The Wondermark Gazette

Our story thus far: Having inadvertently set the crew of the H.M.D. Flopsy Bunny against each other, and then accidentally caused the whole lot of them to be lost to the sea, I am alone on the ship with no land in sight.

The sea was calm.

No wind ruffled the tattered remains of the Flopsy Bunny’s sails. Not so much as a zephyr stirred the waves. The boat sat heavy in the water.

On the first day, I had launched the vessel’s sole life-boat, only to accidentally set fire to the oars, which alighted the dinghy itself. I watched helplessly from the Bunny’s stern as the smouldering row-boat bobbed in the current-less sea, slowly taking on water for an hour before finally slipping beneath the surface with a white hiss of steam.

With nothing else to do, I paced the deck a hundred times a day. I had no knowledge of rigging or helmsmanship or even knots, save for that bare amount I’d picked up in the back-alley sass-shops of Darkest Mudborough on Prom Night. The ship’s mast had snapped, crushing the poor organ-boy (who was now a brownish skeleton tossed into a corner; the gulls and I had shared the sweetmeats he’d been cultivating), and then slowly toppling over the side, happening to brain a flailing survivor.

Besides that one poor sinking fellow, of the Kippers and other crewmen I saw no sign — not so much as a kerchief floating on the whitecaps. It was just me, a dead vessel, and a hold filled with un-baited leprechaun-traps and barrels of Shamrock Shakes, vile, milky beverages made of sugar-syrup and hatred. After availing myself generously of the latter, I began to feel woozy and hallucinate, and at one point thought that a pirate ship was approaching; however I realized many hours later, after trying unsuccessfully to hail them with a makeshift semaphore of my own devising, that pirates, in fact, do not exist. If I hadn’t managed to pry the lid from a crate of leprechaun-traps, I might have tripped on Shamrock Shakes for days, until I starved, or thrown myself overboard, or impaled myself on the splinters of the mast, thinking I was diving through marshmallows after a scampering booze-pixie. People have died in worse ways, many by my own hand. But the intricate mechanisms of the traps intrigued me, because with so many bits and parts and pieces, I thought there might be something of use to my present situation — and even if not, it was something to play with.

The leprechaun-traps were constructed out of flexible wire, the better to mold them around trees and branches and integrate them into the surrounding foliage and terrain. They had a catch-and-trigger system attached to a powerful spring, which could be fitted with trap-cages, skull-piercing spikes, or the rather unpopular pillow-fight system, which pelted the little rascals with down-filled cushions. That last option was likely a ploy on the part of the manufacturers to be able to claim that they offered humane alternatives to the poison-tipped bone-masher that came packaged with the unit — I’d overheard one crew member mentioning that the pillow-fight attachment was listed in the manufacturer’s catalogue but rarely, if ever, actually offered in retail stores.

Not that there were any leprechauns around here — they feared open ocean, or so I had been told, hence their chronic overpopulation on the Irish island. But I wondered if any use might be made of the spikes, or springs…or, in a worst-case scenario, the poison-tipped bone-masher.

I ransacked every room on board ship, searching aimlessly for anything useful towards any end. Cap’n Narwhal’s quarters were full of gibberish charts and squiggly maps and stupid-looking sextants and the like; none of it was of any use to me. I wondered, not for the first time, what the hook-handed old coot had been doing during the long days of our voyage. Then I wondered if he had a special attachment for use in the restroom, or at least some sort of sheath to cover his hook when the time came to get close to the delicate bits. A quick peek into his mahogany-paneled soil-chamber proved my supposition correct — hanging from loops in the wall were a whole line of gleaming silver attachments for various purposes: a spork, for stews; a toothbrush, for who-knows-what; even a shoe-horn that looked like it hadn’t seen much use since he’d had hooks replace his feet, which was easier on the diabetes, I supposed.

I discovered while idly messing with everything I could touch that the helm’s wheel now spun freely, as if it were no longer attached to anything heavy. From this I surmised that the tiller had likely snapped. Which meant that should I ever find some way to propel the ship, I wouldn’t be able to steer it. With no land in sight in any direction — and, save for long-ago whiffs of clover that had since faded in the still air, no indication that land even still existed — I began to seriously doubt my chances of making it through the next week, much less to Dublin, or back to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats. With the organ-boy totally consumed, that left me just the barrels of Shamrock Shakes; a crate labeled “Beer-Stones” that turned out to be, unfortunately, actual stones; and casks of clover-remover, which did me no good as I had no clover. I tried to huff the stuff to get high, but all that happened was that I suddenly grew a beard overnight, which was unexpected, but rather dashing.

Clearly, my only options involved either leaving the ship behind, or getting stoned out of my gourd on Shamrock Shakes. After a brief deliberation, I chose the latter, and headed down to the hold. I sucked on one of the green spigots for a while, and had a pleasant conversation with a French polar bear on holiday from Calais, until he started spouting nonsense about colonialism and I had to cram him into my coin-purse. Then my barrel ran dry, and as I wobblingly rolled another barrel into position, I began to notice my boots sloshing through an inch or so of standing water. The wood was soaked dark beneath my feet, as if it had been dark for some time. A leaky barrel, I thought to myself — and then the boat pitched and I saw salt-foam seep through a crack between timbers. The ship was taking on water.

I staggered back against the row of barrels, dropping the one I’d been balancing onto its side. It rolled easily along the lower deck, picking up speed as it wobbled, before finally smashing out the aft ladder and caroming thuddily into a bulkhead. I watched the action wide-eyed; helpless, but afraid to look away. I felt the polar bear in my coin-purse struggling about. “What’s going on out there?” it cried. “Qu’est-ce qu’il fait? Dis-moi!”

The barrel screeched as it came to rest. Then it yowled. A muffled, human yowl.

I stared at the barrel, half my height and twice my weight. A dark brown cylinder of buckled staves and pitch. Rocking of its own accord.

Maybe it was the burbling salt water filling the hold, or maybe it was the human innards and Shamrock Shakes corrupting my decision-making from their perch deep in my bowel. But I advanced on the barrel with a pry-bar, and with a shriek of old nails and a splintering snap of wood giving up, I opened the barrel. I held the nail-studded lid as a shield, peering over its craggy round edge.

The barrel was filled with salt. Coarse, white, clumpy salt, shifting and sinking as if it were in an hourglass.

I poked the white mass with the pry-bar. A few grains came back with the metal. Definitely salt, fit for a nobleman’s table. A hint of tallow in the after-taste, similar to Uncle’s old stock back at the Manor. A good garnish for a meat dish, with hardy undertones of labour. It tasted like sweat.

I turned back to watch the mound of salt begin to rise from the unlidded barrel, pouring now over the edge and snowing onto the deck — the soft shushing of the cascading crystals reminded me of oil sizzling over fire.

And then a hand emerged, craggy and sallow, barely more than a skin-wrapped skeleton. With a terrified shout, I leapt backwards and struck at the barrel’s side with the pry-bar, making those bony fingers flinch with the impact. The barrel began to rock from within, and within a few seconds it was clacking back and forth, bouncing on the deck in wild arcs. It fell over with a crash, and then for long seconds the only sound was the loud, high shush of salt pouring across the wooden beams.

I felt my hands tighten around the ridges of the pry-bar as I hid myself behind a bulkhead, watching the strange creature slowly pull itself from the barrel. That skeletal hand was joined by a bald skull, and then a shoulder, and then another hand…until the torso of a man lay on the deck, salt pooled around him. He lay back on the deck to draw great, heaving breaths into an impossibly wrinkled rib-cage flecked with sparse white hair. “Dis-moiiiiiiii,” the polar bear whined from the coin-purse. After a moment of gathering his breath, the man — for it was a man, yellow skin drawn and stretched over the hundred points of a sharp, hairy skeleton — slowly brushed salt from his eyes, seeming to pull the lids open with his fingers, then coughed, sending a dry spray of salt clattering across the hold. He looked around, curiously but deliberately, and it didn’t take long for his gaze to fix on me.

“Abalasta walabanishifa,” he shouted, with a wheezing voice more creak and crinkle than speech.

My heart snap-drumming in my tightened chest, I rushed him with the pry-bar and made to spread his brains across the hold. I cried and swung the heavy metal at that bright yellow skull –

I saw a flash of motion, and then my fingers were ringing off the bar. The metal slapped the man’s palm, and I heard a serial popping as his thin fingers closed around it. He wrenched the bar from my grip, and swiftly pulled his lower body free of the salt, standing on shaky legs and tossing the bar into the far corner of the hold all at once. It clattered against a cask of clover-remover, and came to rest before the echoes of its impact had fully faded.

The man’s toes touched the standing salt water, and he felt the wetness, slapping the surface with the sole of one yellow foot. He dipped his curled brown toenails into the water, then looked up at me. I was cowering against the far bulkhead, searching vainly for another hand-held weapon, but I stopped when he spoke.

“Looks like your boat’s sinking,” he said, in raspy but perfectly accented King’s English. “At this rate, looks like you’ve got about three days.”

I turned to stare at the shocking creature, searching for my breath, fumbling my tongue around the words. “Don’t you think I know that?” I shot back, adding a glare for good measure.

I didn’t know who this guy was, but he’d gotten one thing right. This was my boat.

NEXT: An Uneasy Alliance

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