Geraint paused just inside the doorway of the ranchhouse and groaned. Two crisp-suited MAMI’s boys lingered in the open foyer, talking at the receptionist. With any luck, he could ghost on by, get to the hallway and into SuperCrypt before they spotted him.

He was almost home free when the receptionist looked up. “Hey, Geraint, you don’t sign in; you don’t get paid.”

Two crew cut heads swiveled.

“So, Spazzie, how’s it going? Find any fairy gold lately?”

Geraint scrawled his name in the time book, muttered, “I hope an alien nails your ass.”

Geraint slammed the door to SuperCrypt behind him and headed for the small gathering around the largest desk, delaying meeting his supervisor. Ro hadn’t been pleased with his reports on gremlins, or lack thereof; right now, Cryptozoology’s pastry tray was far more appealing. Simone looked up, waved a cruller-laden hand. “You look bothered. Come on in, have a pastry.”

“What are MAMI’s boys doing on our side of the ranch?” Geraint asked. He selected a lemon twist, and chewed moodily.

“Looking for something else to mooch off our turf. Bastards.” Simone finished her cruller, refilled her coffee mug. The letters SPSZS curled around the rim in gold.

“Man/Alien Meeting Investigations are abusing their popularity,” Lewis said, sniffing. “Just because the public wants aliens, MAMI reclassified a modern sighting of Springheel Jack as alien interaction. We should complain to the board.”

“What are you so hot about?” Geraint said. “Jack’s not yours anyway. He’s Supernatural. Mine. A man, not a beast. MAMI screwed me, not you. We’ve got to do something about them.”

“Tech And Time,” Mark said, looking up from the coffee urn. “They classified Jack as Tech and Time. And that department’s theirs.”

“Only ‘cause they stole it,” Simone said. “Jerks.”

Geraint chewed, thinking, yeah, and if MAMI hadn’t claimed Technology and Time Travel to be their jurisdiction, the Search for Paranormal, Supernatural, and Zoological Species would have an acronym that not only declared them Spazzes, but Spastics.

Mark sighed. “We really should do something about them, or they’ll be moving in on our Cryptos next. They’ll come up with some theory or something--”

Lewis cleared his throat. “Actually, speaking of theories--”

Geraint started trying to swallow. Food wasn’t allowed in Super and he knew what Lewis was going to say. They’d heard nothing but his crack-pot theory for weeks. Geraint gulped the donut down and headed for Super. Behind him, he heard Lewis start in on evolution’s effect on the Supercrypt world. What made it worse was that Simone and Mark were beginning to fall for it. Only yesterday, Simone had wondered aloud if the Cryptos had evolved some sort of stealth mechanism. It wasn’t enough they spent their days hunting monsters; apparently Simone thought they might be hunting invisible monsters.

Geraint let the door bang behind him, cutting off Lewis’s voice. He stared at the shut door for a moment, thinking about going back out, about setting him straight. If monsters could evolve they wouldn’t be monsters. Monsters were things that got left behind at the evolutionary all-aboard. Everything else was just a mutant. “And mutants probably fall under MAMI,” Geraint muttered. “Damn thieves.”

A crash made him turn. Rowena righted the potted philodendron with a grimace and said. “Good, you’re here.” She came towards him, waving his reports. “These interviews you did. Hundreds of them, asking people about odd experiences. Not one mention of gremlins. Why not?” Ro tripped over the rug, regained her balance and tripped on her skirt, tumbling down, scattering papers.

Geraint helped her up. “‘Cause no one mentioned them. You okay?”

“Fine, fine.” She waved him off and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Sinuses are acting up. Brings out my klutz gene. Don’t change the subject. Gremlins.”

Geraint shrugged. “What more can I--”

Rowena gestured at him, irritably, “Go back out. Ask about gremlins. Better yet, just go find some.” Ro slung herself into her seat, banged her knees into the desk drawers, and winced. She put her head into her hands, rubbed her nose.

It was an axiom in SuperCrypt that people didn’t talk about what wasn’t there, but Geraint didn’t think Ro wanted to be reminded, so he headed out to his car, thinking about gremlins.

Gremlins were nothing more than rats dressed up in superstitions. But assuming they existed, gremlins were known to feed off large machines. Geraint flipped through the phone book in his backseat. Auto yards, junkyards, tech warehouses, and one abandoned amusement park.

The amusement park sounded more interesting than the rest, and probably didn’t have anyone to talk his way past. Since he’d joined SuperCrypt, he’d been a Terminex man, a health inspector, and most often, a reporter. The one thing he hadn’t been was a Spaz Agent. It was just too damn hard to talk to someone who was laughing at you.

The old carousel loomed up over the chained-off gate. Geraint looked up. No barbed wire. Who in their right mind wanted to go into a broken amusement park anyway? Other than a million small boys and him. He climbed the fence, the chain link ringing under his weight, and dropped down to the other side, walked on down the old fairway. It hadn’t been much of a park, judging by the remnants left behind. The carousel, a tilt-a-whirl, far more tilty than whirly these days, a dismembered rollercoaster, and some buildings that had to have been the haunted house, the house of mirrors and the misnamed fun house.

Daylight made the place sad. Geraint entered the House of Mirrors just to get away from the forlorn rides. Warped plasti-glass sagged, distorting his shape further than even the creators had intended. Geraint made his way through the halls, stepping over tag ends of cigarettes, beer bottles, and condoms. Geraint shrugged and upped his mental estimate of the marauding boys’ age.

At the center, Geraint paused. This wasn’t any good. There was no machinery here, just worn frames and twisted glass. As he was about to leave, he paused, hearing scratching. Mice probably. Rats, maybe. Gremlins? He headed toward the skittering, scratching sound and traced it to the fusebox that had controlled the lighting. A wadded heap of blankets attested to someone’s longer presence. Geraint prodded the faded pink blankets with his sneaker. Tiny mice streaked out, startling him so that he fell back and hit his head against the wall.

“Jesus,” he said, prodding the knot swelling on his skull to see how much it hurt. A lot. “Damnation,” he muttered. He blinked. The mice were everywhere he looked, scuttling away from his sudden collapse. Mice? He blinked. Mice didn’t have more than four legs that he was aware of. He staggered to his feet. He stamped them and the shadows were gone.

“Hey, what are you doing in here?” There was a security guard after all. A big, pink, bored man in a nice white shirt. He tripped over the blanket, recovered his footing, clipped the wall and sneezed. “You’re a little old to be a squatter.”

“Just visiting,” Geraint said. “Nostalgia trip.” He rubbed his head. The swelling didn’t go down.

“You okay?”

“Knocked myself on my ass,” Geraint said. “You have some ice?”

“Yeah, come on,” the guard said. Behind the hall of mirrors stood a small trailer. The guard stumbled up the stairs, popped the door open.

“You live here?” Geraint asked.

“Well, off and on. I own this place. Try to keep an eye on it. Just so if I get an idea on what to do with it, there’s something to do it with.” The man opened the freezer, pulled out the tray of ice and stared at it. “You wanted ice, right? For your head?”

“Please,” Geraint said. He took the tray from the guard, trying not to think that the man had been too long alone, and gone nutsy with it. Right now, he was sorting through the series of cramped cabinets, and muttering. “Skillet, pot, where’s the damn plastic bags, oh, teapot. I was looking for that.” He bunged it up onto the counter and filled it with water, dropped it on the stovetop with a clatter. “Butterfingers, today. That’s me.”

Geraint’s fingertips felt pinched with cold, pressed against the old metal ice tray. He set it down on the rickety table. It looked like he was having tea and sympathy instead of cold compresses.

The owner turned and said, “Oh, damn. Bag for your ice. I do not know what is the matter with me these days. I’d forget my own head if it weren’t glued on.” He opened the drawer next to the sink and pulled out a bunch of new baggies. “There you go.”

Geraint broke the tray loose, filled a bag, and wincing, put it against the knot on his head.

“Tea?” the owner said, filling two mugs without waiting for his answer.

“Sure,” Geraint said.

“I’m Mitch, by the way. I didn’t tell you that already, did I?”

“No,” Geraint said, reaching over and taking the second mug when it looked like Mitch was just going to hold it.

“It’s the damn weather or something. I get sinus headaches like you wouldn’t believe and I can’t think at all.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed his eyes. “Got some medicine, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as good old saline. You don’t mind, do you?”

Geraint shrugged.

Mitch got up, poured some of the cooling water into another mug and added salt. Then he cupped his hand and snorted, hawked and spat in the sink.

“Jesus!” Geraint twitched in his seat, then lunged forward to join the man at the sink. “What was that? Did you see that?”

Mitch frowned. “Hit your head pretty hard, did you?”

“Not that hard.” Geraint stared down into the drain. He could see the faint shimmer of saline solution, mucous, and something else, something small, something shadowy, something with tendrils. “Mitch, you got a jar I can have?”

“Empty one?”

Geraint nodded. Mitch looked around the kitchen, nodded, went to the second cabinet and pulled a five gallon jar out. “Old specimen jar do you? Used to be in the freak show, back when that was considered wholesome entertainment.” Geraint noticed Mitch was sharper-witted, more with it. Of course, he thought. . . why wouldn’t he be.

Geraint went back to the hall of mirrors, checked around the fusebox again, around the blankets and with quick fingers, shoved a piece of blanket in entire. Faint, undulating shadows on the old glass told him he’d been successful. Tiny feet tapped at the glass. Searching.

Back at the ranch, he paused, held the jar up to the light. There--like shadow mice, like mice with translucent bodies and thready tendrils instead of legs--crawled the creatures. Evolution had a lot to answer for.

The axiom said people didn’t talk about things that didn’t exist. The corollary said people also didn’t talk about things that were so common they didn’t really notice them. Headaches, a case of the stupids, forgetfulness, ideas gone astray, clumsiness, normal parts of the workaday world. But maybe gremlins never really fed on the machinery but on the ideas men put into it. But now machines made machinery, mass produced it for a jaded public.

Maybe that machinery wasn’t enough for the gremlins. Maybe they started starving. Maybe they went straight for the source. Straight for the brain. Geraint’s hands shook on the jar. He was delusional. He was concussed. He wished.

Tucking the jar under his arm, he headed into Crypt. Coffee break had been dragged out long as it could go and was moving into lunch now. Geraint set the jar down on the table. Simone chewed her sandwich, and mumbled through a full mouth, “What is that?”

“Don’t open it,” he said. “What do you see in it?”

She squinted, leaned close to the rippled glass. “Mice? Or really big centipedes. Did you bring us centipedes?” She pushed her chair away from the table.

Mark laughed, and joined them. Lewis, not to be left out, did the same. “Just don’t open it, yet,” Geraint said. “I want to get Ro.”

She looked up from her desk, from her blank paper and tapping pencil. “You brought me what?” He repeated himself. She rubbed her eyes, her nose. Geraint winced.

“Where’d you go last night, Ro. See any mice?”

“Heard them. Never saw them. Had an allergy attack and went home. Never even thought I had allergies when I was a kid.”

“Allergies are much more common than they used to be, huh,” Geraint said. “Come see what I’ve got.”

“Your jar full of gremlins.”

“Of evolved gremlins, damn him, Lewis may have been right. Sort of.” Geraint reminded himself he was muttering and stopped.

The three Crypts were poking at the jar with pencils. Faint shadows shivered. “So what have you got in there beside some really dirty fabric,” Mark said.

“Gremlins,” Geraint said.

Lewis said, “No way,” startled for once out of his speech patterns and into Simone’s. She floundered, her words gone and repeated, “No way.”

“Get me a specimen cup,” Ro said. Mark darted to his desk, pulled one from a drawer. “Tongs?”

The tongs found, she carefully started to unscrew the lid. The old metal, ground against the glass lip one notch too tight, shifted wrong and shattered the glass.

“Crap!” Simone shrieked.

Geraint clamped a hand over his mouth and nose, yelled, “Don’t breathe in.”

He could see the shadow shapes rushing outward, rushing them, felt the drift in the air as they wafted at him, legs moving like rudders, like wings, like tentacles. Like tiny nightmares. He tried to imagine what it felt like--them climbing inside. It had to feel common, something nearly unnoticeable. A tickle? A sudden itch? A drawing of breath, followed by the feeling like a blocked sneeze? Something he was sure he and others had felt before and dismissed. He shuddered, breathing hard through his fingers.

Simone screamed again, the clean high sound of someone who suddenly saw. She pointed at Mark and screamed. Something grey dangled near his mouth, in his nostrils, drawing upward. Geraint lunged, got his arms around Mark’s chest, squeezed. Mark’s breath gusted out. Simone scrabbled at his face. The gremlin flew across the room and landed in the trash can. Simone flicked her Bic and dropped it in. “My specimens, dammit!” Geraint said.

Ro, gasping with adrenaline, expelled the one within her, and shrieked. She flailed at it with a chair. Lewis grabbed his leather coat up above his head and jigged around the room, stamping at shadows. Mark grabbed the flyswatter and laid about. Simone lit fires. Geraint caught their horror and repulsion, renewed his own, and grabbed the empty doughnut box and smashed and smashed and smashed. High pitched beeping finally rose above their own din; the receptionist ran in with a fire extinguisher and sprayed everything down, glared at them all, and stamped his way back out.

Geraint slumped onto a wet chair. Ro and Simone leaned against each other and sat on the floor. Mark felt his upper lip and leaned against the wall. Lewis checked the corners of the room.

“Lewis,” Geraint said. “Creatures evolve, right?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good, then I’m reclassifying gremlins as Cryptos.”

“No,” Simone said.

“Oh yeah,” Geraint said. “And I’ve done my collecting. It’s up to you all now.”

“No,” said Mark. “They’re supernatural.”

“We squashed them, didn’t we? Burned them up? Stamped them flat? Supernatural creatures don’t die. They’re all yours.”

“They eat ideas, you said,” Lewis said. “Idea-eating is yours.”

“Yeah, but evolving is not mine. Vampires don’t evolve. The Fairy folk definitely don’t evolve. They don’t even change their skies. And evolving’s more important than eating ideas.”

“Besides,” Simone said, “Maybe they’re eating what our body secretes.”

“Simone, whose side are you on?” Mark said.

Ro breathed out. “The important thing is who’s going to go get more specimens. Volunteers? It can’t be that hard--” Geraint winced. She had had to say that, point out what all of them knew. That they’d all been infested at one point or another. That gremlins were likely as common and as welcome as cockroaches.

The silence lingered.

“Come on, you all. For once we had proof. Isn’t that worth it?”

Geraint let his breath out, careful, lest someone think he was volunteering. He wasn’t. “I have an idea,” he said. Behind the protective cage of his fingers, he found a shaky grin.

“Your last idea sucked,” Mark said. “Storing dangerous creatures in an unsafe container. What now?”

“Gremlins have historically been technological menaces, right?” Geraint said.

Lewis stopped peering into the shadows and started to smile.

“Sounds like MAMI to me,” Geraint finished.

“Extradepartmental reclassifications require a vote,” Ro said. “All in favor?”

There were no nays. SuperCrypt knew when and where to bury their differences. As well as their gremlins.

The End

Bio

Lane Robins is a graduate of the 1999 Odyssey workshop. While writing is her number one career choice, being a Spaz Agent would run a close second.