I lay on my back and stared out at the night sky through the skylight, and listened to the jangling of the perimeter fence as the night creatures stalked over our camp. Something bad was going on back at home. Moobin was suggesting I use ‘Every Effort’ to regain Perkins and despite the fact that Moobin had been against looking for the Eye of Zoltar, he was now asking me to carry on with all due determination. Something wasn’t right. I was still trying to figure it out when I fell fast asleep.
Slow boat to the Land of Snodd
When I awoke the sun was up, but not by much. I had been disturbed twice in the night. Once as a Tralfamosaur herd moved through in a noisy manner, and then again when Ignatius found a gherkin-sized flesh-eating slug sucking on his toe as he lay asleep in bed. He screamed and dislodged it, which was a relief as we then didn’t have to help him.
I unbolted the door of my pod and cautiously looked out. A ground fog had crept in, which offered good cover for a Hotax attack, so it would be wise to remain vigilant until the fog cleared. I folded up my bedroll, tidied the pod, collected my belongings and then signed my name in the visitors’ book before descending the pole to get the breakfast going, all the while keeping a wary eye out.
The half-track had been shoved a few feet sideways by a clumsy Tralfamosaur, but aside from a small piece of bent armour plate, no damage had been done. There were Snork Badger footprints aplenty, and here and there were the shiny trails of flesh-eating slugs. If we wanted to earn a few moolah we could have scraped up the trails and sold them to any glue supplier, as slug slime is that gooey substance you find in glue-guns.
‘Ook?’ said Ralph, appearing from the brush, seemingly unharmed by his night out in the open. He would have been more used to sleeping with dangerous creatures all about him, even though most of the nasty creatures he might have known would have died out by the end of the Pleistocene.
‘Sleep well?’ I asked, and he stared at me in an uncomprehending sort of way.
‘G-ook,’ he said, making an effort to emphasise the ‘G’. I think he was learning to speak. Or relearning, at any rate.
‘L-ook,’ he said, and showed me the flint knife he had been making.
‘May I hold it?’ I asked, putting out a hand, and after looking at me suspiciously for a moment, he gave me the knife. It was well balanced, with a carved bone grip in the shape of the half-track. The blade was finely curved, dangerously serrated and was so thin as to be almost translucent. I smiled appreciatively, and handed it back. He gave an odd half-smile and placed it in a large ladies’ handbag he had found somewhere, then hung the bag over the crook of his arm.
‘Jennifer,’ I said, pointing at myself.
‘J-ookff,’ he said, then pointed at himself and said: ‘R-ooff.’
‘You’re getting it,’ I said with a smile, then nodded as he pointed at various things around the campsite, the small part of what was once Ralph’s brain attempting to speak through an Australopithecine voice box.
‘Hfff t-Ook,’ he said, pointing at the half-track. After a while he settled down by himself, practising pronunciations, and eating some beetles he’d collected.
I had noticed with dismay that Perkins’ and Addie’s ladders were still down, indicating that they’d not returned. I also noticed Ignatius’ ladder was down, so checked his pod – it was empty. I found a few slime trails and oddly shaped footprints at the base of his pod pole, but no evidence of Ignatius himself. It was only on a search for a fireberry with which to cook breakfast that I found Ignatius. He was huddled – wedged might be a better word – in one of the wooden rowing boats, which, as previously noted, were lighter than air because of the Thermowizidrical fallout, and were dangling straight up, tethered to earth only by a frayed rope tied to the jetty. Ignatius was alive, awake, and was staring at me with a shocked expression on his face.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘No, I am not okay,’ he said. ‘Several large creatures, two small ones and a slimy thing tried to eat me in the night.’
‘That’s an uneventful night here in the Empty Quarter,’ I said. ‘Didn’t anyone explain the dangers before you came out here?’
‘No, they did not,’ said Ignatius in an aggrieved tone. ‘They said this experience would be like the most amazing and enjoyable dangerfest known to man.’
‘And …?’
‘They said it would be like it – not actually it. You all must be stark staring bonkers wanting to be out here. I’m going home.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said, glad to be rid of him. ‘You can pick up a G’mooh in Llangurig.’
‘I’m not going a step farther. You can call me a G’mooh as soon as you find a payphone. It can come and get me. I’m not shifting.’
G’mooh was an acronym for ‘Get Me Out of Here’, the slang and universally accepted name for a Fast Exit Taxi, which will guarantee those who have lost their nerve a speedy way out of the Empire. The G’mooh drivers are usually battle-damaged former tour guides who will stop at nothing to return their passengers to safety. It’s expensive, but few haggle.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘if you want to stay out here on your own, but I’d not …’
I stopped talking because Ralph was lolloping up the jetty towards Ignatius, and when he reached him, stared up at where Ignatius sat huddled in the vertically moored boat.
‘Go away, monkey-boy,’ said Ignatius. ‘Go on, shoo.’
But Ralph did not shoo, and instead flicked the taut rope that anchored the rowing boat with an inquisitive forefinger. He then looked up at Ignatius.
‘No mmnk … boy.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Ignatius.
‘I think he said he wasn’t a monkey-boy.’
Ignatius laughed.
‘Well, he is, that much is obvious – and a nasty piece of genetic throwback, to boot.’
Ralph frowned for a moment, rummaged in his handbag and brought out the razor-sharp flint knife. Without pausing he sliced cleanly through the rope that tethered Ignatius to the ground. The rowing boat, with Ignatius inside it, began to rise gently in the morning air.
‘Ralph!’ yelled Ignatius, suddenly panicking. ‘What in—!’
‘Wait there,’ I said, ‘I’ll throw you a line!’
I ran to the half-track and rummaged in the tool locker for a length of cord. By the time I had found one, Ignatius was about twenty feet above me, drifting east. I tied a spanner to the end of the line and readied myself to throw it to him.
‘It’s okay,’ he yelled excitedly. ‘The wind is taking me towards the border. Cancel the taxi, I’ll be home and safe in an hour or two!’
‘Hang on, Ignatius,’ I said, having seen civilians try to use magic for their own ends and it all going horribly wrong, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Ignatius happily, ‘by the time the magic wears off I’ll be home and dry.’
‘Wait … !’
But I was too late. The rowing boat was now drifting faster as the breeze caught it, even bumping against Curtis’ pod pole as it went past. Curtis popped his head out to see what was going on, and was surprised to see Ignatius drifting past.
‘I’m off home,’ said Ignatius. ‘Join me?’
Curtis said he wouldn’t but wished him well and they agreed to meet up at a bar in London some time when all of this was over. Their voices roused everyone else, who also wished Ignatius well but probably, like me, were actually fed up with him. The rowing boat rose until it reached its maximum height of about six hundred feet or so, and continued to drift in the direction of the unUnited Kingdoms.
Now awake, the group came down from their pod poles. The fog had now dispersed and the risk of Hotax attack lessened, so they washed in the lake while they swapped notes about the night’s noises, terrors and close calls, then we all sat down to a breakfast of coffee and bacon and eggs. By the time we had finished, Ignatius and his rowing boat were simply a distant dot in the morning sky.
‘I’ve just had a thought
,’ said the Princess. ‘I mean, aren’t there anti-aircraft batteries along the border?’
‘That’s just for aircraft coming in,’ said Wilson. ‘They’d have to be either mad or vindictive to shoot at anyone leaving – wouldn’t they?’
And as if to prove that Emperor Tharv’s orders to his military were precisely those things – mad and vindictive – we saw small puffs of anti-aircraft fire explode around the small dot. It was a slow-moving target, and Ignatius didn’t stand a chance. There was a large explosion and we saw a few bits fall to earth trailing smoke.
‘That was hard cheese,’ remarked Curtis without a shred of compassion. ‘Should have stuck with us – or taken a parachute.’
‘I trained in the navy,’ said Wilson, ‘and the first thing you learn is that parachutes are not generally required while boating.’
‘Ook-ook-ook,’ said Ralph, with a slight curling of the lip that I took to be an early hominid smile.
‘Do you think he planned that?’ asked the Princess.
‘I’m not sure Australopithecines can plan,’ I said, ‘but you never know.’
‘Okay,’ I said, as soon as we had given Ignatius a minute’s silence as a vague sort of respect, ‘this is where we are: Addie went to rescue Perkins last night and told me that if she didn’t return she was dead. It’s now nine o’clock. I say we leave it until midday before assuming the worst. After that, we head off towards Llangurig. Any objections?’
There weren’t any, of course, and we settled down to wait.
Leviathans explained and some tourists
It rained in the morning for about half an hour, but we sheltered under the awning attached to the half-track. At eleven o’clock two Tralfamosaurs moved through the camp, so we climbed the poles until they were safely past. The morale of the small group was not high. Despite the fact that none of us had liked Ignatius and his demise had tipped Addie’s guaranteed 50 per cent survival rate in our favour, a member of our group had still died, and somewhere he would be mourned. Curtis was being unbearably smug as he thought he had one over on me, so was best avoided. I’d told the Princess about his visit the previous evening. She again suggested she kill him, which I again refused. So with neither of us talking to Curtis and Ralph not talking very well, Wilson was about the only person we could all turn to for a chat. He was in a good mood, and spent the time writing up his birdwatching notes in a blue exercise book.
I looked over his shoulder and noticed that aside from the odd pigeon and a wren or two, the ‘birds I’ve seen this week’ page was almost completely blank.
‘Not much luck seeing birds, then?’ I asked. ‘Tharv’s ban must be working.’
‘The absence of birds has nothing to do with him,’ said Wilson. ‘Birds have a hard time living out here. The successful ones either learn how to burrow like sand martins, puffins or blind mole-sparrows, or have a huge turn of speed like the swift or Falcon X-1. Anything else that flaps is otherwise … devoured.’
‘By what?’
‘The Cloud Leviathans,’ said Wilson as though it were obvious. ‘The beasts swoop low across the land ingesting huge volumes of air along with everything that’s in it. The air is then compressed in the Leviathan’s muscular chambers, and when the run is over, the beast swallows the flying creatures and vents the compressed air through pressure ducts on its undersides, assisting with extra lift at the end of a feeding run.’
‘Sort of like whales in the ocean?’ asked Curtis.
‘Absolutely,’ said Wilson. ‘Leviathans have been known to swallow flocks of starlings more than ten thousand strong, and are suggested as the reason behind the passenger pigeon extinction in North America. It’s the reason birds migrate, too – to avoid being eaten. I’m not surprised at the lack of birds. Since Cloud Leviathans are about the size of a smallish passenger jet, they can get pretty hungry.’
‘How does it fly with such ridiculously small wings?’ asked the Princess, holding up a blurry photograph she’d found in a copy of Ten Animals to Avoid in the Cambrian Empire. The creature was sort of like a stubby plesiosaur, with four seemingly inadequate-sized paddle-shaped wings, and a large mouth on the underneath of a broad, flat head.
‘No one’s ever studied them at length,’ said Wilson, ‘firstly because they are rare – fewer than five, it’s suggested – and secondly because they have a chameleonic skin that allows them a limited invisibility. No one has ever seen a body, far less a skeleton, hence the theory of a legendary graveyard – somewhere they all go to die.’
‘Do you think it’s likely Sky Pirate Wolff trained one?’ I asked.
Wilson thought for a moment.
‘It’s always possible, of course, and I’ve heard the stories about aerial piracy, the destruction of Cloud City Nimbus III and the RMS Tyrannic, but I’m fairly sceptical. As the Princess noted, it doesn’t look like a good flyer, so how could it support the weight of a team of pirates?’
We all fell silent after that, and I considered Sky Pirate Wolff, and whether she existed or not – if not, then the Eye of Zoltar might not exist either, but I was not necessarily here to find the Eye, but to ask Able Quizzler what he knew – something I could still do, even with our current difficulties.
On the dot of twelve and with Addie and Perkins not returned, I decided we should leave. I wrote what we were doing on a sheet of paper and left it taped to the bottom of Addie’s pod pole. Wilson suggested he take the wheel and after some grinding of gears we departed along the the compacted dirt road marked ‘Llangurig and the North’, to which the Cambrian Tourist Board had helpfully added: ‘32% chance of being devoured, but good scenery with ample picnic spots’.
We hadn’t gone more than two miles when we came across a dusty Range Rover parked on a grassy lay-by at the side of the road. We slowed down as we passed, and looked in at the driver and passenger, who were staring at the view. They didn’t look up and, sensing something might be wrong, I instructed Wilson to stop the half-track a little way down the road.
‘Wait for us here,’ I said to the Princess and Curtis, then walked cautiously back to the Range Rover accompanied by Wilson and Ralph, who didn’t seem to want to stray too far from my side.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked the driver of the Range Rover, but he didn’t reply. He was a well-dressed middle-aged man who was holding a camera in one hand while the other rested lightly on the steering wheel. His brow was wrinkled, as though he had just seen something, but he made no movement. Something definitely wasn’t right.
‘Hello?’ I said, and waved a hand in front of the driver’s face. He didn’t even blink.
‘Mine’s unresponsive,’ I said, ‘what about yours?’
‘Same,’ said Wilson, staring uneasily at the passenger. She was seemingly frozen in mid-stretch, her mouth partially open as though just finishing a yawn.
‘Mule Fever?’ I suggested.
‘If it was, they’d have ears long before the paralysis set in,’ replied Wilson.
‘I can’t feel a pulse,’ I remarked, holding the driver’s wrist, ‘and the skin feels hard and waxy.’
‘Hotax did this,’ said Wilson.
I looked at the motionless people.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying,’ said Wilson, ‘that the Hotax are not just murderously cannibalistic but big on conservation. They retain the discarded skin, hair and bones then preserve them perfectly. Look.’
He reached inside the car and lifted the hair from the back of the driver’s neck to reveal a row of fine cross-stitching in the skin, then tapped the man’s nearest eyeball, which was not human at all, but skilfully made of glass.
I peered closer. It was quite the most remarkable piece of work. As realistic as anything I had ever seen, and ten times better than the rubbish you get at the waxworks.
‘Amazingly lifelike, aren’t they?’ said Wilson. ‘The families of Hotax victims often elect not to bury their relatives but instead use them as hatstands in the hall. Mind you, th
e good thing about a Hotax attack is that you don’t know anything about it – just a slight prick in the back of the neck as the poisoned dart hits home. Then you’re like this, preserved at the moment of death, for ever.’
‘I … suppose I could think of worse ways to go,’ I said.
‘I could definitely think of worse ways to go,’ agreed Wilson thoughtfully. ‘Knowing Hotax they would have stripped the car for any tradable spares, too. Look.’
He lifted the bonnet to reveal an empty engine bay.
We stood for a moment, musing upon the Hotax’s odd mix of utter savagery, skilled artistry and business sense in the car spares industry, when the roar of an engine punctuated the silence.
It was the half-track. We both turned, and whoever was driving clunked the vehicle swiftly into gear and it lurched off.
‘Hey!’ I yelled, and ran after it. As it drove away, the driver turned to see how close I was, and I recognised him immediately – Curtis. The half-track was not fast, but Curtis had a head start; I couldn’t catch him.
‘Tell me you didn’t leave the keys in the ignition,’ I said to Wilson as he joined me.
‘Whoops,’ he said, ‘sorry.’
‘Ook,’ said Ralph.
‘This is bad,’ I said, looking around at the empty moorland and wondering what horrors lay hidden just out of sight, ‘really bad,’
‘He’s probably doing it as a stupid joke,’ said Wilson without much conviction. ‘He’ll be back soon.’
‘He’s gone for good,’ I said, realising what was happening, ‘on a journey to the Leviathans’ Graveyard.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he thinks Leviathans’ teeth are key to the magic industry and wants them all for himself, I imagine.’
‘Are they?’
‘Not at all. But,’ I added, ‘it doesn’t explain why he didn’t dump my handmaiden by the side of the road.’