The scream had only just begun to die away by the time Mortimer was in the hallway, torchless, heedless, heart in his mouth. It had been decades since he’d heard the sound of a human soul departing its body, but he knew it when he heard it. Yet still he ran – no time to switch on a light, no time to get dressed – hopelessly hurling himself towards the bedroom, knowing he was too late.
Master Eddlemont was sitting on the edge of his bed, breathing heavily and sweating a bit. “Oh! Hello, Mortimer,” he said. One sleeve wiped fluid from the corner of his mouth. “Could you bring me a drink, a snack, and my draft-board, please? Something has come up.”
“Sir?” Mortimer managed. “You’re bleeding.”
“Oh, that. Yes, I suppose I am. Well, get on then! I’ve got a lot to do, and quickly. The draft-board first, Mortimer. What I have seen – it cannot wait!”
The great-grandfather clock – crafted by Eddlemont’s great-grandfather to win the love of his great-grandmother – chimed midnight with a hollow clang.
“The doctor, perhaps-”
“No! No such! Mortimer, I beheld the face of my own dear mother just now – my own dear mother, perished when I was but a child! I beheld her in my dreams, Mortimer, and do you know what she said?”
The great-grandfather clock – worn with four generations of love and care – chimed midnight again, shriller this time. In the distance, thunder rumbled.
“Sir?”
“She said ‘You must NOT do the thing you’re thinking of. I know you, Percy, don’t you dare! No! Don’t you dare! I need you to PROMISE ME not to do it! NO DON’T DO IT HONEY DON’T DO IT DON’T DON’T DON’T AAAAAUUUGH’ and then I screamed too and then I woke up. But I woke up knowing what I must do.”
A wolf howled outside, somehow. The rain was beginning to pick up. The great-grandfather clock – towering higher than a chandelier, standing broader than a wardrobe – rocked furiously on its heels, sending dust bunnies seven decades old scurrying for cover as it chimed midnight yet again.
“I am going to build a completely unsinkable ship that will suffer no calamity whatsoever,” said Master Percival Woolwurst Eddlemont, lead designer of Sloomoot Shiplines. “And it shall be called …the Gigantic.”
The great-grandfather clock chimed midnight ten more times at increasing speed, then exploded.
***
Mister Vooms prided himself on his imperturbability. He was a man of business, a man of numbers, a man of reason, a man who did business by explaining which numbers were reasonable to other less reasonable less numerate and less businesslike men. He had seen grown men reduced to crying and screaming and wailing pull themselves back together at his rightly-placed handshake, nod, or stiffening of his upper lip. He was an anchor of sanity on which ships lost in the midnight of the soul were moored. He was a rock in the storm of the world. He was the spoken voice of the quiet wish in the back of humanity’s skull that everything would work out. He had walked past thirteen black cats on the way from Master Eddlemont’s driveway to his front door.
“Shoo!” he told the nearest one. It hissed at him, arched its back, and vanished in the way cats can.
The door opened. Mortimer the manservant was behind it. A manservant shaped like Mortimer was behind it. Whoever it was, they were operating on a lot less blood than a mature human was meant to have.
“Please,” whispered the emaciated wraith, as it ushered him down a hall filled entirely with shattered mirrors, shards crunching under their feet like beetles. “Please, you must speak to him. You must make him see sense.”
“Enter!” cried a voice from within, and whatever Mister Vooms might have replied to this was lost to him for all time, for as soon as his hand opened the door and his eyes alit on the office he beheld the drafting-board of Master Percival Eddlemont, and he woke up on the floor being gently splashed with water and filled with a terrible foreboding he could not recall, let alone describe.
“Sorry,” said Eddlemont, with an apologetic sort of grimace. “It does that when it’s exposed to light. I assume it’s noon out there?”
“Two forty nine PM,” said Mister Vooms reflexively. “You have cut yourself.”
“What?” Eddlemont glanced at his shirt. “No I haven’t.”
“Repeatedly, I should say. With a bayonet.”
“Oh! Ahaha, no, no, not at all! I’m fit as a fiddle! That’s just from my pen. Damn things keep jamming up on me and then all that comes out is blood.” Thus saying, he took up the blamed instrument, applied it to the edge of his notebook, and with a flick produced a rusty red smear and a faint scream. “Makes the noise too. Gruesome. Anyways, behold the purpose of our entire endeavour as a company, Vooms! Also, of our lives in any meaningful capacity! I give you …the Gigantic!”
Mister Vooms squinted with caution, but in the shadows of that curtained room the schematics were mere lines – of blood – and curves – of dread – arching off into symbols – of dire portents.
“Your scale bar is oddly labeled,” he noted. “And the man is posed strangely.”
“That’s not a man! That’s the state of liberty.”
“Oh. I see the Gigantic is not just a na-”
“No!”
“Pardon?”
“It is NOT ‘the Gigantic!’ It is ‘…the Gigantic.’ The ellipsis is PARAMOUNT!”
“Ah! Yes, of course. Sorry. Anyways, it’s very big.”
“Yes! But, like an iceberg, the true genius of my vessel remains hidden below the surface of your assumptions! It is unsinkable! It cannot be sunk. Nothing will ever sink it. I promise.”
A rattle of soft thuds came from the shrouded windowpane.
“It didn’t look like rain today.”
“Flock of pure white doves. Third time the past hour. Anyways, I’m sure I don’t need to explain the fundamental marketability and rationality of making a boat that the creator of the universe would find themselves powerless to raise a hand against in anger. See, if you’ll look at the math it’s all very simple.”
Mister Vooms looked at the math. Mister Vooms felt something else stir in his mouth that was not his tongue, then spat frantically until the centipede came loose and curled resentfully under the desk.
“Yes,” he said, patting his lips with a handkerchief. “This all seems in order. I’ll bring it to the board’s attention at once.”
“Thank you VERY much Mister Vooms! And keep up the good work!”
The door shut behind him, and Mister Vooms realized he had been shivering and short of breath for the past half-hour. He sighed, and wheezed, and as he tottered gingerly down to his waiting car – no Mortimer in sight, for which he worried – he felt as though he were being watched, and turned about to find that this was so. On the house’s thirteen chimneys perched thirteen vultures each larger than the last, and atop the bald head of the vastest vulture stood an ancient raven of great size, and upon her head rested a crown of human teeth, and from her throat dangled a feathered greying beard woven through with human thumb-bones, and from her open hollow blackened bill there came a voice as deep and dark as the door of death itself, and that voice spoke one word, and that word was “doom.”
“My goodness,” said Mister Vooms.
As he left, he thought it peculiar that although the house was bedecked with so many and so darkened a flock, the building itself cast no shadow.
***
The construction of …the Gigantic took several years longer than planned, largely because of four unforeseen problems.
First, every ladder erected during construction irresistibly pulled every passerby within a hundred yards to walk underneath it at least five times in a row, after which they would begin to leak blood from their mouths.
Second, the boiler pieces refused to stay properly assembled until every church bell in the country was melted down into rivets that wept continuously as they were driven in and filled the boiler-room with the sound of crying children.
Third, despite the ship clearly being designed to be unsinkable, it persisted in being able to sink. This made Master Eddlemont very angry until he realized it was simply a problem of math, and after recognizing this he removed all math from the ship’s blueprints, which solved the problem at the cost of rendering the hull fundamentally uncountable – making it hard to explain how many ships were being built, or how large they were beyond ‘very.’
Fourth, no priest would officiate at the ship’s launch, nor governmental representative, nor businessman, nor pillar of the community, none but a very old bent man with a very faded silk robe and a forked tongue, who cackled to himself as he stood athwart the great boat’s bow.
“I dub thee…the Gigantic, who is unsinkable,” he croaked, and smashed the bottle of finest sparkling wine atop its metal brow. Six dead bats fell out, each caught in the act of swallowing the next smallest.
“Augh!” he shrieked, great tears of pitch and piss rolling down the melted rivulets of his face. “Get it away from me!” And so wailing, he cast himself from the hundred-story height of the gunwales down into the timid and browbeaten sea. The band played, then vomited. Every dog in town danced on their hind legs, jaws agape in rictus grin, mouths spewing words that made humans sad to hear them. The sun went black and exploded.
“Good job everyone, who wants cake?” asked Master Eddlemont cheerily. “It’s pineapple upside-down! With ice cream!”
***
…the Gigantic’s passengers boarded, bedecked in ribbons. Everyone who was anyone was there. Everything that was priceless and irreplaceable was there. Ten tons of Faberge eggs; half the world’s gold reserve; the social security numbers and birth certificates of every royal family member, celebrity, and world leader alive; the copyright certificate to the New Testament; the last living dodo; the first living mechanical man; a nail, a pail, and a snail; the eternal peace treaty sealing the mutual siblinghood and love of all nations to all others for all time; the only known bar of immortalium, the cancer-eradicating element; and Little Orphan Anna – the most precious child in the world – all went into the cabins and the vaults and the banquet halls and the gilded display cases of …the Gigantic.
“We are unsinkable, and this is great,” they told each other as they drank gallons of whiskey and brandy and champagne and dandelion-and-burdock and gin-and-tonic and cheese-and-crackers and roast-and-beef and French-and-onion-and-soup and so on and on and on and on. The band finished playing and to applaud every single audience member took out an umbrella and opened and shut it indoors thirteen times, the leathery flapping a parody of the slapping of hands. Every single penny on the ship flipped itself over to tails and refused to be budged.
“This is your captain speaking,” said Captain Bluggs over the announcement system. “As we are impossible to sink, I will be sailing full speed ahead without touching the steering wheel or looking at the controls or indeed looking at anything at all. I will not be trying to do anything to direct the vessel until someone tells me we reach port. I have already left the bridge and consumed three bottles of red wine. Goodbye, and remember: we are entirely unsinkable!”
A drunken cheer went up from every passenger aboard, all of whom picked up the nearest holy book or symbol to hand and spat on it before flipping it off.
“Unsinkable!” they cried, dancing in the halls with no pants.
“Unsinkable!” hooted the first mate, dangling from the mizzen
“Unsinkable!” sang the choir who performed at dinner, each of whom had found a two-leaf clover pressed in the pages of their sheet music three minutes earlier.
“Unsinkable!” shouted Little Orphan Anna, whose dog had been trained to bite in the presence of the poor.
“Unsinkable,” chanted Master Eddlemont, tied upside down to the ship’s prow with an upside-down horseshoe branded on his chest and an upside-down rabbit’s-foot in each upside-down hand. “Unsinkable, unsinkable, unthinkable, unsinkable, unstinkable, unsinkable, sinkable, sinkable, hee hee hee.”
The sun went down. Only two things glowed: the horizon’s rim and the gigantic candlelit altar to Thing Under The World that trailed black blood from the ship’s stern so that all the sharks in the sea might follow and know their promise was not forgotten. For an instant, the stars failed to come out. The ship’s mad prophet spoke three normal words and his eyes popped out. The engine sang. The bow hummed. The stern whistled. The steering wheel whispered an apology.
Then …the Gigantic struck a floating leaf on her starboard bow and exploded.
***
In truth and sincerity the ship did not sink, as every atom and particle of its composition rocketed directly upwards into the sky and left earth’s atmosphere entirely. With this the insurance companies were appeased, and so life went on without anyone the wiser.