Susie and the Snow-it-alls

by Gregory Dark

  “Great advice … what did you say your name was again?”

  “Syllabylly.”

  “Great advice, Syllabylly,” Susie said. “I was doing that, don’t you know, already. Oh, and God, I’m ‘don’t-you-knowing’ just thinking about blooming Mr E!” But answer came there none.

  “Hello?” she said into the void, but she knew Syllabylly had gone. The clock boinged seven. The boings were still only of boing.

  “I thought the whole point of oracles was that they spoke,” Susie challenged the oracle-less air. “Well, go ahead: speak.” Nothing.

  So, because she knew it was good for her and because she knew of no better ways to gall the Snow-it-alls, she started again to laugh.

  Her laughter dredged to the surface something Susie had been too nervous even to feel deep within her: hope. Hope that she was – really and truly – one day going to get out of this place. Hope bred confidence. She started to become confident, started to feel – YES – sure she would get out of this hell-hole.

  Over what in Earth terms would be a fortnight or so, and which in IAO terms Susie didn’t know because their time divisions made no sense to her, she and Dremo hisspered an urgent conversation together whilst the bill was being signed. On some days, if the pengrins strayed too close, such snatches were literally of a word. On two days, not even that.

  The compressed upshot of that conversation was that Dremo was grateful to Susie for her concern about the Ughlies. There was a growing underground movement dedicated to the removal of shamemocracy (which could be pronounced either as ‘sham-emocracy’ or ‘shame-mocracy’ because, finally, they were the same). If Susie were prepared to return to the Ughloovre and speak again to the Emos – this time with her own words and opinions – then Dremo would do his utmost to assist her in getting there.

  Was Dremo aware, Susie wanted urgently to know, that such would mean helping her to escape from the dungeons?

  Dremo was fully aware of that. He was also fully aware of the penalty which, if caught, the Snow-it-allest would exact.

  Susie needed Mr E, she told Dremo. Everything was contingent on Mr E’s being able to whoosh her out of the place. Were the Sufrogs still next door, did Dremo know?

  They were still in the pile in which they had been thrown. Dremo was sure of that. After all, why wouldn’t they be?

  If Dremo could get Mr E to her, Susie promised – promised on her wordest of honour – that she would return to the Ughloovre and tell the Emos of her experience.

  And when she said it, she meant it.

  Chapter 32

  Days then did shuffle by. Then days and days shuffled by. In fact, so languid was their shuffle they started to slouch. Susie was beginning to wonder even whether the whole thing with Dremo were not some Snow-it-all jape, another act of vindictiveness and cruelty designed either to hurt or to humiliate her.

  One day, however, bent across her in an attempt to shield his words from a brace of pengrins standing, for no reason, much closer than usual, Dremo gabbled in a whisper: “Tomorrow.”

  “Wait,” Susie hisspered back.

  Dremo’s eyes pointed out the pengrins. They told her he couldn’t wait, that the pengrins would become suspicious.

  “I need two,” she gabbled as she grabbed him. But he had already moved. Susie didn’t know whether he had heard her or not.

  It was vital that he had heard. Vital. She’d worked out that Mr E by himself was no use. She also needed a go-between from them to the other Sufrogs. Mr E couldn’t be that himself. The moment he let go of Susie he would become inanimate again. Without the second frog, whoever it was, the entire exercise would only be one of greater frustration and vexation.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me, Emo, I need to see the bill again.”

  “The bill’s fine, prisoner,” Dremo replied from the cell door, his eyes asking her what on Earth she was doing.

  “I need to see it,” Susie insisted.

  The pengrins were alert. This was not standard conduct. Anything which wasn’t standard conduct was something to which they alerted. Dremo thought for a moment, and decided that a refusal to return to Susie would, if anything, be more unstandard than complying. Emos’ feet were not of a design which rendered stomping easy. As much as that design would allow, though, he stomped back to her.

  “Do you know how dangerous this is?” he hisspered at her, as he seemed to show her the bill. “What would seem to be the problem, prisoner?” he asked very much more loudly.

  As he said this, Susie hisspered back to him: “I need another frog.” Aloud she said, “Is that figure right?”

  “Instead of the beanbag?” hisspered Dremo. Aloud: “Completely, prisoner.”

  “As well as,” hisspered; aloud: “It seems very high.”

  “Two Sufrogs?” hisspered; aloud: “It’s for the apples, prisoner. What do you think, for goodness’ sake? That apples grow on trees?”

  “It has to be two,” hisspered; aloud and indignantly: “I haven’t had any apples.”

  “Do you know how dangerous this is?” hisspered Dremo again. “You don’t expect us to starve, do you, prisoner? The pengrins and the Emos?” he asked aloud before again hisspering: “Does it matter which Sufrog?”

  “Mr E plus one,” she replied. “Plus any one. Mr E’s the beanbag frog,” she added, before adding in her normal voice: “I’d like an apple.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Dremo hisspered.

  “I’d love an apple, in fact,” she said, her usual voice seasoned with a certain winsomeness.

  “Anything else, prisoner?” Dremo asked aloud.

  “An apple?” Susie replied in her normal voice.

  Dremo withdrew. “Prisoners!” he tutted to the two pengrins as he passed by them. They tutted and nodded their beaks in wry agreement as one of them retrieved Susie’s tray.

  Moments laters, the door clanged, the key rasped in the lock, situation and sounds normal.

  Susie had to hold onto her heart, though. It was pounding – boinging, in fact, and boinging with far greater resonance than the boings of the clock. She had to check her imagination indeed from just tearing down the walls and allowing her to walk in bare feet through silken and dewy grass, whilst birds tweeted in verdant hedgerows. She had to remind herself that, first, a plot had to be hatched, that fleeing this awful place was not going to be … well, a walk through the grass.

  “You will be all right,” Syllabylly told her.

  “Stay awhile,” Susie implored her.

  “I go where the wind takes me,” Syllabylly told her. “I am not my own mistress.”

  “Protect yourself from the wind,” Susie pleaded with her. But even as she so pleaded, Susie knew the oracle had already gone. Just about the only knowledge Susie could dredge up in her head about oracles is that they rhymed with ‘coracles’: a piece of information not currently of the greatest use to her. The less so as she couldn’t even, quite, remember what a ‘coracle’ was.

  She didn’t therefore know whether this will-o’-the-windness was something endemic to the oracular species or something particular to this specimen. Her (mostly, it must be admitted, any-port-in-a-storm-like) fondness for Syllabylly notwithstanding, the dependent she’d become on the reassuringness of her voice, she could not help herself being irked by this … whimsy. Yes, this whimsy of wispiness.

  Yeah, and what about yours, then Susie? Your whimsy of wimpishness? She should stand up to people more – to the oracles of this world, to the pengrins and Emos and Snow-it-alls. She should. She really should. And she would. Really. Just as soon as she was a prisoner no more.

  She could also not help herself wondering how genuine it was, Syllabylly’s whimsy of wispiness. As the oracle was invisible it was impossible to know whether she had actually disappeared or whether she was just playing possum. It had seemed to Susie that, once or twice, Syllabylly’s suddenly no-longer-thereness came at remarkably convenient moments. Moments, for instance, when struggling with awkward
questions.

  The clock boinged nine. These were not any longer the boings of boinging. They had become the fanfares to her freedom.

  She heard a scrape on the iron bars of her cell door, the almost inaudible thud of two soft objects bouncing on a hard, hard floor. For a moment or two she wouldn’t allow herself to look around.

  There were two reasons for this. The first was an inherent caution lest the pengrins were somehow in some kind of attendance. The second was to steel herself both for the joy there would be in seeing again her for so long absent friends, and for the disappointment that the noise was not of such an arrival at all, but of some altogether different event.

  Her ears satisfied that there were no pengrins skulking, she turned around slowly. Very, very slowly.

  Her eyes confirmed the coast was clear.

  Then they dropped to the floor.

  There they were: Mr E and Nespa.

  There they really were.

  Her ordeal was coming to an end; her loneliness was coming to an end.

  Her eyes were filled with the tears of joy.

  She dropped to her knees and hugged the two creatures to her breast.

  Chapter 33

  To begin with, Susie didn’t even notice that the two frogs remained inert in her hands. She was so enormously comforted by the fact of them. She was reassured by the feel of them and the smell of them. Certainly they represented freedom, they represented a return to Earth and normality; but they had become more now than just representatives.

  It was them that she was hugging. Not what they represented, but them themselves. Not a whoosher, not a souvenir of France – not even a portable kiss –, but Mr E himself and Nespa herself. It felt good to be with them again. And for moments more full than she had often experienced she wallowed in the warmth of that goodness, and frolicked in the golden rays which came from it, and she allowed that goodness to become her goodness. And she allowed the goodness that was then in her heart to course through the whole of her so that the goodness spread to all of her.

  The moment of realisation, on the other hand, was ice-cold. However incipient the process leading up to it, the moment of realisation is always a moment.

  This moment of realisation, that her frogs had not returned to life, was measured in nanoseconds. In which time a temperate warmth plunged to a chill which could have frozen mercury.

  They weren’t alive! She’d touched them and still … still they were not alive! And on that icicled thought froze her hope, died any joy that she might experience in life. She was condemned to eke out her miserable existence here, the prisoner of Snow-italls, condemned to wrinkle into a premature old age before sliding into what by then would be a merciful death. Well, she sarcastichuckled, what more would any sensible person expect? Given, after all, the inherent unfairness which is life?

  She looked at the two creatures, lifeless in her palms, now just lumps of stuffed material, because devoid of life devoid of personality.

  And then it struck her.

  How could she possibly – possibly – have been so stupid?

  She had to kiss them.

  Had there in the whole history of humanity ever been anyone – anyone – born stupider or more stupid? And who had then cultivated that stupidity as if it were a … prize marrow or something?

  Night had fallen since they’d become inanimate, she therefore – now she remembered – had to kiss them. She’d been told that. Was there – no, she was being serious – anyone born sillier or forgetfuller?

  Her self-recrimination, however, was stucco’d with a relief that was goose-bumping in its intensity. It splashed through her like a wash of colour. And it changed her colour. She dropped to the palliasse. She started tingling. Partly this was a pleasant feeling, as if Tinkerbell had sprayed her with the sparkle of a thousand stars; partly it was a very unpleasant one, as if those stars were jagging into her with their points.

  She waited to compose herself before she brought the frogs back to life. If she was not in control, at the very least she wanted to seem to be in control.

  She breathed deeply. The clock boinged ten times. They continued to be the boings of boinging. The tingles started flowing one into the other, leaving her with a goosebumpless all-rightness. She was calm.

  Right.

  Here went.

  She kissed Mr E.

  “DON’T STOP TOUCHING US,” he said loudly.

  “SHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!” she shhhhhed him exasperatedly and cast a worried ear over to where the pengrins’ footfalls would come from. “We’ve done that bit,” she hisspered at him.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Ages ago.”

  “Right,” he said. “And we are whispering why precisely?”

  “Pengrins,” she hisspered again, her ear all the while commuting between the outside of the cell and the palliasse.

  “Oh, we’re still, don’t you know, in jail, then?” Mr E asked rhetorically.

  “Yes,” Susie exasperated.

  “And, do not zink zis goes unnoticed,” Nespa warned, “in zis prison zey have a novel mezod of execution: deaz by starvation.”

  Suddenly, from the adjoining cell, a baloo started of the hullaest. It was enough to awaken the dead. The pengrins, Susie knew, would be sure to investigate.

  She didn’t have time to explain. She had to act. And act now.

  She let go of Mr E. The Sufrogs, of course, became silent. They’d become inert.

  Sure enough, seconds later, Susie heard the familiar, almost rhythmic jangle of keys, and the muted sound of four pairs of webbed feet on soggy concrete. She heard those feet pause at the previous cell. She could sense the peering, the detailed scrutiny. Would they notice that the heap of Sufrogs was smaller by two?

  She heard those feet move from that cell to her own. There was no ‘almost’ about it, she did hear her guards’ eyes swivel in their sockets, as her cell too was scrutinised for the shouldn’t-be-there.

  Susie had feigned sleep on the palliasse. She had positioned her body such that, whilst she wasn’t actually touching the Sufrogs, she was shielding them from the prying – from the scrutinising – eyes beyond the door.

  She had thought about lying on top of them, but that would have been to touch them and to touch them would have brought them alive … It wasn’t Mr E that Susie was worried about, or even Nespa. Them she could silence with a shh. It was those in the adjacent cell who clearly had forgotten where they were, or what danger any racket from them would represent.

  The scrutiny continued for what felt like aeons. With each swivel of their eyes Susie awaited the rasp of key in lock – and the consequent cooking of her goose. (The same goose presumably which had earlier so liberally donated her its bumps!)

  If the two Sufrogs were found in her cell … well, Susie had no idea what the consequences would be. Beyond the certainty, that was, that they would be dire.

  The clock boinged ten-and-a-half.

  No, of course it didn’t! But to Susie it felt as though it should. Then eleven and three quarters, then thirteen and a quarter, seventeen and five-eighths … and so on. There was no boing. Perhaps there is no boing sufficient to the passing of an aeon.

  Eventually the pengrins did withdraw. Susie slammed open her eyes. Her ears tentacled to the outer limits of their shot. She heard the outer barred door open. And she heard it close. But she heard no key turning in a lock. An absence of key-turning meant possum had to be played a while longer.

  Sure enough, a moment or three later, key-janglelessly and with muffled footfalls, she heard the two pengrins return. Their steps at the Sufrogs’ cell would have afforded them no more than a glance. Into her cell, however, they peered. Long and hard. Shorter and easier than they had done previously, but still long enough for a peer to become a stare.

  As they left, they again let their keys jangle. They had no need to hide their curiosity. This time Susie did hear the key turn in the lock of the corridor’s barred door.

  The problem
still remained, how to silence the Sufrogs in the cell next door. If she could get Nespa to her own cell door without rousing the others, at least the caterwauling might be restrained to kittenerwauling. As long as she didn’t have contact. As long as she didn’t touch them.

  She touched Mr E and shhed him and Nespa severely. They instantly obeyed. Even more instantly, though, next door the lynxerwauling began. Susie withdrew her hand almost immediately. She listened for the pengrins.

  She resolved to lift Nespa and Mr E to the cell door on a clump of straw which she’d pull from the mattress. This required her to despaghetti strands from the surrounding mass. Which proved to be a job considerably more fiddly and more tiresome than she would have imagined. As she pulled the last strand free the clock boinged eleven. She hadn’t noticed it boing ten.

  That meant that time was truly pressing.

  Escape she had realised would have to be that night.

  Even if Nespa stayed in the next door cell, Mr E would be sure to be found in hers. She could carry him, of course, but the idea that either Miss Chief or Bluemerang or O’Nestly … or even Mimimi, come to that … could keep quiet for the time she was at her hard labour … well, it just didn’t bear thinking about. By comparison, the chances of being struck by lightning were odds on.

  With the concentration of an egg-and-spoon racer Susie bore her Sufrogs, perched on a clump of bendy straw, to her cell door. There she set her burden down, almost as if she were making some offering to a pagan god.

  Her heart in her mouth, she touched Mr E as she said to Nespa: “Tell …” She said no more.

  There was a blast from next door. Then it stopped. Susie preened her ears, waiting for footfalls. Nothing.

  “ … them …” she said, took her hand away, listened again for footsteps. Thus, one word at a time.

  “ … to … shut … up.”

  Nespa nodded that she understood. She scuttled through the bars. “Then come back to me,” Susie hisspered after her. But she had no idea whether or not Nespa had heard. She kicked herself.

  Without Nespa she had no contact with the others. The row from the next door cell was so deafening, Susie thought it must rouse the pengrins. She was hugely tempted to let go of Mr E. But that would mean Nespa would stop where she was in her tracks. And that would mean, if the pengrins were to come and investigate, they would be sure to find Nespa in the no-man’s-land between the two cells. She just had to hold fast (literally and figuratively) and hope that Nespa would deliver her communication before the pengrins heard anything.