By J. B. Rockwell

While applying fresh caulk to the hull of the first-class whaler, Penroyal heard a walloping thump.

Not a bump, nor a splat, plop, or slosh. A thump. In his experience, that meant only one thing.

“Ye put down that rum, John Clarence,” he warned. “Ye keep tippin’ over and ye’ll drown in t’sea.”

“’Tweren’t drinkin’,” the burly, bearded carpenter objected. “’T’weren’t tippin’, neither. ’Twere that walrus.”

“Now I know ye been drinkin’.” Penroyal snorted, applying the wood mallet to the caulking iron to tamp down the marline and oakum. “’T’ain’t no tuskers this far south.”

“’Tis,” John Clarence insisted, standing outside the boat with his tar brush in hand, making a right fine mess of the ground, his pea coat, and boots without any corresponding progress on the boat’s hull.

“I say ’t’aint, and yer drunk,” Penroyal growled, cursing roundly when he smashed his thumb with the mallet. “Damn ye, John Clarence. Now look what ye done.” He tossed the mallet aside, sucking his bruised appendage as another of those squelching wet thumps shook the whaler, accompanied by a flippity-flap and a groaning ha-roo! Sounds he unfortunately knew all too well. “John—John Clarence?” he warbled, peering cautiously over the boat’s side.

“’Tweren’t me, I told ye. It’s that morse with the whiskers thick as Sunday.” John Clarence’s ham-and-links arm lifted, pointing a sausage-thick finger at a sloughing-mist shape.

Tusked and whiskered and roly-poly with blubber, it galumphed across the shingle on fan-shaped flippers of skin stretched across many-jointed bones. Green-black in color, not cinnamon brown or pure white, it had whiskers thick as porcupine quills, and those tusks grew so long they scraped its belly. The bones of its skull showed clearly beneath the skin, and barnacle colonies bloomed in place of eyes.

“Can’t be,” Penroyal whispered, voice leaden with dread. Only one walrus he knew looked like that.

“Ha-roo!” the great morse greeted him, undulating from the surf.

“Tears of Saint Brendan,” Penroyal breathed. He ducked back and grabbed up the mallet, hugging it two-handed to his chest, calling, “Hsst!” to John Clarence, still standing there staring with his brush drip-dripping sticky tar onto the rocks. “Turn away, man!” he said, but that brine-for-brains John Clarence kept right on gawking.

“Look at the fat on yon beauty. And those whiskers, those tusks! Gimme that harpoon.” John Clarence’s fist bumped the whaler’s hull. “I’m gonna have ’im to sell ’is parts.”

“T’ain’t no ‘him’, John Clarence. That’s a her, and ye don’ want nothin’ to do with her, neither.”

“Don’ ye be tellin’ me what I do and I don’ want, Penroyal. Ye just hand me that steel tickler—”

“Ha-roo!” the walrus interrupted, sliding closer on her bloated and blubbery belly. “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!”

Peeking through an unsealed crack in the hull’s slats, Penroyal whispered, “Do ye hear that, John Clarence? That moanin’? That hunger? That’s Neptune’s reaper ticklin’ at yer toes.”

“Walbertie? Ye’re sure?” John Clarence’s voice shook. Beneath its beard covering, his face turned ashen gray.

“She’s seen ye,” Penroyal said mournfully and with a heavy sigh. “There’s nothin’ to be done for it, I’m afraid. It’s the deep for ye, John Clarence, and a seaweed grave. Unless…”

“Unless?” John Clarence peered back at him through that crack, desperation shining in his one blue eye.

Poor sod don’ know what’s comin’. Penroyal choked down a twinge of guilt, staring his partner and not quite friend right in that eye. “Ye heard of sea wives, John Clarence?”

“Aye,” he said slowly.

“Then ye need to claim yon beauty as yer one and only. Ye woo Walbertie, and she won’t kill ye,” Penroyal promised.

“Woo her?” John Clarence repeated faintly, eyes on Walbertie.

She dragged her thickly insulated, parasite-ridden body his way, ha-rooing for all she was worth—quite the set of pipes on that particular morse.

“How—?” he asked, voice cracking, shuddering at each lovelorn, walrussy ululation Walbertie belched out. “How do I go about wooin’ a tusker?”

“Verse, man.” Penroyal tapped his nose. “Beneath that blubber, Walbertie’s still a filly. Ye mark my words, John Clarence. It’s poetry that’ll win that filly’s heart.”

“Poetry,” he murmured, all tuck-armed and wrinkled-browed with thought. He cleared his throat, before launching into an ardent lament.

“Oh, tusked beauty, plump and round
On yer fat rolls I expound.
How fishy, sticky is yer shape.
How wide and whisk’ry is yer face.
Would ye, could ye be my wife?
And share with me this seaside—”

Ma-ha-roo! Walbertie warbled. Titillated—Penroyal could tell.

“Don’t stop now, man, it’s workin’,” he said.

“Help!” John Clarence yelped back at him just as something large and solid thumped the boat. “Penroyal help! There’s so much blubber!”

A squishy, slurping sound followed that Penroyal knew all too well.

“Sweet Mother!” John Clarence cried. “She smells like a latrine!” His fingers wrapped the boat’s gunwale, clinging desperately before ripping away. “Penroyal!” he screamed one last time.

“Be strong, John Clarence! Ye steer clear of those tusks and whiskers. She don’ like ye touchin’ ’em!”

“How do ye know?”

“She used to be mine,” Penroyal said softly as Walbertie dragged John Clarence into the sea.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in the maple-syrup wilds of New England, J.B. Rockwell dreamed of being the next Indiana Jones, until an unforeseen series of twists and turns (involving cats, a marriage, and a SCUBA certification) resulted in an IT career. In her spare time, she scribbles nonsense and somehow published a few novels, including the Serengeti and Forgotten Stars & Distant Seas from Severed Press, and Crimson King, a supernatural/weird novella from Bizarro Pulp Press.

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