The Case of the Missing Mario Bros (Short Story)

 “Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the writer from being sued by the copyright holders…”

To call the weather crummy would be like calling a sharp right turn off a cliff a shortcut. The wind whipped and howled in all directions, blowing away hats and then returning them again. The night sky vomited out snow like it had just swallowed a stale tub of movie theatre popcorn. The whole world gurgled and churned and groaned and shrieked in agony. And while it was impossible to see more than six inches ahead, one thing was perfectly clear: God needed an antacid tablet.

I arrived at the door – the world screaming at my back – and knocked four times before she answered me. A short dame. Blonde, but with dark roots. She looked me up and down and then tried to shut the door.

I blocked her and asked:

“Your name Pauline?”

“Yeah,” she said as she stopped trying to crush my foot. “What do you want?”

“My name’s Jack Diamond. I’m with the police, missing plumbers division. I want to talk to you about your boyfriend.”

Tears welled in her eyes, but she brushed them aside and led me into the house. We walked – well, I hobbled – through a living room littered with the refuse of a directionless life. Baseball bats, golf clubs, tennis rackets, a lab coat, typewriters, go-carts, carpentry tools and what was clearly a back-mounted sunshine gathering water cannon. The boyfriend liked to keep busy, it seemed. As we moved through all of this, she told me how they first met. Standard story: boy meets girl, boy’s pet monkey captures girl, boy saves girl, girl falls for boy. It’s an old story, but one with a sinister new epilogue here.

“This is where it happened,” Pauline said, as we stopped outside a small bathroom just off the living room, “this is where my Mario disappeared.”

I stepped past to look at the room. It was small, decorated with a flower trim wallpaper and dishes of potpourri. It probably had a doily or two lying around. Can’t say I ever knew what a doily was, but this seemed like a very doily kind of bathroom. The walls hummed with water rushing through pipes and the toilet dribbled and heaved like it had just choked down something big and was still getting used to breathing again.

“You know, you should probably jiggle that handle,” I told her.

“Hey, I’m dating a plumber specifically so I don’t have to jiggle any more handles.”

“Fair enough. Has Mario been in the plumbing game long?”
“No, he was a carpenter when I met him. But then his brother – Luigi’s his name – came along and said that the real money’s in draining crap out of people’s pipes.”

I pulled my smokes out of my coat pocket, lit one and took a long, healthy puff of that sweet, sweet tar. Pauline swatted her hand around like her head was surrounded by horse flies.

“Do you mind?” she scolded.

“Not at all. So Luigi was here helping Mario the day he disappeared?”

“Yeah, it was pretty routine,” she coughed, “just snaking the drain or something. I was in the living room at the time and I heard some crashing sounds. But when I went to check, both of them were gone.”

I looked around the bathroom again. There wasn’t much there: no windows, no other doors. Just this one entrance leading straight into the living room. No way they could have left without her knowing, unless…

“Isn’t it possible you just fell asleep and they snuck out to go get a beer or something?”

“They’ve been gone for three days!”

“Okay, so they snuck out to get several beers.”

She turned as red as a baboon’s ass, grabbed my collar, dragged me into the bedroom and threw me to the floor.

“Listen, lady, I’m flattered and all, but I’m on duty right now.”

She didn’t answer… unless you count kicking me in the side as an answer. She just turned to the dresser, opened a drawer and produced a crumpled piece of paper.

“I found this near the toilet after Mario vanished.”

I opened it up, examined it and looked at her. She looked back and, in a choked-down sob, said:

“You see, Mr. Diamond, my Mario didn’t just run off. He was kidnapped.”

What can I say? The dame had a point. Kidnapping plumbers. I’ve seen some terrible things in my days on the force, but that takes the cake. I mean, we’re talking about people who dedicate their entire professional lives to cleaning up our shit and someone goes and victimizes them like this. How can anyone believe there is a just a merciful God in a world like that? I know from experience that plumbers must be protected. I’ve seen what happens in a world without them. I’ve seen rural towns with crap piling up so high, it blocks out the sun; I’ve seen epidemics of fatal constipation because all toilets within two hundred miles were clogged; and I’ve seen lowland valleys flooded with toilet water for exactly that same reason. I lost my parakeet, Koo-Koo Bunny, to one of those floods. So protecting plumbers, it wasn’t just my job; it was personal.

I looked again at the note I got from Pauline. It didn’t say much, but what little it did say spoke volumes.

“Sincerest gratitude from the Mushroom Kingdom.”

Clearly, somebody nabbed Mario and Luigi right out of their own home and left a note to taunt Pauline. Either we were dealing with a garden-variety sadist or somebody with a chip on their shoulder. And I knew of only one guy with a chip big enough and – surprise, surprise – he had just recently become head of a new cartel that specialized in “controlled substances.” Mushroom Kingdom indeed.

I found him holed up in a treehouse on the outskirts of the city. The tree in question looked oddly tropical, planted in a small island in the center of a street. It rose above the nearby skyscrapers, a stark contrast of green and brown amidst the gray and piss. The branches rattled in the wind and shook loose any snow that got trapped amidst the leaves; and anything that pelted the trunk quickly fell to the ground, leaving the tree relatively unaffected by the weather reporters were calling “a sign of the imminent Apocalypse.” The tree was sending a message – a subtle one, but distinct all the same:

“I am untouchable.”

As I approached, I tripped some hidden alarm and conga drums blasted out of loudspeakers, lights went on in the house and a shadow flew out from one of the windows and landed in front of me. It stood up as high as it could – a good three feet above my head – and in the light from the house I could see it was covered in brown hair and wore a red necktie. It beat its chest and howled at the night like it just found out the night had slept with its girl.

I stood there, lit up a cigarette, took a long puff and exhaled, allowing the smoke to waft away into the darkness before I spoke:

“You done?”

The beast just growled, hurling insults and spittle my way.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ Look, are you Don…”

“MR. K!” the monkey man said with great pride.

“Alright, Mr. K, then. You know a guy named Mario?”

Another roar, this one loud enough to turn on the lights in neighboring buildings.

“Mr. K know Mario! Mr. K hate Mario!”

“Right. You used to be his pet monkey until you kidnapped his girlfriend?”

“Mario mean! So, Mr. K take Pauline and bring her to top of building.”

“And then what happened?”

“Mario knock Mr. K off building.”

He roared yet again, setting off a few car alarms this time, and causing one guy directly above us to insist from his window – very calmly and very rationally – that he quiet down because some people had to work the next day. Mr. K then calmly and rationally picked up a nearby barrel and hurled it through that same window.

I sidestepped some falling glass, took another drag on the cigarette and continued my questioning.

“Mario and his brother have gone missing. Know anything about that?”

He looked at me like a vegan looks at a steak dinner and yelled:

“Mr. K no take Mario! Mr. K hate Mario!”

“What about Luigi?”

“Mr. K ambivalent toward Luigi.”

I took in another delicious breath of rasping, toxic air and looked past K to the treehouse.

“So, what do you guys do in there at this K Family Kartel of yours? Dealing in mushrooms, maybe?”

Now, he looked at me like I just showed him a naked picture of his grandmother.

“No mushroom. Only banana.”

“Bananas?”

“Yeah, bananas good.”

I took another puff of smoke and blew it in his face.

“You make me sick. Do you know what bananas look like? And to think, because of people like you, kids can get their hands on them.”

K roared and threw me against the building.

“You no speak bad about bananas. Bananas good! You go now.”

I pushed him off me and straightened my coat.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go. But you be careful and don’t leave town.”

And with that we parted each other’s company. I plodded back through town in the snow, hoping and praying another lead would just fall into my lap. But it wasn’t until I stopped looking at my lap that I saw it. Small and blurry in the periphery of my vision, I thought I saw a dame. A tiny one, a dwarf really. But she vanished too quickly, so I chased after her, catching glimpses of her as I ran. But she was a spry little thing and kept ducking away. Fast as she was, though, I had the longer legs and I eventually caught up with her and cornered her in an alleyway. She was a dame, alright, a short one too, just as I thought. She dressed in white pants and a vest and wore something on her head that almost looked like… a mushroom.

“Well, toots,” I said as I walked up to her, “where were you three days ago?”
She said nothing, only looked up and behind me with terror in her eyes. Instinctively, I followed her gaze to see a shadow descending from on high. It crashed onto the street, throwing snow into the air. When it settled, I once again saw the imposing figure of Mr. K.

“Mr. K just remembered! Mr. K do know something.”

Fully expecting another proud declaration that bananas are in fact good, I ignored him and turned back to the girl. But all I found was an empty alleyway, a brick wall and a small leaky drainpipe.

It looked like I was stuck with following Mr. K’s suggestion, though figuring out exactly what Mr. K’s suggestion was took some doing, what with all his growling and shrieking and crap-flinging. Eventually, I deduced that “The loony man of long ago. Him talk mushroom kingdom.” Meant “There was another plumber who disappeared several years ago; and when police finally found him, he just kept going on and on about a mushroom kingdom. You should probably look into him.”

Sure enough, the story checked out. The plumber’s name was apparently Wario and he was being kept in a nuthouse outside of town.

The building was old, brick, covered in moss. It loomed over me like the shadow of Death after he got a bad employee evaluation. And even during this blizzard a thunderstorm raged on with lightning searing the night sky and scorching the earth, melting snow banks and making room for yet more snow. It’s days like this I wish I drank.

I lit up a cigarette and went inside.

The receptionist took me to Wario’s room. The pale little man sat on his bed, grinning like one of those kids you hear about who torture little animals for fun. This guy had a darkness in front of him. He looked to the receptionist and his mustache curled over his lips in just such a way as to suggest that after he was done torturing little animals, he was going to tie her to some railroad tracks. She barely took notice; she just let me in and closed the door behind me. Wario looked at me like Hannibal Lecter looks at a fat guy, that same smile fixed over and above his lips.

“Hello, Mr. Diamond,” he said in the creepiest way possible.

“You know my name?”

“Yes, the agents of the Mushroom Kingdom warned me you might come.”

“You mean like that little girl with the mushroom head?”

“Yes, precisely. I’m not supposed to tell you anything, but I don’t think I’m going to listen.”

“Good. So, basics first. You’re a plumber?”

“I was. I was on assignment, snaking some lady’s toilet, when I blacked out and woke up… there.”

“How did you get there?”

“I don’t know. I told you I blacked out.”

“What happened there? How did you get back?”

“Oh, now that, Mr. Diamond… that is something I’ll never forget.”

I awoke into a strange landscape. Behind me was a large green pipe sticking out of earth that looked like rock, but felt soft. The sun shone down upon a pastoral landscape, where grass wafted in the gentle breeze, where the hills smiled at you from the distance, where gold coins littered the ground and where magical beanstalks could whisk you away to a world in the clouds, a world of enchantment and riches. And in the distance was a magnificent castle that rose high into the air.

The people – tiny men who looked like a cross between toad people and mushrooms – cheered my arrival; they offered tithes of flowers, leaves, feathers and of course mushrooms; and they welcomed me as the savior of this, their Mushroom Kingdom.

“How is it a place like this needs saving?” I asked

But before they could answer, a flying clown face crashed down from the clouds, swooped overhead and cut a bloody swath through the assembled toads before making its way toward the castle.

I lay on my back, shocked, dazed, covered in toad blood. What had just happened?

“Hurry!” insisted one of the survivors. “You must save our princess.”

I don’t know why, but for some reason that motivated me. I leapt to my feet and rushed to the castle, but I quickly found my path impeded by a squad of angry-looking mushrooms with fangs.

“Goombas!” yelled the toad to my side as he rushed headlong into combat, only for his opponent to bite off his head and spit it out.

A great rage billowed within and drove me forward. I charged at the bloody mushroom, prepared to rip out its fangs with my bare hands; but I stumbled over the former toad’s severed head, flew up into the air and landed on my foe, crushing him into the ground. It wasn’t exactly the plan, but it was effective all the same. So, I leapt up and jumped down onto the rest of the squad and continued this trend as I progressed to the castle.

Goombas came at me in droves, but I crushed them, squashed them, smooshed them, stomped them and bopped them, bending and breaking all beneath me. And I danced, I danced a jig of fury and passion, for I was Wario: Slayer of Goombas. And the sky above colluded with me in my joy, the clouds smiling and singing and cheering me on.

All but that one cloud.

That one cloud that frowned. That cloud that screamed. That cloud that looked right at me and glared. That cloud that fell beneath the cloud line, grew a reptilian head and started hurling large balls of spikes to the ground below. No, that cloud didn’t collude at all.

The spike balls fell to the earth, crushing huts and toads alike. I evaded them as best I could and they landed all around me, further pulverizing the little remnants of goomba that covered the ground. But when the onslaught ceased, I was unharmed. I was surrounded by spike balls and dead things, but I had survived. And I laughed that I survived, laughed the laugh of a madman. But my laughter ceased as the spike balls began to unfurl, to reveal hidden legs, to stand upon those legs and walk toward me. I couldn’t just jump on them – their shells were made of spikes – so I jumped over them and ran. Indestructible spiky basilisks whose only thoughts were of death, there was nothing else I could do. I ran.

They followed me, though. The cloud followed me and threw more them after me. But I was too quick, too spry. I leapt over obstacles, over pipes and over the fire-spitting Venus Flytraps within those pipes. I ran past goombas, jumped across chasms and crawled through the masses of dead toads until at last I had reached the safety of the castle. Here, I thought, I could at last rest.

But I thought wrong, as the castle held its own traps. Rotating pillars of fire, giant pits filled with lava, balls of bouncing flame – all of these impeded my trek. But I made it through. I found the princess: a woman of unimaginable beauty. Unfortunately, I also found standing in front of her a giant lizard/snapping turtle king or something. He was reptilian, this much was certain. He had green skin, a large spiky shell on his back and a crown on his head. His nostrils flared with smoke and as he huffed and roared, fire shot from his throat. And he was big, impossibly big, a behemoth in a half-shell. I looked at him and knew I couldn’t win. Despair set in and I succumbed. And what did he do, this giant reptilian fire-breathing turtle thing? He threw a hammer at my head.

And I fell back, I passed out and the world faded away.

“Have you ever been hit in the head with a hammer, Mr. Diamond?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“It has an interesting way of reshuffling your perspectives, your cranial contents and your moral dispositions.”

“That’s wonderful, but how did you get back?”

“I simply awoke again in the bathroom. The bathroom is the key, I believe. I’ll learn its secrets someday and then I’ll return to the Mushroom Kingdom on my own terms. And when I do, it’ll be a whole new world.”

This was going nowhere, so I stood up and started to walk out, but somehow Wario was there waiting for me, that same twisted smile locked onto his face.

“Leaving so soon? You should take this.”

He took my hand into his and then quickly let go, leaving behind a small orange blossom.

“It’s one of the flowers the toads gave me. It has secrets I only recently discovered. The agent of the Mushroom Kingdom is still out there. You may need that.”

“Thanks,” I said half-heartedly as I gently pulled him away from the door.

“One more thing, Mr. Diamond…”

“Yeah?”

“Remember that everywhere – even an asylum – has a bathroom.”

I left him there to cackle maniacally alone in the dark. But after leaving the asylum and finding myself back out in the thunder blizzard, I considered heading back in. Not because it was cold, but because I still had questions. Why capture plumbers? Who was the lizard king? But I figured if Wario had learned more, he would’ve spoken up. The man did love to talk. So, I traipsed through the snow and decided to head back to Pauline’s and tell her what I knew, whatever it was I knew.

But as I walked, I found my eyes drawn to something strange: a few red dots sitting – almost invisible – amidst the raging and whipping white. I rushed toward them, thinking I knew what they were. And as I near them, I found that they floated above a small figure in a blue vest. The mushroom girl turned to face me. She didn’t run, didn’t flee, didn’t speak. She just took two steps back and disappeared. But that didn’t stop me racing toward her, headlong, reckless, desperate for answers; I ran until I fell through an open manhole and crashed into the sewers below, where she waited for me.

She ran off down the tunnel and I chased after her. She wasn’t running as fast as last time, she wasn’t trying to lose me. Were I at all in a thinking kind of mood, then I would’ve realized she was leading me somewhere – most likely a trap – but I was too tired to think, too cold, too covered in human waste and McDonalds wrappers; so I just ran after her.

We stopped in a tunnel with a metal gate at each end. She stood in front of one gate at the far side, while the gate behind me shut and locked as soon as I had passed it. Again, this spelled ‘trap,’ but correct spelling required thought and I was out of thoughts that day, so I spelled ‘trip’ instead and fell to my knees.

“Who are you?” I asked her, pleaded to her.

“Why, honey, you can call me Toadette,” she said with a sly grin.

“Did you kidnap Mario and Luigi?”

“My people did, yes. We need them to save our princess.”

“But we need them to clean up our shit!”

“Same concept, sweety. You see, our Mushroom Kingdom is at war with the Dark Kingdom of the koopas for various unimportant reasons and they keep capturing our princess to be their queen. Peach is her name, though some of us secretly call her Toadstool, you see, because she’s poison. Her frequent kidnappings are tearing our nation apart. I mean, it’s gotten so bad that the koopa king has coerced some of our own people to help him.”

“The goombas, I take it?”

“Yes, exactly. We’re all fed up and we need someone to take care of all this crap for us. We heard your plumbers are experts at dealing with crap and… well, you can probably piece together the rest on your own.”

“But if your princess is such a pain, why not let the koopas have her? And why would a reptile king want a human princess as his queen anyway?”

“To your first question: because she’s our princess; we have to protect her. To your second, I try not to think about it.”

“But you can’t just take people against their will, especially not our plumbers, what if they don’t want to stay?”

“Oh, but they’re treated very well, like royalty… assuming they don’t touch the goombas, get eaten by plants, hit by the spike guys, shot by cannons, fall off cliffs, fall into lava, fall on spikes, get crushed, blow up, eat the bad mushrooms, get hit with hammers, get hit with fireballs or die in some yet undetermined way.”

“What about the people left behind, the people who will never know what happened to their loved ones?”

“Well, I do leave thank-you notes. It’d be rude not to.”

She didn’t understand why she was wrong. She had to be stopped. I struggled to my feet and started marching toward her.

“I can’t let you keep doing this. We need our plumbers. For the parakeets.”

But she backed out of the tunnel and sealed the gate behind her. Really should have seen that coming.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Diamond, but you’re a liability. If Mario fails us, we’ll have to find somebody else and I can’t have you alerting people.”

“What are you going to do, leave me here to starve?”

“No, of course not. I have something better. We may lose countless people as goombas everyday, but on occasion we have been able to turn a few of the koopa minions to our cause. It was nice knowing you.”

And she ran off, leaving me to the darkness and the strange whistling from above. I looked up and realized that this tunnel had inexplicably high ceilings and something was falling from them. It came crashing down just in front of that far gate: a giant silver monstrosity, bordered with spikes and scowling at me. It leapt back into the air, just higher than me and fell back down a few feet ahead with a mighty:

Thwomp!

I backed up as far as I could and the metal thing slowly bounced toward me.

Thwomp!

I frantically searched my pockets for anything that could help.

Thwomp!

No gun, no taser, no pepperspray, no baton – what kind of a cop was I?

Thwomp!

All I found was that flower I got from Wario, that ratty orange thing he said he got from the toads.

Thwomp!

Frustrated, I crushed the thing in my fist and turned my attention to the bars on the back gate. Maybe I could bend them.

Thwomp!

But before I could even try, I noticed that my clothes had turned as orange as the flower, except for my coat and hat, which had both turned white.

Thwomp!

I opened my hand to see the flower, but it was gone, replaced with a tiny ball of fire.

Thwomp!

The metal crushing thing was one jump away now, but the fireball grew in my hand and it was so big and so bright that it was almost blinding.

The thing jumped into the air and I hurled the fireball at it and the two of them exploded on contact, flying backward through the far gate and crashing against a wall.

Shadows returned to the tunnel and I rushed ahead to find the metal thing seared through and wrecked and Toadette long gone. It was over.

Except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. One question still needed answering. I knew who kidnapped Mario and Luigi and I knew why. But how? That was still vexing me.

So, I returned to Pauline’s, stormed right into her bathroom and just stared at it. It was just as I left it: same décor, same tub, same sink, same toilet that was still running because nobody could be bothered to jiggle a flippin’ handle. There were no windows, the walls were solid and Pauline was awake outside the whole time. How did they do it? I stood there, pondering this in absolute silence for hours… well, nearly absolute silence. There was still that maddening cacophony of running water in the toilet. Eventually, this became so distracting that I jiggled the handle myself.

But as I fiddled with that toilet flusher, a grand epiphany bloomed like a fire flower in the deepest reaches of my mind. I opened the lid and flushed the toilet. I watched as the water swirled into a vortex that had sufficient power to compact large materials and deliver them down that tiny aperture into that complex network of pipes that could lead anywhere. As the water settled, I closed the lid, fell to the ground and lit up a celebratory cigarette, content that I had found my answer.

http://www.anders-fischer.net/stories/the-case-of-the-missing-mario-bros/

http://www.anders-fischer.net/stories/the-case-of-the-missing-mario-bros/