Prospero Regained

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  The Ketos thrashed violently. Then, it twitched three times and was still. Wiping the blades of my fan clean against the monster’s scales, I looked around. Mab was nowhere to be seen, though I could hear his voice, swearing. Erasmus’s feet protruded from a fold of stomach wall. Gregor held up the Staff of Darkness and was experimenting to see the effect of the Hellshadow that issued from it upon the stomach of our host. Malagigi sat cross-legged upon the dome of the skull, the silver star resting upon his open palm.

  “Olley-olley-Ome-free!” I shouted, grabbing Erasmus’s legs and pulling. “I got it. You can all come out now.”

  * * *

  “NO good.” Erasmus lowered his staff, which vibrated and hummed in his pitted Urim gauntlet. He gagged, covering his tender nose with his free hand. When he recovered and could shout again, he called, “Look at that stomach fold! Instead of withering it, I just made the thing bigger!”

  “It’s a dinosaur!” I shouted over the noise of digestion. I rested against one of the ribs, rubbing my damaged lips with an antiseptic wipe Erasmus had given me from his bag. It did not seem to soothe the burning at all. I could not keep from wondering whether Erasmus had intended to aid me when he gave it to me. At least the smell of it helped keep the odor of the digestion going on about me at bay.

  “Kronosaurs are not dinosaurs,” Gregor interrupted. His voice came from a pool of shadow issuing from his staff. “They are short-necked plesiosaurs.”

  “A plesiosaur, then,” I continued. “These creatures don’t die of old age; they just grow larger. That’s what some reptiles on earth today do, anyhow. They don’t have a natural adult size like mammals; they just keep getting bigger until something kills them—a predator, disease, or lack of food. Down here, without any natural predators, this thing has apparently just kept growing—since the Cretaceous Period!”

  “Then my staff is useless,” Erasmus concluded. He came back over to sit close to Gregor and me, so that he could speak without shouting. “It’s cut our way out or die the death of digestion. What are you doing in there, Gregor? The silver star too bright for you?”

  “I prefer the mild brimstone scent of the Hellshadow to the stench of vomit and bile,” Gregor replied. The reminder of the smell caused Erasmus to gag again.

  “Ugh!” Mab groaned. “This is a bad business!”

  “But, of course, now we know firsthand how Jonah felt,” Malagigi offered from where he sat atop the skull, star in hand.

  “We can’t afford to stay here three days!” I pounded my hand against the skull, rocking the boat. “Father is going to be killed on Twelfth Night. We had five days left when we set out, and that was at least a day ago, maybe two. Not to mention what could be happening to the rest of our family!”

  “We wouldn’t be worried about the rest of the family, if someone hadn’t summoned the Hellwinds.” Erasmus gave me an accusatory stare. “We’d be past the Wall of Flame by now, not sitting in the stinking belly of some prehistoric whale.”

  “Enough, Erasmus.” Gregor’s voice called from the ball of darkness. “We have more important things to do than snipe at one another. We must work together to get out of here.”

  “What about crawling out the throat or the anus?” Mab asked.

  “We could go up the throat—if we knew which way it was and had some method to keep the kronosaur from swallowing us again—but the other way is a no-no.” Erasmus shuddered. “Can you imagine how long the intestines would be in a thing this size? Miles, perhaps hundreds of miles, depending upon how advanced the creature’s innards are. We’d probably founder somewhere and end our days smothered by plesiosaur poop, if the stench didn’t get us first.”

  “If I could be killed by stench, I would be dead already,” I murmured.

  It seemed a shame that my awful swim through the Swamp of Uncleanness when we first entered Hell had not inured me to unpleasant smells. At the time, I had thought that no odor would ever disturb me again. Apparently, that was not how one’s nose operates.

  “Could we cut our way out?” the ball of brimstony Hellshadow asked calmly in Gregor’s voice.

  “I doubt it.” Erasmus patted Durandel. “Even if we were capable of physically hacking our way through what is probably at least two dozen feet of meat, bone, and gristle, it’s unlikely we could survive being caught inside the wound-tunnel, once the creature began writhing from the pain. We’d be squashed.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Mab scratched his eternal beard stubble and then counted the points on his fingers. “We can’t wither it. We can’t cut our way out. The Staff of Darkness doesn’t do squat down here, except protect us from the stench, assuming we want to trade light and a bad odor for darkness; neither does the Seal of Solomon. And calling the Hellwinds inside this big oaf’s stomach … Bad idea, right?”

  “Right.” Erasmus nodded.

  “What’s left?” Mab asked.

  “Slow death by digestive juices?” Erasmus suggested.

  “Can you help us, Mage Monk?” Mab turned to Malagigi.

  “Mais non.” The Frenchman shook his head. “I am able to walk through the monster’s flesh, so I could leave, were I willing to abandon the star. But I could not take any of you with me.” He smiled ruefully. “Rather like the old days, when I knew all manner of secret paths but could not walk them unless I went alone.”

  “Could you go for help?” Mab asked.

  “Go where?” Malagigi gave a very Gallic shrug. “No one out there would be willing to help, even if they could. As for the Brotherhood of Hope, my people won’t be back for days. Hell is hard for us to reach. The masters brought us here and will not come back for us up until we have given what aid we may. Even if they were to come early, what could they do for you? You are not dead.

  “It is at moments like these,” the ex-sorcerer Malagigi opined eloquently, spreading his arms, “that I wish I could call up my old friends to help me. But even if they would come, I would not call them here. They were ethereal creatures, all. Elementals. This place would harm them. Merely being in Hell would corrupt the purity of their natures.”

  I leaned against the nearest rib and considered our situation. There had to be a way out. I recalled the angel Muriel Sophia, with her warmth and golden light, and how her visit had banished all uncertainties from my heart. She could not have sent us all into Hell just to have it end like this. I could not turn to my Lady for ideas so I glanced around at the great folds of bloodless flesh, searching for inspiration from other less spiritual sources. How huge and intimidating they looked, like great, slimy, smelly curtains. And Erasmus was right. He had made them even larger.

  “Hey!” I exclaimed. “How about making the kronosaurus younger?”

  “Come again?” asked Erasmus.

  “Make it younger! If aging makes it grow, wouldn’t making it younger make it shrink?” I asked. “Either it would throw us up when we became too big for its stomach, or we could cut our way through the narrower side.”

  “If you made it small enough, it would break open around us,” Mab offered. “Er … if we didn’t get squished first.”

  “You know, Miranda, I think you may have finally had a good idea,” Erasmus said as he tapped his staff. It began to hum and buzz in his gauntlet again and to emit a blue glow. “How amazing! I suppose there’s a first time for everything.”

  * * *

  SHRINKING the kronosaurus small proved a lengthy process. While we waited, we built ourselves a sort of makeshift lean-to to protect us from the churning and stench of the stomach. First, we cut the skull of the mystery beast free from its skeleton, flipped it over so that it formed a giant white cup. Next, we wedged it inside its own curving ribs—the only things down here that were too large to be routinely tossed about by action of the stomach. This, we bound together with rope from Mab’s bag. Then, we placed the cracked gondola inside the upside-down skull, giving us a place to sit. Finally, using pieces of Malagigi’s broken pole as tent poles, we strung Gregor’s enchante
d crimson robes over our heads, to protect us from the digestive juices. Like my tea gown, Gregor’s robes had been woven by Logistilla’s magical process and could not be damaged by ordinary means. This was why he still wore them, even though he had not been a cardinal for centuries and preferred to dress in black.

  So we all huddled together in our makeshift hideout and waited. Erasmus lay on his stomach beside the gondola, stretched out on the edge of the upturned skull. His arm was extended beyond our small enclosure, so that the tip of his staff pushed against the stomach wall. I was not privy to the secrets of the Staff of Decay, but he seemed to have some directional control over its effect.

  Beside him, Gregor was now dressed in the black turtleneck and slacks he had been wearing beneath his robes. Using the Staff of Darkness, he wreathed the outside of our hideout in the thick shadowy stuff that issued from his staff, in the hope that it might protect us from the terrible smell.

  I sat next to Mab, who was rereading his notes in the light of the silver star. The star rested on my hand, so long as I concentrated upon it. Malagigi, who was not encumbered by the monster’s flesh, flitted in and out of the kronosaurus, reporting to Erasmus upon his progress.

  From time to time, Erasmus would take a break from shrinking the plesiosaur to age the digestive juices that had gathered beneath us. The giant reptile might merely grow larger when withered, but the juices in it stomach could be aged until they were no longer active. With time, new juices gathered, but Erasmus’s actions gave us a bit of leeway. When the smell became overwhelming, Mab would open his mouth and puff, creating a cool fresh breeze and blowing away the putrid odor. This, I now realized, was the source of the fresh air I had momentarily breathed when we first entered the stomach. After a time, the fresh air would leak out, the stench return, and Mab would do it again.

  Mab had been hunched over his notes. Now, he glanced at me and chuckled.

  “What’s so amusing?” I called. Despite our close quarters, it was still difficult to hear one another, due to the near-deafening whirr and squish of digestion around us.

  “Er … nothing, Ma’am.” Mab lowered the brim of his hat. “Just that I may have figured out something about all those Post-It notes we found at your brother’s place. Don’t want to say anything yet, though, as I’m still forming my theory.” Returning to his notes, he murmured something to himself. I could not quite make out his words, but it sounded like: “If I’m right, I’m going to owe the Harebrain some kind of apology.”

  Closing his notebook about fifteen minutes later, Mab took a length of rope and, exiting our lean-to, began measuring the stomach folds and their shrinkage times, coordinating his findings with Malagigi’s. As his watch was not working, he asked Gregor and me to count seconds, to help him gauge time. After ten minutes, he announced that he thought it would take approximately five hours to shrink the creature sufficiently to allow for our escape.

  “Which isn’t so bad,” Mab concluded, “if you consider that the creature has been growing for over a hundred and thirty million years!”

  Five hours! Increasingly, I found myself worrying about Father and the rest of the family. Father, at least, was in a prison somewhere, and, while Lilith might be torturing him, she would not kill him until Twelfth Night. So, in an odd sort of way, he was safe.

  But Theo? Mephisto? Titus? Logistilla? Cornelius, and Ulysses? Oh, and Caliban? Who knew where the Hellwinds had deposited them. The Hellwinds were designed to bring souls to the part of Hell most appropriate to their sins. If my siblings were dumped headlong in the places designed to torment them for their worst vices, what chance did they have of surviving?

  Dread and foreboding gripped my heart, and cold sweat ran down the back of my neck. These sensations grew worse whenever I had to resist my five-hundred-year-old habit of turning to my Lady for solace. My only comfort was the light of the little star. Somehow, seeing its cheerful silvery glow, it was impossible to be entirely glum.

  * * *

  THE waiting dragged on and on. I am not ordinarily claustrophobic, but the narrow confines of the acid-filled stomach began to oppress me. I contemplated the future should we fail to escape this living prison. Many things troubled me: the fate of my family, our unanswered questions, plans that I had not completed. What bothered me most was that Prospero, Inc., would be left with no one at the helm, leaving mankind with less protection than they had received for the last five centuries.

  My heart went out to the Aerie Ones we employed and to the billions of human beings who benefited from our services. It seemed unfair that, should I perish here—never returning to ensure that Prospero, Inc., continued to honor its obligations—the spirits would eventually break free of the covenants that enforced the laws upon which modern science depended, and mankind would be plunged into another dark age.

  Seemed like a terrible price: I die in the belly of a kronosaur; all mankind suffers.

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY, Gregor suggested we take this opportunity to get some sleep. Since we had just two days ago imbibed our yearly drop of Water of Life, which rejuvenated our bodies and extended our life, we were at our heartiest. We could do without food or sleep for some time. As we did not know what would come next, however, it seemed wise not to strain our resources. Erasmus had to stay awake to operate his staff, but Malagigi offered to sit with him and let the rest of us, who still lived in flesh, sleep.

  Mab, Gregor, and I arranged ourselves about the small vessel as best we could, using the hardwood benches as our pillows. We spent a few hours in fitful sleep, tossing and turning and suffering from nightmares. They were so terrifying that waking up to discover I was merely in the stomach of a kronosaurus in the depths of Hell was a relief. Perhaps Gregor’s dreams were similarly nightmarish, for he also gave up on sleeping and, instead, knelt in prayer. Mab and I continued to wrest what repose we could from the occasion. The hard surface and uncomfortable position conspired to make this difficult, but I eventually drifted off with visions of elf lords dancing in my head.

  * * *

  I AWOKE sore and stiff. Mab woke, too, stretching and grumbling. He muttered something about coffee, to which Erasmus replied with a chuckle. “This is Hell, my man. You need to go to Heaven for good coffee.”

  We sat in silence for a time, huddled like children at summer camp—assuming that they had pitched their camp inside the world’s largest living laundry machine during the wash cycle.

  Gregor, who was watching the process around us intently, asked, “How did this creature come to be so great? It is far greater than the kronosaurus of Earth. They were only forty-five feet long.”

  Erasmus glanced back from where he lay stretched out upon his stomach, his staff extended. “Why do we assume that the biggest ones got stuck in tar pits? Those limits we read about—thirty-five feet, fifty-five feet—that’s the length of the largest specimen we’ve found … Who knows how big the ones we didn’t find were? Can you imagine trying to figure out what humans were like by measuring remains discovered in bogs?”

  “That’s a mildly disturbing thought,” murmured Gregor. I doubt the others could hear him over the roar of digestion, but he was seated right beside me.

  The air had begun to grow blue around Erasmus, as his staff continued to whirl. He quickly thrust his arm away from himself and toward the kronosaurus, but not before he removed at least ten years from himself. He now looked rather young for a professor.

  “Oh, I saw ’em,” Mab reported loudly. “The dinosaurs, I mean. They were big! Bigger than your museums account for … but of course, I was a wind at the time, so it’s hard to give exact measurements. Wasn’t really interested in measuring, in fact, until I got this fleshly body.”

  “Why are they called kronosaurus?” asked Malagigi. Somehow, his voice always carried, despite the noise. “Is it because they are so old, it is as if they were the masters of time?”

  “No. They were named thus after the Greek Titan who ate his own children. I believe the tho
ught was that this reptile had a mouth so big, it could swallow anything,” Gregor explained.

  “Even us,” muttered Mab.

  “What?” Gregor leaned forward.

  “Even us,” Mab shouted.

  “Ah.” Gregor nodded.

  “How do you know so much about kronosauruses?” Erasmus called. “An evolution scoffer like you?”

  “Ulysses was an admirer of dinosaurs. He took me to see a kronosaurus skull once, back in 1897,” Gregor shouted back, a difficult thing for a man who spoke in a hoarse, raspy voice. “A man had done a painting of what he thought the living creature might have looked like. Not a bad likeness, though he got the shape of the brow ridge wrong.”

  I said, “But I thought you didn’t believed in evolution.”

  “I don’t,” Gregor replied. “I believed dinosaur bones were a trap to lead men away from the faith, a tool of the devil. Clearly, I was right. The presence of this creature proves my point. Dinosaurs and their relatives come from Hell.”

  “That does not necessarily follow—” I began, but Mab interrupted me.

  “There was an age when dinosaurs roamed the earth, all right, if that’s what you are arguing about,” he assured us. “Big massive slowpokes that used to stomp around. You had to really get up speed to blow them over, but once you got one of those big ones down, they’d roll around for hours, days sometimes, making their weird, undulating sound. We used to love to … er, never mind.” Mab trailed off.

  Erasmus chuckled. “Who would have imagined it? Our Company Detective was a prehistoric cow-tipper!”

  “A what?” called Gregor. Malagigi seemed puzzled as well.