The Fathom Flies Again

by James Walley

  Marty got to his feet, taking a few steps towards the mighty cannon. Behind them, the clowns veered ever closer, and Whipstaff wheeled the gun to bear upon them, an oversized gunsight framing the lead group of hellspawn harlequins. “This is just like that movie,” Marty called out.

  “What? Gone with The Wind?” Whipstaff replied, still playing with his many levers.

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” Timbers chimed in. “Whipstaff. When you’re ready, lad. Give `em a dose of mutton mayhem.”

  With the order given, Oaf ushered a weakly bleating sheep into the back of the cannon, which closed behind it.

  “Wait, no!” Kate cried, jumping up from where she sat. “That poor sheep!”

  “Fear not, m’lady. We keep a paddock of completely mechanical livestock on this boat. No animals are harmed in the use of the Mutton Musket. A whole bunch of clowns are about to get mullered, though.” Chuckling, Timbers levelled his sword at the advancing jesters and issued a bellowing command. “FIRE!”

  A cackling Whipstaff trained the gun on the nearest cluster of floating harlequins, and pulled the trigger.

  A booming retort sent the robo-sheep hurtling from the barrel of the cannon, and pitched the Fathom forward. Whipstaff craned from his seat, watching as the sheep whistled through the night air, bleating mechanically as it flew towards its target.

  From the ground, this whole spectacle might have looked like a page from the Big Book of Unhinged Bedtime Stories, which was exactly what it did look like to a cluster of passing students, heavy laden with stomachs full of cheap alcohol, and heads full of beer tornados. Somehow, they had managed to stumble through the calamity that the evening’s nightmares had wrought, and giggled with inebriated wonder as the floating pirate ship berthed a mildly complaining sheep into the sky above them.

  It reached the first row of floating clowns in seconds, and exploded in a plume of wool, cogs and brightly colored, paper clown guts, drawing raucous applause from the massed ranks for drunken academics in the street below.

  “Home run!” Timbers cried, punching the air. “How’d you like them sheep-shaped apples, you swarthy balloon blowers?” He pitched a thumbs up at his first mate, who gleefully repositioned the gun at the second phalanx of advancing jesters.

  The street ended abruptly up ahead, and Zephyr pitched the Fathom hard to port, bringing the ship around into a sweeping fly-by of the local drive-in theatre. Marty clutched the rail as they coasted sideways across the massive screen, which danced merrily to the tune of a fifties, sci-fi B movie. The Fathom lurched creakily level, guaranteeing that any passenger not in full possession of their air legs would most likely be enjoying a close reunion with their lunch.

  Still the clowns pursued, although a number of them were now being pelted with popcorn and plastic cups. The discerning patrons of the drive-in had clearly decided that the addition of an all too realistic 3D element to their evening’s entertainment was unacceptable. A few of the clowns broke rank and dove at their concession wielding attackers, although not enough for Marty’s liking, as his eyes returned to the pressing flanks of circus freaks, now gaining on them.

  He had seen a hell of a lot following his re-acquaintance with the plush pirate brigade, but this seemed absurd, even by their standards. His mind quickly rewound to the impressive explosion they’d caused moments earlier, and he wheeled on Timbers. “Wait. Sheep now? We’re firing sheep at clowns?” A frantic giggle sneaked out of his mouth. “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  Timbers paused, mid-command, and rolled his good eye. “Which part of this whole thing does make sense, matey?”

  He had a point, and Marty wasn’t sure what his follow up question was going to be, but he readied it anyway. “Yeah, but why sheep?”

  “What better way to send your enemies back to the land of nod, in this case in several pieces?” Timbers beamed. “Plus, the added bonus with these critters is you don’t have to count them. You get to one, and you’re pretty much done.” As always, the little captain’s logic was tenuous, completely insane, and bang on the money. Satisfied that he’d explained himself adequately, Timbers returned to the matter in hand. “Bring out number two, Bessie,” he ordered, prompting Oaf to fish around in the cage and pluck out another mechanical bleater. Bessie sported a red number two on her flank, and duly shuffled into the loading bay of the Mutton Musket.

  “Ready to fire, captain,” Whipstaff screamed, clearly loving the opportunity to shoot something big and explodey. “Lamb in the hole!” Another apocalyptic boom rang out, as Bessie sailed from the musket’s muzzle, fixing the oncoming clowns with a determined, robotic gaze. She ploughed through their ranks, sending balloons and oversized shoes streaking from their owners in a shower of sheepy fire. The impact also served to pepper the screen of the drive in with what was once clowns, but was now nothing more than pluming showers of glittering debris. The moviegoers groaned and threw more light refreshments, although in truth, this intrusion had probably been more entertaining than the movie.

  Timbers leapt into the air, fueled by the effectiveness of his farmyard ammunition. “Sleep tight!” he shouted, before issuing another command. “All right Oaf, time for number six, Mittens.” As requested, Mittens the sheep, a big red six emblazoned on her side, was readied for deployment. “Aim for that big bunch of red nosed gits off to starboard, Whipstaff.”

  Buffeted by a sudden descent as Zephyr plunged further floorward, the eagle eyed first mate twirled the gun effortlessly to bear on the flanking sortie of clowns and fired. Again, the woolen harbinger of doom blasted forth and detonated, sending her clownish targets to their presumably chuckling maker, and bringing forth more whoops of triumph from the deck of the Fathom.

  Marty glanced over the side, gripping the rail worriedly as he realized they were mere feet from the floor. Trees, cars and bemused onlookers whipped past as the Fathom gunned towards the wafting flags and inviting lights of the MacWenCastle diner. “Cheeseburgers!” Whipstaff cheered from his perch in the command chair of bleating destruction. “Who’s got change?”

  Timbers scampered across to the gangplank, apparently gauging their speed to drive thru window ratio. “You’re buying, Whipstaff,” he called back to his first mate. “That is, if they take giant, lepre-coins.” Whipstaff had no time to object, as the Fathom screamed through the drive thru, faster than the beleaguered clerk could take in what he was witnessing, let alone their order. Barely edible, cow based treats would have to wait for another day, it would seem, as Zephyr flung the Fathom out through MacWenCastle’s exit, and back up into the heavens with all the grace and poise of a blind shot putter throwing sloppy joes through a wind tunnel.

  Amidst the various laments about unrequited junk food, Marty glanced over to port, just as a group of twenty or more clowns dropped out of a cloud and drifted up alongside the Fathom, close enough to see their bared teeth and frantically grasping claws. “Timbers, port side!” he shrieked, pulling Kate back towards the quarterdeck as their pursuing assailants swooped in for a surprise attack.

  Timbers’ odes to rapidly departing sandwiches ceased, taking with it his gleeful smile, as the new danger filtered into his field of vision. Marty knew that the smile would return—it always did. Timbers had unfathomable sleeves upon which to draw an ace, and Marty was not about to doubt his pint-sized ally, when he had seen that grin re-emerge countless times before.

  Almost on cue, Timbers gave voice to a near impossible, teeth baring beamer. “Whipstaff. Turn the musket to port. Oaf, bring out number nine, Mrs Cottonbomb.

  The name alone demanded some kind of fanfare, and possibly a deep voiced introduction. Marty felt as though he should brace himself as Oaf hauled out a wholly terrifying looking sheep with the number nine etched upon her side. Mrs Cottonbomb was the A-Bomb of farmyard animals. She strutted up to the loading bay with a determined look in her eyes, and flicked her robotic tail defiantly. As Mrs Cottonbomb disappeared into the Mutton Musket, she bellowed out a battle cry that sounded like t
he hounds of hell playing fetch with a nuke. The following explosion was no less cataclysmic, as the most violently terrifying sheep in existence plummeted headlong into the thick of the clown offensive.

  Marty just had time to hear Timbers yell, “Hit the deck!” as the world’s biggest firecracker erupted beside them. He threw himself to cover Kate as the midnight sky turned a bright shade of daylight, and everything decided to collide with everything else.

  In his peripheral vision, a tiny point of light became a ball, and then a horizon, before filling the night sky with brilliant, sheep borne fire.

  Several whirling, wind whipped moments passed, during which Marty was sure he felt his eyebrows singeing, before the buffeting ceased, and the Fathom came to a drifting rest. Like passing thunder, the noise drifted back into silence, and Marty opened his eyes, checking to see if he still had the normal amount of limbs. The rest of the crew were in various stages of recovering from the atomic blast around him, and Kate stared out into the inky blackness which had returned to the night around them.

  Off the Fathom’s port side, no clowns threatened to board them. Behind, upon the rapidly diminishing canvas of the town, nothing threatened to pursue. Beside Marty on the quarterdeck, Timbers picked himself up and surveyed his ship. Oaf stood next to the musket cage, looking bewildered. Since this was pretty standard for Oaf, nobody really paid any attention. Above him, Whipstaff sat in his gun seat, blackened, and blasted. Singed hair stuck out from beneath his bandana, and random articles of his clothing still smoldered. “Wow,” he muttered, staggering down from his perch. “Mrs Cottonbomb. What a sheep.”

  Timbers sheathed his sword, nodding in reverent acknowledgement of the shearly departed. “What a sheep, indeed. I would say we packed her with too much dynamite, but come on.” His trademark grin reappeared. “That’s just crazy talk. There’s no such thing as too much dynamite.”

  Marty chipped in worriedly, “Hang on, Timbers. Weren’t we supposed to be leading those guys to the big top?” He leaned over the side of the Fathom, regarding the clown-less sky behind them. “Essentially, all we’re doing now is dropping in on the incoming pie chuckers.”

  Timbers hitched his thumbs into his belt, fixing Marty with his one good eye. “We’ve just dropped a sheep nuke on Peepers’ army. He’ll have seen that, and he’ll come running. All we’ve got to do now is take the big top, and wait for the head harlequin to come home.”

  Marty raised a hand to his mouth, in a vain attempt to suppress the smile beneath. “Is that all?”

  Timbers winked, apparently seeing through Marty’s disguised attempt at incredulity. “Yeah, that’s all. Come on lad, you’ve flown with me before. Haven’t you learned by now that this is how we do things?”

  Marty removed the hand, but not the smile. He was in, and they both knew it. Kate stepped up alongside Marty. She was not smiling, but the intent in her eyes conveyed that she too was in.

  “Okay,” Marty conceded. “So how exactly do we do that?”

  Timbers scampered up to the bow of the Fathom, turning back to deliver a jovial shrug. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  All things considered, and given the flavor of the evening thus far, the flight had taken a serene, almost normal turn. Mechanical whirring from Zephyr’s huge metal wings rang out like a pulse through the night air, and only the sound of gently creaking rigging accompanied it. That, and the soft clunking and gentle swearing which signaled the crew’s stowing of the Mutton Musket back below decks.

  Marty hadn’t strayed far from Kate since they had dispatched the clowns, and although she put a brave face on, he could tell that her mind was fixed on her little koala casualty. Marty took a seat on the steps to the quarterdeck, where Kate had stationed herself against the forward mast. She absently scored lines into the wood, and staring emptily into the night ahead of them. Marty took her hands and gave them a gentle squeeze. “Better not let Timbers see you doing that, or he’ll throw a fit.” He smiled, as supportively as he knew how, and tried to illicit a similar one from Kate. “We don’t want to walk the plank right now, that first step’s a nightmare. Literally.”

  Kate shifted her hypnotic gaze and blinked weary eyes. “There’s going to be a hell of a lot of giggling bodies in that tent when we get there. How are we going to pull this off? We’re not cut out for this sort of thing. Hell, I only stopped off for a drink on the way home from work tonight, and now I’m mourning a talking koala.”

  Marty nodded, immediately aware of how that felt. When he’d woken up dreamside, the conversations with his own mirror self and the smart mouthed cuddly toy from his childhood had left him feeling like a passenger on a driverless train for a time, and he knew full well how disconcerting it was.

  “Hey. Remember when Timbers got toy-napped, and we barged recklessly into the heart of enemy territory, just a paper-thin plan, a wing and a prayer away from being juggler bait? I seem to recall you were just as dubious about the ins and outs of the process then, too.” He smiled, as though recalling a treasured memory, which for all the running and screaming, it was.

  “The point is, we got in, and we got out. We didn’t need a finely crafted strategy, concocted by some master tactician. We did it on the back of bare-faced foolhardiness and a bit of luck. Okay, a lot of luck. And an ice cream truck.” Marty reigned in his thoughts, which threatened to derail his speech. “What I mean is, we have the tools and the guile to get us through this. Every obstacle we’ve faced, we’ve dealt with, because we’re frankly awesome at this.”

  Kate looked up into his eyes, as though she heard what he was saying, at last.

  “I get through the days because I have to. In the real world, you get by because the bills need to be paid, and the food needs to somehow find its way onto your table. You get by, and you make it work as best you can, because there’s nothing really at stake, and at worst, you have to hand in your Space Beagle costume.”

  Marty pressed on, now as sure that he didn’t belong in reality as he had been when he woke up to the assaulting beer monkeys in his own subconscious, even if he hadn’t fully realized it at the time. “But here, here we get through the days because we can. I’m sure I wasn’t put here to wander around dressed as a cosmic hound and entertain bored kids. Were you put here to push tickets through a slot?”

  She knew the answer, and he knew that she did.

  “We’ll get to the Big Top, and we’ll do what has to be done, because we can. Because it’s not something we can just shrug off as a bad day and forget about when we punch our clocks at the end of our shift.” Marty cleared his throat. He was saying this as much to himself as he was to Kate, and it scared part of him. That piece of him lived in the before, though, and the part that mattered cheered him on, throwing more words into his head. “This, right here, right now. This is real. This is what matters, no matter how crazy it seems. It’s important to us, and so it gets done, by any means necessary.”

  Marty breathed out a sigh, along with the remaining ties he had with the real world, and Kate joined him in the exodus.

  “That was some speech,” she replied, after a moment’s consideration. “If I didn’t know what was going on, I’d probably have you committed.” She held a serious look long enough to get Marty a little worried, before cracking a smile. “Fortunately, I know of your escapades in the land of the surreal, sir. If you say we’ll get it done, I believe you.”

  Marty squeezed the hands in his grasp again, and urged their owners to their feet. They must surely be approaching the edge of town by now, and action needed to be taken. Kate pulled Marty back as he made for the pirates. “Just so you know, after all this is over, I might still have you committed.”

  Marty grinned. “You’d be doing me a favor. There’s a staff meeting Monday morning, and I’d take rubber walls over that any day.”

  “Who’s having a rubber meeting? Also, what’s a rubber meeting?” Timbers had finished his duties, and strode across the deck beside th
em.

  “Nothing, Timbers,” Marty replied. “We were just questioning our existence, and our place in this wholly make believe world.” He turned towards the captain, positioning himself so that Timbers couldn’t see the vandalized mast. “That was some pretty hefty sheep deployment back there, are you sure it’ll be enough to get Peepers’ attention?”

  Timbers cocked his head and made a pondering face. “Marty, we’re in the business of clown removal. Land, sea, and air. I’m chalking this one up as a victory. Peepers? He’ll take it personal, trust me.”

  Marty half-smiled. Although his compadre had a point, they had been on a mission to lead the clown ranks back to the big top at the edge of town. Now, all the circus freaks followed various tufts of smoldering wool that drifted back down to earth behind them. “We were supposed to be doing the whole Pied Piper bit, and taking the chucklers back to where they came though, remember?”

  Timbers stroked his beard thoughtfully, not that there was any other way that one could stroke one’s beard. “This is true,” he mused. “And therein lies my point. We lit up the sky with enough exploding jugglers to make even the devil sit up and take notice.” He snapped off brisk nod, “Oh yes, that guy’s a clown, make no mistake.” Marty was in no mood to argue. Beelzebub could be a roller skating walrus singing show tunes, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid tonight. “You can bet your bottom doubloon that Peepers saw, or at least got word of his army getting the old lamb treatment, and you’d better believe he’ll come running.” Again, the logic, which hung in ragged strands amid the canopy of the night’s activities, was irrefutable. “All’s we’ve got to do now is get to this big top, lay low till he shows his crimson honker, and then chuck him through the shiny portal.” By now, his bluster was unstoppable. “We’ve landed a fair few weighty boots in his checkered britches before, this should be like taking candy from a baby, giving it to a monster, and then running away.”