Gargantis

by Thomas Taylor

“Aye,” says a voice I don’t recognize. “Like a pair of shrimps sucked into the belly of a whale.”

  We spin around to see a wiry old man dressed in tatty woollens and an old weather-beaten waxed coat. He has a wild beard, even wilder hair and some pretty wild tattoos. The little spectacles on his nose are much repaired.

  “Are you …?” Violet begins.

  “… old Squint?” I finish. “Old Squint Westerley?”

  “Aye,” says the man. “But less of the ‘old’, if you don’t mind. I’m as fit as a gazbaleen’s girdle, I am!” And he thumps his chest, causing a small coughing fit.

  “Now, what’s all the noise?” he asks, when the coughing has subsided. “And how did you…?”

  Then he stares behind us, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

  “By Dismal’s beard, Gancy! Gancy’s back!”

  And now he’s running between the wrecks – if you can call jogging from one crooked leg to the other running – and so, of course, we run after him.

  Gargantis, when we reach her, is lying in vast and spectacular ruin, at the edge of the lake. Her great length is coiled and collapsed in the water, deflated like a crashed airship, her banks of fins lying limp. Her jaws – bristling with tusks – are closed, and her wounds are terrible to see.

  One barnacle-encrusted eyelid is open a little, showing a wide yellow slit through which she gazes down at us as we gather beside her. She lets out a long, keening moan of pain.

  “She’s still alive…” says Violet.

  “Barely!” cries Squint. “Oh, disaster! Who did this?”

  Violet and I look at each other. Where do we even start explaining everything that’s happened? But then Squint looks past us, and his eyes darken as they narrow.

  “Ah, of course,” he says. “I might have known.”

  Behind us, on the far bank of the lake, the wreck of Bludgeon is resting at a crazy angle, its whaling cannon smashed. All around, the fishermen of Eerie are sitting dazed or staggering in the shallows. As they regain their senses, they stare in wonder at their strange surroundings and the stricken monster they helped to destroy.

  “This is all my fault!” Old Squint tugs his beard. “I should never have told anyone about this place till I understood it all myself. I should never have told anyone about Gancy. And now nothing can keep Eerie Rock from sliding into the sea.”

  “There must be something we can do!” cries Violet.

  Squint Westerley shakes his head.

  “Without the Gargantic Light, there’s nothing anyone can do.”

  “The Light!” I shout. “The sprightning! I had her with me, but…”

  “You had it?” The old man grabs me by the scruff. “Is it here? Where is it now? Quickly, boy!”

  “I … I don’t know.” I pat myself down and clutch at my capless head. “It was following me around, but … but…”

  “Herbie, keep still,” says Vi. She reaches towards my ear with a little driftwood stick and then gently hooks something out from behind it and drops it in my hands.

  In my palm the tiny, sodden figure of the sprightning lies motionless, not even the slightest spark of life crackling from it.

  “By Dismal’s beard!” gasps old Squint. “Quickly, she must be returned to her nest! It may be hard to believe, but the fate of great Gargantis and this tiny sprightning are deeply entwined. If we can get them back together, there may still be time.”

  “Nest?” says Violet. “What nest?”

  But Squint is already at the front of Gargantis’s head, beckoning me to join him. The long, spindly appendage of Gancy’s lure lies drooping down the front of her head, the empty bulb at the end limp on the ground.

  “The sprightning gives light to the storm fish, and Gargantis gives the sprightning electrical power in return, so she can breed her swarm. They bind for ever, and should never be separated for long. While one lives, there’s still a chance for them both. Quickly!”

  I walk over to him, cupping the little creature in my hands, blowing on her gently, willing the fairy back to life. And she crackles in response – the tiniest spark of a wing – and begins to glow faintly again. Behind me, the fishermen of Eerie gather around.

  “Who are you?” says old Squint in a wondering voice, as he watches the light brightening in my hands.

  “Me?” I say. “I’m Herbie, Lost-and-Founder at the Grand Nautilus Hotel. This light – the Gargantic Light – was lost. I’m just trying to return it to its rightful owner, that’s all.”

  And I crouch down beside the bulb on the ground.

  “This belongs to you, Gancy.”

  I nestle the faintly glowing sprightning inside the gauzy bulb and take my hands away.

  The light of the sprightning flickers out and dies.

  There’s a hush over the fishermen, and over me and Vi, too, because it seems as if something should be happening now, only something isn’t.

  Then the ground starts to shake.

  HORRIBLY CHANGED

  THE SHAKING OF THE GROUND intensifies, and all around us stalactites begin to fall from the cavern roof. Straight in front of Gargantis, as if the creature had been trying to reach it, there is a large cave entrance in the cavern wall. The rock around this cave cracks and splits, as if the whole cavern wall was collapsing under its own weight.

  “We’re too late!” Old Squint’s face goes deathly white. “Eerie Rock is crumbling. Gancy’s been out of her cave too long. The whole thing is going to come crashing down!”

  “But Eerie-on-Sea is built on that rock!” I cry.

  “What about them?” Vi says to Squint, pointing to the other sprightnings. They are flying around the cavern in great agitation. “Won’t one of those do?”

  Squint shakes his head.

  “It has to be the queen, the one that fool Dismal trapped in the bottle. Those others are just her children, the workers of the swarm, who guard the Vortiss.”

  “Come on!” I crouch down and pat the gauzy bulb, feeling useless. I can see the tiny fairy figure lying in there, motionless, without a spark. “Come back! I returned you to your home. What else can I do?”

  Then Violet starts to sing.

  Now, I’d like to say that Violet has a beautiful voice. I’d like to say she sings like a Disney princess, and that wild creatures gather around to listen, but that wouldn’t be true. It’s not a bad voice – don’t get me wrong – it’s just a creaky, uncertain one. Like the voice of a person who never normally thinks to sing, and who is astonished to find herself doing it now.

  I look up at her and see a tear in her eye. She has one hand on Gancy’s side.

  Violet’s song is the one I’ve heard the fishermen sing as they fix their nets and set their sails, and it’s the one the clockwork hermit crab played for us back in my cellar, at the beginning of it all. It’s the same song Blaze sang when he thought Bludgeon was lost – an old, sad song of the wind and the waves and the sea.

  But Violet doesn’t know all the words.

  The song dies mid-verse, and now Violet’s mouth is just opening and closing as she desperately tries to remember more.

  So the fishermen sing it for her.

  One by one, the burly, sullen fisherfolk of Eerie-on-Sea take up the song where Violet leaves off, their voices raised in harmonious chorus. Even Boadicea Bates joins in, her voice surprisingly high and clear. The fishermen reach out and touch Gargantis, and close their eyes, and sing.

  Until the song is ended.

  And Gancy lies as still as stone, her light extinguished.

  “You’re too late!”

  A horrible voice cuts into the silence, enunciating each word with disgusting precision. Deep Hood steps out from behind the wreck of Bludgeon.

  “The creature is dead! And now I will have its carcass.”

  “You!” cries old Squint. “Oh, what a fool I was to trust you with the secret. Now look what you’ve done!”

  “You never would have discovered any secrets without my help,” Deep Hood
sneers in reply. “Without my gold, you’d still be tinkering on your boat with that dim-witted apprentice of yours.”

  Squint Westerley unhooks an axe from his belt and hefts it threateningly.

  “Blaze is no dimwit! He’s just not ready, that’s all. One day he will be, and then I’ll teach him about all of this.”

  The ground starts shaking again, and boulders fall down the rock face.

  “But there won’t be a ‘one day’, will there?” Deep Hood gurgles with laughter. “Eerie-on-Sea is doomed.”

  “Why?” Violet shouts. “Why have you done this? Just to make your stupid potion?”

  “Stupid?” Deep Hood roars in fury. “Who are you to call me stupid, Violet Parma? It’s thanks to your stupidity that I’m here at all – that I have to do any of this.”

  “What do you mean?” I say, joining Violet at her side. “Who are you?”

  “Do you really not know?” Deep Hood swings his hood from me to Violet and back to me again. “Have you already forgotten? Forgotten how you stopped me from getting my prize once before? How you left me to die in the bowels of a battleship, torn to shreds by the malamander, my hand bitten clean off?”

  Violet gasps.

  “But the oil of a storm fish is miraculous. It grew back that hand!”

  He lifts his right arm, and the sleeve falls back, revealing a hand – shiny pink, as if newly grown.

  “And a few little extras besides.”

  The tentacle slides out and waves obscenely in the air. Then it throws back the hood, revealing a face we thought we’d never see again.

  The author of The Cold, Dark Bottom of the Sea.

  Sebastian Eels.

  Standing before us.

  But the once-handsome face of Eerie-on-Sea’s most famous writer is horribly changed: around his mouth, dozens of little pink feelers wave in the air and clutch at his lips and gums. No wonder he sounds as if he’s struggling to speak. On his neck, gills gape and twitch, as if desperate for water, while behind his head the repulsive pink tentacle rises triumphantly from between his shoulders.

  “Oh, I was shocked too,” he says, seeing our faces. “When it first happened. But then I realized just how useful extra limbs could be.”

  Violet, the fishermen of Eerie and I – we all recoil in horror.

  “And this is just the start!” drawls Sebastian Eels. “With more of my tincture, what could I become? Stronger, even, than this? Faster, tougher – something truly magnificent?”

  “You have sold your humanity,” says old Squint in disgust, “to become a monster.”

  Sebastian Eels spits a gob of green saliva.

  “Humanity is cheap,” he burbles, “and so easily crushed.”

  Without warning, the tentacle strikes forward and punches Squint in the face. The old fisherman is knocked to the ground, his glasses shattering.

  Eels picks up the fallen axe with his tentacle and twirls it expertly as he faces me and Violet.

  “And now it’s your turn.”

  DEEPEST SECRET

  AND SO WE RUN – me to the left, Violet to the right. The axe zips between us and bounces off the hard scales on Gancy’s snout.

  I don’t know how, but without agreeing in advance, Violet and I are both running to the cave entrance we saw in the wall of the cavern. Eerie Rock may be about to collapse – the ground is shaking harder than ever – but the cave seems to offer more places to hide than anywhere else. We reach the mouth of it, gasping for breath, looking frantically behind us for signs of pursuit.

  “Where’s he gone?” I gasp.

  “I don’t know,” cries Vi. “I can’t see him!”

  Drip.

  A drop of green lands on the rocks between us.

  Drip.

  Another blob of green. This time on my shoe.

  Slowly, Violet and I both look up.

  Above the cave entrance, staring down at us with dark glee, Sebastian Eels is suckered onto the rock by his tentacle, his hands and feet planted against it, ready to strike. Another glob of green saliva falls from his terrible grin.

  We back into the cave, stumbling and tripping, as the man-become-monster drops powerfully onto the rocky floor and turns to face us.

  “Am I not beautiful?” he gurgles. “With more of my tincture, can you even imagine what I might become?”

  “But the town!” says Violet, as we back further into the cave. “Without Gancy to hold it up, Eerie-on-Sea will be destroyed! Don’t you care?”

  “A ridiculous place full of meddlers and simpletons,” Eels says, stalking into the cave entrance after us, tentacle poised like a scorpion’s tail. “Of course I don’t care! It will be easier for me when everyone is dead, and nothing but skeletons at the bottom of the sea.” He flashes a knowing glint at me as he says this. “Easier for me to locate the deepest secret of Eerie and take it for my own.”

  “Deepest secret?” I say. “What ‘deepest secret’?”

  “You know, it’s actually funny,” says Eels as he drives us further down the cave. The whole place trembles again, and rocks fall all around, but Sebastian Eels just deflects them with his tentacle. “Funny that you, of all people, Herbert Lemon, don’t know the secret. Everything truly eerie in this place is tied together by a common thread – the malamander, Gargantis, a cat who can speak…”

  “What?” cried Violet. “How do you know about Erwin…?”

  “Oh, I know. I know more about the legends of Eerie-on-Sea than anyone. And that includes the story of the boy who washed up in a crate of lemons.”

  “You know my story?” I can hardly believe what Eels is saying. “You know where I come from? But … how?”

  “I could tell you.” Eels gives a superior smile. “But you’re about to be dead anyway, so what does it matter now? Ha! Just think, you survived the sinking of SS Fabulous, only to end up axed to bits in this dismal cave.”

  My mouth falls wide open.

  “SS Fabulous?” I cry.

  I’m about to add, But that’s the name of the ship in your book! but suddenly there isn’t time. There isn’t time for anything.

  Because, back down by the lake, I’ve just seen something that makes me jangle from noggin to niblets with both terror and hope.

  Behind Sebastian Eels, out in the cavernous undersea landscape, something massive is rushing at us on frantic flippers and fins, closing fast, a powerful light blazing between two huge yellow eyes. Something that is about to enter the cave like a speeding train enters a tunnel.

  Gargantis!

  Revived!

  I see a deep, wide fissure in the cave wall beside us. With barely time to think, I shove Violet into it. Well, there’s no need for us both to be squished, is there?

  Eels’ face changes as he realizes what is about to happen.

  But it’s too late.

  Gargantis enters the cave in a blaze of light and a roar of scraping scales and fins, her gaping mouth scooping up Sebastian Eels, boulders of rock …

  … and me!

  Somehow I manage to grab a tusk and cling on, my legs dangling down inside the throat of the storm fish as she powers deep, deep into the caves beneath Eerie Rock. Further down that throat, eyes wide with terror, Sebastian Eels clings by the tiniest tip of his tentacle to one of Gancy’s massive teeth.

  “Save me!” he screams, his voice just reaching me above the crash and roar. “Save me, Herbert Lemon, and I’ll tell you who you really are!”

  I blink as stones bounce down my face and arms. I try to get my foot towards him…

  Then the tentacle gives way, and Sebastian Eels flies down, down into the eternal dark of the belly of Gargantis.

  There’s a sudden echoing sound and change of air, and the creature’s head bursts out through a second cave entrance. She comes to an abrupt halt, and I’m thrown forward and out of the monster’s mouth, to land upside down and back to front on a tuft of prickly sea lavender.

  “OW!”

  GUARDIAN OF GARGANTIS

  I
PICK MYSELF UP and pull out a spiky twig or three.

  “Herbie!”

  That’s Violet calling.

  “Herbie, are you OK?”

  She’s running across the mossy ground. Behind her is old Squint Westerley, clutching his bashed face. It’s then I notice that the cave Gancy’s head emerged from is only a short way from the one we first entered. Despite this, Gancy’s entire body is now concealed, threaded through the foundations of Eerie Rock.

  The storm fish sings a deep, melodious note and snaps her jaws once or twice. There’s a rushing sound as air is drawn into her mouth, and I sense her long body inflating and filling the cave beneath Eerie Rock completely. The trembling of the ground stops, and the rock face falls still. Then Gargantis twists her tail over towards her head, gently closes her mouth over it and allows her eyes to close. As we gather around, the breathing of the great storm fish settles into a slow, peaceful rhythm.

  Above Gancy’s head, at the end of the lure that sprouts between her eyes, the gauzy bulb bathes us in a twinkling glow.

  “She sleeps!” says old Squint. “At last, Gargantis sleeps.”

  “So Eerie keeps?” I ask, and the old man smiles.

  “There’s someone who doesn’t sleep, though,” says Violet, pointing. The sprightning crawls out from the opening in the side of the bulb. Her electrical wings spark on, and she takes to the air, flitting around with a bright crackle of energy. All the other sprightnings in the cavern swarm around, darting here and there, but ours – the queen of them all – shines the brightest and the fiercest.

  “She looks better than she ever did nesting on my head,” I say.

  Then she notices me and flitters down to bob in front of my face.

  I reach my hand up, but Squint blocks it.

  “Don’t touch her,” he says. “She’s bound herself to her storm fish again, where she belongs. It’s people touching her and putting her in bottles that started all this trouble in the first place.”

  The sprightning – my sprightning – hovers closer still, and somewhere deep inside her brilliant light, I think I can see a little fairy face smiling out at me. And then she’s gone, whirring away back into her nest on the head of Gargantis. The gauzy bulb glows again with a wondrous light as the other sprightnings dance around.