The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Romantics (19 page)

‘No it’s just . . . the pirate with a scarf is usually so reliable.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Sorry, nothing. Just thinking out loud.’

‘To be honest, Captain, I’m considering abandoning the whole thing,’ Mary sighed again. ‘Because I have reached something of an impasse. There’s a scene I simply don’t know how to write.’

‘Oh dear. Anything I can help with? You’ve tried my capital letters trick?’

‘It’s near the end. Phoebe still doesn’t know her own mind. She’s torn. So she goes to the sea monster’s cave lair. She fears he will try to seduce her. Or rather, she is not sure if she fears it . . . or hopes for it.’

She gazed up at him expectantly. It struck the Captain that it was just possible Mary was doing her subtext thing again. But he wasn’t entirely sure. If Jennifer hadn’t got herself eaten by a vampire then she might have been able to help him out at this point. People, he reflected, could be selfish.

‘If he
was
to seduce her, how do you think it might go, Pirate Captain?’

The Captain pondered. ‘Well, I have a feeling that the half-man, half-seaweed mutant would skirt about the issue rather than come straight out with it. “Would you like to rub the gas-filled bladders on my ventral surfaces?” is too blunt. The art of seduction is about saying less with your mouth than with your expressions, gestures and undulating, swaying movements.’

‘Go on,’ said Mary, trembling a bit.

‘Their eyes would meet. Not literally, that would be disgusting. More like this.’

The Pirate Captain gave Mary a meaningful look.

‘Oh, you monster!’ said Mary. ‘You knew I’d come tonight! You know I can’t resist your soulful eyes, both your normal eye
and
the compound eye . . . panted Phoebe.’

No going back now, thought the Pirate Captain. He took off his hat.

‘What do you expect? You’ve bounced a rainbow off my heart, dear Phoebe. Just your name is poetry to my ears. For these past weeks I’ve been unable to think of anything else. I’ve lost so much, but all I can think about is your smooth face and sensuous lips . . . breathed the half-man, half-seaweed mutant.’

Mary bit her lip again. ‘You heathen brute. Every fibre of my being tells me to flee, but my quivering femininity, and this waterlogged wetsuit, keep me rooted to the spot!’

There was a pause.

‘Said Phoebe,’ added the Pirate Captain.

‘Of course,’ said Mary.

There was another pause, this time with added metaphorical sparks flying.

‘Captain,’ said Mary.

‘Yes?’ said the Captain.

‘I . . .’ Mary looked him right in the eye. ‘I think . . .’

And at that moment the pirate in green and the albino pirate burst in through the door, wide-eyed and gasping.

‘GHOSTS!’ they cried.

‘Oh, for the love of kelp,’ said the Pirate Captain.

‘I don’t know if you remember Aesop’s fable about “the pirates who cried ghosts”,’ said the Captain, as the albino pirate dragged him by his sleeve out of his bedroom and down the stairs, ‘but I seem to recall that they stopped crying ghosts because an angry pirate captain had run them through in a particularly vicious manner.’

‘It’s definitely ghosts this time. Possibly more than one. Listen! It’s coming from the crypt!’

When they reached the door to the crypt, the usual crowd had assembled. They all strained to listen. There were undeniably ghostly noises emanating from within. Strange rustling sounds, and the occasional terrible moan.

‘That was definitely a ghostly wail!’

‘And that bump sounded exactly like a head being chopped off!’

‘Though I can barely credit such a thing, it does seem like some fearful occult gathering is taking place,’ muttered Babbage.

‘All right,’ said the Captain, rolling up his sleeves in a resigned sort of way. ‘But this is the last sinister door I’m going to go through on this adventure. Three is my absolute limit.’

He picked up a lantern, pulled open the door, drew his cutlass, and crept inside the crypt.
³⁶
The
rest
gingerly
followed
him
in
.
Picking
their
way
past
big
stone
tombs
,
the
little
group
advanced
towards
the
awful
ghostly
sounds
.
Something
moved
in
the
corner
.
The
Captain
raised
the
lantern
to
see
what
was
going
on
.

‘Kraken’s eyeballs!’ exclaimed the Pirate Captain, at the grim spectacle that confronted him. For there, stretched out on a sarcophagus, lay the pale lifeless body of Jennifer, and looming over her, apparently just getting ready to take a big bite out of her neck, was Byron.

Seventeen

The Intestine That Came Back

‘Hello, Pirate Captain,’ said Jennifer’s lifeless body, sitting up and adjusting its blouse. ‘You really ought to knock, you know. It’s very impolite to just go barging in to crypts like this.’

‘An apparition! And the beast himself, no less!’ cried Babbage, trying to curl up into a ball. The Pirate Captain leaned forward and gave Jennifer a poke with his cutlass.

‘You smell nice, for a ghost,’ he remarked.

‘I’m not a ghost.’

‘She isn’t,’ agreed Byron.

‘Well, a zombie corpse then.’ The Captain waggled his cutlass at Byron. ‘And don’t you get any closer, you monster.’

‘I haven’t been murdered,’ persisted Jennifer, ‘and Byron here isn’t a vampire.’

‘But we’ve caught him red-handed,’ said Babbage, ‘about to drain the blood from your semi-clad body!’

‘He wasn’t about to do any such thing.’

‘Then what
was
he doing?’

Byron fought back a grin. Jennifer arched an eyebrow. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘sometimes when an attractive man and a free-spirited girl find themselves with time on their hands, things take their natural course.’

The pirate crew went on doing their blank expressions.

‘Oh, good grief,’ said Jennifer. ‘Do I need to draw you a picture?’

A few of the pirates asked for a picture. Some of the more naive ones contended that this still didn’t explain the ghostly wailing sounds. The pirate in green seemed ready to cry.

‘Come on, you lot,’ said Jennifer, hopping down off the sarcophagus. ‘It’s a bit nippy in here, so let’s all go and light a fire in the study and I’ll explain everything over a nice hot mug of tea.’

‘Right, has everybody got a drink?’ Jennifer asked. ‘I have a feeling that this is going to turn into quite a long explanation, so we don’t want anybody getting thirsty.’

‘If you’ll allow me, Jennifer,’ said the Pirate Captain, brandishing a pipe he had produced from somewhere, ‘I think I’ve already solved the mystery, using my famous nautical powers of deduction.’ He turned and eyeballed the assembled little group. ‘That’s right, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, because if Byron isn’t the dracula, then it can mean only one thing. The actual dracula is
someone else entirely
.’ He held for a dramatic pause, then wheeled around and pointed an accusing finger at the pirate in red. ‘Villain!’

The pirate in red groaned, and slapped his head with a seal flipper.

‘No, Captain, it’s not the pirate in red. And there isn’t any sort of dracula. Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?’ Jennifer leaned against the mantelpiece and started to explain. ‘You see, that first night when we all went off to bed, I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept thinking I heard an ominous eerie rumbling. But I quickly realised that the rumbling was my belly, and that I was just really hungry. So I went downstairs to the pantry to get some toast and jam. It’s quite cold in this castle, so I took the toast back upstairs to bed with me. Only then I managed to get jam all over the bed sheets. I don’t know why you all assumed it was blood. If you’d looked closely you’d have seen pips, which blood doesn’t tend to have.’

‘This is why I’m always telling you coves not to eat snacks in your hammocks,’ said the Captain to the pirates. ‘It’s unsanitary. No wonder we’ve got so many rats knocking about the boat.’

‘So anyhow,’ continued Jennifer, ‘I went
back
downstairs looking for a cloth to wipe it up. But then I heard a sound coming from the library. Curious, I tiptoed inside to see what was going on. The last thing I remembered was some great big owl flapping at me, and then bang! it bopped me on the head. A little while later I woke up, confused and disorientated, inside the crypt of all places. The door was bolted, and I didn’t have a clue what to do. But luckily I stumbled upon a
secret passage
. It turns out this place is riddled with them. Since then I’ve been walking about, trying to find my way out, but it’s like an impossible dusty maze. I did find my way out for just a moment, when I believe the albino pirate and the pirate in green saw me – a bit covered in cobwebs – but I think I was still rather concussed, because I managed to get turned about and wandered straight back into the secret passage again.
³⁷
After an age it spat me out in the pantry, where I encountered Mister Byron. He told me he was a vampire and that you were all about to dispatch him in a grisly fashion. He felt that might be for the best, but I didn’t think it sounded like a very good idea at all, so I took him off into the secret passage before you had the chance to do anything daft. Eventually we found our way right back to where I’d begun, in the crypt. Well, by that point I’d had my fill of wandering about secret passages, so Byron and I decided to find some other ways to occupy ourselves. And then of course, that’s when you lot turned up.’

‘So who was it that bopped you on the head and trapped you in the crypt?’ asked the pirate with a scarf, who was good at identifying the pertinent questions to ask.

‘A mystery!’ exclaimed the Captain, tapping his temple. ‘But not so great a mystery that it can withstand the detective genius of the Pirate Captain. The clue was in that last confused glimpse you caught of your assailant. Fair enough to think you were being attacked by an owl, because it was dark and you were getting bopped on the head and you’re a lady, prone to overwrought flights of fancy. But it was no owl. It was a person
with a face a bit like an owl
. Because you, Charles Babbage,’ the Captain whirled around and did his finger-pointing thing again, ‘are a dracula!’

‘I am no such thing,’ spluttered Babbage.

‘We’ll see about that!’ said the Captain, quickly blessing his tea and then throwing it over the mathematician. For some reason he didn’t burst into flames. He just dripped a bit.

‘Oh good grief,’ said Babbage, wiping his spectacles. ‘Look, I confess – it
was
me that bopped Jennifer on the head.’

‘But why?’ the poets gasped in unison.

‘Well, there’s no point in hiding it any longer. The truth is, I wanted “On Feelings” for myself.’

‘You old dog!’ boomed Byron. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you. Bad news though, Chuck, I don’t think they had mechanical ladies in Plato’s day.’

‘No, it’s not quite like that.’ Babbage tried to dab himself dry with some napkins. ‘I have, as you know, been working for some twenty years now on my difference engine. A computational device of enormous power. One that can alter the face of society.’

‘Go on,’ said the Captain, tugging his lapels in the way he’d seen lawyers sometimes do.

‘For these past millennia, human relationships have been left in the idiot hands of capricious fate. But my machine could change all that! An opportunity to finally match lonely hearts together on the basis of sensible criteria. It is my contention that people do not necessarily know what is good for them. A pneumatic young lady may
think
she wants an athletic, rippling-torsoed type. Whereas, in actual fact, she might be more suited to a more nebbishy intellectual sort. Well, through the use of punch cards my difference engine is able to work out exactly who is compatible with whom, thereby taking the ridiculous palaver of romance from the equation. Completely removes the need for fruitless chit-chat. But if the contents of this infernal book should be made public then that’s my entire business model down the drain. A disaster!’