The Tooth Thief

    The great city of Staig Bathad began as a small port town. It was built beside a river which flowed into an expansive bay. Spectacular mountain ranges rose on either side of it and continued out to sea, forming headlands that sheltered the waterfront from the worst of the winter storms. Its sensible location and picturesque surroundings did much to attract newcomers but eventually worked against it: the mountains and harbour restricted Staig Bathad’s expansion, and when the floodplain had been filled the population continued to grow. Some people responded by building houseboats on the bay or cabins on the mountain slopes, but the city planners were forced to tear down great swathes of normal housing and replace them with tall residential blocks. Class divisions grew more obvious: while the rich still enjoyed their waterfront mansions, the poor had to settle for crowded slums or footholds on the city’s edge. But pressure breeds resourcefulness, and these undesirable places spawned an unexpected genius. The people’s homegrown solutions to Staig Bathad’s infrastructure woes were so endlessly inventive they inspired imitations which served no practical purpose but helped to fill art galleries.

    Most slum dwellers resented this, not least Viktor Zanast, a self-taught inventor who loathed tall residential blocks and streets that rarely saw the sun. Though he lacked the means to change his surroundings he wanted to bring them more natural light. He thought that as life came from sunlight the correct application of chemistry could reverse the process and make sunlight come from life. More sunlight might be extracted from more complex organisms which ate simpler ones for energy; and the greatest concentrations of sunlight would be found in the hardest organic materials. Zanast believed human teeth would be an ideal source, being so common, simple to store, and more easily acquired than bones.

    Zanast valued his own teeth so he opened a dental clinic. As dentists were in great demand among the poor of Staig Bathad, and Zanast charged very reasonable fees, he and his assistant Yves soon had a large supply of used teeth. Though they tried many different methods their efforts to make sunlight failed. Zanast decided better results would be gained from better teeth, but the owners of such teeth were not so keen to part with them. Zanast sent Yves out at night, armed with pliers and a club, and sometimes he returned with teeth of higher quality, but these also failed to yield results. As more people woke up in dark alleys with their wallets untouched but their mouths rearranged they formed vigilante gangs and their aggressive street presence made Yves’ work more dangerous. The last straw came when Yves realised the strain of yanking teeth from fallen victims was doing bad things to his spine. He could not face the ignominy of being a hunchbacked inventor’s assistant so he packed his bags and left.

    This betrayal further undermined Zanast’s dim view of humanity so he started work on a robot assistant. For all Zanast’s other failures Zob Ropar was an outstanding success. This small toylike automaton could do precise work in small spaces owing to its snakelike limbs. Each ended in a hand-like device which could be used for grabbing and climbing. It could leap great distances and survive the shock of long falls. Zanast programmed it to scale walls and jump on victims from above. In its first night of deployment it brought in more teeth than Yves had in a month, but these failed to generate the sunlight Zanast desperately craved.

    One night Zanast took a break. He stretched out on the couch, turned on the TV, and saw the film awards were on. Though he normally ignored such things he noticed one celebrity – the actress Chrysanthemum Mellencamp – had perfect teeth that were so white they might have glowed internally. Zanast immediately knew these teeth would give him his best chance of success and sent Zob Ropar out to get them. Mellencamp’s security would have discouraged most hardened assassins but Zob Ropar faithfully obeyed.

    The morning promised a fine day but saw a media storm unleashed. After winning the annual award for Best Actress, Mellencamp had gone to a party at an older patron’s home, and after passing out in the loft she woke to find her teeth were gone. She was naturally hysterical and the accusations that followed were worse. To Zanast’s surprise and delight no-one had noticed Zob Ropar, who had returned a short time earlier with Mellencamp’s resplendent teeth.

    As Zanast resumed his experiments Mellencamp’s followers rallied around her and offered an attractive reward – plus instant celebrity status – to anyone with information that would lead to the tooth thief’s arrest. Yves found this irresistible and betrayed his former friend again. An army of police descended on Zanast’s laboratory and on breaking down the door found him calmly awaiting arrest. When even Mellencamp’s teeth had failed to give him the expected sunlight his long-buried conscience had returned.

    Another media storm began and Zanast was sent to jail. Yves enjoyed his new celebrity status – something rarely bestowed on a borderline hunchback – and though Mellencamp’s teeth could not be restored their synthetic replacements were adequate. Then one night Yves’ security guards heard a horrifying scream. They burst into Yves’ bedroom to find him clasping a bloodstained sheet to his mouth. Beneath it all his teeth were gone.

    Although his speech was badly affected Yves managed to describe his attacker, but Zob Ropar’s vengeance did not end there. The elusive little robot still haunts the streets of Staig Bathad, stealing teeth from the unwary; and anyone who craves sunlight enough to continue Zanast’s experiments would do well to find its lair.