Monster - A. Lee Martinez [47]
Satisfied with its latest acts of vandalism, the sphinx sat before Greta and asked, “If Train A leaves New York traveling at two hundred miles per hour…”
“Oh, come on,” said Greta. “That’s not even a riddle. It’s a math problem.”
“… and Train B is leaving New York traveling at one hundred miles per hour…”
Greta found a pen and small notebook in her suit pocket and hurriedly scribbled down what she could remember.
“Could you repeat the question?” she asked the sphinx.
The creature frowned and turned its head at an angle, puzzled.
“I missed some of it,” said Greta. “I know I can get the answer if you just repeat the question.”
“Is that your final answer?” asked the sphinx.
“What answer? I didn’t answer.”
The sphinx wheeled and leaped on the car.
“I didn’t answer!” said Greta.
The sphinx seemed not to care. It tore a bigger hole in the roof and reached inside to rake its claws across the front seat. Then it squatted and urinated on the upholstery. With a satisfied grin, it hopped before Greta, who was determined to get the next riddle right, even if it was too late to save her car. She could smell the sphinx urine from here, a heady mix of ammonia and tuna fish.
“What is the final digit of pi?” posed the sphinx.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows,” said Greta aloud without thinking about it.
The sphinx turned toward Greta’s ruined automobile.
“Wait, wait.”
The sphinx glanced over its shoulder and raised an eyebrow.
“Eight,” answered Greta.
The sphinx sat down, folded its wings, and yawned. It didn’t move toward Greta’s car, and in fact, seemed to have lost interest in everything except its own grooming.
“Eight?” said Greta. “Was that right?”
The sphinx wrinkled its nose at her but didn’t reply.
A van pulled up beside her. A man leaned out of the passenger-side window. “We have a call about a sphinx. Is this it?”
Greta nodded. She hadn’t called, but the huge mythological creature sitting just a few feet away answered the question.
The man and his partner, a short, dark-haired woman, exited the van.
“Did you answer a riddle?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Greta. “Then it just sat down.”
“Yup, they’ll do that,” said the woman.
The woman had Greta fill out some paperwork while the man mixed together a potion. He poured it into a squirt gun and doused the sphinx with the green concoction. The sphinx fell asleep and shrank to the size of a house cat. He stuck it in a cage. It all seemed to make some kind of sense to Greta, though exactly what kind, she couldn’t say.
“What demands an answer but never asks a question?” said Greta.
“Telephone,” replied the woman.
Greta completed the paperwork just as a cab appeared.
“Are you the lady who called for a cab?” asked the driver.
“Uh, sure. Yeah, that’s me.” She was just glad to get out of there, away from that weirdness. At work, some people asked what happened to Jeanine and Mary. She had no good answer, only a hazy memory that didn’t really gel. She was ready to get to work and put it behind her.
She discovered her office was inhabited by a flock of miniature gargoyles. They’d opened her drawers and upended her furniture. They’d torn the carpeting to pieces, and two were busy gnawing on her computer.
Quietly, Greta closed the door and decided to take an early lunch.
12
Some experimentation showed that gaborchends had a particular weakness for Cheez Whiz, and it wasn’t difficult to lure the second goat creature out of the bathroom and onto a transmogrification rune.
“I think this all has something to do with Miss Hines,” said Chester.
“Why would you think that?” asked Monster.
“I don’t know. No good reason. Just an intuition. This crypto surge seems out of place. And it started with the grocery store incident.”
“That’s arbitrary,” said Monster. “I run into cryptos every day. It’s my job. And activity rises and falls. It has to start somewhere. It’s easy to notice a foreign