The Wondermark Gazette

I bolted down the hall-way as fast as my legs could carry me. The relative brightness of the lantern-lit passageway stung at my eyes — so I buried my face in the crook of my elbow and simply ran, caroming off walls and stumbling hither and yon, trusting that instinct would find me safely out of the corridor, and that I would soon feel the cool night air and the dirigible’s gang-plank beneath my feet.

And then: “Ho, there, sir!” came Mr K____’s voice, and I looked up just in time to avoid crashing into the man, to say nothing of the massive tureen of soup he balanced precariously on a silver tray. “How’s Master Peapoddy doing?”

“Listen to me,” I said, heaving for breath and narrowing my eyes, as a plan alighted in the plan-centre of my plan-brain. “He’s in dire condition. You’re just the man I need — get in there and start pressing on his chest with all your weight, over and over and over, anything to keep the blood pumping through his heart. Over and over and over, do you hear me? Keep his heart pumping! Break his ribs if you have to! I’ll take this.” I lifted the silver tray from his hands, the warm aroma of broth enveloping me like a pleasant, nourishing swamp-gas as I elbowed around Mr K____ in the hall-way.

I had taken barely three steps away when a thought came unbidden to my temple: that if Mr K____ could keep Peapoddy alive a few moments longer, I might have a chance to find and rescue Abu Fromage.

What! No, I argued with myself, I have to get out of here!

He saved you, I answered myself, silently so I wouldn’t look crazy, and at once I knew I was right.

I turned back to where Mr K____ was stumbling down the hall-way, and called out to him. “One other thing!” I shouted. “Where do you keep the old man?”

Mr K____ faltered a step. “Old…man?”

“The old man who bit Peapoddy! He said you kept him in shackles!” I was beginning to grow frantic, now — I really didn’t have time to waste if Mr K____ didn’t hasten on to Peapoddy’s state-room. My voice slipped up an octave in alarm; I’ve found it to be a reliable method of communicating urgency, though it does make me seem a bit of a nancy. But I couldn’t worry about that now. “I need to find him! He’s the only cure!”

Mr K____ stared cock-eyed at the ceiling like an imbecile, suddenly pale as a Finlander with a nervous tic. “I don’t know what old man you mean.”

I took a running start and shot-put the soup-tureen square at his widened eyes. “This tall! Looks old! He bit Peapoddy!” Soup splashed across Mr K____’s face, scalding him, causing him to cry out, possibly wetting his trousers if I was lucky, though it was hard to tell with the soup and all. I was running out of options — if my patented Soup Interrogation didn’t get the information out of him, I’d have no choice but to turn and bolt for the gang-plank. I might have already doomed myself by waiting this long.

But I would give him this last chance to speak. I couldn’t just abandon Abu Fromage — not in this horrible place. Not even in a nice place. So I screamed one last time at Mr K____: “Where do you keep him?!” Three-octave rise, with an audible slip in timbre; a sure-fire sign of agony if ever there was one. I should get some sort of trophy for that performance.

“I don’t know the man you mean,” Mr K____ spluttered, “but he’s probably in the — er, in the engine room, with the rest of them.”

The rest of who? No time to find out. “Which way?”

“Around the corner and down,” he said, too slowly for my taste — but with the information in-ear I punched the wall, then turned and ran, calling back over my shoulder. “Back to Peapoddy! Pump his heart! Go! Now! Don’t stop!”

The stairs were right around the corner where Mr K____ had said; I’ll credit him for that. Narrow and creaking, they led down towards a red-glowing darkness that seemed to squirm, somehow; it was a solid-colour shadow that undulated in the gloom. It looked like a roiling sea of scariness. I hoped Mr K____ could keep Peapoddy’s heart beating. I had no idea if it would even stave off the explosion if he could. I’d heard about that heart-compression technique from an old Cossack with a methadone habit, but he’d also told me that he’d ridden dinosaurs in the cavalry. So who knows.

But I was already this far. “Hello?” I cried into the engine-room, but the hissing crackle of the dirigible’s burning furnace drowned out my words, and the sound only grew in intensity as I reached the lower steps. I shouted as loudly as my cracked throat could bear. “Abu Fromage?”

My front foot left the wooden stair and set upon something soft and moving. I jerked back, but it was too late — the surface bucked beneath me. I flailed for balance, but the surface twisted, solid but strangely pliant. I lost my footing, and came down hard with my hands on that same churning lumpiness. I heard a groan. They were bodies. Living bodies, warm and wet with sweat, their soft moans buried under the roar of the furnace. Hundreds of bodies covered every inch of the engine-room floor.

I recoiled, but there was nowhere to go — the stairs were lost now in the darkness, and every movement of my hands and feet put me in contact with more squirming flesh. I never felt the true floor of the room at all.

The bodies groaned and yelped as I put weight on them, but, being crammed so close together, they couldn’t give way to my pressure. After a moment to regain my bearings I was able to stand once again, and now that I knew what I was dealing with, it was easy to walk confidently on the twisting masses of flesh. In fact, in a strange sort of way it almost made me feel at home. “Abu Fromage!” I called out, taking large, confident strides across the room, making a wide circuit around the hissing iron furnace filling the air with flaming redness and the smell of soot and barbecue. “Abu Fromage, can you hear me?”

By the time I reached the back-side of the furnace I was beginning to grow frantic. How much time did I want to spend hunting for Abu Fromage in this dark pit of misery? How few seconds did I have left before the entire air-ship rent itself apart? Each second was an eternity of terrible anticipation, imagining the dreadful, brilliant blast that could come at any moment. I realised with a start that I had barely breathed at all these last twenty steps.

Behind the furnace, a tangled maze of belts, pulleys and sprockets clicked and hummed in the sweltering dimness, each piece swaying and spinning with clock-work movements. It was all a great, hot tangle of machinery, made to lurch and blink in my vision by the jumping shadows cast by the furnace’s fire. I felt my knees grow weak with tummy-roiling, and my hands searched for someplace to lean: but the furnace itself was blisteringly hot, and the far wall was yards away. My blind fingertips found a length of brass pipe, and I set my weight tentatively against it while I sought my balance; but the pipe creaked and bent and I leapt back, fighting to stay upright, surfing atop the lumpy, nameless bodies.

I set my eyes on the pipe, which seemed to snake from a gear-box away and up towards the ceiling, where I glimpsed some vicious and erratic movement — I had the strange sensation of being a shark, all of a sudden, or a beer-acuda or a duck-billed ninny-whale or some other carnivorous under-sea creature, and for some reason at that instant my pangs of hunger returned. I also had the distinct impression of having smelt blood in the water, which was frankly just odd.

Then I realised I was staring at Peapoddy’s under-side, his feet and legs dangling through the floor of his state-room, kicking and twitching as he clung to the last dangling tentacles of life. I placed the odour, too — Peapoddy hadn’t lied when he claimed that his bloat was from the retention of waste. I felt my stomach churn as his jelly-like legs rippled with each flapping movement.

But he yet lived, which meant that I had time. A little bit, at least. “Keep pumping his chest!” I screamed towards the ceiling, and as if in response, the feet kicked in a vigorous flurry, like a fat little dog trying not to drown.

Thus buoyed, for the moment at least, I turned my attention back to the bodies beneath my feet. My eyes seemed to have adjusted somewhat to the darkness, and I was able to discern the faint outlines of faces in the churning mass — but none I recognised. “Abu Fromage!” I cried. “How can I find you?”

Suddenly the surface beneath my feet shifted, and I found myself falling again; I came down hard with my elbows on somebody’s spine, which rather hurt my elbows. The owner of the spine let out a hoarse gasp, but I barely heard it: for two feet away, staring me in the face, was the sallow, pocked visage of Abu Fromage.

“Oh good!” I said, figuring wrongly that the hardest part was over.

NEXT: The Gift

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