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.Gothic Horror comes to Brobdingrag	By : keithcompany Category: Titles in the Public Domain > Gulliver's Travels Views: 2356 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work fiction, based on Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift. Any resemblance to person(s) living or dead is purely coincidental.

Chapter List
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Terrpragoh found an interesting sight when he returned home. Mister was sprawled across a stool with one leg hanging down. Mice were lined up against the wall in two lines. Terr leaned against the doorway and watched.
One at a time, the rodents ran across the floor, passing under that dangling paw. He swatted at them lazily as they went by. They continued to the far wall. When they were all on one side, they returned.
The jerkiness as they turned around was a clear indication of Gabrishella’s influence. He looked around to find her. She turned out to be perched on Mister’s back, scratching behind his ears.
“Ah,” he said. “I was wondering why he wasn’t trying harder to catch them.”
“Well, he’s caught ten of them already,” she replied. As she spoke, the mice broke formation and scattered. Mister watched them go then stretched.
Terr scooped his roommate up off of his cat, giving the fat feline a pat that was cheerfully ignored. “I guess you two made up.”
“Yeah. We shared a rat and it’s been wonderful ever since.” Gabrishella wriggled out of his grip and swarmed up his sleeve. She gave him a peck on his cheek and brushed his hair over his ear. “What are you doing home?”
“I live here,” he said. He walked into the bedroom and started to change his clothes.
“It’s Market. Aren’t you supposed to be in the pub until the middle of the next morning?”
“I missed you,” he shrugged. She hopped over his collar as he pulled off his vest.
“Aw, that’s sweet.” She extended a claw and poked it deeply into his ear lobe. He howled and twisted and she let herself swing up and off of his shoulder. That let her whole weight dangle from her finger, thus from his ear. He howled more.
“You have a girlfriend,” she called over his yelps. “Which alters your behavior. And people will notice.”
He staggered against the wall and slowly reached up to her. She relented and stepped onto his palm. Her lecture never faltered. “If people start wondering who you’re seeing, they’ll come looking. And I am supposed to be a SECRET!”
Terr held her before his face while tenderly probing his head. There was only a single drop of blood but the throbbing seemed to grow.
“So go, have fun, be seen, let people fix you up with their ugly sister.” Her foot edged under one finger and raised it to point up. She smiled and kissed the tip. “THEN come back to me, my love.”
“Okay,” he said. He stepped over to place her on the foot of the bed. “This is good,” he said as he lifted a shirt off if his chair and sniffed at it.
“Good?” she asked.
“The bounty hunter is in town. I wanted to see the circus.”
Gabrielle blinked a few times. “I know every word you used, but I have no idea what you said.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Okay, what’s a bounty hunter doing with a circus? Does he make criminals perform?” She remembered another form of entertainment from her youth. “Or do you get to throw rotten fruits at them?”
“Criminals? What would a bounty hunter be doing with criminals?”
----
Since well before the day that Gulliver was deserted on the shore of Brobdingrag artifacts of the human world were discovered.
Royalty had traditionally paid for any unusual tokens of an inexplicably tiny world. After the Englishman’s rise to fame in the royal court, they’d paid very well.
It had created a small, competitive industry of hunters that roamed the shores. They collected jetsam, flotsam and the rare half-drowned animal.
The random finds brought satisfying rewards, but they weren’t enough to make a living. The bounty hunters were famous for having a secondary source of income.
“A circus?” Gabrielle called from Terr’s pocket.
“He has a brace of splacknucks,” he said as he stepped over a fence-walk.
“I kind of remember the word,” she said. “Tell me again what they are?”
“Little…oh, well, pests, I guess. They’re about your size. Your shape, too, but not as pretty.” He smiled down at her. She lifted the flap of his pocket to smile back up at the compliment. “They’re hairy, dirty, dumb as candles but kind of clever with their hands. They get into everything.”
“So they’re like rats with opposable thumbs,” she mused. She wondered if some ancient traveling humans had found their way to this land and stabbed their way into the appropriate niche. She hadn’t met too many races or societies that didn’t fit the description, at one time or another.
“He selects the ones as close to human as he can find, trains them to do things,” Terr went on.
“Things?”
“Jumping from table to table, flipping in the air, throwing each other around, that sort of thing.”
It sounded perfectly dreadful to Gabrielle. Vermin trained to run around and be amusing. She was about to compare human and giant entertainments when she heard a voice.
Terr had arrived at the edge of town, a few doors from the pub. There were people about that would hear her. She turned to face his chest, pressing her mouth against the shirt above a rib.
“Sounds like fun,” she said, willing the sound into his bones. The vibrations traveled through his skeleton and shook his eardrums through his skull. He gave a slight misstep in surprise, but recovered.
“Different,” he whispered then went inside.
--------------
The usual drinkers were arranged around the tables looking grumpy. Every Market there were a dozen or more additional patrons in the tavern. Terr knew that the daily drinkers looked on the additions as an invasion of their space.
Tonight the crowd was twice the size of a usual Market day. The extras crowded around a large table next to the bar, watching something.
Terr aimed for the bar and signaled to Whisfeskatey for an ale. Someone shouted his name before he got it, though.
“Terrpragoh!” It was the Lord’s Factor, Goltreeden. “He’s the man you should meet,” he told a man beside him. “Maybe his luck will rub off.
The stranger stepped forward with an odd smile. Terr saw an angular face and thought of a small dog. Then he saw the eyes.
The look in the man’s eyes took Terr back to the wolf attack. He shuddered, then grabbed up his drink and took a long draught.
By then Goltreeden had reached him and he had to touch wrists with both men as he was introduced. “Terrpragoh, this is Evvibasdra, the bounty hunter. That’s his circus over there.”
“You’re the boy that found the boat,” the man asked/sneered. Terr nodded. “Just came on it of a morning,” he went on. Terr tried to ignore the man’s condescending tone, but he felt Gabbishella twisting around in his pocket.
“That’s pretty much what happened,” he admitted.   “Just lucky, I guess.”
“Luck,” the man said, his eyebrows rising. “Yes, I suppose it would be. Some men, they spend days on end combing the rocks. Finding a piece of cloth, a shirt, a box with tiny writing on it. Hours of effort for a silver of reward.
“Others just trip over a pile of horse shit and land in a harem.” He turned and spat on the dirt floor. Golt waited a moment, then politely kicked dirt over the wet spot for him.
“Must have gotten quite a reward for a whole damned boat,” Evvi went on.
“Oh, a great big chest,” Golt belted out. A few listeners around the room cheered for Terr’s fortune. He blushed and hid behind another drink.
The hunter looked him up and down. Terr got the impression the man was gauging the total price of his clothes. “Must be using the chest as a bookend,” Evvi said.
Terr opened his mouth to say, “No, it’s buried under Gabbi’s rose bush.” Before he could blurt it out, though, Gabbishella elbowed him in the chest. That bony little joint fit nicely between his ribs and about half way to his heart, it seemed.
He yelped, then coughed to cover it. The two men stared as he stuck his nose in the tankard and finished off his drink. By the time he looked around again, Golt had taken the man back to his circus.
“Thanks,” he muttered. There was no answer. Terr wondered if Gabbi was angry with him. He went and found a stool to wait for the show.
------
Gabrielle drifted around the edges of the tavern. She’d dressed for camouflage, but was beginning to suspect the effort was wasted. Everyone was watching the top of the table.
She climbed up the shadowed side of a post and peeked around. The patrons, all men, were taking seats for the performance. The greedy bastard was collecting his animals and getting them set for the show.
She knew that look in his eyes. He’d spent a life hoping for a find like Terr’s. He was the type to figure that he deserved the reward more than a young idiot.
Well, Terr was her idiot and she was going to protect him. She remembered the elbow jab with a wicked smile. She’d also have to protect him from himself.
“And I’m just the girl for the job,” she hissed with evil pleasure.
The show started and the vampire was distinctly unimpressed. Drunken tumbling was what she’d call it. Small figures in baggy clothing ran around a tabletop and threw themselves into the air.
The giants laughed, cheered, clapped and gasped at the appropriate points, though. She wasn’t sure if it was the movements, or the novelty of dressed splacknucks that was so entertaining.
“A high school gymnastics class could probably stop their breathing,” she sneered. Then she turned back to the post and climbed higher.
From the vantage point of a wooden beam over the table she got a better look at the performers. They were…. “Ugly doesn’t begin to cover it,” she spat. The scene of slightly malformed almost-people performing tabletop for big sweaty giants put her in mind of a Hieronymos Bosch painting.
Gabrielle didn’t really know what a Bosch painting was, but she’d spent some time dating an art critic. He compared everything to one or another artist’s style. Grotesque and confusing scenes made him refer to H.B, and this seemed to fit that context.
She smiled to recall that critic. He’d said once that she reminded him of a Degas work. After she’d made him swallow his own fist to the elbow, she’d browsed the Art section of a bookstore. Turned out it was a compliment.
“Who knew?” she muttered.
The performance didn’t interest her, but the performers did. While she was nothing close to hungry, she was always interested in a new taste. The beastly beasts below promised something she’d never had.
She walked across the beam towards the stairwell. The pub had only one room for travelers, a barracks-like affair with six beds and six closets. She licked her lips, hoping that there were some splacknucks that weren’t under the spotlights.
She glanced back at Terr as she reached the steps. He was patting lightly at her pocket. Well, she should be back before he got too worried about her.
-----
Terr was immediately terrified. Gabbishella had disappeared.
If she was discovered by someone from the village that would be bad. He’d have to try to get someone to choose to betray the Crown for his friendship. He didn’t have that many close friends.
But if the bountyman found her, there was no chance of covering up the find. She would be the man’s ticket to fame, glory, new clothes. Maybe a bath.
Terr touched at his nose for luck and worried.
He glanced up guiltily to find Evvi staring at him.
-----
Gabrielle was in luck. There was a cage full of the creatures at the foot of one of the beds. She walked quickly to the side that was hidden from the doorway and looked them over.
The splacknucks in the cage were naked. She saw that they were all females and realized all the performers had been males. She wondered if they were separated to keep the performers on task or if she was looking at their payment.
“Are you trained?” she asked one sincerely ugly beast that was poking through the straw covering the cage floor.
“What? Is someone there?” To Gabrielle’s amazement there was a human amongst the beasts. A thin brunette staggered out of the crowd to collapse against the bars. “Are you real, or have I started to hallucinate?”
“I’m real,” she replied. She smiled wide to show her fangs. “But you may not believe me.”
The human stared as Gabrielle looked her over. Naked and dirty, she probably looked like just another vermin to a passing giant. Did Evvibas..Everbasb… Did the evil bastard even know he had a human among his pets?
“Fangs,” the other finally said in a monotone. “Sure. What else. My plane falls apart, I crash in a harbor full of whales, a giant fishes me out of the water and throws me into a cage full of Neanderthals-“
“I knew they looked familiar!” Gabrielle shouted with a snap of her fingers. “So, splacknucks are the last remaining trace of Neanderthals on the planet. And they’re here in Brobdingrag.” The brunette was staring at her. “I’m sorry. I interrupted. Go on. You were saying…thrust in a cage of…?”
She shut her mouth and shook her head. After a moment’s consideration she shrugged. “No, actually, that’s pretty much it. I’ve been in one or another cage ever since. Now, I meet you.” She stuck a hand through the bars of the cage. “Lieutenant Moira Lee. US Navy.”
“Gabrielle,” she replied, taking the hand gently in her own. “Child of darkness and walking dead.” Moira laughed.
“Of course you are,” she said with a shake of her head. Other females in the cage moved away from the two. They seemed upset by the frequency that teeth were being displayed. Gabrielle smiled and spurred them on.
“Walking dead,” Moira snorted. She turned to pace along the cage wall. “You know, the worst part is that I don’t know if this is a total fantasy or a delusion.”
Gabbrielle kept pace on her own side of the cage. “And the difference would be?”
“Well, I might be sinking slowly into the depths of the Pacific, my oxygen-starved brain creating this,” and she waved at the beasts around her, “rather grotesque world from nothing.” She smiled at Gabrielle. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“Thank you,” Gabby nodded graciously. They turned about to walk the other way.
“Or, I was rescued, but with brain damage. I’m filtering everything through some weird nightmare issue. Maybe my physical therapist just introduced himself, and I interpreted him as a beautiful woman with fangs and an air of the occult.”
“That’s an interesting problem,” Gabby said. She’d almost never had nightmares, even after she became one, and felt a strange sympathy for the beleaguered woman. Actual sympathy.
“Must be Terr’s influence,” she muttered, hands curling into fists.
“What?”
“Nothing. So, has the giant tried to teach you any tricks?” Moira didn’t answer, just shuddered and swore. “What? What’s wrong?”
“He has them rape me,” she said in a small voice.
“What? For show?”
“I think…I think he’s trying to breed me. To breed them with me.”
“The hell,” Gabrielle said in a dark voice. The Neanderthals that heard her started to crowd up against the far side of the cage.
-----
Terr was scared. Evvibasdra had been staring since his show ended. Terr was reminded again of the wolf attack. At some point, Gabbishella was going to be seen, he’d be hauled before the Crown to explain why he’d hidden her. And she’d probably burst into flames a few times before the philosophers cut her into…
He downed yet another ale. He was drinking more tonight than he usually did for a week. He realized that it was dangerous. The alcohol was going to make him do something stupid. That made him scared and guilty. Which made him drink more alcohol.
He recalled Gabbishella on that bush, stuck through with thorns. He’d thought her dead. Really dead, that is. Then he remembered the wolf again. But it was a different memory. He remembered having to drag that wolf’s body off of Gabbishella.
He’d killed that wolf. He and his little human (she’d made him stop referring to all little people as ‘Englishmen’ some time ago) had prevailed in desperate straits. Dammit, he’d looked death in the eye! And she’d looked back! With a smile!
No ratty-assed bounty hunter was going to bother him any more. He raised his gaze along the counter to the other man’s seat. That’s how he saw what happened.
The pepper bag at Evvi’s elbow shook. It was very slight, Terr wasn’t sure if he’d really seen it move. But he had, and knew he had when the bounty hunter sneezed.
It was a prodigious explosion. The hairy head rocked forward like he was ducking under an attack. Terr felt the counter under his wrists shudder as the man’s forehead bounced off of it.
Reeling from the impact, Evvi’s eyes rolled as he raised his head. Then he sneezed again. He had a hand out to keep from bouncing off the counter again, but it wasn’t a help.
In mid-sneeze his chin jerked towards one shoulder. The head continued forward, the inertia cracking something in the neck. Evvi tipped off the stool and fell bonelessly to the floor.
Men rushed to his side while Terr felt his shirt pocket reflexively.
----
Half a candle later, it was a much subdued room full of drinkers.   Goltreeden wouldn’t let anyone depart until the Lord Stais or his sheriff was satisfied with the facts of the incident.
Men sipped slowly at their mugs and tried to look anywhere but the cloak-draped body on the bench.
“Some year,” Golt muttered. He rested against the counter beside Terr.
“Huh?” Terr asked.
“Well, for season after season nothing much happens in this village,” Golt explained. He ticked off one finger for each of the incidents that concerned him. “Then you find that Boat. First real Englishman artifact in 200 years. You also find a wolf in the valley for the first time in 300 years. Then, well, a man falls off a bar stool and breaks his neck in three places. That’s a first.”
He pulled at his mug then looked over at Terr. “I wonder if we’ve got ourselves some sort of curse going.”
-----
Golt lapsed into an uncomfortable silence after that remark. Terr downed another ale and stared at the splacknuck cage. He began to develop an idea.
For some reason, the little creatures were rare in the village. They seemed to have died out or moved away some time ago.
Terr was always terrified that someone would see Gabbishella and realize she was off the boat that he’d found. If there were more splacknucks in the area, they might assume she was simply a member of the local vermin.
She wasn’t a perfect match, but if it was only movement out of the corner of someone’s eye…
He was about to suggest letting the little creatures go when he felt movement around his boot, just below his shin. The tickling sensation was uncomfortable but familiar. After a few moons living with a tiny vampire, he’d learned to keep from screeching and leaping at every unlooked-for touch.
Sure enough, just as he identified the sensation, he ‘heard’ the little woman’s voice again. She seemed to be speaking from the center of his skull as she suggested: “Tell them that Lord Stays-guy should take ownership of the Neander…of the splacknucks.”
Terr’s mouth dropped open. One simply did not offer gift vermin to nobility. He’d sooner loan the Lord a cloak that was known to have fleas. At least on a rainy or snowy eve, the man might get enough protection to make it worthwhile. Owning little rats with thumbs, on the other hand…no good could come from this.
He rejected the suggestion instantly.   Now he just needed a week or two to figure out how to explain that the splacknuck’s were pests while making it clear that Gabbi was anything but.
That desperate line of thought was terminated by a call from the bedding room.
“Look at this!” the pub-keeper’s daughter shouted. Susumarena staggered into the central room carrying a cage. It was similar to the one already on the table, but larger and rougher.
She slung the cage next to the other one and stepped away. Men nearby glanced in, then winced and turned away. Terr and Golt stood to step closer.
Terr instantly regretted it. While male splacknucks in costume were cute, naked females were just ugly. They looked remarkably like real women for a second, then appeared crushed down and distorted. But one caught his eye through the dirt and filth.
As his eyes lit upon her, the tiny creature climbed up a few fingers of the cage wall and started shouting. To everyone’s amazement, they could understand what she was shouting.
“Englishman!” she cried, over and over. Terr stepped back as Golt leaned down to examine the woman closely.
“By the moon, I think she is,” he murmured. Everyone glanced over at the covered body.
“Pity to die on the same day he finally found one,” Terr said with a sad shake of his head.
“Same day?” one of the geezers asked.
“Well, sure,” Terr said. “I mean, if he’d found her before today, he’d already be at the capital, asking for an audience.”
“Yeah,” everyone nodded. “Makes sense.” Terr mentally heaved a sigh and retreated from the cage. Golt reached in an scooped up the shouting beast, dropping her into an empty mug.
“Hush, hush, little one,” he said soothingly. “You’ll be taken care of, now.” The other patrons crowded around him, looking down at the tiny, naked Englishman. She seemed embarrassed, but strangely happy.
Terr sipped at his ale as people offered her scraps of food. His clothes shifted slightly as Gabbishella climbed rapidly to his pocket and hid away.
----
“…that she’d be better off as a pampered pet than a brood mare,” Gabrielle explained into Terr’s ear. She stood comfortably on his shoulder as he walked home through the night. “She agreed. I made her promise not to tell anyone about me, and I gave her my word that she’d be sent to the queen.”
“And Evvi?” Terr asked.
“Well, we couldn’t have him disputing the story, or who owns Moira, or forcing any more sex on the woman, now could we?”
“I suppose not,” he agreed. He gave a slight shudder at the thought of the death he’d witnessed. Then he had a small fright at the fact that violent death only gave him a small shudder. Suddenly, the slight weight at his shoulder seemed a bit heavier.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, quite sensitive to his moods. It might have been her supernatural powers and their strange metaphysical connection. Or it might be easy to notice physical reactions while standing on a shoulder that shook like a fleshy earthquake.
“Well, I hope she’s not going to say that she’s been in that cage for long,” he said, quickly changing the subject. “I told everyone she must have been caught today or yesterday.” He reached his house and opened the door.
“I was thinking that the more ironic the situation, the more people would think about that.” He lit the lamp on the kitchen table and worked his way to the bedroom. As he stepped through the living room, it looked as though Mister hadn’t moved since they’d left. He raised one eyebrow, then slipped back into a protein-induced coma.
“That would take the spotlight off of me, and you. Maybe people will stop thinking about that boat. Or any curse.”
“Could be,” Gabrielle agreed.    As they entered the bedroom, she noticed something outside the window. The pathway to the barn didn’t look right. “Terr, could you step to the window?”
He obeyed instantly. The light from the lamp shone out. It reflected from hundreds of tiny, staring eyes. The path was covered with rats. Immobile, staring rats waiting patiently for their hypnotic commands.
“Whoops,” Gabrielle said.
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.Gothic Horror comes to Brobdingrag