Ken's Blog

The table was bare but for four empty espresso cups and two small bronze music boxes. “How remarkable!” exclaimed Francesca.

“What’s remarkable?” Umbry asked.

“That one can find such an excellent espresso in this part of the globe. My compliments to Lindsay.”

“Lindsay doesn’t do coffee,” snorted Umbry, nodding her head toward her partner. “Julia here is our barrista.”

Francesca quickly turned to Julia, a contrite look on her face. “My dear, I’m so terribly sorry for my faux pas. That was by far the finest espresso I have had in quite some time. Can you ever forgive my stupidity?”

Julia was blushing, completely charmed, and very much enjoying the compliment. She was extremely proud of her skill with an espresso machine, a skill that was far too rarely acknowledged. “Francesca,” she replied, “It would be my honor to prepare espresso for you any time. If that means we’ll get to see more of you, then we are the lucky ones.”

Clay watched the smile of mutual appreciation between Francesca and Julia, as well as the much more more difficult to read expression that had now formed upon Umbry’s face. Instinctively he sensed that this would be an excellent time to shift gears.

“We were here for a purpose, ladies,” he said.

The three women just looked at him in silence, a silence that seemed to go on for an uncomfortably long time.

It was Francesca who finally spoke.

“They are so remarkably alike.”

Clay was surprised. He too had noticed the uncanny resemblance between the two young detectives, but this was not a statement he had expected from Francesca. It was very unlike her to comment upon the appearance of others. He glanced at Julia and Umbry to see whether they had taken offense, and found that both of them were merely watching the older woman with rapt attention.

Only then did Clay realize that Francesca had not been speaking about SunMoon at all. In fact, following his lead, she had picked up the two little bronze music boxes off the table and was now examining them, studying both carefully, turning over first one then the other, all the while placing them together in various ways with her long elegant fingers.

“When you see the two of them one alongside the other,” she continued, “they become quite fascinating, don’t you think? Both were clearly the work of the same highly skilled craftsman. Identical in every way but for the insigniae engraved into their lids. I found the one box to be merely amusing, but for the unfortunate circumstance of its sudden appearance in my life. But the two together are something else entirely. I am quite certain that they were designed to convey a message.

Clay looked toward the two young women. “We won’t be disturbed, will we?”

Julia shook her head. “Lindsay is under strict instructions. Absolutely no interruptions until I give the all clear. If Armageddon were to break out sometime in the next forty minutes, he has my permission to knock, as long as he does it quietly.”

Clay nodded. “Good. I don’t want Francesca disturbed while she is working.”

The girls looked at him quizzically. He chuckled. “I’m sure you’ve checked up on her, knowing how thorough you two are, but what you won’t find in your files is the rather remarkable true history of our elegant friend here. Let’s just say that there was a time, before Freddie came into her life, when Francesca was the top forensic cryptologist in the antifascist movement — she had a lot to do with bringing down the National Front.”

“Really?” Julia and Umbry exclaimed in unison, a look of genuine delight on their faces.

Francesca, for her part, was ignoring the entire conversation. Clayton had already told her that these rather unusual young women could be trusted, and his word was quite sufficient for her. The ethic she had learned in the Movement had never really changed. From the world at large Francesca kept her secrets, but every individual within the circle of trust was a Comrade.

“Now, my darlings,” she explained, “There are etched lines upon the Earth symbol that adorns this box, the one formerly in the possession of poor Freddie. The lines have worn away with time, yet may still be faintly discerned. One can see that they indicate a planet in partial eclipse.” She pointed delicately to various places on the box lid, while the others looked on, fascinated.

“The meaning of the etching is clear – the light is meant to come from this direction, whereas this other nearby direction is meant to cast a shadow.” She picked up the other box, turning it at an odd angle. “Illuminated by sun, yet eclipsed by moon. Yes, I see now. There seems to be a slight groove along these two lids… If one slides one groove along the other, just so…”

There was an audible click, as both boxes simultaneously sprung open. The others gasped.

“Most ingenious,” Francesca continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “We found no key because each box is itself a key – the key that unlocks its sister box.”

At that moment Lindsay burst in. “Lindsay!” said Julia. “I told you not to disturb us unless Armageddon had arrived!”

“I’m afraid that Armageddon came early this year,” he smirked. For the first time they noticed the Lorcin L 380 in his hand. He gestured with the gun toward the boxes in Francesca’s hands. “I’ll be taking those, thank you.”

“Don’t give them to him,” shouted Julia.

“Hey wait, you don’t get to say that. I’m the one holding the gun,” Lindsay tried to look menacing.

“Gimme a break, Lindsay.” Julia rolled her eyes. “You come in here waving a lousy Saturday Night Special, and suddenly we’re supposed to respect you or something? If you’re as good at being a bad guy as you were at being a good guy, I’m rooting for our team.”

Umbry decided she’d better do something before her partner got carried away – literally. “Julia, I’m afraid we have little choice, we need to do as the man says.” There was another click, and then Umbry was holding the now closed boxes out to Lindsay.

Lindsay glared at her. “I didn’t say to close them!”

Clay spoke up. “You didn’t tell her not to. Although I suspect your client will be quite satisfied just to know that they can be opened. If I know him the way I think I do, I’m pretty sure he will be able to work out the rest on his own very soon.”

“I hope you’re right Terransky – for your sake!” Lindsay slowly backed out of the room, clutching the two music boxes with one hand and waving the gun around with the other. He shot one last glance at Umbry. “Don’t even think about following me.”

And then he was gone.

***

“So Lindsay was a double agent,” Julia said. “That would certainly explain his lousy secretarial skills. Clay, how did you know who he was working for?”

Clay shrugged. “There are very few players in this game. I did some research when Francesca first showed me the box. There are records of these things, if you know where to look. Two bronze music boxes — a paired set — surfaced on the antiquities market twenty three years ago. One of them was a match for Frederick’s box, the one engraved with an image of the Earth. The other was described as having a moon and sun engraved into its lid. Not so surprising, since Freddie’s note specifically directed me to you two. Although I didn’t realize at first that you actually had the other box.”

“And now Lindsay — or rather, his employer — has taken possession of both boxes,” Francesca spoke up for the first time since Lindsay’s appearance. “It is fortunate that the young man is so stupid.”

“Why is that?” Julia asked.

“Because, my dear, it would have been extremely easy for him to have reopened the box. He could simply have shot the three of you, one at a time, until I had agreed to open them again. I suspect I would have acceeded to his wish after the very first death.”

“Oh,” said Julia, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“But Clay did,” Umbry chimed in. She was smiling up at Clay. “That’s why he did the whole routine about Lindsay’s client knowing how to open the box – to create a distraction — a distraction that probably saved our lives.”

“I do what I can,” Clay smiled sheepishly, feeling suddenly shy under Umbry’s admiring gaze.

“I don’t think Lindsay had it in him,” Julia said doubtfully. Just then the cat wandered in. Absently she started to pet it. “Damn, we were so close,” she said. “Well, at least the idiot didn’t run off with our cat.” The cat started to purr as Julia scratched between its ears. “Look guys, I’m glad we’re still alive and everything, but where do we go from here? We don’t even know what was in the two boxes!”

“Oh yes we do,” Umbry said. “I’m quicker than I look.” She held open her hand. In her palm were two tiny sealed envelopes.

Julia beamed. “That’s my girl.”

Julia sat at her desk, absently drawing a doodle of a happy child in happier times. She had long ago given up on trying to concentrate – the room was littered with half-read books and unfinished doodles, the trash overflowing with crumpled drawings. She glared at the unfinished picture, and sighed in defeat. Crumpling up the paper, she added it to the growing heap.

There was a knock at the door and she straightened herself up, not bothering even to try to tidy up the mess. “Come in.”

Umbry swept into the room, her long black hair flowing behind her, her arms full with old case files. She used both elbows to shove papers off the table, then carefully laid the pile of case files down in their place. Julia watched with a sort of absent half-interest, her head leaning on her hand. The silence became thick with something awful.

At last Umbry broke the silence. “I want to see if we can find anything out about Mr. Whi–”

“I know.”

Silence again.

“It’s been a long time since someone’s–”

“I know.”

And silence.

“Then you should know I’m not good at comforting people,” Umbry snapped, glaring at her partner.

Julia almost smiled at that. “That is true. I consider it to be one of your finer qualities.” She turned to face her partner. “It gets to you, you know? This is like, what, the third person close to us in three years?”

Umbry perched herself on the edge of the table. “According to the FBI, three murders with the same criteria designates a pattern.” She was smiling a little as she said it, but it was just the ghost of a smile.

Julia could tell she was serious. “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” she said gravely. “This can’t be a coincidence. It doesn’t feel right.” Then she grinned. “Hey, look at the bright side. At least now we know where the other box is.”

She hesitated for just a second and then stood up. Umbry followed her to the back of the room to an old filing cabinet, and together they opened the very bottom drawer. Reaching way into the back, Julia’s fingers touched a small bronze box. She took it out and placed it on the table.

It was a music box. On the top, lovingly engraved, was a tiny insignia of the sun eclipsed by the moon. The two of them stared at it, each of them remembering. They were still standing there, like pensive statues, when Lindsay charged into the room.

“Yo,” he called out, “you wanted some files about that Italian woman, right? Franchinella or something?”

Umbry glared at him. “Francesca.”

“Right, that.” He stopped and took a better look at his two bosses. How symmetrical they looked – they always seemed like twins when they were thinking deeply about something. They had exactly the same thinking face, he noticed. “Um, am I interrupting something?”

“What?” They both asked at the same moment, turning to look at him in unison.

Lindsay shook his head, at a loss for words. Julia was the first to move into action, half-skipping past him toward his computer. “No problem — I’ll check out those files on Francesca, thanks. You interrupted us with something relevant, so it’s okay,” she said, smiling as she passed him, but her smile seemed rushed and perhaps a little contrived. Lindsay sighed, realizing that whatever was going on he was out of his depth. He retreated to the living room to pet the cat while Julia worked on his computer, leaving her partner alone with the music box.

Umbry sighed, pulling at the top of the box, trying one more time to tease it open. As always, though, it wouldn’t budge. She ran her fingers gently over the hand-engraved symbol, and then reluctantly put the box back in its place in the bottom filing cabinet drawer. She straightened herself, turned off the light in her partner’s room and silently closed the door behind her.

“Clayton, darling, it is Francesca.”

For a moment Clay felt only astonishment. Then a big grin came over his face. “Francesca! How wonderful to hear from you.”

“Yes, my darling, it has been ages, and I have missed you. We will meet for coffee.” He understood that this was not a request. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Coffee with Francesca was very much something he looked forward to.

It was one of those charming little European style cafés, tucked away in a narrow side street, a place known only to locals. One sad day it would be discovered by tourists — betrayed, perhaps, by some well-meaning writer of guidebooks — and the thronging hordes would quickly suck the magic right out of it. And then, as if guided by some immutable law of cities, another café would spring up somewhere to take its place. But for now it was safe — you had to know somebody to find it, or at least know somebody who knew somebody.

Francesca knew everybody. Looking across at her beautiful aristocratic face, he could see even in this dim light that she was, at fifty six, far lovelier than any twenty four year old could ever hope to be. Francesca was like a fine italian wine – maturity only deepened her appeal, added new flavors and mysteries. Right now she was filling him in, her elegant phrases framed by a lilting Milanese accent that Carlo Porta himself would have envied.

“…Not that Frederick and I were happy toward the end, precisely. Dear Freddie was such a lost little boy, in so many ways. I suppose that was an essential part of the appeal, you see, at least during the early years. Summers in the south of France, that little cottage we kept in Majorca, the parties and the party people, it was all delightful, and I regret none of it. I stood by him through those ridiculous accusations, of course. But over time I came to accept that he was more boy than man. A boy I loved with all my heart, but alas not quite the yang to my yin, if you see what I mean.”

Clay nodded, letting her ramble on. We each deal with grief in our own way, he mused to himself. If Francesca needed to reframe her relationship with her departed lover, to create some distance in her mind, who was he to judge? We all get by, and many of us wage our battles with Thanatos by turning his own dark weapons against him. Some of us drink.

His reverie was interrupted by something she said. “Wait,” he said, “Go over that last part again.”

Francesca laughed, shaking her head. “Oh Clayton, you were always the dreamer – drifting off somewhere. Wherever does your mind go in such moments?” She regarded him with a fond look, and continued. “I was just speaking of the music box. The strange little box of bronze I found upon Freddie’s desk the day after his suicide, quite pretty actually, one of those silly little dual-purpose things in which you can place your small treasures and what-nots. It plays the most adorable tune, but this tune I cannot place. The melody is strangely familiar, as though one has encountered it before, perhaps as one remembers a tune last heard in childhood.” She looked thoughtful, a faintest crease of worry appearing upon her forehead. Then she leaned forward, gazing into Clay’s eyes with an intensity that was almost mesmerizing. “What I cannot understand — the puzzle, if you will — is how my Frederick could have been in possession of such an object without my ever having seen it. Was it a gift, perhaps, from another? Was I not woman enough for him?”

Suddenly she broke down and started to sob. Awkwardly Clay offered her his napkin. He wished he could say something that would comfort her, but there really were no words. Even Francesca’s formidable armor of European insoucience was no match for such an unexpected death.

He let her weep for a few minutes, waiting until he thought she was ready. He had already decided he would simply say it straight out, unadorned. “Francesca, Frederick’s death was not a suicide.”

She looked at him, startled. He could tell this revelation had caught her completely off-guard. “But the note he left, the method he chose to die — so much like his own writings — the way he had cut himself off from everyone those last months, how even I could not reach him…” Clay waited quietly until her protests had run their course.

“He sent me another note, quite a different one,” Clay continued, handing her the letter he had received. “We have established that this letter is real — and the suicide note a forgery. Your Freddie was murdered, I’m afraid.”

He could see that she had already regained possession of herself — the murder of her lover, horrific as it may have been, was easier for her to accept than the possibility of suicide. Francesca had a formidable mind, and now it was fully engaged. “Enemies?” she pondered. “Who would be an enemy to poor Freddie? He was more than enough of a danger to himself, without any need for outside assistance.” Absently she started to take a sip from her espresso, realized the little cup was empty, and placed it gently back down into its saucer. “What on earth are we dealing with here, my dear?”

“The music box,” Clay replied. “I have a hunch there is a connection. Have you looked inside the box?”

She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I confess that was the very first thought I had upon finding the cursed thing. I was seeking a clue for his suicide, although I was a bit fearful of what I might find. Perhaps only that after all this time I had lost his heart to another. I do not know whether I could have withstood the second loss, on top of the first.”

“And what did you find?”

Francesca shrugged. “Nothing, nothing at all. The little bronze box is quite securely locked. I searched through all the drawers of his desk, somewhat frantically I’m afraid, but the key has turned up nowhere.”

“A private eye…?” Umbry stared at Clay suspiciously. She didn’t like it. Why would a gumshoe go around cold calling, just to share a case?

“A PI?” Julia stared at him as well, tilting her head in thought. He seemed nice, like he was on top of things. And he was obviously determined – she could tell, from his expression. Maybe a little tired, judging from the circles under his eyes, but he seemed okay.

Umbry looked over at Julia hesitantly, but Julia smiled and that was good enough for her.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Clayton. My name is Umbry Stykes, and this is Julia Strype. I believe you’ve come to the right place.”

Clay relaxed a little, and watched as the girls began to fix the place up, moving around the room in an ordered whirl, like one person with two bodies. Umbry set up the tables while Julia closed the curtains, carefully avoiding the cat and managing to give it a pet as well. Clay took a seat closest to the window and they took the other side, sitting next to each other in what seemed to be symmetrical poses. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope.

“I received this recent letter from a friend, recommending you two,” he began, opening his briefcase. He took out a copy of the letter and a collection of photos, which Julia began to peruse.

The first picture was of a man, smiling, with beautifully snowy mountains in the background. The man seemed to be perhaps in his 50s or early 60s, but he’d certainly aged well, and he looked happy. There were several more pictures of him similar to these, next to friends or in large groups, always smiling. In one he was standing next to Clay. His smile looked slightly sadder in this picture.

“Does he look familiar?” Clay asked, watching them. “He’d been a client of mine, Mr. White.”

“He rings a bell, but I can’t say,” Julia finally said, biting her lip.

Umbry scowled at Clay. “You mean to say he’s dead?”

He nodded. “You’re quite observant, Umbry. The letter I received from him was dated just prior to his death, and I received it only afterward.” Clay held out two pieces of paper and an envelope, which Umbry promptly took and smoothed out in front of her. Meanwhile Julia flipped to the last picture in the collection, which was obviously a crime-scene photo. Mr. White was hanging by a rope from the ceiling. He wasn’t smiling at all.

Umbry read the letters. The first was addressed to Clayton Adam Terransky. Judging from the envelope, it had apparently gone to several places before reaching its destination. “Dear Clay,” it read.

“If you are reading this letter, then I am already dead. My instructions to my solicitor were to keep this note securely locked in my safety deposit vault in Zurich until such time as I ceased to be. You, my dear Clayton, are the only one I can trust. Here is the address of a certain detective agency – two charming if rather eccentric young women. Go to them – they will help…” The signature was scribbled, but Umbry read it as Frederick White.

The second was a suicide note. Julia leaned over Umbry’s side and read it aloud.

“For me, the world just isn’t enough anymore. Those close to me have all died, and there is no longer anyone I can trust. I will take my leave now. Tell the world that I was once Frederick White, and let me die in peace.”

The note was also signed, and the signatures appeared to match. Julia looked back at the picture of the smiling man and the cloudy mountains and sighed. “Poor man…”

“It wasn’t a suicide, Julia,” Umbry said. “This note was forged.” Julia wrinkled her nose at Umbry, surprised, while Umbry continued, “But you know that already, don’t you, Mr. Terransky?”

“Yes, I do. The forger was skilled and could almost reproduce Fred’s handwriting, but he used contractions. Fred hated those. In every piece of writing I have from him, he has never used a contraction.”

“So you knew him as more than a client. He was your friend.” Julia was still staring at the pictures, which she’d now spread out in front of her.

“Yes, he was. And that’s why I’ve followed his instructions here.”

“But why here? We aren’t exactly famous. We are so definitely not famous.”

“He knew you. In fact, you were very important to him,” Clayton said. He took out another case file from his briefcase, this one seemingly a little older. But the girls knew exactly what it was as soon as they saw it.”This is…” Julia began, staring at it as she plucked the memories from her head.

“…It’s our breakout case. The Fitzgerald case, with the millionaire,” Umbry continued. “Everyone thought the motive was burglary, but the theft was just smoke and mirrors. And there was a Mr. White — your Mr. White it appears. He was the prime suspect until our sleuthing cleared him. We never actually met the man, but I knew I remembered that face. Wow. This guy gets his fair share of cases, doesn’t he?” Julia continued to stare at the photo, finally laying it back down and piling it with the others. “This time the case is his own death.” She shivered.

“But he isn’t just hiring one gumshoe,” Umbry mused, still deep in thought. “If he’d just wanted SunMoon on the case, he could’ve easily sent that letter to us directly. No, he wanted you in on it too, which means either that he wanted us all to work together or that you’re involved. Perhaps both.”

Clay stared at her. The sorts of implications she was making… “Do you suspect me of anything? I have a clear alibi. The police already interviewed me and didn’t find me suspicious–”

“We’re not suspecting you, Clayton.” Julia was smiling, slightly bemused. “Umbry can be like that sometimes, which is why I’m the one who deals with the witness reports. Now the fact is, Mr. White knew that in order to solve his case you would need to join forces with Umbry and myself, and I know that the two of us feel horribly that he died, especially after all that’s happened to him in the past. He knew that coming to us would yield good results for you, and it will. So if you’ll trust us, I’m sure we’ll have this case solved in no time, no matter what it takes. Sound good?”

Clay found himself touched by this speech. He had expected eccentricity, but he hadn’t expected charm. He found himself shaking Julia’s hand, then Umbry’s, and promising to keep them in the loop. He felt oddly elated all the way back home. He thought to himself that it had been a successful first meeting, and he figured he might sit down and have a glass to celebrate. Only the one glass. Just then the phone rang. He managed to pick it up just before the answering machine kicked in, sounding slightly out of breath when he answered.

“Hello?”

He was running fast – as fast as he’d ever remembered running. Sweat was pouring down into his eyes, making everything before him smear into a blur. Darting into one narrow alleyway and out of another, he thought a few times he’d given it the slip – the Beast – but then he’d hear its heavy footfalls behind him again. Where was he? The signs were all in Japanese – Tokyo, maybe. Asakusa district. But the streets were deserted, which was impossible. No time to think about that now. He didn’t look back – that would just slow him down, the hideous thing would catch up with him and that would be the end. Wait – did he even know what the Beast looked like? Had he ever looked back? Something about that last thought seemed wrong. “This has happened before,” he heard himself saying aloud, although he could swear he hadn’t moved his lips. That was the last thought he had before he felt a claw attach itself to his left ankle. He tried to shake free but the claw dug in and pulled savagely backward, drawing his snared foot with it. Needles of pain shot up his leg. He began screaming even before he started to fall…

Clay woke up covered in sweat.

So the dreams were coming back. He hadn’t had one of those since the first months after she… He stopped the thought before it had time to fully form, with a discipline born of long practice. He tried sitting up, and promptly realized he had a raging hangover. Slowly, deliberately, he swung his legs to the floor and managed to get his weight under him, to stand up. It took all his concentration to make it to the bathroom, to get his head under the shower, one hand pressed against the cool tile for support, the other hand turning on the cold water tap.

It felt good. Icy cold, damned good. Brain function began to return, clarity restored, a clarity he’d obviously been trying his darnedest to avoid the night before. He didn’t remember the exact sequence, but it seemed that at some point last night he’d given up trying to keep the memories out, had poured himself a drink, only the one, just to take the edge off. But of course it was never only the one, was it?

He dried off his hair, and with a purposeful air walked back into the bedroom. One of the two whiskey bottles was empty, but the other was only half finished – good thing he’d passed out when he had or he’d be feeling a lot worse right about now. He looked at the labels, impressed. Both bottles were Macallan thirty year old single malt – pure liquid gold. How the hell had he come into possession of such riches? Most likely the misplaced gratitude of a wealthy former client. Back in the day, when he’d still had wealthy clients. Before…

He could feel the thought stop cold in his head as he walked over to the sink, ran the tap, and carefully poured out the remaining whiskey. How odd to be pouring over four hundred dollars worth of liquor down the drain – more money than he had left in the bank, last time he’d checked. But now he had something better than money – something he hadn’t had in a long time – an interesting case.

It took him only twenty minutes to shower the rest of his body, shave badly, pull on his old suit and head out the door. Another twenty to get to his destination. When he arrived he looked dubiously at the dilapidated old store front. The rotten smell emanating from the grocery store next door was definitely not helping his lingering hangover. He couldn’t figure out which looked more out of place here, the ancient doorbell beneath the faded sign on the glass door, or the fluffy white cat sleeping in the window. He declared it a tie. Trying to look as dignified as possible, he rang the bell.

The front half of the doorbell promptly fell off the door. It hit the ground with a loud ringing thud that seemed to go right through his aching head. He stared down balefully, wondering if this had been a good idea after all. Just then the door opened and a young brown haired man opened the door.

“Welcome to SunMoon detective services. We solve your cases, night or day. How may I help you?” The young man smiled helpfully. “Please don’t mind the doorbell – it does that.”

Clay remembered the importance of first impressions. He thought of various ways of expressing regret over the doorbell incident, decided in the end to pretend it had never happened. Squaring his shoulders, he looked the young man in the eye and was about to speak, when suddenly he realized he was seeing double. Well, almost double. Two young women had just appeared. They looked almost identical, except that one had bright orange curls and the other possessed the blackest head of straight hair he’d ever seen. Both women had one eye hidden by her hair, so that between them they had only two eyes visible. For a moment he had the oddest sensation that he was looking into the eyes of a single person.

“Oh my,” he said to himself, “One person, two heads.” His own head started to ache with renewed vigour. Then he got a hold of himself, and started again.

“My name is Clayton Adam Terransky, private investigator, and I have an interesting case for you.”

This is the first part (of thirty parts) of a Nanowrimo story that my collaborator and I will be writing, as one post every day, throughout the month of November.

It really didn’t seem like that amazing a place when you first saw it. The sign on the glass door was old (but could have been older), its text faded (but still legible). To the left of the street entrance was an old grocery store whose food was nearly all rotten or infested with some sort of bug — to the right, a restaurant that never got any customers. A fluffy white cat was sleeping in the window. From the outside, the agency looked more like a dentist’s office. The only clue to its true nature was the small, badly-drawn symbol on the aforementioned old, faded sign — the sun, eclipsed by the moon, and a simple phrase in plain text: SunMoon detective services.

Of course it was a run-down place, but that was probably a good thing. Those girls, the SunMoon detectives, were so smart that a place any nicer would have flooded them with customers and undoubtedly burnt them out within a month and a half. They liked it here. Or rather, they didn’t particularly dislike it. None of their neighbours talked to them much, and they had to do the occasional odd job to pay the rent, but when they got their cases, they solved every one. Whether it was lost cat or a murderer on the lam, they could find it for you.

The self-proclaimed ‘Sun’ half of their service was exceedingly bored at the moment. Her office was littered with bad drawings of smiling faces and rainbows. On her desk, in place of the customary picture of a loved one, she had a newspaper clipping from the last time they’d solved a really big case a few years ago. Her computer ran a screensaver of a bustling city during the day, but it was of no interest to her at the moment. Right now she was wrapped up in one of her doodles, trying desperately to draw a lion basking in the sun purely from memory. Or at least that was the picture in her head. To anyone else the drawing looked a lot more like an anorexic cat right after being run over.

But that wasn’t the kind of thought she would have. She was the sun, and the Sun should be bright, productive and cheery. Oh! Productive! That’s right, she was supposed to be doing something worthwhile. She straightened herself up, pushing orange curls off of her right eye, and wrote in large letters on the top of her doodle-filled page: NOTES. Smiling and having accomplished her goal, she slouched again and continued drawing her lion. Julia Strype, after all, wouldn’t be caught dead doing something non-productive.

Speaking of non-productive, in an adjacent office, one door down from Julia the ‘Sun’, sat the ‘Moon’, although this title was not exactly self-proclaimed. She couldn’t remember exactly how she had gotten to be the ‘Moon’, but suffice to say it was not her idea. Her room was far less cheery than that of her partner. On the wall were miscellaneous prints of waterfalls and mountainous landscapes, neither of which particularly ignited her interest, and on her desk was a faded newspaper clipping from when they were still Genius Teen Detectives. On the back wall there was a colourful dartboard, festooned at the moment with about a dozen magnet darts, none of which were even vaguely close to the center of the board.

She glanced over quickly at her computer’s screensaver, which displayed a number of tropical fish swimming across the screen, back and forth, back and forth. Quite mesmerizing, she thought, if you stared at it long enough. Right now it was the angelfish. Sighing, she pushed her straight black hair out of her left eye and threw another dart, missing the dartboard completely. Maybe it was her lack of depth perception… why did they have these stupid haircuts, anyway? Concealing one eye each from the rest of the world only debilitated them, didn’t it? Anyway, all things considered it probably hadn’t been her idea. She decided to throw her next dart straight up into the air and catch it, but it ended up hitting the door behind her and landing, broken, on the ground. She sighed again, frustrated.

It had been months since their last case, and their last case had been way too easy. They needed something big. Umbry Stykes, the ‘Moon’ detective, really hated being bored. A whole world full of crime, and yet it seemed there weren’t any interesting cases they could get their hands on. Friggin’ FBI and the police and all the other acronyms got all the good ones. Maybe the days of the PI were really over. Maybe they should shorten their name. S and M? Oh wait, that didn’t sound too good at all. She wrinkled her nose, stretched and stood up, walking out into the lobby. She was greeted by an apathetic college guy and a sleeping cat. She patted it (the sleeping cat, that is, NOT the college guy) on the head and it purred. The college guy, on the other hand, didn’t even acknowledge her presence.

“Any calls, Lindsay?” She asked, trying to act as if she hadn’t come out here for the express purpose of knowing if there were any calls.

“What do you think?”

Umbry sighed. “Good point.” She gave the fluffy cat one last scratch behind the ears and left. The cat turned lazily to gaze up at Lindsay. He smiled back at it before going back to looking at funny pictures of other cats. Oh, how he loved cats.

A few minutes later Julia emerged from her office. She scratched the white cat’s ear and rubbed its belly, and the cat purred loudly in contentment. She smiled.

“Any calls, Lindsay?”

“What do you think?”

“…Oh.” Somewhat disappointed, she gave the cat one last belly rub and left for her office, closing the door behind her.

Lindsay rolled his eyes. “What weirdos. I swear, as soon as I get a better job than this…” He leaned back in his chair and yawned, pushing shaggy brown hair out of his eyes. The cat stared at him for a second through half-open eyes and then curled back up in a ball to continue sleeping, apparently having had enough excitement for one day. He grinned in appreciation at the feline’s economy of expression, and was about to continue perusing his catalogue of comical cats when the front doorbell rang. Startled by the unexpected sound, he jumped out of the chair, quickly scooping up the mess of doodles, darts and candy wrappers and sweeping them into the desk drawer. If he’d been able to get to the door faster, he could have told his customer that their bell was very old. Now he could only watch as half of the bell detached itself from the glass door, making a very depressing muffled ringing as it hit the ground. Bashfully, he massaged his temples, and proceeded to flip his long bangs away from his face. He put on an obviously fake ghost of a smile. The cat, now awake again, watched this unexpected bustle of activity with clinical interest.

“Welcome to SunMoon detective services. We solve your cases, night or day. How may I help you?”

Halloween eve in New York City, and the last day before my writing partner and I begin our November novel. In this pause between two projects, I have time to reflect with nostalgia on something we used to have in NYC. It’s not something everybody cares about, and I realize I’m going to sound hopelessly old fashioned in some circles for being so gauche as to mention this. But I can remember a time – not all that long ago really, when New York City actually had a democratically elected mayor.

Now of course we have the illusion of an election. Everybody here is going through the motions, pretending it’s a real election, pretending that there is any doubt as to the outcome. But of course it’s not a real election. It’s like some poor sap being pushed into the ring with a raging gorilla, and told to fight a fair fight.

Well, almost like that. Except in this case, the gorilla weighs around sixteen times as much as his opponent.

And the odd thing is that none of this is about who is the better candidate. There are good things and bad things to say about both the incumbent mayor Mike Bloomberg and his challenger Bill Thompson. Each has done commendable things during his political tenure, and each has stumbled on occasion. But that’s not what this election is about, not even a little.

This election is about three hundred and fifty million dollars – around one third of a billion bucks. That’s how much our current Mayor, a billionaire worth around $17 billion, will have spent on his three runs for office by election day next Tuesday. By comparison, the Obama presidential campaign spent less than twice that much to reach an electorate approximately one hundred times larger.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that’s a lot of money. On the contrary, it’s hardly anything at all – chump change really – if you are Mike Bloomberg and so happen to have $17 billion in the bank. By way of comparison, let’s say you were running for mayor, and you decided to self-finance your campaign. Suppose you had, say, $10,000 in your bank account (times being hard and all). Well, if you spent the same proportion of your personal wealth as our current mayor has this time around, the election would cost you less than a hundred bucks – about the cost of a nice dinner for two in Manhattan, if you order wine and dessert, and don’t have to pay for parking.

So basically all our mayor is doing, in terms of his own personal spending, is going out for dinner with a lady friend and maybe getting a nice merlot and the blueberry pie. He’s not even taking the car.

But from the point of view of us ordinary mortals the situation is quite different. Bloomberg has top ad agencies, production companies, store fronts in Manhattan filled with teams of campaign workers, the services of the best professionals money can buy, all working around the clock, all focused on trying to discredit Bill Thompson. Almost every day I get a fancy flyer in my mailbox from the Bloomberg reelection campaign. And these are no ordinary flyers. They are like nothing you’ve ever seen before in an election. The production quality on these things makes even the polished Obama campaign literature look like it was hand cranked on a used mimeograph machine by some sweaty old guy in a basement.

Somewhere there are suppliers of fancy paper, exotic inks, custom illustrations and high class glossy photography, as well as an entire Letterman-show full of writers, who are thriving despite the bad economy, just to make those flyers that keep landing in my mailbox. And every one of these lovely flyers does the same thing – attack Bill Thompson with the intensity of a pack of feral dogs ripping into a downed calf.

I’m starting to wonder whether Bill Thompson isn’t actually some sort of saint – a holy man with angel wings and the moral discipline of a Mahatma Gandhi. Otherwise, by now we would surely all be convinced the man was a raving pornographic child molester, given the sheer volume of vitriol being hurled at him by the Bloomberg campaign.

Don’t get me wrong. Our incumbent mayor has achieved some fine things at City Hall. But this is crazy. The Thompson campaign is completely outgunned, shouted down at every turn by Bloomberg’s shockingly over-financed operation. The challenger is unable to get any message at all out to the voters. Anything he might have to say has been overwhelmed by the solid wall of media blitz that is the Bloomberg campaign.

No, Mr. Bloomberg is not breaking any laws by doing this. The fault lies with our election laws, which are so screwed up that they indeed allow wealthy people to buy elections. And to be fair, it wouldn’t work if Bloomberg were an atrocious mayor. But nonetheless, this is not an election about the merits – it is not about which of the two candidates is better. That question has been effectively buried under an avalanche of lopsided spending. This election is about one thing: a sixteen to one spending ratio.

And so I find myself asking the following question: If you believe in the idea of fair elections, can you vote for someone who is deliberately, ostentatiously subverting the process? And if you were to pull the lever for that guy, knowing he was effectively buying your vote, could you still tell yourself that you live in a democracy?

That’s pretty much it for the new techniques developed for combining hand drawn and 3D animation for the Wild Things test. The only thing left to talk about is shadows. Here we cheated, in a really outrageous way – but it paid off.

When you create a computer graphic scene, you specify a number of light sources. The computer program calculates, for each pixel in the image, where is the visible 3D point at that pixel, and from that it calculates which of your light sources are able to illuminate that point, and which are in shadow. After all, not every light source can reach every point in the scene. Sometimes there are objects in the way that block the light from some light source or another – thereby creating shadows.

In order to make Max and his dog feel as though they were part of the 3D scene – even though they were really hand-drawn animated characters – it was very important that they cast shadows. Otherwise they would have appeared to look like they were just floating in front of the scene.

Of course, Max and his dog were not really 3D objects in the scene. So we couldn’t just throw some sort of algorithm at the problem of what shape their shadows should take – there is, quite literally, no mathematical solution to that problem. Fortunately, we had animators who were perfectly happy to draw the outline of a shadow. And here is where we cheated. Just as we had the animator draw the outline of a character, and then used a computer paint program to fill in that character’s colors, similarly, we asked the animator to draw the outline of the shadow that Max or his dog should cast onto the 3D scene.

In other words, we relied on the animator’s talent to figure out where the shadow should go. Once we knew the shape of the shadow in any given frame of the animation, we used that shape to suppress the lighting from the key light source in the 3D computer graphic lighting. The visual result was the same as if we’d had a magic computer graphic algorithm to cast true shadows onto the scene.

Note that we were not painting a shadow onto the scene. Rather, we were invoking the same computer graphics techniques that we used to light and shade the 3D background – except we were giving the animator a chance to add shadows to this 3D shaded scene.

On a philosophical level, this created a very interesting interaction between animator and scene. 2D hand drawings were being used to reach in and directly modify the physics of a 3D computer graphic simulation – in particular, blocking 3D light sources at selected pixels. Effectively, we were casting actual shadows from non-existent objects.

The results were spectacularly successful, as you can see from watching the Wild Things test.

The only final note – and it is an important one – is that we were very careful throughout the production to choose the colors for the 3D computer graphic background and the image-processed hand-drawn characters that would mesh together perfectly. I can’t overemphasize how important this is when making a film that combines work from two very different media.

Examined in hindsight, our little test for “Where the Wild Things Are” represented a new way to look at computer animation. It wasn’t the result a single technique, or even a single approach, but rather a mash-up of complementary techniques and approaches, a way of mixing the old and the new, of using the computer as a tool in a very different way. That little test floated around the industry in the following years, and ended up influencing many things that were to come after, from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” to the “Toy Story” films and beyond. I would argue that the success of this test proved the point of what my friend Lance Williams used to point out, around the time we were first bringing Max and his dog to life: “Computer graphics,'” he would say, “is limited only by your imagination.”

One thing that animators can do very quickly and accurately is draw lines on paper. And there are a lot of line drawings involved in making an animation, so you don’t want to make any extra work for the animator. We wanted to give the animators an easy way to convey to the computer, through their drawings, what a fully shaded and rounded-looking character would look like. The following image of the back of Max’s head will give you an idea of what we came up with.

The artist would draw something like the image on the left – indicating the shape of the characters, as well as the outline of regions where the character should be bright or dark. Once we scanned in this image, we could start to do our magic on it. Christine Chang implemented a paint program that allowed an operator to fill each of these regions with a different color or shade, as shown in the image on the right.

But how do you go from that image to something that looks fully smooth and rounded? My basic approach was to use my fast blurring technique to blur out the regions inside the character. First, in software we clean up the painted image by removing the outlines and setting everything outside the shape to black:

Then we apply those fast blurs I talked about yesterday. In the two images that follow, we smear first horizontally, and then vertically:

But like I said yesterday, one blur isn’t good enough – the result doesn’t look quite as smooth as we would like. So we just smear again, first horizontally and then vertically:

Now it’s starting to look good. We had to smear four times to get that result (twice horizontally and twice vertically) but that’s ok, since the technique is fast.

But this result is clearly not yet what we want – the shape itself is blurry, not just the internal details. So next we use the silhouette of the original unblurred shape to trim the result – just like using a cookie cutter:

It’s almost there now, but not quite. Max’s head is too dark around the perimeter. But why? Because when we blurred everything, the black background color bled into the shape, creating an unwanted vignetting effect. We need to need to get rid of that vignette.

Fortunately, we know exactly how much black has bled into the shape at every pixel – exactly the same amount by which the silhouette becomes darker at that pixel when we blur the silhouette. And that gives a solution to this problem: At every pixel inside the shape, we need to divide by the brightness of the blurred silhouette. Most places this won’t change anything – the blurred silhouette is white almost everywhere. But near the perimeter, the result will get brighter by just the right amount:

Aha! Now it’s starting to look like a rounded 3D version of Max’s head. All that remains is to add the character to the background. In the real test, that background was the 3D computer graphic room, but here I’m just going to drop him into a white background. Also, of course, in the actual test Glen Keane draw the entire body of Max, not just the back of his head. 🙂

So there you have it – we are almost done with the series. Mostly all that remains is to talk about shadows and a few little details about color, which I’ll discuss tomorrow to wrap up.

In my own personal experience doing this, the part of the above recipe that was a true revelation for me was in the step where I realized I just needed to divide by the blurry silhouette to get rid of the vignetting around the edges. That was the first time I realized that I could do any arithmetic I wanted on entire images, treating them just like numbers that can add, subtract, multiply and divide. There was a sense of freedom in realizing this, and it led me to start thinking more out of the box about images and the infinite possibilities of computer graphics.

On one level, what Richard Taylor was asking for was easy. Below is an example of blurring an image. On the left is the original, and on the right is the blurred version.

By the way, for those of you who don’t know, this is an image of Lena Sjööblom. She was originally the Playboy playmate of the month in November 1972. Her image started to be used by appreciative computer vision researchers at the University of Southern California, and she ended up becoming the standard test picture for image processing research. Needless to say, the original photo showed quite a bit more of Lena. If they had used the entire image, the field of image processing might have taken quite a different turn. You can read the whole story here.

Blurring is easy when you use a camera. Just push the lens out of focus, and you get a nice blurry image. That’s because every point of the original image gets smeared out over many points of the resulting blurry image. I could have done it that way in computer software, but that would have taken a very long time. Computers then were a lot slower than they are now. The image below shows the problem I was facing:

If you want to blur an image, then every pixel of the original image (left) needs to get added to many pixels of the blurred image (right). This is a serious problem if you’re image is typical size – say 1000 × 1000, or a million pixels. If your blur size is 30 × 30 pixels, then every pixel in the original image needs to get added to about 1000 pixels in the blurred image. We’re talking about a billion or so operations here. Back when we were doing the Wild Things test, that was way too much computation to be practical.

I needed to come up with something faster. The breakthrough came when I had the idea of smearing. If you think of the value at one pixel of an image, you can do the following to smear that pixel value out in a horizontal direction. First, copy the pixel value to another image, but offset to the left. Also copy the negative of the pixel value to this other image, but offset to the right. You can see this represented in the image below, in the transition from A to B:

Now here comes the secret sauce. Sum up all of the values in the result, starting from the left and going all the way to the right. What you end up with is the pattern in C above – a smearing out of this one pixel value over an entire region. What’s cool about this is that it doesn’t matter how far apart you separate the positive and negative values – the amount of computation stays the same.

Of course it’s not all that useful to blur out a single pixel. But the nice thing is that if you start with more than one pixel value, everything still works. In the image below we have two non-zero pixels. Applying the same trick (going from A to B in the image), we get some positive values and some negative values. If we sum everything up from left to right (going from B to C) we end up with a blurred version of the original.

This trick works no matter how many pixels you start with in the original image. In fact, you can start with any image at all, apply the same trick, and you end up with a smeared out version of your original image. And the amount of computation doesn’t increase as the smearing gets bigger.

This gave me a way to create nicely blurred images without requiring too much computation. I could just do this smearing trick twice in the horizontal direction, and twice in the vertical direction, and end up with a really nicely blurred image – without needing to wait too long for the result.

So how did this little fast blurring trick let me create images of Max and his dog that looked rounded and 3D? We’ll get to that tomorrow.