The Great Galloon

by Tom Banks

  Stanley stepped into the room just behind Rasmussen and immediately realised that the Brunt had been right. This was the hottest room Stanley had ever been in. In it were lots of heavy, oily tools, such as pickaxes, bellows, a great pair of bolt cutters, a hammer the size of a fencepost and half a dozen different shovels and spades, as if the Brunt was a gardener, a blacksmith and a miner all at once. At one end of the room was a chute, below which was an iron hopper, like a skip, full of coal. In the far wall was a metal door, at least eight feet square, of immensely strong construction, with rivets the size of coconut halves, criss-crossed with thick steel bands. The middle of the door was glowing orange from the heat of the fire behind it.

  As Stanley and Rasmussen watched through their darkened visors, the Brunt picked up a great wooden stick, charred and notched with use, and used it to lift the latch on the red-hot door.

  ‘Stand back, please, Rasmussen and Stanley,’ he said, and they had no doubt that it was a good idea. The Brunt opened the door with the stick, letting out a blast of heat like they had never felt. He hung his small kettle on a hook at the end of the blackened stick, and thrust it into the fire.

  Just a few seconds later he withdrew the stick, which was in flames, and took the kettle, now whistling merrily, off the hook. He put the kettle on the ground, beat the stick with the cloth until the flames went out and used it to close the door again. Then he picked up the kettle, which was still whistling, and led the way out of the room. Stanley looked at Rasmussen in awe. She seemed similarly impressed and gave a happy shrug. Then they followed him back along the corridor to his little bedroom, almost forgetting to take off their protective hoods.

  Over tea, they asked more questions.

  ‘So you keep the fire burning, the Brunt?’

  ‘Yes, Rasmussen.’

  ‘Just you?’

  ‘Yes, Stanley.’

  ‘Can I have more sugar please, the Brunt?’

  ‘Yes, Stanley.’

  ‘Do you ever get bored?’

  ‘Yes, Rasmussen.’

  And so on. They learned that the Brunt only had to shovel coal for two hours a day, first thing in the morning, to keep the Galloon aloft. They learned that he did indeed get bored on occasion, but he liked to play solitaire and whittle bits of wood and coal into interesting shapes. He was making a chess set, but only had the pawns so far. He kept up a written correspondence with the Captain, and trained rats and other animals that he found in the hold. They were able to do things for him, such as fetch his slippers, read out interesting excerpts from newspapers, and so on. Indeed, as they talked, one particular rat popped out from under the bed, and began sweeping up around the fireplace and generally keeping the place tidy. Stanley was only slightly surprised to see that it was wearing clogs whittled out of clothes pegs.

  ‘Do you like shovelling coal?’ he said to the Brunt once more.

  ‘Yes, Stanley.’

  ‘Do you ever want to come outside?’

  ‘No, Rasmussen. Too cold.’

  ‘Don’t you like the cold?’

  ‘Don’t know. I would die.’

  ‘Does anything get on your nerves?’

  But the Brunt didn’t answer that last question straight away. It appeared to Stanley that the Brunt was beginning to come out of himself and wanted to answer with more than a yes or a no. He seemed to be struggling with a thought, as if he wanted to say something out loud, but wasn’t sure how it would go down.

  Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke again. ‘The noise,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Stanley, suddenly remembering why they had come down here in the first place. ‘The noise. It’s not . . . it’s not you, is it, the Brunt?’

  ‘No, Stanley,’ said the Brunt. ‘Too loud. I like quiet. The noise makes my head ache. Stops me from . . .’

  And then, as if someone had been listening in, the noise happened again. And down here it was even louder than on deck. It thrummed through the Brunt’s little room like a tidal wave, smashing the teacups and making Stanley’s horn shudder and his head swell. As the cleaning rat scuttled into a corner, the Brunt clenched his mighty fists and pressed them to his temples.

  His collection of whittled coal animals fell from the mantelpiece and shattered. He had his mouth open, but Stanley couldn’t tell if he was shouting or not, so loud was the noise this time. The noise carried on, and Stanley watched as the Brunt curled himself up into a tight but enormous ball and pulled his thick blanket up to his chin. Stanley was surprised and upset to see a great wet tear plop onto the Brunt’s pillow as he screwed his eyes shut tight.

  After a minute and two seconds, the noise died, and Rasmussen stood up from where she had been crouching on the floor. The Brunt was sobbing slightly and still had his eyes squeezed shut. They looked at him, and thought about how awful it must be for him, down here on his own, trying to get on with his thankless work, but being driven to bed and distraction by these awful noises.

  ‘Right,’ they said together, but quietly so as not to disturb the Brunt further.

  ‘This isn’t fair,’ whispered Rasmussen. ‘We have to find out what’s causing these noises, and make them stop. For his sake.’

  ‘And ours!’ said Stanley, his ears still ringing.

  ‘The noise is louder here than anywhere,’ said Rasmussen. ‘So we must be getting nearer to . . . whatever it is.’

  ‘But what is it? And if it’s scary enough to make the Brunt cry, what chance have we got of stopping it?’ said Stanley, trying to appeal to Rasmussen’s sensible side, but knowing she was right really.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ said Rasmussen, and actually stamped her foot a little. ‘Whatever it is, it’s causing all sorts of bother and must be made to see sense. Come along, Stanley, we have a job to do.’

  And, taking Stanley’s hand, she turned for the door. They stopped and turned in the doorway, and Stanley said, ‘See you later, the Brunt. We’ll do what we can to help.’

  But the Brunt just stayed still, curled up on his bed with his eyes screwed up. They closed the door gently behind them.

  ‘It’s up to us now,’ said Rasmussen.

  ‘Yes. It’s up to us,’ Stanley agreed. And with a slight gulp, he set off down the dark corridor again, wondering, not for the first time, whether they would get all this out of the way in time for the adventure to start.

  Of course nobody on the Galloon knew that Stanley and Rasmussen had been having tea with the Brunt. In fact, almost nobody knew the Brunt was there. But the fact that they were losing height hadn’t gone unnoticed. People were starting to gossip and many theories were being put forward.

  Only Cloudier and Clamdigger knew the real danger they were in, and they hadn’t had a chance to speak to each other about it yet. Up in the crow’s nest, Clamdigger swung his trusty brass telescope away from the weather balloon, to focus on the pursuing beasts, which were just beginning to heave into view. He could see them flapping their huge wings lazily, as they powered after the floating ship.

  BeheMoths weren’t evil, but they were dangerous. Clamdigger had heard tales of them from seasoned old skysailors, and he had even doubted their existence, but now here they were. If the Captain couldn’t work out how to take the ship higher soon, these destructive beasts would latch onto it, like they latched on to anything even vaguely edible, and begin devouring the oiled canvas of the sails and the great balloon itself. And they were more or less unstoppable. Clamdigger lowered his telescope, and picked up a speaking tube that was clipped to the mast by his ear.

  ‘Erm . . .’ he said, uncertainly. ‘The BeheMoths are on their way. To stern. Could someone send up a cup of tea, please?’

  In the weather balloon, Cloudier was reading frantically. She had a small selection of her favourite books up here – not just poetry, but story books, reference books, diaries and magazines, and any one of them could have contained something important.

  So far, nothing had struck her as useful, although she had le
arned how to get BeheMoth spit out of a linen smock, and what the collective noun was for BeheMoths. It was a ‘foreboding’.

  There didn’t seem to be any stories about brave Gallooniers ridding their vessel of the terrible beasts through the power of poetry. She looked up briefly to rest her eyes, and suddenly a huge leggy shape swooped down on the little balloon that was keeping her aloft. It fluttered its wings panickily, and Cloudier saw its jaws gape as it flew alongside the balloon.

  ‘Oi!’ she yelled, but the BeheMoth took no notice.

  ‘Don’t!’ shouted Cloudier, standing up from her cushion

  ‘Eat!’ She reached down to the shelf and grabbed a book at random.

  ‘My!’ She threw her arm back way behind her head, with the heavy book in her hand.

  ‘Weather balloon!’ and with this slightly unsatisfactory finish, she flung the heavy book into the air. It only had enough force behind it to tap the BeheMoth on its revolting knee, but that was enough to stop it from settling. It dropped straight towards Cloudier, who saw its skull-like features up close for the first time.

  ‘Euw!’ she cried, and ducked just as the moth swooped past her and away. Cloudier stood up again to watch it go, but at that moment the book she had flung came back to her. It landed before her with a heavy crunk, and the pages flopped open.

  Having lived on the Galloon all of her life, Cloudier was only slightly surprised to realise that the chapter it had fallen open at was called ‘The BeheMoths, and How We Frightened Them Away’.

  ‘Ah!’ she said to herself. ‘That’ll do nicely.’

  And, ignoring the BeheMoths as best she could, she settled down to read once more.

  Down in the hold, Stanley and Rasmussen had made their way back along the corridor in the opposite direction to the Fire Entrance. They had taken one of the Brunt’s old oil lamps, feeling sure he wouldn’t mind, and had decided to look in every room they passed, hoping for a clue as to what the noises were.

  During the last outburst of noise, they had tried their best to figure out what direction it was coming from. Rasmussen said she thought they were heading the right way – towards the pointy end of the Galloon. So they were now standing in front of an old door with rusty hinges, arguing over who should open it.

  ‘It’s my turn!’ hissed Rasmussen, indignantly.

  ‘But this is the first one, how can it be your turn?’ whispered Stanley, grabbing the door handle with both hands.

  ‘Because it’s always my turn first. And I’m older than you,’ said Rasmussen, putting her hands over his.

  ‘You’re not!’ cried Stanley, forgetting that they were being quiet and stealthy.

  ‘I am. I was the Queen of the Congo in a former life. That makes me a thousand years old, in a way.’

  ‘Corks,’ said Stanley, thinking how Rasmussen was full of surprises, and before he could think of a comeback, she had wrenched open the door. But inside was just a broom cupboard, albeit one that hadn’t been used for a number of years, with a family of mice living in the mop bucket. The Brunt had obviously met these mice, as one of them was reading a newspaper. It clicked its tongue irritably at the intrusion.

  ‘Sorry!’ said Stanley and Rasmussen together and closed the door quietly.

  ‘There are dozens of doors in this corridor. We’d better split up. You do that side, and I’ll do this.’ Stanley moved on as he spoke, and Rasmussen followed.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If you find anything interesting, give the secret signal.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Stanley, his hand on the next door handle. ‘There’s no one else here.’

  ‘There might be – behind one of these doors,’ said Rasmussen theatrically, and wrenched open the door to what turned out to be a small, mouldy bathroom.

  Soon they had looked in almost all the rooms down this corridor, including a room with a dark, forgotten theatre, its curtains hanging forlornly before an empty stage, and a long room lined with bunk beds, each with its own washstand and chamber pot. But they had found nothing that looked like it was capable of making a noise such as the one they were investigating.

  In fact it contained nothing more foreboding than the thick, clinging cobwebs that coated their hair and faces every few steps. Stanley realised that it must have been a very long time since anyone had been to this particular part of the Galloon.

  He caught up with Rasmussen just as she was about to investigate the last door in the corridor. This one was slightly larger than the others, and slightly more ornate. There was a faint pattern carved in the wood, although it was as covered in dust as everything else down here, and so hard to make out.

  Rasmussen knocked politely on the door, waited ten seconds and opened it. She held up the lamp as they peered in, but it was merely another storeroom with empty boxes, some old books and a low table with a smoking candle on it.

  ‘Nothing in here.’ Rasmussen closed the door, with a disappointed air.

  ‘Maybe this is pointless,’ said Stanley. ‘Even the Brunt hasn’t been along here for years, judging by all these cobwebs. We’re wasting our time.’

  ‘There’re no more doors on this corridor, but maybe we should look one floor up,’ said Rasmussen brightly. ‘That noise has got to be coming from somewhere.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stanley. ‘Or maybe we should go back on deck. Surely this is a job for the Captain, or Clamdigger, or any one of a hundred people older, cleverer and more responsible than us. What if we find the thing that’s making this noise and it’s a herd of wild elephants, or an artillery regiment, or another Brunt who isn’t so friendly?’

  Stanley had been moving back along the passage, but stopped when he saw that Rasmussen wasn’t going to follow him.

  ‘Stanley!’ she said crossly, pulling cobwebs from her hair. ‘Don’t you dare pretend you’re too scared. You’re no more scared than I am, which is a bit but not much.’ She was now struggling to get the sticky cobwebs off her hands, which was making her crosser still. ‘If we meet wild elephants, we’ll tame them. If we meet an artillery regiment, we’ll rout it. If we meet another Brunt, we’ll make friends with it, and if that doesn’t work we’ll catch it in a cage and drop it off in the snow. And you know all that perfectly well. If you’re bored or tired, just say so. But don’t pretend you’re too little or too scared.’

  Stanley should have known that Rasmussen would react like this. If there was one thing that made her cross (and actually there were dozens), it was people making excuses for being lazy. And he knew she was right. Somebody had to find the noise and put a stop to it, and it might as well be them. The Captain was preoccupied, the Brunt was ill in bed, and everybody else was somewhere else, so there he had it. He was just about to apologise to Rasmussen when a thought struck him like a clout on the ear.

  ‘A smoking candle?’ he said.

  Seconds later they were back inside the small storeroom, examining the stump of a candle that had been blown out some time in the last few minutes.

  ‘I didn’t light it,’ said Stanley. ‘You didn’t light it, and the Brunt’s ill in bed. So there is somebody else down here after all.’

  And our doom seemed upon us. The beasts were ravaging us, eating all our supplies, down to the very bags and tents they were stored in. No book had warned us of this danger, and were it not for a stroke of great fortune, we would never have made it down from the mountainside.

  Cloudier looked up from the book, swallowed hard, and blinked. The BeheMoths were flying past in twos and threes now, and she was hunkered deep in the corner of her little basket. Hoping that the author would get straight to the point, she brought her eyes back down to the page.

  At that instant, a storm rent the hillside all around. Thunder raged, and drops of rain the size of goldfish bowls fell all about us. Lying in my tent, with the death’s-head of a BeheMoth just inches from me, I watched as it broke off from devouring my home. Its long antennae waved around, as if tasting the air. Thunder crashed across the valley, and the rain picked up pace. F
alling now in sheets, it began to batter the creature and me. I raised an arm to protect myself. Thunder crashed again, and when I looked once more, the beast was gone. All its foul brethren went with it, up to the grey clouds and out of our lives forever. Rain saves play.

  ‘Wow!’ said Cloudier, forgetting for a moment to be nonchalant.

  Was this it? Had she found the answer to the Galloon’s problems? She didn’t have long to reflect, because at that moment her little balloon shook and rocked so hard she was nearly tipped out. She clung tightly to the edge of the basket, and peeped over. Below her the sky was now thick with the flapping, dusty shapes of BeheMoths, each one as big as a cow.

  Her basket was being buffeted and bashed as the falling Galloon dragged it down into the throng. One of the beasts took an experimental bite at the tethering rope as it flew by, and this was enough to sting Cloudier into action. If that rope snapped, or was eaten through, she would be floating free, held aloft only by her small canvas balloon, in a flock of cloth-eating monsters. It wasn’t enough to send a message asking Clamdigger to haul her in. She had to take evasive action.

  Secretly thrilled, but remembering to tut and roll her eyes for the look of the thing, she picked up a rocket-shaped message capsule, and threw one foot up onto the rim of the basket. Using the bookshelf as a brace, she pushed herself over until she was balanced precariously on the inch-wide strip of plush that covered the basketwork.

  Running past her head was the half-mile long hempen cable that connected her weather balloon to the deck of the Galloon. It wasn’t fully wound out just now, but nevertheless the tether stretched out hundreds of yards, through the flock of beasts, to the mountainous mass of sails, balloons, rigging and flags that was the Galloon when seen from this angle. The wind whipped through her hair, and her knuckles whitened as she thought about what she had to do.