Chapter Nineteen
Clip clop.
She seemed to hear the noise in her guts before it registered in her brain. She’d heard noises like this before, in her nightmares. All extraordinary zookeepers had.
Clip clop.
Somewhere, she knew Jellybean was trying to send sparks of lightning down the ignition, his shrieking now loud enough to wake the deepest sleeping shrimp.
She inhaled the sea and the tang of iron.
She urgently scanned the causeway, but the lights were spasming like a strobe disco, her eyelids flashing imprints of storm monkeys. She couldn’t see anything.
Clip clop, clip clop.
She tried to think. Neither a shrimp nor a kraken had hooves. That was good. Baby unicorns had hooves. Maybe this was just Princess Issy, coming to nuzzle her to death?
The hoofbeats grew louder.
This definitely wasn’t Issy.
In less than a heartbeat she searched her inner map of the LEZ. A kelpie, perhaps? Lu-Lu, Skeletor and Darth Vader were menaces, sure, but she’d stand a chance. Or the hippocamp? He was a Level 6 but went to sleep the moment you sang him a lullaby.
She turned around in the seat as a huge shape finally came into view, dragging his back leg slowly along the causeway after them.
This wasn’t Issy, Skeletor or Helion.
This was so much worse.
Her mouth opened in a wordless scream.
Frida, Antony and Hamish had once made a game of Extraordinary Zoo Top Trumps for Cliff’s birthday.
The pack was still in the Watering Hole, and they played it every now and then when Hamish’s bottle of whiskey was doing the rounds after an evening’s shift.
The categories were mostly silly. Your ability to make Cliff cry; how dumb your zoo name is; how much you love messing with your keepers.
But there were others, too. How much of Melody you can destroy.
How many nightmares you feature in. How many ways you can commit homicide.
The Nuckelavee was a top trump for this.
It was said the Nuckelavee could kill someone in 10,000 different ways.
Like God, Madonna or Prince, he was so iconic, he didn’t even have a zoo name. He was just The Nuckelavee.
Oh, go to Ocean, Frida. Just take a little harmless jaunt to the library.
She watched helplessly: the impossible sight of the Nuckelavee coming towards her down the causeway, the library looming behind him.
He’d come, originally, from the dark underwater caves of Orkney.
Amongst the typical arrays of nastiness such as killing crops, causing famine and sickness, floods and earthquakes, the Nuckelavee could also debone a person in a matter of seconds and swallow babies whole.
Whether he’d always been on his own, no one knew.
Perhaps there had once been more nuckelavees.
He must have had one or more parents presumably, although Orcadian legends claimed he was spawned from the womb of hell itself.
Now however, experts agreed there was just this one – a true endling.
Unlike creatures like the Lagarfljót Worm, he was incapable of impregnating himself.
When the Nuckelavee died, hell wouldn’t spawn more baby nuckelavees.
Clip clop, clip clop.
Frida was frozen in fear as she took in every inch of him. Ten metres high. More. His right back leg dragging behind him, an injury he’d sustained when he’d been captured. A hiss, the sound of a hot sword plunged into water, emerging from his nose.
Clip clop, hiss, clip clop, hiss.
Suddenly, the idea of being full-body-boiled to death by a shrimp didn’t seem so bad.
The Nuckelavee was mostly horse, except there was a lumpy bloody protrusion on his back that looked like a rider but was actually a second head made out of bright red bone and sinew.
Unlike the hippocamp who was water itself, or the kelpies who were corporeal, the Nuckelavee was neither and both at the same time.
He was sea and foam and spray. A tidal wave big enough to drown a city, or a tidal pool that swirled in the summer sun, full of crabs and molluscs waiting for you to step in.
Crabs and molluscs.
‘Those puddles!’ she gasped with a hoarse moan.
Jellybean was about to have an aneurism.
He finally managed to get Grace started, and when he squeaked affirmation, she slammed her foot so hard on the accelerator, the rest of the monkeys took flight.
Sweet god and poisonous shrimps, she’d had the Nuckelavee’s poster on her wall as a child.
She even had a tattoo of him on her damned leg!
She glanced behind her, her whole body glued to Grace’s seat as the engine roared, and she took in his two long dangling arms, ending in scaled claws that scraped the ground with a resounding screech.
His mouth opened vertically with two sheets of needle-point fangs.
‘Grace! Grace! Grace!’ The monkeys were cheering.
Clop, hiss, clop, hiss.
Why couldn’t it have been Karen who’d escaped?
They’d have had a great time, discussing how to ballet dance underwater!
She was pressing her foot down so hard, she thought she might break the accelerator as Jellybean tumbled into the footwell.
He shrieked indignantly, a roiling ball of thunder.
But they were finally off the causeway, and onto the huge wide-open plaza that marked the end of Ocean.
She barely registered which of the arches was ahead, or which section of the zoo it would lead her to.
She didn’t care where they went, just that it was away from here.
Praying that the habitat of another section would deter the Nuckelavee, she heard his booming voice, ‘HUMAN!’
Oh great. He could talk to her. Now she could enjoy a poetic description of how he planned to kill her.
‘HUAMMAAAANN!’ It was briny seaweed and freezing limestone caves, the crash of waves and the sinking of a bloody sun. It made her brain weep.
She leaned forwards over the steering wheel, Jellybean, Cream Pie and Shirley Temple and all the others shouting rousing challenges from the top of the buggy as Grace miraculously gained speed.
The sound of the waves diminished as the nearest arch blazed before her.
Sky. They were going to Sky. That was fine. She loved Sky!
The Nuckelavee gave a shriek, close enough for sea foam to hit Frida’s neck.
She could see the rocks of Sky rearing up, great stacks of limestone and slate, artfully designed to look as if they’d fallen millennia ago.
Fifty feet . . . twenty feet . . . ten feet.
All the monkeys trilling, Jellybean doing backflips, the sea air in his mohawks as the arch passed above them, and she felt the sudden but inexplicable switch from ocean waves to the wonder of Himalayan mountains.
Cool, crisp wind. A sense of Gloria. Sky smelled of her, or she smelled of Sky, who knew which came first. It didn’t matter – both were fabulous.
Grace wobbled over the yellow cobbles. Frida had never been so relieved to be surrounded by tall, sheer cliffs.
She kept driving, vibrating with the pump of her heart and the screams of the monkeys, tiny storms charring Grace’s seats.
When she dared look over her shoulder, she saw, incredulous as it was, that the Nuckelavee had paused on the other side of the arch, eying the tall coral spires, taking in the looming rocks with whatever hell-senses he possessed.
She held her breath as his ears flicked back.
His eye sockets smouldered. Steam hissed from his nostrils.
The mountain wind whipped Frida’s hair as she craned her neck to watch him move a single hoof towards the archway.
‘Just stay there, buddy,’ she implored him.
Thirty-two sets of moon yellow eyes waited, uncertain.
Then the Nuckelavee let out an ear-splitting roar. The next second he was tossing his massive head with delight and galloping straight for them. Jellybean leapt up on the dash, pointing urgently through the windshield.
‘Ree!’ Jellybean squealed. ‘Go!’
With a curse, Frida veered the way he pointed, and they thundered beneath the granite stacks.
The banshees passed by on the right, Madame and Sir Shrieksalot’s not quite solid veils of shadows fluttering.
She didn’t know where they were going, only that they were GOING.
They zoomed past the silent habitat of Ignatius Emberwing, the solitary, mysterious phoenix.
Past the mountain groots, past Sherlock, Watson and Moriarty, the three-horned mares who were holding claws as they slept, levitating half a foot in the air.
The monkeys shot tiny bolts of lightning from their paws that disappeared with an excited poof.
Jellybean backflipped and front-flipped and did all the flips.
Blindly, Frida followed his eagerly pointed directions, swinging around the end of the mares’ enclosure, rounding a familiar sandy limestone habitat that she knew by heart.
Grace was starting to flag, and the Nuckelavee sensed it, barely yards behind them now, but suddenly, hot black smoke blazed through her mind: desert heat, windstorms and baked volcanic rock, and she could almost see the shapes of talons, curling out of the smoke. Talons and wings.
Oh dragons.
But the Nuckelavee was bursting around the corner too, hot on their heels.
‘Oh my fucking dragons!’ she screamed.
The Nuckelavee reared, blood-red flesh and needle point fangs, coal-flaming eyes rolling, sprays of spittle exploding.
She, Grace and the monkeys plunged down into the valley where sand and honeyed rock rippled for as far as she could see, but whatever hope she’d felt died as she gathered the monkeys to her and Grace gave a final devastating splutter.
Behind them, the Nuckelavee howled in victory.
.