The Gyre

By E.K. Wicher

The molluscan colonists of the Great Pacific Gyre have their own amateur detective, a mash up of Miss Marple and and an octopus. When an old friend begs for help Devilly Peen stretches her tentacles to investigate a series of brutal and baffling murders in a city confected of plastic refuse. Squid ink and siuckers abound in this alien whodunnit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ekwicherbooks
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777454739

E.K. Wicher

E.K. Wicher is a Canadian author based in Quebec. 

Book preview

Chapter 1

Devilly Peen stretched out her Number Two tentacle and tapped The End. She had, after twenty-three successive whodunits, decided to retire her creation, the private detective Daisy Cuttle. So much for cozy mystery; it was time to move on to a different genre.

Her metamorph, Henri, had adopted the face of a sea-slug today—a bored expression with a supercilious curl to the lip. He slithered onto the plastic confection opposite Devilly’s writing nook that he was pleased to call his sofa and pouted unpleasantly.

I suppose you want me to fetch you a drink now, slurred Henri, through sea-slug lips unsuited for polite conversation. Why he had chosen that shade of puce for lipstick, Devilly could not imagine.

Yes, I would like a drink to celebrate, replied Devilly. You read my mind. It was not every day one finished off a heroine of cozy detection. Do you think, dear slug, that you could bestir yourself to fetch me a clam juice from the kitchen. No, wait; I’d rather suck on a crab.

Henri slimed off the sofa and headed for the door, lisping Yes Ma’am, no Ma’am, three bags full Ma’am. Devilly watched he leave with a speculative eye. Perhaps with a spicy sauce? Henri was putting on airs; he was just a gofer when all was said and done. She extended her Number Six tentacle and swept it through Henri’s sofa, reducing its pretentious agglomeration of plastic pop bottles to a heap of empties on the far side of the study. Henri could rearrange them tomorrow into less comfortable furniture.

Devilly eased herself down into her nest of plastic. An advantage of being a tri-sexual alien octopod was that she could get comfortable just about anywhere, but she was fond of the particular arrangement of plastic waste she had gathered beneath her. She called it her writing chair. No, but no one was allowed to lounge there.

Especially not Henri. He was slowly returning, the requested crab balanced on one tentacle. She looked at the drink suspiciously. It looked properly regurgitated, a crustacean smoothie. Sometimes Henri missed fragments of shell, but this seemed the right colour and texture.

Perfect! She sucked long and hard on the straw, making a bubbling sound. Carrying her drink, she extricated herself from her writing nook, glided to the door and went outside into the garden behind Rose Grottage.

For Devilly, the sea garden had been one of the major attractions of the modest house she had bought many revolutions ago as a retreat from the bustle of the city. Then, it had been something of a wilderness. Now, the garden burgeoned with the fruits of her toil. She had fussed over it for many planetary revolutions, and it was now comfortably mature, only requiring judicious pruning here and there. The choicest plastic containers occupied the most advantageous spots where they were bathed by the mild current that flowed consistently in an anticlockwise direction. Carefully seeded corals hedged the perimeter, a sharp deterrent to intruders, although crime was barely known in this distant sub-eddy of the Great Pacific Gyre.

She settled down, drink in hand. Overhead, the sky was a blue oval with only a few fluffs of foam blowing across the surface of the sea. To her left was her pride and joy: a patch of red anemones waving bravely in the current. Devilly felt a warming sense of accomplishment; they had been devilish hard to root, having a tendency to wander. With a sigh of satisfaction, she let one tentacle take control, and watched it wriggle towards the mollusc patch, where rows of limpets promised delightful salads in the weeks to come. It was bliss.

It must have been on such a day as this when Devilly’s great grandparents had first seen this bright blue pearl of a planet. Back on their home world the waters had become excessively saline, and the surrounding land infested by trees. The shrinking seas were becoming frankly unlivable for octopods. After a long search for the perfect candidate, the founders had arranged a simple planet swap with a species of intelligent and tree-hugging ape in a neighbouring star system. All had gone according to the interplanetary conventions, and on Splash-Down Day—it must be eighty revolutions ago now—their craft had plunged from space into the welcoming warmth, that all embracing resource-rich soup which would become home.

The planet was perfect, nine tenths covered by seas of ideal saltiness, a pre-existing food chain from plankton through prawns to lobsters, and abundant resources in the form of vast rafts of plastic floating in giant swirls or gyres, visible even from outer space. The scientists had been dumbfounded. No one had guessed from early reconnaissance, that these gentle swirls would be ideal for settlement, but so it proved. These vast concentrations of plastic bottles just waited to be harvested and used to as a raw material for a new floating civilization.

The first settlers gathered the plastic to build simple refuges. These were mere bulges in the sea of plastic, thickenings that gave protection from whatever dangers might lurk in the ocean depths below. A plastic roof protected the octos from the desiccating effects of sun and wind, walls of opaque plastic ensured privacy, and tentacles could be lowered below the plastic floor to fish. From these modest beginnings grew the outport villages, encircling the centre of the Gyre, where the city dubbed Gyre Centro swelled at the centre of a slowly rotating galaxy of plastic.

Nether Vortice was one of those villages far out on one of the spiral arms of the Gyre. Devilly had lived there for years. Across her coral hedge she noted the comings and goings; knew the names of all her neighbours. Not all, she reflected, were as they appeared; passions can run deep in small communities. But nothing to excite her recently, she acknowledged to herself; nothing to provide material for Daisy Cuttle to get her beak into. This had been one reason to put an end to her creation’s detective exploits.

The shadows lengthened and the oval of sky turned pink, then purple as the Gyre spun slowly away towards the night. She let her skin change colour in harmony with the sky, an ever-deepening violet. Devilly sucked the last of the crab and went indoors.

Chapter 2

Henri was late with her breakfast. Nothing unusual in that: he often went early to the village eddy to sift Devilly’s mail and morning paper from the swirl of assorted junk.

After lying in her nest for a few more minutes as the light slowly strengthened, she got up and went to the garden window. Henri was down below, half hidden by the seaweed growing over the pergola. He had acquired tentacles and seemed to be doing an exercise, a sort of wet karate. He could be quite active when it suited him, she thought; presumably when he thought he was not being watched.

Ten minutes later, Devilly heard the whispered kiss of a thousand sucker feet as Henri slowly appeared. The metamorph had changed again, into something he evidently felt more likely to annoy his mistress. He was now mostly starfish, which meant the chores would take even longer than yesterday’s sea-slug.

A letter, Ma’am, Henri lisped, as he delivered an envelope, the Vortice Daily News and her morning clam with a slow-motion slap of one of his arms.

Devilly sensed a certain discontentment in her servant but resisted asking what his problem was this early in the morning.

Thank you, Henri, she said. But do us both a favour and choose a more athletic shape next time.

Devilly picked up the Daily News and started—as per her habit—with the inside back page. She scanned the small ads offering sundry services, checked that the memorials for the recently defunct included no acquaintances, and noted announcements for the upcoming Church Fête and Fun Run. God knows fun would be in short supply, she thought, and turned to the front page. Her interested quickened; another suspicious death on public transport! That made three over the last