Chimera Book One

Chapter Twenty-One

Kyp glanced back at Thingopolis, dark clouds hanging above the distant city.  He thought about the Berserker running amok, delirious with pleasure as it battered its way through the ruinous streets.  He thought about the Tealeaf, its pale body bright with guzzled Light - and Madame Chartreuse, gliding among the survivors of the Cavalcade, hunting for treasures; hunting for him.

Kyp steadied his nerves.

He’d come to the edge of an enormous crater heaped with furniture, all of it grey with mould. He eased himself down its steep slope, tiring quickly as he threaded his way through the haphazard chicanes of furniture.  Spires formed from wooden school assembly chairs reached high into the air.  His feet kept sinking into the ground, porridge-like sludge creeping over the tops of his shoes.  Tiring quickly, Kyp leant against a wooden table, only for it to collapse into dust beneath his weight.

He hadn’t been walking long when he encountered a flamingo pushing a large old-fashioned pram.  Around the flamingo’s neck on a sash of ribbon were a snare drum and two drumsticks. Tied to the creature’s knobbly knees was a pair of cymbals. In place of an ordinary flamingo’s body, it possessed an inflatable rubber ring, dotted with puncture-repair patches.  Hanging from the underside of the pram was an aged foot-pump.           

‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ the flamingo announced quite suddenly.  ‘Not since Simian Miriam and her Flaming Hoop of Fire has there been an act as exciting as this! Not since the Brothers Fallzoffalot’s triple-decker trapeze-manoeuvre above the raging rapids of Niagara has there been a comparable spectacle of theatrical accomplishment! Put your hands together, I entreat you, for the undisputed master of mirth, magic and mysteriousness! Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Cuthbert Two-Tongues!’        

The hood of the pram retracted revealing a ventriloquist’s dummy wearing a dented top hat, bowtie and a purple velvet suit.  The dummy’s face was livid pink with a pointy nose.  Its glassy green eyes swivelled quickly in their sockets.  It was holding a silver-handled cane, which it brandished at the flamingo.

‘Music!’ the dummy demanded.

The flamingo gave the pram a vigorous shake, the funnel of a gramophone popping up periscope-like to emit a fanfare of scratchy-sounding trumpets. The flamingo gave the pram another hard shake and a fishing rod shot out of it, the torch fastened to it bathing the dummy in a circle of light.

‘Good evening!’ said Cuthbert, fixing Kyp with a blank-eyed stare. ‘Welcome to Rising Damp!  Looks like we’ve got a shy one in the audience tonight.  We need a joke to get things underway.  I say, I say, I say, what do you call a man with a seagull on his head?’

Kyp didn’t have the heart to tell the dummy he knew this joke. Didn’t everyone?

‘Cliff!’ cried Cuthbert, pleased with himself, his bowtie spinning.

The flamingo gave the pram another shake, a second fishing-rod shooting out of it, a hand-written sign hanging from it that read, ‘Audience Laughs’.

Kyp didn’t.

His bowtie coming to an abrupt halt, Cuthbert looked at Kyp suspiciously.

‘What are you doing all the way out here, anyway?  It’s not safe, you know.  Certainly not for the likes of you.  Don’t you know about the rot? It makes everything grittle to the touch.’

‘You mean brittle?’ said Kyp.

‘Grittle, yes, as in greakable, as in easily groken.’

‘My illustrious master experiences difficulty enunciating the letter b,’ said the flamingo.

‘Nonsense, Pneumo.  Listen - gottle of geer.’

‘It’s bottle of beer, master.’

‘Yes, gottle of geer.’

‘Bottle of beer.’         

‘Gottle.’

‘It’s bottle.’

‘I think you’ll find you’re deflating,’ Cuthbert informed the flamingo nastily, and he was right; the flamingo was sagging.

Cuthbert reached for the foot-pump hanging from the pram and attached it none-too-gently to a nozzle on the underside of the flamingo’s donut-shaped body.  Cuthbert threw the pump down on the floor and began to operate it with little stabs of his foot. 

‘From internationally acclaimed star of the stage to this,’ he muttered. ‘I used to have my own dressing room.  Fans would send me great gunches of flowers and tokens of their adoration. Of course, Marvello thought the flowers were for him, but everyone knew it was me the people adored. We were a great dougle-act known the world over, our names in lights.  We were unstoppable, a showgiz phenomenon, until Marvello decided he didn’t want the fame anymore, didn’t want the lights or the money. No, he wanted to pursue a solo career.’

‘Cuthbert -.’

‘Don’t interrupt, Pneumo,’ snapped Cuthbert, his foot attacking the pump. ‘You know I hate that.  Marvello used to do that to me all the time.’

‘But Cuthbert -.’

‘I told you!’ he said, turning to find his assistant’s over-inflated body floating several feet in the air.  

Kyp giggled.  He couldn’t help it. 

The dummy glared at Kyp murderously, before kicking the foot-pump away.  He watched, amused, as Pneumo shot into the air and across the dirty-grey landscape making a noise like a Whoopee cushion.

‘What did you go and do that for?’ asked Kyp.

‘Nogody upstages me.  I get the laughs around here.’

‘I’m looking for the Sin King,’ said Kyp, keen to be on his way.

‘You’ll come to a tunnel taking you out of the crater.  The Gadlands lie geyond it.  There’s a city.  Look there.’

‘Thank you.’

Cuthbert smiled in a way Kyp didn’t like at all.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’