by Hal Duncan
– North, he cries.
And Lily and Erin’s in a tightening ring of puppet creature death, the Whimsy’s headed ramming speed, guns blazing, for a giant’s bonce, but with a hand snatching up to crush em, even as Flashjack, alicorn Nazis on his tail, races north, sleek Spitfire’s fireballs tracing writhe and slother to its roots – of course! – in Loch Shianta – fucking duh!
And it’s dive, boy, dive! a hail of dragonfire pounding, searing, slicing the Addanc’s rotten heart clean from its vast unspeakable mass of flurrying and snicketing appendages, to slice the puppeteer’s strings.
And every corpse its grip were dancing simply drops.
• 7
And even as limbs and corpses rains down on the battlefield round Lily and Erin, as them skeletal droid minions all just whoomfs back to clouds of midges, aimless gnats smirred on the wind... high above, a glass blister smashes at a bowsprit’s impact. As Blackstone drops, the Addanc’s latchings severed from his will, that bowsprit nearly spears the fucker. Oh, but no. His raised hand’s echoed in stone what’s snatched the Good Ship Whimsy in its grasp at the last squirmy latchings of an Addanc’s final act.
And out he comes, on eagle wings extending, roaring for Scruffian blood.
– To Peter! cries Foxtrot sprinting down the deck.
And even as his pirate rapier’s lobbed like ninja’s dagger, Squirlet’s swashbuckling a rope from crow’s nest down to snatch it, winding round the treetrunk like a maypole, launching it onward.
– To Peter! she cries.
And Janie’s monkey-swinging branch to branch, leaping to nab that sword, darting nimble with her tail for balance to a branch’s bouncing tip, to hurl it on. And in that spittly speech she really oughtn’t be so shy about – she really oughtn’t – why, in that very moment, she give Peter his Scruffian name.
– Peacher! she cries.
It’s not just some easy nab and jab though, scamps, not with that bastard flying out, hands clamping Peter’s throat: I’ll wring your neck, filthy scruff! Peter has to think sharp, kick the fucker in his bollocks, but that just makes him tighten his grip, start twisting with the throttling like’s to tear his noggin right fucking off. But, aha! Of course! And Peter stamps a tackety boot, hard as fuck, right into that wound he left in Blackstone’s thigh, where’s he were going for the femural artery. And now the fucker lets go, Peter kicks himself free and –
– Peacher!
Peter pirouettes to see the rapier soaring, backflips, catches, loops and stabs – straight in the heart, scamps! He skewers that lionheaded, eagle-winged cuntfucker straight through his rotten Nazi heart!
But Blackstone’s hand shoots out, scamps, snatches his throat again. Oh, the bastard’s mortal wounded, but he ain’t gone yet, and it’s a death grip squeezing now, and the dying lion’s jaws are opening wide, scamps, angling – oh, fuckety fuck – to chomp Peter’s Stamp right off his chest, closing in...
CRACK!
And it’s a bullet in the brain from a Springfield Trapdoor – hallefuckinlujah! – crackshot Lily from gobsmackerty hundred feet below.
• 8
It’s victory, scamps, victory! And take that for yer fucking Merry Nazi Christmas! The Land of Somewhere Safe is saved – huzzah! – and safe again for every scruff – well, okay, not entirely safe when’s Peter’s celebratory tootling wakes the giant Og himself to an earthshaking jig as sends them allies scarpering from splatterisings, Foxtrot shouting: A lullaby! A lullaby! But then ain’t nowhere’s never entirely safe, eh, scamps? We just makes it safe as we can, just fights to make it safe for ourselves and others, and the less safe it is, the fiercer we fights.
Eh, Slickspit, ain’t that right?
So it’s a week-long ceilidh in Dun Tarakin’s streets, scamps, with Polish centaurs prancing like foals, and satyrs gamboling like kids, jumping up on anything what’s higher than their noggins as goats is wont to do. Right through to Hogmanay it goes, with aerial acrobatics and fireworks from Spitfire as it turns a New Year what Erin says, as they feasts in Dun Straich, time being bonkers here, could well be next New Year, or somewhen afters, could be whichever New Year will see the war’s end... if that’s what they wants – for the safety of the Stamp, like.
So maybe’s it ain’t a War Meeting them scruffs has, strictly speaking, them talking peace, but then again… If they can take the Stamp back to a waking world safe from Nazis now, well, all em orphan strays out there, all em Scruffians-to-be... Ain’t making things safe as we can for them the war still to be won?
That’s why they decides it’s hometime – most of em anyways.
– I think I should like to stay a little while longer? says Lily to Erin.
– And oughtn’t someone go looking for Keen and Able? says Peter. On a ship, perhaps?
Oh, the adventures them two had! Yer might even have heard a peep of em via one groanhuff’s half-arsed fancification of a half-remembered dream. Of course, that bungling don’t explificate what it were made all Peacher Peckerpipe’s boys feel sorta lost and want to play with just boys, ta, nor how Sniperlily Tuckerinny’s tribe of wildlings was all them others, girls and boys and elsewises, as found Peter’s gay bratchelor fraternity a bit tame, to be honest. And fuck that pile of pish about mothers and thimbles, and that racist monicker on Lily’s tribe, fuck’s sake...
Sorry.
Anyway...
• 9
So Peter tootles the Good Ship Whimsy to anchor over Dun Straich, to keep any magical malarkey within that castle’s sphere of containment, and they runs the Faerie Flag up as its colours. They has to damn near prise Flashjack away from a tearful farewell to Spitfire where’s he’s latched around the dragon’s neck, and if it weren’t for the fact the Stamp has to travel by scofflaw courier with an hellion escort, and Foxtrot reminding him he can visit any time he dreams, well, that scallywag might have never left. But finally, finally, they gets him up the rope.
It’s up to the quarterdeck then for Erin, a wee pinch of wishsnuff, a sneeze, but instead of some rocketing flight off into the wild blue yonder, she just sets to turning the wheel in the queerest manner, clockwise and widdershins, widdershins and clockwise, roundabout mostways, a jigger back – why, it’s like nuffink so much as Vermintrude Toerag cracking a combination safe.
– Give us We’ll Meet Again, laddie, she says then to Peter.
And with fond farewells all round, she huchles those Brawling Bastables to that treetrunk’s base, a great gaping knothole, and in she sends em, one by one.
One by one they hops in, and in a tick they’s hooshing down and round, whooshing helter skelter as on some waterpark flume, scamps, only with a force ten gale instead of water, blasting em faster, faster, round and around, and up, firing up and out – wahey! oh, deary me! fuuuuuck – ! aaaaaaaah! – Flashjack’s acrobatic (and even dramatic) landing on one knee somewhat spoiled by them others, one by one, landing atop him, them all ending up in a guddly heap just a little away from the hollow trunk of the Elfin Oak in Kensington Gardens what they’d been squooffed from.
They couldn’t hardly believe it when they comes out of Hyde Park by Wellington Arch, finds themselves toddling up to a Piccadilly Circus jumping with news of Victory in Europe, packed with partying Londoners and lit to high heavens – bleeding searchlights and all. As Zoe Gail herself stands on a balcony in her top hat and tails singing I’m Going to Get Lit Up When the Lights Go Up in London, why, it were only the sight of a scrag lifting a drunk’s leather and legging it...
Only then did they truly know they was back home, safe and sound.
• 10
Snug in Quip’s ensconcing cuddle, nooked between the scallywag’s knees and wrappled in a way that couldn’t be further from an Addanc’s thrall, Slickspit Hamshankery, prentice fabbler, watches Gob lean back with the fabble’s end, stretch and crick his neck. The rapt hush – until now, that is – of the gaggle of scamps in a horseshoe around him... that might well have a wee echo of the Addanc’s thrall to it, right enough,
given the way it whoomfs to a cloud of chattery babble and fidgeting now as Gob clambers to his feet.
– Right, says he. Shust and snatch some kip.
Like an ear-skritched mutt, Slick angles his head into the strokes of thumb where Quip’s right hand idles in the crook of neck and shoulder, the left rested over his heart, arm tucked round under his own, and with the two of them dug down into the sleeping bag to boot, he could almost doze off himself. What with Gob’s penchant for piss breaks and pauses to skin up, suspiciously synched with dramatic twists – look, me throat’s just sore, Gob’s truth – it must be nearing dawn now. In other circumstances, it’d be a wonder the scamps aren’t asleep already.
As the nippers bumshuffle, inchworm and elbow, in their bundlings of sleeping bags and blankies, into a right moger, as Gob would put it, of squidge and sprawl halfway between a pile of pups and a bin bag of togs half-inched from an Oxfam’s doorway and dumped by a scallywag on the crib floor, the fabbler tips Slick and Quip a nod c’mere. Neither’s exactly hop-to-it peachy keen in unhuddling from their cosy nest, but with a lazy limbering and a flapple of sleeping bag round shoulders, they join Gob as he peels bin bag from window.
– Should get ready to offsky soon, says Gob.
Outside, shadow is still all you can really make out, but there’s form to it now, if you look upwards, a scraggly thick scribble of branches and twig, splotched with crow’s nests and, after a night of rain to clear the sky, silhouetted against the deep blue of twilight’s twin. The ochenin. In the dark, they can hide. In the light, they’ll fight. In between, in this dead time before dawn, it’s safe to move. Safe to retreat, regroup, rethink. Well, not entirely safe. Never entirely safe.
But safe enough for now.
About the Author
Hal Duncan is the author of the novels Vellum and Ink, more recently Testament, and an ongoing series of Scruffians chapbooks, along with numerous short stories, poems, essays, even some musicals. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him “THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (sic), and you can find him online at www.halduncan.com or at his Patreon for readings, revelling in that role.
NewCon Press Novella Set 4: Strange Tales
Gary Gibson – Ghost Frequencies
Susan MacDonald knows she’s close to perfecting a revolutionary new form of instantaneous communication, but unless she makes a breakthrough soon her project will be shut down. Do the odd sounds – snatches of random conversation and even music – that are hampering her experiments represent the presence of ‘ghosts’ as some claim, deliberate sabotage as suggested by others, or is there a more sinister explanation?
Adam Roberts – The Lake Boy
Cynthia lives in a lakeside parish in Cumbria, where none suspect her blemished past. Then a ghostly scar-faced boy starts to appear to her and strange lights manifest over Blaswater. What of the astromomer Mr Sales, who comes to study the lights but disappears, presumed drowned, only to be found wandering naked days later with a fanciful tale of being ‘hopped’ into the sky and held within a brass-walled room? What of married mother of two Eliza, who sets Cynthia’s heart so aflutter?
Ricardo Pinto – Matryoshka
Lost in Venice in the aftermath of the war, Cherenkov just wants to put his head down somewhere and sleep, but her copper hair snares his eye. She leads him to Eborius, a baroque land lost in time, and takes him on a pilgrimage across Sargasso seas in search of the Old Man, who dwells on an island where time follows its own rules. Last of his kind, the Old Man is the only being alive who may hold the answers Cherenkov craves.
Learning How to Drown
Cat Hellisen
Cat Hellisen is a South African writer of dark fantasy. She has the ability to conjure a sense of ‘otherness’ that most writers can only envy, casting grounded characters driven by passions and ambitions we can all recognise in situations that take a step away from the reality we know. Her stories have already featured in such venues as Fantasy & Science Fiction and Tor.com, and she is the winner of the Short Story Day Africa Prize.
Learning How to Drown represents Cat’s best work to date, gathering together seventeen fabulous stories, two of which appear for the first time and all of which showcase why Cat Hellisen is being tipped as one to watch.
“Cat Hellisen is one of the most accomplished writers of African SFF. This fine collection gathers the best so far of her wondrous fictions.”
– Geoff Ryman, author of The Child Garden
“Cat Hellisen is a writer of wonderful and allusive stories; rich,
engaging and often unsettling. Be prepared to be both submersed – and transformed – by the gripping magic within!”
– Nick Wood, author of Azanian Bridges
“I loved this stunning collection of stories, every tale limned with
beauty and steeped in a darkling strangeness that is absolutely unique. The bookshelves of any reader interested in the modern short story should proudly display a copy of Learning How To Drown front and centre.”
– Neil Williamson, author of The Moon King
Learning How to Drown is available now as a paperback and as a numbered limited edition hardback, signed by the author.
Table of Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
About the Author
