by Gregory Dark
“There’s a good place,” said Bluemerang.
Having once experienced a whoosh-landing posteriorly, Susie opted on this occasion to absorb the shock through her legs. It was thus considerably less bruising than it had been on the previous occasion.
“Your madam – Miss Chief, I mean – will expect us to come to her, you know that?” O’Nestly commented.
“None of this matters,” said Susie. “The only thing that does is whooshing back to Earth. And quickly, guys. Before we get rearrested again.”
“We could maybe meet her halfway,” suggested Mr E.
“Us meeting her half-blueming-way,” said Bluemerang, “would be just what O’Nest-blueming-ly said: us going to her.”
They were in a valley – if they had taken the trouble to look – of outstanding, if primeval, beauty. Giant mountains, rising to points which at a distance looked as sharp as tigers’ teeth, monstered their magnificent awe. The snow which decorated them released onto its surface the gazillion fairies glittering their tutu’d arabesques. There were waves of snow, and rolls of it; there were sheets of snow, slivers, mounds, hillocks, crests of snow. It was a kaleidoscope of snow, the wind swirling it into ever different patterns, painting it first one shade of white, then another.
Despite the blackness of the louring clouds, a weak and desultory sun was creeping into the horizon. In this light a few pink wisps streamered from it, a few duckling yellow strands plaited loosely through them.
Again the flying figure vrrrooooomed past. But the vrrroooom was no longer upper-cased. It had slowed down to a point where capital letters were no longer required. They could even now discern its shape. A rabbit, yes, but with a nose honed to a point as fine as that on a supersonic jet. And with the most enormous ears. Ears which somehow got extended from its head to form its wings.
This figure – which O’Nestly remembered was called ‘Conscut’ – started circling them. They were intrigued by it, curious to know more about it, more curious to know why it was apparently following them.
But time, as Susie reminded tham, was a-pressing, so they pressed forward. Conscut-watching was a hobby for another day. They were, they knew, some distance from Snow-it Hall, but Susie had no desire to push her luck. Having tasted freedom, she was extremely anxious not again to forfeit it. The troupe trudged forward.
Vrrrrroooom, the figure vrrrrooooomed.
Onward the troupe trudged.
Vrrrrooom, the figure swooped, then soared once again into the ever darkening atmosphere.
Susie was beginning to find the aerorabbit … well, to say the least of it, bothersome. So were most of the remaining Sufrogs.
Vrrrooom, it swooped again. This time they saw that its forepaws weren’t paws at all, but giant talons. These had been spread out razor-bladely. Was this creature attacking them? What? Did they need to take cover? And if they did, how long would they have to do so?
Vrrrooom, Conscut dived again.
He grabbed Mr E.
Mr E struggled, trying to free himself from the monster’s purchase. But Conscut was not about to be deprived. He pincered the magi frog with the firmness of superglue and started flapping its ears frantically to steer it away from the group.
Who, having scrabbled desperately to grab back the writhing figure, could now do nothing more than gape with horror.
Which horror, Susie realised with increased horror, still had yet more horror in store. With a still struggling Mr E dangling from its talons, Conscut seemed to be on a suicide course, one guaranteed to collide with one of the biggest mountains.
Conscut was flapping like a thing demented, vrrroooming like a thing demented, trying to gain altitude. And it was. Just not enough.
Further and further from the Sufrogs they flew, closer and closer to the mountain. Closer and closer to death.
Obviously, Mr E saw too what was before him. He suddenly stopped struggling, as if knowing that the real danger of the mountain was far more urgent than any perceived or future danger posed by the aerorabbit.
Who still wrestled for altitude.
The Sufrogs could not bear to watch. They couldn’t watch. Only Mimimi watched. And Mimimi watched because she was so shocked she had been struck catatonic.
The flapping got still franticker. The Sufrogs further, the mountain ever closer. Even more franticker the flapping. The mountain now metres away.
They couldn’t miss it.
They had to hit it.
They had to …
They missed it.
By the milliest of millimetres, Mr E’s feet scraped across the top of it. They’d made it.
Mr E was alive.
No sooner had which joy been realised, however, than the awareness also intruded that he was gone. Which awareness soon blancmanged into yet another horror.
A horror that, very soon, Susie knew to be double-edged.
One side of which stabbed her with the knowledge that one of her dearest friends had now been taken from her. The other side stabbed her with its realisation that that was it! Without Mr E to whoosh her back, that was it. She was doomed to live out her life in the Iffies-Andes-Orbutties.
She was stuck there.
Forever.
Chapter 36
“Charming,” stomped Miss Chief who returned to them at about this time. “Charming, we must say. Leaving us to stomp like that, through snow and ice like that. What are you all gawping at?”
“Mr E,” said O’Nestly.
“He’s blueming gone,” said Bluemerang.
“Taken by a flying rabbit,” said Nespa.
“No blueming way out,” Bluemerang bluesed.
“Leaving me – leaving us – all alone,” said Mimimi.
“Oh yes, there is,” said … they didn’t know.
They looked to one another to see whether one of them were not putting on a funny voice or something. No. Neither, Susie knew, was it Syllabylly. This was a man’s voice.
“Mr E has been taken,” the voice continued. It was a nasally sort of voice, a voice like unripened rhubarb, “to the dungeons of Dunster Fryin. Dunster Fryin is my home.” He laughed dryly, but there was no gladness in the laugh. So its rasp was a sinister one.
The Sufrogs looked to the direction the voice was coming from. There was a large rock there. Rocks, they all knew, did not speak.
From the solid cloud-base beneath it, as if riding on the prongs of an invisible fork-lift truck, emerged … well, a sort of a man. He spoke like a man. But he was mostly transluscent, and wholly transparent. It was like looking through a very odd pane of glass. He was made entirely from vegetables.
“As soon, Susie, as you get me to Grammar Castle, Mr E will be released,” he said as he rose.
Suddenly he was there. A creature which was, as they all were on Grammarcloud, strange-looking – even very strange-looking. His breast was a cob of corn, his face was a turnip, his mouth two slivers of red pepper. Above those protruded from his nose a huge and bulbous, not the frankfurter Susie had seen from Earth, but a carrot. Eyebrows? Two runner beans. And below those beans eyes which were, yes, PEAS.
“Who are you?” Susie asked.
“Nip,” he replied, rhubarbly. “Peatur Nip. You may call me Mr Nip.”
“I know who you are,” crowed O’Nestly. “Sure, you’re famous, aren’t you?”
“Well … ” said Mr Nip, trying to assume a modesty which fitted him as well as a glass slipper fitted an ugly sister.
“Sure, you are,” said O’Nestly. “Of course you are.” Nip’s coyness was almost throttling him. “You’re the famous ‘nip in the air’.”
Bluemerang roared, Susie tittered, Miss Chief, Nespa and Mimimi all looked somewhat bemused. Nip himself looked both wounded and insulted. “Corniun!” he shouted bad-temperedly, investing the yell with the seethe he could not direct at the Sufrogs.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mr Nip,” said Susie adamantly, “until you let me see Mr E.”
“Just as soon as you get back from Grammar Castle,” Mr
E told her. “When? That is entirely up to you. Corniun!” he shouted again, equally bad-temperedly.
“It’s crazy,” Susie said. “I don’t even know where … what did you say it was called?”
“Grammar Castle.”
“Grammar Castle. I don’t even know where that is.”
“Oh, I know where it is,” said the vegetable-man. “Corniun!” he shouted again. “It’s through the Fowork Forest, the other side of the Just Deserts, across the Blind Sea, via the Complicated Plains to the Freudle Jungle. And then we’re there. I know where it is. I just don’t know how to get there.”
“I don’t know how to get there either,” Susie snapped.
“Syllabylly, however, told me different,” Nip admonished her – rhubarbly.
“As in the same Syllabylly, would that be, who came to see me?”
“Of course. There is only one Syllabylly,” Nip told her as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“She’s got a lot to answer for, then,” Susie said, mostly to herself.
“Excuse-moi,” said Nespa. “You would not happen to know, Monsieur Nip, if zere are any snowwiches nearby?”
“We don’t have time to eat. The Snow-it-alls are not too keen – not too keen at all – on their prisoners cocking a snoot at their ‘hospitality’. Already, a posse of I-knew-its will be on its way to fetch you back.”
“It’s going to get awfully blueming wet,” said Bluemerang looking at a sky which, as day was nearing, was getting ominously – and unnaturally – darker.
“Where’s Mr E?” Susie stomped.
“Forget Mr E,” Nip told her. “I could just leave you here. Wait for the I-knew-its to find you. You won’t leave Snow-it Hall again. Not ever. Your choice,” he said with a large dollop of menace.
Susie dropped her eyes. Tried to examine her toenails through her shoes. “There is no choice,” she said quietly. “You must know how horrible those dungeons are,” she added more loudly, looking Nip square in his pea eyes. “You know I have no choice.”
“Corniun!” Nip called again, the merest flicker of a smile playing about over his chin.
“We can’t blueming whoosh, Suse,” said Bluemerang.
“Not till we’ve rescued your Papuan frog,” said O’Nestly.
“We have no bargaining position,” said Susie grown-uply.
“So, let’s go,” said Mr Nip.
“Snowwiches?” asked Nespa ever-hopefully.
“Corniun!” shouted Mr Nip.
“Coming,” said a weary voice, a woman’s voice. It came from behind the same rock before which Mr Nip had just manifested himself.
Even those of the Sufrogs adamant that they were not in the least bit curious turned to face the direction of the voice. From behind the boulder came the most beautiful beast any of them had ever seen: a unicorn, whose huge Delft blue eyes were surrounded by ringletted eyelashes. Her coat shimmered as if it were made of silk and changed colour from a pure white to an off-white as her muscles undulated effortlessly beneath them. Her horn was ribbed as flawlessly as its ivory was flawless.
One small, almost incidental … quirk: the unicorn walked backwards.
Oh, and she talked backwards as well.
“Going get let’s,” the unicorn suggested. There was one other property unique to Corniun: She had x-ray eyes. These could penetrate through the surrounding mountains to the valleys and passes beyond. She told them (much to Nip’s I-told-you-so satisfaction) there was an I-knew-it posse hot on their trail. O’Nestly wondered how anyone could be ‘hot’ on a trail covered in snow, but he was told roundly – and by all of them – that the time for wise-cracks was not now. Bluemerang continued to gloomy about the inclemency of the weather.
“Climb on board,” Nip told them.
“Excuse we,” hoity-toitied Miss Chief, “excuse we: We am an amphibassador. Amphibassadors are not conveyanced on the rumps of equivocals.”
“-quines,” wearied O’Nestly. “E-, Miss Chief, -quines.”
“Walks she!” obstinated Corniun.
“The I-knew-its will be here any minute,” Mr Nip told them. “Up to you. You want to be captured?”
Corniun snootied that it made no odds to her. She didn’t need to get to Grammar Castle.
And Miss Chief felt it incumbent on her not to be outsnootied, so she also said it made no odds to her either.
“You don’t know what that place was like,” Susie said with a mixture in her voice of dread, irritation and more dread. “You have no idea. I can’t go back there. I just can’t. I cannot get captured.”
“And I don’t want to freeze to blueming death,” said Bluemerang.
Corniun, however, remained adamant that there was “way no” Miss Chief was hitching a ride with her. For her part, Miss Chief remained equally adamant that there was no way an amphibassador could be expected to ride upon a clod-hopper the like of Corniun.
Impasse was squeezed past only by Nespa suggesting that, maybe, Miss Chief could ride as Susie’s contact. That way amphibassador and unicorn need have no direct contact.
The I-knew-its, Corniun told them, were closing and closing fast.
“Let’s get going,” said Susie and Mr Nip so simultaneously they were almost in unison.
So … they got going.
Chapter 37
The snow started falling in great gobs of icy hardness. There was nothing flaky about this snow. It was savage in its cold and brittle in its intensity. The wind was starting to howl around them, adding to the snow’s unpleasantness by creating scurries of icicled scree which eddied round about them and – worst of all – darted into their eyes.
“Closer getting they’re,” Corniun shouted at them.
“Don’t just say that,” despaired Susie. “Go faster.”
“Faster won’t help,” Nip told her. “There’ll be another posse – bound to be – coming in from the opposite direction.”
“Oh God!” wailed Susie.
“They’ll catch us in a pincer movement.”
“What are we going to do?” Susie waisked.
“Have to find a cave,” Nip shouted. “Hide. Hope they miss us.”
“That’s the best you’ve got?” Susie asked. “Hope?”
“It’s all YOU’VE got,” Nip replied.
“We’ve got to find a cave, guys. Now. We’ve got to find a cave, guys, like now.”
“Mimimi’s the tallest,” said Miss Chief, suddenly the tank commander directing operations from the tank-turret that was Susie’s bib pocket. “Stand up, Mimimi. Look for caves.”
“Me?” asked Mimimi.
“You,” the others said together.
Mimimi stood upright on Corniun, like a circus bareback-rider, except that she had a gaggle of hands to support her.
They were passing a mountain face so sheer that even the snow stuck to it only on the sharpest of crags. Peering through the blasts of oncoming snow was no easy task. The snow scratched, even lashed. Mimimi had to bear it, though. And she knew she had to. Either that was done or they were done for. It was that stark, the choice.
The face was pock-marked with tiny holes, ‘caves’ so small barely one of them would have been able to fit within. Let alone all of them – plus a unicorn! As if reading her mind, Nip shouted to Mimimi, “Don’t worry about Corniun. She’ll find a place to camouflage herself in the snow. Just find somewhere for the rest of us.”
“Quickly and,” said Corniun.
“Look, for God’s sake, Mimimi,” said Susie.
“Us behind right they’re.”
“Look, Mimimi,” said Nespa.
“For God’s sake,” said O’Nestly.
“Got it!” said Mimimi, and pointed to a small cave, some ten metres or so above her head.
Using desperation as her tutor, it was now Susie who stood on Corniun’s back. It was easier (and thus faster) for the Sufrogs to clamber over her than up the icy ridges. Their limbs were numbed by the cold. The jaggedyness of the cliff face felt
scimitar-sharp.
They scrambled over Susie’s body to the entrance. They huddled within it, seeking warmth from the body heat of the others.
The I-knew-its were now closing fast. Corniun’s x-ray eyes confirmed that the forward I-knew-it of the posse was – surprise, surprise – 31 & 32. It marched with grim determination. And somehow that determination was searing a trench before it, snow-ploughing a route, meeting the pebble-like snow as it whipped into their faces.
Finally it was the turn of Susie herself. She launched herself at the cliff. As soon as Susie was off her back, Corniun clopped off the track and, so it seemed, immediately invisibled herself within the surrounding countryside. Susie knew where the unicorn was, but still she couldn’t see her.
She heaved herself up, wincing as each razored crag bit into her frozen hand. She hauled herself to the next hand-hold. And the next. She was at the mouth of the cave. The Sufrogs were hauling her in. It was a tight squeeze. She felt the rocks scratching at her legs, wanting to tear the fabric of her dungarees. Pull, guys, she urged them.
The squeeze became tighter.
“Pull, guys,” she told them aloud. “Pull.”
She got stuck.
She wiggled. But that just wedged her in faster.
The I-knew-its were now in sight. As yet dots on the horizon smaller than the snowflakes. But they were there.
Susie wiggled some more. Wedged herself faster yet. There was a lot of groaning and shoving. It remained groaning and shoving. It achieved nothing.
The I-knew-its were closer now. Inexorably now closer. Marching inexorably. Driven by something more powerful than and just as elemental as the driving snow. There were eight of them – sixteen faces. Any one had only to look up a bit and there it would be, Susie’s bottom, sticking out of the cave like a mouse being eaten by a snake.
Inside the cave, they had stopped trying to release Susie. Instead, anxious eyes peered around the side of her rump, waiting to see whether or not the I-knew-its had seen them. There was about this column of I-knew-its the impersonal ruthlessness of marcher ants. Its marching may have been unstoppable – inexorable, even – but it was so focussed as to be blinkered.