Gobbled by Ghorks

by Robert Paul Weston

  “B-but, sir . . .” stammered Grinner, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

  “Listen, Chief,” said Iris, rising from her chair. “What Grinner’s trying to say is, don’t be too hasty.” She put out one hand, gesturing toward the Fabled Sixth Ghork. “What could be more insidious than a creature so profoundly evil he is utterly devoid of even the merest modicum of mirth? Isn’t that just the sort of spiteful, maniacally devious ghork we need to lead us?”

  In the spotlight, Giggles yawned.

  “Well,” said the Chief, “when you put it that way, it actually makes a bit of sense.” He gave his shadowy chin a thoughtful rub. “Yes, you might have a point. But first, I’ll need a test.”

  “A t-test?” asked Iris. She suddenly sounded much less confident than a moment ago.

  “Of course,” said the Chief. “I need to determine exactly how truly humorless Giggles is.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “By telling him a joke,” said the Chief.

  “But sir, you can’t really be—”

  “Ssh! I’ve got a good one.” The Chief cleared his throat and looked down at Giggles. “Why is it,” he asked, “that eye-ghorks are so gullible?”

  “Hey!” said Iris, obviously offended.

  “Because,” said the Chief, “seeing is believing!”

  Ghorks all across the coliseum burst out laughing—all except the eye-ghorks, of course. They sat glumly silent, just as offended as Iris.

  “That’s a terrible joke,” said Leslie, rolling her eyes.

  Jean-Remy agreed. “Only ze ghorks—creatures without ze sense of humor—could laugh at such a ridiculous pun!”

  Giggles, however, wasn’t laughing. He hadn’t so much as twitched.

  “You see?” said Grinner, finding his voice again. “It’s impossible to make him laugh!”

  But the Chief had more, one for each kind of ghork:

  “Why do ear-ghorks hate Day-Glo T-shirts? Because the colors are too loud!”

  “Why do nose-ghorks hate people who complain a lot? Because they can’t stand it when people kick up a stink!”

  “Why are hand-ghorks scared of being sent to an insane asylum? Because it means they’ve lost touch with reality!”

  “Why are mouth-ghorks so bad at doing their taxes? Because there’s no accounting for taste!”

  Each joke was rewarded in the same way: with laughter and cheering from four fifths of the ghorks (the ones who weren’t the butt of the joke) and no reaction at all from Giggles.

  At last, when the Chief ran out of gags, Grinner smiled triumphantly. “See?” he said. “You couldn’t do it.”

  Iris nodded. “Only the most evil of creatures could resist such hilarity!”

  “Are you kidding? That wasn’t hilarity! Those were the lamest jokes ever!”

  “Who said that?!” growled the Chief.

  “I did,” said Leslie. “Down here! In the cage!”

  “As far as I’m aware,” said the Chief, “we aren’t currently seeking input from people in cages.”

  “Well, maybe you should,” said Leslie. “At least we have a sense of humor, which is probably why we can tell those jokes were terrible! I’ll bet if your Fabled Sixth Ghork heard something that was actually funny, he’d crack up just like anybody else would.”

  “Oh, really?” asked the Chief. “All right, then. Let’s hear one.”

  Leslie squinted up at him. “One what?”

  “One joke. Something that—as you so eloquently put it—is actually funny.” The Chief spoke with such gravity it was clear there would be consequences if Leslie didn’t come up with something hilarious. Every eye in the room (some of them repulsively huge) swiveled to the cage.

  “Umm . . .” said Leslie. “Let me see. . . .”

  Silence fell across the coliseum. The Chief leaned forward in his executive captain’s chair, and the creak of leather was so sharp and loud it was like a crash of thunder.

  A crash, thought Elliot. That’s it!

  He jumped up and waved his hairy, creaturely arm through the bars. “I know!” he cried. “I know something so funny, it’s guaranteed to make Giggles giggle.”

  The Chief turned his attention from Leslie to Elliot. “And who might you be?”

  “I’m Elliot.”

  “That’s strange, you don’t look like an Elliot. What sort of creature are you?”

  “I’m a . . . umm . . . a green-vested fuzzball.”

  “Where’s your green vest?”

  Elliot looked down at himself. “I took it off because it didn’t really go with . . . well, never mind that. Listen, if you really want to test Giggles, you’ve got to show him something truly hilarious, and I know just the thing!”

  “Oh, really?”

  Elliot nodded. He realized this might be his one chance to save the day. If they could make Giggles laugh, the Chief would be convinced the Fabled Sixth Ghork wasn’t up to the job of leading an army of ghorks.

  “What is it,” asked the Chief, “you think is so funny?”

  Elliot puffed out his hairy chest. “My friends! Or at least their cabaret performance!”

  “That’s right!” said Leslie. “That was the silliest, funniest thing we’ve ever seen! It was so hilarious it even crashed a chiropractor!”

  “Excuse me?” asked the Chief.

  “She means Coleopter-copter,” said Elliot, “but that’s another story. If you let my friends perform in the Simmersville Food Festival Dinner-Theatre-Style Costume Cabaret, we’ll prove that Giggles isn’t as evil as you think he is. In fact, maybe he’s not even the Sixth Ghork at all!”

  “Liar!” screeched Iris. “Of course he’s the Fabled Sixth Ghork! He’s the most evil ghork the world has ever known! Just look at him!”

  In the spotlight, Giggles blinked.

  “How do you know?” asked Elliot. “It’s common knowledge there’s more than eleven thousand different kinds of creatures in creaturedom! Can you really be sure you found the right one?”

  “Mr. Chief, please,” said Grinner. “You’re not really going to listen to a . . . to a . . . a green-vested fuzzball, are you?”

  “Perhaps, my bigmouthed minion,” said the Chief, “you’re forgetting something. That something is: I’m the Chief, and I can listen to whoever I want! And if I find out you brought me the wrong ghork . . . I’m going to be very, very, very upset.”

  Grinner waggled his arms, his huge mouth gaping up at the screen. “But Chief! I’m telling you, we looked everywhere! This is him! Giggles is the Fabled Sixth Ghork!”

  “Maybe so,” said the Chief, “but now—thanks to that green-vested fuzzball down there—we have a way of finding out, don’t we?” He turned his attention to the cage at the foot of the plateau and smiled in a way that made Elliot shiver.

  “Fuzzball,” he said, “you got yourself a deal. If you can make Giggles giggle, I’ll let everyone go.” He turned his attention to the Five Ghorks. “Then you five bozos will go out and find me the real Sixth Ghork!”

  “B-but, sir!” Grinner stammered. “Th-this is the r-real S-S-Si—”

  “Zip it, bigmouth,” snapped the Chief. “Tonight we’ll settle this in the only way possible. With cabaret!”

  CHAPTER 21

  In which the creatures learn you can’t teach old inventions new tricks, Jean-Remy reveals the truth, and Elliot has an idea

  What have you done with Elliot?” asked Professor von Doppler. He stood near the entrance of Dungeon 101, where the ghorks had just deposited three new prisoners: Leslie, Jean-Remy, and a fuzzy green creature in a yellow rugby shirt.

  “I am Elliot!” said the fuzzy green creature in the yellow rugby shirt.

  “From where I’m standing,” said Harrumphrey (who was standing next to the professor), “you look more like creat
ure type 887, subset F: a three-toed bristle-imp.”

  “How do you remember all that?” Leslie asked him.

  Harrumphrey responded with a shrug that went directly from his ankles to his chin. “Look at the size of this noggin. Gotta fill it with something!”

  “Elliot’s telling the truth,” Leslie told the professor. “The ghorks did this to him. It’s all because he ordered Grinner’s ‘Special’ when we first arrived.”

  The professor walked around Elliot, examining him closely. When he arrived back in front of his nephew, he took off his glasses and slapped one hand over his face. “When we get out of this, your parents are going to kill me!”

  “Don’t worry,” said Elliot. “Now that we’re all back together, I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to turn me back to normal—using creature science, of course!”

  “I’m sssorry,” said an eerie, slurring voice behind Elliot, “but that’sss not going to happen.”

  Elliot turned around to see the small dark caverns that ad-joined the main dungeon. The voice had come from inside them. Emerging from the darkness, there came a huge green lizard, a creature that was half python and half crocodile, with a mouthful of jigsaw teeth and huge glossy eyes. Its long sinuous tail swished as it walked, and its shimmering green scales glimmered in the flickering light.

  Scales, thought Elliot. Green scales!

  “You’re the clerk from the Simmersville Inn!” Leslie blurted.

  The lizard nodded sadly. She was dressed in only the tatters of her former uniform, but over her heart, clipped to the remains of her shirt, was a name tag:

  Hello, my name is Emily.

  “I guesss you ordered the Ssssspecial,” she said to Elliot.

  He nodded. “You said turning us back is impossible. Why?”

  “There’sss no antidote,” Emily hissed. “Even if one existed, it would have to be cooked with exactly the same ingredientssss as the original disssh. But sssadly, that awful ssschef merely threw in whatever was lying around the kitchen, so no one knows the ressscipe, not even him.”

  “Grinner!” Elliot muttered. He despised the mouth-ghork more than ever before. “You mean we can’t change back? Not ever?”

  Emily shook her head. “None of usss can.”

  “There’s more of you?” asked Leslie.

  Emily nodded. Behind her, emerging from the same cavern, came four more creatures. First, a beast like a bright green polar bear; then another creature who resembled a fastidious businessman, only with a long green neck and the bovine head of a giraffe; third, a creature like a stooping four-armed troll (also green); and a creature with only one eye, extending on a mossy tendril above a body that was almost entirely stomach. Each of them wore pitiful expressions of fear and bewilderment.

  “They turned all of you into creatures?” asked Elliot.

  The emerald-green polar bear creature nodded. “They call us ‘the Specimens.’”

  “I’m afraid Emily’s right,” said the professor. He placed one hand on Elliot’s hairy shoulder. “We’ve been locked in here since yesterday, and we’ve tried everything we know to change them back. But without Grinner’s recipe, it’s impossible.”

  Elliot looked down at his paws, at his talons, at his ungainly feet. He was a three-toed bristle-imp, and he was going to stay that way. As the certainty of this sunk in, he felt his heart thump faster and his breath catch in his throat. Ever since he had left Bickleburgh, he had wondered about the possibility that perhaps he belonged to creaturedom. Now his wish had been granted . . . and he only felt dizzy. He could hardly breathe.

  “This . . . ,” he gasped, “is going to take some getting used to.” He looked up at his friends. “Please, can somebody give me a mirror?”

  Unfortunately, dungeons weren’t the sorts of places where fine grooming was terribly important. The closest anyone could find to a mirror was a brass flywheel, but it was far too tarnished to offer Elliot a clear reflection. All he saw was a cloudy, greenish smudge, as if he were still Totally Blurrified!

  As Elliot stood in silence, trying (and failing) to see what he looked like, he suddenly became aware of a flurry of activity all around him. He looked up to see the creatures of DENKi-3000 actively engaged in building things, tinkering with strange apparatuses, conducting arcane experiments, just as if they were at home in the Creature Department.

  “What’s everyone doing?” Leslie asked.

  “Believe it or not,” said the professor, “they’re trying to build weapons.”

  “Weapons?” asked Jean-Remy. “But look! Zat . . . zat is my flying pan!”

  Patti Mudmeyer was across the dungeon, holding a remote control. She used it to steer what was obviously a prototype of Jean-Remy’s invention (a conventional frying pan with flapping, mechanical wings). A short distance away, Reggie stood stoically straight, his hands on his hips, as the flying pan swatted and spanked him about the head and shoulders. Unfortunately, since the great bombastadon was so blubbery, the blows had very little effect.

  “No, no, no!” cried Jean-Remy. “Blasphemy! You have it all wrong! What is more, you are not even cooking ze crêpe! You are just beating ze bombastadon!” He soared over to Patti, and the two of them began wrestling over the remote.

  Meanwhile, at another table, several of Harrumphrey’s shoehorn horns had been arranged on tripods, with their speakers pointed at Gabe, the mildly depressed DENKi-3000 expectavator operator, who sat slumped in a chair nearby. The shoehorn horns played “When the Saints Go Marching In” at top volume, but the sound quality was poor and tinny. It did little more than make Gabe tap his listless foot in time with the melody.

  Then there was a table where Bildorf and Pib were strapped to a pair of miniature hospital gurneys. Above them, a suspended lightbulb flashed on and off, its glass casing printed with a ghoulish face. When the light switched on, the face said, “Boo!”

  On.

  “Boo!”

  “GAH!”

  Off.

  On.

  “Boo!”

  “ERK!”

  Off . . .

  And so on. This was obviously a prototype of Patti’s invention, the Fright Bulb. Although it had the effect of startling the two hobmongrels, it was hardly very menacing.

  “Those are the worst weapons I’ve ever seen,” said Elliot.

  “Weapons aren’t really our forte,” said the professor.

  “Why are they trying to turn perfectly good inventions into weapons in the first place?” asked Leslie.

  “We don’t have a choice. I’ll show you why.”

  The professor led them past laboratory tables where creatures tried in vain to make weaponry (and where Jean-Remy still battled Patti for control of his flying pan). They left this first part of the dungeon and entered another cavern, and then another. Elliot recalled the paradoxes of creature physics, the fact that rooms (or in this case, locked cells) could be larger than they first appeared. He began to wonder if a dungeon like this could go on . . . forever.

  At last, they turned down a passage that grew narrower and narrower until it contracted to a cramped dead end. At the center of the final wall was a small, perfectly round circle of light. It was a hole, no bigger than the face of a clock, carved straight through the rock.

  “Look through there,” said the professor.

  Elliot and Leslie each peered through the hole. They saw a completely white room. It was so brightly lit, there seemed to be no floor, ceiling or walls. It was dizzying to stare into such limitless emptiness. Floating in the midst of all that white was something very peculiar: a gigantic blender.

  One of the ghorks’ spherical cages hung above it, suspended from a thick chain like a hideous Christmas ornament. The chain rose up and up and up until it became nothing but a thin black thread, vanishing into the snow-white emptiness above. Inside the cage were three figures.
The first was—

  “Gügor!” Leslie cried.

  She shouted the word, but the sound was swallowed up by the strange acoustics of the white chamber. Gügor couldn’t hear her. The big knucklecrumpler lay flat on his back, and he looked awful. Cuts and bruises covered his body. Standing over him was a second, much smaller figure. It was a toad-like creature in a ratty cardigan. He peered down at Gügor with a look of pity and concern.

  “Dr. Heppleworth,” said Elliot.

  “You know him?” asked the professor.

  “We met,” Elliot explained, “when we first came down here to meet you.”

  The third figure was the smallest of all, hovering in the air only inches above Gügor’s head. A beautiful fairy-bat. She was gently stroking his colorful dreadlocks and singing to him in a whispered voice.

  “That’s her, isn’t it?” Elliot asked. “Jean-Remy’s sister.”

  “Gügor’s One True Love,” said Leslie.

  “Yes,” said the professor. “So you see we have no choice but to obey the Chief. If we don’t invent him some sort of ultimate weapon, he’ll grind up Gügor and feed whatever comes out to the mouth-ghorks.”

  “That’s awful!” Leslie cried.

  “That’s the Chief,” said Elliot.

  “The same goes for Dr. Heppleworth and Eloise-Yvette. The Chief is using them to force the Food Factory Creature Department to create something even worse.”

  “A secret potion,” said Leslie.

  “That’ll turn the whole town into ghorks,” said Elliot.

  The professor nodded.

  “Wait a second,” said Leslie. She stooped to look through the hole one more time. “There’s something I don’t get. Jean-Remy told us his sister was selfish and vain and couldn’t be trusted, but she looks like the sweetest, gentlest creature I’ve ever seen! How can that be her?”

  “It is,” said a voice they hadn’t expected to hear. “Zat is her.”

  Leslie drew her face away from the wall and saw Jean-Remy floating above them. He had obviously followed them down into this part of the dungeon.