Down and Out

Startled, the friends turned at the sound of the voice. He was about their height and dressed exactly like them in the Blenk household livery. But there the similarity ended. He was more or less human in shape but his bald head was completely spherical and his face recessed into it.

‘Perhaps I should introduce myself. My name is Swivel and I am Master Blenk’s butler.’ He inclined his round head in a bow.

‘No you’re not,’ said Ludo. ‘I’ve never seen you around the mansion.’

‘Forgive me, young sir, but I serve the master here, in his residence in the Mirrorscape. Like all inhabitants of the Mirrorscape I am a figment. In my case, of Master Blenk’s imagination.’

Mel quickly made the connection. ‘You mean you work in that funny-looking house?’

‘Precisely, young sir. And it’s rather important that I get back as soon as possible. The master needs looking after.’

‘Then you’ll know what’s happened here?’ said Wren.

‘Indeed. Master Blenk was visiting his house by the lake when a large band of red-robed ruffians from the Fifth Mystery arrived and began vandalising the grounds and mistreating the wildlife. Then they attempted to enter the residence, quite without invitation. Such appalling manners.’ At this point the strangest thing happened. Swivel’s face, which up until then had been composed, swivelled around within his head with a metallic, scraping sound, to be replaced by another with a look of disdain on it. It then swivelled back and he continued. ‘Billet, who you rather questionably refer to as “that funny-looking house”, took umbrage at this and, after excusing himself to Master Blenk, set about teaching that rabble how to behave towards their betters. But they wouldn’t be told. It was all most regrettable.’ He sighed and his face rotated in the other direction to display one of resigned sadness before flipping back. ‘They fled and he … we, gave chase. To cut a long story short, we ended up here, at the Mine of Inspiration, where things took a turn for the worse. Up until that time, Billet had the upper hand and the hooligans were in full flight. But once inside the mine they managed to appropriate several important articles of inspiration and caused quite a furore. I’m sure you’ve seen the result. Not to put too fine a point on it, the tables were turned. Master Blenk and Billet fled from the mine, this time with the hooligans in pursuit. Unfortunately, during the unpleasantness, I was accidentally ejected and left behind. I believe I may have been held to blame by the management for the unfortunate events and found myself sequestered here.’

‘It looks like the master needs our help now more than ever,’ said Mel. ‘The question is, how do we get out of here?’

‘I was just about to suggest something, young sir. But first, if you’ll permit me?’ Swivel’s hand retracted into his sleeve and when it came back out had a clothes brush attached. He began to brush the dust from Mel’s velvet doublet.

‘Never mind that now. What’s your suggestion?’ asked Mel.

‘As you wish. It’s just that I see you have the omniscope.’

‘The what?’

‘The omniscope, young sir.’ The clothes brush hand withdrew into Swivel’s sleeve and his open hand popped back out. ‘May I?’

Mel realised that he was referring to his telescope. ‘This thing? I’ve used it but I can’t see a way out anywhere.’ He passed it to the butler.

‘But perhaps the young sir is not aware of its rather special attributes.’

‘You mean making things appear closer?’

‘Forgive me, but the omniscope does rather more than that. You have perhaps been wondering about the various attachments along its length, only one of which is the special enlargement facility. This control here, for instance, allows for better illumination of the subject and this one here – ’

‘Let me see,’ said Ludo snatching the object from Swivel’s hand. ‘Wow! You should see this, Mel. Everything’s as bright as day.’

He handed Mel the omniscope and Mel began to re-inspect the interior.

‘Excuse me, young sirs, but you won’t find a way out there. I’ve already looked.’ At this, Swivel’s face rotated again, this time from his chin upwards, revealing a face with huge, nocturnal eyes.

Its ghastly appearance made Ludo jump.

‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’ The butler’s face swivelled back to his normal one.

‘So there’s no way out?’ said Wren, disappointed.

‘Perhaps if I may continue? This control here will permit you to see a distance through things.’ Swivel indicated another knob on the omniscope.

Mel returned the apparatus to his eye and twiddled the knob. At first nothing seemed to change, but as he turned the knob further, the walls of the volcano paled and vanished and he could clearly see the surrounding islands and ships. ‘That’s amazing, but I still can’t see a way out of here.’

‘Ahem!’ The polite cough once more. ‘Perhaps the young sir is looking in the wrong direction?’ The butler nodded towards the pile of junk.

Mel turned the omniscope on it and looked down deep into the heart of the scrapheap. ‘There’s a great big hole in the floor, right in the centre, like a massive drain or something. But it’s blocked. There’s a big whatnot wedged in it. Perhaps all this junk’s supposed to vanish down there.’

‘Exactly,’ said Swivel.

‘But that still doesn’t help us much,’ said Mel. ‘There must be hundreds of tons of junk in this pile. We’ll never shift it.’

‘Maybe this’ll help.’ Wren held out a battered and dented helmet similar to the one they had used to produce their inspiration. ‘I’ve just found this on the scrapheap. It’s been through the wars but perhaps we can get it to work.’

‘How very enterprising of you, miss. If you’ll permit me?’

Wren passed the helmet to Swivel. He held it in his left hand and his right withdrew into the sleeve of his doublet and re-emerged as a stubby screwdriver. He tightened a few screws, changed his hand for a pair of pliers, remade a connection or two, changed his hand back to normal, blew some dust off the helmet and handed it back. ‘That might serve tolerably well, although I sincerely doubt it will function perfectly. After all, it had been thrown away.’

‘Go on, Wren, you found it, you use it,’ said Mel.

Wren put the helmet on and closed her eyes. Her brow furrowed in concentration and the lights flickered and then glowed dimly. There was a sound like fingernails scraping on a blackboard, and something amorphous began to materialise on the floor in front of Wren. At first it was vague and transparent and then it started to fade away altogether.

‘Do excuse me, miss.’ Swivel whacked the side of the helmet with his hand. ‘Most frightfully sorry, and all that.’

Wren recovered from the blow as the lights glowed brighter and, with a pop like a champagne cork, a python with the head of a flamingo sprang into existence at her feet.

‘Well done. That’s fantastic. It works!’ said Mel, slapping Wren on the back.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Wren, disappointed. ‘I tried for a rope with a hook on the end. Something we could use to drag this junk aside.’

‘At least we’re getting something,’ said Ludo.

Wren tried some more and then Ludo and Mel took turns, but after an hour of attempts at imagining something useful all they had produced was another pile of worthless junk. More by luck than design, they had created several more or less round wheels, lots of nondescript tubes and more than a fair share of useless and malformed animal parts before the helmet gave up the ghost with a flash, a bang and a puff of multicoloured smoke.

Mel removed the smoking helmet. ‘Well, I guess that’s it.’

‘What now?’ said a downhearted Ludo.

‘We’re not necessarily finished yet, young sirs, miss. Between the items you have imagined and the scrapheap here, we now have at our disposal a rather large quantity of raw material. A kit of parts, as it were. If you were to describe exactly what you were aiming for, with my skills I might just be able to fabricate such a device.’

Mel retrieved a pencil and the master’s sketchbook from his satchel and turned to a blank page. ‘What about some kind of excavating machine?’ He sketched out what he had in mind. Wren and Ludo made some helpful suggestions which he incorporated before handing the finished design to the butler. Swivel set to work.

Swivel was amazingly industrious and, after going through an impressive repertoire of different faces and hands, had Mel’s machine fully assembled. It would have been finished a lot sooner if he had not stopped periodically to tidy up after himself. The friends inspected the finished machine.

The main part of it was built from the ribcage of an enormous fish. Inside was a four-seater tandem bicycle frame. This was bolted on to a flat bed from beneath which protruded a multitude of feet. Some were human-looking (with and without shoes), while others were distinctly animal in origin. Still others were mechanical, built from small pistons, bolts and springs. For the excavating end there was a huge dinosaur’s head with a formidable array of sharp teeth. Its eyes had been replaced with lanterns. It was anchored in front of a rather dangerous-looking steam engine, topped with organ pipes of varying length. The excavated waste was to be channelled along the machine by a complicated tangle of intestine-like flexible pipes and finally expelled from the rear via something that resembled an oversized sousaphone. This emerged from a great big bottom. All in all it looked as if it would be rather more dangerous to the operators than to the scrapheap.

‘Look, I’m not so sure this is a good idea after all,’ said Ludo, studying the machine. ‘I think I’d rather stay here having inspiration than getting in that jerry-built thing.’

‘Excuse me, but I rather think you are labouring under a misapprehension,’ said Swivel. ‘When the Mine of Inspiration wishes to uncover a large amount of inspirational ore, it uses what any other mine would given the same situation.’

‘Oh, and what’s that?’ asked Ludo.

‘Why, explosives, young sir.’

Ludo was the first to climb on board the strange machine. He took the rear saddle with Wren in front of him, then Mel, who fastened his satchel to the crossbar. Swivel, who knew how to operate the contraption, sat in the driving seat immediately behind the steam engine. As they built up a head of steam the organ pipes began to whistle musically. The butler started the excavator and it rose on its feet and edged forward like a huge, weird centipede.

‘And just what do you think you’re doing?’ The face emerged with a metallic boing from a malformed gondola at the edge of the scrapheap. It was evidently angry.

‘With your permission, young sirs, miss?’

‘Be our guest,’ said Ludo.

Swivel pulled one of the many levers arrayed along the handlebars and the head of the machine turned and crushed the boat with its massive jaws.

The face immediately reappeared on the other side, this time on a church steeple that appeared to be constructed from dried moths. ‘Oh no, you don’t. I know what your little game is. I’ll fix you.’

The face vanished and moments later the gloomy light inside the volcano dimmed even more.

‘What’s that?’ said Wren.

Mel looked up. ‘Whatever it is, it’s bad news.’

They all gazed up through the ribs of the excavator and saw a black cloud obscuring the mouth of the crater.

‘I didn’t expect them to have weather in here.’

‘That’s not weather, Wren,’ said Mel as he trained the omniscope on the cloud. ‘That cloud’s made from beetles!’

‘Let’s get out of here!’ shouted Ludo.

Swivel pulled a lever and the jaws of the machine bit into the scrapheap. The friends could hear a clanging noise in the pipes as the masticated morsels of junk were channelled along, to be expelled behind. Suddenly, Wren screamed. The interior of the excavator was invaded by the beetles. Their bodies were as big as goose eggs and their scratchy legs began crawling over the occupants, nipping them painfully with their pincerlike jaws.

‘Keep going, Swivel. I’ll deal with this,’ shouted Mel over the din. Flailing his arms to bat away the beetles, he jumped off his saddle and grabbed one of the flexible pipes running alongside the excavator. ‘Everyone cover your faces!’ He wrenched the pipe away, then used it like a machine gun to hose down the insects with the shredded junk that shot from the end with great velocity.

By this time, the excavator was wholly inside the scrapheap. No more insects could get in and those behind were being pelted with the debris thrown out from the rear of the machine. Within a short time Mel had shot them all, and managed to reattach the pipe.

The friends tended to their painful bites between coughing back the choking smoke as the excavator chomped on into the heart of the scrapheap. It was very dark.

After a while, the butler turned. ‘Not far now, young sirs, miss. There appears to be a large cavity all around the drain.’

The cavity itself was formed by the upturned hull of a truly enormous galleon. Most of the decks were missing, exposing its ribs and keel, and the gigantic masts and yards had crumpled and were wedged crossways in the drain, causing the blockage.

The friends could all breathe more easily now that the smoke was escaping into the cavity, but even above the rhythmic noise of the steam engine and the musical pipes, they could hear the ominous creaking of the countless tons of rubbish above them bearing down on the hull.

‘The scrapheap’s about to collapse!’ cried Ludo.

Swivel navigated the excavator through the jungle of fallen rigging and spars that littered the floor. As he manoeuvred up to the drain, he worked a handlebar lever that engaged a circular saw. It bit into the debris that was causing the blockage, sending a fountain of bright sparks high into the air. Then, suddenly, the obstruction tumbled down into the drain. Without hesitation, the butler drove the excavator forward and into the hole. After a brief, vertical plunge, the passage of the drain evened out into a steep, downward slope. Swivel wrestled with the controls as they dived deeper and deeper.

‘You won’t be getting away that easily.’

‘Look!’ cried Wren in alarm.

The face had appeared out of the wall of the drain. It was much bigger and angrier than before and was moving along at great speed, keeping pace with their descent.

‘That brain cell of yours is getting a real workout,’ it sneered. ‘But you won’t be getting out of the mine just yet.’

Muscular arms emerged from the wall and their powerful hands grabbed two of the excavator’s ribs, snapping them apart as if they were matchsticks. One hand thrust into the excavator and made a grab for Mel. Mel leapt from his saddle as the hand crushed the bicycle frame, and his satchel fell to the floor. It burst open and the contents spilled out. Wren grabbed the regulator, and Ludo the sketchbook with one hand and the omniscope with the other. Mel lunged for the pencils but they rolled out of the machine. The hand reached in again and seized Ludo and Wren.

‘Help! Help!’ cried Ludo.

Ludo and Wren wailed in pain and struggled vainly to free themselves from the face’s grasp.

Mel reached down, grabbed one of the snapped-off ribs and thrust it out of the excavator and into the face’s left eye. ‘Let go of my friends!’

The face howled and dropped the youngsters. ‘You vicious little tyke!’ spat the face, rubbing its wounded eye. It formed its other hand into a fist and punched hard into the machine, catching Mel a hefty whack that bowled him across the floor of the excavator. He made a fruitless grab for one of the ribs on the far side but was hurled out of the machine as it reached a fork in the drain. Mel fell into one side-branch, while the excavator with Swivel, Ludo and Wren careered on into the other.

Mel forced himself on to his back so that he was sliding feet-first. Fortunately, the lining of the drain was smooth, but this also prevented him from slowing himself down. He veered wildly from side to side, striking his elbows, ribs and, occasionally, his head. One half of his mind fought against mounting panic while the other half tried to concentrate on avoiding any more collisions. He came to a halt with a jarring thud, stopped by a heavy grille blocking the end of the drain. Through its criss-cross bars he could see a long slope of ejected scrap and, beyond, a green, flat landscape.

The face appeared from the opposite wall of the drain and stared balefully at Mel with its uninjured eye. The other one was swollen and closed. ‘I’m going to wring your ruddy neck, you whelp. Come here!’ The muscular arms emerged from the drain wall and made a grab for him.

Mel jumped back and the face’s powerful hands closed on thin air just in front of him.

‘Come here, you little blighter.’ The face vanished and reappeared on the opposite wall but Mel jumped back the other way. It then flowed sinuously around the inside of the drain and on to the floor like quicksilver. Mel leapt on to the circular grille and climbed to the centre just as the face smashed its great fist into the wall where he had been standing only an instant before. The face made another vain attempt to grab him, this time from above. But Mel was just beyond its reach. As long as he stayed put right in the centre of the grille, the hands could not touch him.

Then he heard a clanking rumble echoing down the drain. There was no mistaking what it was. It was getting louder and the drain began to shake. A sizable proportion of the monstrous scrapheap was hurtling towards him where he was perched like the bull’s-eye on a target.

‘Now we’ve got him. There’s nowhere left for him to run to.’ Adolfus Spute rubbed his hands together. ‘We’ve got him and his atrocious abode surrounded. Mumchance, my leprous leprechaun, signal the men to attack. This is finally the end of Ambrosius Blenk.’