***
The gnomes had joined Ghost-Tongue in song much the way the tablet described their singing with Turbees. While they sang a song of their own, they had attempted to match mood & tempo at least. That is to say it was not a pure cacophony. It was only an annoyance to him but at least it was not such for the Gurglesplat. Their aid had given him short moments wherein he could rest his throat and still continue to keep the colossal monstrosity at a creeping pace. All the while, and for quite a while by this time, the Captain was somewhere inside the Gurglesplat.
The sore-throated Indian was just about to take another break when he realized there was a third song being sung, or rather played. It was a flute or a pipe or more precisely… a fife. It was faint and distant and sounded more like an echo. Listening closer he narrowed it down to coming from inside the Gurglesplat. The Captain's plan had worked.
Waving his hands, Ghost-Tongue gathered the attention of the gnomes surrounding him and motioned with his hands to lower their voices. He then cupped a hand behind one ear and aimed it at the Gurglesplat and the music issuing forth from it. He held his breath and waited as he trained his eyes on the rocky trunk of the massive fiend. Nary a stone did stir, not even a pebble as far as he could tell. Better than his song or that of the village could manage, it seemed the Captain’s music had done what before only a very ravenous goblin could do.
Then all at once there was a clatter, a blaring mistuned blast of the fife and the unmistakable curses of Captain Vaguely echoing out from the monster’s cavernous innards. While physically impossible, much of what the Captain had exclaimed involved the basest of behavior one could expect from demonic cattle and whomever “you” was at that moment. Dhamnú raised an eyebrow and nodded in approval of the Captain's abusive conjugation. “Quite the craftsman,” he muttered to the Indian.
“Unfortunately, it appears his mechanical handiwork cannot match his tongue today,” replied Ghost-Tongue. “Look! The Gurglesplat moves again.”
Indeed, the stones and boulders began to shift and roll down its face yet again as behemoth creation began its approach anew. Waving his hands upwards, Ghost-Tongue incited the gnomes to sing once more. All the while he kept his eye on that dark spot nearly center of the Gurglesplat, where he had seen the Captain enter.
Flustered by the failure of his cohort, or perhaps just so raw in his throat that he could not attain the correct pitch, Ghost-Tongue choked and balked. He cleared his throat and summoned a deep bellow from his gut but soon coughed and sputtered. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself but then he heard Dhamnú say, “There’s your spudwallered friend. Look at that guffneck run.”
Ghost-Tongue opened his eyes and saw the Captain bounding down from the Gurglesplat’s interior and out across the rolling hills before it. Even moving at full speed, the titanic beast of stones was no match for the Captain. Intermittently disappearing behind a hill and then rising back up into view, Vaguely was hurling himself forward with abandon; arms and legs a blur. When he finally reached the foot of Ghost-Tongue’s center stage, the Indian saw the obviously winded white man was still smiling.
“So there’s hope,” Ghost-Tongue said to the Captain once he had staggered up to the hilltop.
“There’s always hope, Jobi,” the Captain chuckled and then drew in a deep breath. “Sweat and hope; I’ve plenty of both.”
“What the pigglestoop happened?” asked Dhamnú, looking up at the Captain dourly.
The Captain spread his stance, shoved his hands to his hips, and with all the posture of a victorious battlefield general he explained, “Well, for a moment there we had Vague Enterprise’s prototype for the Perpetual Music Machine™.”
“What the burdletwomp is that now?” the vulgar gnome wondered.
“Well, what I did was I took that horn from your foreman and broke off its mouthpiece.”
“He’ll punch you in the jagsmacking mouth for that.”
“I can very nearly assure you these pearly white chops have never participated in any sort of jagsmacking but I’ll make sure to keep away from the foreman when he’s standing on any step ladders. In any event, I then set my bellows into the narrow hole of the horn. I tore the rods from either end of the scroll you refused to sign, gummed the torn edges of the scroll together with some melted crayon and set the rods within the loop. These rods I mounted haphazardly on a framework of twigs from Turbees’ bedding along with the fife and the bellow-horn contraption. I set these pieces as such…” Using his hands as an aid, the Captain described, “Fife under the scroll, the curved horn parallel here but arched over the scroll like this, and then the bellows into the horn. Once mounted, I set them in one of the windier channels inside the great beast. I then wove a large, wind-catching web-“
Dhamnú looked the Captain over from head to toe and even checked his backside. “You wove what?”
“A web,” the Captain explain matter-of-factly. “Using Vague Enterprise’s very own-”
“Captain,” Ghost-Tongue interrupted, giving a glance toward the towering heap of doom creeping toward them.
“I have a machine, my diminutive friend, but needless to say I can make webs. And so I made this web from the floor to the lower handle of the bellows and from the ceiling to the upper handle of the bellows. Oh! I forgot to mention, I had poked holes in the scroll to coincide with the various pipes of the fife. So when the wind caught the web in either direction, it opened and closed and harnessed the bellows, which blew air down the soundless horn, through the precisely placed holes in the scroll and thus played the fife in continuity for as long as the monster breathed.”
“Fan-fuggaling-tastic!” Dhamnú exclaimed.
The Captain was about to respond when Ghost-Tongue asked, “But Cap’n… How did the hole-punched music scroll move?”
“Music roll, old boy. It’s called a music roll,” Tripp explained and then chuckled somewhat softly. “Well, do you remember our little friend from Hollow Earth? The tiny little vaguelosaur I once trapped in one of my Transmundane Pockets of Quasi-Reality™?”
Ghost-Tongue’s eyes narrowed in a slow, prolonged flinch. “The relentless, blood-thirsty hellspawn that would never be happy until it dined on our hearts?” Ghost-Tongue dared to ask.
“That’s the one!” the Captain replied with a smile. “Well I dangled a bit of butterscotch from a gossamer thread just beyond the contraption and set the little toothy bugger on the roll like it was a treadmill. He gave immediate chase on those two birdlike hind legs and voila! Music was born!”
“And what song was that?” Ghost-Tongue wondered. “It sounded familiar but I could not put my finger on it.”
“Camptown Ladies,” the Captain blushed. “It’s the only song I ever learned from a childhood of piano lessons. Sounded rather eerie at the tempo of the Gurglesplat’s respiration though, didn’t it?”
Ghost-Tongue grinned and nodded. Dhamnú was forced to ask, “What gave?”
“That damned lilliputian thunder lizard managed to catch the butterscotch,” said Vaguely with a great sigh of disgust. “One tug on the thread and he pulled the rest of the web down with it. The whole thing just fell apart on the second round of doo-da’s. All that was left was the tune the old cow died of.”
“And what of the vaguelosaur?” Ghost-Tongue gulped, his eyes drifting even more warily toward the Gurglesplat now.
“Damned if I know,” Tripp replied, following Ghost-Tongue’s gaze. “The miniature terror was preoccupied with finding some way to devour a piece of hard candy the size of its own head. That seemed a prudent time to absquatulate.”
“Well what now?” asked the gnome. It was then that they looked around and found the whole village looking to the Captain and Ghost-Tongue with the same exact question apparent on their faces. They had abandoned their singing, which was not enough to slow the monster on their own.
The Captain, still smiling, looked to Ghost-Tongue, then back to the gnome and said, “You wouldn’t happen to have any other limerick
-laden monoliths around would you? Maybe one that tells us why the Gurglesplat wants you lot so very dead?”
“Nope,” answered Dhamnú. “That’s our only monolith. We buried it a long time ago so the Gurglesplat wouldn’t destroy it.” He looked back down the hill toward the slab lying in the center of the valley. “It’s still laying flat. How’d you read the other side?”
The Captain and Ghost-Tongue locked eyes for a full second before respectively bolting or hobbling down the hill. Summoning the villagers for help, they were eventually able to upright the stone, wash its muddy face and read what had been well hidden for generations of the Kettle’s Knob citizenry.
There once was the village of Kettle’s Spout
The sort of place you’d write poems about
Built there were homes
Full of kind gnomes
Both sorts built short, squat, and stout
There once was a gnome called, Bung
Who could sniff out iron like dung
Never was there finer
A gnome iron miner
That could set to wagging so much tongue
Back in the village of Kettle’s Spout
Bung was all folk could talk about
So they made him their chief
The village his fief
And hung from his neck a mountain of clout
Along came a day that Chief Bung
For whom so many songs had been sung
Discovered an ore
Bigger than ever before
In stone that was ready and ripe to be wrung
Alas this ore was born from stone so jolting
On a mountain so very revolting
That they mined it with haste
Lest they look at its face
And then to their homes they’d be bolting
Inside a mine so hideous and foul
With faces twisted into permanent scowls
They plundered it quick
Before they got sick
From a draft so strong it would howl
Seasons had passed and the miners kept churning
Day and night their lanterns were burning
Until the ore was all gone
Then they returned to their bawn
For a proper work’s adjourning
But before the mine was finally left
And of all ore it was thoroughly bereft
Upon a stone from the lode
They etched this very ode
Then brought back home its considerable heft
Now you can see quite plainly
The point of a stone so gross and ungainly
It was so we could etch
All the words we could fetch
To speak of ourselves so vainly
“The other side was funnier,” said the Captain, lighting a cigar. The rumbling of the Gurglesplat had set the grounds of the village into a quake. The recently righted monolith was now on the verge of toppling yet again.
“But this side is far more educational,” Ghost-Tongue grinned, his eyes wide and scanning furiously across the face of the stone.
The Captain smiled back. “I like it when you get that look, Jobi. What is it?”
“They were mining the Gurglesplat! They took every last scrap of iron and brought it back… Well they brought it back to Kettle’s Spout.” He looked to Dhamnú. “Is that near here?”
“It is here, karblath it!” the gnome answered. “The name was changed some time ago in some fool’s plan to confuse the Gurglesplat. These idiots would know that if they’d pull their fingers out of their ears when I started guffgarted speaking.” Dhamnú huffed.
When Ghost-Tongue’s eyes narrowed on him, Dhamnú explained, “My da’s da, never got used to the new name. He always called it, Kettle’s Spout. S’how I know about the cobnobbered attempt to trick the Gurglesplat.” He cast a spiteful eye toward the churning behemoth and added, “Anyway, it didn’t work.”
“Well there you go!” Ghost-Tongue laughed. “It wants its ore back! It wants its iron!”
“It got its kerblamming iron back,” Dhamnú explained. “Read the other side again. It gobbled up the village time and time again. Each time it got some of its ore back. Now all that’s left is… well…. gawlfadding hate I guess.”
“What about the catapult?” the Captain asked, looking to the banged up mechanism on the hill.
“We made that with our own iron,” answered a gnome from the crowd around them, his tiny arms folded defensively across his chest.
“See?” said Dhamnú. “The thing just wants revenge. It won’t stop until we’re all dead.”
“No,” said Ghost-Tongue, intrigued again. “It sings of sorrow, deep and woeful. It almost mourns. It is incomplete. There’s still something missing from its life.”
Then the Captain laughed. His laugh began as a chuckle but quickly became a chortle and then a guffaw. Soon his hilarity was so loud and raucous that it became contagious. Some of the villagers were laughing even if they knew not why.
“What is it, Cap’n?” Ghost-Tongue begged, a smile breaching his lips again.
“Look,” the Captain instructed, nodding to the great etched stone. “Doesn’t this stone look familiar? Sort of ugly is it not?” He began twisting at the lenses of his goggles, adjusting their focus to discern the various ranges of energies present.
“Well, yes. There, like the limerick says, it came from the Gurglesplat and as Dhamnú told us the villagers buried it; hid it from the thing. Are you saying it wants this last bit of itself back?”
“Yes and no. You said it feels sorrow, Jobi. Sorrow! Something is missing… not from it… but from its life! And unless I’m mistaken, and the bright white aura I see here is the innocent purity of the algae and lichen living on its face, this monolith is just as much alive as the mountain that seeks to crush us. The Gurglesplat isn’t after a part of itself. This isn’t vanity. It’s family! The monolith, Jobi!” Vaguely laughed. “The codgallered monolith is the Gurglesplat’s young!” He looked to Dhamnú who nodded with approval at both the vulgarity and the realization.
With his world famous, solar smile, the Captain said, “Let’s send baby back home to momma!”
The Vulgar Gnome of Kettle's Knob Page 11