Little Agnes and the Ghosts of Kelpie Wharf

by Stella Drexler

enveloped Vic once more, and when it faded, he stood, quite himself, once more.

  Dr Antonin sighed in relief, but Vic looked down at his ratty figure in slight disappointment. Being venomous had been, momentarily, rather fraught with possibility. He had little time to consider his continuing misfortune; there were more pressing matters at hand.

  “Which one of these mad dinguses is the matter transporter?” Agnes demanded, fiddling with the volatile cylinders of toxic liquids, the ill-conceived engines, the particle accelerators and the directed energy rays she found scattered haphazardly around the laboratory. She pressed a button on a hopeful looking wave cannon, and a beam of poisonous green light shot from its barrel, disintegrating a rack of test tubes filled with murky grey sludge.

  “Stop that! Stop mucking with things!” Dr Antonin cried desperately. “You're going to ruin everything!”

  Agnes shot him an arch look. “You'd best help, then, I reckon. Where is the matter transporter?”

  He pressed his lips together with a stubborn gleam in his dark eyes.

  “Right, then. I'll just keep mucking about, then, eh?” She stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes widening agog. “Ooh. What's this?”

  She stepped towards a large, cylindrical glass chamber that spanned from floor to ceiling, its diameter at least as wide as her bedroom closet laboratory at home in the Crowley Tower of Astonishing Innovations and Brilliant Discoveries, so named by her pompous, infamously mad papa. The chamber was not the most astonishing feature, for it was just one of two constructed side-by-side along the far wall of Antonin's laboratory. Rather, it was the large chamber of moving, multi-coloured energy housed in between the two empty chambers that tickled her fancy.

  “Wicked!” She pressed her nose to the glass, watching the liquidised energy swirl and swish in the thick glass chamber.

  “Stay away from there!”

  She ignored the raving doctor and directed her attention to the collection of dials and gauges protruding from the base of the chamber. They looked much like those on the Brass Canary, and she suspected they worked in much the same way. She examined the display of strange numbers on a small scrap of ticker tape. “What are these?”

  “Get away from there! You don't know what you're doing! You'll ruin everything!”

  Vic dragged him towards the chambers, eyeing the read out curiously. “Coordinates.”

  “Vic, you re-animated genius! They are coordinates.” She frowned. Admiring the ingenuity of the apparatus, she located the dials, spinning them at random to see the ticker tape spit out the exact coordinates she had entered.

  “It's very delicate!”

  “This won't help us much,” Agnes remarked unhappily. “I don't know anything about latitude and longitude.”

  Vic's milky eyes rolled back into his head. He thrust a thick pile of parchment he'd picked up from a side table into her hands.

  She peered down at the stack in confusion until she made sense of the cryptic symbols and sweeping criss-crossing lines. “A map! Vic! Why didn't I think of this?”

  He scoffed, but he did not trouble himself to retort.

  After several painstaking moments in which Dr Antonin watched her in smug silence, she spun the dials, grinning eagerly up at the energy chamber. It glowed violently, swirling with a frenetic vim that seemed almost lifelike. “Brilliant! Let's see if we got the coordinates right. We can zap the doctor and bring him back.” She screwed her face up thoughtfully. “I only hope it doesn't turn out like the gerbils. I was quite confident about them, too.”

  Vic tugged on his arm, and Dr Antonin dragged his heels. “Stop! I--” He hung his head in a last, forlorn gesture of defeat. “I will show you.”

  Agnes beamed at him. “Okay. Thanks!”

  He submitted to Vic, who tugged on his arm. He spun the dials with intense concentration, pressing buttons and eyeing the gauges carefully. He sighed in relief when he'd righted the shambles the little girl had wrought upon his beloved device.

  “Set it to send us back to Kelpie Wharf,” Agnes commanded imperiously.

  He turned a scowl upon her. “I will not do that. I will send you all out to sea.”

  Her smile did not falter; if anything, it was more radiant than ever. “All right. You go first. Vic?”

  Vic propelled him towards one of the empty chambers. Antonin held up his hands, squealing in terror. “All right! All right! I will show you how to set it correctly.”

  “Thanks” She watched as he consulted the map coordinates and spun the dials. Vic eyed his handiwork speculatively, then nodded to Agnes. “Great! Now, you and Vic go first. He'll lash you to the railing or something equally clever, and then I'll bring him back.”

  Vic did not like the sound of this. “Spliced.”

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You're not going to get spliced! Just don't move. I'll give you a few moments to bind him up really good, and then I'll zap you right back here. If you aren't ready, just don't step back into the beam, and I'll take a stray dog or some village riff-raff instead.”

  Vic heaved a deep, long-suffering sigh, but he stepped into the empty chamber, dragging the pleading, wide-eyed mad man along with him. “Justice.”

  “That's right, Dr Antonin, Vic will explain everything to my father when we get back, and you will be sorry. Ready Vic?”

  “Keen.”

  “Ace.” She slammed the glass chamber door shut with a snap and gleefully cranked the dial on the operator panel. “Right, then, old chap, see you in a mo’”

  The energy churned and battered the walls of its chamber, and a loud, almost deafening whine filled the air, rattling the laboratory walls. In a flash of light, Vic and his unfortunate captive were gone. Agnes spun back around to admire the doctor's impressive accomplishments. Left alone to Dr Antonin's devices, she could not resist another go with the directed energy cannon. Or the human transmuter or the cyclotron, or the really brilliant hand-held guns that performed a variety of very hilarious functions, such as slightly altering the length of the sailors' noses or their hair or changing the colour of their skin or giving them really hideous buck teeth or...

  She stopped dead, glancing sheepishly at the small pocket watch tucked into a breast pocket of her lab coat. She'd quite forgotten to zap Vic back in all the excitement. She hurried to the matter transporter and reversed the direction. Light flashed once again, and a very irritated-looking Vic glared out at her through the thick, shining glass.

  “Sorry, sorry!” She strode forward to throw open the door. “I got a bit...carried away.”

  “Shiny?”

  “Oh, so many shiny things! Look! This little gun here turns his arms into--” She subsided at the stern look on her companion's face. “All right, all right. I hope you left the doctor somewhere safe.”

  “Constable.”

  “Spot on, Vic. Spot on. Right. Now.” She turned towards the laboratory playground, suddenly seized with the urge to throw herself into its shiny delights, but she steeled her resolve. “We've got to get these sailors home. We'll have to get them into the matter transporter.”

  “Ship?”

  “Don't be ridiculous. This is much more entertaining.”

  “Heavy.”

  “Stop complaining. There's only about fifty of them.”

  “Seventy.”

  “Well, who's counting, anyway? Right then. Step lively.”

  It took more time than she'd anticipated to drag all the stunned monsters from the heap in the antechamber to the transporter's chamber, and they panted with the effort when they'd done. The monsters, transmuted as they were to ghastly inhuman proportions and contortions, did not quite fit. The glass door did not close behind them.

  Agnes stomped her foot in irritation. “We'll have to send them a few at a time,” she complained, dragging the mob back out of the chamber again. They sent them back to Port Enshus a half-dozen or so at a time, space permitting.

  “Havoc,” Vic moaned apathetically.

 
“Belt up! I'm not wreaking havoc. They're all knocked out. It's fine. They're the villagers' loved ones. It's a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem.”

  Vic shrugged as they hefted the last of the monsters, several semi-identical Spring-Heeled Jacks, and watched them disappear in a flash of light. “Canary?”

  “No!” Agnes glared at him. “You've already gotten to ride it. It's my turn. I'll set the dial on a delay. I've become quite good at this matter transporting thing in the last hour or so. Come on, then.” She seized his arm and dragged him inside the chamber with her, closing the door behind them. She waited eagerly, and then the light flashed, and she felt a strange floating sensation, as though every particle in her body had come completely apart, leaving only her twisted mind intact. Before she even had a moment to revel in the intriguing sensation, her parts came back together and she was righted again, blinking around at foggy Kelpie Wharf.

  The scene into which they transported was quite ghastly, which she might have anticipated, had she spent more time thinking through her choices, rather than choosing the more amusing path.

  The monsters, enervated from their temporary torpor, rampaged through the town, shrieking, howling, yowling, gurgling, biting, slashing and terrorising the poor, unsuspecting fishy villagers, who battled their loved ones with harpoons, six-shooters, axes and bits of broken buildings they'd picked up in the melee.

  “Havoc,” Vic said in a very smug way.

  Agnes ignored him. She threw herself into the mayhem, calling out to the murderous