The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Doctor Weighbend spun around – his massive tail catching a cart of instruments and beakers and sending glassware smashing to the floor – and was gone. Jack sat wearily and down-in-the-dumpily for a few long minutes, then levered himself up and trudged off down the aisle formed by the curtained wards.

  Almost to the exit, Jack’s attention was drawn between two parted drapes.

  On a table lay the Motorball Champion Dean Tesh! Bloodied and grimacing, his signature cornucopia-shaped head drooping, sparks and fizzles spurting from his numerous lumpy adjuncts, Jack Neck’s hero awaited his own treatment. Assuredly, that day’s game had been a rumbunctious and asgardian fray! And Jack had missed it!

  Impulsively, Jack entered the Champions cubicle. “Superlative Dean Tesh, if I may intrude briefly upon your eminence. I’m one of your biggest fans, and I wish to offer my condolences on your lapsarian desuetude.”

  Dean Tesh boldly smiled like the rigorous roughrider he was. “Tis nothing, really, old mummenschanz. Once they jimmy open my cranial circuit flap and insert a few new wigwags, I’ll be right as skysyrup!”

  Jack blushed to be addressed by his union’s highest title, in actuality undeserved. “Your magnificent spirit inspires me, lordly Dean Tesh! Somehow I too will win through my own malediction!”

  Dean Tesh’s ocular lenses whirred for a better look. “Worrybird, is it? I’ve heard Uncle Bradley has a way with them.”

  “Uncle Bradley! Of course! Did he not design your own world-renowned servos and shunts? If medicine holds no answers to my problem, then surely Uncle Bradley’s Syntactical Fibroid Engineering must!”

  And so bidding Dean Tesh a heartfelt farewell replete with benisonical affirmations of the Champion’s swift recovery, Jack Neck set out for Cementville.

  Soon Jack’s trail of tiny archless footprints – outlined in fast-growing sporulating molds and luminescent quiverslimes – could be traced through many an urban mile. Behind him already lay the evil precincts of Barrio Garmi, where the Stilt-legged Spreckles were prone to drop rotten melons from their lofty vantages upon innocent passersby. Jack had with wiles and guiles eluded that sloppy fate. The district of Clovis Points he had also cunningly circumnavigated, wrenching free at the last possible moment from the tenebrous grasp of a pack of Shanghai Liliths, whose lickerish intention it was to drag innocent Jack to their spraddle-skirted leader, Lil’ Omen, for the irreligious ceremony known as the Ecstatic Excruciation.

  For several blocks thereafter he had dared to ride the Henniker Avenue Slantwise Subway, disembarking hastily through his car’s emergency exit and thence by escape-ready ladder-chute when he spotted a blockade across the tracks surely erected by the muskageous minions of Baron Sugarslinger. Luckily, Jack had had the foresight to obtain a transfer-wafer and so was able to board the Baba Wanderly Aerial Viaticum for free, riding high and safe above the verdigrised-copper-colored towers and chimney-pots, gables and garrets of Doo-Boo-Kay Flats.

  At last, as a pavonine dusk was o’erspreading the haze-raddled, swag-bellied firmament, Jack Neck and his endlessly asseverating Worrybird – its face like a hairless druid’s, its folded wings gloomy as a layoff notice from Krespo’s – arrived at the premises of Uncle Bradley.

  The largest employer in gritty Cementville, the firm of Bradley and His Boyo-Boys, experts in SFE, ran round the erratic clock all thirteen moons a year, turning out many and many a marvelous product, both luxuries and essentials, the former including Seductive Bergamot Filters and the latter notable for Nevermiss Nailguns. Renowned for accepting any and all engineering challenges, the more intractable the more alluring, Uncle Bradley represented Jack’s best hope in the Worrybird-Removal Department.

  At the towering portal to the lumbering and rachitic nine-storey algae-brick-fronted manufactory that occupied ten square blocks of Dimmig Gardens, Jack made free with the bellpull: the nose of a leering brass jackanapes. A minidoor opened within the gigundo pressboard entrance, and a functionary appeared. As the employee began to speak, Jack noted with dismay that the fellow suffered from Papyrus Mouth: his words emerged not as ordinary vocables but as separate words printed in blearsome bodily inks upon shoddy scraps of organic-tissue paper.

  Jack sought to catch the emergent syllables as they spelunked bucally forth, but some eluded him and whiffed away on the diddling breezes. Nervously assembling the remaining message, Jack read: business state Bradley please with.

  “I need to solicit dear Uncle Bradley’s genius in the area of invasive parasite disengagement.” Jack jerked a thick split-nailed thumb backward at his broodsome rider.

  A gush of flighty papyri: Follow Bradley Uncle free see if me.

  Most gladfully, Jack Neck entered the dynamic establishment and strode after the Papyrus Mouther. Through humming, thrumming offices and sparky workshops – where crucibles glowed with neon-tinted polymeric compounds and, under the nimble fingers of Machine Elves, transistors danced the Happy Chicken Trot with capacitors and optical-fluid valves – Jack and his guide threaded, until at last they stood before a ridged and fumarole-pocked door with a riveted steel rubric announcing it as UNCLE BRADLEY’S CARBON CAVE.

  Wait here.

  Alone, Jack hipper-hopped nervously from toe to toe. He prayed to all the Saints whose names he could remember – Fimbule and Flubber, Flacken and Floss, Fluffie and Farina – that Uncle Bradley possessed the secret of his salvation – and at a price he could afford.

  After an almost unsquingeable wait, the Papyrus Mouther returned.

  with Bradley will now you Uncle meet.

  “Oh, thank you, kind underling! A myriad blessings of the Yongy-bongy-bo descend upon you!”

  Into the fabled Hades-embered Carbon Cave now, whose inward-seeming rattled Jack’s sensory modes. The walls and ceiling of the vasty deep were layered with snivelling encrustations of Syntactical Fibroid Engineering at its most complex. Flickering readouts and mumbling speaker-grilles obtruded their cicatrice-bordered surfaces from amongst switches and pulls, toggles and knife-throws, fingering-holes and mentation-bands. Innumerable crystal monitors studded all surfaces, displaying upon their garnet and amethyst faces scenes from across Drudge City. For a briefer-than-brief second, a shot of Marmoreal Boulevard – right in front of Boris Crocodiles! – flashed across one, and Jack nearly wept for the nostalgic past of mere yesterday!

  In the middle of the Carbon Cave, on his numinous, numbly throne, sat Uncle Bradley. Almost totally overwhelmed with layers of SFE extrudements, a helpful carapace of gadgetry, the master of the Boyo-Boys showed bare only his snaggle-toothed and wildly inventive face, and his two striped arms, one of which terminated in chromium piratical hook. Dangling all around inspiration-eyed Uncle Bradley were speakers and microphones, mini-monitors, telefactored manipulators and sniff-sources, allowing him to run his many-branched enterprise without leaving his cozy sanctum.

  As Jack approached tentatively across the wide checkerboard floor, he could hear from Uncle Bradley a constant stream of queries, advice and commands.

  “Lay on ten thousand more karma-watts to the Soul Furnace! Process Violet-Hundred is failing? Six hundred kilograms of Charm Catalyst into the mix! Eureka! Start a new assembly line: personal Eyeblink Moderators! Has the Bloodwort stabilized yet? No? Lash it with the Zestful Invigorators! Cancel the Corndog Project, and feed the experimental subjects to the Hullygees! How are the Pull Hats selling this season? That poorly? Try them with claw-tassels in plaid!”

  Jack and his momentarily silent Worrybird had reached the base of Uncle Bradley’s seat of power, and now the edisonical eminence took notice of the supplicant. Before Jack could even state his need, Uncle Bradley, laying a machicolated salesman’s smile upon him, was offering a concise prix-fixe of options.

  “Worrybird, correct? Of course! Obviousness obtrudes! Here are your recoursical tactics, in order of cost and desirability. For five thousand crones, we inject the bird with a Circuitry Virus. In three days the bird is totally roboticized. Still unremovable, of course
, but its lethality is slowed by fifty percent. For three thousand crones, we attach a Secondary Imagineer to your cerebrumal interstices. You promptly forget the bird is there for the rest of your allotted span. For eight hundred crones, a simple cable allows you to share the bird’s own mentation. Thus you enjoy your own death, and feel it to be darwinically mandated. Lastly, for a piddling three hundred crones, we remand one of our novice Boyo-Boys to stay by your side till you succumb to the inevitable wastage. He plys you with personalized jest and frolic, and remonstrates with anyone who dares to offer you contumely!”

  Jack could barely conceal his dismay. “Those – those are my only choices?”

  “What more could a sensible man want? The Worrybird is an incorrigable opponent, and no one besides the recondite and rascally Uncle Bradley dares even to tamper with one! Be quick now, old gansel! Which will it be?”

  Jack wimbled and wambled pitifully. “I have not even the three hundred crones for the humblest palliation. I was hoping for more triumphalist affronts and easier terms…”

  “What! You dare to waste Uncle’s invaluable chronospasms without funds in reserve! And then to derogate my nostrums as if you were a fellow engineer at a throwdown session of the Tinkerer’s Sodality! Away with you, laggardly old momerath!”

  Suddenly, the Papyrus Mouther was by Jack’s elbow. Without pleasant hostly ado, Jack was spun about and frog-marched from the Cave of the SFErical Monarch. Just before the heavy door slammed behind him, Jack could hear Uncle Bradley resume his litany of savantical willfullness: “Engage the services of ten thousand more Glissandos, and another dozen Kriegsteins!”

  Summarily and insultively ejected onto the cheesily porous cobbled terrace before the SFErical Emporium, true night pressing down from above like a corpulent lover, Jack knew himself at the end of both his abilities and the universe’s possibilities. The weight of the Worrybird seemed suddenly Atlasian. At the first “Never again, but not yet!”, every nerve in Jack’s poor frame thrilled with galvanic imbroglication. He hung his head, able to focus only on the snailslick cobbles.

  Three tags of payrus skittered by just then, and without much hope Jack used the last of his scanty vigor to retrieve them.

  Seek Saint Fiacre.

  Now was veracious and lordly midnight come without fear of fleering misrecognition to occupy Drudge City like a famously conquering cubic khan. Much too low in the sky hung a sherberty scoop-hollowed partial moon like a slice of vanilla-icecream-sheened cantaloupe half-eaten by a finicky godling. Stars shown in the space between the tips of the errant satellites horns. Insect-seeking sweaterbats, their calls of “stitch-stitch!” leavening the mist, thronged the curvaceous canyons formed by the tottering towers of home and office, both kinds of hobbledehoy establishment darkened as their inhabitants blissfully or troubledly slept. Only meeps and monks, strumpets and troubadors, witlings and mudlarks were abroad at this hour – at least in this dismal section of Drudge City. Perhaps among the delightful theaters in the district known as Prisbey’s Heaves, or in the saucer-slurping cafes of Mechanics’ Ramble, good citizens yet disported themselves without fear of encountering lurking angina-anklers or burrow-bums. And surely – most sadly of a certainty – at Boris Crocodile’s Beanery and Caustics Bar, ghosty-eyed Nori Nougat was even at this moment frugging with ledge-browed Zack Zither, while Stinky Frankie Konk tortured banshee wails from his hybrid instrument.

  But out here, where putrid Ashmolean Alley and rancid Rotifer Gangway ranked as the only streets of distinction, no such gaiety could be found. There lolloped only a besmirched and bedaubed and bedemoned Jack Neck, bustedly dragging himself down block after block, in search of Saint Fiacre.

  The last Jack had heard – from Dirty Bill Brownback, in fact – rumors of a Saint sighting had recently wafted from out Ubidio way. No guarantee that said sighted Saint was named Fiacre, or that he was even still present. Saints had a disconcerting propensity to phase-shift at random. Yet poor Jack Neck had no other phantom to pursue, so thence he now leathered.

  Two hours past the nights navel, Jack Neck emerged from encircling buildings onto bare-tiled Pringle Plaza. In the middle of the civic space ruminated an eyelid-shuttered naked Saint.

  The Saint had once been human. After much spiritual kenning and abstemious indulgences, making the choice to give him or herself up entirely to the avariciously bountiful forces of the Indeterminate, the human had morpholyzed into a Saint. The Saint’s trunk had widened and spread into a bulbous heap, from which sprouted withered legs and off-kilter arms, but no visible generative parts. Instead, out of the trunk at queer angles protruded numerous quasi-organic spouts and intakes similar to rusty gutter-pipes. The Saint’s neck was a corded barrel supporting a pointy-peaked head on which the features had wandered north, south, east and west. Overall, the creature was a pebbled mushroom-white, and three times the size of Jack. Around this living interface with the Indeterminate, the air wavered whorlfully

  Humble as a wet cat, Jack approached the Saint. When the Worrybird-carrier was within a few yards of the strange being, the Saint opened his eyes.

  “Are thee Fiacre?” nervously intoned Jack, who had never cozened with a Saint before, nor ever thought to.

  “Aye.”

  “I was sent to thee. This bumptious bird I would begone.”

  The Saint pondered for a chronospasm. “You must perambulate round the Inverted Stupa for three hours, reciting without cease, Always once again, and perhaps now.’”

  “This will cause the Worrybird to relinquish its hold?”

  “Not at all. The procedure will simply give me further time to peer into the Indeterminate. But nonetheless, you must attend with precision to my instructions, upon pain of rasterbation.”

  “As you say, oh Saint.”

  Luckily, the Inverted Stupa was only half a league onward. Hurrying with renewed hope, Jack soon reached the famous monument. In the middle of another peopleless plaza, lit fitfully by torches of witch’s-hair, was a railed pit of no small dimensions. Looking down over the rail, Jack saw the vertiginous walls of the Inverted Stupa, lighted windows stretching down to the earth’s borborygmous bowels, deeper by far than even Baron Sugarslinger’s realm.

  Without delay, Jack began his circular hegira, chanting his Saintly mantra.

  “Always once again, and perhaps now. Always once again, and perhaps now…”

  The Worrybird seemed in no wise discommoded by Jack’s croaking exertions. Jack tried not to lose his resurgent tentative cheer. At long last, just when Jack’s legs – both good and bad – felt ready to snap, a nearby clock tolled five, releasing him to return to the Saint.

  Saint Fiacre sat unchanged, a yeasty enigmatic effigy with a face like an anthropomorphic cartoon breadloaf

  “You have done well, old mockmurphy. Come close now, and cover my sacred Intake Number Nine with your palm.”

  Jack sidle-stepped up to the Saint, entering the zone where his vision burbled. He raised his hand toward the properly labelled bodypipe, then capped the opening with the flat of his permanently work-roughened hand.

  Instantly, the insidious and undeniable vacuum-suck often dozen black holes!

  Jack’s hand was quickly pulled in. Before he could even gasp, his shoulder was pressed to the treacherous Intake Number Nine. Then Jack felt himself drawn even further in! Oddly he experienced no pain. Only, he was sure, because he was already dead.

  Soon Jack was ingulped headwise up to both shoulders. His hump delayed his swallowment slightly, but then, thanks to a swelling surge of pull-power, even his abused hump was past the rim.

  And the Worrybird too? Apparently not! Peeled off like a potato skin was that manfaced mordaunt! But what of their commingled Akashic Aura? Only Gossip Time would tell…

  Within seconds, Jack was fully through Intake Number Nine. Then began a journey of sense-thwarting intricacy. Through a maze of bloodlit veiny pipes Jack flowed like the slorq at Krespo’s, until he finally shot out of a funnel-mouth into ultracoloure
d drifts of sheer abundant nothingness that smelled like a bosomy woman and tasted like Shugwort’s Lemon Coddle. Here existence was a matter of wayward wafts and dreamy enticements, so connubially unlike the pestiferous hurlyburly of mundane existence. Time evaporated, and soon Jack did too…

  Early morning in Pringle Plaza, sunlight like the drip of candyapple glaze. Sanitation chimps were about their cleaning, sweeping litter and leaf into the open mouths of attendant roadhogs. A travelling preacher had unfolded his pocket altar and was preaching the doctrine of Klacktoveedsedsteen to a yawning group of bow-tied office dandies. Saint Fiacre, having just given a lonely little girl the second head she had requested, suddenly quivered all over as if stricken by Earthquake Ague, then decocted a real-as-mud, sprightly-as-fleas Jack Neck from Outflow Number Three.

  Jack got woozily to his tiny feet. “Saint Fiacre, I thank thee!”

  “Say twenty-seven Nuclear Novenas nightly, invoking the names of Gretchen Growl, Mercy Luna and the Rowrbazzle. And do not stick your foolish mummer’s head out any more windows without forethought.”

  And then Saint Fiacre was gone.

  Having polished off his supper and seen the merry Motherway lickily attending to his bonedog privates, mawkly old Jack Neck now commonly got to Boris Crocodiles a little later each night. Those Nuclear Novenas took time, and he did not trust either his tongue or his pledged determination after a shot of Dinky Pachinko’s dumble-rum. Neither could his saviorology be allowed to interfere during the day with Jacks ardent eyeballing of the exploits of the mighty Dean Tesh, Motorball Mauler! So postprandial were his doxologies.

  But despite the slight change in his schedule, Jack still entered the Beanery and Caustics Bar in mid-stridulation of hookah-banjo, still found his favourite reserved barstool awaiting him, still feasted his rheumy eyes on the flirtsome gavotteners atrot, and still affirmed to any and all who would lend an ear, “Yessir, assuming you can get through the rough spots, life can turn out mighty sweet!”