Zeuglodon (9 page)

The
Clematis
was a gray ghost, because the fog had closed in, and our sunny bit of ocean was getting smaller and smaller by the moment. Waves no longer ran up the beach, but rapidly fell away as the island picked up speed, moving across the water directly away from the
Clematis
, bound for who knew where, and us with it. The Creeper stepped out of the boat onto the ice now, reaching into his coat, and right then Brendan yelled, “Get him!” and without thinking we all went for him, with no one holding back, until we saw him draw a knife from within his jacket. We put on the brakes, then, and I was thankful for the ice cleats.

The Creeper would have been thankful for a pair of ice cleats, too, because he was wearing his boots, and he slipped now on the wet ice and threw his hands out to keep from falling. The knife flew out of his hand and skittered away. He lunged after it, trying to keep from slipping. It was a stupid thing to do, because if he had wanted to stop us from leaving all he would have had to do was push the inflatable out into the ocean and set it adrift, or stab it all over with the knife, and deflate it.

But he wanted the knife, and he surely didn’t want us to have it, and in his wild hurry he slipped again. Brendan ran to the knife and snatched it up, and Perry ran past the Creeper to the inflatable, where he pulled one of the wooden oars out from under the thwarts. The Creeper was just then clambering to his feet again when Perry came up behind him, shouted “Melmoth!” and leveled a great blow at his back, knocking him forward. His feet went out from under him, and he slammed down onto the ice and slid nearly to the ocean, throwing his hands up to protect himself. Perry took another heavy swing at him, but the oar glanced off his shoulder and slipped out of Perry’s hands and flew off into the water.

The fog closed in upon us then. A wash of mist swirled through, milky white, the last of the sun shining through it. I looked up and saw the tops of the ice cliffs disappear just like the
Clematis
had disappeared, and on the instant we were swallowed up too, the white mist turning to gray. The Creeper, who was just a few feet away, was a dark shadow, angling to cut Brendan off from the inflatable, but he was slipping and sliding on the wet ice. Brendan got there first, with me right behind him. Perry had pushed the inflatable into the water by now and climbed in, flopping down onto his rear end and pulling off his cleats so that they didn’t stab things full of holes.

Brendan sort of bounced in over the side of the inflatable, the Creeper staggering forward now, maybe fifteen feet away, his arms out in front of him for balance. In another instant I was climbing into the boat, too, and yanking off my cleats, one of which I lost into the ocean because I was in such a terrible hurry. At that moment the Creeper caught up to us, looming up out of the fog. His face was petrified with rage. He took a desperate lunge at the boat as we drifted away, trying to throw himself aboard, grabbing hold of the motor so that the inflatable slewed about crazily. The ice island was rapidly leaving us behind now, and leaving the Creeper behind, too.

I crouched in the bow of the inflatable to stay out of the Creeper’s reach, glad to see that he couldn’t stand up in the deep water. Except then he began pulling himself up the back of the motor in order to boost himself in, and tried to get a foot on the propeller. Perry slipped the second oar from under the thwarts, and held it with both hands, aimed at the Creeper’s forehead. “Let go
now
,” Perry said, “while you can still swim to shore.” He started to count to three, but the Creeper interrupted, calling him a skinny little something-or-other. Perry speared the end of the oar toward the Creeper’s forehead, but then jerked it back before it struck him. The Creeper let go of the engine with one hand as if to grab the oar, throwing half his body up over the edge of the boat and catching hold of the painter, the piece of rope that ties the boat up to the dock.

Perry gave it to him for real now with the end of the oar, knocking him right in the chest, and the Creeper fell backward again, yanking down on the stern of the boat, which plunged downward, a great wash of ocean rolling in over the side. Perry lost his balance and teetered on one foot, dropping the second oar into the sea. I reached forward and grabbed Perry’s jacket, seeing that the Creeper still had hold of the rope and was dragging himself forward again. But Brendan leaned out, holding the Creeper’s knife now, and in an instant he had sawed through the painter, and the Creeper fell back and sank beneath the water, his arms flailing. Perry sat down hard on the thwart, and I went for the engine. It was time to go, plus some.

The Creeper was drifting away from us now, his hand holding onto the little severed piece of rope, which lay on the top of the water like an eel. He sank again momentarily and then beat his way to the surface, a good distance away. We heard him shout something I can’t repeat. Then, just before he disappeared in the fog, I grabbed one of the canvas and foam lifesaving rings that was stowed along the edge of the boat and flung it hard over the side, not quite hitting the Creeper in the head with it. Then the fog was too thick to see.

We motored away slowly in the direction that we had last seen the
Clematis
, or at least we hoped it was that direction. Brendan was shaking, and at first I thought he was just cold, but then I saw that he was scared, or something like it, and was staring out into the fog but not really looking at anything, holding the knife in his fist. He had defeated the Creeper, but he looked like the one who had been defeated. Even though it was the Creeper, you see, there was something awful about Brendan’s cutting him loose from the boat—a man who couldn’t swim, and who was wearing heavy boots and a greatcoat that might drag him to the bottom. Brendan bent down and picked up the picnic box, opened it, and put the knife inside. Then he sat and looked at his hand, which he opened and shut slowly.

“That was quick thinking with the life preserver,” Perry said to me. “Maybe it’ll change his attitude. Frosticos will pick him up in the submarine. You can count on that. When the Creeper doesn’t bring us back, Frosticos will know something’s wrong, and he’ll go looking, and when the Creeper’s not on the beach, they’ll set out to hunt for him. He can’t be seen above the water because of the fog, but below the water won’t be a problem. No fog down there. All he has to do is stay afloat.”

Brendan just shrugged at the end of Perry’s little speech, but he seemed to be slightly less dismal. He didn’t want to talk about it, though, and neither did I. Maybe it’s shameful, but I didn’t really
want
Perry to be right. I didn’t want the Creeper dead, but I didn’t want him alive either, and so I just shut up and let it be, and it took me some time before I was actually
glad
I threw the life vest. Soon we were distracted from all these thoughts anyway when we heard the ringing of a ship’s bell.

Perry and I thought it sounded away to the left of us, off the port side, but Brendan said it had sounded like it had come from behind us, and so we compromised, and I turned us half around, all of us listening hard. There was nothing to orient us, though, and when we heard the bell again minutes later, it seemed to be off to starboard, farther away, and although I changed direction again, I didn’t have any real hope. We sat in our little inflatable with the gray fog all around, and if it had been midnight it wouldn’t have been any more lonesome and we wouldn’t have been any more miserable.

Perry said that we should put on life vests ourselves, and so we did, and then we got situated around the boat so that our weight was evened out. I navigated us back and forth in big loopy curves, but slowly, so that we didn’t run into anyone or anything, because we still couldn’t see twenty feet ahead of us in the murk. Brendan has the loudest voice, and so he yelled “Ahoy!” at intervals, but we heard nothing in reply. After a while Perry took over the yelling, and then all three of us together, but after that we lost interest in it and fell silent.

Brendan was shivering badly now that the first excitement was over, because he had gotten wetter than the rest of us while trying to rescue the Creeper’s knife. Perry dug out the emergency box from its little cabinet under the seat, and inside we found some very good things. There were rocket flares and a gun to shoot them into the air with, and there was a compass for finding directions, and there were blankets made out of a sort of aluminum foil that were folded up very small, and also there were yellow plastic rain ponchos. We all put on the ponchos, just to keep from soaking up more fog, and we opened one of the blankets and wrapped it around Brendan, who didn’t argue with us.

There was drinking water, too, in packages, and there was a first aid kit and plastic bottles of red dye that you could squirt onto the surface of the ocean to make a big red splash of color that could be seen from a passing airplane. Except that a passing airplane couldn’t see the ocean at all in a fog like this, even if you dyed it all the colors of the rainbow. The flare gun was similarly useless, and so was the compass. North might as well have been straight ahead. Maybe it was. The most useful thing was a sort of miniature foghorn that was operated by a can of compressed air. Brendan wanted to blast away with it right off, but we took another vote and agreed that we should wait until we heard a ship’s bell again, and then blast away. Otherwise we might empty the can when there was no hope of being heard.

Perry passed me a ham sandwich, then, out of the lunch box, and I realized that I was hungry, which is very much better than realizing you’re lost, at least it is if you have something to eat. Perry reminded us of what the Hungry Man said: “If I had me some ham, I’d make me a sandwich, if I had me some bread,” and we all laughed at it, which was good.The Creeper had helped himself to our lunch, but there was still plenty left—ham sandwiches and slices of cold meat pie and dill pickles and cookies and bags of chips and a big thermos of hot chocolate that was still hot, which I can tell you is just the thing when you’re lost in the fog. We started in with the sandwiches, leaving the meat pies until later.

Perry took the Creeper’s knife back out of the lunch box and said that it belonged to Brendan now, that it was the spoils of war. It had a handle carved out of bone, and a wicked looking blade that was hidden in the handle, and when you pressed a button on the bottom of the handle the blade sprang straight out. Brendan said that he hoped Uncle Hedge would let him keep it, and that made me think of Uncle Hedge for the first time since I saw him standing on the pier, fixing to throw the iron-bound maps into the depths, and I believe that everyone else was thinking the same thing that I was—that we might never see him again at all. And just like that we were miserable.

We took a vote and decided to cut the engine to preserve fuel. It was pointless not to. We would feel like nitwits if we ran out of gas and then needed power, which we would if the ocean got rough, because it’s better to move through the waves then to let them toss you around. And of course the oars were both lost, which was a bad thing, but not as bad as being caught by the Creeper, unless we were never found at all. In that case it wouldn’t matter what was bad and what was worse. It would all turn out the same.

I put that thought out of my mind the best I could. We sat there drifting again, rising and falling over the long, low swells. The dark surface of the ocean was smooth, and there was no wind at all, thank goodness, because by now we were very cold indeed, and the fog was heavier and deeper and more lonesome than ever.

Time passed. How much time? I don’t know. None of us wore a watch. The world grew even dimmer. Night was coming on. We wrapped ourselves in the blankets and consulted the compass to get our minds off other things, and we guessed that we were drifting toward the northeast, or else we were drifting away from it—unless, of course, we were sitting dead still. We put the compass away. Perry started up a game of “Animal, Mineral, Vegetable,” and that went well until Brendan used the word “doughnut” and said it was a mineral because it had sugar. I said it was a vegetable because it had flour, which is wheat, and anyway sugar comes from a vegetable, too, and one thing led to another and suddenly we were all talking about food, and whether it should be Animal, Mineral, Vegetable, Food, and whether something would count as food just because you ate it. Like let’s say a frog eats a bug or a goat eats a piece of cardboard.

Then Perry said that he had read a book in which sailors, lost at sea in an open boat and starving to death, had eaten their belts and shoes, so those articles of clothing would have to count as food too.

“Sometimes sailors ate each other when they were starving,” Brendan said morbidly.

“Starting with the youngest,” Perry said, at which point I told them both to shut their gobs. We decided it was time for dinner, and Perry handed out the meat pies.

It was night almost before we knew it. The gray of the fog just got darker and darker, still hovering thick around us, and I sat for a long time staring at nothing, and wondering about mermaids, and whether there might be any thereabouts, and whether they really rescued poor lost mariners like in the stories. And then I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew I was startled awake when Brendan yelled, “Look!”

The wind had come up, and the seas with it, and the first thing I thought was that we were capsizing, because the inflatable was bobbing up and down with the rising and falling of the seas. I found myself looking straight into a black wall of water looming above our heads, and then we rose on the swell as it passed beneath us. The water was ink-black—blacker than the night fog—but far down in the depths, off my side of the boat, there shone a pair of great, luminous eyes gazing up at us. And they were apparently growing, too, as they rose toward the surface, larger and larger, the glowing eyes of an enormous fish, a fish the size of a zeuglodon, or a vast great squid.

I thought of the creatures in the lake on the ice island. I could see the shape of this one now, not a squid but something more like an immense whale. Then more eyes winked on, as if there were several of the creatures all rising together, and into my mind came the thought that this was the end, and that we were going to be capsized and swallowed like Jonah. I held on tight to the thwarts, bubbles rushing up around the boat as we rose again on another swell. I saw that Brendan had the Creeper’s knife open in his hand, although it looked pitifully small, but there was something about it that made it easier not to be afraid, for about a second, anyway. Whatever it was in the water was now very near the surface, and I closed my eyes, the boat tilting and tilting until we were sliding backward down the face of a watery hillside.

I opened my eyes then, because scary or not I just had to see. There was a great agitation of the water, millions of bubbles churning up in a foamy rush, and the creature rose above the surface not twenty feet away, and just kept on rising, the seas flowing off its sides in a waterfall. We were all shouting like crazy now, and I slid down into the bottom of the boat, which had a couple of inches of very cold seawater sloshing around in it, although I didn’t feel it at the time.

Then I saw what it was—the submarine, and not a sea creature at all. Its row of lights were glowing through the fog now. We could hear the hum of its engines, and we watched as it very slowly drew away from us, obviously not seeing us there in our little boat in that foggy darkness. Uncle Hedge must be somewhere aboard—I hoped he was—and Lala, and Reginald Peach, all bound for who-knows-where and, for the moment, only a biscuit-toss away.

“The horn!” Brendan shouted, and he took out the foghorn can and popped loose a little plastic bit that protected the trigger. It let off a great blast that shocked us all it was so very loud. But the lights of the submarine continued to fade away through the mists, and so Brendan blasted another one, because all of us by then were cold and hungry and we would by far rather be prisoners and be warm aboard the submarine than be lost and eat our shoes.

But the lights winked out and the submarine vanished, just like the
Clematis
and the ice island had vanished. For a moment there was a sort of moonlike glow some ways off through the mists, but only for that moment, and then the night was as deep and dark as ever, and the humming of the engines died away into silence.

Brendan blasted the horn one last time, senselessly, because he was angry, and I said, “Don’t waste it!” because I was angry too, although I don’t know if I was angry at Brendan or at our losing our chance to be rescued. Then, in the moment of quiet that followed, just when I was feeling like it had been hope itself that had vanished in the fog, there was an answering horn, and close by, too. We waited, holding our breath and holding on even harder to the inflatable, because, as I said, the ocean had grown a little bit wild by then. The horn sounded once more, and Brendan answered with our horn, and the ship answered, closer now.

I started the engine and turned into the swell. The wind gusted, and the fog blew aside, and the night was suddenly sparklingly clear. The sky was alive with stars, and the moon shone down on the ocean in a long ivory road stretching toward the horizon. Not fifty yards away lay the
Clematis
, glowing with lights and with her big spotlight searching the sea. After a moment it shone right on us, blindingly, and we waved our hands and Brendan blew the horn again, half standing up and nearly pitching out of the boat as the searchlight moved on past. Then the light swung back toward us, and stayed there, and we all waved and shouted, just out of happiness, because there was really no more need for waving and shouting.

Brendan, I can tell you, was very much the hero, because he was the man with the horn. Perry said that it had been just like Rolland, I said I thought it had been, too, and so did Brendan, although I had no idea about Rolland, and I was pretty sure Brendan didn’t either. Later Perry told me that Rolland was a great hero in the time of Charlemagne who blew on his horn so hard that blood flew out of his eyes and ears, which is either a very awful thing to contemplate or else a very ridiculous thing, depending. No part of Brendan’s head had exploded, of course, and the air came from inside a can instead of from inside his lungs, but if he wanted to be Rolland it was fine with me, because his impetuous behavior had saved us from a hideous fate.

We bumped along over the choppy seas toward the
Clematis
, and before we knew it we were rescued, hauled aboard and safely back in our cabins and climbing out of our wet clothes. My hands were so frozen that it took me a long time just to work the buttons on my shirt, and my feet, which had gone numb, felt like they were on fire when they started to thaw out, and were still prickly and rubbery-feeling even a half hour later when we were all sitting in the saloon and telling Captain Sodbury what had happened to us—about the betrayal by Dr. Frosticos and about the Creeper, and how the ice island had seemed to be sailing away under its own power and the submarine with it.

Captain Sodbury said that he reckoned we could catch the ice island sometime tomorrow if we could fix the location. But then we told him that the submarine was now out in the open sea, that it had left its moorings on the island. The Captain said that was too bad, and there was no point in our asking why, because the answer was obvious. We ate again, hot food this time, roasted chicken and potatoes and any number of side dishes and a tub of ice cream. We were ravenously hungry despite the meat pie, but also very tired. Brendan fell asleep with his head on the table, and Charlie Slimmerman had to carry him to his bunk. As for me, I’d never been so worn out in all my life, and bed has never felt so good before or since.