The Castaways (19 page)

The guard came down. He carried his lantern along the deck, then up the next set of stairs. As soon as he’d gone I rolled out of my hammock and went to the window.

I pushed my arm through a gap in the bars. Already it was easier to do. The prison food—so sparse, so awful—had left me weak and hungry. But at least I could reach farther through the bars.

I picked two mussels. Every night I picked two mussels. I pulled them from that band of dried weeds and barnacles, and brought them in through the window.

They had been out of the water long enough now that they were half dead and easy to open. From the shells I scraped the lumps of orange flesh, and tried to lick away what juices were left. Then I carried my little treasures back to my hammock.

As always, I offered one of the bits of meat to Weedle. He wasn’t as hungry as I was since, as a nob, he took a share of each meal from the smaller boys. But still he never got enough, and I could see he was tempted to share the mussels when I held out my hand to his hammock.

“Go on,” I said. “Take one.”

“Not me. They ain’t no good, Tom,” he said. “One night you’ll get a bad one, you’ll see.”

I always laughed at his fears. But that night he was right.

I swallowed the mussels whole, one after the other. It was like swallowing gobs of spit. They were horrible things, but they kept my stomach busy.

It was only a few moments later that my lips began to tingle. Then my stomach seemed to twist itself into a knot. I groaned.

“You see? You see?” said Walter Weedle. “Didn’t I tell you, Tom?”

The tingling spread to my lips, then leapt to my fingertips. I felt incredibly hot, as though my skin were melting, but when I touched my face I found I couldn’t feel it. My fingers had gone numb.

I suddenly wanted water. I was desperately thirsty. I tried to swing out of my hammock but tumbled from it instead, crashing to the deck.

“Tom, what are you doing?” said Weedle. “You’ll bring the guards.”

I hobbled to the window. I thrust my arm through the bars and reached down as far as possible. I couldn’t tell if I touched the water until I raised my hand and saw my fingers glistening with wetness. I sucked the salty dew and reached for more.

Now the hulk seemed to pitch as though in a storm. I clung to the window so that I wouldn’t be thrown across the deck. Then the sight of the hammocks hanging perfectly still sent a wave of fear right through me. I let go of the window bars and put my hands to my face. I reeled away from the wall and collapsed on the deck.

“Tom?” said Weedle. “Tom!”

He came to my side. All around, white faces popped out from the edges of hammocks.

Weedle shook me. He shook me so hard that he rattled my teeth together and banged my head on the deck. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he shouted.

I tried to tell him what was happening, but my lips and mouth were now so numb that they wouldn’t form the words.
Then I found with horror that I couldn’t lift an arm to save myself. From head to toe, through and through, I was powerless to move a muscle.

I could draw only the smallest breaths. My heart, which had been racing desperately, seemed to stop altogether. There was only a mere tremble of blood through my veins.

"Yet I could hear and see and understand all that was happening. Boys began to mutter, then to shout. A guard came running with his lantern.

Weedle slapped my cheeks to bring life to them. It was the most curious, frightening thing to hear the slaps of his fingers, but not to feel the blows. He took me again by the shoulders, trying to shake me awake.

That was how the guard found him, kneeling over my chest as though he had beaten me to death. The guard whistled for others, then bashed at Weedle with his stick. A hundred boys came hurtling from their hammocks, and I lay surrounded by pandemonium, certain that I was about to die.

When what had happened was all sorted out, and the guards stood heaving breaths at one side of the hulk, the boys at the other, the doctor at last came down. He bent over me.

I couldn’t even move my eyes. I could see only what was straight ahead. The doctor’s face loomed over me, and then Weedle’s as he peered anxiously over the doctor’s shoulder.

“It was them mussels,” said Weedle. “I tried to tell him they was no good.” He was bleeding from his nose. There was a red welt on his cheek, and the red marks of fingers on his neck. “Is he going to die, doctor?”

“I’m afraid he already has.” The doctor put his hand on my chest.

I couldn’t feel it, though I sensed he was pressing very hard. I tried to talk, but that was impossible. I couldn’t even push the air through my mouth.

“Yes, he’s cold as ice,” said the doctor. “No trace of a heartbeat. He’s gone already.”

No! No!
I shouted in my mind. But there was not a sound from my lips, not a quiver from my tongue.

“He’s dead?” said Weedle, unbelieving.

“As doornails,” said the doctor.

“No, it can’t be. He saved us from the cannibals. He brought us home, he did. It just can’t be.”

“Well, it is,” said the doctor, rising to his feet. “Guards, carry him up to the deck.”

One took my shoulders, another my legs, and they bore me like a sack of rubbish up the many stairs. I watched the roof beams pass above me, then the square of stars in the hatch turning round and round as we rose toward them. They dropped me onto the deck, in the open air, by the gate in the railing where steps went down to the river.

The blacksmith came and took away my irons. Then another man brought a strip of canvas and bundled me inside it. I saw his needle passing in and out of the cloth as he sewed me into my shroud.

How long I lay there I don’t know. It seemed an eternity before I was carried down to a boat and placed awkwardly between the thwarts. I could hear two men talking, and a third rowing. He used short and choppy strokes that splashed water onto one of the other fellows.

I had fought with cannibals. I had nearly drowned in storms at sea. I had faced strange beasts, and stranger men,
but I had never been more terrified than I was in that boat, sewn into my shroud. With my every muscle paralyzed, and my brain whirling from the horror, I went toward my end without the slightest hope of escaping. I tried to kick my legs and thrash my arms; in my mind I was doing just that. But I couldn’t move enough to put even a ripple in the canvas.

“Poor lad,” said one of the men. “Wasn’t on the hulk a week, you know. A few more days, he’d be off to Australia.”

The other spat. “Well, he’s off just the same, ain’t he? Going down under. Only not the way he thought he would.”

“It’s for the better, I suppose. The lad probably never had two pennies to knock together, and never the hope he would. Better he go to his rest now, and save himself the suffering.”

They fell silent then, probably turning their heads to watch the sunrise. I could see the light through the canvas, the cloth turning brown.

“Rain this morning,” said one of the men.

It wasn’t long before I heard the boat grind up onto the riverbank, and the men splash ashore. I was heaved out as rudely as I’d been heaved in, and half dragged through the mud. Again I was set down, as the shoveling began.

One of the men must have been the chaplain. I heard him praying over me, asking God to accept my soul. Then he pressed something to my chest—a crucifix, perhaps. I saw the cloth pucker round it, and his shadow fall across the canvas.

I felt the touch of his hand!

Where before I had no feeling, I could now sense the pressure of his fingers. The poison was surely passing through me, fading from my flesh.

But too late. I was picked up and tossed down. I only vaguely felt the jarring thump as I landed in my grave. I heard the shovel pushing into dirt, then the pattering hail of the first clods falling onto my shroud. I began to feel their weight as they piled heavily on my feet, on my shins and my knees.

Desperately, I tried to move, to signal that I was still alive. The dirt kept falling by the shovelful.

I could feel the coarse canvas pressing at my elbows and hips. I was aware of my heart quickening. But still I was unable to move as the clods of dirt fell upon me. They covered my chest, then pattered down onto my head. I could feel each and every one.

I put my whole mind to making a sound. I forced air in and out of my lungs. I believed I was roaring, but it must have been no more than a whisper.

Then the shoveling stopped. “Did you hear that?” said one of the men.

Again I roared.

“There!” cried the fellow.

“Don’t be daft. I can’t hear a thing,” said the other.

“He’s whispering, he is. He’s whispering, I tell you!”

With a flash of hope I thought the men would clear away the dirt and haul me from the ground. But all they did was run away. “He’s covered enough,” said the first fellow. “The rain will do the rest.”

I heard them bolt across the marsh. The grasses slithered, and birds cried out. The thump of the oars came soon after, and I lay in the ground all alone.

The rain began as a soft drizzle on the canvas. Then it fell more heavily, until it beat at the ground with a hiss and a rush, likes waves out on the ocean. My grave slowly filled with water, and its sides collapsed around me, so that it seemed I would drown in the earth.

What a sad and terrible end it seemed I had come to. The ground softened into mud that oozed all around me, welling over my chest, covering my chin. It cast a mold of my body, as though I were an insect encased forever in amber.

If, in a hundred years—or a thousand years—someone happened to come across my grave, he would think I’d been laid peacefully to my rest. He would see no sign of the horror I’d felt as the mud rose up to choke me. He would never guess I’d been buried alive.

As the canvas soaked with rain, and the melting mud was painted across it, my darkness deepened. It made me think of Midgely, and how brave he was to have never complained. The thought of that brought something of a calm over me.

I lay and waited—I could do nothing more nor less—listening to the rain and the push of waves against the river-bank. I began to understand how Midge had come to “see” with his ears, in a manner of speaking. I could tell the river was rising, and knew when it advanced as far as the grasses. I heard it creep closer, and imagined the mice and the shrews retreating before it.

Next I heard a squash of mud, a creak of wood. I “saw” the grasses bend and crush below the turning wheel of a wagon. I “saw” the mud squirting up around the horse’s hooves. There was a strange pattern in the animal’s steps, but it puzzled me for only a moment.

With a clarity that would have startled Midgely, I “saw” the horse in every detail. I saw it with three legs and a wooden stump, with a straw hat slit for its ears, in a glistening coat of leather and cloth and metal scraps. I saw the driver in his greasy clothes, in his hood and hat and gloves, swaying on the seat as the wagon tipped its way across the dunes. But of course I knew them well, old Worms and his three-legged horse.

I heard him call, “Whoa, Peggy!” then clamber down to the mud. I heard him work the latch at the back of the wagon and open the drawer that hid his gruesome cargo.

There was a trudging in the mud, the sound growing louder. Soon came a laugh. “Hookey Walker!” shouted Worms. “Here’s one what don’t even need digging, Peggy. He’s come up to the surface like a grub.”

I knew then that I was safe. Worms hauled me from the ground and carried me away on his shoulder. I could feel his
hands holding me, and smell all the stinks that came from his bone grubber’s clothes. He rolled me off onto the hard planks of the wooden drawer, then slit my shroud with a knife. The blade nearly cut through my nose; it nearly stabbed my eye. Then his fingers came through the gap and pulled the cloth aside, and I was looking right into his face.

I saw it all at once: his grimy hat and black hood; the look of sad surprise that came over him.

“By jabers!” he said. “It’s that boy from London, Peggy. Tom Tin; that were his name. Wal-ker! I thought he’d amount to something, that one. Not come to his end in a convict’s grave. He must have gone back on the tidy dodge.”

I put all my strength and all my will into moving my muscles then. It took every ounce of effort to manage so much as a wink. But I did it! I winked one eye at the body snatcher, and he leapt back as though I’d taken him by the throat.

“Hookey Walker!” he cried again. “Lord have mercy, he’s alive!”

Worms bent over me. He patted my cheeks; he nipped them in his fingers. “I’ve got just the ticket,” he said, and fetched from his wagon a little brown bottle that he put to my lips.

It was tonic and whisky and pine tar and rum. But mostly it was whisky, and it burned my tongue and clogged my throat; I hadn’t the strength to swallow.

He tipped up my head and emptied the bottle into my mouth. It was the searing shock of it that must have brought me to my senses, for I coughed and wretched, and suddenly
my lungs were filling with air. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, but my fingers were twitching of their own accord.

“There, you’re back. You’re back,” said Worms. “Oh, mercy, Tom Tin, you gave me half a fright, you did.”

My head lolled to one side. I could see across the marshes and out to the river, all gray and gloomy in the rain. The hulk of
Lachesis
was no more than a looming shape, but I feared that someone there was watching this all.

“Please,” I managed. “Take me away.”

Worms had the same fear of being spotted. He pushed me down into the drawer. “Best you stay out of sight till we’re clear of the marshes,” he said. Then he slid me into the wagon, took his seat, and drove off.

And so I began my trip toward London, lying in the very same place where my twin had lain when Worms had dragged
him
from his grave. At first I bounced and tumbled with the wagon’s motion, but the feeling returned to my arms, and I was able to brace myself as we rolled out from the dunes to the road.

A mile or two on our way, Worms stopped and let me out. He added my burial shroud to his box full of rags, and dressed me in clothes that he’d gathered from dustbins. When I sat up beside him, I looked every inch a grubber.