. “Come back, little girl!” she coaxed sweetly. “I can make you perfect!” The young woman in my arms shut her eyes tight. I turned and started towards the door.

“We can be happy together,” Kennedy’s voice had changed to a soft plea. “I know you’re lonely. I’m lonely, too. Ah!” A set of grimy claws began to widen the holes in her stomach, pulling out more offal. “I just need someone to protect me. Can you do that? For me?”

I kept walking, as fast as I could manage with the girl weighing me down.

“Fine. Then how about we die together?” she asked. I turned to see her stick her hand into an open drawer, fighting the claw in her shoulder to grab something and hold it triumphantly aloft.

A gunshot sounded from behind me, and her hand fell to the ground, still clutching the detonator. “Let’s go!” shouted Kermit. I carried the girl to the door as fast as my legs would take me, and took a last look back at its threshold. She was staring, not at me, but at the girl in my arms. She kept staring even after the beast’s mandibles closed around her throat and severed her neck. Her juices shot from the wound violently and covered the Snuffleupagus. For the first time, I could see its full outline.

***

I work in the hills now. I took the transfer a month or so back. I told Kermit it was because of his Snuffleupagus, but that was only half the truth. I just don’t want to work with felts anymore. Kennedy and her craziness, they rattled me up, sure, but it was what I saw as she lay dying that got me out of that ghetto for good. Once the Snuffleupagus’s form was completely revealed, I could see the ropes going up from his body into the ceiling. When he turned to his left to look at me, I saw how the ropes on his left moved first, and then his body followed suit.

Maybe I need to use a metaphor here. When I was a kid, I fucking loved Super Mario Bros. I wasn’t one of those kids that used the shortcuts to try to beat the game faster. I played through the whole thing every time; I wanted to drink in the whole atmosphere, you know? See everything there was to see in Mario’s world. Then one day, a friend of mine tells me that the clouds were just recolored bushes. From then on, I couldn’t see a tree or a bush without becoming painfully aware of the ersatz nature of that world. Somehow, that one little fact just destroyed the magic of it. I was completely disillusioned, to the point where I barely played the game after that.

Well, ever since I saw the Snuffleupagus, I’ve been noticing things. Maybe I’m watching a movie, and Big Bird’ll move a certain way, and then I catch a glint of something, thin as fishing line, heading up towards the sky. Or I’ll be walking down the sidewalk with Kermit and I catch sight of our shadows, and it looks like there are sticks hanging from his arms, controlling their movement, but when I look at his body, I don’t see a thing. Or one time I was playing keepaway with my felt landlord’s daughter, and as I held her backpack above her head, I felt my arm snag on something for just a second. Then she got real embarrassed and ran inside and left her pack with me.

If these things happened just a couple times, I’d think that maybe I’m still a little shook up from the Kennedy case, that it was just nerves. But the harder I look, the more I find. That’s why I got a transfer, why I moved to a neighborhood that most felts couldn’t afford. It’s crazy, sure, barely a step up from those idiots that think the world began in 1969. Still, I can’t help thinking about where all the strings and sticks and ropes lead to. What if all the felts are just avatars for another race waiting in the wings for their chance to take over? Worse yet, what if all the strings are being pulled by a single puppetmaster?