The Wondermark Gazette

We moved quickly through London’s crowded boulevards and cramped alley-ways, the clatter of our chariot’s wheels on filth-encrusted pave-stones like a thrumming rumba beat from a Casio key-board’s ‘demonstration mode’. I had owned one of those Oriental music-pianos once, long ago in another life — now its tonnes of pipes and coal-burning synthesizer-gears reduced, like the rest of my past, to a combination of figurative and literal ash.

The beat stumbled — I whipped Thigton without missing a tick.

“Faster!” I cried to the imp-man who threaded our rick-shaw ‘twixt poor-people dung-heaps and the dung-heaps of the nobler class. Thigton suffered the blow with a dignified moan — he’d learned better than to squeal embarrassingly in public — and redoubled his pace. He was a competent valet in most respects (if a bit squeamish before the branding-iron) but at this — running through London’s stinking streets pulling Ursula and me in a two-wheeled cart made of birch-wood and lead — he was without living peer. His predecessor, a thick-waisted stevedore named Bumbercraps, had been equally fleet of foot but had proven to have a rather pitiful pain-tolerance. Thigton took the blows I dealt with dignity. I suspected the man to be a fetishist, which, if it made him more competent at his becharged duties, I was fine with. I was open-minded like that.

Ursula took my hand in her bear-like paw. She was a tall woman, stout of limb and poor of fashion-sense in the Yam-Runner way, who seemed to choose her day’s wardrobe with eyes closed tightly shut against the distant chance of finding any articles of clothing that remotely matched. It was this characteristic of her that drew the most stares and whispers from London’s street-level gawkers, but she felt self-conscious about her size all the same; if I cared, I would tell her that the card-gallery and opium-den nick-names for her were “Steam-Sheet” (after the billowing character of one particular dress) and “Shoe-Bomber” (after a particularly ill-chosen pair of flamingo-skin loafers), and not “Giraffe-Wench” or “Crazy-Mc-Crane-Head” or “Yo That Is One Massive Frickin’ Mama” or any of the other slurs I sometimes over-heard among angry school-yard punks and their mud-flecked orphan contemporaries. Usually they were referring to the jolly green statue the French had just shipped across the pond to the over-grown colonists; either her, or the Queen.

Ursula’s sweaty grip dwarfed my delicate, manicured fingers. Her skin was coarse and labour-thick, while I had gone to considerable expense to have my hands de-roughened and restored to the natural, buttery-silk texture of God’s own meat-hooks. (Assuming, of course, that the Deity hadn’t done all that “sculpting Man from dust and clay” business manually.) Ursula’s touch reminded me of a life of less comfort than I currently enjoyed: one of hard-ship and loss, where my every selfish act had consequences. It was a life I had been happy to leave behind, but if Thigton didn’t get a move on, here, it would be one I would have to return to all too soon.

We rounded a corner and there, across Cobbling-Balls Square, was the theatre — I could make out the shapes of expensive carriages and at least one peanut-oil auto-car. This was a Society event, to be sure — but I detected neither top-hatted fuss-budgets nor preening man-servants yet making their way up the famed steps of the Puddingpop Theatre. The ceremony must have already started. I feared we were already too late.

Without needing to be told, Thigton drew upon some still-deeper well of rick-shaw-pulling energy and raced us across the rabble-strewn square. “Shall I get you there with ‘haste’, milord?” he cried over his shoulder, and I mentally commended the imp-man for his fore-thought.

“Yes, capital idea,” I replied, and made myself ready for the coming manoevre — first extricating my hand from Ursula’s, then doing everything else I needed to do to get ready. Ursula shook her head, bracing herself against the sides of the rick-shaw.

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” she said — but her meaning wasn’t clear. Was she opposing the technique to come (after seriously injuring herself the last three times Thigton had pulled this manoevre off, she was due for a success), or simply mentally crossing out a series of objections she might have? I reached to the cloth roof above us and folded the frame down and away, bringing the harsh moon-light into direct contact with our tender faces. Well, my tender face, anyhow — Ursula some-what resembled a de-tenderised strip of buffalo-beef, salted and cured in a meat-bin behind a slaughter-farm. That is to say, hearty and nourishing.

“Ready in five, four, three,” Thigton called out. The count-down was a rather new development I’d taught the lad, after his prior tendency to simply launch into the manouvre sans warning had left a certain success to be desired. I set my hat on the seat, flexed my knees, and Thigton threw his feet out from under himself.

The rick-shaw lurched, and Thigton pressed his whole impish weight into the pull-bar, laying its length across his arched back and pulling forwards and down. The rear part of the chariot thusly launched upwards, and I shoved off powerfully as Ursula and I were propelled into the cool night air.

For a moment we were flying, the Theatre’s steps drawing closer each second, and then we were there — I tucked in my chin and rolled smoothly across the marble portico, springing to my feet and assuming the most dignified of expressions for the benefit of on-lookers. Ursula smashed into the floor and careened across the porch wildly, bowling over two ushers and the Duchess of Corn-Hash, whose tedious garden-functions we’d presumably be spared from attending now.

“Dear me, sir, may I enquire…” The head usher was a gelatinous man with what seemed to be a permanently aghast expression — at least so far that’s all I’d seen out of the chap. I cut him off with a stern wave and my usual air of awesomeness.

“No time to lose,” I growled. He gulped down his protest — I was that good. “Has the awards ceremony started yet? The Bon-Mot gala?”

“I — er, that is to say, we’ve — er, yes, the, ah, the first presenters are just going on now,” he burbled, clearly no contender for a trophy tonight. The Bon-Mot gala was an aristocratic tradition honouring the year’s best quips, snide asides, and clever turns-of-phrase uttered by the snooty set during the previous year. I was surely in the running for next year’s prizes — reference previously-heralded awesomeness — but Ursula and I’d only arrived in London three months ago. Enough time, however, to learn of a most dastardly murder plot to unfold here, this very night.

“It’s an emergency,” I barked at the usher. “We need to stop the ceremony. A man’s life is in danger.” This elicited just more stammers from the usher — evidently this sort of thing hadn’t been covered in the training-manual. I pushed him aside and made for the doors to the theatre.

“You can’t go in there!” he finally huffed, having found his tongue underneath a quivering mass of jellied cowardice, or something, and striding to intercept me. I could hear applause beginning to grow from behind the doors — there was no time to lose.

That was when Ursula intercepted him, laying those massive hands on his shoulders, his feet suddenly swishing across the marble without bearing him forward. “Go on,” she nodded to me. “He’ll stay here.”

“So I shall,” the usher squeaked, which was a pretty good rejoinder on short notice. I turned and pushed through the theatre doors, a murder-plot to stifle, or at the very least, a murder to watch.

NEXT: At Any Moment

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