by Walter Moers
‘The darkness isn’t used to the Zamonium!’ he cried. ‘It’ll take a while, I’m afraid. I can’t control it any longer!’
The cloud bucked madly and whinnied like a herd of mustangs. Nightingale spoke as if he had hiccups.
‘I d-don’t th-think I c-can hold it m-much long …’
The cloud reared up and galloped off with him, zigzagging wildly across the sea like a balloon with air escaping from the neck. Before long, the professor, the Nightingalator and the cloud were just a dwindling black dot on the horizon.
Nightingale had disappeared, but so had the Zamonium. The Moloch’s crew were free at last.
Although they still hadn’t the faintest idea where or who they were, the situation would probably resolve itself in due course. Knio was still throttling one of the Yetis, who must have been wondering how he’d got into such a situation. I had to haul Knio off him. There was a lot of re-education to be done.
Stop engines!
For a start, the engines had to be stopped. The clouds of black smoke added to the confusion and made it no easier to find our bearings. I hurried to one of the engine rooms, but all I encountered there were a few bemused Yetis who were trying to remember their own names.
The Zamonium had expertly navigated the vessel by remote control throughout her voyages, personally supervising every engine and furnace, piston and propeller. The ship had no captain or experienced officers, just a horde of obedient, unwitting slaves. Without the Zamonium, the crew were completely helpless. The Moloch’s machinery was so complex and intricate that I myself would have taken years to learn to operate it. All this dawned on me the moment one of the Yetis in the engine room asked me for my autograph. His last recollection had been of a Duel of Lies I’d fought in the Megathon at Atlantis.
I went back on deck. Our situation was not as critical as all that. We would simply have to wait until the ship’s fuel ran out and she stopped of her own accord. Then we could lower some boats and leave the Moloch to her fate.
‘Did you find the brakes?’ asked Weeny.
‘The Moloch doesn’t have any.’
‘Pity. Hear that noise?’
An ominous sound
I listened. I could hear the throb of the ship’s engines, the roar of the furnaces, the hissing of the valves, the bewildered grunts of disorientated Yetis. Yes, and a gurgling sound.
I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t think where or when. ‘Something’s gurgling,’ I said.
‘And how,’ said Weeny. ‘No idea what it is, you can’t see a thing in this soup, but it’s getting louder. Sounds like we’re heading straight for it.’
‘How about climbing one of the funnels?’ Knio suggested.
We looked around for the biggest smokestack not in current use. Welded to the side were some metal rungs that disappeared into the thick of the smoke overhead. Knio and I proceeded to climb them. After a hundred feet or so we couldn’t see a thing. The acrid vapour compelled us to shut our eyes and mouths and make our way blindly, mutely, upwards.
Then the smoke thinned. We were some five hundred feet above the surface of the sea. The thick, black carpet of smoke below us conveyed the reassuring but deceptive impression that it would catch us if we fell. Around this carpet, and especially towards the bow, the sea was clearly visible. The gurgling sound was much more distinct up here. I now remembered when I’d heard it before: it was the very first sound I’d heard in the very first of my lives.
We could also see its source now. About ten miles away was a hole in the sea, a circular whirlpool many times the size of the Moloch. It was the Malmstrom, the legendary hole in the sea from which the Minipirates had rescued me.
And we were heading towards it at full speed.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Malmstrom, The. Highly unpopular with sailors, this marine vortex in the Zamonian Sea north-east of the mainland is a whirlpool covering a surface area of twenty square miles and extending to a depth of twenty-five or thirty miles. At its base the whirlpool disappears into the crater of an extinct marine volcano five miles in diameter.
The Malmstrom is marked on all charts and should be given a wide berth, because anything that gets caught up in it is inexorably sucked down into the depths. Fish and other marine creatures instinctively avoid the whirlpool; sailors, on the other hand, often fall prey to their irrepressible curiosity and venture too close to it.
Little research has been devoted to where the Malmstrom’s masses of water go, and this is a natural breeding ground for legends. Folk tales transfigure the volcanic crater into the Gates of Hell, and certain less than reputable scientists claim that the Malmstrom will continue to suck water into the interior of the earth until the latter explodes.
We were on board a huge ship full of helpless creatures, surrounded by sharks and steaming at full speed, with no possibility of stopping, towards a hole in the sea more than twenty-five miles deep.
My only assistants were a Gnomelet suffering from memory loss and a Barbaric Hog without any manners. As for Nightingale, he was doubtless riding his cloud across the sea in the opposite direction.
All my other friends were presumably light years away, soaring through the cosmos in a gigantic spaceship. Meantime, Yetis were coming up every few minutes and asking me where the men’s room was – and I couldn’t even answer that for certain. That’s what I call a challenging situation!
‘What shall we do now?’ asked Weeny.
‘How about dying?’ I replied.
By now the gurgle of the Malmstrom was drowning every other sound – we had to shout to make ourselves heard. The others on board seemed to be slowly recovering their wits, and the brighter ones among them explained the situation to the more obtuse – not that this did much good because the Moloch was now within a mile of the whirlpool and beginning to rotate in waltz time. This, in turn, added to the commotion on deck. It was only now that most of the crew ran to the rail and grasped the true nature of our predicament. A babble of cries went up. Many fell to their knees and wept.
The Moloch was revolving faster and faster. We had now reached the edge of the whirlpool, and the thunder of its turbulent waters drowned the cries of panic. Slowly, the ship’s bow crept over the edge of the Malmstrom.
Knio and Weeny stood at the rail like a pair of stone statues.
The Moloch’s hull began to tilt. Another few minutes, and she would plunge into the depths.
‘Only thirteen lives,’ I thought to myself.
All of a sudden, swirling gaps appeared at many places in the pall of smoke overhead. They were made by mighty wings whose beat was audible even above the general pandemonium.
Hundreds – nay, thousands – of huge birds came swooping through the gaps in the smoke and landed on deck. Everyone fell silent at the sight of this army of Reptilian Rescuers.
One of them touched down right in front of me. It was Deus X. Machina. ‘Well,’ he croaked, ‘seems we’ve cut it pretty fine, huh?’
Abandon ship!
All over the deck, former Moloch slaves were clambering aboard the pterodactyls, one or two of which had already taken off. The ship was tilting ominously.
Mac was as imperturbable as ever.
‘The Reptilian Rescuers’ Retirement Home wasn’t my cup of tea. The inmates sat around all day long, playing blackjack and bragging about their exploits in the long ago. I hate card games – in fact I hate company, to be honest. Besides, walls make me nervous and ceilings are even worse. I didn’t need to retire, all I needed was a decent pair of glasses. Think they suit me?’
He gave me a piercing stare. His eyes were magnified by a huge pair of glasses the size of soup plates. Their watery whites were threaded with thick red veins.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘they suit you splendidly.’
‘Life is too precious to be left to chance, my boy.’
<
br /> By now, a third of the Moloch was jutting over the edge of the Malmstrom.
‘It was developments in Atlantis that alerted us. All the Reptilian Rescuers in the world assembled over the city in the last few days because a major disaster seemed to be imminent. The air was positively crackling with danger. We thought the city would sink. Instead of that, it levitated.’
Mac was having to squawk louder and louder to make himself heard above the gurgle of the whirlpool. I would sooner have listened to his résumé perched on his back and high in the air.
‘We didn’t have to do a thing. Not a single inhabitant fell off the edge of the city or jumped to his death out of fear or high spirits. Whoever organized the operation did a good job.’
‘Thatw was the Invisibles. Listen, Mac, maybe we ought to –’
‘So we searched the sea awhile for possible victims of the tidal wave that surged back into the hole Atlantis had left behind, but all we found was that maniac Nightingale on his crazy contraption. He looked as if he planned to win the Derby – kept shouting something about “the Moloch” and “north-easterly direction”. So we flew here.’
Every rivet in the Moloch’s hull was creaking, and bolts were whistling through the air like bullets. The ship was about to plunge bow first into the depths. Knio and Weeny had flown off long ago. Mac and I were the last souls on board.
‘Er, Mac, don’t be offended, but I really think we ought to be –’ ‘Of course, my boy. Climb aboard.’
Mac turned round so that I could climb on his back. At that moment, someone shoved me from behind and knocked me sideways. I collided with the rail, hit my head, and lay there slightly stunned for a moment. A hideous figure vaulted on to Mac’s back.
It was the Troglotroll.
Before I could say anything, my old friend took off and soared into the air. The Troglotroll gave me a friendly wave as Mac flew away, flapping his mighty wings. Then the pall of smoke swallowed them up.
The Moloch plunged into the Malmstrom.
To recapitulate, every member of the Moloch’s crew had been rescued except your unfortunate narrator. Every last Reptilian Rescuer was laden with one or more Yetis, Wolpertingers, or other creatures. The Troglotroll was riding on Mac’s back, and I knew from my days as a congladiator how well he could imitate voices. It would be child’s play for him to convince Mac, for as long as the flight lasted, that he was carrying me on his back. So I could expect no help from that quarter.
It would be incorrect to describe the ensuing process as ‘falling’. Although the Moloch had tipped over bow first, she remained in the water’s embrace as the whirlpool sucked her into the depths. The ship went spiralling downwards. Because of her size relative to that of the Malmstrom, this happened so slowly that I had time for a few last reflections on life and fate.
My fate seemed justified.
I had set events in motion. By destroying the Zamonium I had unintentionally sent the ship to the bottom. By taking charge I had become the Moloch’s new captain, so to speak. As such, it was my seaman’s traditional duty to go down with her. I clung to the rail and did my best to look death in the face. I conceived of that death as resembling one of the black holes Professor Nightingale had cut out of the sky with his Nightingalator. I drew a deep breath.
An unpleasant odour stung my nostrils.
Simultaneously strange yet familiar, the smell was more concentrated than I had ever known it.
It was genff.
There couldn’t have been a more inappropriate time, I knew, but I wanted to discover, at long last, what genff was. Death could wait.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Genff. Unwholesome gas given off by →Time-Snails. One of the great mysteries of the universe is where time goes to. We all experience the passage of time every day. Seconds, minutes, days, months and years go by, but where to? The answer: time flows away into dimensional hiatuses. If it did not, the earth’s atmosphere would fill up with time until it exploded, hence the existence of ‘drainpipes’ for elapsed time. This function is performed by dimensional hiatuses. But if time simply flowed through these into other dimensions, the latter, too, would explode at some stage. This is where Time-Snails come in. They perch on the edges of dimensional hiatuses, devour the time as it flows into them, and promptly digest it. In so doing they give off an evil-smelling gas known to dimensional hiatus experts as ‘genff’. In other words, to put it rather crudely, genff is time metabolized into farts.
This denoted that the Malmstrom was a dimensional hiatus.
And dimensional hiatuses seemed to exert an attraction on me which Qwerty had envied.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Malmstrom, The [cont.]. Some authorities on dimensional hiatuses espouse the view that the Malmstrom is the largest →Dimensional Hiatus in the known universe. This assumption is at least supported by the genff readings on its periphery, because no greater concentrations of that sewer gas have been found anywhere else.
Well, although it was scarcely my heart’s desire to plunge into a dimensional hiatus with the Moloch, I found the prospect of cruising the galaxies on board that huge vessel more attractive than simply drowning.
This also explains why, in a state of Carefree Catalepsy, I had once seen the Moloch soaring through space: it was a vision of the future. My predicament had a certain grandeur, I felt. I was not only plunging into the biggest whirlpool in the seven seas with the biggest ship in the contemporary world, but falling through the most gigantic dimensional hiatus in the universe.
Still clinging to the rail, I boldly gazed down into the swirling abyss. My thirteenth life was drawing to a suitably extraordinary close.
But that was not the most extraordinary thing to happen at that moment.
More extraordinary still was the fact that flying towards me from the depths of the Malmstrom, or dimensional hiatus, was a carpet. But even that was not the most extraordinary thing of all.
Why not? Because seated on the carpet was Qwerty Uiop.
A gelatine prince suffering from Carefree Catalepsy
I could tell from afar that Qwerty was still in a state of Carefree Catalepsy. That condition, as I have already described at length, is brought about by falling down a dimensional hiatus. It is a state of temporary imbecility that protects one from the mental overload occasioned by plummeting through time, space, and alien dimensions. So Qwerty completely failed to notice me.
He even seemed unaware of the gigantic Moloch plunging past him or, if not, wholly indifferent to the sight.
I had to seize the initiative myself. Qwerty was still several hundred feet below me, and his flight path was quite a long way from the Moloch.
I pushed off the deck with my hind legs as hard possible, spread my forelegs, and flew!
Of course, I didn’t really fly the way I described it in my fictitious story about the Molehill Volcano, but I could at least influence my trajectory. The unusual wind conditions prevailing inside the whirlpool favoured spiral flight, and I could steer, accelerate and brake by using my paws as ailerons.
I manœuvred myself so that I was right on Qwerty’s flight path and steering a collision course. He came racing towards me at breakneck speed.
Two hundred feet to go …
Qwerty opened his eyes a little wider. He seemed to be emerging from his Carefree Catalepsy.
A hundred and twenty feet …
Qwerty rubbed his eyes. This didn’t suit my plans at all. I’d intended to dive beneath him and grab the trailing edge of his carpet. It was precision work. If he woke up and changed course himself, it would be all over.
Fifty feet …
Qwerty opened his eyes wide and stared at me in consternation.
Twenty
feet …
I altered the angle of my paws by a couple of degrees so as to miss the bottom of the carpet by a hair’s-breadth.
Ten feet …
Qwerty leant forwards in a panic and tugged at the fringe of his carpet. The carpet swerved a few feet, making it impossible for me to reach it.
Our eyes met briefly as we zoomed past each other. I heard him call out ‘Bluebear?’ in a puzzled voice.
There were still perhaps five hundred feet between me and the black spot at which the whirlpool condensed and became a dimensional hiatus. No matter how hard I flapped my legs, the illusion of being able to fly created by the whirling air currents in the upper regions of the Malmstrom was steadily dispelled the further I fell. On the contrary, I felt I was being sucked downwards with increasing force, as if the power of attraction exerted by the dimensional hiatus were doubling and trebling.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Malmstrom, The [cont.]. In the lower regions of the Malmstrom there occurs a rare and curious quirk of physics which does, in fact, conflict with all the laws of nature. For the last five hundred feet the rate of descent doubles every twenty feet, so an object falling into the Malmstrom would crash on the bottom at almost the speed of light. This is thought to be attributable to the Malmstrom’s torque and suction power and its affinity with a dimensional hiatus.
I could actually register the fact that my rate of descent was accelerating second by second. The air pressure thrust my ears and my entire face backwards, causing me – without my volition – to bare my teeth and expose my gums like a hungry wolf. My eyes were forced deep into their sockets. Then there was a deafening report that went echoing around the Malmstrom’s swirling cauldron.
