9 Tales From Elsewhere 9 Read online

  He’d never thought that was something he wanted, before. But maybe he’d been wrong.

  Shannon held out the bag again. He plucked out another steaming, vinegary chip and popped it into his mouth.

  Johnny and his daughter stayed where they were. After a while the bus doors closed, and it drove away.

  THE END.

  JACK-A-FALLING by Tom Osborne

  You’re wasting your time with him, lads, leave him I say!

  Can you not see the vomit drying on his breeches? It’ll take more than the tinkle of coin in his mug to rouse him tonight. Old Tom’s never good for a tune after one these days. Leave him be by the piano boys, there’ll be no music tonight.

  Aye, you could. Martin’s Inn’ll have fiddles screeching late into the night tonight, as will The Albatross up on Mason’s Hill. Of course you’ll leave without your wallets and be lucky to leave with your lives, young scholars like you. This is an airman’s town. Much as I’d love to hear the tale of how a brave young collegiate took on three of Pat Burrow’s moonlight boys armed only with a textbook and a slide rule, I’d as soon not have young blood on these old hands. This is the only drinking hole on the right side of the gas ducts that’ll serve at this time, so heed my words and stay in the warm.

  Not totally without entertainment, I’d say. For less than Old Tom’s going rate I’d be happy to furnish you young gents with a story to while away the time. A glass of whisky buys you the tale, and its sequel hinges on the bottle. You’ll want the sequel lads, and trust me.

  Old soak I may be, young man, but I’ll swing this hook into your guts to snag your bowels and we’ll hang ‘em over the door, you say so again. That’s more like it. You’ll have to go to her to get her attention, she’s deaf as a coot. A large glass, mind.

  Now that we’re all settled. What know you of Jack-A- Falling?

  Bollocks, says you? Maybe so, but it wasn’t bollocks that took down The Buzzard last spring nor bollocks that saw The Nightjar dashed on the rocks out near Weakman’s Reach.

  Some dastardly new weapon from our eastern cousins? Now there’s a pretty thought. Ever been out east? They had anything that powerful they were keeping secret, and we’d all be speaking their foul tongue boys, Mark my words.

  Pirates? Don’t make me laugh schoolboy. I’ve seen pirates in my time, here, see these? And that one, too? Aye, they’re dangerous men, and desperate too which makes them all the more fearsome. But a hole ripped clean from stern to bow, and all the crewmen between killed? And not just killed but ripped? Torn? Plastering the cabins with gore and half-digested rations? No pirate, boy. No man at all. That was Jack, my boys, plain as day.

  How would I know? Indeed, how does anyone know anything, unless it’s from sitting in lofty towers sifting through dusty books and being buggered nightly by professors? I saw him, you cheeky little bastard. I met Jack ‘afore he was Jack.

  Oh would you look at that, I’ve drained my glass already and our tale is not yet begun. Fetch me another, and perhaps if there’s less interruptions from now on I’ll have less time to sip at it.

  Lovely.

  He was a shivering kid on the docks when first I saw him. I was tasked with sitting out before the gangplank holding the sign-up sheet. I was the last warning. It was the skin, you see. You can spot Airman skin a mile away and you’re looking at a prime example.

  Scarred and mottled by burning metal plates, chewed up by gears, great chunks of it missing to tar-coated whips and pecked at by daggers in dockside brawls. Blasted flat by bitter winds and scorched by that pure sun above the clouds. These eyes have squinted through the broiling madness of great storms to seek out the placid heart within, these ribs have cracked as snapping cables whipped through the night. The arm? Well, god knows what chymicals those mad bastards use to power a gyro motor but a touch of it on the wrist and they’ll take the arm just before the elbow and by god you’ll thank them for it.

  And the ink, that too. It’s a map of the open sky and the lands beneath, which are her dominion. This jagged stuff here? That’s the language of the slave-drivers in Kesh, and believe me it’s no prettier to hear it aloud. The weather vane is 100,000 miles by air. We’d be here all night if I took you through the rest.

  This is skin that’s not seen home for a lifetime. It’s skin that makes most rebellious youngsters reconsider and run home to their sainted mothers before they sign their lives away.

  It didn’t work on him.

  One look at him and you could tell there was something far worse waiting for him the way he’d come. I’ve known starvation in my time, felt it gnawing at my belly and tugging at my soul. It was close to taking him, I could see that. He was a rag-dressed skeleton standing there, all dark-socketed eyes and fidgeting hands. He had a mudwyrm tattoo circling his wrist, biting its own tail. In that town, that meant a lifetime that meant brotherhood. That meant if you leave us we’ll tie you up in a bag of lime and throw you in the canal to burn and drown. If he was risking that just by talking to me, no warning I gave would dissuade him.

  He gave me a name that I knew he’d made on the spot and papers that he’d forged with boot black and a piece of wire, or I’m a dwarf. There was nothing I could do for him, I could already see his eyes darting around the boxes and barrels. If I didn’t let him up the ramp he’d have come hidden in the hold, and that would have most likely meant chipping his frozen corpse out of the bilge with a chisel.

  I signed him up.

  Better for the crew of The Buzzard If I hadn’t, better for all of us.

  It was the AS Standardwing that took him, lovely old bird was she. One of the old Mark IV designs left over from the war. They blunted her claws and set her to work on the northerly routes up to Brunnich’s post for the rocks they haul there. She’d seen better days. Her figurehead, we still had carved wood figures on the prows then, this’ll show my age, was missing two thirds of its face. Half bird half buxom lady, it was the style back then. She was a dog’s breakfast of oily timbers and rust-chewed metal plates. The rigid dirigible was patched with canvas and leather and attached with a forest of wrist thick cables to the boat. Veined with humming pipes and coughing vents, peppered with beaten bass and peering at you with rounded portholes. She was the kind of boat a man could love, but to him she meant only escape. Of course he-

  Aye, and I’ll rip them off if you giggle when I’m speaking again. Soft now, lad. In a place like this, at this hour, you’re either tough or polite. I don’t think you’re cut out for the former, do you? Another whisky it is then, make it snappy, and remember the hook.

  Where was I? You look a little shaken my lad, have a dram yourself.

  I wasn’t out on The Standardwing myself, but on her sister ship The Black Guillemot, but I had many mates who were and the story I’ll piece together for you from now on as best I can.

  Now this may be a term you’re unfamiliar with but out in the open sky we indulge in what is termed “work”. There’s no masters to scold you when you don’t get your essays in on time, but there’s a boson who’ll flay the skin from your back if he catches you drunk at your post. An airship’s got a thousand ways to die and few are peaceful. On the southern routes tropical diseases will see you voiding your bowels till there’s nothing left of you, it gets so cold to the North that I’ve seen men’s teeth explode in their skulls. On board there’s minor accidents every day, from pulled backs and minor scorchings to small fires and knife fights below decks. Just to keep you on your toes, occasionally a pipe’ll spring a leak. Could be something as playful as a bit of scalding steam or it could fill a corridor with Sprigger’s gas from the kinetic engines. You’ll splutter your last through mouthfuls of your own lung.

  From what I hear, our boy Jack was able to navigate all of this with ease. He knew who to avoid, who to look in the eye, when to puff up and when to shrink into the shadows. Wherever he’d come from, these were skills he’d needed, right enough. He even managed to avoid the political struggles below decks unscathed. Of cours
e, below decks there aren’t any ranks, just junior crewmen. One big happy family eh? Course, boys will be boys and have their own way of asserting who’s on top and gets the most when it comes to mealtimes and who’s on bottom when night falls, if you catch my drift. I’m sure your professors have similar ideas when it comes to punishments, eh? Just having you on lads, no need to look so bleeding scandalized. I thought you only drank like old women, didn’t realise you thought like ‘em too.

  So all was well for our lost little waif, every hour he drew further and further from whatever he ran from. Life was hard, but he wasn’t afraid of hard work if it got him to where he needed to be. He bought a leather strap from a crewmate with a lucky pendant on it to hide the tattoo on his wrist. Maybe he almost forgot.

  Then, one fateful day, he was put on tub duty. An old mate of mine ran the stores on The Standardwing, a fat bastard who’d fleece you soon as look as you on land but kept his ledger straight as a die in the air. In comes our boy one day with his orders, just an inspection of the underside of the undercarriage. Folks’ve heard groanings from the plates where there should be none. My mate gives him the hooks. Leather gauntlets with big steel question marks jutting out from the wrists, boots with vicious spiked caps. To go under the tub means keeping yourself attached by hanging from the rusty metal rings that crisscross beneath to form service ladders. The hooks and spikes are kept razor sharp in case you miss, they’ll give you a fighting chance of flailing out and snagging on the wood of the hull.

  So off he goes, Hooks, spikes and goggles, furs and cap. This makes a difference from scrubbing floors, thinks he. Over the lip of the first deck, hand over hand, down he goes. The wind whistles round his head and his goggles steam. One ring, then another, then another. Pretty soon he’s dangling, his back to the earth which is now a distant memory. Casting about now, looking for a flapping bit of canvas or some exposed wiring, some fault or breech to report. Seeing nothing.

  Then, he looks down.

  Ever seen open sky? It’s a sight more beautiful and terrible than you can imagine. It’s a landscape of towering cloud formations, like an alien world. I’ve known many an adventurer struck dumb at their first real glimpse, outside of the portholes, feeling the wind on their skin as they behold it. Our jack saw something else, something great and terrible. He saw an awful intelligence that stared right back at him as he dangled.

  He feels the wind examine him, exploring his hair, his mouth, whirling around his arms and legs, getting a taste for him. In the shape of the clouds he reads its mind, sees its love, its fear and its terrible, terrible wrath. It whispers to him, calling him by name.

  His vision swims, a greyness creeps in around the corners of his eyes, his limbs lose their vitality and strength. He falls.

  Now in your college you think you know all about the sky. You’ll talk of air currents and pressure loads and wind changes. You’ll categories and label and dissect. Hear me tell you now boys; there’s more to it than that. There’s something that can’t be neatly labelled and indexed and referenced. You talk to a Skyseer from the guild, a real one, mind, not some crank. He’ll tell you right. There’s something there that governs those clouds. Something that only tolerates our presence, and barely at that. That’s the thing that had our jack in its thrall.

  Of course, you can only fall so far when you’re in a harness. Jack hung there for nigh on twenty minutes, unconscious with the wind whispering its dark secrets into his ears before anyone noticed and hauled him up. So there he is, laying in the infirmary for days, babbling and moaning, mumbling about clouds and demons and fire in the sky. No-one knows what to make of him. When the fever breaks, he’s more or less back to his old self, but he’s a marked man now. In the cut and thrust of life-below- decks, an Airman who swoons like a woman when he looks at the clouds is the lowest of the low. To save himself, he becomes an animal. He lashes out at any who approach him, earns bruises and scars and a lot of time in solitary, but eventually also the label of “not worth the effort”.

  He’s a broken boy though. Every night he goes without sleep, clutching a small blade to his chest. He listens to the moaning and groaning of the beams, the whistle of the wind as it probes the bows of the ship. He knows that it’s searching for him. It’s marked him as its own now, and will not rest until he is back in its clutches again.

  He threw himself into all the menial jobs of life aboard. He’d have peeled a million potatoes or held a candle to a thousand pairs of shit-stained underbreeches to pop the lice if it meant he could avoid tub duty again.

  My cup runs dry again boys, whose parent’s money will see me to another glass? You could do with the exercise, porky, why don’t you get the round in?

  There we go, the good stuff. Warms you better than any fire, and I’ve not had a glass as sweet in all my travels.

  Now, it happened that on this vessel there was a senior officer named Bydawell. Josef Bydawell I think his name was. By all accounts a bastard of the highest order. There are men whose cruelty is difficult to understand, boys. It’s a sudden storm in a calm ocean, a hanging at a dinner party, a rape at a parish meeting. He kept his boots polished and his buttons shiny, never a hair out of place. Kept his face placid and serene as you like as well, even when he beat the boys with leather straps and ropes until they were a bloody mess before him. Except perhaps at night, in his bolted cabin, in his bunk, as he imagined the next day’s cruelties. Maybe then a flicker of emotion might ripple over his face, a quickening of the pulse, maybe he’d even let a gasp escape. He was that kind of man.

  Now it doesn’t matter how much of a monster you make yourself into, how hard you bite or punch. If there’s fear underpinning it a man like Bydawell will smell it on you, right enough. Our boy knew this and he waited, the wait was interminable. Weeks went by and Bydawell made no move, what was he waiting for? Something special is what. Bydawell was the worst kind of cruel; a creative. He came from a well-to- do family and his commission was paid for before he was out of short trousers but he never made anything of it, still just a lowly rank on a shite detail out to the northern tundra. I’ve known men like that, balls of entitled frustration crashing around the corridors making everyone pay for their failings. Anyway, I digress.

  Have you heard of Harrigan’s fist? She’s a spinner, a storm that just keeps on rolling around like clockwork every three years, devastates everything north of the mountains. Saved us from invasion many, many lifetimes’ ago, hence the name. Ill-earned, of course, all Harrigan had to do was watch as seventy enemy ships got chewed to shit in the gale. A modern ship can make it through, just barely, if the gyroscopic gear is functioning right and everyone aboard has said their prayers. Every three years it hits the route to Brunnich’s with a vengeance.

  Now our lad knew he was on a ship heading right into the heart of it, and he trembled all night at the thought. No ship makes it through Harrigan’s fist without losing a panel or two and a tendril of icy wind was all he thought the thing outside would need to snag him by the ankle and drag him out into that great expanse to face the demon of his dreams. At night he took to tying himself to a pipe, slightly comforted by the fact that whatever it was that governed the breeze would need to shake the whole ship apart to tear him loose.

  On the first night of the storm, Bydawell sprang his trap. As the storm screamed and roared at the creaking hull, the boys snuck around the terrified lad with cudgels and a sack. With a roar of “now!” they leapt on him as one, covering him bodily with the sack and beating at the lump where they thought face might be until blood seeped through the canvas. Then they cut him loose from the pipe and carried him to the centre of the room. There was a cacophony of banging pots and pans, a flurry from crude tin flutes and a host of shouts, cheers and whoops as the boys capered around their captive. When the bag was ripped away, the boy beheld Bydawell made up in powders and wig, wrapped in blanket robes and sitting on a throne comprised of three crouching boys who dared not risk complaint. The boys were arranged around h
im on stacked benches, they capered and drank purloined rum and beat drums and other instruments in a show of forced conviviality. They kept one eye on Bydawell, knowing that they had to keep up the carnival charade or risk his displeasure. The scene was a parody of a courtroom, and Lord Chief Justice Bydawell was residing.

  The sentence was passed quick and clean; keel-hauling, no mask, no goggles, no furs. That means out the side, under the hull and back in on the opposite side maintenance hatch. Oh, and did I mention no harness? Nothing between you and the great white beyond but a pair of sharpened hooks and a prayer. Difficult as hell at the best of times, but with no furs or goggles in a storm? Blinded and freezing? A death sentence. Still, he was junior aircrew so no-one above decks would care, or even notice, right?

  Well, of course, he bit and scratched and screamed and punched and gouged but by then his crewmates’ brains were sloshing in rum and they were braying for blood. Bydawell spurred them on, promising them more stolen booze to make a quick job of it. Bets were made but no-one took them seriously or passed coin around, the odds were too steep. They forced the hooks onto his wrists and feet and pushed him out of the porthole, into the waiting arms of the storm. Jack was numb with panic, perched on the lip of the porthole, he found the first set of rings with shaking hands and hooked in. “If you don’t keep moving, you’ll freeze within the hour” says Bydawell, “10 minutes and the cold will stop you moving.” He was screaming to be heard over the gale. “Best of luck, old boy,” and, with a smirk, he slams closed the hatch and shoots the bolt.

  What? What are you looking at? Oh, you want to know if he makes it? I grow tired lads and what’s more; thirsty. Eh? Oh, so you have, good lads. Anything for an old man’s pipe? Much obliged. Drink up yourselves as well.

  Right, so there he was, outside the hull, clinging on for dear life, just him and the storm. He felt its fury, it had tasted him the first time and been denied, now it wanted blood. It was seething and boiling in rage, flashes of lightning outlining the looming clouds in silver. What air he could breathe was thin and stale where the wind didn’t snatch it away with malice. The rain drove icy needles into his eyeballs as he squinted for the next set of rungs in the murk. Muscles straining as the cold sapped their strength, he began to climb downwards. Terror was gouging great scratches into the lining of his belly, but all he had to do was survive, survive and make it to the other side.