The Wondermark Gazette

“It’s okay, Abu Fromage,” I shouted at the old man, straining to speak over the blasting roar of the mighty coal-furnace. Abu Fromage twitched, his thin spine arching upwards until he looked like a Stegosaurus, vertebrae spearing the air under a tissue-thin layer of skin. He may have been trying to look up at me, but his reedy neck couldn’t even begin to support the weight of his venerable cranium. He gathered himself for a moment, and then with a powerful exertion, the fine, ropy muscles in his neck strummed and bulged hopefully; then in a sudden jerking movement, he whipped his head upward, and I met his gaze…

…If only for a moment. Inertia kept his head moving up and back. He struggled to control his heavy skull, but it was like balancing a bowling-ball on a tooth-pick: a hopeless endeavour, if a bit comical in its futility. The desiccated old figure lurched this way and that with a birdish, tumbling clumsiness that was positively giggle-worthy in its pathos. This was the man I’d sought to model my life after, and look at him now. A clown for my amusement. He heaved a sick, wheezing breath. Hilarious!

The lesson here seemed to be that old people are funny when they are in distress; it was nice to see one of the founding precepts of my life verified in such a spectacularly ridiculous fashion. But I had no time to send a descriptive note recounting the event to The New World’s Funniest Handwritten Accounts of Humourous Goings-On; nor did I have any paper, nor, come to consider it, even the necessary literacy. Instead, in the privacy of the dirigible’s engine-room, surrounded by only the faceless, moaning figures supporting my weight with their misery, I watched Abu Fromage struggle to sit upright, and it was funny.

But I felt something peculiar inside me as well. It could have been gas, or else a tape-worm, or else perhaps the curious stirrings of new embryonic life deep within the womb that I had no reason to believe I did not have, but in fact it was none of these. It was something that an un-informed observer may have inaccurately labeled “compassion” — though I will state for the record that I acted entirely in my own self-interest the entire time, as has always been my wont; any acts of mine that appeared in any way selfless were, in fact, obliquely contributing to my own ultimate benefit, and I’ll never testify to any other interpretation.

That being said, I surprised myself by reaching out to the old man and steadying his freak-out with my own quivering palm.

It was as if Tesla himself had uppercut my teeth into my fore-brain. The touch of foreign skin to my own was electric. Abu Fromage’s face felt like an old woman’s hand-bag, all leathery and dry with rhine-stones in unattractive places, swinging about heavily with too much junk crammed inside. Even as I stilled the frantic motion of his head, his eyes continued to fumble in every direction. After stealing a glance towards the ceiling where Peapoddy’s whalish feet still offered forth an occasional kick, I spit on my fingertips, rubbed them together in the Continental fashion, and manually stilled Abu Fromage’s eye-balls.

“Abu Fromage,” I said with what I hoped was a commanding tone, though my heart was fluttering like a flutter-snake digesting a Spanish vibradillo. “Let me take you out of here.”

He didn’t recognise me, I could tell. I was hardly surprised; my long, disgusting beard added years to my appearance, and my red, wrinkled skin stole precious points from my attractiveness-index; but all that besides, I would be surprised if Abu Fromage could recognise anything or anyone in his addled state — his expression suggested that, given the chance, he might stare quizzically at a glass of milk for an hour. I would get him out of this floating death-trap, and find the Tome of the Precious Lore, and using the ancient medical math within, I would nurse him back to health; then he would thank me profusely, and impart on me the secrets of the cheese-trade, and I would become a cheese-monk like himself, and perhaps one day inherit his property in the Himalayas. I would become his protegé, and he my gruff father-figure, his brusque manner cloaking a deep and abiding love for my whelpish antics; together we would live on a cool mountain-top and train acolytes in the ancient art of cheese-twirling. The future looked happy for us, and with tears welling in my eyes I wrapped my arms around his thin, feather-weight torso and lifted him up.

He didn’t move — his legs were caught on something, stuck underneath some random body. I looked back up at Peapoddy’s lower half, protruding through the ceiling; those fat flippers were only kicking about once per second now. I thought I almost heard a gurgling scream from the direction that up-stairs state-room, but it could have been wishful thinking, or my own stomach, or ghosts I guess.

Suddenly Abu Fromage spoke, in a reedy wheeze that sounded more like the wind through a barren canyon than intelligible human speech. I leaned close and bade him repeat the words.

“Countess?” he breathed. “Have you returned?”

“No, Abu Fromage, it’s me, your favorite son, your protegé-to-be,” I told him, reassuring the scared li’l guy as best I could. “I’m getting you out of here, just hold on — let me just free your limbs.”

“Limbs?” Abu Fromage gasped, and lolled his head down to stare at the anonymous body weighing down his lower half. I released my grip on the old man’s torso, and he fell back like a floating leaf, landing with a rustle on more bizarre, moaning flesh. I idly wondered who all these people were, and why Peapoddy would sandbag his dirigible with their mass, but hey, what he did on his own time was his business. I set a shoulder to the body covering Abu Fromage’s legs and heaved it to one groaning side, exposing the engine-room floor for the first time, sending tiny bugs skittering to burrow God-knows-where; at this I leapt back in alarm, but reassembled my courage — time was running out, and my heart was already working unpaid over-time as it was. Soon that moaning organ would be complaining to the Labour Board, and frankly, trouble with the Workies was the next-to-last thing I needed right now, after, of course, a collection of My Little Ponies in mint condition (NIB!! L@@K!!).

The old man’s one visible foot was a tiny, shrivelled ball of black flesh, curled and misshapen like children’s dreams held too long over a flame. What’s more, a glistening, sucking mould seemed to infect the wood of the engine-room’s floor — vile tendrils of the slime wrapped around one leg entirely, just that awful foot protruding from the greenish gunk; the other leg was not visible at all, perhaps swallowed further by the mould. I thought I also saw the corner of an iron shackle poking through the slime, pitted orange with rust and brown with mocking futility.

I stared in horror at that disgusting fungus, not wanting to touch its surface but wondering how I would extract Abu Fromage so that I could rescue him and we could go have our perfect life together. My mind raced — and came in last by a length. My brain, exhausted, stalled. I turned the crank over and over. I tried to make myself think. My eyelids suddenly felt a hundred pounds each.

The futility of it all hit me like a mouse-lobbed brick. What a dumb quest. What a miserable life. All of a sudden, all I wanted to do was lie down in the slime and fall forever to sleep. It would be so much easier.

A scream from up-stairs rattled the walls, and I snapped awake in an instant, calling on reserves I didn’t know I had. Wouldn’t they be surprised when they got their deployment orders. They kisses their wives good-by as I pulled myself to my feet and blew my nose violently. No Siberian Sleep-Mould would plant its spores in my virile body! I had taken vitamins, once!

The scream became a horrible, gurgling death-rattle. I knew the sound. I’d heard it many times. Mr K____’s frantic voice echoed from the state-room: “No, no, no! Master Grenadon! It’s not wooooooorking!”

“Don’t stop!” I screamed at a volume somewhere approaching a squeaky whisper, my throat suddenly burning from the soot-choked air, my voice-box blasted raw from fatigue and pain and gross little mould-spores with their gross little spore-hooks. Peapoddy’s feet gave one final, feeble flutter, and fell still. I wrapped my arms around Abu Fromage, pulled with what was left of my might, and he came loose with a terrible, rending rrrrip. Mould-dust filled the air, but I held my breath and powered right through.

I stumbled back towards the stairs with the old man in my arms. “I’ve got you, don’t worry, we’ll make it out of here,” I told him, or maybe myself, as I fought to find footing on the squirming, mould-infected masses of flesh covering the floor. Behind me, clock-works clicked into new positions, and levers pushed pistons; the process was starting. I was out of time.

The furnace door flew open with a bang that shook the room, and a gout of oven-heat smacked be in the back of the head — along with the distinctive tangy smell of barbecue. Ah, I thought, so that’s what all these bodies are for.

The sounds behind me grew increasingly menacing — clicks, whirrs, electric hums. And then — finally and terribly — the sputtering, burning hiss of an explosive fuse.

My steps became solid as I found stairs beneath my feet. I took them six at a time, bursting out of the air-ship’s cabin and into the cool exteriour air, everything in sight blue after the burning redness of the engine-room. In the pre-dawn glimmer I could make out the gang-plank, the cliff-side, the sky — and, in the distance, atop a mountain far across the island, the orange flicker that was surely Grenadon’s cave. I fixed its relative location in my memory as I dashed down the gang-plank.

And then my foot slipped, and with no fanfare or warning we were off the gang-plank and falling freely through the air.

I couldn’t believe it. I watched the thin wooden bridge zip past my eyes. All that trouble to escape, and I fell off the gang-plank. I felt like an idiot.

The whipping wind was nice and refreshing, though. The ocean below was a dark, roiling blue. It was pretty. I looked at Abu Fromage. Time slowed.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

Sometime between the engine-room and now he seemed to have recognised me, because there was a twinkle in his be-cataracked eyes that I hadn’t seen before. It may also have been the starlight, but I prefer to think it was my charisma. “We all do our best,” he said, and he reached his hand out to me.

He held a thin white rod clutched tightly in his knobby fingers. I took it. It was a cheese-twirling wand, as perfectly balanced as any I’d ever wielded. “Is this — is this for me?” I asked, my voice choking on something. Not emotion. Something else. Chicken or something. “Where did you get this?”

Abu Fromage looked down, and I followed his gaze. The cliff-side was approaching rapidly — but it was no tough feat to time it right and simply kick off the cliff-wall, sending us arcing away from the crashing stone where Rikah’s stupid horse had landed, back towards the ocean, falling, ever falling.

But Abu Fromage had not been looking at the cliff-side. He had been looking at himself — or more precisely, at his lack of self.

His legs were gone. I had ripped the man in half.

“This,” Abu Fromage told me, gently touching the ivory-colored wand in my hand, “is what kept me sane. Working every day, whittling it bit by bit.” He grinned. His teeth were destroyed.

“Is this…” I swallowed the words. Not because it was too awful to contemplate. But because it was the most awesome thing I could possibly conceive of. This was why Abu Fromage was the man. Dude had whittled the most perfect cheese-wand in existence from his own femur. With his teeth.

I knew then, as we both touched the wand, that this was it. Closure. It felt good.

“Thanks for giving Peapoddy the Camembert Under-Bite,” I said. “Really messed the dude up.”

“I was hoping it would,” Abu Fromage said. “I’m glad it at least bought you some time.”

“I’m sorry I ripped you in half,” I added, as the sea beneath us loomed closer. “And I’m sorry I fell off the gang-plank.”

He shrugged. “I’m not too worried about it,” he said. “The way I figure it, when the air-ship explodes, the heat will instantly vapourise the top few feet of sea-water — effectively creating a cushion of steam that will arrest our fall.”

“Huh,” I said, furrowing my brow. “Really?”

Abu Fromage shrugged. “I have no idea.” He looked down at the ocean, rapidly filling our vision, then up at the hovering air-ship, still floating silently against the night. “But since we seem to have a second, there’s one other thing you should know about Peapoddy. The Countess–”

The dirigible erupted in a massive, orange fire-ball. I heard it for exactly one second before we hit the water at a hundred miles per hour.

NEXT: Awakening

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