The Wondermark Gazette

Our story thus far: Mistaken (at my own unspoken urging) for the ancient healer Grenadon, I have been taken by the mysterious Rikah to heal a certain Peapoddy — who happens to be my true identity’s deepest foe.

The dirigible loomed dark and menacing over the cliff-side path, as Rikah and the man I knew as an Ectologist led me towards the narrow gang-plank connecting the air-ship to the mountain, which rocked creakily and terrifyingly through the midnight nothingness. My hands shivered and fidgeted at my sides as I ran through my options — I would likely be able to hurl either Rikah or the burly man over the edge, to be dashed into meat on the sea-rocks below, but the other would likely object; the odds of my facing down both parties seemed grim, and worse still if Rikah decided, for some reason, to disrobe and use the weapon of her shapely form against me. This prospect seemed even less likely, despite my hind-brain’s fiercest urgings, and after some internal wrestling I managed to discard the whole plan as an option, given the slim likelihood of that particular out-come.

Besides, as we slowly approached that thin, swaying platform, I found myself curious to see Peapoddy again. The closer I drew to him, I rationalised, the more likely I would have a chance to realise my greatest desire: to take a croquet-mallet to the man’s spine, and see him suffer for his many crimes against me, and also suffer in general.

As was typical when I considered my abiding hatred for Peapoddy, I thought of the chalk-white Lara, lying comatose in her hospital bed, back in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats — it was a quest for her salvation that had driven me to the sea months ago, and it was the man ahead, in the dirigible, that had lain her sadly and silently into that dreadful sleep. I shook my head, my cheeks waggling a little in the night. I couldn’t forget my commitment to Lara. That was my whole purpose here.

I meant to recall the glow of noon-time sun-light on her soft, squishy-looking skin, but when I tried, all that filled my mind was Rikah, standing two feet away. I waggled my cheeks again to dislodge the impostor image. I waggled them with futility.

A burst of wind fluttered my beard and Rikah’s cloak, and I saw that we had reached the edge of the gang-plank. I glanced down in time to watch the Ectologist place in Rikah’s delicate hands a purse that clanked of heavy coin. “Thank you, Mr K____,” she murmured, and let her gaze linger on the man a second or two longer than mere civility would dictate.

He cleared his throat, coughed weakly, looked over at me, then nervously hocked a loogie into the void off the cliff-edge.

Rikah raised her chin, and something crossed her eyes that I couldn’t quite detect in the darkness. Perhaps a scorpion, inside her skull? Who could tell? The thin pool of lamp-light from the Ectologist’s — Mr K_____’s — hand-held lantern swayed dizzyingly in a sudden gust, making shadows dance and lurch across the woman’s proud expression. I felt a little nauseous, but I thought I could hold in any voidage at least until she got out of earshot. That would be seriously un-suave — and currently I was the only dude within arm’s length who hadn’t spit a gob of phlegm right past her off the cliff, placing me squarely in the lead. I wondered if I would get a good-bye kiss out of it.

Lara, I thought. Remember Lara.

I hadn’t ridden behind Lara on a pointy saddle through miles of galloping forest, pressed against her throbbing back, though, had I? And I certainly hadn’t done it within the last hour. In fact, I was ashamed to admit to myself, I had scarcely touched the woman I so claimed to adore — but I couldn’t let my feelings cloud, at this critical juncture! I waggled my cheeks with vigourous fierceness.

Rikah turned to me, nodded curtly, and with a strange “We will expect to see you back in time for the banquet, Grandfather, but please avoid the stables” she turned and disappeared quickly into the night.

Without a lantern or a horse, I wondered how she would find her way back through the island’s dense forest. I nearly called out to her to express concern — chicks liked that, right? But as I gathered my courage — and fought with my blasted, Lara-centric propriety — Mr K____ caught me by the arm and stepped heavily onto the gang-plank. “Come along, Mr Grenadon, there isn’t time to waste,” he barked, and then added something else that the wind snatched and stole away. As it does. Greedy.

He walked quickly, and he had both my arm and the light, so I followed. Though I was nervous at crossing the expanse on such a treacherous bridge, the first step was fine, and by the second I thought myself an old hand at this practise. But the third put me out over the edge of the cliff, separated by just the thin plank from a hundred-foot drop to the foaming sea and black rocks below. My stomach lurched; I felt my knees begin to wobble — and there was still a good twenty feet yet to go, sloping gently upwards towards the bobbing air-ship, fading into the inky sky ahead.

Mr K____’s insistent pressure on my arm, however, left no quarter for contemplation. He made his way forward with haste and surety, while I stumbled weakly, my innards churning and roiling with each step, feeling the vibrations that his foot-falls sent humming through the thin wood.

Against my best efforts, I took a terrible glance downwards, and that was it. I felt my center of gravity shift terminally askew.

I flailed and fumbled for Mr K____, grasping his vest in a tight fist-ful, knowing for sure only that I would drag him to his demise with me, and also that Peapoddy would die as well, alone and un-healed, far above our mangled, never-to-be-found corpses –

My last thought before I fell was that I had never even been in a foursome. And then I tumbled, weight-less, for what seemed like an eternity.

But it wasn’t an eternity. It was half a second. I fell heavily to the dirigible’s deck, Mr K____ heaving me to one side, sending me tumbling across slick, lacquered wood. My fingers fought for purchase on the smooth surface, and my skin squealed against the floor like a basket-ball player. I was still. I was sweaty. I was alive.

“This way, then,” Mr K____ grunted, and I was left to scramble to my feet unaided.

The interiour of the dirigible’s cabin was a narrow affair, its central hall-way barely the width of the poor-aisle in an old Hindoo peasant-tram, and without even thinking hard I could name forty fat people who would have trouble navigating its confines. Mr K____ strode confidently through the space, ducking beneath bulk-heads and dodging round jutting spigots and sconces and the like, though I hit every one of these protrusions with enough force for the both of us. With each collision I thought I felt the whole air-ship shudder, but that may have merely been the flicker of flames in the sconce-lamps, or else a delirious Shamrock Shake flash-back. Something told me I would be having trouble with that stuff for a long time to come.

The lantern-light ahead came to rest at the end of the hall-way, and Mr K___ opened a thin, squeaky door at the terminus. “Here you are,” he said, and without further ceremony, he stepped to one side.

I peered into the dark stateroom revealed past the door-way, and barely detected a thick, porky wheezing. A faint, bluish light seemed to tap at the boundaries of my perception. Also, something smelled like tanned chicken-leather, left to rot on an April after-noon. It was a distinctive aroma, and not one I encountered often — at least not since I’d hosted the Games back at the Manor last Spring.

“Is he there?” came a voice, heavy and slurred with afflictions I could scarcely surmise, but beneath it all, a foppish malice that plucked a basso chord of loathing deep in my bowel. It was indeed Peapoddy, alive, and here.

I leaned into the room — a cramped affair on scale with the rest of the cabin — and found a deeply shadowed hulk, buried in blankets and coverlets, poured onto an ornately carved bed. He had treated his skin with Aboriginal algae-dust, as he had when I had first met the monster. Thusly, he glowed, faintly and unearthily. It gave him the appearance of a massive, sweating sea-slug, or else some sort of vile, post-mortem Jedi, as if Jabba had learned the ways of the Force late in life.

His face was twisted in a contorted mass of scarring. He sucked air from the room as if he was drowning. He was, a bit surprisingly, massively obese.

I stepped carefully over the polished wooden ridge marking the door-way, and turned back to Mr K____ with what I hoped was a haughty sniff. I hoped that, in the dimness, he would not detect my knees’ violent quaking.

“I shall need a croquet-mallet and some privacy,” I said, reaching back and swiftly snapping shut the stateroom door.

NEXT: Ritual Acts

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