The Fourth Bear

“Have we missed something?” asked Baker as he and Gretel appeared from the back garden, where they had seen the grand sum of precisely nothing. Jack nodded toward the pit, where the Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man cursed at them in the most loathsome language imaginable.

“He looks kind of puny without the scissors, doesn’t he?” said Jack as they all stared down at him. “I’ll toss you for who gets to put the cuffs on.”

Just then the Scissor-man stopped yelling and screaming, as he had suddenly noticed a small, accidentally self-inflicted cut on his hand.

“Snip!” he said to himself in dismay. “Cut myself—bad—wrong!”

“How apt,” murmured Jack. “Mr. Red-Legg’d Scissor-man… you’re nicked.”

3. St. Cerebellum’s

Most outdated secure hospital: St. Cerebellum’s, Reading. This woefully inadequate and outdated institution was constructed in 1831 and was considered modern for its day. With separate wards for unmarried mothers, milk allergies, unwanted relatives and the genuinely disturbed, St. Cerebellum’s once boasted a proud record of ill-conceived experimental treatment, with curious-onlooker receipts that surpassed even Bedlam’s. But the glory days are long over, and the crumbling ruin is now an anachronistic stain on Reading’s otherwise fine record of psychiatric treatment.

—The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

Dr. Alan Mandible led the group of suited consultants along the peeling corridors of St. Cerebellum’s, Reading’s premier secure hospital for the criminally insane. While perhaps not the newest, cleanest or driest, it did contain the most interesting patients. There are not many secure hospitals that can boast someone who thought he was Napoleon, but St. Cerebellum’s could field three—not to mention a handful of serial killers whose names inexplicably yet conveniently rhymed with their crimes. Notorious cannibal “Peter the Eater” was incarcerated here, as were “Sasha the Slasher” and “Mr. Browner the Serial Drowner.” But the undisputed king of rhyme-inspired serial murder was Isle of Man resident Maximilian Marx, who went under the uniquely tongue-twisting epithet “Mad Max Marx, the Masked Manxman Axman.” Deirdre Blott tried to top Max’s clear superiority by changing her name so as to become “Nutty Nora Newsome, the Knife-Wielding Weird Widow from Waddersdon,” but no one was impressed, and she was ostracized by the other patients for being such a terrible show-off.

“We have funding to demolish the old nuthouse, Dr. Maxilla,” explained Dr. Mandible earnestly, catching sight of the Japanese delegate’s obvious distaste at the moldering fabric of the building, and adding quickly, “I’m sorry, when I said ‘nuthouse,’ I actually meant ‘secure hospital.’"

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” replied Dr. Maxilla cheerfully.

“I often refer to my patients as ‘the loons.’"

Dr. Mandible smiled. They understood each other perfectly.

There were five delegates following Dr. Mandible’s brisk pace down the corridors, each hailing from a different nation. They were visiting St. Cerebellum’s as part of an international exchange of ideas concerning the treatment of the dangerously criminally insane; Dr. Mandible himself had attended Professor Frank Strait’s specialist hospital in Ohio and would visit Dr. Maxilla’s clinic in Kobe at the end of the year.

“I understand that one of your consultants was caught conducting unethical experiments,” said the French delegate, Dr. Vômer. “Such as grafting a kitten’s head onto a haddock.”

“Dr. Quatt? I barely knew her,” replied Mandible hurriedly,

“and her experiments were conducted without the knowledge or approval of the hospital governors or even of QuangTech, who own the hospital.”

“Oh!” said Vômer, who had once himself dabbled in the ethically gray area of grafting things onto other things for no apparent purpose. “Her work was much admired in Toulouse, where such experiments are permitted for gastronomic research.”

Mandible sighed. “I wish our own medical council were as broad-minded. She was one of St. Cerebellum’s most celebrated perverters of the natural order. But, alas, she died earlier this year.”

“A great loss,” said Vômer sadly. “I was hoping to speak to her—was it unexpected?”