Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is no sensible explanation. None at all. The hunter pauses to think over his immediate memories.

He was chasing the wabbit. Yes. A chase.

Through the woods, past the same tree, bush, mountain, stump, rock, tree, bush, mountain, stump, rock; endlessly repeating, blurring together.

Such has been his life, ever since that day long ago, when he first noticed the rifle in his hands. The scenery changes but the chase continues…

First through the woods where, in the midst of his nimble tiptoeing, he was crushed by a falling tree…

Then a busy intersection; he dodged skilfully between all the vehicles but was stampeded by a passing marathon...

A downtown tramway; he followed the wabbit through the closely huddled throng of passengers only to fall out the other side, into the bay. When he climbed back out, dripping wet, the marathon stampeded over him again…

A high-rise apartment elevator in which the wabbit somehow tricked the hunter into firing at his own reflection, whose bullet came out the other side of the mirror…

And always, always , the wabbit one step ahead of him. Forever outpacing the hunter no matter his travails. His woes.

That accursed wabbit. That dastardly rascal. That treacherous trickster. His buck-toothed nasal tones echo throughout the hunter’s every waking thought. His every wiseass salute – what’s up Doc??????? – haunts the hunter’s dreams.

For how long an age has the hunter thought, begged, prayed for even a moment’s peace from the succorless torment visited upon him by his very prey?

It would appear at last that peace has found him, for a moment. Without sensible explanation.

Yewwow , he thinks.

It is true. This room is all yellow. The fitted carpet that depresses moistly underfoot is a sickly yellow. The cheaply papered walls are yellow. The hunter’s eye looks upon a field of mustard.

There is a hum above his head. Fluorescent squares of sharp white light illumine the path around him, if path it may be called. Everything — no, everything , really – is the same. Ahead and behind are as one. The room expands outward, in all directions, to an unfathomable end.

The hunter’s lower lip trembles. Visions of chases past, with all their frustrations and indignities, hurl themselves at him. Stale and eerie as this place is, it may prove merely a new site of humiliation, perhaps at the very paws of the long-eared, carrot-chewing browbeater who even now could be in here with the hunter. Bounding through these boundless corridors.

The hunter gulps. He takes it all in; this ugly carpet, those harsh lights, that balefully drab wallpaper.

‘Oh cwud ,’ he says, and means it.

Chapter Text

It is neither particularly hot nor cold in the Backwooms.

That said, the chills that come upon him now and then are barely tolerable; the heat of the fluorescents is less pleasant still.

The hunter feels he is lost. He removes his cap to scratch a smooth, perfectly spherical head in puzzlement, then replaces it. 

This place, he thinks, belongs not in the realm of created things. It is no home for men, monsters, or beasts. Walls abound. And floors. Walls are where they should not be. Doorways appear close to the ceiling. Distant corridors span daedal eternities. There is no apparent purpose or order to any of it.

And the size …already he has covered on foot an equivalent of perhaps four acres, and still there is no sign of a window. He can only guess if outside it is night or day. Time has become a joke, and a pathetic one.

The lights are clustered overhead in distributions he cannot make sense of. Sometimes there are so many that all around is thrown into vivid, ugly relief; elsetimes the lights are absent for black stretches of corridor half a mile or more in length.

These last are so horribly dark that the hunter shakes with trepidation each time he must pass down one, with nothing to light the way but his own large, expressive eyes.

‘Be vewy quiet, Fudd,’ he tells himself. ‘Be quiet and vewy bwave.’

From time to time there are sounds. Fudd finds them dreadfully perturbing: cacophonous howls that reverberate for far too long, which are sporadically accompanied by peripheral glimpses of a mysterious dark creature that appears very tall and thin.

It may be the wabbit. Fudd is not sure. They have not yet gotten close to each other.

This section of the Backwooms is treacherous. With no warning, he has come to a great pit in the carpet that must be eighty square feet and bottomless.

‘Gee whiz, that wooks wike a wong way down,’ he mumbles.

There is but a single way across: a strip of carpeted floor barely thicker than a person’s thigh.

Fudd tiptoes cautiously along it, holding his rifle out in front for balance like a high wire walker. He does his best not to think about the gaping chasms either side of him. Or the ominous low sound that has now begun to drone, only a room or two behind.

The hunter is certainly not thinking about that. No, not at all.

The other side nears. Easy does it, he thinks. Nice and swow.

Behind him, the noise is growing louder, and with it come heavy footfalls. Heavy and fast.

‘Perhaps just a widdle quicker,’ mutters Fudd to himself as he speeds up (still on tiptoes).

The footsteps grow nearer still, thundering through the hallways. Fudd focuses on his goal. A widdle bit wonger, Ewmer. Not far now. An appwoximate eweven feet. He tiptoes even faster, the other end now within his reach. A final spurt, and–

–He puts a foot wrong.

He wobbles.

Teeters.

Yelps. Spins.

His misplaced leg swings up and around, now over his head, now level with his shoulder. It would be an amusing sight, were he center-framed in a wide-angle shot.

His arms windmill into blurs as Fudd tries desperately to stay on the carpeted bridge, but it is in vain. He topples over one side, and by the Gwace of the Awmighty, just manages to stop himself from plummeting down. He clings onto the carpet with one hand.

The rifle slips from his other hand, and is lost. Down, down it falls. Fudd waits for the crash below, but there is none. The drop must be immense.

Above him, the great dark entity looms.

It does not resemble the wabbit, now that he sees it properly. Its head – if it even has one – is nearly touching the ceiling, while as Fudd recalls, the wabbit is not that much taller than himself.

The huge thing is composed entirely of a black, vermiculate substance. Its horrid and stringy claws grasp at the carpet with such force that they buckle the floor beneath. The abomination atop its long neck rears back and howls.

The noise is unutterably awful; anguished yet bloodthirsty, at once the roar of both predator and prey. It is alien to Fudd’s ears, though there is some damnably human note within it.

He cries piteously, ‘Oh pwease have mercy, stwange giant cweature!’ This seems to do no good. Perhaps the thing is deaf.

Or perhaps…now just perhaps…it is only pretending to be. Perhaps all that has happened is merely pretense.

A thought has struck Fudd, which is a rarity (even he is surprised).

‘Say, wouldn’t it be scwewed up…’ he muses, as though speaking directly to a viewer through camera, ‘if that cweature actuawwy was the wabbit, wearing another cwazy costume!’

He gives the thought a moment’s pause, whose length admits of an impeccable comedic timing. Or it would, at any rate, were the situation not so direly serious.

‘By gowwy, I think that is the wabbit!’ he announces, incensed. The atrocious being howls once more, and this time Fudd returns the favor.

‘Gotcha, you twicksy wupine hoowigan! You wabbit stew, you! Now that’s a vewy vewy cwever disguise, but this time you’re not gonna foow old Ewmer!’

So saying, the hunter reaches haughtily up to unmask the wabbit, whom he imagines caught unawares in the righteous headlights of his eyes. But Fudd’s hands do not catch upon any costume. Only a stringy black viscous substance his fingers cannot hold onto.

At most, the creature seems bewildered. Possibly a little annoyed.

There is just enough time for Fudd to register this before he also realizes that he has, in fact, reached up with both hands, therefore depriving himself of any remaining hold on the carpet.

He hangs there just long enough to say ‘Oh cwud’ again, though this time with even less cheer, then falls immediately downwards, leaving a Fudd-shaped white cloud in his wake which momentarily dissipates.

He falls.

Down…

And down…

A fact about Fudd: when he falls, his body makes a drawn-out high noise that gradually descends in pitch, like someone very slowly playing a slide whistle.

Fudd feels that this lends a certain indignity to the many injuries he has sustained as a result of falling from great heights. He has tried hypnosis. He has tried medication. He spent nearly three years working with a physical therapist.

Nevertheless, his falling body whistles. It is the way of things. All life ends in death. Fire is hot. Water is wet–

SPWASH!

Darkness abounds.

He does not know which way is up.

He struggles, swims, and bursts to the surface. He spits out a mouthful.

‘Good gwacious,’ he splutters, ‘this water is chwowinated!’

He is not wrong. The astringent chlorine odor is heavy in this humid air. The taste is heavier still, in the water. He can hear it sloshing around in all directions. He cannot imagine how high the ceiling is.

Fudd paddles in the only direction where there is any light. As it gets brighter, a vast room becomes visible, and as he swims into it, Fudd’s usually inactive mind grows still less so, for he is struck dumb with awe.

‘This woom…’ he marvels quietly, ‘it’s an endwess pool.’

Lukewarm blue pools of water lap endlessly at slick pale tiles. Abstruse aquatic architecture undulates off into the distance.

Everything smells bleachy.

‘A whole wotta wooms full of pools,’ says Fudd somberly,

‘They should caww this pwace the “Wooney Wagoons”!’

Nobody else is around. That is why nobody laughs.

Chapter Text

The humidity here is quite difficult to abide. By now, Fudd is wrinkled head to toe.

‘I must wook pwacticawwy wike a pwune,’ he says listlessly, wiping his brow.

Indeed he does. Fudd the despondent prune makes his lachrymose and prunish way through the damply dripping labyrinth of the Poolwooms.

He is growing used to the sporadic darkness, and now simply trudges onward with little aplomb or courage. Inevitably he emerges back out into the fluorescent glare not much the worse for it, merely sweatier.

His mood is not optimistic. If such terrible creatures as the Thing-That-Was-Not-The-Wabbit are to be found roaming about down here, then assuredly there is little he can do should he meet another one.

Even his trusty rifle has deserted him, which is a vicissitude Fudd finds especially hard to bear. He’s always had a weapon. He can scarcely remember a time before the rifle, the spear, the barber’s razor. It feels almost as though they were born fused to one another, Fudd and his weapons. And a huntsman with no weapon is a poor sight indeed.

He has approached a tunnel. This one is even stranger than most, for in height it barely comes up to his collar, and is curiously triangular in shape.

Fudd looks either side and, seeing no other way to progress, kneels down and begins to squeeze himself into the narrow aperture and inch along its unforgiving vertices.

‘This…cwawlspace…(ouch)…is...awfuwwy…(ooh ouch)… cwamped ,’ he huffs, soaked knees scuffing the hard tiles beneath. ‘It’s a good thing I’m not cwaustwophobic.’

He pauses.

There is no fourth wall for him to break. Still, Fudd says, ‘Dang it, I just wemembered I am cwaustwophobic!’ And with that he crawls faster, praying for a swift egress from this new nightmare.

No light greets him. Worse still, the tunnel seems to be narrowing in size the further along he travels; his shoulders are now touching behind his neck (as Fudd is of unusually rubbery, one might even say cartoonish , constitution). His acute sensibility is that of a bullet being fired through a stoppered barrel, about to be embedded in its absolute Fate.

Some desperate and primeval part of him is screaming that there is no exit. There is no way out, Fudd. None. There will be no light at this tunnel’s end.

And then bonk. ‘OUCH!’ cries Fudd.

I knew it, says his primeval mind. We’re trapped.

Twapped… echoes Fudd’s marginally more evolved mind.

That’s what I said, says the primeval mind.

Ah. Sowwy…

He reaches forward with immense difficulty, and feels the lump rising surely from his head. Oh, how it smarts. Meaner than the mean point of a bell curve.

Why must that awways happen when I’m stwuck upon the cwanium?

A crueler God than most is He who governs this universe, Fudd thinks, and long has it so seemed. Longer certainly than his own time in the Backwooms. Perhaps he is just one of nature’s rubes. Perhaps that is all the explanation he is owed.

You are Fate’s eternal piñata, Elmer. The perennial patsy. The hapless pharmakos of this ungiving, Looney world.

Mentally, Fudd reviews his predicament: he is lost, wet, squished, two-thirds-blind, prune-textured and his body has by now been inveigled by the tunnel’s corners into a shape that cannot be called flattering, and only generously Euclidean. His spine and esophagus have never met before, and find little to say to each other.

But there comes now a tap-tap-tap against the wall, against which his head is pressed. And it repeats: tap-tap-tap.

Fudd’s eyes widen, brightening the tunnel just a little. ‘Hewwo? Is somebody there?’

The tapping continues: tap-tap-tap-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP. It grows in volume and in pressure, and Fudd realizes that whatever is on the other side is trying to get through.

He attempts to wriggle backward, but this is no use. He is well and truly stuck. The taps come louder and faster and it is all Fudd can do to close his eyes and hope that his end will be gentler than his beginning and middle have been.

A crack. Two, three, four. Air spills in, fresher than before. Further cracks and the airflow increases. Fudd gasps it in, though he dares not look.

‘My God…’ says a muffled voice from the room beyond,

‘We found him. He’s really here.’

Chapter Text

A pair of hands, then two pairs. They drag Fudd out and unroll him like a wet dishcloth.

‘Dude this place …’ says the nearby voice, ‘It really messes with you, huh?’

‘Sure does Kelly,’ says a second voice from further off. ‘In fact, I think you’re losing it.’

‘What? How do you figure?’

‘Ooh, let me see…what was it again…oh yes. Ahem. YOU SMASHED A WALL OPEN. IN. THE. POOLROOMS.’

‘Well Marcus, this little guy was inside after all.’

‘There could have been anything in there! Bacteria. Spores. A chute. Who knows what you might have unleashed.’

Fudd sits up and rubs his eyes. The two speakers peer down at him, Kelly nearby and Marcus from afar. They are both much taller than he is, and clad entirely in bright yellow suits that obscure every human detail. Their faces are hidden behind black oxygen masks.

A third person, smaller than the rest though identically attired, squats at Fudd’s feet. They give Fudd a cheerful wave, saying nothing.

‘Thank you for wescuing me,’ says the hunter plaintively to the trio.

‘If it wasn’t for the sign, we never would’ve found you,’ says Kelly cheerfully. ‘Hey, um…whassyername…New Guy, why don’t you show him?’

She helps Fudd to his feet while New Guy retrieves a tripod with what looks like an expensive black trail camera mounted on top. New Guy turns it so that Fudd can see the attached screen, and rewinds the footage.

In the video, a figure in a yellow suit whom he takes to be Kelly approaches a white-tiled wall with a sledgehammer in one hand. Another yellow-suited person (presumably Marcus) is vigorously shaking his head, palms raised, indicating she should not do what she is plainly about to.

Video-Kelly takes position by a black-marked X upon the wall, above which some unknown actor has scrawled in ten-foot-high letters:

OPEN UP FOR A SURPRISE!

The video-Kelly taps steadily against the X, assessing the wall’s thickness. She raises the huge hammer and takes a swing. The wall tiles crack where it lands.

Video-Marcus runs toward her gesticulating in apparent panic. She swings again. And again. Fragments of the wall come away with each blow, and inside the hole she has opened up, Fudd can just about discern his own tiny, squashed frame. Video-Kelly and video-New Guy begin to extract him from the wall (though perhaps ‘extract’ is not the word for it; ‘unclog’ may be more appropriate).

The screen goes black and New Guy returns the camera to its tripod.

‘We had no idea there was a person in there,’ says Kelly,

‘Honestly, I was hoping for a huge box of candy.’

Marcus throws his hands up in exasperation and looks for agreement from New Guy, who simply shrugs.

‘Wemme guess,’ says Fudd grimly, ‘you aww got twapped in here too, by accident?’

Kelly helps Fudd to his feet. ‘Trapped? Hell no.’

‘Let’s hope not,’ Marcus says, leading them around a corner and into view of an assortment of bewildering machinery, much of it piled on the back of a small trailer coupled to a squat white buggy wide enough for six bodies.

‘The thing is…er…’

‘Ewmer,’ adds Fudd helpfully.

‘The thing is, Elmer, we work here . And not by accident.’ He lifts a large instrument off the back of the trailer and motions for New Guy to help him carry it. ‘We’ve been all over the Backrooms.’

Backwooms . Fudd ponders the word. Its overtones carry a dreadful weight.

Marcus says, ‘We were assigned to this section of the Poolrooms twelve days ago.’

‘The…Poolwooms?’

‘Take a guess…’

‘Oh. Oooh wight, I get it.’

Not as cwever as the “Wooney Wagoons”, but I’ll cut them some swack.

‘We’ve run across some freaky shit,’ continues Marcus. ‘You’re not the first, you’re not even a tenth of it. You can’t imagine…it’s like this freakin place knows we’re in here, and can’t make up its mind what to do about us. Sometimes it damn near tries to kill us–’

‘Quadrant 22C,’ interjects Kelly darkly. ‘Remember?’

‘ Kee-rist . Don’t even go there. I dunno how the heck we survived that thing.’

Fudd’s ears quite literally prick up (by an inch or two), when he senses pertinent information.

‘What “thing” are you weferring to?’ he asks, innocuous as he can manage.

‘Some kind of entity. Animate, possibly sentient, definitely hostile.’ Kelly recites the words as though reading them from a debriefing report.

‘Approximately eleven feet in height. Composed of interwoven black matter of as-yet-undetermined origin,’ Marcus adds. Fudd shivers, in spite of the humidity.

They are speaking of the Thing-That-Was-Not-The-Wabbit (the Backwooms Wabbit? The Backwabbit?) He is sure of it.

‘What’s the matter, Elmer?’ Marcus sounds genuinely worried. He gives Fudd a gentle touch on the arm.

‘You okay buddy? You’re all pale.’

‘I…I think I’ve met that cweature too,’ says Fudd, ‘it was way up there, before, with the yewwow carpet and the fwuowescents.’

Kelly shakes her head. ‘That can’t be right, not where you came out. We’re too far off. And anyway, the entity is confined. It can’t leave the Quadrant.’

Elmer cannot be sure, but under all that gear Marcus might look as nervous and ashen as he does himself.

‘No.’ Marcus shakes his head.

‘What?’

‘Kelly, what if…?’

‘What…? Oh. Hell no.’

‘It makes too much sense. Think about it. The disparate activity. All that stuff Marv went through–’

‘–But we only have this guy’s word, no proof.’

‘No pwoof of what?’ asks Fudd.

Kelly and Marcus exchange the kind of look only people who have worked a long time together under many layers of protective clothing can exchange.

‘That there could be more than one entity in here,’ says Kelly gravely.

The ensuing silence is finally broken by New Guy powering up the device, which clicks and buzzes mightily.

Fudd is glad that for once he is not alone, as the group travels forward through the tiled corridors. Slowly, he is coming to terms with the notion that his skin might never unwrinkle. He may be a prune forever.

New Guy and Marcus walk single-file ahead, sharing the burden of the instrument’s weight between them, while Fudd and Kelly bring up the rear. The Poolwooms slope and rise far more than that of the plain old Backwooms, and Fudd’s tiny legs have to work hard to keep up with the others. To ride in the buggy would have been a relief, but these halls are simply too narrow.

Before they set off, these people from ASync – as their peculiar organization is named – were kind enough to outfit him with an oxygen mask and the hood of a spare hazmat suit, the bottom of which now hangs above Fudd’s boots. Giving him the entire suit to wear would have done as much good as draping a circus tent over him.

New Guy is not much taller than Fudd, but Kelly and Marcus are easily twice the hunter’s size. A lot of humans are. Many also have heads and arms in considerably more even proportions to their torsos than his own. For all Fudd knows, when these people fall, their bodies don’t even whistle.

Kelly occasionally calls directions according to readings she takes from a small screen in her hands. ‘It’s the next right up ahead. We’re looking at a minimum 75% RH, folks.’

‘Jesus,’ mutters Marcus.

‘Yup. It’s gonna get funky.’

‘You’re probably gonna have to stick with us for the time being, little buddy,’ says Kelly to Fudd.

‘Weawwy? If you say so…’ Fudd says, hoping he sounds nonchalant and not wracked with anxiety. He and Kelly turn the corner and enter the new room.

Before them - beneath them – is the largest swimming pool Fudd has ever seen in his, or anyone else’s life. It is huge. Vast. Hugely vast. Inconceivably so, extending even beyond the horizon. Two blue whales could avoid each other inside it.

For a moment, his fear gives way to wonder. It is only as the wall bumps the toes of his boots that Fudd realizes he has shuffled forward in a trance and collided with the low balcony wall. The water’s surface must be forty feet below.

Beside him, a heavily breathing Marcus mounts the machine on a low tripod with assistance from the equable New Guy, who appears nonplussed by the heft of the thing and with one hand is already twiddling with its various controls.

Fudd plucks up the courage to ask, ‘Pardon me fewwas but…what does this contwaption do?’

Marcus gets to his feet. He brushes away moisture from the knees of his yellow suit, then stares absently at his gloves, presumably wondering why he bothered.

‘That’s a good question Elmer,’ he murmurs, ‘A real good question.’

‘We don’t know what it does,’ says Kelly. ‘It wasn’t our decision. Our bosses sent it down with the New Guy.’

‘Is he some sort of speciawist?’

‘Sure hope he is,’ grunts Marcus. ‘I got no idea how that damn thing works.’

The three of them stand back and watch as New Guy intently modulates and calibrates and regulates the machine.

The easiest comparison to make is that of an oversized bubble jet printer, studded on all sides with a number of lensed excrescences. It looks as though it has sprouted high-polymer tumors. The sight of it makes Fudd nervous.

New Guy presses one final button and leaps back, as at last the machine comes to sudden activation.

From all the different lenses, in a single instant, there erupts a lattice of concentrated light beams that shoot arrow-like and perpendicular across the enormous space. They cut through even the distant haze, and vanish beyond Fudd’s view, though he imagines they must continue.

‘Holy……shitballs,’ says Kelly, tactfully.

New Guy bows like a circus ringmaster, then prances balletically to the edge of the balcony, vaulting backwards over it. He is gone.

Everyone screams at once.

Chapter Text

‘WHAT THE HELL?!’ bellows Marcus, rushing to the edge.

‘Ow!’ Kelly winces. ‘We’re on the same frequency dude, there’s no need to shout.’

‘NEW GUUUUUUUUUY! NEW GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUY!!! ’

‘I take it back. Shout away. Who needs ears, right?’

Marcus thumps the balcony and roars in frustration. He begins to pace by the edge, the yellow hood twisting to and fro with the force of his head shaking. His words babble out at such high pitch that Fudd worries Marcus may either break into laughter or sobs.

‘We’re screwed, we’re so so screwed, we are so motherlovin uber colossally SCREWED-’

‘Marcus!’ snaps Kelly.

‘WHAT?!’

‘Take that tone, sure. Would you calm down please?’

‘Kelly he – he – he dove off the edge! On his first day. His first damn day on the job! We’re gonna die in here Kelly, this is it. Trust me, I know a sign when I see one. We’re dead. We’re finished.’

The woman sighs and calls to Fudd, ‘He gets like this when he’s stressed out. It’s a whole thing. Sorry.’

Fudd is only somewhat aware of their voices, as his eyes follow the light beam through the miles of chlorine haze.

He surprises himself with a notion, unbidden: just how faw away does that wight go?

‘This is serious Kelly,’ splutters Marcus. ‘Take it serious. About it. I mean you should, that is…you…be serious, darn you!’

‘Marcus,’ says Kelly patiently, ‘as your coworker and sometime drinking buddy, I’m telling you that when you panic, you get messed up. You make bad calls. Rash decisions. You gotta cool off.’

The hunter looks to the device, still emanating its many beams. He looks back out at the water. He deliberates.

‘You’re telling me to cool off? In here?!’

‘Hey, if you want I can cover my eyes and hum for a quick five while you jerk your turkey.’

‘Kelly!’ Marcus sounds aghast. Meanwhile, Fudd has both hands on the balcony edge and one leg already raised.

‘What?’

‘I…that…that was one time. We spent a whole week in Quadrant 8F, and I was going nuts.’

‘–Sounded like just one nut, actually.’

‘–And I swore you to secrecy, Kelly!’

‘Hey, what are you doing?’

‘Nope. Not falling for that. I don’t even have a boner.’

‘Not you,’ snaps Kelly, ‘Hey Elmer! Buddy? What the hell are you doing?!’

Fudd keeps his eyes fixed ahead and maintains a preternatural calm.

One boot leaves the balcony edge.

He does not look down.

‘ELMER!’ Kelly’s scream matches Marcus for intensity, if not volume. Fudd forces himself to ignore them. His second boot steps off the balcony, and Fudd the hunter is suspended in the air.

He stands atop a ramrod-straight beam of light, like a highwire walker.

Chlorine billows, forty feet below.

Fevered noise comes from behind and Fudd realizes the ASync researchers are scrambling to set up their camera, to record the event as it happens. He maintains his gaze.

Don’t wook down, Ewmer. Ignore all distwactions.

His reasoning, though perverse, is not without logic. In the course of many a fierce pursuit of the wabbit, Fudd has wilfully stumbled past a cliff edge, rooftop or other incipient sheer plummet, and his boots tread nothing but the air as he, ignorant of this fact, stamps doggedly onward. Perhaps he even claims victory, for a moment.

Without fail he will slow in puzzlement. The fresh air underneath always disconcerts him. There is a sudden stillness as the soundtrack drops away.

Then Fudd has only to look beneath him, before that horrendous gag called gravity is brought to bear, and he whistles all the way down.

Fudd knows this all too well. It is tugging at him even now, behind his neck, in the pit of his stomach. A most curious sensation. By some ruinous mad law, some stricture in the ledger of Fudd’s universe, he senses he has disobeyed. Fudd almost feels he can hear a voice rumbling somewhere (his Creator?) that this is not how it goes. Not for him. For he is, must always be, the butt of the joke. That is what the voice says.

FALL, DAMN YOU!

FALL, FUDD!

PLUMMET, HARD AND FAST!

He shudders at the urgency of it all; Reality itself seems at this moment no more than a brutish observer, an impatient spectator. All of Creation furiously holds its breath.

Step by step, Fudd makes his way across the bridge of light, and all around is lost to him. Even the slosh of the curiously opaque pool is muted. So too is this very silence a tense one. It is the beat before the music starts back up: fractious and expectant.

At this moment, Fudd is something like a comedian who has refused to deliver the punchline, and as such is acutely aware of the audience growing ever more hostile. Something has to give, he just knows it. He knows.

‘STOP!’

He ignores Marcus’s cry. He keeps going. And still, the Poolwoom shows no sign of ending.

‘STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!’

No. No no no, I’m not wistening.

‘KELLY!’

He can’t help himself – he turns his head. Behind him, Kelly has one leg over the balcony and is making to stand on the same light beam. Her orange boot is placed just above it, and looks so substantial in comparison that Fudd cannot avoid a jolt of panic in sympathy with Marcus’s yelling.

Kelly swings her other leg over and is now sitting on the balcony’s edge. ‘I’m gonna do it!’ she calls to the open room.

‘NO YOU WON’T! PLEASE!’ Marcus is nearly hysterical.

Fudd feels frozen as he watches the researcher’s shoulders heave with three deep, calming breaths, and then she stands up, clear of the balcony’s protection.

Kelly lands on the light bridge, just missing Marcus’s attempt to catch her under the armpits.

Marcus screams. Fudd cannot wrench his gaze away.

Cautiously, Kelly stands up. She has not fallen. She is still there.

‘Gosh darn shitballs on parade,’ she says, quite matter-of-factly.

‘You made this look easier, Elmer.’

Kelly takes a step, and then another. The light beam isn't even slightly impacted by the full weight of a much larger human than Fudd, which seems uniquely distressing to her fellow ASync employee.

‘This is not possible,’ Marcus whimpers, again and again. ‘Not possible.’

‘No duh, I hope the camera’s getting it,’ she replies.

‘You cannot be this calm! Not now, not when you’re breaking every single one of Newton’s Laws of Motion!’

‘And yet here we are, Marky. You should try it. Like walking on a trampoline.’

‘What, is it bouncy?’

‘No, but it’s…fun. Remember fun?’

Marcus rests his hazmat-suited head on the balcony, arms by his side. ‘I give up,’ he drones. ‘Bye bye, towel. The towel has been thrown in. What physics? What self-consistent universe?’

‘Ugh. Stop licking the cage, Faraday.’ Kelly is inching further along the light towards Fudd, who – seeing that she still has not fallen – is likewise tentatively inching towards her. ‘Look, you and I both knew when we signed up for this crazy job that we might have to, well, do a little “mind-expansion” while on the clock. The way I see it, things could have turned out a lot woooOOOOOORSE –’

She has put a foot wrong, and now manically swerves and sways. The motion of her body is elastic, rubbery. She comes just this close to falling. Again. And again.

Her body produces teetering, wobbling, tumbling sound effects that cannot help but be diegetic.

Kelly is being cartooned – there is no other word for it. 

Fudd has never seen this happen to another person. He thought he was the only one.

‘I’m okay I’m – JESUS – okay I’m – WOAH – okAY I’m OKAY I’M OKAY,’ Kelly says very loudly, with quite alarming composure. Her arms windmill into blurs. Her unsupported leg flails. Flies. Flurries.

Kelly falls, whistling.

Her yellow researcher’s suit hits the water’s surface and keeps going. She does not bob back up. It is as if something is pulling her body down.

With no greater ceremony than a strangled cry, Marcus charges over the balcony and dives into the water, landing a considerable distance from where Kelly fell.

His body, too, vanishes beneath the opaque waters. Fudd is alone once more.

‘Kewwy?’ he calls. ‘Mawcus?’

No response.

‘Er…New Fewwa?’

Still nothing. At least until a series of distant clicks and buzzes starts up and Fudd realizes that the oddball machine which produced the light beams, including the one upon which he stands, is starting to turn them off.

Oh cwud oh cwud oh cwud.

But this time the hunter won’t be so easily fooled by his own panic. Even with no rifle to balance him, Fudd keeps a level gaze.

He won’t fall for it. Not again. He won’t fall one bit. After all, what right has such a spiteful world to demand equanimity from him?

The light beam beneath his boots is gone, but Fudd does not drop. He continues across thin air, refusing to look down. 

He is sick of playing by someone else’s rules. From now on, he will give as callous as he ever got.

To no one in particular, Fudd begins to sing a half-remembered tune from a day long ago, out in the snow during wabbit season.

‘A-hunting we will go,

A-hunting we will go,

Heigh-ho, the mewwy-oh,

A-hunting we will go!’

He had been a red-hot sportsman after wild game, back then. That day there was a long yellow line to follow, and signs that read THIS WAY TO RABBIT. But the Backwooms have changed him, and Fudd has since grown suspicious of signs, lines and being led by the nose down foreign paths.

Also of the color yellow.

Fudd reaches the other side – another balcony, almost identical to the first – some three hours later.

He is exhausted and crusty-eyed, but impossibly, miraculously alive. Though he cannot help but wonder what may have become of his erstwhile companions, it does no good to worry over it.

This balcony’s exit immediately leads to a pair of familiarly moist, yellow-carpeted staircases. Both are foreboding. Neither seems the advantageous choice.

Without hesitation, Fudd opts to go higher, and begins the climb. He does not tremble, and the cast of his round face, beneath the ASync hood, is determined indeed.

He is still a hunter, and though he may have gone astray, his true purpose is not yet lost to him.

Fudd has a wabbit to find. A big, bad, Backwabbit.

Chapter Text

Tracking the Backwabbit is proving troublesome.

Backwabbits, Fudd has surmised, do not leave Backwabbit tracks. Prowl the Backwooms though he might, even this crackerjack monomaniac tracker, seldom slack, notes a distinct lack of Backwabbit tracks.

‘Awas, awack,’ he broods, ‘perhaps I wack the knack for Backwabbit-twacking.’

Never mind. Another fieldcraft skill much availed by Fudd in the Backwooms is that of camouflage. The hood remains invaluable in this regard. Both it and the Backwooms’ wallpaper are yellow, although of markedly different hues. Still, Fudd reasons that a predator as brash and ugly as the Backwabbit is unlikely to notice the distinction, and to that end he plans a most subtle and delicate entrapment…

Phase 1: Hide in wait for the Backwabbit.

Phase 2: Eventuawwy, it awwives.

Phase 3: Impwovise.

It is cunning, but risky. The Backwabbit may well have anticipated his stratagem and accordingly planned some devious countermeasure. Fudd still shudders to recall the horrid monster’s form. He has his suspicions. Who’s to say it isn’t also clever, despite appearances? That it isn’t a wily and tricksome beast capable of confounding even the hunter’s best-laid plans?

No, he chides himself. No, that is unlikely. Upon encountering Fudd, the thing did not attempt any manner of subterfuge or mockery toward him. In the main, it seemed hungry. The Backwabbit is a fearsome animal, but so is the Tasmanian Devil. Animals can be conquered, tamed, brought to submission. Most importantly, they may be killed.

Where before he wandered aimlessly, Fudd now moves with a degree of stealth. Instead of bisecting the sometimes cavernous corridors, he hugs the walls, creeping forward on his tiptoes, and always poking his head inquisitively around corners before the rest of him slinks forward to accompany it.

Regrettably, there is little he can do about the fluorescent lights except hope to enter an area less densely clustered with them. At least he knows that anything else he meets will be equally as exposed as himself.

Oh, but how his fingers itch for his poor, lost rifle! The cruel theft still wounds him in his very soul. Had he the time, he would have said Kaddish for the weapon (also had it been a person, and Fudd a Jew).

There is nothing else for it: with no firearm, Fudd must rely on his brains and, failing those, his brawn. Armored thus, he shall face the dreaded Backwabbit.

The matchup is far from desirable, yet strangely it emboldens him. There is something to be said for this new Fudd, and the latent valor he has discovered within himself.

So what if the Backwabbit is eldritch and inscrutable and fast-moving and fearsomely strong and unspeakably hideous and unknowably powerful?

He is a hunter, confound it all! Come what may, he will bring the creature down, and restore rightness to this catawampus plane of reality.

Fudd considers where to hide, and at once an attractive nook catches his eye, ensconced between the juncture of three walls. Unless the Backwabbit is heading directly towards him, Fudd has the drop on it.

Safe in this knowledge, he duly ensconces himself.

Minutes pass.

Minutes become hours, and time settles like a sludge on the moist carpet.

Fudd is just beginning to consider that he may be a little too well hidden, and whether it wouldn’t be prudent to go in search of a more advantageous spot, when he hears a rumbling from a few rooms to his left.

If there were any hairs on the back of the hunter’s neck, they’d be standing up right now. This is what he has waited for. That Backwabbit will come bounding into this room any minute now, but this time Fudd has no plans to go gentle into that good night.

Unlike the last time, he has ground; by golly he’s going to stand on it. Yes sir, that wretched monster has finally met its match. Fudd suppresses a wicked grin; the hunter’s instinct. The thrill of the chase, of the trap.

And now there’s the Backwabbit, looking at him. Unspeakable, dark, stringy. He didn’t even hear it come in.

He’d almost forgotten quite how… large it was.

They stare each other down, man and beast. Neither moves. The Backwabbit is distressingly silent. Is Fudd being threatened? Goaded? Assessed for weakness? He cannot say. But if he doesn’t make his move now, it will be too late.

Fudd clears his throat and cries, ‘Hey! Hey you, Backwabbit!’

The monster does not respond. Its enormous handlike protuberances are rested on the carpet like those of a gorilla. Fudd repeats himself.

‘Say, Backwabbit. You big ugwy bwute, you! You woathsome cweature! Weady to wearn why they caww it Wabbit Season?’

He waves his arms about beneath the ASync hood, emphasizing just how scathing these taunts are. The Backwabbit shifts from leglike aberration to leglike aberration, as though about to charge.

‘That’s wight, you better get weady to wun,’ crows Fudd, his confidence growing by the second, ‘You’re gonna be toast soon, you wepwobate! You’ll be gwilled wike a gwilled cheese sandwich! Don’t you weawize who you’re deawing with?’

He puffs himself up. ‘The name’s Elmer J. Fudd. Wed-hot sportsman and wabbit hunter extwaowdinaiwe. And you, oh wepulsive wascawwy yewwow-bewwied tewwor of the Backwooms, are about to be–’

Then the Backwabbit replies.

‘I’m okay I’m – J£%^S – ok&y I’m – WOAH – o^AY I’m 0K)Y I’M O^AY,’ it says.

Fudd pales, and not metaphorically. All color physically drains from his face as surely as an acetate bath would have wrought. He is maggot-white.

The voice emerging from the Backwabbit’s horrid maw is Kelly’s.

Or it was. Something has happened to it – her voice is a distorted echo, butchered, corrupted. But there is no mistaking that cry of strangely self-assured panic.

‘What…what have you done to her, Backwabbit?’

Fudd’s voice trembles not with fear but with a rage which, were it not so incandescent, might even have surprised him. ‘You wotten, depwowable fiend. If you harmed a single haiw on her head, why I’ll, I’ll–’

Does Kelly have hair, he wonders? He never actually saw under her ASync hood, but it’s reasonable to assume she does.

Fudd steels himself. In this, and even if only in this, he shall be no coward. Maybe his Maker would expect different, but if so then He should have unmade Fudd when He had the chance.

Fudd steps closer to the detestable being. ‘Don’t you make me wepeat myself,’ he says in his best approximation of a surly-yet-commanding John Wayne growl,

‘What did you do to Mawcus? To Kewwy?’

The Backwabbit makes no intelligible reply. It shudders and rocks and howls, all of which should strike fear in the heart of any sane human.

Fudd does not hesitate; he grabs ahold of the folds of the  Backwabbit’s chest, roughly at the point where the scruff of the neck ought to be. That is to say, where it would be on a Backwabbit of roughly equal size to Elmer Fudd, which this one is not.

The hunter bellows, ‘WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY FWIENDS?!’

Abruptly, the Backwabbit picks Fudd up in one enormous clawlike protrusion and hurls him far, far down the corridor before thundering after him.

Chapter Text

BOING

BOING

BOING

           BOING

boing

BOING

BOING          BOING          BOING

boing    boing    boing

boing   boing

boing boiiiiiing

*shlump*.

Fudd has stopped.

Sometimes an unusually rubbery constitution does come in handy. Umpteen bounces on every surface of his body and Fudd is still not much worse for it.

He gets to his feet. A lump rises out of his head, and placing both palms atop it he pushes it, irritated, back down into his scalp.

There is a POP. A button flies off.

Fudd does not have time to retrieve it, because the Backwabbit is in hot pursuit.

He has seldom moved in his life as he does now. The yellow corridors blur into one, and keep coming, and the Backwabbit keeps gaining.

Fudd runs for not-until-this-moment-has-it-ever-felt-so-dear life. He has already cheated Fate enough times for any man.

He has an idea.

It is ridiculous. But if he is honest with himself, when has his life not been ridiculous?

What happens next is somewhat difficult to describe, because it does not take place entirely within the continuity of reality. Let it happen thusly:

Fudd darts behind a panoply of oddly clustered walls, and returns almost instantaneously with a pot of paint and a paintbrush. The paint’s color is nonspecific, indeterminable. Don’t worry about that. That is not what should draw your eye.

On the wall in front of him, in mere seconds, Fudd outlines and fills in extraordinary detail a photorealistic painting of none other than an unassuming Backwooms corridor. It looks as though it were meant to be; no Flack or Estes canvas could compare.

In the few split seconds that remain, Fudd darts to one side and hides. He waits. Sure enough, the Backwabbit barrels down the corridor, straight towards Fudd’s painting. Closer.

Then without even the slightest pause, it passes straight through the material of the wall and rampages onwards through Fudd’s painted landscape; oblivious, for all Fudd knows, to its illusory surroundings. Its huge dark form recedes down the false corridor in front.

No time must be lost. In Fudd’s hand is a white cloth that was not there before. In four clean, quick wipes he erases his handiwork. The painted corridor is gone.

He is exasperated, breathless, but triumphant. He cannot help himself. He chortles aloud.

‘Heheheheh, siwwy Backwabbit!’

No exit suggests itself, so Fudd simply makes one.

How does he do this? Most easily. He produces another paintbrush, daubs a quite serviceable ladder against the wall, and begins to climb, adding rungs as he goes. When he reaches the ceiling, he simply paints a wide enough black hole and continues upward through the uncharted geometries.

It’s just the sort of thing that would happen in an old Saturday morning cartoon. Perverse and illogical of course, but utterly of a piece with the madcap, Looney world from which Fudd and all his compatriots spring.

Fudd clutches the brush in his teeth. It doesn’t drip. There will be paint on the end if the story requires it. Every few feet he pauses to add new rungs.

For too long Fudd has played not beneficiary but victim to the logic of the cartoon, and at long and bitter last he has rectified this injustice.

Notwithstanding, the hunter did not choose his new role. It is fairer to say that protagony has been thrust upon him.

Fudd’s climb takes him, in time, through vistas strange and horrible, each an insight into the further mysteries of the various wooms. When a sudden bonk on his skull reveals he has collided with a ventilation shaft, an urgent expectancy pervades Fudd’s entire being, and he paints a junction into the metal.

Further along, the air in the shaft grows muggy and, as it happens, thick with the smells of earth and loam; the first somewhat natural odors he has detected in all his time here.

His hopes that he has by some miracle made his way back to the land of the living are soon dashed, for what becomes apparent is that the metal walls are punctuated by masses of overgrown weeds. Through the fissures made by the stems in the four surfaces around him, Fudd glimpses the wooms beyond: dank, cramped, but thriving with plantlife.

The air is heavy and the ripe stench nearly overpowers his other senses. Still, Fudd is glad for having come this way. At least here, and perhaps only here, is a form of life not so malign. The sight brings tears to Fudd’s big round eyes. That, and his keen hay fever.

Further still, he passes high over a section of what must be the Poolwooms, and it is here that things start to become…stranger. The environment transluces through the metal walls, a little at first, then more and more, until Fudd feels as though he is once again moving through the very air, unsupported.

Expanding out in all directions is a mandala of corridors, of pools, of light beams. Up is down and down is left and left is back and right is further back, which is somehow also up. The gravity joke has gotten old, and been done away with.

Fudd feels as though he is crawling down the barrel of a kaleidoscope; upon every axis of his vision a fearful symmetry of wooms revolves, evolves, threatens to resolve. Pool, tiles, light, pool, tiles, light, pool, tiles, light…

He recognizes the strange machine from Chapter 4, or rather a plethora of them.

How many are they? Are they in fact one and the same? One machine in many dimensions? He has no answer for such mysteries. The things are even now firing out myriad beams across Poolwooms beyond numbering. Those gleaming highways criss-cross each other toward eternity, while the sight of all that chlorinated bluish water sloshing about instills in him an aching feeling. One less like dread and more like nostalgia.

This is simply how it is here, he has learned. Fudd would have said, however long ago it was that he stumbled into the Backwooms, that the Backwooms were, beyond doubt, a place of capital-E Evil.

A pause. It has become necessary to speak, for a moment, on the subject of Evil.

What is there to say that you don’t already know?

The truth is that Evil is really a very tedious thing. You do not need to be told that. Nevertheless, such an admission is a blasphemy even among civilized minds, though it holds in every circumstance. 

Evil is not compelling, not sexy, empty of mystery and devoid of charm. Evil, true Evil, is boring. The seductive airs that prophets and poets have heaped upon it across the eons do nothing to lessen this fact. It is something lifeless. A blunt knife in a gilded sheath.

On those occasions when it does appear, Evil – the genuine article, not some facsimile, not petty malice nor deviousness nor even the will to commit grievous harm – but real Evil…

…It does not want to hurt you. It is merely indifferent to your pain.

It does not care that you are fearful, or stouthearted in the face of fear; in fact Evil does not care that there is such a thing as You, or that You are distinct from It.

We presume – because we must – that our suffering has purpose, even one we may never ascertain. Surely this is not, could not be, in vain? Surely some greater and more terrible design is at work! This is what we tell ourselves, for what choice is there? What alternative? One both too much to bear, and simultaneously too little. It is something less than three-dimensional. Too prosaic. Too flat.

Fudd knows a thing or two about life in the flat world. He knows that every story needs a villain, or failing that, an antagonist. For years he thought himself the hero, but doesn’t everyone?

A real hero would not have been crushed by a tree, stampeded by a marathon, tricked and tricked ad infinitum by a bamboozling wabbit. Elmer Fudd’s Maker denied him the dignity of living in three dimensions, and in turn Fudd was made flat, pink, dimwitted, round, slow, a joke.

Kelly and Marcus were people – real people – but he, Fudd, is something else. And the Backwooms, for all its emptiness, its fecundity of paradox and silence and oblivion, seems in some way Fudd cannot even comprehend to share this with him.

This place that is both so like reality, and so manifestly unlike it. A home for monstrosities and perversions, adjoined to Creation’s underbelly without apology or excuse.

Such a notion breaks Fudd’s heart, yet also keeps him moving.

The kaleidoscope turns, and the hunter sees all.

New corridors, new pools, threaded by a matrix of light beams. A veritable tessewact of wooms.

And in one of them, hopelessly lost and very alone, is Kelly.

She is sodden, head to toe, and her oxygen mask and hood have either been removed or discarded. She plods disconsolately along an empty Poolwoom corridor, towards no obvious destination.

This is the first time Fudd’s seen her face. Kelly’s black curls are in close cornrows and she has a birthmark on one cheek. She looks so…normal.

‘Hello?’ she calls out halfheartedly to the empty space.

Fudd does not hesitate. ‘Kewwy! Hewwo down there! KEWWY!’ he shouts excitedly.

She does not respond, and keeps moving. ‘Hello?’ she calls again.

‘Marcus? You in here, pal? Marky Mark? If you’re dead, say “I’m dead”.’

She laughs gently, then coughs to stifle something less than a laugh.

‘If you’re alive, then you…you just stay quiet, okay? I’m coming. I’ll find you. Don’t give up hope.’

Fudd tries to paint a hole beneath himself, to open an aperture through which he might shout, but this time the brush fails him, making no impression on the unseen floor.

He pounds his fists uselessly against it. ‘KEWWY! IT’S ME, EWMER!’ Fudd cries.

But she cannot hear him. He watches her traipse down that same corridor until she vanishes, and eventually Fudd forces himself to keep crawling.

He finds Marcus far away, hours or even days later. The fellow still assiduously wears his entire ASync suit, mask and all, though he has contrived to dry off by now. He is wandering the desultory, garishly colored halls of an endless shopping mall complex.

Pink toy slides sit abandoned by plastic ball pits with no gleeful children to give life to them. The rows of tables in the deserted food courts are matched by the hundreds of empty benches, the dry public fountain, the still, quiet bowling alley.

Marcus stops a while at the last. He sits. His head is in his hands, and his shoulders heave gently, up and down.

After this, Marcus plays twenty-two rounds of bowling. There are no pins at the other end of the lane, so every ball rolls clean through. Fudd makes a point of applauding heartily and announcing ‘STWWWWWIKE FOR MAWCUS!’ each time.

This makes no difference to anything whatsoever. You and Fudd both know it.

Still, Fudd does it.

It is so very difficult to leave Marcus there, but eventually the hunter does, blinking back tears. There is nothing else he can do to help the man.

So it goes, in the Backwooms.

Chapter Text

Were a list to be someday compiled of Things Everyone Understands But Which Almost Nobody Can Satisfactorily Explain, the concept of ‘comedic timing’ would be a sure contender for the top five.

We all know when a punchline has landed. But how on Earth do you explain it? How to quantify that precise, ever-mutable concordance of language, of musicality, timbre, the blank space between the noise?

Still, everyone gets it: you, your friends, your accordionist neighbor, your local taxidermist, your great-aunt’s spindly 6’6” health insurance provider who never takes off his top hat. Everyone. Even the very densest member of a hermetic tribe yet uncontacted by the rest of humanity understands when a joke has been well delivered.

Call it a sixth sense. For the past hour or more, Fudd’s has been going off like a tornado siren as he continues along the ventilation shaft, turning left and right based solely on gut instinct. It is the Maker’s malevolent voice, the same sneer of Creation that bade him fall from the light beam in the Poolwooms, which now is all but screeching at him.

A punchline is imminent, and Fudd does not like the shape of it. For how much longer can he avoid what is coming?

There is an opening in front of him. Finally. Fudd squeezes himself through it and drops back down onto the familiar moist carpet. He adjusts the ASync hood, which has held up remarkably well given everything it has been put through; Fudd picks a direction at random, and off he goes.

He passes a patch of flaking wallpaper, and rips it clean off the wall, scrunching it into a ball and then kicking it down the corridor.

Why? Because scwew this pwace, that’s why.

He pays no heed to the harsh halogens, the stickiness underfoot, the sea of suffocating banality that threatens to swallow him forever.

Fudd has bested the Backwabbit, and is now finally, actively seeking an exit from this forsaken place. Let it not be forgotten that out there, in the world he comes from, Fudd still has another score to settle. Another wabbit to find.

There is noise from somewhere nearby. A rustling, shuffling, bustling, rumbling noise.

‘Say, I wonder what that wustewing, shuffewing, bustewing, wumbewing noise is,’ Fudd ponders, before walking into a lamppost.

‘OOOH OUCH,’ he exclaims. ‘Dwat! Just wike on that day twip to Awbany.’

The hood has impaired his field of vision. Fudd has no choice; he struggles out of it. Rubbing his head (the lump is already growing), he inspects the lamppost. The gray metal pole sticks up from the carpet, harshly illuminating the entire room. A single indoor lamppost, where a lamppost shouldn’t be. The incongruity of such a thing scarcely raises Fudd’s eyebrows. He’s seen weirder.

It is, as most things are, taller than him. But this particular lamppost is incongruously large, its bulb higher than ten Fudds all standing on each others’ shoulders. He squints, and can just make out a hole in the ceiling. What’s more, there are rungs attached to one side of it.

That settles it: he’s going up.

Fudd was never much good at rope climbing in gym class. Or dodgeball, or football, or hockey. If there’d been a lamppost-climbing exercise he probably would have been no good at that either. But determination can work wonders for you.

The hunter shimmies up with, if not grace, then certainly vigor. As he nears the curve of the top, he wraps his hands around the metal and presses the soles of boots against it, ankles together, like a coconut picker.

A notion: he reaches up and pushes the lump back down into his head. In one spring, he is launched upwards, airborne.

His fingers curl over the bottom rung. Made it, Ewmer. Now CWIMB!

Kicking his little legs for balance, Fudd takes the rungs one at a time, each a mighty effort. They are clamped, buried, in the wall. A ladder no one was ever meant to see, let alone climb. He shouldn’t be up here.

The thought gives him a chill of wicked satisfaction.

A comparatively short ascent later, and dim halogen light pours down. Fudd’s face comes into light.

Hope is a curious substance; swiftly crushed in one’s everyday existence, yet so often renewed in the direst of straits. A tiny, unkillable weed that sprouts in even the darkest nooks of Reality. Perhaps even flourishes there. Humans are such oddities.

There is no reason for Fudd to be hopeful, but the higher he climbs, the more hopeful he is.

Something passes by him. Something unexpected. He backtracks down a few rungs to inspect it.

It’s so much smaller this time. But look! The same black letters, the same hand. The very same.

ONE IN

ONE OUT

For what reason, he couldn’t possibly say; Fudd reaches out and runs his fingers across the words. They smear easily. The ink is fresh. If there were a ringing in his ears, it would have intensified. The punchline is coming. He is certain.

He climbs the last few rungs, and his hands find purchase on the carpet. The hunter wrenches himself into the new space, and lies flat on his back, breathing in and out, eyes closed. Finally, he sits up.

He opens his eyes.

Oh….

Ohhhh…

OHHHHHHHHH….

‘Cwud,’ says Fudd, without shock, without inflection. It is too late now for that.

The woom is cavernous, sparsely lit. Here and there in the distance is a fluorescent square, or another lamppost. If it were empty, Fudd would doubtless have miles to stare down. But it is not empty.

There is one. Right there.

No more than a few yards from Fudd’s boots. And another behind it.

Several more behind that one, and yet others beyond, standing huge and dark and motionless like…trees.

Horrid, stringy trees.

‘There you are,’ says Elmer Fudd, ‘Old Mister Punchwine.’

Chapter Text

Silence.

If you – yes, you – were to find yourself transported at this very moment to the endless yellow maze southwest of Creation, and by a chance so infinitesimal neither Newton or Leibniz would bother to calculate it, you were to land in this very room…

…You would see nothing move.

No lights flicker. No shadows change. The hunter seems almost statuary: his limbs still, his eyes unblinking.

He sits and stares mutely ahead.

And all around him, a forest of Backwabbits.

You would similarly be mistaken to assume, from the look on his face, that Fudd has been dumbfounded yet again. On the contrary. His mind is frantic with activity. He has never seen such beings as these remain still for so long, and in their immobility he is able to perceive them in a new light, to a new degree of detail.

The one closest is a dead ringer for the very first entity to cross Fudd’s path. He had imagined one Backwabbit to look much the same as another, but no, no. Each and every specimen is unique, the shape and texture of their skin putting him in mind of the old cottonwoods he would sometimes pass when he was out hunting.

It has a head, he sees. All the Backwabbits have heads. They look like people.

Well, at least…they must have looked like people once, in much the same way a puddle of wax once looked like a candle.

Fudd gets to his knees, and starts to crawl. He leaves one Backwabbit behind him, passes another, and with utmost caution tries to put what distance he can between the monsters and himself. There are just so many of them. More than dozens; hundreds.

His mind turns to the ASync researchers, those poor souls now lost to the wooms as surely as gemstones in a roiling ocean. As surely as himself. What they would have given to see this place, he thinks.

Some of the monsters stand rigid, but others are frozen mid-stride. One’s arm is raised as though in victory. Perhaps the Backwabbits are partial to a game of musical chairs, same as anyone.

The hunter’s path vacillates, of necessity. Some entities are so close together that passage between them is impossible. Fudd finds himself crawling under Backwabbits’ raised legs, dodging their leering torsos. He gives silent thanks that they are so blessedly still.

You know this game well enough by now: he should not have done that.

The sound comes from everywhere at once, and the hunter does not even have to strain to notice it resolving into a voice.

A gibbering, stuttering voice that squeakily trips over itself with almost every other word.

‘G-g-gosh! I – gee w-w-w-w-whiz I - uh d-d! I d-d-d think! I’m t-t-otal uh d-d-d- completely! uh d-d lo-lo-los-lost in here!’

Fudd would know that panicked porcine prattling anywhere.

Porky.

The pig’s voice continues: ‘Ann-any-any uh d-d-d-d is there anyb-b-b-ody there? Uh d-d uh anybody at all?’

Fudd notices the lampposts first; identical to the one he bumped into earlier, with PA speakers attached to them. Porky Pig’s tinny voice blares out, ricocheting off every surface.

This wakes the Backwabbits up.

Their poses unfreeze and, like so many cattle, the huge dark beasts lumber about and into one another. As they collide, they roar. Fudd clamps his hands over his ears, because the sound they emit is intolerable. Try your best not to imagine it.

The halogens flood a deep red, and the hunter watches with anticipation as one section of yellow-papered wall sinks into the floor, revealing blackness behind; a gaping chute.

The nearest Backwabbit is paused before it, like one about to dive from a cliff. It moves one foot, then the other. Its weight shifts between the two.

Is it a remaining spark of Fudd’s empathy that causes him to feel – yes, so strongly feel – the creature’s reluctance? It seems to him that the Backwabbit does not want to step into that void. That it is…refusing?

Every joke has a punchline. It is, again, the way of things.

Before a single further comedic beat is wasted, another of the Backwabbits shoves the apprehensive candidate in the back, and the monster disappears down the hole, which is once again sealed behind the rising wall.

Other Backwabbits have noticed Fudd, and are rounding on him. Not missing his chance, the hunter dashes between two of the nearest monsters, causing them to collide with each other in their attempt to grab him.

As Fudd slips and dodges between Backwabbits galore, Porky Pig’s voice continues to ring out across the yellow woom.

‘It’s s-s-s-s-o v-very d-d-d-dark!’

Narrowly missing the claws of a Backwabbit to his right, Fudd leaps sideways and (to his surprise) through an open door that has appeared on his left.

The new woom, too, is densely packed with Backwabbits; it seems the entire floor is a veritable Backwabbit warehouse. As the lights blare red and the creatures spring to juddering life, Fudd notices that at the far wall there is an array of identical doors.

Viewed in a classic Keatonesque wide, the following happens:

Fudd runs left to right, arms stretched in front, his feet a blur.

Chasing after him, a whole jacked-up pack of Backwabbits on the attack, aiming to make a snack of Fudd the eleutheromaniac. They resemble nothing so much as a fast-moving black cloud of limbs.

Fudd opens a door and dashes out of sight, leaving it open behind him. Moments later, the Backwabbits thunder into the darkness and the door shuts.

Instantly, one further down the wall opens; Fudd comes running out again. The Backwabbits follow.

Through another door Fudd exits, pursued by Backwabbits.

Now another door – there he goes. There they are, behind him. The doors open and shut in rapid succession.

Fudd. Then Backwabbits. Then Fudd again.

Backwabbits, chasing each other.

Fudd, chasing the Backwabbits.

…and then…

A Backwabbit chases two other Backwabbits; one is sitting on the other’s shoulders.

Fudd sits in a wheelbarrow pushed by a Backwabbit; the pair of them are pursuing a third Backwabbit.

Fudd (walking on his hands) is being pushed by a Backwabbit, while the two of them are themselves being chased by a wheelbarrow (that nobody is pushing).

…and so on, until…

Having exhausted every possible maneuver with which to outwit, confound, or otherwise bamboozle the entities, Fudd darts out of shot once more.

The cloud of Backwabbits follows afterward, as horrifying and implacable as ever, and – look!

What’s this?

It cannot be…

Surely not…

…Who should be standing at the other end of the corridor – in a polka dot taffeta dress and matching peep toe pumps, batting her enormous eyelashes and tossing her golden curls – but a beautiful Lady Backwabbit?

‘YOO HOO!’ she calls daintily, waving a white-gloved hand.

In unison, every monster launches several feet into the air, heart-shaped eyes bulging forward to the tune of a hundred unseen trumpets.

‘Oopsie daisy!’ continues the Lady Backwabbit, casting a white cloth to the carpet, ‘I seem to have miswaid my handkerchief! Oh siwwy me! Would one of you stwapping gentlewabbits be kind enough to wetwieve it for me?’

The ensuing pandemonium is quite something to behold. Backwabbits shove each other aside, blundering past each other, scratching and howling and all reaching for the handkerchief, so as to win the Lady Backwabbit’s favor. The monsters are picked up and thrown aside by their fellows with abandon motivated by a lust so brazen it tests the very limits of a PG rating.

The Lady herself titters and toys with her pearl necklace, shaking her luxuriant curls beneath the lights. Porky Pig’s voice sounds throughout the woom once more.

‘Oh d-d-dear m-me that’s a very st-steep dr-dro-dro uh a l-long way d-down!’

The unruly mass of Backwabbits has almost reached the Lady, the handkerchief passing from handlike extrusion to handlike extrusion as they snatch it from each other.

She smiles a knowing (and oddly dimpled?) smile, and steps to one side.

Porky’s voice says, ‘B-b-b-b-be c-c-careful! D-d-don’t f-f-f-’

The open doorway that the Lady Backwabbit was cunningly occluding is now directly in the path of the monsters’ stampede, and they all go tumbling straight down into the bottomless void on the other side.

Their roars of sudden confusion and rage come in time with the distant voice of Porky Pig, who is presently somewhere else in the great Backwooms complex, wailing ‘D-DON’T F-F-FAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!’

He, too, sounds like he is falling.

Can you hear that noise? That whistling noise?

The Lady Backwabbit slams the door and removes her long hair. Oh, discovery! Oh, shock! It was not a Lady Backwabbit, after all. It was Elmer Fudd the whole time, merely wearing a dress, pumps and wig as a clever disguise.

‘That’ll teach you to mess with a wed-hot sportsman and master iwwusionist!’ he crows, triumphantly. He lifts up one leg and peers over his shoulder.

‘These shoes fwatter my figure handsomewy,’ he murmurs approvingly. ‘I can see why the wabbit has a pwefewence for cwoss-dwessing.’

‘Say,’ he adds, ‘what was that noise?’

He pauses.

‘Cwud. There’s another Backwabbit behind me, isn’t there?’

Fudd turns around.

As sure as lightning precedes thunder, and payoff follows setup, the final Backwabbit is hunched over not ten paces from where Fudd stands.

Its head almost touches the ceiling. Not only that, but Fudd recognizes it.

‘Say, aren’t you–’ he begins, before the monster says,

‘¥ou juẞt st&y Quiet, 0kAy? Im coming. I’# fiNd yøu. Don’T ⅁ive up hope.’

He knew it. It is that same brute from before, the one that speaks in Kelly’s mangled voice. Despite Fudd’s efforts, the wiley rascal has made it back to torment him one last time.

And this time, he is really, truly out of ideas.

‘What’ll it take for you to weave me awone?’ he demands, not expecting an answer. ‘Can you understand me? Are you even an intewwigent cweature or just an ugwy abewwation, a fweak of nature?’

Fighting every instinct, the hunter takes a step closer.

‘Is there a personawity in there? A bwain, a heart? Some sembwance of commonawity, or compassion?’ He throws up his hands, entreating the great beast to understand him, damn it all. All Fudd wants is to find a screed of understanding, of meaning, in this mad riddle of a world.

‘My Cweator has mistweated me, to be sure,’ Fudd says in desperation, ‘But that cannot mean that aww the universe is mawign! I wefuse to swawwow such oppwobwium!’

He falls to his knees. ‘Oh Backwabbit! Destwoy me if you must. Wend me to tiny widdle shweds if that bwings you pweasure. But know this, cweature: you and I are cut from the same howwible cwoth. You are just as powerwess to infwuence your destiny as I am. You’re no viwwain, no twue wabbit. Know what you are? You’re just another swave to Fate. And Fate, cweature, is nothing more than a punchwine in a fancy hat.’

He stares the abomination dead in the not-really-but-might-as-well-be-its face, and does not look away, determined to invest this, their last interaction, with a measure of human dignity.

The hunter chooses his final words most carefully.

‘I’d say “See you in Heww”,’ he begins with a wry and morbid smirk, ‘But I don’t bewieve in–’

Fudd does not get to finish his (undoubtedly) badass zinger because at this precise moment, an oversized pie comes flying from out of nowhere, and collides squarely with the Backwabbit.

The great beast stumbles backwards, coconut custard and whipped cream dripping down the contours of its body.

Chapter Text

Gripping him tightly by the wrist, Fudd’s savior whisks him away down a stretch of yellow carpet, which makes the hunter realize that he is, right now, trailing in the air like a windsock, bobbing up and down with the jouncy fluidity that only comes from being animated on twos. He watches as the Backwabbit roars again and begins to stomp after them, while Fudd’s companion bounds onward through the boundless corridors.

He makes to ask, ‘Say, are you–’ but is cut off by another coconut custard pie (with whipped cream) as his rescuer sends it whizzing past him and straight into the Backwabbit’s frightful visage.

‘A diwect hit!’ cries Fudd, admiringly.

This second pie appears to particularly aggravate the creature. It bellows with matchless ferocity, though admittedly its nightmarish features inspire rather less fear now that two helpings of cold coconut custard are trickling slowly down them.

As they hurtle round a tight corner, Fudd notices another message casually written in a large, loopy scrawl across the corner wall:

WELL

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT

–more walls whip past as–

IN AN

OPERA

–they keep moving. Then:

A

HAPPY

ENDING

?

Is it Fudd’s imagination…

…or are he and his rescuer picking up speed?

The walls smear, blur and collapse into a mustard myriad. The flesh on Fudd’s cheeks ripples with a sound like a canvas gazebo in a force nine wind, while the one charging ahead at the front maintains their grip on him even as their speed surely begins to approach that of light.

One moment there is carpet underneath them; the next, it is gone.

In its place, the wet tilework of the Poolwooms.

Fudd’s rescuer weaves them sharply between two columns and leaps like a gazelle across a mid-size pool, making another narrow turn into a corridor barely wide enough for them both. Indeed, it is not wide enough at all. The further along they go, the closer the walls taper in.

Thankfully, they make it out the other side, though Fudd’s limbs all come through a little slower, each with an audible *pop*. The running continues.

Feeling rather queasy by now, Fudd looks over to one side. Kelly’s face looks back at him, astonished. She is sitting on the edge of a pool eighteen feet or so away, her boots off and the legs of her suit rolled up to her knees. Her feet are dangling in the water, like a kid on summer vacation.

‘Elmer?’ she mumbles, feebly.

‘KEWWY!’ he shouts, but it’s too late. They whizz past a wall and she is obscured from view.

‘Stop!’ Fudd wails, trying to grab his rescuer’s attention. ‘Stop, pwease! My fwiend is back there, we have to go hewp her!’

It is no use. They don’t slow down. Rubbery as he is, and with no mean exertion, Fudd twists his quaggy head around to an almost owlish degree. Not quite 180 degrees, but at least a solid 165.

An orange glove is tight around his wrist, and the hand that wears it is not much bigger than his own.

It can’t be. And yet it is–

‘NEW GUY?!’ Fudd splutters, gobsmacked.

His neck, wound-up like a spring, suddenly recoils with a similar noise to that of a rapidly deflating balloon, and he finds himself facing behind again. Fudd’s black pupils circumduct the rims of his big white eyes, in opposite directions, as happens when he gets dizzy.

A tiny ring of brightly colored birds flits about his head, but they disperse as he shakes himself back to lucidity. The air underneath feels different and he peers down.

The tiles aren’t there anymore. Nothing is there. They left a balcony behind them. New Guy’s feet tread the air.

Below is yet another pool, another sheer drop into chlorinated Lethe, and nothing between it and New Guy’s boots but a long pure plank of light.

Fudd’s rescuer takes the bridge at quadruple pace with not a hint of fear, and the hunter feels the slightest pang of envy over it.

Behind them, the Backwabbit has stalled at the very edge of the balcony, before the sudden drop of tiled wall down to the water. It shakes away the last of the coconut custard and whipped cream, but it does not move.

Perhaps this is its weakness. At long last: Backwabbits can’t swim. Who knew? Fudd cannot help himself. ‘So wong, Backwabbit!’ he crows, ‘We pwomise to wwite!’

He murmurs over his shoulder to New Guy, ‘Sucker. I won’t send so much as a single wetter!’

The monster roars but the sound is growing fainter now as New Guy puts ever more distance behind the pair of them.

There is a warm sensation growing in Fudd’s chest. Hope. Is it hope, truly? He’d forgotten the feeling. The hunter so rarely gets to win that when something like it happens, he is as flustered as one being proposed to.

Still, it’s nice.

If only it could last.

Another roar – over his shoulder now – and Fudd sighs. New Guy screeches to a halt, for against all odds but those of a cartoon, the Backwabbit has contrived to reappear right at the other side of the bridge, where the light beam meets the opposing balcony.

The monster roars again: the paroxysm-inducing howls of the endless void given form. Don’t imagine the sound. Don’t.

…You’re imagining it, aren’t you?

Very well.

Imagine the sudden creep of the centipede’s legs against the flesh of your neck.

The sound the wall made, in the dark room where you woke to find the window in your bed, and teeth in every pocket.

The twitching, hair-encrusted thing. That thing. You know the one, they pulled it from your mouth, sodden, like a flannel promised blood. How did it fit down there?

Imagine poking at the chrysalis. It opens. The stench. It absorbs you. Don’t let go don’t let go don’t let…

–Do you see?

The Backwabbit’s roar is just like that, only worse.

It is indifferent to pain. To Fudd’s, and yours and mine.

For the first time, New Guy releases Fudd’s wrist. The hunter lands on his feet and turns to face their opponent. They stand at the end of the light bridge, one final Backwabbit blocking their path.

‘What’s the pwan?’ whispers Fudd.

New Guy responds by striding up to the Backwabbit and raising a STOP sign he appears to have pulled from thin air. Over his ASync suit he now sports a crossing guard’s visibility vest.

New Guy looks left. New Guy looks right. Then he waves the beast forward.

Bewildered, the Backwabbit lumbers a few paces, but no sooner is it on the light bridge than New Guy brandishes the sign in a most officious manner – indicating that the creature has failed to obey some traffic law or other – and the Backwabbit swings its huge leg up and around to avoid overstepping. New Guy indignantly blows a whistle at it. Yes, he has a whistle now.

The Backwabbit makes a conciliatory gesture but New Guy is having none of it. Angrily tooting on the whistle, he marches the Backwabbit (and Fudd) here and there, backwards and forwards – STOP, proceed, STOP, STOP, go that way – gesticulating with all the wild panache of an orchestra conductor until, according to some configuration Fudd cannot quite puzzle out, both he and New Guy are standing on the balcony…

…and the Backwabbit is on the bridge.

New Guy nods once. The Backwabbit nods back. They shake hands. Then the light bridge turns off and the Backwabbit falls down into the water.

Naturally, it whistles on the way.

The first real sign of civilization, to Fudd’s eyes, is neither the carts, nor the suits, nor the equipment cases; it’s the lunchbox.

One of the ASync crew, Raunak, had brought a packed lunch with him through the differential portal, and was being summarily lambasted by the site supervisor for such an unpardonable breach of conduct when the other researchers noticed the two new figures standing in their midst.

The supervisor is one of only a handful of individuals whose face is visible beneath a clear mask, instead of the usual tinted. He is a ruddy-faced man in middle age with a thick mustache and military bearing. He was the last to fall silent at the sight of Fudd and New Guy, having been busy chewing out Raunak, who was (and is) himself, chewing. Presumably Raunak doesn’t want his imminent pay dock to be in vain.

The researchers stare at Fudd and New Guy, and for the life of him, all Fudd can stare at is the lunchbox. At this moment, and not until this moment, he has never in all his days felt quite so ravenous. Even wabbit stew would not sate him. The sight of Raunak’s burrito sets his mouth to drooling.

When finally someone speaks, it is the supervisor. He is not happy.

‘Where the hell did you come from?’ he snaps.

‘It’s a vewy, vewy wong stowy,’ says Fudd, still looking at the burrito.

‘Oh, is it? Well if I were you, I’d start explaining this long story sooner rather than later, because you better know that this sector is beyond classified, and civilians have no business being–’

He is interrupted by another, more familiar voice from the other side of the room. A very squeaky voice.

‘G-g-g-g-gosh, uh d-d is th-that the old d-d-d hunt-hunt the uh d-d-d the old sportsman I h-hear?’

The meager crowd parts and Porky Pig emerges, outfitted in an ASync suit hood that fits him even worse than Fudd’s did. He gawps in amazement.

‘Why I’ll b-b-b-be! If it d-d-d isn’t ol’ E-E-E-Elmer uh F-Fudd!’

He rushes to meet the hunter in an embrace but is yanked back by the supervisor.

‘Oh no you don’t!’ the man barks, dangling the pig like a bag of groceries. ‘He’s fresh out of a Red Quadrant, son. Right now, those two are shit hot contaminants, and for all we know they’ve been exposed to dozens of entities. Stay back!’

All follow his command immediately. Despite the tepid atmosphere around them, Fudd shivers nervously, while New Guy doesn’t move at all. The supervisor locks eyes with the hunter.

‘So, you’re that Elmer Fudd. Am I right?’

‘I pwesume that my weputation pwecedes me,’ Fudd says evenly.

‘Not by much. We caught this one–’ he waggles Porky again ‘–on his way down the 46A chute. He was squealing for his life.’

‘And uh o-o-once ag-ag-again,’ says the pig plaintively, ‘I r-r-really uh uh am awful th-thankful for–’

‘Shut up.’

‘You g-g-got it, Sir. Consider m-my uh l-l-lips z-zipped.’

‘I said shut up.’

Porky gulps.

‘Like I was saying, our team got a hold of him. Asked him a few questions. Who was he, how did he get here, where did he come from. Your name was one of the first that came up, believe it or not; yours and…some duck’s.’

He waves a ponderous finger. ‘You gotta understand Mister Fudd, there ain’t no procedure for dealing with DPs while they’re still intact. Every detail counts. We had to know just how in the Lord’s name he wound up Backside.’

A nearby researcher snickers, then abruptly tries to hide it.

‘Jason, I swear…’ says the supervisor wearily.

Jason clears his throat. ‘Sorry Sir.’

‘Backside, Jason. Back. Side. You gotta get used to hearing that. Now where was I?’

‘Interrogating the DP Sir,’ Jason says helpfully.

‘DP?’ asks Fudd.

‘Displaced Person,’ the supervisor continues. ‘Which is you, by the way. You and Porkchop here. You’re both lucky, that’s for damn sure. We’ve mapped maybe thirty percent of known B-space, and if a civilian transports within that, we have a decent chance of finding them. But it’s roulette, son. Pure roulette. You have no earthly idea just how very lucky you are.’

That does it.

‘How…wucky…we are?!’ Fudd exclaims, his face boiling vermilion. Steam erupts from his ears.

‘HOW WUCKY WE ARE?!?! ’

He stomps straight over to the man and glowers up at him.

‘Wemme tell YOU something Mister Supewvisor: fwom the vewy first moment I awwived in the Backwooms, I’ve seen fwightful monstwosities and suffewed howwendous aggwavation!

‘First I wost my wifle, then I befwiended your wesearchers Kewwy and Mawcus, but wost them to the wavages of the Poolwooms. I’ve been stuck up on a wight bwidge, I’ve cwawled thwough miles of ventiwation shaft, and I’ve had more cwose encounters with Backwabbits than I could ever wemember.

‘I’ve seen deep into the tewwible depths of this pwace and I gua-wan- tee you it’s a hundwed miwwion times worse than any widdle “Quadwant” of yours.’

Fudd’s gaze is steely, his words blunt and hard. ‘Have you seen the abhowwent wifeforms of the Backwooms, fwiend? Do you know what sort of punchwines are waiting back there?’

There is a brief silence.

The taller man is clearly taken aback. But he recovers himself.

‘You…you saw Kelly?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Fudd with all the bitterness he can muster,

‘Yes Mister Supervisor, I did indeed. And she’s still wost in there too.’

‘But she’s alive?’

‘She’s…’ Fudd falters. ‘...Yes. We wan past her. Somewhere in the Poolwooms. She was dangwing her feet in the water.’

The supervisor makes a mild choking noise, and Fudd notices his eyes are rimmed red.

‘Thank the Lord for that,’ he says softly. ‘My niece is alive somewhere.’

He coughs. A few other ASync researchers cough too, and politely look elsewhere. Porky wipes away a tear, snuffling. The supervisor comes back to himself and finally deposits the pig back on the carpet. Meanwhile, Raunak quietly finishes the last of his burrito and Fudd’s stomach audibly rumbles.

The supervisor’s attention finally turns to New Guy. He seems confused by him.

‘You saw my niece too, crewman? You saw her, alive?’

New Guy nods.

‘You with us?’ he says.

New Guy shrugs. The supervisor bends down to inspect him.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way son, but you’re a little…ah… small.’

New Guy’s posture suggests he is affronted by that. He reaches up to remove his headgear.

And from where Fudd is standing, it is as though all the sound has dropped out of the world. All but that voice.

‘Hey now Doc, there’s no need for ya to get so personal!’

That buck-toothed.

Nasal.

VOICE.

Everything goes black.

Chapter Text

When Fudd comes to, he realizes he has been loaded onto the back of one of the ASync buggies. It is not uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he struggles to sit up.

‘Woah! Woah, be careful,’ says a voice to his right: a yellow-suited researcher waving his hands apprehensively. ‘You were out of it back there. Never seen anyone faint like that before. Feeling okay?’

The hunter’s recollection is cloudy. His head feels like a clock’s bell that has just struck the hour.

The wabbit. I saw the wabbit…

‘Unnghhh…’ he groans.

‘Here.’ His companion passes him a package wrapped in a paper napkin. Fudd’s heart sings. His stomach practically yodels.

‘Is this…?’

‘The, um, pig said you were partial to them. We had to go Earthside just to make it.’

Three (perhaps four) bites later, and Fudd is licking his fingers contentedly while he digests the single most satisfying grilled cheese of his entire life.

‘That good, huh?’ says the researcher. Raunak , he remembers. This is Raunak.

‘I’m vewy gwateful,’ says Fudd. As his eyes refocus he almost jumps, startled.

‘You-you’re not-’ He gestures to his head.

Raunak laughs. ‘Nope, nope, not here. Don’t have to. This part of the Quadrant was green-zoned a while back. I mean obviously you can still wear a hood if you want, but I figure why deprive my colleagues of these fine features?’

He gestures dramatically, pouting like a movie star. Fudd chuckles, and takes a wider look around the area, trying to get his bearings.

‘Where are we, exactwy?’

‘Peasy,’ says Raunak matter-of-factly. It is strange; he and the few others who are milling around this place without their suit hoods are just ordinary people, with ordinary faces.

Fudd is confused. ‘...Peasy?’

‘Yup, Peasy. “Easy peasy!”’

They stare at each other. Raunak smacks his forehead. ‘Shit. I’m so sorry my guy, it’s been a long day. For you too, I’d imagine. Okay, so. Okay. We call it…so this place is PZ. Like as in P-Z. It stands for “Point Zero”.’

‘Point Zewo?’

‘Where the Quadrants meet. The primary ones anyway. Basically, it’s our Backrooms reference point, where the axes cross. Every place we map, all the new B-space that gets explored, we link it all back to here. This is where ASync first broke through.’

He points to a door about thirty feet away. ‘There, actually. Right there. That door.’

It is a plain old white door. Same as you would find in any office building. Fudd can scarcely believe it. His deliverance, an end to his torments, rests on the other side of that door.

‘“Old Yeller”, we call it!’ says Raunak cheerfully. ‘Well I do anyway.’

‘You…what?’ Fudd asks.

‘Get it? Because it’s all “yeller” in here? No? Guess you had to be there. Marcus said he thought it was funny.’

Something Raunak said has snagged Fudd's attention. He swallows hard. ‘You…you people…bwoke thwough?’

‘Yeah. I mean, not me personally, this was back in the eighties. Real grandpa tech too, the old low-proximity magnetic distortion fields. Back before the hipsters got into it.’

‘You mean,’ Fudd says coldly, ‘that I’ve been stuck in here for what feels wike a wifetime because ASync has been bweaking HOLES THWOUGH TO ANOTHER DIMENSION?!’

The few people around them are all staring at Fudd.

‘Take it easy little guy,’ says Raunak. ‘You’re in shock, I get it. Want another sandwich? We can get you one–’

Fudd can’t help himself – he bursts out laughing. He rocks back and forth, slapping his little legs with his hands. A nearby ASync researcher (still hooded) joins in.

In between desperate breaths, Fudd howls out, ‘O-o-open up….for….a…..SUWPWISE!’

He wipes his eyes on his sleeves. It’s all a joke. All of it. The Creator won’t ever let him forget that. Everything he’s been through, everything he’s seen, and still–

Fudd gives a start.

His mind spins in recall:

…A great warehouse of a room, packed with Backwabbits….

…The voice of Porky Pig, newly arrived and scared out of his wits, blaring through the air like an announcement…

…A ladder bolted to a wall that shouldn’t be there, four simple and strangely taunting words left halfway up the climb, for no one to ever see…

…No one but him…

‘Holy cwuuuuuud….’ Fudd’s head swims and he fears he may faint again. He breathes deeply, and hops off the back of the buggy. Other ASync researchers have come nearer by now.

‘What is it?’ asks Raunak. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think I finawwy understand now,’ Fudd says. ‘Oh. Oh ho ho ho ho and it’s a bad one! It’s the corniest punchwine you ever heard!’

He laughs again, crazier and more desperately. He can’t stop.

‘Dude you’re worrying me now.’ Raunak waves over another suited figure who still has their black oxygen mask on. ‘Hey! This is him, right? The guy you met?’

Fudd meets the mask’s eyes and, despite the figure’s identical appearance to all the researchers around them, he feels an instant spark of recognition.

‘MAWCUS! You’re awive! I can’t bewieve it! I-I-I saw Kewwy ! She’s awive too, we’ll go back and wescue her! And! And…and…wait, how did you escape?’

Marcus tilts his head sideways.

‘You’re telling me to cøøl off?’ he asks. His voice sounds odd.

‘Mawcus, you…you were twapped inside a bowwing awwey the wast time I saw you,’ Fudd explains. ‘Was there a way out, after aww?’

‘Elmer, we w0rk here. And not by áccident.’

Raunak slaps a hand on Marcus’s shoulder, grinning wildly. The other man doesn’t react at all. ‘I’m telling you bro, this is a real one right here! I thought Marcus was gone, we all did. We’ve lost a lot of good people, you know. But lo and be-fucking-hold, this morning he just fucking turns up out of a hole in the wall.’

‘What physics?’ asks Marcus. ‘Whåt physics? What physiçs? What–’

Without warning, he turns and walks away in a straight line, still mumbling to himself. Fudd and Raunak watch him leave.

‘Ah, he’s always been a bit of a nervous Nellie,’ remarks the researcher. ‘Good guy though. Real good Catan player too.’

Fudd’s eyes narrow. ‘He weturned from out of a hole?’

‘That’s right. Big black hole in the wall. Like a Marcus vending machine, or something.’

‘That does it,’ says Fudd. ‘That’s the punchwine, Waunak. I saw it wwitten on a waww while cwimbing a wadder.’

‘What? What ladder? And what do you mean, punchline?’

Fudd looks around. He needs to find Porky. ‘Where’s Porky? Teww me where he is.’

‘The pig? He went to debriefing, then commissary.’

‘Debwiefing where? Is the wabbit with him? I must find them. I have to know!’

‘Buddy, you can’t just up and leave like that. I’m supposed to stay with you, y’know. Supervisor still wants to talk to you too, and he’s not like me; he’s real chatty.’

‘I’ww go to him then.’ Fudd marches off towards the door, the white door that leads back to the real world. Raunak chases after him.

‘Hey. HEY! Wait up. Stop! Somebody stop him!’

A meaty hand lands on Fudd’s shoulder and he looks up to see a particularly broad ASync crewmember shaking their head.

Raunak catches up. ‘I sympathize, man. You’re gonna get out of here, don’t you worry. Debriefing doesn’t happen Backside, you’ll go through that door soon enough, but the thing is–’

‘–Differential portal,’ says the person who stopped him, in a bass voice.

‘Yeah. They have to calibrate the field a particular way, or else you get…uh…well there’s no polite way to say this. You get magnetized to fuck. Torn into tiny gooey pieces.’

‘Nothing made of flesh can stand it,’ concurs the other.

Fudd considers this. ‘Nothing made of fwesh?’

The researchers shake their heads. Fudd inhales and exhales concentratedly.

This wiww have to be quick.

‘Alwight,’ he says, more to the fourth wall than to his companions, ‘I’d be wemiss if I didn’t acknowwedge that I’m usuawwy at the other end of these chases, but no matter. Here we go.’

And he takes off at full speed toward the door, from under the researcher’s grip, leaving a Fudd-shaped cloud behind him.

Chapter Text

It’s not even close.

The hunter is through the door and the door shuts behind him before the ASync crew have even broken into a run. The speed of a toon is quite something to behold.

‘Huh,’ he says to himself, still running at full tilt. ‘I guess that magnetic fiewd tawk was just a woad of hooey!’

Fudd looks down to realize his clothes have been zapped into nonexistence. All that remains are his brightly colored heart-patterned underwear. He blushes red and zips out of frame.

The camera stays put for a beat.

Fudd returns, dressed anew in his usual hunter’s garb. ‘Apowogies, folks!’ he says.

He scans the walls for signs, and there they are, readable and plain, each pointing to a place that Fudd assumes must be in that very same Euclidean direction.

Signs one can trust? What sublime luxury.

Fudd runs the way indicated by the CAFETERIA sign. If he knows Porky, the pig is bound to be there.

Contrary to what some may have said, suffering through a morning of abysmal terror really does work up one’s appetite.

When he bursts through the cafeteria doors, Fudd finds Porky Pig – sure enough – sitting at one of the tables with his snout in a bowl of macaroni and cheese, chewing away contentedly. Lounging in a nearby chair, like a despot upon his throne, is the wabbit. They both turn to look at him.

‘Don’t wowwy,’ says Fudd as he approaches. ‘I come in peace. Wewax.’

Porky swallows and beams happily. ‘Hey there M-M-Mister F-Fudd! I uh d-d-d I s-s-s-sure am g-g-glad to d-d-d s-see you alive and w-w-w-well!’

‘Wikewise Porky, wikewise.’

Fudd levels a direct gaze at his longtime foe.

‘Wabbit,’ he says with crisp formality.

A rapid cronchcronchcronch is followed by a characteristically nonchalant ‘Ehhh, what’s up Doc?’ as Bugs nods back, chewing lazily on a carrot. His eyes are half-closed, his huge teeth gleaming.

‘W-w-would you d-d l-l-like some d-d-d-d mac n’ ch-ch-cheese?’ Porky asks Fudd. ‘Th-th-there’s p-plenty.’

‘Fwiends,’ the hunter announces, grimacing inwardly at even addressing the wabbit as such. ‘The time has come to put our diffewences aside.’

‘Our d-d uh our d-d-d-differences?’ says Porky.

‘Our diffewences,’ nods Fudd.

‘We d-d-d-d must p-p-put them aside?’

‘We must.’

‘P-put as-as-aside our d-d-d-differences?’

‘Pwecisewy.’

The pig is a perfect picture of pensive porcine mastication. Finally he says, ‘Could y-you uh r-r-rep uh repea d-d-d uh r-r-rep uh s-say that again?’

Fudd slams a fist down on the table, impassioned. ‘Wisten! Both of you! For the first time in goodness-knows-how-wong, we need to join fowces to bwing down an unspeakabwy howwible advewsawy.’

‘The th-three of us?’ asks the pig, nervously.

‘Yes Porky. Whatever hostiwities and stwifes we’ve had in the past must be swept under the bwidge, because the cweatures wurking on the other side of that white door pwesent a more twemendous thweat to our civiwization than any scwapes between oursewves.’

The pig gestures helplessly with his trotters. ‘H-h-how can you be s-s-so sure Elmer?’

Fudd looks again at the wabbit. Bugs Bunny continues to gaze calmly back at him, seemingly disinterested in the proceedings.

‘In aww that time,’ the hunter hears himself say, the conviction arising within him from some other place, some unknown source, ‘Thwoughout that endwess age of being wost and awone in the Backwooms, the onwy thing I wanted was to compwehend why. Why me? Why was I bedeviwed by such howwors?’

Spurred by the moment, he sits and takes the pig’s trotter in his own hand, looking into those wide white eyes, as expressive and luminous as his own.

‘I figuwed it out,’ Fudd says.

‘“One in, one out.” That’s how it aww works. That’s what the Backwooms do.’

The pig is, understandably, befuddled. ‘Wh-wh-what?’

‘Oh, the ASync cwew will cwack it soon enough,’ says the hunter acidly. ‘Turns out they got aww manner of maps and Backwabbit-twacking gadgets. But they didn’t see what I saw.

‘A warehouse, Porky. That’s what it was. A whole Backwabbit stowage faciwity. I heard you, in there. The vewy moment you awwived in the Backwooms I heard your cwies for hewp, and so did aww those cweatures.’

Bugs Bunny speaks up. ‘Very perceptive of ya, Doc.’ His expression betrays nothing.

Of course, of course, Fudd thinks. Awways cool and cowwected, that’s our wabbit.

He grips Porky by the shoulder. ‘Don’t you see? The Backwooms don’t wike us and they don’t hate us; heck, it’s not even weawwy about us. Whenever someone stumbles in fwom the weal world, a Backwabbit gets set woose to deal with them.’

He spreads his hands wide. ‘One goes in, one comes out.’ His hands seesaw from side to side. ‘Setup and punchwine, Porky. It’s the oldest twick in the book. That’s why wunning and hiding and pweading with them doesn’t work. They don’t pway by the weal world’s wules.’

‘D-d-don’t they?’

Fudd shakes his head and stands back up again. He looks soberly at both Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny, and allows the faintest of smiles to creep across his smooth, spherical countenance. ‘But neither do we.’

The wabbit rises from his chair and leans against it like a teacher watching a promising student teeter on the verge of a breakthrough. ‘Go on, Elmer.’

‘Why do you think I’m standing here wight now?’ Fudd demands.

‘B-b-because this is th-th-the only d-d uh eatery open for d-d-dining?’ hazards Porky Pig.

‘Exactwy! And…wait, what? No. NO. Darn it Porky, focus.’

‘S-sorry Elmer.’

‘The onwy weason I suwvived in there for so wong – the weason I made it thwough that heaviwy magnetized white door – is that I wefused to pway by weawity’s wules,’ Fudd explains. ‘And Kewwy and Mawcus and evewy one of those other poor souls wost to the Backwooms couldn’t do it, but I could. We could.’

‘Because we’re not people.’ The wabbit’s buck toothed grin is effortlessly confident.

Fudd nods. ‘We’re toons.’

Porky frowns and examines his body, seeing himself as if for the first time. His bright pink features, his blue cardigan, his red bowtie. ‘Well j-j-jeez it’s a l-l-little on the n-n-n-no uh d-d-d a little g-g-gauche to p-point out, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ says the hunter, ‘but it’s our twump card.’

So saying, he leaps onto the table and faces the pair of them; a gallant commander rallying his (admittedly few) troops.

‘The ASync corpowation doesn’t weawize what they’re deawing with,’ he proclaims. ‘They don’t know the chaos they might unweash upon the world. If just one Backwabbit ever gets fwee and makes it acwoss that thweshold, thwough that white door…’

Porky pales. He begins to whimper but Fudd silences him with a look.

‘They can’t stop it,’ he continues, ‘but we can. We have weapons in our awsenal they can never dweam of. We pway by a diffewent wuleset, baby!’

Their enthusiasm is growing, he can feel it.

‘Swapstick! Chase sequences! Dwawn-out segments where one – or sevewal of us – is dwessed in dwag! Extwemewy warge, perfectwy sphewical bwack bombs!’

Fudd pummels the air excitedly. Porky joins in.

‘Just think!’ he exclaims, ‘With our combined Wooney pwowess, we can vanquish any wascawwy Backwabbit that dares cwoss our paths! So what do you say – Porky? Wabbit? Shall we agwee to wet bygones be bygones? Shall we pool our wesources for the gweater good of all human- and toon-kind?’

He leaps down and puts one hand in the middle of their circle. Porky’s trotter joins it. Both look expectantly at Bugs.

Bugs Bunny looks back at them, from one to the other. He chuckles softly.

‘Ah dang it,’ he drawls, ‘you’re a pair of maroons.’

Chapter Text

For a few very tense moments, nobody says anything. It is Porky who finally breaks both the silence and the circle.

‘C-c-come now uh d-d-d Bugsy old ch-chum!’ He entreats earnestly. ‘Th-this is no t-t-t-time to d-d-d uh to b-be p-p-pigheaded!’

‘N-none taken,’ he adds, apparently to himself.

Fudd scowls, annoyed that pouring his heart out hasn’t had the desired effect. ‘Tell me that’s not weawwy your answer, wabbit?’

‘Don’t get me wrong Doc, it was some real pretty speechifying,’ Bugs replies, ‘But still I gotta pass.’

‘What? Are you too yewwow-bewwied? Don’t have the gizzard to stand up and do what’s wight?’

‘Now now Elmer, old pal,’ says Bugs coolly, ‘we wouldn’t want to start fighting, would we?’

‘Haven’t you been wistening ?!’ Fudd yells. ‘Fighting is exactwy what we should be doing! You and me, side by side!’

He squares up to Bugs – it is easy, they are roughly the same height after all, sans the ears – and pushes his nose right up against the lupine miscreant’s face.

‘What’s the matter, wabbit?’ he sneers. ‘Afwaid you can’t take it?’

Bugs pushes back. ‘Oh no, I can take it!’

‘Oh NO, you can’t take it!’

‘No no NO Elmer, you can’t take it!’

Fudd is aghast. Livid. ‘I can’t take it? I can too take it!’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah! I can take it!’

‘Well alright!’ says Bugs brightly, handing Fudd a large lit stick of dynamite, ‘Take it!’

The hunter does.

*BANG!*

When he comes to, Fudd realizes groggily that he has been tied to a cafeteria chair. He squirms and rocks but cannot get free.

Porky, slumped over and still unconscious, is in the chair next to him.

Fudd looks around, trying to get his bearings.

The wabbit is perched on a table, watching him.

‘What is this?’ Fudd cries. ‘Wabbit! Bugs! I demand that you fwee me at once!’

‘Gee,’ says Bugs Bunny, ‘I’d sure love to, but I’m under very strict instructions not to “fwee” you at all.’

This makes no sense. Fudd struggles for a coherent response.

The best he can manage is a halting ‘Whaaa…?’

‘Lemme just check it for ya,’ says the wabbit, pulling a book from nowhere, titled Very Strict Instructions.

‘AH! Yup, says so right here. ‘“After being hog-tied (and man-tied), under no circumstances let Messrs P.B.Y.O.B.B.Q Pig and E.J. Fudd out of their restraints.” Sorry Doc, nuthin I can do.’

The hunter’s head is spinning.

‘I…I don’t get it…’ he says weakly. ‘You…you pwotected me in there, wabbit. You saved my neck wight at the end.’

The wabbit reclines, smiling aloofly. ‘Sure. Ain’t I generous?’

‘Why are you doing this? After aww we’ve been thwough?’

‘All we’ve been through?’ Bugs gives him a quizzical look. ‘Lemme just remind ya that you chased me into the Backrooms.’

It seems a lifetime ago, yet Fudd can just about remember it. He was chasing the wabbit. Yes, a chase. ‘With my wifle…’

‘Yeeees, with your wifle.’ The wabbit is unamused.

‘That wifle went evewywhere with me,’ Fudd says, a lump rising in his throat. ‘It was pwacticawwy a part of my body. I nearwy wept when I wost it.’

‘Uh huh,’ says Bugs idly. ‘I was watching, ya know.’

This gives Fudd pause. ‘You – you were?’

‘Positively, Doc. Every step. We had to send one of our best entities after ya, and then ya went and gave it the slip. Took yourself a dip in the Poolrooms. I had to make drastic changes to the plan, on your account.’

Fudd looks over at Porky. The pig’s eyelids are droopy and do not open.

‘It was you.’ The dots are beginning to connect. ‘You were puwwing aww the stwings; you’re the one who wed Kewwy and Mawcus diwectwy to that wall!’ Fudd cries, ‘you knew I’d be stuck inside!’

He shakes his head. What a fool he’s been, this entire time. Fate’s perennial patsy indeed.

‘And all those messages? “Open up for a suwpwise!” I should have known. You inscwibed evewy one of them, didn’t you?’

Bugs blinks. ‘What are ya talking about? I didn’t write nothing.’

‘WIAR!’

The wabbit sighs. ‘No-good nefarious schemer I may be, Elmer, but even I don’t control everything in the Backrooms. Not by a long shot. Them words mighta just appeared on their own. That sorta thing happens over there. Pretty kooky if you ask me.’

Fudd’s brain scrambles to make sense of it all, but it is like grasping for handfuls of smoke. ‘B-b-but, what about the machine? The wight-bwidge machine? When you set it up, you surewy must have known that it would get wid of my fwiends!’

The wabbit reaches beneath the table. He lifts up a large, many-lensed contraption and places it on the tabletop.

‘You mean this thing?’

No doubt about it. It’s the light-bridge machine alright. An oversized printer covered in camera lenses. Or close enough.

‘Answer me this,’ Fudd says. ‘Did you mean for your infernaw machine to kiww Kewwy and Mawcus in cold bwood? Or were they just more acceptabwe casuawties in your no-good, oh-so nefawious scheme?’

Bugs reaches for a stick of celery and chomps partway through it. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he says, ‘I didn’t know what it was gonna do.’

Once Fudd’s face has resumed its normal color and steam has ceased blowing out of his ears, he attempts to ask, with a shade more dignity, ‘What do you mean, you didn’t know?’

‘Doc,’ says the wabbit, not unkindly. ‘I think you oughta see what this gizmo really is.’

So saying, he hefts the machine all the way over to Fudd’s chair, twists it around in one smooth motion and points at the neat white label affixed to one side.

Fudd leans in and reads:

|PLOT DEVICE|

© WARNER BROS ENTERTAINMENT INC.

‘It makes the story move quicker,’ Bugs says.

Fudd wants to weep, but now finds he cannot. Perhaps the Creator erased his tear ducts, sometime between Fudd’s past and his present. ‘Is that what this is to you, then? Just another one of your funny stowies?’

‘Heck no.’ The wabbit puts the machine back down. ‘Nothing funny about this, kiddo. There’s this sub clause, see. We plum forgot about it, but it was almost gonna kick right in on all the contracts: yours, Porky’s, Foghorn’s, Sam’s.

‘The long and short is that after seventy some-odd years, yous get all the rights to your own IPs. And that means everything: old reels, old adventures. Merchandise. The whole megillah, Doc. Obviously, the studio can’t allow that.’

The blood rushes in Fudd’s ears. ‘You…you wascaw. So you sold us aww out, is that it? But-but why bwing us here, to the Backwooms?! Expwain that!’

Bugs shrugs. ‘Ever heard of vertical integration, pal? Warner Bros bought ASync last quarter. We give ‘em all the funds they ask for, in exchange for a little use of the old B-space Backlot. Strictly private of course. You’ve met the supervisor; he don’t need the headache.’

He hops off the table and does a Fred Astaire shuffle across the floor. ‘If one of our toons happens to be a little “displaced” in space and time – legally speaking – well then…a certain sub clause gets automatically voided, and hey presto! The rights revert back to Warner. Neat, huh?’

He picks Fudd up (still in his chair) and waltzes him around the cafeteria. ‘Ya know for the record,’ says the wabbit, ‘I said we should send yous all off to Vegas. Maybe give yous a residency at some theater. But this was cheaper.’

‘Put me down,’ says Fudd icily. The wabbit does.

‘What do you get out of this?’ Fudd asks. ‘Hmm, Bunnydict Awnold? What’s in it for you?’

The wabbit feigns shock. ‘For me? My dear huntsman, dontcha know I’m the mascot of a thirty billion dollar enterprise, beloved by generations and still culturally relevant after the better part of a century?’

He leans in and smiles sweetly, though his voice carries a hard edge. ‘I am this dang company. You really think they’d push old Bugsy off the cliff?’

The hunter doesn’t flinch. He carefully remarks, ‘I bet if they did, you wouldn’t even whistwe.’

Bugs seems confused by this. ‘Why would I whistle?’

Fudd shakes his head.

‘You wouldn't undewstand. And anyway, what now? Maybe Warner owns the wights to my soul, maybe I’ww fowever be a swave to that contwact.

‘But!’ he adds pointedly, ‘bwag about it aww you wike, but your pwans never compwetewy came to fwuition.’

Bugs’ hands are on his hips. He gives Fudd a wilting glance. ‘Really Doc? Is this the part where you reveal an even bigger dynamite stick hidden up your sleeve?’

Fudd laughs. ‘Nothing so ewementawy, wabbit. I’m simpwy pointing out that though you’ve been vewy vewy cwever, you still can’t foow old Ewmer.’

The wabbit laughs too. A chuckle at first, but it builds and builds.

Eventually he is laid on the floor, kicking his legs in the air, wracked by howls of mirth. It is as unseemly a display as Fudd has ever witnessed from a corporate mascot.

Finally Bugs Bunny sits back up and dabs his eyes. ‘Oh wow. Oh mama, thank you. That was really somethin. Ya know, I’ve always had a soft spot for ya, Nimrod. You’ve always been my favorite.’

‘Weawwy?’ says Fudd with no inflection. ‘Why might that be?’

Bugs beams. ‘You’re just so dang stupid. “I can’t fool you”, huh? All I’ve ever done is fool you, since day one. Them’s the rules, Elmer. You behave like your stupid self, and I run rings around you. That’s our show. Curtain.’

He gasps. ‘Look at ya! Why, you’re going red, ya tomato-faced goon! Is this bothering you? Is it?’ Bugs smiles wickedly. ‘Will you sing me my song?’

‘What song?’

‘You know the one.’ The wabbit begins to hum, and Fudd recognizes the tune: Wagner’s “Ritt der Walküren”.

‘No,’ he says flatly.

‘Why not? C’mon, dontcha remember the words?’

‘I said no,’ says Fudd.

‘C’mon c’mon, sing it with me: kiww da waaabbit, kiww da waaaaabbit, KIWW DA WAAAAAABBIT.’

‘Sowwy,’ Fudd says, attempting a shrug while still bound to the chair. ‘Guess I’m just not in the mood.’

‘I’m offended Doc,’ Bugs says, sounding genuinely regretful. ‘You won’t do this for me? Not even as a parting gift for your old pal Bugsy, before I seal you up in a wooden crate and throw you in a dumpster?’

‘Afwaid not,’ Fudd says.

Bugs pouts. ‘Why?’

Fudd glances at Porky Pig again: still out cold. He makes a judgment.

‘Sure,’ he begins, ‘maybe I’d sing that old tune one wast time, if my old wival weawwy was wistening.

‘But awas, he’s not even here.’

Fudd’s headlight eyes are in full glare, aimed at the impostor.

‘You,’ he says coldly, ‘Are. Not. The. Wabbit.’

Chapter Text

It starts in the teeth. They multiply.

More and more of them sprout either side of the two bucked front incisors. Too many teeth, far too many.

Then Bugs’s ears begin to lengthen, darkening. Their texture changes. Fudd is reminded of a timelapse he once saw of a tree growing: the inexorable emergence of new limbs constantly sprouting, expanding, twisting.

The false wabbit grows in size, alarmingly quickly.

‘HoW cöuLD you TELL?’ it asks, still grinning maniacally. Its voice is becoming deeper, stranger.

‘There were a handfuw of cwues,’ says Fudd, doing his best not to show fear. A lot of fear shows, nevertheless.

‘First: the cewewy. As wong as I’ve known the wabbit, he always chews on nothing but cawwots. When you puwwed the gween stuff out, I knew something was up.

‘Second: this whole cwazy pwot. What does Bugs care about sucking up to corpowate Amewica? About miwwions of dowwars? I guess you weren’t aware he stiww visits his famiwy down the wabbit hole he gwew up in.

‘Third: the whistwe. Any toon knows that when you faww fwom a gweat height, your body whistwes. Wookie ewwor there, fwiend.

‘And wast but not weast,’ Fudd says heavily, ‘Say what you wike about our ups and downs, our centuwy of wivalwy. But the weal Bugs Bunny would never be so cwuel to me. He would never gwoat.’

The false wabbit is still growing. Huge, stringy, many-fingered wabbit paws thrust tables and chairs aside as though they weigh nothing.

‘It was an impwessive perfowmance,’ the hunter says. ‘You’re not wike the others. You’re twicksier, more intewwigent. You can even tawk. But wike I said, you can’t foow old Ewmer.’

The Bugswabbit’s great maw opens wide.

‘I L€ARN FÁST,’ it says, through a huge and hideous smile.

‘How wong have you been in the weal world?’ Fudd asks, shuddering at the behemoth’s voice (and, incidentally, its quite awful breath).

‘L0NG ENOUGĦ T0 ŁIKE IT HÊRE,’ the Bugswabbit says. ‘WARNER BRÔS MADE ME AS THEIŔ OWN PERⱾONAL BACKROOMS GOƑER, BUT IT SEEMS I’VE OUTGROẄN THAT ROLE.’

It picks up Fudd’s chair and looks deep into the hunter’s eyes from its own dark, vacant sockets.

‘ÐO YOU HAVE ÀNY IDEA HOW ƁORING LIFE IS IN THE BACKЯOOMS?’ the beast hisses at him.

‘Er, weww yes, actuawwy I do–’

‘THE SAME ENDLESS CARPET, THE CON$TANT ELECTRIC ḂÜŻŻ, THE SMELL.’

The monster shakes the chair in frustration; the hunter is starting to feel seasick.

‘AND ŴHO IS THĘRE FOR COMPANY? NOTHING BUT MORE MONSTERS, THĘIR MINDS SAPPED OUT, AS MUCH PRISONERS AS YOURSELF.’

The Bugswabbit makes a swooping gesture around the cafeteria.

‘BUT THIS WORLD? FŲLL OF AIR, LIGHT, WIṄDOWS, PEOƤLE.’

It runs a huge and horrible finger along the side of Fudd’s face.

‘YOU’RE ALL SⱣOILED,’ it says. ‘ËVEN YOU DON’T REALIƸE IT, RIDIƆULOUS LI🄣TLE MAN THAT YOU ARE.’

Angrily, the monster tosses Fudd’s chair across the room.  ‘IT’S NOT FAIR!’

It and Fudd bounce together – boing boing boing.

‘NØNE OF YØU DESEЯVE THIS WORLD,’ the monster screeches, bounding after him. ‘I’VE SEEN ŢHE WAY HUMANS ACT IN YOŪR PATHETIC LIVES, IN YOUR PITIFUL LITTLE BOARDROOMS.’

It picks Fudd’s chair up again and squeezes tightly. The hunter’s chest contracts, causing his head to balloon in size, bulging like a pufferfish.

The monster growls over his constricted gasps. ‘OH, YOU THINK YOU’RE SO VERY MEAN AND MIGHTY, WITH SUČH KILLER INSTINCTS.

‘BUT ¿WHAT IS IT YOU ĎESTROY? POIŃTLESS, TINY THINGS. ÙNÌÒNS. RESIDUAL CHECKS. ₿UDG€T$. TAKE OVER A TOŴN HERE. POLLUTE A RIVER THERE.’

The creature’s disgust is plain. Fudd’s vision is clouding under its vice-like grip, and he fears he will faint again.

‘I….don’t…..contwol……the budgets…’ he manages to wheeze.

Whether he’ll reawaken this time, only his Maker knows.

‘YOU MAROOИS HAVE BEEN IN CHARĢE FAR TOO LONG,’ the Bugswabbit leers. ‘ALL THÅT MONEY AND POWER WA$TED. IMAGINE WĦAT A REAL VILLAIN COULD DO WITH IT.’

Words are lost to Fudd. He surely cannot go much longer without breath.

‘ONCE I’VE ASSUMED CONTROL OF BOTH WARNER BRÕS AND ĀSYNC, THEN HUMANITY WILL LEARN THE REAL MEANING OℲ OBLIVION, OF ŁONELINESS.

‘PICTURE IT: MILLI0NS OF ABANDONED SOULS, ROAṂING THE BACKROOMS FOR ALL ETERNITY. HOPELESSLY LOƧT AND VERY ALONE, NO TWO OF THEM EVER MEĒTING.’

At once, the hunter does indeed picture it: the yellow-wallpapered rooms trod for evermore by the shuffling gait of wretched, miserable people. Their eyes empty and lifeless, their bodies lengthening over time into jagged and stringy perversities.

The monster grins, sickeningly wide. ‘Ï PLANT MY SEEDS OF MADNE$$ WITH CÅRE, DONTCHÄ KNOW.’

Fudd’s face is gooseberry-purple. The abominable creature is close to killing him.

But then somehow, finally, it relents. Fudd gasps as deeply as if he had swum Lake Chicago, wearing concrete flippers.

‘MAYBE …’ says the Bugswabbit, with the palpable amusement that accompanies a new and suddenly interesting notion, ‘MAYBE I’LL SEND ŸOU BACK TOO, DOC. JUST ꟻOR FUN. A TOY FOR THE HUMANS.’

A huge finger flicks Fudd’s slowly deflating head, which bobbles like a desk toy.

‘BABIES LOVE THEIR CẲRTOONS, DON’T THEY?’

The hunter looks sullenly up at the Bugswabbit. He was right to be suspicious. This ordeal is worse than anything the real wabbit has ever visited upon him.

‘YOU REALLY ARE MY FAVORITE, ’ says the monster. ‘THAT WAS NO LIE. THE SKUNK WAS EASY TO LURE, THE ANGRY COWBOY ONLY NEEDED A P!CTURE OF BUGS TO CHARGE AT, BUT YOU ELMER? YOU ACTUALLY TRIED TO FIGHT BAƆK.

‘I SHĀLL MISS YOU,’ it concludes. ‘HUMANS JUST DON’T KNOW HOW TO TÔRTURE LIKE I DO.’

‘Au contwaire,’ remarks Fudd hoarsely. ‘Dare I say it, towture may be where we twuly show our excewwence.’

This plainly entertains the Bugswabbit. The laughter that follows is almost as frightful as the beast’s howls of anger. Almost.

‘ꟼATHETIC,’ it says, ‘AND WRONG. HUMANS ARE JUST MUSHY LITTLE CRIṪṪERS. YOU’RE BORN, YOU SUFFER, YOU DIE. NO ELEGAǸCÈ AT ALL.’

‘Oh I agwee,’ says Fudd seriously. ‘Why you’re absowutewy wight that it’s inewegant. But, wabbit, why should it be? We are an inewegant species.’

The Bugswabbit’s face pulls something like a frown. ‘AGAIN WITH THE “WE”? MUST I REMIИD YOU, NIMROD? YOU’RE NOT A PERSON, YOÛ’RE A TOON.’

The little man looks down at his own body, still strapped tight into the cafeteria chair, as though finally noticing himself for the very first time.

‘Yessir,’ he beams. ‘As cartoony as they come, Bugswabbit. So I can’t help but wonder…’

His arms spring up at his sides as Elmer Fudd the hunter leaps gracefully from the chair.

‘...If it wouldn’ta been a better idea to tie me up with cartoon wopes.’

He smiles sweetly.

There is not a moment to lose.

The Bugswabbit lunges after him, but Fudd sidesteps the attack.

The monster tries again, and again. Each attempt is fruitless. Fudd is a blur: here, now there, now here.

He tuts. ‘Dear oh dear, Bugsy. You’re a weal swowpoke these days!’

The monster is enraged. ‘ḦOW?! HOW DID YOU GET FRĘĘ?’

‘You should wisten to yourself, you know,’ says Fudd lightly, dodging each new attack with his arms folded behind him. ‘You’re so wwapped up in your harebwained scheme, you can’t wemember what’s what. “You humans are so fwagile!” “Oh siwwy Ewmer, you’re not a weal human.”’

He eyes the Bugswabbit with eyes full of mischief. ‘So what then, Bugsy Boy? Am I a toon or a human? A useful idiot, or hapwess pwey?’

The Bugswabbit smashes through the tables as Fudd slips between them. Plywood shards go flying.

‘Maybe you’re so angwy because…after all your hopping between dimensions…you can’t teww anymore?’

‘YOU’RE DEAD MEAT FUDD,’ growls the monster, nothing humorous in its tone anymore. It means every word.

‘Cowwection! I am never-was-awive meat!’ cries Fudd spiritedly. ‘And I’m not even weawwy meat; just 2D cells on a 3D pwane. Put that in your cawwot and smoke it!’

More wood crunches and splinters as the Bugswabbit draws closer to the hunter. Fudd is playing for time. Just a widdle more, just hold the punchwine off a widdle wonger.

He has maneuvered himself behind the chair to which Porky Pig is still tied, slumped forwards. The pig is snoring lightly.

In one movement, the hunter swoops Porky out of his restraints and over the hunter’s shoulders. He stumbles a little, and mugs ingratiatingly for a camera that may or may not be there.

‘Oof! Heavy sweeper! Am I wight, folks?’

‘SṪOP THÃT!’ screams the Bugswabbit.

‘Afwaid I’m not stopping for anything!’ Fudd shouts back.

And with a sound like a gunshot ricocheting down the main street of a dusty Western town, he zips away, Porky on his shoulders, pursued by the bounding eldritch form of a most displeased Backwabbit.

Chapter Text

One day, Fudd promises himself, heart pounding, one day I’ll go on an adventure that doesn’t wequire this much wunning.

He is sprinting down a shiny-floored corridor somewhere in the vast ASync research compound, taking left and right turns at random. The facility is terminally bland in design; tiled floors and fire doors, rows of lockers and steel vaults. 

But for the generally drier air and quieter halogens, the place bears quite a resemblance to the infernal eternity of the Backwooms. Though given the researchers’ line of work, it probably helps to be a little desensitized.

The sound of the monster’s steps looms close behind. Fudd hears walls caved in with a single forceful blow of the Bugswabbit’s paws.

‘YOU ÇAN’T RÚN FORÊVER DOC,’ it bellows after them.

‘Elmer?’ mumbles a bleary voice over his shoulder. The pig has finally woken up.

‘Thank goodness you’re awwight.’

Porky looks behind them and yelps, startling himself into wakefulness. ‘Is th-that B-B-Bugs I see d-d chasing us?’

‘Don’t wowwy, I can expwain evewything,’ lies Fudd.

He waits a few beats until the camera angle has reverted to a classic wide shot of this chase – he and Porky on the right side of the frame and the Bugswabbit on the left – and Fudd speeds up just enough that he and the pig disappear out of shot.

The Bugswabbit necessarily puts on an extra spurt, and sure enough it vanishes after him.

With no principals to fill the frame, the background is reduced to a static plane of the same few details whizzing past again and again: lockers, light fixtures, steel doors and tiles underneath it all. 

Endlessly repeating, blurring together. 

Fudd and Porky reappear, but this time on the left. Fudd’s face is triumphant; Porky’s is bewildered. They race off the right side of the frame again.

They are pursued, a half second too late, by the still-irate Bugswabbit. It too races after them.

By the time the pig and hunter have returned yet again from the left, the (animated) film stock has come out of joint with the (imagined) camera, and segmented black bars appear at all sides of the shot.

Fudd hastily hops out of their frame, and past the previous one in which the Bugswabbit is still frozen mid-chase.

‘W-w-what are you d-doing Elmer?’

‘Twust me,’ says Fudd, ‘This is how we wick that mean old Bugswabbit.’

He leaps back into the frame immediately preceding the Bugswabbit’s, and now all of a sudden it is they who are chasing the monster and not the other way around.

Fudd says, ‘Now we wait for things to westart, aaaand…’

The imagined camera starts to jig and whirr back into action, and before you can say Jack Robinson (or Friz Freleng, or Ben Hardaway, or Chuck Jones) the hunter and the pig are chasing after the Bugswabbit, and the monster finds itself being chased by them.

‘THAT’S RICH DOC,’ the Bugswabbit bellows, ‘BUT YOU CAN’T OUTŴIT ME WITH TOON LOǦIC,’ and it skids to a halt, a huge cloud of dust appearing at its feet. The hunter and pig do likewise, stopping just before colliding with the monster.

‘Change of pwan!’ Fudd announces, with only a touch of panic. He spins around and they take off in the opposite direction, the Bugswabbit bounding after them yet again.

‘Th-that way!’ exclaims Porky, yanking Fudd to the right by his collar. The hunter suddenly finds himself running across the wall, his small frame level with the floor. Back to the floor he drops, quite nimbly for one so usually clumsy.

The Bugswabbit is tearing chunks out of the architecture, sending chairs and water coolers flying. Whatever else happens, ASync is going to have to redecorate.

Porky says ‘Okay d-d-d n-now this way!’ and pilots Fudd around another tight corner and into a supply closet, slamming the door behind them.

‘In here?!’ cries Fudd hysterically. ‘But I’m cwaustwophobic!’

‘I r-remember,’ says Porky, ‘so I th-th-think uh you uh d-d ought t-to f-find us a d-d-d w-way out.’

And Fudd understands.

‘Okay…I’ll twy,’ he says. The monster’s approach is rumbling the walls around them. The closet door rattles.

Fudd extends his little arms – he’s never attempted anything remotely similar to this before – and concentrates with all his might on the dingy closet wall, just inches from his nose.

This is not a tiny widdle cwoset, he thinks. 

This is a big woom.

A huge fist slams against the door. Porky’s trotters tighten around Fudd’s collar.

A vewy big woom. He pushes his arms forward.

Another slam. The door is barely holding in place. Fudd wills the geometry to bend and expand for him.

Wong and wide and deep.

The buzz in his ears and the tightness in his stomach (both symptoms of claustrophobia) are reducing more and more.

Reducing perfectly in time with the closet wall receding away from them.

‘J-j-jeez,’ says Porky. ‘Words f-fail me.’

The largest slam yet, followed by the Bugswabbit frustratedly grunting, ‘DAMNED STRƠNG ƊOOR.’

Fudd keeps pushing the boundaries of this once-small closet, not simply in front of them but outward, in all directions, to an unfathomable end. The hunter’s lip curls.

‘That’s more wike it!’ he says, and means it. He finally lets Porky hop off his back. Fudd stretches, glad to be rid of the weight.

‘V-v-very impressive E-Elmer,’ Porky notes, ‘but I uh d-d was hoping you c-could uh p-p-provide us w-with another d-d-D-D- DOOR?!’

‘Oh, my twembling porcine fwiend,’ says Fudd sagely, ‘we’ll find oursewves a door, don’t you wowwy.’

He jogs forward and Porky falls in step next to him.

There is a splintering sound behind: the closet door finally caves in, and the Bugswabbit bounds into Fudd’s new extended pocket of reality.

‘NIÇE TRY,’ it growls, not without a grudging respect. The pig and hunter pick up their pace.

‘By gowwy, there’s gotta be one awound here somepwace,’ muses Fudd.

The pig cranes his short neck. ‘I d-d-don’t see anything.’

Fudd raises a hand and the closest wall, pale and featureless, pushes itself back, deepening the dimensions of the space.

He makes a fist and shunts it even further. The center collapses backward, forming another further wall, and then  another, and another, the light dimming along the way.

Fudd has made a tunnel.

‘I’ve made a tunnew,’ he says, a little surprised.

‘You s-s-sure have,’ concurs the pig, even more so.

They proceed briskly along Fudd’s tunnel, the Bugswabbit surely not far behind. The sounds of its destruction trail close nearby. Fudd repeats his wall-shunting maneuver from before and sure enough, he makes a new tunnel, this time in the wall of the preceding tunnel, jutting outwards, perpendicular to their path.

‘G-g-gosh you’ve d-d g-got a d-d-d real kn-kn-knack for this, E-Elmer,’ says Porky admiringly.

‘Expewience,’ says the hunter brusquely, then, ‘Gee, would you wook at that? We found one.’

A door. As simple and unassuming as any other, peeking out from a section of this newly stretched extradimensional purposeless damp-carpeted space.

‘I wonder where it weads…’ Fudd says thoughtfully, as he and Porky dash toward it.

They open the door, and a warm breath of chlorinated air wafts over them.

‘A s-s-swimming p-pool?’ asks Porky, dumbfounded. ‘Do they d-d-d have a d-d a s-sauna in here t-too?’

Fudd gesticulates in a wild, operatic manner, like one commanding thunder from the heavens.

‘Sure would be easier with a magic hewmet,’ he mutters.

There is an almighty creaking, like the swinging of an out-of-control industrial crane, as the tilework beneath them juts out, forming a bridge over the waters.

‘Go Porky, quick!’

‘Is it d-d-d safe, Elmer?’

‘It better be. I’m taking no more chances with scwewy old wight beams,’ Fudd says grimly, ushering the pig ahead of him. He looks over his shoulder and sees the Bugswabbit’s huge form bulging through the tiny doorframe, cracks splintering through the walls around it. Its great dark paw leaves marks in the tiles.

The pig and hunter make it to the other side and Fudd lets their bridge collapse, the tiles splashing into the endless pool. He produces a paint pot and brush from nowhere and daubs a rather fetching tropical beach scene on the nearest suitable wall.

‘Very h-handsome,’ says Porky.

‘Thank you,’ says Fudd, who runs into it.

The Bugswabbit roars and leaps high, high into the air. Closer it comes, and closer…

‘Imagine if that had weawwy worked!’

Fudd is almost tickled by the sight. He and Porky, having run into and through the very picture he painted, find themselves in none other than an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Backwoom.

That said, this one is made only a little less ordinary by the sight of Fudd’s handiwork now splayed across the far wall, four times its original size and all smeared out of proportion, like a rushed theater backdrop dripping down the plasterboard. The palm tree sags, weeping green droplets down the peeling paper.

‘W-well it’s sure b-b-better than d-d than uh b-being ground up into that m-monster’s next m-m-m-meal,’ Porky concedes.

‘Quickwy,’ Fudd says, ‘before-’

But the Bugswabbit’s many-fingered paws are already prising their way through the wall of their makeshift oasis. Fudd wastes no time. Over the smeared remains of the sun-drenched beach, he daubs a new scene.

Porky takes his hand; the pig already understands. They leap-

-And land,

  and skid,

   …down…

…and down…

…and down they go…

‘I’m s-sure g-glad you p-painted skis!’ shouts Porky, as he and the hunter go whizzing down the side of this interminable snowy mountain.

Fudd looks up, squinting against the (colder?) air whipping at his spherical face; high above, the painted blue sky does indeed peter out back into an infinite column of yellow wallpaper. But this landscape is still convincing, much more so than the previous one.

Here and there are coniferous trees, wallpaper visible in swirling patches beneath the bark; distant mountain peaks poke up behind, and in some cases through, yellow columns a mile or more high. There’s no doubt about it: this is another kind of woom entirely, one brighter, more abstracted. More cartoonish.

There is a pounding of mighty paws not far behind. Fudd and Porky weave a hasty and rapid slalom between the pillars in their path: tree and column and lamppost and upended swimming pool guardrail all.

‘YOU’RE RUNNÎNG OUT OF ЯOOMS,’ crows the Bugswabbit. It is unnervingly close behind them, bloodlust on its foul breath.

Fudd withdraws the paint pot and brush. ‘Just you twy me, wabbit,’ he growls.

A splash of paint. A new backdrop…

…They are dashing across the nighttime rooftops in what appears to be a close approximation of the city of Jiangzhou, sometime during the reign of the Sui dynasty. The weight of the Bugswabbit’s mighty form sends terracotta tiles flying in all directions, revealing the scraps of moist yellow carpet beneath…

…They are swerving on skates, across the wooden rink of a roller disco, the faint outlines of a kitschy mall bowling alley just barely visible behind. There is a murky crowd of faceless figures all swaying to the groove of the deafening and unidentifiable music; not people but not Backwabbits either. Not yet.

The Bugswabbit – likewise outfitted on skates too small for its enormous hind paws – lunges after them. Porky and Fudd briefly swing over and under each other to avoid its attack, cutting some interesting shapes as…

…Fudd leaps them into a brightly-colored, chlorine-odored circus, where they ride a trapeze towards…

…The high beams of an old cathedral, thick with the microbial musk of mold and mildew…

…A subway tunnel…

…The end of a rainbow…

…A long featureless office block corridor, at the far end of which, through his last splotches of paint, Fudd finds himself outlining a strangely familiar bayside road, one that he can just remember being brushed off by a stampeding marathon, a lifetime ago…

‘Porky!’ cries the hunter, ‘Fowwow me! This way!’

He can taste freedom. They have almost broken out the other end; on the other side of the painted portal lies reality, true reality. He will save them, he will-

‘Elmer.’

Fudd skids to a stop. The pig’s voice is no squeal. He turns.

Slowly, the Bugswabbit lumbers toward him, Porky Pig clutched in its grip. It grins wider than a Cheshire Cat, more viciously than any foe the hunter has ever faced.

‘I’m s-sorry Elmer,’ says Porky, struggling against being squeezed, ‘Running m-makes me th-thirsty. It c-caught me when I s-stopped at the d-d-d water c-cooler.’

Of course, thinks Fudd. Old habits. The pig was always doomed to this. ‘It’s awwight Porky,’ he says, his voice strangely calm.

Tears wet the pig’s cheeks. ‘D-don’t try to s-s-save me Elmer. G-get out! GO!’

‘HẼ’S NOT GOING ANYWḤERE,’ says the Bugswabbit. ‘AṚE YOU, ELMẾR?’

‘W-what are y-you w-w-waiting for?’ sobs Porky. ‘R-RUN ELMER!’

‘Wabbit,’ says Elmer carefully, ‘you can still stop this chawade. Wet him go. It doesn’t have to end wike this.’

There is a fine sliver of a beat, too short to be comedic, before the Bugswabbit shrieks out an ungainly laugh; piercing and not of this world.

‘SUỈT YOURSELF DOC,’ it says, in a manner that is all jeer and all snarl and (just slightly) resignation, and it throws Porky Pig inside its wide open maw, swallowing him whole.

The pig’s screams echo down a long, long way, much longer than they should.

The Bugswabbit advances.

Chapter Text

‘WELL? ’ demands the beast, licking its slavering chops with a vivid red serpentine tongue. ‘YOU GONÑA SURPRISE ME ÕNE LAST TIME, HUNTER?’

Fudd turns and looks at the image of the road by the water, dripping slowly down the wall. He can no longer hear the traffic, nor smell the sea air. The portal is vanishing.

‘You know,’ he says evenly, ‘if I’da known I had this kind of power aww awong, I never woulda needed to go after that wascawwy wabbit. I coulda been anything.’

The Bugswabbit swells to fill the space, its colossal dark shadow blotting out Fudd’s face (though of course his big round eyes are still visible).

‘LĮKE WHAT?’ It asks, sounding sincerely curious.

Fudd shrugs. ‘My own man. I coulda gone fishing instead of hunting. I coulda wazed awound the house weading mystewy novels and baking bwuebewwy pies. I coulda had the kind of joy I’ve awways dweamed of, the kind I thought chasing the wabbit for so many years would bwing me.’

He spreads his arms wide. ‘But you got me, Bugswabbit. There are wules. There has to be a punchwine. No matter what, it awways comes back to the punchwine, doesn’t it?’

The monster that wears a perversion of his longtime nemesis’ face crouches and stares the hunter directly in his pale pudgy face. There is, for once, no malice in its eyes.

‘YOU’RE A MỌRE COMPŁEX LITŤLE MAN THÅN I THOUGHT,’ it rumbles.

‘A PITY. HOW MUČH MORE INTERE$TING YOU COULD’VE BEEN.’

‘There’s stiww time…’ Fudd jokes halfheartedly, as the Bugswabbit’s enormous paw sweeps him up.

‘NÒ,’ the monster says, ‘NOT F0R ŸOU.’

Fudd watches as the Bugswabbit’s maw unhinges to absurd proportions, and as he stares down into its foul, fathomless gullet he is struck by the familiar sensation of riding a rollercoaster all the way to its peak, preparing for the drop below. The expectation before the payoff.

It’s almost like coming home.

He feels himself let go, tumbling, plummeting into this last abyss. The light disappears.

The exact origin of the one we call Elmer Fudd is uncertain. Various iterations of the character appear as far back as the late thirties. He was erased and redesigned on a few occasions. The green jacket and brown bowler gave way, in time, to a huntsman's garb and cap.

Suffice it to say he was never really born. Elmer Fudd did not go to school, did not have childhood friends, did not get his heart broken by a first love. When precisely he arrived nobody can say for sure, but he arrived fully formed; an iteration, a copy of a copy. Bemused, blundering and unequivocally destined for buffoonery.

A man, such as he was. A lone individual, pitched out into the world already grown in order to fight and chase and struggle and lose. Forever.

How would you live, if you were doomed?

Darkness.

There is less of an echo than Fudd expected, but at least his voice rings clear. He is floating, neither up nor down. Flashes of indescribable things pass by, in the sightless gloom. Wherever he is, it goes on for a long way. Maybe forever.

‘Porky?’ he calls to the blackness.

Nothing. He swivels another way, or so it feels.

He calls again. ‘Porky? Are you here?’

Distantly, he hears ‘Elmer…’

He shouts back, ‘Can you move awound?’

‘I’m…f-floating…?’

Fudd pushes himself forward as though paddling through a brook, and it does feel as though he is moving.

From all around him, from everywhere at once, the Bugswabbit’s voice rumbles.

ŚTILL GOT SOME FIGHT LEFT IN YA, DÒC?

He ignores it. He keeps straining towards the source of Porky’s voice. The creature continues, barely able to restrain its menacing glee.

FEEĹING SNUG?

The very space dilates and constricts around Fudd, assuming an infinite proximity. The darkness all around him is at once achingly distant and unbearably close.

The hunter’s breathing is steady, calm. He doesn’t flinch, but paddles continuously on, if somewhat slower now.

WHAT?

The Bugswabbit’s voice rings, disconcerted, through the warped space.

WHAŤ ARE YOU DÕING?

Fudd extends a palm and lightning erupts from his fingers, a sudden brightening of the dark that releases him from his constriction, accompanied by a peal of thunder. Very operatic.

The creature howls in agony.

‘Porky?’ Fudd calls once more.

Not too far away, he hears the voice. ‘F-floating…’ it mumbles.

TAĶE TH I S!

The Bugswabbit’s snarl is followed by a feeling of viscid, stringy limbs, umpteen thousand hateful fingers writhing in the dark and coiling around Fudd’s body, tighter and tighter until he cannot possibly free himself. Surely not.

Fudd shakes them loose and carries on. A widdle further, just a widdle.

The final roar seems to come from deep within the universe. The primal hatred of the Bugswabbit, lethal and apoplectic.

WHY?!

It screams,

ẂHY

WØN’T

Y0U

D IÉ?!?!

A new sensation, or rather an old one. Fudd’s hand finds a familiar trotter, and grasps tightly onto it.

‘L-lost,’ mumbles Porky Pig, the luminescence of his eyes now very dim.

Fudd squeezes his friend’s trotter. ‘Not wost Porky. For the vewy first time, I know exactwy where we are. I know exactwy what comes next.’

He closes his own eyes.

A dot.

A patch of 

Light, yellow-

Growing

Bigger

Bigger…

‘WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’

screeches the Bugswabbit, its mangled, rattling voice already growing fainter. 

‘Don’t let go,’ Fudd says to Porky, as

More light rushes in; the air, it’s opening up

A hole pierced through the darkness

As the yellow turns to white

turns into blue

A searing, brilliant, beautiful blue.

The two of them cling tightly to each other,

Air rushing past, eyes a-watering,

like flight, falling-but-not falling,

like the plummet off the cliff’s edge in reverse

Hand in trotter, hunter and porcine, toon and toon, and up

and up

and up and up

And up they go, and-

Daylight.

The noonday sun, if noon it is (it feels like it), glints lazily off the water. There are clouds, enough that it doesn’t feel like summer. But not enough to hide the sun.

Fudd and Porky are on a pier. A familiar pier.

Around, scattered in a million stringy pieces, the indiscernible remains of something that had been called – by Fudd at least – a ‘Bugswabbit’.

The viscera lie quivering in the sun. Porky treads his way around them, and picks a remnant up. It twitches in his grip.

‘G-gosh, don’t they l-l-look j-just d-d l-like black little d-d-d worms?’ he says, thoughtfully.

‘Your appetized tone is vewy weassuwing,’ says Fudd drily. He inhales deeply, taking in the sea air. He has no words for what it makes him feel.

The sudden croak of a nearby voice would have made the old Fudd jump.

‘hÔwWw…’ it says feebly. The pig and hunter look down towards the pier’s edge, and there, splattered at their feet is the limp-eared, snaggletoothed head of the Bugswabbit. It is considerably smaller and more shriveled looking than Fudd remembers.

‘Hewwo cweature,’ says Fudd, with no suggestion of anything in particular in his voice. The Bugswabbit’s vacuous pits fix on his own eyes. (Quite how a pair of holes can ‘fix’ on anything I could not tell you, but that is what happens).

‘hoW…?…I…I sWallowed ÿou…’

‘You did,’ says Fudd.

‘We w-were there, you kn-know,’ adds Porky.

‘you…don’T have……this kińd of… power…’ the head wheezes,

‘toon…loGic i$n’t…strong enough……to…kill me.’

Fudd sits down, cross legged. ‘I didn’t defeat you with toon wogic, Bugswabbit,’ he says, ‘It may be twicksy stuff but it’s not the stwongest thing awound.’

Porky sits down on the wooden boards, next to Fudd. Possibly because it seems like the polite thing to do.

‘You reveawed the twuth yourself, back in the Cafetewia,’ Fudd continues, ‘Maybe it awways does come back to the punchwine, but it can’t go on wike that fowever. Sometimes the pwot just has to move awong. That’s aww I did.’

The sun disappears briefly, behind a cover of clouds. The Bugswabbit’s head is growing more desiccated by the second. The pieces of its body are already drying into the pier wood. Tomorrow they will just be wispy scraps, ready for the salt spray of the ocean to wash them away.

‘n0… ’ the Bugswabbit spits. ‘it’s…not pøssiBle. you…you’re not……’

‘Shh,’ Fudd says, and reaches out to gently pat the Bugswabbit’s head. It is a gesture of comfort, and nothing more.

‘You don’t have to wowwy about that anymore,’ he says. ‘It’s over.’

‘No! ’ the head rasps, weaker still now. ‘never……not over…’

‘It was wwong,’ Fudd says, ‘What the Warner company did. They should never have cweated you, never condemned you to such a misewable existence. But it’s their fauwt, cweature. Not yours.’

He gets to his feet and brushes himself off. A few bits of residual Backwabbit matter drop from the huntsman’s clothes.

‘I’m sowwy,’ Fudd says to the Bugswabbit. ‘For evewything they did. And I pwomise you this: they are going to pay.’

It is with a mightily impressive effort that the Bugswabbit’s head forces itself forward. It hops a few inches, like a shriveled black toad.

‘c0Me baCk!’ it demands hoarsely, its voice battling to be heard against the gentle breeze.

‘Afwaid I’ve got pwaces to be,’ says Fudd, already walking away and not looking behind him.

The thing keeps moving, fighting for every inch of ground. ‘no! get……Bāck……here…..!’

‘Oh g-g-g-G-G-GET LOST!’

With a single mighty swing of his lower trotter, Porky Pig sends the Bugswabbit’s head flying off the end of the pier. It lands in the brisk blue waves with less of a ‘spwash’ and more of a simple, run-of-the-mill splash.

Porky whoops. ‘A-alright! A perfect d-d-d f-field goal!’ He pauses, frowning. ‘Or a s-sea goal I s-s-suppose.’

He turns and jogs to catch up with Fudd, who is still walking away.

‘Did you see th-th-that E-Elmer?’

‘I heard it.’

‘A m-masterful k-kick if I d-d do say so d-d if I d-do say so mys-s-s…well it was a very g-good kick.’

‘I bewieve you Porky.’

The two of them make it to the road, and assiduously check both ways before crossing. No marathon runners flatten them as they go. No falling pianos. Not even a measly anvil.

‘I could have p-played h-h-high school f-football you know.’

‘Oh weawwy?’

‘Y-yup. I had q-quite the talent with the d-d-d with the ol’ p-pigskin.’

They make it to the other side of the road.

‘Say,’ muses Porky, ‘why d-do you think they c-call it that? “The ol’ pigskin”?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ says Fudd, only somewhat telling the truth. They turn into a side street and head up a hill towards the noise of a distant freeway.

Porky scratches his chin, curious. ‘Wh-where are w-we going, Elmer?’

‘To visit an old fwiend,’ Fudd replies.

Chapter Text

The demonstration has been going on since morning. The strike has been going on for months.

A throng of staff writers, story editors, script supervisors, actors, and many, many others are crowded outside the Warner Bros offices, waving their SAG-AFTRA banners and keeping a loud chant going. Many of them are holding up homemade signs:

WGA ON STRIKE!

DO THE WRITE THING!

I PAID FOR THIS SIGN WITH EXPERIENCE

Nearby, just near enough to be noticeable but not so near that they get trod on by mistake, a throng of animated characters are parading in a circle with their own homemade declarations of outrage and defiance.

Foghorn Leghorn is indignantly brandishing a sign reading AH SAY, PAY YER PEOPLE FAIR, YA WELL-HEELED SO AND SO’S!

Between her tiny feet, Tweety Bird carries a placard that says I TAUT I TAW A PAY PACKET (I DIDN’T)

Taz’s largely misspelled sign reads BLAAAAH BLURREGH BLAAH GREEDY BLEEEH

It is not clear what Sylvester’s sign says because it is upside down.

Daffy Duck’s simply reads WE HAVE BILLS TOO.

And presiding over it all, chanting along with the best of them, is Bugs Bunny. He is keeping them animated, so to speak, proclaiming his thoughts through a megaphone.

‘THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS! MAKE ‘EM SHIVER AND QUAKE IN THEIR SILVER-LINED BOOTS! THEY WANT TO STIFF US ON OUR 401KS? TWENTY-SIX HOUR WORKDAYS WITH A TWO-HOUR COMMUTE? BROTHER, YOU BETTER BELIEVE THEM’S FIGHTING WORDS!’

A tap on the rabbit’s shoulder; he turns.

‘ELMER?!’

‘Ouch!’ The hunter and Porky clamp their hands (or trotters) over their ears.

‘PARDON ME.’ Bugs lowers the megaphone. ‘Long time, Doc! We were worried about yous. Where have you been?’

‘You wouldn’t bewieve me if I told you,’ replies the hunter. ‘Wisten up wabbit, and wisten good. Warner Bwothers have sold us out.’

‘Oh we know that,’ says Bugs, gesturing at the throng around them, ‘They think they can get us all to work for chump change while their profit margins go skyward. Well we ain’t gonna take it, Doc!’

‘Yeah…’ Fudd says. ‘Wook Bugs. We’ve been sold out for more than that. The Warner congwomewate owns the ASync corpowation now-’

‘The who?’

‘-Big bad company doing some vewy dangewous things with low-pwoximity magnetic distowtion fiewds, but that’s not important. What is important is that they were pwanning to ewiminate us, one by one.’

He gestures at the pig and himself. ‘Twust me, it nearwy happened to both of us.’

‘They’re d-d not f-fooling around this time, B-Bugsy old p-pal,’ says Porky solemnly.

‘They were weady to bwank us out of existence, abandon us fowever to the infinite stock backgwound art of the Backwooms, and aww for stweaming wights and a tax wwite-off.’

Fudd grips Bugs by the rabbit’s shoulders and shakes him. A first.

‘Do you see? Do you understand? None of this is by accident. They want us to feel powerwess, to forget what we’ve awways known.’

‘And what’ve we always known then, son?’ The other toons have noticed their presence and are staring at Fudd and Porky. It is Foghorn Leghorn who has spoken, staring down at the hunter curiously.

‘That they can bwuise and batter us aww they wike,’ Fudd says, leveling his gaze at each of them, ‘But then it ends, and a new scene starts. Evewy joke must have a punchwine, but punchwines can’t wast fowever.

‘They can dwown us, set us abwaze, bwow us up with dynamite, bwast us with cannonfire, or stwike us with wightning; we awways come back again, fwesh and weady for the next indignity.’

The toons look at each other, and at themselves. Hands and tails and beaks and fur are examined; big luminous expressive eyes point every way, excitement mounting.

‘We have toon wogic on our side,’ Fudd says, ‘But more than that. We are cweatures of nawwative. We keep going for as wong as our stowy does. And these wepwobates-‘

He waves a righteous fist in the studio’s direction.

‘-Think they have a wight to decide how and when we end.’

‘It ain’t right!’ bellows Foghorn.

‘It’s abtholutely prepothterous!’ cries Daffy.

‘BLAHBLURAGGABLARGH!’ concurs Taz.

Bugs looks back at them. He looks at the crowd of fellow strikers, angry and determined and oblivious to their conversation.

He looks at Elmer.

‘Alright Doc,’ he drawls, ‘Whaddaya suggest?’

Fudd looks at them all, former friends and foes alike. ‘How would you aww wike,’ he says to the assembled cartoons, ‘to meet your Makers?’

His fellow toons all nod, smiling wickedly in return.

‘Then fwiends,’ Fudd cries, ‘a-hunting we wiww go!’

He spins on his heels, and marches away, towards the wall of a studio building. The other cartoons follow after him. Daffy discreetly collects the signs they drop on the way and redistributes them to (rather bewildered) fellow human strikers.

‘How exactly ya planning on getting in there?’ asks Bugs, pointing at the featureless blank wall.

Fudd winks. ‘Wet’s just say I’ve picked up a twick or two since you wast saw me.’

From nowhere in particular, he produces a rifle.

‘Impressive,’ Bugs says, ‘but I think it’s gonna take more than that.’

Fudd gives him a patient but exasperated glance. ‘This is for once we’re inside, wabbit.’

He slings the firearm over his back, and from the same nowhere he takes a pot of paint and a brush. In no time at all, Fudd has daubed a perfect image of an executive building hallway.

‘Come on!’ he announces, and ushers them through.

‘Dang smartasses don’t know what they got coming to em,’ growls Foghorn, striding in.

‘Oooh, the AC works in here!‘ cries Tweety, fluttering in circles overhead.

As the last of them make it in, Fudd wipes the doorway out of existence. A true hunter knows that you only leave a trail behind if you’re the prey.

‘Which way, Elmer?’ calls Bugs from far up front.

‘Whichever way you pwefer,’ replies Fudd, ‘I got a feewing we’re cwose alweady.’

‘Close to what?’

Fudd smiles. A wide and cunning and sincere smile that is just toothy enough, more human than not, and more cartoonish than anything.

‘To the Boardwooms.’