Bound . . . and Determined

(Wendip week: prompt is "Handcuffed together.")

(Summer 2021)

1

"Allow me to be quite clear," the Minister for Magical Law Enforcement told Dr. Mason Pines and his wife Dr. Wendy Pines. "If it were solely up to me, I wouldn't have called you in at all. However, the homeowner in question is an American—as well as a highly-qualified witch—and has requested your aid specifically."

"We understand that, Mrs.—uh, I'm sorry, how should we address you?" Dipper asked.

"Minister is the preferred term. However, as we are in the same line of work, 'HG' will do.""

"Thanks, HG," Wendy said. "I'm Wendy, and you can call my husband Dipper."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's a code name," Dipper said smoothly. "Now—this client—"

"Mrs. Abigail Merriwether," the Minister said, picking up her glasses to read from a memo. "Formerly of Salem, Massachusetts, has lived in the UK for, let's see, ten years, suspects there is an unfriendly ghost in her home." She put the memo down. "Please understand, Mrs. Merriwether's husband Hugh is a mu—a non-magical person. For reasons of her own, she prefers that he not know of her special talents."

"If she's a witch," Wendy said, "couldn't she handle a ghost?"

"Ah, but this is not an ordinary ghost," the Minister said with a smile. "Here is a card with the address for you. However, I shall have a car take you there. Exorcize the phantom, and the Ministry will pay your expenses. Now, as to fee—"

"No fee," Dipper said. "Consider it a case of international cooperation."

"Well," the Minister said. "Isn't that nice." Before they left her office, she seemed to thaw a bit. "Do you know," she said, glancing at Wendy, "I just realized you remind me a bit of my sister-in-law. She's a ginger, too."

"Really."

"Yes, and quite a nice woman. Well, is there anything else you require."

"If it's not too much trouble," Wendy said, "since we had to fly on a commercial airline, I would like to request something that I wasn't allowed to carry aboard."

"And that would be?"

"An axe," Wendy said. "I've looked at British axes, and I would prefer an Eversteel 3000 felling axe, 85 centimeter handle, 1.75 kilogram head."

The Minister frowned a little as she wrote that down. "Why do you need this to take care of a ghost?"

"I believe," Wendy explained, "that every woman should carry an axe. Oh, and I'll need a Handleman leather scabbard, too, with bandolier harness. I won't be taking them back to America, so I'll return them to you when this job is over."

"I'm sure we'll find some use for them," the Minister said. "The Armory will send out for your, ah, implement. They're quite efficient. Be ready to leave in an hour."

2

"How is it?" Dipper asked as the self-driving car let them out at the curb—kerb, whatever—in a reasonably suburban stretch outside of Metropolitan London. The houses here were miniature estates, most of them brick, standing in spacious grounds—say half an acre or more each.

Wendy moved her shoulders. "It's OK. It'll do. But it's like British food. Not quite the same."

He told the car, "We'll call when we've finished." The car did not respond verbally, but purred away.

"Quite a house," Wendy said.

"More like quite a tower with a little house built onto it," Dipper replied. The brick cottage looked cozy, but adjoining it on the right was a massive three-storied tower with a round observatory-like dome, looking completely out of place, as if it had wandered there from one of the castles dotting the English landscape and had settled down for a snooze. Surrounding the spacious yard was an eight-foot-tall fence of black wrought-iron.

"Let's see if our client is in," Dipper said. He pressed the call button on the left pillar of the wrought-iron gate.

A moment later, a hologram of a thin, gray-haired man in a pale blue blazer and a dark bow tie appeared. "Yes?" He had a British accent, even with just that one word.

Dipper smiled. "Hello, sir. Are you Mr. Merriwether?"

"I am."

"I'm Mason Pines, and this is my wife Wendy, sir. We're former students of Dr. Merriwether's, and when we let her know we'd be vacationing in London, she asked us to visit. May we speak to her?"

"Ah—sorry, she's not home yet. But yes, I recall her saying something about visitors. Just a moment, I'll buzz you in."

The gate clacked, they went inside and up to the door, where the man stood, having just opened it. "Please come in, young people. Would you care for tea?"

Dipper glanced at Wendy. "No, thank you, sir. When will your wife be home?"

"Oh, any time, any time. Would you care to wait for her in her little workshop? She most often takes her guests there."

"That will be fine," Dipper said.

"This way, then." He pottered around, opened a door, said, "No, pantry, lose my own head next," and then found the right one, a stairway leading down. "She says it's cool in the cellar," he said. Go along, go along, I'll follow. Not so spry on the steps as I used to be, you know."

They descended and the first thing Dipper thought was It's like the Shack—more cellar than house!

The second was It's a trap! Against the wall near the stair was a workbench with carpentry tools on a pegboard—but the rest of the cellar was a cellar, stacked with tidy piles of odds and ends, with wiring and pipes hanging from the overhead joists. No workshop.

He spun, Wendy caught his flash of thought, and she reached for her axe.

"Ah-ah!" The man stood on the stairway, holding a wand. "Now, I cannot kill you—yet. But I can't have you inconveniencing me as I question Mrs. Merriwether, so pleasant dreams!" He waved the wand and things turned black.

3

Well, when you think it's a ghost, you don't go into the fight prepared to battle an evil wizard. "We should've brought Mabel, dude," Wendy said, rattling the chain that held them together.

"Even if she weren't pregnant, I'm not sure that would have helped," Dipper told her.

Here they were, in the basement, stripped to their underwear and handcuffed together.

With magical handcuffs, the chain behind a floor-to-ceiling pipe. The space between the pipe and the wall was maybe eight inches—too narrow to squeeze through.

"What did he do with our clothes?" Dipper asked. "Did you see?"

"Nope," Wendy said. "Last thing I remember, he flicked that stick at us, and boosh! Here we were, stripped down and chained up. Any ideas?"

Dipper looked up. "Well, these may be magical handcuffs, but the pipe's an ordinary three-inch water pipe. Think we can climb it?"

"Dude, this is Lumberjack Girl you're talkin' to. I can climb it. What about you?"

"I'll do my best."

They were not ordinary handcuffs—the chain was about a foot long. On one hand, that gave them a little freedom of movement. On the other, it didn't give them all that much. They had to climb practically wrapped around each other, facing each other, with the pipe between them. "Yes!" Dipper said after they had nearly reached the top, eight feet from the floor. "Look! The pipe makes an L-bend! If we can loop the chain over the horizontal run—"

"We can get to the wall over there—"

"And maybe you can reach down to the tool bench with your toes—"

"And snag the hacksaw hanging there! And then we can saw through the chain!"

"Maybe!"

A few things stood in their way, though. Or, more accurately, hung in their way: three equally-spaced hanger straps, about four feet apart, that supported the horizontal run of the old pipe, perforated metal bands that hammocked the pipe and then were screwed to the joists overhead.

The pipe sagged with their weight, though, and because the house was an old house and the plumbing was aged and the straps had been manufactured in Birmingham, UK, in 1919, when there was a steel shortage, the first one snapped.

And that rendered the question of the hacksaw moot, because without its support the pipe gave way, too, and broke free from the upright. And water gushed from the upright in a soaking shower.

"Dude, it's cold!" Wendy complained as they staggered through falling water.

"At least it wasn't a sewage drain," Dipper yelled. They sloshed over to the tool bench, where Wendy grabbed the hacksaw and, after a moment's hesitation, Dipper picked up a hand sledge, a five-pound hammer. They hurried to the stairs, where Wendy sawed at the chain.

"Any progress?" Dipper yelled. "The basement's flooding pretty fast!"

"Yeah!" Wendy said. "I've worn all the teeth off the saw! What's wrong with you?"

"Your bra's so wet," Dipper said, "that's it's pretty, uh, translucent."

"Right now, we got other worries. Let's see if he locked the door."

The evil magician had not. "Come on, dude," Wendy said. "We have to find him."

"I know where he'll be," Dipper told her. "The tower room. Under the dome. Way up at the top. He locked us up as low as he could because he was going high."

"Figures," Wendy said. "Wish I knew what the son of a witch did with my axe!"

"I got it figured out," Dipper said. "The lady who thought it was a ghost was really being harassed by this guy—bet you he's not Mr. Merriwether at all. Somehow, he got past her defenses and got in, and now he may be torturing her."

"Let's go, dude!"

They found the tower and the spiral staircase leading up. They crept up on still-damp bare feet. They heard angry voices from the top. They paused outside the door. Dipper held up the hand sledge and whispered his intent.

"Could work," Wendy whispered. "But we gotta get all the way inside!"

"See if the door's locked."

It wasn't. From the room, they heard a woman's angry voice: "You can kill me, but you'll still never learn where it is!"

"There are worse things than killing!"

"Now," Dipper said, and they stepped through the door.

The wizard jerked around. He had tied a woman to a chair and had been menacing her with his wand. Now, his face furious, he raised the wand and began to yell, "Avada—"

"Go!" Wendy yelled. She stepped away from Dipper. They jerked their arms forward. They had hooked the sledge hammer over the chain by the head. They hurled it forward, as if they were a human slingshot.

The wizard was unable to finish whatever spell he'd started because a heavy hand sledge-hammer hurtling at the speed of 75 miles per hour tends to make enunciation difficult the moment it knocks out all your front teeth and renders you unconscious.

"The wand!" the woman shouted. "Get the wand!"

Dipper and Wendy ran forward, she scooped it up, and she asked, "Now what?"

"Give it to me and I'll unbind these ropes," she said. It was difficult, because her hands were behind her, but she twitched the wand and said, "Solvite!" The ropes dropped away.

Then she tied up the still-unconscious man. "Thank you," she said. "You are the young Americans my friend Dr. Pines recommended?"

"Wendy and Mason Pines," Dipper said.

"Why are you naked? That's a nice little navel ring you're wearing, Mrs. Pines."

"Thanks," Wendy said. "It was sort of my first wedding ring!"

"He stripped our clothes off," Dipper said. "Hit us with a spell that left us in our underwear and put these cuffs on us. Down in the basement."

"This is Makoto," Mrs. Merriwether said. "British, of course. Good thing, I suppose. If he were American, like us, he probably would have vanished your underclothing, too. He is seeking—well, never mind, a magical object, and if he found it, he could kill anyone, anywhere, without fear of retribution. Now the wizard court will deal with him."

"Um—your basement is filling up with water," Wendy said. "We had to break a pipe to get free."

"Hm." The woman went to a table and picked up a slimmer wand. "This is my own," she said. "It obeys me much better than Makoto's does. Speaking of which—" she snapped his wand in half. "That will take care of him!"

She waved the wand and spoke a rapid-fire series of spells: Restituo! Harefacio! Operiemur! Nothing visible happened, but she smiled and said, "There, all repaired, all dried, and we should find your clothes downstairs. Just a second now." Then she materialized a phone, made a quick call, and asked, "What's the time, Mr. Pines?"

"I suppose it's about noon," he said. "My watch is gone, too."

"Oh, of course. Well, we have to wait just a few moments—ah, no we don't, they are here."

With little flashes of air, three men in robes appeared. "Hello, Abbie!" one of them said. "What's the row—bloody hell! Hello, Miss!"

"Ronald," Mrs. Merriwether said firmly, "I told the Ministry Makoto would try! Here he is. Take him away and remember—you are married!"

"She's beautiful, though," the man said with a grin. "All right boys, let's take this scrote in custody!" The other two grabbed the still-unconscious Makoto and they all four vanished.

"Come," Mrs. Merriwether said, tucking her wand away somewhere in her dress. "My husband will be home in a matter of minutes, and he doesn't know about any of this. And he mustn't."

Their clothing lay in a heap in front of the cellar door. "But we can't get dressed until you take off these handcuffs," Wendy said.

"There is a problem," she confessed. "This is a dark spell, and only the man who cast it can take it off. However, I've broken his wand, and he will not be permitted to use magic again anytime soon."

"Then we're stuck like this?" Dipper asked. "Me in shorts, and my wife in—what she has on?"

"No, no," Mrs. Merriwether sighed. "There are ways, but they take time. The fastest—well, no, it costs too much."

"What?" Wendy asked.

"Well—there is a payment. You see, each person has a defined lifespan, and except for magic, it cannot be extended. We can't predict what our time is or foresee the future, but let's say one of you will live for another, oh, fifty years, and the other for sixty. A demonstration of commitment will vanish the handcuffs. If you agreed to blend your lifespans—then one of you will gain five years of life, but the other will lose the same amount of time, and you would both pass on in fifty-five years, at the same moment. But as I say, we never know. Suppose one of you has only two years, the other eighty! That's a terrible price."

Dipper took Wendy's hand and looked her in the eyes. Their chain jangled. They both smiled.

"Do it," they said together.

4

Later that week, Dipper said, "Well, it's five years late, but we finally got our honeymoon!" They were standing in front of Hexcombe Priory, a ruin that once had been the most haunted spot in England. It had a lot more history than the Mystery Shack, and the tour had been interesting, but Grunkle Stan could have made it more fun.

"And I got my axe back," Wendy said. "Shame I couldn't keep it. It had a really nice balance!"

"Well, now I know what to get you for our next anniversary," Dipper said. They kissed. He stroked her lovely, long red hair. "Do you regret what we did?"

She grinned, wrinkling her nose. "Nope. You?"

"Actually," he said, "I'd never thought about it before—but to live our lives together and leave them together—that might have been something I would have wished for."

"So love still binds us together," Wendy said, squeezing his hand. "For life and afterward."

They kissed, and Dipper whispered, "Always and forever."

The End