Stomp Bigfoot Drives Plow and Solves Murder in a February Nor'easter
Bakers mousetrapped in a blizzard. A "cereal killer" on the loose. A Stomp sasquatch murder mystery from 2024.
This story is about 12,000 words, or a 40-minute read. As I challenge the scope of Stomp’s world, the stories get deeper. You can access the full Stomp catalog anytime from the Archive. I inform you now so that you can light your candles, get a drink, get cozy, and…
Prepare for the blizzard.
Thank you for coming along. Now, let’s go for a ride.
If you’d like to support the time and heart that goes into Stomp’s universe, you are welcome to subscribe, share, or buy the author a summer cottage.
Welcome.
Stomp Bigfoot Drives Plow and Solves Murder in a February Nor’easter
January 2024 – Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania, Milky Star Lodge Airbnb
The human-sized mouse trap was baited and ready to spring.
It lay in plain sight in the chic mountain kitchen of the Milky Star Lodge Airbnb rental. The springs were lightly oiled and new. The six-foot-long platform was made of fitted wood pieces, like a model airplane carefully assembled. The hold-down bar was upcycled copper and the hammer shone with a glistening, serrated edge.
In the bait catch was a glimmering and blue-glowing candy bar, with wavy drizzle and bright red striations. The treat was the shape of a raw chunk of chocolate, and shone with a mesmerizing electronic blue shimmer.
The clock struck 8 o’clock.
“Hon’, you want another boxed wine? I’m gonna grab one of those crafty beers.”
“I’ll have one of those!” came the reply from the den.
Chet Sparnkle padded into the dark kitchen in moccasins and baby blue pajama bottoms. He was exhausted from sex and parmesan tilapia. It was a warm exhaustion. He had escaped his toil as a social media consultant and she had escaped the bakery for the weekend. Sheila did not have to wake up at 4 a.m. to bake.
Chet swung the fridge door open and stopped. His eye caught the blue glow by the cleaning closet and he turned his head slow. He looked down to the floor.
Hees-doos-ama-doos!
An angelic gothic chorus rang in his head. The mousetrap called to him.
“Babe.”
“What?”
“Come look at this. It’s fascinating.”
“Is there a bear in the yard?”
“No bear. Come look.”
Sheila’s soft feet padded in and she wore an oversized sweatshirt and nothing else.
Hees-doos-ama-doos!
“What is that?”
Staring at the mechanism, Sheila felt a tremendous urge to lash out. To choose a side. She wanted to speak in all caps.
“You know, you don’t know anything about foreign war policy like you say you do.”
Chet looked back at her and felt the same urge. “These are complex issues. I know more than you do.”
She gazed transfixed at the chunk of chocolatey blue-and-red treat. “This wasn’t here when we came in. This is weird—we should call the police.”
Chet stared into it and closed the fridge door. “Do you think it’s dangerous?”
“Of course, it’s dangerous. Look at it.”
Sheila reached out and placed her hand against her husband’s chest. The wind gusted against the cabin windows and thrummed the walls. The faint chatter of the television drifted into the room. She licked the bead of sweat from her lips.
“We should taste it.”
Chet jerked his head up and down. “Yup. That looks delicious. You take one side and I’ll take the other.”
The chocolate bar seemed to sweat with anticipation. Red and blue sesame seed sparkles melted onto the wooden trap platform. Randy gripped Sheila’s hand.
“On the count of three, we grab it?”
She nodded hard. “On the count of three.”
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three!”
They unclasped hands and dashed toward the bar. Chet’s foot stomped the bait catch. The hammer flew so hard that the kitchen windows blew out.
SNAP!
Chet’s legs flailed out like a puppet. Sheila let out a squeak. Then crumpled, they both lay still.
A pitter-patter of small feet scurried out from under the fridge. The stub of a gnawed purple crayon rolled out and stopped in the crevice of a floor tile. The plump rodent body climbed the counter. Then it slunk out the window and its tail swished and was gone.
The calm moonlit night glow night reflected drifting flurries of snow.
February 2024 - Elk State Forest, Central Pennsylvania
Mottled brown and green branches bent against the blistering frenzy of whipped snow. Regal ice-encrusted pine boughs shuddered sideways in gusts and sprung back. Great, heavy clumps mounded into woodland cake frosting. The wind tossed angry white dust into the air like a belligerent baker with flour. A golden eagle, attempting to fight the brutality, gazed down at the white seam of logging road that creased between the forest. It could hear the rumble and the distant sound of music. Then—
“SQUAWNK!”
—The eagle was gusted into oblivion.
The distant tremor of an F350 diesel V8 grew to a throaty rumble. Overhanging tree branches cracked and shed aside.
Skerrrrrrrrrrrrrr
The massive yellow plow threw soft white waves into the forest. The wipers swatted furiously at the blizzard. Through the fogged windshield was a misted silhouette, hulking and brown, in buckskin pants and a checkered red flappy musher’s hat, in aviator glasses. And in the cab—
For maximum atmospheric effect, this scene pairs well with a “2 am” by Foals, vintage 2022.
“All my life, I’ve been lookin’ for a light, and it’s 2 a.m. ah-gah-innnnn!”
Stomp Freedomfoot pounded on the steering wheel to the beat. His wild tuft of belly button fur poked out from an undersized green flannel that was fit to burst. In the backseat, a terrified, hog-tied man in winter clothes with a slap of duct tape on the mouth struggled to untie his hands. The sloppily-tied rope fell free. Stomp heard a door kick open:
BRONK.
“I know that it’s all over when we go-ho-ho-ho, go-ho-ho—ut oh.”
Stomp pressed the brake and shifted into neutral. The big diesel came to a soft stop in two feet of snow. Stomp hit pause on the music. He put his hand on the door latch and opened and craned his head out into the blizzard.
The man stumbled back the other way and tripped through coils of loose rope. He ripped the duct tape and screamed:
“Helpuh! Helpuh! Helppppp!”
BRERNK.
Stomp slammed the cab door shut. Pressed “play” on the music. Foals surged back through the speakers. He shifted into reverse and pressed the accelerator. The wheels spun in the snow.
“Come on, fella.”
The big diesel engine surged and the truck careened backwards.
Reeeeeennnnnnnnn
The running man looked back once.
“Nah-nah-no!”
BRONK.
The truck’s rear bumper met the man’s rear bumper. The man flew ten feet and splayed flat.
Heavy footsteps trudged through the snow. Stomp dragged the man back by one foot. He tossed him back into the cab.
“Be nice now, captive. Don’t wanna have to bonk bonk.”
“Please, no, no—”
“Shhhhhh.”
Stomp placed a wet furry finger on the man’s lips. Put the truck into first gear. Eased back into the blizzard.
“But ah hoped we’d be stronger. But nah I know-uh-hoh…”
The blizzard dampened to a lull. A lazy breeze swept grains of snow which scurried along the topfrost. The truck idled off-road in a hemlock glen. Sheltered here. Little wind. In places, the snow hadn’t even reached the floor and the loam was a mix of heavy browned hemlocks quills in a fine white dust. Through the muted snowclap, an elk whistle shrilled.
Stomp slammed the truck door shut.
“Where are ya, where are ya…”
Stomp paced around the clearing. Back and forth. Back and forth. He returned to the truck and swung open the passenger door.
“I promise, I promise—I’ll do it never again, I promise—”
“Shush now. No talkie.”
Stomp pulled his burlap knapsack out of the cab and laid it out on the hood. He removed a three-hundred-year-old caked brown map and unfolded it.
“Right here. Uh huh.”
He smashed a finger down on the map. Swung the door back open. Grabbed the man by the collar. He fell out in a snowdrift. Stomp picked up under one arm like a kid carrying books down the school hall.
“Don’t fret, little puppy.”
Stomp trudged back into the hemlocks, found an enormous gnarled-up pine, and knocked.
BONK BONK.
“Hallloooo? Anyone home? Alguien en casa?”
He heard a shuffling and there was movement from a hole in the trunk. A silver and brown owl, clothed fully in owl pajamas with a Scrooge nightcap, thrust its head out.
“Whaddaya want?” Its giant yellow eyes flashed. “You brought mice?!”
“Sir, thank you—um.” Stomp stepped back, flustered. “No. No mice. I love your pajamas—Is that Muga silk?”
“Love them mice—salted. Extra spice.” The owl picked up a saltshaker and shook it. “Who are you?”
“My name is Stomp Freedomfoot, just a humble wandering vagabond, just a simple soul upon this wondrous tundra of life—”
“I said, whaddaya want, ya oaf?! If you don’t got mice or know mice that got to get ate, bug off.”
“Ah-hm. Map says there’s a pubstump here. Called Sproul’s, I believe. Map says right here.”
“They moved!” The owl hung its body out the dark hole and pointed a talon toward a sprawling downfallen oak. “I am King Toodles. The watcher of this wood. The gatekeeper to your nightmares.”
“Ooh-kay, thank you.” Stomp shifted the two-hundred-pound man under his arm and felt around in his pants pocket. “No mice but…a chunk of raw onion for your trouble.”
Stomp strode forward through the snow and felt the onion pelt him in the back of the head.
“Not a very nice King Toodles, huh?”
The tangle of downed branches was impenetrable for anything less than a bulldozer. Stomp assessed, and then marched to the rotted trunk with his man-bundle and kicked it twice. Somewhere around him, a lookout—probably up in a tree—would assess his business, send a signal to the doorman, and let them in. Or not.
Stomp looked back and saw the owl framed squarely against its tree hole, knitting a scarf out of a row of mouse hides.
The ground rumbled. The snow crumbled and shuddered. A ten-foot-wide piece of snowy sod shifted and fell downward like an open trap door. Stomp peered into a case of steps hewn into the hard soil. His captive’s eyes went wide. He turned and saluted the owl’s tree.
“Going down, babes.”
Stomp descended into a spiraling staircase illuminated by wall-mounted honeycomb lamps. He held the bound man under his arm like a pile of newspapers. Through the walls rumbled a booming thrum of nightclub bass. Cackling voices and screeches filled the staircase. A glass shattered. A porcupine in square black shades sat on a stool by a medieval oaken door. It nodded at Stomp’s prize.
“No refunds on humans.”
“No problem. I’m dumping off.”
The porcupine stood and Stomp smelled the frisky scent of tree bark. “Password.”
Stomp felt in his pocket for a crumbled-up slip of paper. He squinted in the tunnel and read:
“Booby wooby poopy doopy.”
“That’s ten for each of you.”
“What?!” Stomp threw a paw up. “You’re doing cover charges? For both of us?!”
“That’s ten for each, brother.”
“Do you do discounts for plow squatch?”
“What?”
“For plow squatch.” Stomp tugged at the red checkered mush hat on his head. “I drive plow. Roll snow. Rock salt.”
“Man, pay up or get laid up.”
The two-foot porcupine huffed out its quills. Stomp muttered and reached back in his knapsack and felt around. He came out with a pair of Spanish gold ingots embedded with “1762.”
“This all I got.”
“That’ll do.”
The porcupine knocked once. The door creaked open. Stomp stepped in.
He was in a wave pool of sound. Bass shimmered through so thick he could feel the rhythm blow through his neck scruff. Iridescent rods of honeycomb glowed from the walls. A root system hung from the ceiling as gnarled tendrils. A team of barback rats squeaked and scurried past Stomp as they rolled a keg of beer.
“Oh.” Stomp sidestepped. “Sorry.”
Stomp dropped the captive and yanked him up onto his feet. The man’s eyes darted wildly. Stomp read the room.
Two foxes in ivy caps played pool. A werewolf in a tweed coat shook a martini in a shaker at the bar. A sorry elk sat hunched at the bar with its hooves in its hands. A mangy she-bear grooved by herself on the dance floor to the beat. Booths were carved into the walls. The business served criminals while the criminals served business.
Stomp caught eyes at the bar. It was a man dressed in mottled forest green. He took a whiskey shot and chased it with bark beer. Pan Ewert-London. The boiling agitator himself. Stomp noticed the sliver of light that spilled from a room in the back.
“Come on, puppy. That way.”
Stomp jerked the man by his collar and they crossed the room. Billows of tobacco smoke crept along the ceiling and spilled up into a ventilation chimney. About 30 of these chimneys, pockmarked like ground bee dwellings, let down a faint grey light from above. Every half an hour a team of moles ran up through the ceiling and cleared the snow.
“’Scuse me, big mama.” Stomp shrugged around the dancing bear, sidled around a raccoon waitress in deep red lipstick with a tray of drinks.
“Comin’ through, hon.”
Glasses crashed as a pair of tangled muskrats rolled across the floor, screeching and clawing. Stomp yanked the captive around the fight and through the crowd and his eyes were caught by a glimmer of glow-blue in a booth crevice. A wolverine diced up an iridescent candy bar with a playing card and bent to snort a line. Stomp sniffed. He did not recognize the scent.
He pushed the captive into the back room where the light spilled out. The music faded to a dull thump. Boxes of files were stacked against the wall— “ACCOUNTS” was scribbled on each of them. A single bulb hung over a desk. A gigantic bridge troll in overalls with an ice cream cone tatted on its face sat in the corner with a chainsaw. A rat in a little wool accountant’s outfit with a gold hoop in its ear sat and punched numbers into a register. The rat didn’t look up.
“Bounty?”
The rat had a Jersey accent.
“Uh huh.”
“Which one?”
“Uhm…” Stomp felt in his pocket again. He pulled out another paper slip. “Jameson, Barry. Unicorn poacher. Was slaughtering pups for black market ‘corn veal.”
“I, I promise—never again, I—”
“Shushies.” Stomp put a furry finger on the man’s lips and petted his head. “There there, now.” Stomp looked at the eight-foot troll in the corner, bigger than Stomp, who glared back. “Sup, OG?”
“Status?” The rat scribbled notes in a log.
“Wha?”
“The contract was ‘dead or alive.’ What’s the status?”
“Oh.” Stomp brushed a mud cake from the man’s backside where he had hit him with the diesel truck. “Alive. Mostly.”
The rat nodded at the troll, and the troll leaned to its side. It picked up a bakery box and handed it to Stomp. Stomp opened it and drool involuntarily foamed around his mouth as he took in three rows of morning-fresh donuts.
Stomp turned to the door. “Pleasure.”
“Oh, big wanderer?”
The rat yanked its head sideways in the direction of the bar. “Fella at the counter gotta job for you.”
Stomp nodded and the captive was in his rear view.
“Wa—what’s going to happen to me? Please?!”
Stomp didn’t turn around again. “Rehab, compadre.”
Then he walked into the club.
Stomp sat down at the bar with the sad elk and a bullfrog who sat in a saucer of beer on the bar and smoked a cigarette.
“G’ evening, drunkards.”
Stomp closed his eyes and inhaled the aroma from the donut box. He wafted it into his nostrils, let his tongue stick out, and just the tip of it dabbed at a melty glob of chocolate. A human hand slapped Stomp’s shoulder. It was the bearded shepherd.
“Not a great idea to sneak up on a hungry sasquatch.”
“Not a great idea for you to sit with your back to a room of murderers.”
Stomp looked behind him. He was used to the devious glances. “Says the human who sits alone in a pubstump. I’m off the clock. What do you want?”
“There’s a job, if you’ll have it. You could do some good for your kind.”
Punksquatch Magazine once called Pan Ewert-London “America’s boiling agitator” for his work busting endangered fantasticals out of laboratories and prisons. The man dressed like a park ranger with the cat eyes of an art gallery burglar.
“Stomp is doing Stomp. Don’t wanna think about nothing else.”
He kept his nostrils engaged with the stack of donuts. His crusty nose hairs swirled with glee.
“Sad to see such a legend with no purpose. Hard to live that way.”
Stomp looked over. “I am a humble plow squatch now. I am unbothered.”
Ewert-London took a slug from the beer can and shook it. “Well, you ain’t doing much for yourself turning in bounties for donuts. You ever wonder why you’re out drivin’ plow in this storm?”
“I like swishing snow and rockin’ salt.”
“Because you got too much goodness to sit still. People need their roads cleaned and you make it your job.”
Stomp raised a finger. “Barkeep.” The werewolf wandered over. “A tankard of stout for me and a muzzle for my friend.”
“It’s a shame.” Pan slapped his hands on the bar. “Expected to strike again in two nights. All these folks getting kilt and detectives got no leads to solve the serial murders.”
Stomp huffed. “Nobody gets kilt with cereal. Dreadfully maimed at worst.”
Pan tapped the can on the bar. “What do you know about Outrage?”
Stomp accepted a mug made of a hollow log and drank it down. “I am a sasquatch of peace. I do not engage in outrage.”
From the accountant’s back room, Stomp could hear a chainsaw roar up and the tinny burst of man screams.
“It’s a designer drug.” Ewert-London nodded his head to the wolverine in the corner booth. “Extremely addictive for us humanfolk. Enhanced confidence. Decreased awareness. Enlightened sense that the user is an authority on everything.”
“Uh huh.”
“A murderer’s been baking it up, luring folks in with the Outrage. Then boom!” He slapped his hands. “They’re mousetrapped. They’ve struck every seven days since December. Police are agitated. We—the network—think it’s only a matter of time before Fantasticals are blamed and it goes back to the old way. No rights.”
Stomp chugged his beer. “We ain’t got no rights.” He raised a paw for another. “All the same, there’s a storm coming. I’m bloaty and constipated. And you want me to solve a murder in about 42 hours.”
Pan tapped a hand on the counter and played his card. “Welp. It’s a shame what this killer’s doin’. Only slaying innocent bakers. Just a matter of time before there’s no such thing as donuts or pies.”
“Huh-what?”
Stomp whipped his head around and knocked the jazzy saucer bullfrog across the bar. The elk’s beer fell over and spilled everywhere. The sad elk threw its hooves in the air and whistled:
Arrreeeeeeeeen!
Stomp lifted Pan up by both shoulders and sat the man right on his lap. Like a child with the mall Santa.
“Tell me everything you know.”
Pan waved to the bartender for another beer. “What do you know about farm mice?”
Wellsboro, Pennsylvania
Lorin Dewby closed the blinds in the DewMoss Bakery & Café window. Locked the cases. Clicked out the lights. The glowy white bulbs that illuminated the “DewMoss Bakery” sign out front went dim.
Her hair was short and dark. Her septum ring accented cheeks creased from smiling. She wore a tight-fitting black apron with “DewMoss Bakery & Cafe” in block letters. A ship was tattooed on her arm and below it, a sleeve of waves. On the back of one shoulder was tattooed a bear facing one direction, and on the back of the other, a bison. Her flour-covered jeans were snug over a flour-covered pair of brown Doc Martins.
She retrieved her phone from the register and scrolled as she walked out the front and into a side entrance that led up the side of the bakery. She opened the top-floor apartment and dropped her keys on the floor. Too tired, she let them lay and fell into her couch. She continued to scroll and stopped herself. She placed the phone face-down on the table next to a two-year AA “recovery” coin, which lay next to an unopened bottle of Christmas wine.
“Shit.” She looked up at the ceiling. “The bread.”
She trudged back down the stairs. Opened the shop. Hefted a great plastic rack of bread wrapped in brown paper and backed her way out to her banged-up VW Jetta. Her wheels spun in the ice and she rocked forth. She drove down quaint Main Street, past the Art & Cultural Center, past the four-screen Arcadia Theatre, and pulled in at the church.
The lights inside were bright and welcoming. She hoisted the rack out of her trunk. A sign on the church double doors read, “Code Blue Warming Center.” She held the big rack with one arm and jerked a door open.
The air was warm and the smell of coffee fragrant. A few unhoused people lay on cot beds. A few congregated around the coffee maker.
“Hi, Ted. Hi, William.” She placed the tray down on a serving table. “I got pumpernickel, rye. Honey.”
William, a 78-year-old Vietnam veteran, peaked his head down into each brown paper bag. “You got cake?”
“For you, William, I’ve got cakes plural.”
She unwrapped two big chunks of poundcake with vanilla icing. She waved at Betty, the shelter volunteer, and went back out into the cold. She drove back out to DewMoss, parked on the ice, slipped up the steps, and crashed on the couch.
Her still-floured jeans were dusty white against the television glow. It was 10:15. Her alarm was set for 3:30 a.m. She gazed at her phone. Bodies in Gaza. Bodies in Ukraine. Bodies at the border. Mid-scroll, her head slumped over into exhausted slumber.
Outside on a drainpipe came the pitter-patter of small feet.
Stomp assessed the location from a hedgerow with his 1700s brass spyglass.
Bright, cherry red outbarn. Decadent five-bedroom farmhouse with fireplace and rock hearth ovens. Pristine 2022 Honda Fit in a neat-kept front drive. The farmhouse sat on a steep ridge that overlooked the quaint elk tourist town of Benezette.
The farmhouse was entirely occupied by mice.
He’d parked his plow truck in the woods and peed on it to mark the territory. He shifted his gaze to a tree and the trail cam tied around it with a blinking red light. Not unusual for these rural folk to keep trail cameras. No sign of ambush at the farmhouse.
He slid the glass into his knapsack and stepped into the open.
A buzz of welding gear and a burning flare of sparks arced in a dust-caked barn window. He walked closer and leaned his head in. He raised a paw and brushed away a layer of dust.
“Please, come inside, young investigator!”
Stomp whirled around. The farmhouse porch was empty. He could see nothing.
“Please, inside! Do not enter the barn, sir. Inside, sir.”
Stomp dropped his gaze to the stones pressed into a walkway. A scruffy mouse in thick glasses with an overbite stood with its paws on its hips. The mouse wore a bow tie and a little pea coat.
“Hello, little rodent of academia.”
“Come, come. Welcome to Edison Homestead.”
The mouse turned and led Stomp to the house. Stomp turned to look back at the barn and the sound of heavy, shifting machinery. The mouse pressed a button on the doorstep and a lever sprang the front door open.
Stomp stepped in. “Fancy.”
Stomp instantly smelt fresh pies. His fur stood on end. His muzzle sweated.
“My name is Edison Mouse. You can call me ‘Edison’ or ‘Edison Mouse’. Or ‘Genius’. I am an inventor and caretaker of Baker Mouse Lodge, our humble abode for generations.”
The mouse whirled and showed Stomp a pristinely kept interior, with wallpaper painted with strawberries and a wide farmhouse sink next to a row of ovens. Pie plates were set out. On the wall above the sink was a framed quote:
“WINE LIFE.”
Circulating the entire kitchen, on the floors and ceilings, was a system of twine pulleys and ropes. Stomp noted the thicker strands that led under a door to the basement. Edison picked up a tiny loose sock from the floor, set it on a rope, and—
Whiizzzzzzz
—It whirred along the wall to a laundry room and dropped in a basket.
“Where are the human folk?”
“Oh.” Edison led Stomp down a hall, and Stomp was careful not to tread on him. “They got evicted.”
They passed a bedroom with a closed door and thumping with the sound of artificial machine-gun fire. An indignant voice squeaked up and yelled:
“Gotchu, cheese-ass bro-bro!”
Stomp’s head brushed the ceiling. He noted the open door of another bedroom and the floor that held a little homemade weight bench with half dollars as the weight plates.
“Huh,” said Stomp. “Like a prison yard.”
They entered a guest bedroom. The bed was made with a pink pillow on it. He read the embroidery:
“Live. Laugh. Love.”
“Yes, we love our pillows. So, you are here to investigate the, ah, ‘mousetrap murders’, as the media has deemed them?”
“Uh huh. Don’t want no more piemakers getting murdered up.”
“Of course. You are not cooperating with the Pennsylvania State Police detectives, I presume?”
“Nope. Freelance plow ‘squatch style.”
“Excellent. We informed your Shepherd friend that we’d be happy to serve as your staging home as you investigate these horrid deaths.”
“Uh huh. Who’s ‘we’?”
“Ah. Thilly Mouse will return shortly with supplies. Oaf Mouse is working.” Edison cleared his throat. “Unk Mouse is playing Call of Duty.” The front kitchen door thudded shut. “Ah, there comes Thilly Mouse.”
Edison bustled out. Stomp looked around at shelves and shelves filled with model sailboats and cars. He gazed down at the bed with lilac-scented, tight-fitted sheets. The plumped pillows.
“This just won’t do.”
Stomp thrust up the window and bent down into a dead, snow-buried garden. He scooped up a great armful of snowy mulch with two hands and plopped it on the sheets. He smoothed the snow and grit out as it melted to bed slush.
“Yes. Much better.”
Stomp lay his burlap knapsack on the bed. He pulled out a rolled-up map of Pennsylvania, a pack of permanent markers, thumbtacks, a yellow notepad, and a thin manila folder supplied by Pan Ewert-London. He shook his heavy bag. Out fell an authentic wool Sherlock Holmes detective cap.
He replaced his red checkered hat for the Sherlock, then brushed his chin as he gazed at the empty space above a writing desk. He strode forward and thumb-tacked the map straight into the drywall. On the wall, he scribbled three brackets of categories:
1. SUSPECKS
2. VIKTUMS
3. PERPYTRATER?
Stomp held a marker cap between his lips and read through Ewert-London’s briefs, printed on brown paper. Seven murders in seven weeks. Every seven days on Saturday night at eight o’clock. It was Friday morning.
He placed a tack at the location of each mousetrapping, from Tioga County down to State College and east to Lock Haven. The murders formed a loose circle, chronologically starting in Bellefonte and spiraling out like a constellation to the northeast. He traced the marker through each pin and put an “X” through it. The epicenter was Benezette. The pattern indicated a next hit somewhere around…
Stomp circled Tioga County. His marker caught the “W” in Wellsboro.
“Mr. Stomp, sir?”
A little head in a bonnet peeked in the doorway. Thilly Mouse had a giant snout like a mole that sniffled underneath a pair of Ben Franklin bifocals.
“Detective Stomp.”
“’Tective Stomp, sir. I’ve made some fresh mintcream with meadowfluff and danderberry jam. I’ve boilt some dew in a kettle and made honeynectar tea, with a spritz of sparklebooze and a dash of cinnymon on bramble tart.”
She held her hands behind her back and dallied her heel back and forth.
“Um. Okay. So, that’s food, right?”
“Surely, ‘tective. Drabs and dribbles.”
“You have an English accent. I’m so thrown.”
“Yes, ‘tective. Just a simple mouse maiden from Orknoy down Bobbinsberry Way ‘neath Ould Bobblesbee Row.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m only having some fun with you, Detective Stomp. I’m from Rhode Island.”
“Okay. Well. Thank you for…everything.”
Stomp puft the marker cap out of his mouth and snatched up his detective’s notepad. He followed the little matriarch into her kitchen.
There was a mouse-sized table on top of the human table. Edison Mouse sat at the head of it. Unk Mouse wore tiny knee-high white socks and a Nick Van Exel Lakers jersey from 1996. He had a lip ring in the corner of his mouth, a braided rattail behind his mouse ears, and a fuzzy little mustache. He stood on top of a Nintendo Switch and smashed the buttons with his feet. Stomp noted the tinted chocolate dust on Unk’s pawnails.
At the far end of the table was a behemoth of a rodent, like a small groundhog with buckteeth. This mouse wore a welder’s smock and stared straight ahead as it chewed on a red crayon.
“Unk, boy, put the games away.” Edison waved a hand at him. “Company’s here.”
Unk snapped his head up from the game. “Bro bro, you want a dimebag? What you need, bro?”
Stomp stood awkwardly in the hall frame and stretched a finger down to the transfixed face of Oaf Mouse—
“ARF! ARF!”
Stomp recoiled his thumb. “Owie!”
Edison tossed a shred of crayon treat from his pocket and Oaf snatched it up with his tail.
“Oaf is a brilliant tactician with his hands. A craftsman of the finest sort. But sometimes he lapses into a touch of dog madness.”
“Oo-kay.” Stomp rapped his fingers together.
“I’m sorry, papa.” Oaf’s voice was deep, like the dark part of a river channel. “The scary beast startled me.”
Edison smiled at Stomp. “He can assemble a model sailboat in four minutes. Among other things.”
Thilly scurried up the countertop and unwound a pulley with her little paws. The oven door swung down, like a drawbridge opening. She pressed another lever and a hook dropped down from the ceiling on a zipline. Stomp swerved his head. The hook grabbed the oven rack and popped out a 13-inch latticed blueberry pie.
A splash of drool froth dumped from Stomp’s mouth.
“We heard you like pie.” Thilly gestured for Stomp to help himself. “I’m making my own Etsy pie delivery business. Well, I hope...”
Stomp bashfully dipped his paw into the hot pastry and did a full Winnie-the-Pooh suckle.
“She’s modest.” Edison waved a toothpick fork as he poked at a beechnut filled with heavy cream. “Thilly will soon have the finest pie business in the whole state. Just gotta get our production up to scale and squash the competition.”
Thilly blushed. “Well, just a little dream of ours. Really, the only dream.”
“Oh.” Stomp ate pie standing up. “What will you call it?”
“Methinks ‘Rodent Cake’.” She pondered this. “Or perhaps ‘Pie-Stench Rat Crust’.”
Edison smiled at her. “We’re still working on the branding.”
“That’s beautiful. Really rolls off the tongue. So.” Stomp talked between pawfuls. “You must be wildly invested in all these murders goin’ on, huh?”
“Oh, horrid, devilish evil.” She pressed her paws to her cheeks. “I only hope that me and my blessed kitchen isn’t next. Merrie-derrie-me.”
Stomp scribbled a pair of sentences in all-caps on his notepad:
“SO CUTE. TOTALLY INNOCENT.”
Stomp wiped his mouth. “I must say. The killer is expected to strike again in—” he counted on his fingers—“two days.” He haughtily adjusted his detective’s cap. “I must begin the hunt.”
“Oh, of course!” Edison smacked the table. “You’re looking for leads.”
“Yes.”
Unk’s eyes darted to his father and back up to Stomp. Edison stretched his paws behind his head.
“You, of course, let us know just how we can help. Unk and Oaf are themselves about to head out and deliver pies to distant friends.”
“Hostaging me here is already so kind.”
“Hosting.”
“Right.” Stomp snugged down his cap and went to the door. “I know just where to start.”
Lorin Dewby stapled the last of the “Spoken Word Poetry Night at DewMoss Bakery” flyers into a telephone pole and hurried back.
The wind swept Main Street and up her pant legs with an iced chill. The sky billowed with pregnant grey fluff clouds. The bank temperature sign flashed “3:13 p.m. – 7 degrees.” She tugged her beanie down harder and retrieved the microphone stand and small amp from her car. Then she kicked the door open with a foot and entered the warmth of the shop.
This was the first spoken word poetry night. Ever. This was the first she’d hosted anything. She set down the equipment in a corner. Unwrapped her scarf and draped it on a chair. She thought about the Christmas wine upstairs. How tasty it could be. For her poetry guests, of course.
“Oh, freaking yuck!”
She ran to the corner. Cold air blew in through a foot-high hole. The opening was made with chiseled bites that chewed straight through the wall. Squirrels did this sometimes when desperate. She hoped it was squirrels. God help her if she had rats.
She went into the maintenance closet next to the restroom and tugged on the chain lightbulb. She picked up a caulk gun. Rummaged behind piles of extension cords and found the cream-colored paint from the original coat. A paintbrush. There it was. An extra piece of plywood that she’d kept for drywall repairs.
“Yes!”
She staggered out with supplies in both arms, dumped them by the wall, sat cross-legged, and got to work.
“I welcome you to the first ever DewMoss do-yourself poetry night. Like the flan tart, like the apple scone, you each bring something awesome to this table…”
She positioned the repair piece and held a nail between her lips. In the maintenance closet, a heavy rodent body shifted and tugged a roll of wallpaper over a bundle of copper rods. In the road, under a streetlamp, sat the innocuous figure of a blue Honda Fit.
Stomp rumbled the big F350 plow truck off the snow-packed logging road and it settled to rest at the edge of Quehanna Wilderness. He popped out and stomped in.
He noted his crusted footsteps from earlier in the week and the immense hemlock tree with a circular hole. The branches were dense emerald mottled with wet brown arteries. The snow was drifted mounds of white moss draped on trees. The forest was a mute frosted fortress.
Stomp walked up and stood still.
“Heyyyyyy, bird.”
Stomp knocked his fist on the tree. Heavy clumps of snow dislodged.
Whoomf. Whumph.
They fell around his feet. He knocked harder.
“Heyyyyyyy, bird. Here, big bird. Come on, birdie bird.”
A shimmer of air burst against his back and a shadow fell.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
The great owl came down from above and clenched its razor talons into a broad branch.
“Scaring all the tasties away! Oh-hoh! Look at the detective sasquatch with his fancy detective hat.”
The owl swooped and lifted the cap from his head.
“Hey, give that back!”
“What are you gonna do, broadfeets? What are you gonna do?”
“I’m a detective of the Wood! I’ll arrest you!”
Stomp swatted at the owl, who whooshed just out of reach. The owl dropped the cap and resettled on its branch. Stomp dusted it and snuggled it back over his ears.
“You bully. I need intelligence.”
The owl preened itself and puffed up. “Have you brought an offering of mice?”
“What? No, I—”
“King Toodles is a Watcher of the Wood. A monarch of this wood. I requires gifts and sacrificial offerings.”
“You look like a fat bird in a hole.”
The owl ignored him. “What help can I provide the simpleton?”
“I’m investigating the mousetrap murders. You’ve heard?”
“Naturally.”
Stomp had to gaze up into the tree as he talked, like a king’s subject. “The killer is using this Outrage candy to lure folk. Magic ingredients. A serial killer, they say, but I’ve yet to find any sign of cereal.”
“Ah, hm.” The owl furrowed its great unibrow at Stomp, overtop its giant eyes. “What will you pay for such information?”
“What do you want?”
“I’ll think on this. What do you know?”
“They’ll strike again Saturday eve. Mousetrap death. Killing bakers.”
“The killer uses a giant, wire-bound mousetrap made of recycled material.” The owl reached back into its den and put on a pair of glasses. “Where would a killer find such material?”
Stomp held his yellow notepad up in front of his eyes and squinted, and wrote:
“MOUSETRAP STORE.”
“They’re surely not paying for the materials. Too many receipts.”
Stomp’s eyes illuminated. “Junkyard.”
The owl clicked its beak together. “Well done. Start there. A critter buffet.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what I want for payment for my kingly intelligence.” The owl opened its mouth and flicked its tongue in and out. “Find me some critters I can gobble up and gobble down.”
Stomp cringed. “Please don’t do that tongue thing again. I’ll see what I can do.”
Stomp turned away from the pine grove.
“Oh, Sasquatch?”
“Yes, Owl.”
“Look up a creature called ‘The Alchemist’. It’s a name I’ve heard bandied about the pubstump.” The owl ruffled its wings. “Appears to have something to do with this Outrage circulating the Wood.”
“Thank you, Owl.”
Stomp got in his truck and sped down the mountain. Junkyard time.
Stomp gazed up at the barbed wire fence. The cameras mounted on a decrepit RV office. Junkyard owners were notoriously terrible to fantasticals. Many were poachers. It made sense—Stomp and other clawed, grotesque creatures found refuge within the nighttime piles of a junkyard. Stomp read the sign in block letters:
“TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. FANTASTICALS WILL BE SHOT, SKINNED, & SOLD.”
It was dusk. A red-slatted fence was a pair of crooked wooden teeth around stacked piles of cars. Forsaken metal gleamed in the snowlight. He’d chosen the junkyard nearest to the epicenter of the murders. Stomp had brought a pair of zip ties (in case he needed to make citizen’s arrests), and a hammer (for safety).
Stomp snugged down his detective’s cap and walked up to the RV door.
BRONK BRONK BRONK.
He waited. And knocked again.
BRONK BRONK-ERK—
His hand went through the panel door.
“Rut roh.”
He tried to remove his paw. It was stuck. “Sir? Junkyard proprietor, sir?” Stomp tugged his hand against the door and the entire door ripped from the hinges. “Proprietor, sir—I have some official investigator questions.”
He turned to shake the door off his paw. He pulled the hammer from his belt and turned. The door swung and crunched against a window.
Keentz!
Stomp heard a gasp. In the dim-lit trailer, a grey-haired woman in billowing drawers and hair curlers held an empty cooking pot. She dropped it.
BONG-BA-BONGK.
Floodlights flicked on. One after another. Click. Click. Click. Click.
“Delilah!” A voice called out from another trailer across the dirt lot. “Delilah, what in the—”
Stomp’s hulking figure stood crouched against the door light, zip ties on his waist, hammer in his paw.
The woman screamed.
“PREDATORRRRRRR!”
“Are you peek-a-booin’ my Delilah?!”
“No, nuh-no…” Stomp stumbled backward and tripped over a cinderblock.
BOOM.
The shotgun blast ripped a hole in the trailer. Stomp ran like a gorilla with degenerative back issues, dragging the trailer door on his paw.
“OOT!” he snorted. “Ooga-oot!”
“Randy, don’t you dare be shootin’ holes in my trailer again!”
BOOM.
“Oot! Harooga!”
Stomp fled along the slatted fence, skirting the junkyard boundary. The man was behind him, in bare feet and long johns.
“Peek-a-booin’ rascal!”
BOOM.
Stomp smashed the door down like a Roman with his phalanx shield. The door fell off. He reached one paw up and flung himself over the junkyard fence.
Sirens wailed. Stomp crouched amongst the shadows of frozen cars, settled in their rusted winter. He shuffled to the underside of an 18-wheel trailer and silhouetted himself against the big tire.
He knelt with his head down, panting. He sniffed. He smelt musk. He reached his big paw down and poked at a scatter of blue-glowing seeds in the frost. He picked up the hardened nodule on his finger like a stamp. He couldn’t help it—he reached his tongue out and tasted it.
Chocolate. And…antifreeze?
Another ingredient burned his tastebuds, a corrupting piece of alchemy that made Stomp’s belly boil with heat. He wanted to lash out publicly. He sifted a paw over the loose crust and his eyes followed a trail in the snow. Pocked rodent footprints skittered off through a tiny junkyard trail, weaved in and out of car underbellies, beneath the slate cloud glow, and back up the mountain.
Sunlight streamed in the Edison Homestead and attacked Stomp’s eyes.
“Groh.”
Stomp squinted at his perp wall with the map and the pins. It was Saturday morning. The killer was expected to strike in 12 hours.
Stomp felt itchy aches all over his back. He ran his paws up and down his body. No junkyard shotgun pellets in his flesh. No trash-car tetanus. He rubbed two bald areas on his lower back.
“Wha...?”
It was like his fur had been plucked out of his back.
Knonk, knonk.
The door creaked open and Stomp dropped his eyes to the bottom. Thilly mouse peeked her head in.
“Breakfast is on, sir ‘tective Stomp.”
“Mmkay.”
“Rumble tart with snowberry crumble in vanilla winterfrost. Wi’ frostbrumble muffins and jamberlilly tea and a touch of meadow cinnymon.”
“Um, really no need to keep on the British accent. Thank you, Thilly.”
At the mouse breakfast table in the middle of the human breakfast table, Unk Mouse watched 2011’s Drive starring Ryan Gosling on an iPad. He wore little leather mouse driving gloves. Edison sat in his chair with his eyes closed, paws up on the table, and the sun contentedly warming his lashes. An antenna radio blasted the weather news.
…The weekend’s second blizzard this month will likely make last week’s two feet of snowfall look like a dusting. The storm is expected to dump up to 40 inches on the region starting Saturday evening…
The front door slammed. Oaf stomped in with a fresh purple crayon hung from his mouth like a cigar.
Stomp again stood at the dinner without sitting. Oaf gave him a dull gaze.
“Oaf hungry.”
Thilly touched off a lever and the front door slammed shut. “Finish your crayon then you may eat with the rest of us.”
Thilly bustled around her stoves like it was the most delightful romp ever. “Uh-hoh!” she gasped. And, “Uh-hah!” with every sprinkle of sugar and drop of milk that she dumped into a baking bowl. She touched another lever and a plate skyed down from the top of the kitchen window—like a ski lift—and landed in front of Stomp. On it was a plate-sized pancake with toppings.
“Oatcake with buttercream and maple drizzle. Held the nuts—my Oaf has a nut allergy.”
Oaf sneezed. Stomp pawed the pancake and ate slowly this time. Edison opened his eyes.
“So, Detective Stomp, sir. Tell me how you have done with finding these murderous devils.”
Stomp ate slowly. He swallowed. “I’ve got some developments.”
“Wonderful.” Edison sighed. “It’s brilliant what chemistry can achieve, isn’t it?” He nodded at the pancake. “Flour and sugar. Salt and pepper. Sasquatch and murder.”
His ears twitched and he looked back at his wife. “A beautiful alchemy, right, O?”
“Of course, dear.”
Stomp stopped chewing. He remembered Toodles’ advice in the woods. He folded the syrup-glazed pancake and put it in his buckskin pants pocket.
“I gotta go.”
“Very well.” Edison sipped from a steaming acorn top and watched Stomp fling open the front door and stride out. “Do be safe.”
Randy Meriweather handed Lorin Dewby his five-dollar bill and she handed him a croissant and his small steaming coffee. She smiled.
“Thank you, Randy.”
He winked and swished his white ponytail that brushed against the nape of his tan Carhart jacket. “Still gonna have the poetry night with the storm?”
She breathed in deep and her eyes grew wide. “Gonna try.”
He tipped his coffee to her. “Woo. I’ll be there. Storm or not.”
“Thank you, Randy.”
“If the protesters can stand out in the cold, I sure can make it out for your art.”
She craned her neck and looked out to Main Street. The crowd that had gathered was small but passionate. They milled about with signs that read:
“FANGED-FOLK ARE KILLING OUR BAKERS.”
And:
“NO RIGHTS FOR FANTASTICALS. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS.”
The news had spread and the traditionalists, the anti-fantastical media—they’d found their scapegoats. People were afraid. The murders went national.
The door jingled as Randy walked out. The morning rush was gone. She tore off her apron, went out the side, and rushed up her apartment steps. She made it halfway into the kitchen and squatted down on her knees, lightheaded and strobe-lighting.
This was not her first panic attack at work.
She kept the television on while she worked downstairs. It made her feel less alone. She looked up to see the weatherman talking:
…And that snow, it’s likely going to trap everybody right where they are, wherever they are…
She saw her phone on the sitting table, next to her recovery coin and the bottle of Christmas wine that she had gotten as a gift from, of all people, Randy.
Her mind blurred and scattered. She searched about for the journal that helped her slow herself down in slippery moments. It must be in her car. She strode to the table, picked up her phone, and ripped off a handful of scrolls.
Learn how to be a better person! Your neighbor is a millionaire—are you? WAR CORRUPTION BODIES.
She threw the phone down. She picked up the wine, ripped off the red bow and seal, and tore the cork out. She held it to her lips and took a deep chug. Tears sprung from her eyes as she drank.
She heard the bakery door jingle downstairs, the musical tinkle. She strode to the sink and turned the bottle on its butt.
Glug glug glulp
The wine dumped down the drain. She plunked it in the trash and wiped her mouth and teared eyes. Resolutely, she went out to the covered apartment stairwell, walked down, and went behind the counter. She methodically tied on her apron and looked at her piercings and tattoos that reflected in the clear pastry case glass. She nodded down emphatically.
I am worthy of this.
Stomp rumbled to a stop on Main Street in front of an imposing white manor with Greek-influenced pillars fronted by a sign that read “Green Free Library.” The building had once been the home of a lumber baron in the 1850s, Chester Robinson. Stomp remembered working a job for him around the Civil War, poling logs on rafts down Tioga creeks to the Susquehanna River, and on to Harrisburg market.
A crowd of protesters was gathered in front of the now-modern library branch, with two police officers standing by, swinging signs and chanting:
“PROTECT. OUR. BAKERS. STOP THE SAVAGES.”
“Wut woh.”
Stomp sighed in the truck cab. It would not behoove him to draw attention today. The crowd. His plow truck, which he had conveniently…what was that word? Stolen. Plus, he had murder warrants on him going back to the 1780s.
But he had to go in there.
He hopped out of the cab, tugged down his Sherlock Holmes cap, and walked across the snowy lawn. Somebody screamed. Another person pointed. The crowd’s murmur grew to a roar.
“Dirty beast!”
Stomp walked straight through with his eyes lowered. The cops glared but stepped in front of him to hold back the crowd. Somebody held the double doors open for him. A woman waved and whisked him into the quiet.
A young woman with pixie brunette hair—a librarian, he thought—gently closed the doors behind him. The crowd raged around outside. Stomp breathed heavily and kicked the snow from his feet.
“Thank you.”
She smiled and walked behind to the reference desk. “You’re welcome here.”
Even with the open greeting, he could see the apprehension in her face. It was not a usual sight for a Big Game fantastical to wander into a rural library branch.
“I’m looking for your archives, please.”
She smiled. “I’m the archivist here. What can I help you find?”
“I’m looking for any information on…” Stomp retrieved his damp tiny notepad from his pocket. “A guy named ‘The Alchemist’.”
She nodded and typed in some keywords on the desk computer. “Follow me, please.” She turned as she led. “I like your hat.”
“Thank you, please.” He tipped his cap. “I mean, just thank you.”
Seven-foot Stomp followed the five-foot librarian through the stacks and to a staircase. Patrons stood and glared. More than two hundred years of hiding and public spaces were opening their doors. She led him up into a regal side chamber with mahogany shelves and thick carpet and a stale must. She went directly to a “local history” shelf filled with newspapers.
“Each issue is in order of date.” She plucked out one from eighteen years earlier. “This one contains the single mention of ‘The Alchemist’.”
Stomp held the paper awkwardly. He looked down. She had a familiarness that reminded him of listening to an old song underwater. He opened the paper in the center and a torn-up page dangled open. The article had been clean ripped out. Or chewed.
“Vandalism.” She clicked her tongue. “Pieces of shit.” She walked away and out of the room.
A single byline remained at the bottom of the page. They’d missed the one line:
“Our staff is grateful to the Allenwood Penitentiary for providing the Tioga Herald-Gazette access to its populace.”
The librarian hustled back into the room. “The vandal can’t rip out the digitized versions. There is one other mention.”
She handed him a printout with a headline: “Pennsylvania mice fighting against baker discrimination.” The article was from 2006.
Stomp muttered aloud.
“…Local chemist who would only be quoted as ‘The Alchemist’ said bakers are illegally slaying mice families… ‘The Alchemist’ has vowed to fight fire with pharma…says that mouse bakers have no fair shot in the competitive world of pastry baking…fights for unjustly incarcerated mice, especially his kin, ‘O’.”
Stomp handed her back the printout. “Thank you, kind book lady. I must venture on.”
Stomp went down the steps and heard the voice call out behind him:
“May you find something, big wanderer!”
For maximum atmospheric effect, this scene pairs well with a “Forever Means” by Angel Olsen, vintage 2023.
The crowd outside hummed against the windows. Bodies rocked and moved. Angry faces squinted against the backdrop of snow. Stomp pressed forth the double doors and went out.
A snowball immediately struck his face. He shielded his eyes. The bodies rocked into him and he kept his head in his arms.
“Murderer!” someone screamed.
“Stinkprowler!”
“Just investigating, fine country folk. Just officially investigating.”
A glass bottle struck his shoulder and he bellowed:
“ARRAGH!”
The crowd screamed and scattered, like shots had been fired. The police put their hands on their guns. One spoke into his talkie:
“We’ve got a vagrant fantastical threatening a crowd of peaceful protesters. Send backup to Green Free Library immediately…”
KATHUNK.
Stomp slammed the truck door shut, almost forgot to turn the key, and fumbled with it. The truck roared to life. He stomped the accelerator, swerved down Main Street, and careened onto 287 South.
From above, the truck’s green top glided along the road through billowing pockets of forest. On the ground, the asphalt whizzed by, past churches and gas stations and trees, endless trees.
Stomp’s paws shook and he had nothing but time to think. About the years. About loss.
In a remote stretch outside of Morris, he pulled into the gravel lot of a small white church with a quaint bell in a steeple. He let the truck idle and bent his head.
The snow began to fall lightly and coat the hood of the truck and steam off. He let it accumulate on the windshield. He looked through the windshield to see a pair of young children throwing snowballs at each other in the yard of the pastor’s next-door rustic rancher. He began to rock with sobs.
He reached into his pocket for the pancake and shoveled it into his mouth.
ARGOBBLE.
He punched the glove box and it sprung open. Melty stale donuts bound out and fell about the floor. He plucked them up and shoveled them in. He ate and cried.
“Oh, roh-hoh. Oh-hoh.”
He pounded the steering wheel and the horn.
BERRRRHNT. BERRHNT.
The children stopped throwing snowballs and stood still. Stomp heaved and let it out.
“I am still alive,” he sobbed. “I am still here. I deserve to live.” He wiped a warm furry arm across his brow and sniffed. “I am living.”
The snow cared not. It lay around him, magical and light, lilting and atmospheric. The church was stark white against a light cream grey sky. The truck engine trembled and the cab was warm. Stomp held his head in his hands.
“I deserve love. I deserve it.”
Stomp put the truck in gear and pulled forward to the crest where the asphalt met gravel. He looked both ways and slipped out onto the coating of white, and rumbled down 414, on the road to Allenwood.
Sprawling acres of barbed wire. Concrete houses with guards. Nowhere to hide.
Stomp drove the last two miles of highway toward the complex. He passed a sign: “Caution: Do Not Stop for Hitchhikers.” He noted the orange jumpsuits of a road work crew picking up trash. He slowed and turned his head toward a flash of fur. One of the inmates was a grizzled and tatted bridge troll who loomed over the others and stabbed a Fanta can into a bag.
Stomp pulled the truck into the visitor’s lot and looked up at the American flag waving casually in the falling snow. He smacked shut the door and walked across the lot, into the lobby. The silent metal detector strobed. A tiny guard chomped a giant wad of gum behind the desk and whipped his head up like a startled meerkat.
Stomp tapped his knuckles on the counter. “Hello, diminutive cagekeeper.”
The man didn’t respond. He waited for Stomp to continue.
“I’m here to visit my brother O.”
“You on the visitation list?”
The gum chomping sounded like artillery at Normandy.
“Uh-hah,” Stomp laughed. “Not on the visitation list. But I have conjugal privileges.”
The hard-ass stared at him. “You’ve got conjugal privileges. With your brother.”
“Yes.” Stomp nodded slowly. “We all have needs.”
“Look, buddy—we ain’t even house none of your kind here. And look—”
The clerk pointed up at a sign on the wall:
“WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE FANTASTICALS BASED ON LOOKS.”
“Well, now, sir, that’s just prejudicial. I need to see my brother.”
The clerk stared at him without blinking. “You got a background check? Identification? Both required.”
Stomp rolled his fingers on the counter. He noticed the green mints in a bowl and maintained eye contact with the clerk as he grabbed a handful. He put them in his pocket. Then he put his hand back in the bowl.
“I left my identification in the truck.”
KATHUNK.
Stomp slammed the truck door and he was back in the warm cab. “Identification, my butt,” he muttered.
He drove out of the lot and pulled onto the highway. The hulking nine-foot troll was picking at highway trash. A hundred yards off, a pair of guards watched. With rocket launchers. Stomp swerved the truck to the shoulder and buzzed down the window.
“Hey! Hey, fella. Ogrish murderer fella.”
The troll turned to him and stopped. It wore overalls and had a teardrop tattoo under one droopy eye. Its knuckles were tattooed in block letters. Stomp twisted his head to read up close. The hands read “YASS” and “SLAY.”
“Official investigator here. I’m looking for information on an inmate named ‘O’ from 2006. You look so, so old. What do you know?”
The troll stared back at Stomp. Snitch code was different for Big Game fantasticals. Boundaries were blurred. The guards up the highway took notice and began to stroll their way.
“What are you payin’?”
Stomp looked around the interior of the cab. A single bite of melted donut lay on the floor.
“I got a glorious, sugar-filled chunk of chocolate that wants to get acquainted with your colon.” Stomp waved it in the troll’s face and then took a sniff for himself. “Just for you, big bubba.”
Stomp plucked his notepad from the seat and held the pencil at the ready.
“I don’t know no ‘O’.”
“Supposed to be related to ‘The Alchemist’.”
The troll scratched its head. “Oh! You mean O. Yeah, she was a rat, man.”
“A snitch?” Stomp scribbled on his notepad with his tongue out.
“No, man, a rat. Othelia. Yeah, she were The Alchemist’s lady. Bunked in D-wing in ’07. They book fantasticals here co-ed.” He tapped his skull with his great strangling knuckles. “I don’t forget nothing.”
Othelia. Thilly.
“She was hard, man. Chewed through the wires of some bakery oven. Arson. Ten years. Ran a whole rat crew. Queen bitch.”
Stomp scrawled this on the pad and underlined it: QUEEN BITCH
Stomp tossed the troll the donut. The guards with the rocket launchers were 30 yards away.
“Don’t you need a description?”
“Nope.”
Stomp mashed the gas and the brakes and 360-ed the truck in the snow. He took off for the farmhouse, more than an hour west.
He had six hours to stop the kill.
The snow fell like pieces of loose cotton, adrift on a breeze. They lay gently under the streetlights beneath dim, slate sky. The incandescent white Christmas lights of DewMoss Bakery & Cafe shone out and complemented the frosting.
Inside, Lorin hung a strand of neon blue lights to complement the white. Ponytail Randy helped her set up chairs. He sipped his fourth free coffee. Thus was the benefit of helping set up chairs.
Lorin wore black stockings under a denim dress. She had spiked her hair up—it felt fun and right. She recited to herself as she looped blue lights over the pastry case and around the counter edge.
“I got lost. A dripped-off dewdrop of star. A chipped-off pale sliver traveling, floating like a spark.”
Randy stopped and listened.
“Drifting until I find rest, in a newborn constellation.”
She noticed him and stopped.
“Well, that’s beautiful, Lorin. This storm. Those words. Gonna make me cry. Woo.”
“Thanks, Randy.” She looked out to the street. “It’s almost 5:30. I sure hope people come—oh, donkeyshit!”
She went back to the rodent hole she had boarded up. It was chewed open again. Tears came to her eyes. She just wanted this to go right.
From the maintenance closet next to the bathroom came a muffled thump and a squeak.
The big truck roared up the farmhouse drive over a pair of fresh car tracks. Stomp burst through a puddle of slush and parked at the barn. The Honda was gone. He strode to the front door.
Be cool. Be casual.
He kicked in the door and it fell from its hinges.
“Hello, innocent mouse family! I’ve returned. Just an unassuming, dimwitted investigator with absolutely no leads.”
The house was silent.
Stomp held a hand above the ovens. They were cold. He swung open an oven door—blue residue was caked on the racks.
He opened the door to Unk’s room. It smelled like a teenager’s laundry basket. Little blue sesame seed flakes were scattered on the bed, like in the junkyard. He shut the door and looked to the basement steps.
BRNK.
He pummeled his fist through the doorframe and turned the knob from the inside. The door swung in. It stunk. Death wafted. He flicked on the lights and went down.
At the bottom of the steps in L.L. Bean turtlenecks, with blue chocolate on their lips, were the bloated faces of a husband and wife.
The farmhouse owners.
“Hello? Humans?” Stomp bent and pressed his finger into the man’s nose. It sunk in like jelly. “Ohhhh.” The full realization of the scenario hit him, but he couldn’t help himself. He tapped the man’s jelly nose: “Bee boop. Gotcha.”
Stomp ran up the stairs and out to the barn. He flung open the double doors and stormed in.
Oaf’s welding equipment lay on a bench. Piles of copper rods and metal pieces lay about the barn like bundles of straw. The centerpiece was a gleaming, brand-new human-sized mousetrap, set to spring. Stomp noted the brown clumps on the welding bench next to a handwritten note. He stepped forward.
It was him. Pieces of his fur.
“Hey, that’s my back hair!”
He snatched up the note and read:
“Dear police. It was me, Stomp Sasquatch. I am the Mousetrap Murderer. Please note my fingerprints in the home, where I’ve gleefully taken the lives of these kind homesteaders. Please note the prolific evidence about my work camp here, and note my beautiful, gorgeous death trap. Please also note my presence at the Benezette junkyard, where I was peek-a-booing sweet, heavenly Delilah—oh, this is so not me!” Stomp read on: “I will strike again at 8 o’clock tonight. Kindly yours, Stomp the Cereal Murderer.”
Stomp crumpled up the note and ate it.
HARAUGH.
He growled and gulped down the confession. He turned to leave and noticed another piece of paper, discarded in a corner trash pile. He bent and stared at the colorful flyer.
“DewMoss Bakery Poetry Night. Main Street, Wellsboro…8 o’clock…your host, Lorin Dewby…”
The kindly face of Lorin Dewby smiled at him from a picture. He dropped the flyer and ran.
KA-THUNK. Smashed closed the truck door. KERNK. Dropped his plow to the gravel. Turned the key. Gave it gas in neutral.
He slowed his breathing down. Took off the Sherlock Holmes cap. Knocked open the glove box. Removed a pair of aviator glasses. Put them on his forehead. Removed a brown Guatemalan coffee sack he used for blinding captives.
“This’ll do.”
The wind whipped up and the snow swirled in his headlights like angry moths. It came down in a frenzy. He put the wipers on full blast. Spun a 360 in the drive. It was past five o’clock. Wellsboro was two hours away.
He stared down at the limp burlap kidnap sack.
“No.” Stomp shook his head. “Need help. Must make detour.”
He took a breath. Dropped the glasses over his eyes. He punched the gas for the Quehanna Wilderness.
Cindy the matcha drinker came in. Then Sandy the two-creams-no-sugar. Then Jackson-black-tea-with-honey. She didn’t have time to deal with rodents. Storm or not, the door was jingling.
She greeted and circled the room. “Make yourself comfortable, everybody. If we get stranded, I’ve got candles and croissants.”
Randy flung his silver ponytail side to side. “Sure hope we get stranded!”
Everybody laughed. Woo.
Lorin looked at the clock. “Okay, everybody, it’s just about time. I’m so excited you’re all here.”
She looked out at the crowd. There were two dozen guests in her little bakery. Every one of them sat in the chairs and scrolled on their phones.
“I, ah…have worked really hard to bring you this poetry night. I’m so grateful for all of you. You know, this recovery journey has been so hard, and you’ve all embraced me here. I, well…I look forward to this nice evening of expression in the snow.”
Just then the closet door creaked open wide and stood still. A giant mousetrap was pushed out an inch at a time. An iridescent blue glow arose from the trap. The crowd gasped. Lorin turned and her pupils dilated.
In the center of the trap was a pile—a MOUND—of Outrage.
Everyone stood from their seats. Randy licked his lips. Lorin was transfixed.
In the closet, two pairs of beady eyes watched and waited.
The next two minutes pair well with a “Shadow on the sun” by Audioslave. Vintage 2002.
The snow raged in gusting swirls and mounted on the 872 to Wellsboro. Stomp’s truck rumbled. The headlights cut a path. Next to him on the seat, King Toodles sharpened his talons with a nail file.
KERRRRRRRRR
The plow blasted through walls of snow. They passed the dim lights of disabled vehicles on either side. The forest was all around him. Branches fell to the road. Cars parked at haphazard angles with their blinkers on to wait out the squall.
Stomp plowed them open.
“Get on me, friends. Get behind Papa Stomp.”
One vehicle took his lead and followed. Then another. He soon had a trail behind him, like lightning bugs crawling the Arctic.
Stomp plowed on.
Eerie mist camped in the evergreens. He felt a vigor in his heart. A dissipation. The blizzard raged outside. A warmth blazed within.
“Hold on, poetry peoples. The plow ‘squatch cometh.”
Ponytail Randy gazed in hypnosis at the dung pile of blue-glowing Outrage.
“It is but a gift.”
Lorin felt the way she felt when she stared at the Christmas wine on the table. The manic buzz of anxiety in her ribs. The turnt-up feedback loop that was both stimulating and exhausting. She stepped toward the mousetrap and reacted with a spite she didn’t know she had:
“Shut up, Randy. You don’t know the nuances of this like I do.”
He shook his head. “You’re being irrational, Lorin. Clearly, we should all take sides and argue this without hearing each other’s perspectives.”
The crowd divided into two segments. Matcha Cindy’s hand trembled and she flung her arm back and threw her tea at two-creams-no-sugar Sandy. Sandy picked up a cup of hot coffee and flung it back. Cindy ducked and it splatted on the wall.
Lorin’s Converse shoe was three feet from the spring. It smelled like animal musk. The candy smelled like…poison? She needed it. This could prove that she was right. What she did here—she knew better than the rest of them. No nuance. She knew all.
In the street, in the swarming and flowing snow, there was the rumbling and revving of a diesel truck engine. Then the dreadful smash of two vehicles.
Stomp had pulled off Route 6 and seen the blue Honda Fit idling in the street. King Toodles was up on the dashboard, fluffing his wings, licking his lips.
Stomp gazed at the fixated bird. “You need some salt?”
King Toodles manifested a saltshaker and shook it. “I’ve brought my own, thank you.”
Stomp floored the truck toward the Honda. “Hold on, owl. Get ready to dine.”
Stomp veered under the blinking yellow lights of an intersection—25-30-35 miles per hour—and surged through the intersection.
Unk Mouse played Nintendo Switch with his feet in the driver’s seat. Oaf Mouse sat on the floor by the gas pedal and ate a brown crayon. They were both surrounded by intricate mirrors and pulleys attached to the wheel and pedals. Unk steered and Oaf manned the gas.
They heard the roar of a truck. Oaf put his crayon in his mouth. Unk looked up from the game. The headlights were on top of them.
SMASH.
The mice catapulted. Oaf landed on the passenger seat. Unk landed on top of him. An imposing giant—a seven-foot shadow—dropped down from an idling cab and its feet crunched in the snow. The head peeked down and grinned through the frosted window. Then the glass smashed in.
Stomp backed away. “All you, babes.”
A flurry of heavy wings beat the car. Then a pair of three-inch talons gripped the crumbled glass on the windowsill. A brown and silver owl was silhouetted against the snowstorm. In one wing, it held a saltshaker.
Shay-ka shay-ka shay-ka
Unk coughed. Oaf sneezed. They were doused in salt.
“Bro. No, bro. I just drive, bro.” Unk backed against the door. “I just drive. You want a dime bag, bro bro?”
Unk screamed. Oaf sneezed and gulped his crayon. Then the interior was wings and screams and squeaks and claws, and the windshield splattered with a rip of blood.
Stomp saw Lorin with her hand raised toward the candy, frozen in motion, fighting herself, but ever drawn to the glow. The poetry guests all fought, ripped each other’s hair, gouged eyes.
Stomp hopped in the cab and floored it.
KERBOOM. KERRRRRRRRRR
The plow demolished pastry cases and bread cases, scones and cakes.
Stomp put his paw over his eyes. “Oh, no—I’m so sorry, scrumptious morsels.”
Lorin bent with her fingertips an inch from the glowing drizzle. The entire building shuddered with the crash. She gasped and looked up.
Stomp tumbled from the cab, grabbed his kidnap sack, and lunged at the mousetrap.
“Arraga!”
SNAP.
“Owchy!”
The spring slammed down on Stomp’s shoulders and cut a half-inch into his flesh. Tears fell from his eyes. Stomp smushed the chocolate down with his toes and threw his burlap sack overtop. The crowd instantly stopped fighting.
Stomp bent, strained against the pressure of the spring bar. He gave a great heave and the bar bent back and snapped. Stomp stood up straight and wheezed. Two pairs of little feet scampered from the maintenance closet.
“Oy! You ruined it!”
It was Thilly.
Edison followed right behind her. He clapped.
“Good sir, you are incredibly pugnacious.”
Stomp panted with his paws on his knees: “Thank you, Alchemist.”
Thilly, in her little cooking bonnet and dress, smacked Edison on the head. “He knows! How are we supposed to rid the competition now?!”
A fierce look came over her face, and she rolled up her sleeves. Stomp saw two tiny sleeves of prison tats, and one tattoo, clearly defined in bold ink:
QUEEN BITCH.
She pulled a thumbtack shank from the folds of her dress and rushed Stomp.
“Hee-chah!”
“Oh.” He wiped snow from his eyes. “Oh, she’s serious.”
She scurried across the floor and Stomp bent and stuck out his index finger, and gently, politely, picked Thilly up by the head.
“There there, adorable little convict mouse. You had a good run, but…” Stomp whistled and his stomach rumbled. “The world needs bakers.”
King Toodles strutted in the open restaurant front with viscera and a tail hanging from his lips. He slurped in the tail. Toodles brandished the saltshaker. Stomp stepped back. The crowd watched, enrapt. Edison was frozen in place. Stomp dropped Thilly on the floor.
She tried to get up but slipped on a piece of slush. The crowd leaned in. Stomp looked around for popcorn. The crowd leaned in. Her big, wide eyes gazed up at the looming owl.
“Oh, dearie.”
There was a flurry of wings and screams and squeaks and claws, and the pastry case splattered with blood.
The crowd, in unison, politely snapped their fingers.
Four weeks later
Stomp’s plow truck idled at the curb across from DewMoss Bakery. The clouds were slate grey and pregnant. The streets were salty slush lined by crusted and exhaust-tinged snow. Aviators on his forehead, he held a steaming mocha mint latte with a “DewMoss” graphic on the side—a quaint hand-drawn pine tree. He took a sip.
“Ah-hottah!” He bellowed. “Ah-hottah-owchy-hottah!”
A mother on the curb wrapped her arm around her daughter and hurried them across the street.
Plastic wrap covered the front façade of DewMoss Bakery. Men in fluorescent green chatted amiably as they drilled in new windows and wood. Patrons went in and out—there went Ponytail Randy. Lorin Dewby was behind the counter, busy. She looked up long enough to see out and gave Stomp a hearty wave. He tinkled his fingers back at her.
He patted the loaf of fresh, warm old country bread on the passenger seat and flicked on the radio.
…The storm, another behemoth, is expected to dump on northcentral PA any minute now. State officials advise caution on any roadways, as many have not yet been plowed. In other news, fantastical populations have fled back to the forests, as pushback against fantastical rights has led to persecution in urban centers…”
Stomp looked back to the bakery. People smiled. It was warm. At peace. Stomp flicked the radio off. He scratched a fleck of mouse blood from his dash and punched the CD player button.
The great sadness that rested in him was overcome by a desire to embrace the breath that tingled in his chest and electrified his ribs. The sky opened and heavy, wet pack flakes poured down like shaking the branches of a snow-laden evergreen. He buzzed down the electric window, dangled his arm out. He dropped his plow, pulled into the street, and hung his head out:
“Hey now, ya!” He pushed down his aviator glasses. “The plow ‘squatch cometh.”
I’m so glad you came along for this Stomp murder mystery. You never can trust mice, can you? If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can restack the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.
How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Stomp’s last adventure, Stomp Bigfoot Learns Forgiveness at Pine-frosted Christmas, a tale of wintry heartbreak and sasquatch domestication, for those who hurt during the holidays.