Island of the Aunts

by Eva Ibbotson

  “Be careful, dear,” said Myrtle. “It mustn’t get cold.”

  With difficulty, for the egg was heavier than a cannonball, they rolled it back…and the boobrie pushed it out again with her enormous foot.

  The same thing was repeated three times—and then they understood.

  “It’s a present,” said Minette, awed. “She wants us to have it.”

  Minette was right. The boobrie wanted to share. There was nothing to be done except to fetch Art and load the egg on to a barrow—and since seventy-two omelettes are an awful lot of omelettes, the great bun bake began.

  It was hard for the children to be patient during those days of waiting. They knew that when the time came they would find out what the Great Hum meant and who was coming. But on a day when Fabio was sent out for the third time to make sure that not so much as half a cigarette carton or a cotton reel had been washed up on the north shore, he dug in his heels.

  “I think you should tell us,” he said. “Me and Minette, I mean. We can keep secrets.”

  “We will tell you when the time is ripe,” said Aunt Etta, and they had to be content with that.

  But what had been happening to Lambert?

  The aunts were right. Lambert had slept through the beginning of the Hum and heard nothing.

  When he did wake up at last, he realized that the house was empty. Doors stood open; there was no sign of Art in the kitchen. Everyone, though Lambert did not know it, was out on the hill.

  “I want my breakfast,” said Lambert crossly, but there was no one to hear him.

  By the time he was dressed he did hear a kind of thrumming noise, but to Lambert the magical sound seemed to be the kind of noise a generator might make, or some underground machinery.

  But he was interested in the open bedroom doors. Since he had begun to work, Lambert had been allowed to come back into the house to sleep, but Myrtle and the others kept him firmly out of their rooms. Myrtle had not forgotten how he had frightened the ducklings when he first came.

  Now, though, Myrtle’s door stood open. Her bed was unmade and the ducklings had grown enough to manage out of doors.

  Lambert crept in. His shifty eyes took in all Myrtle’s little treasures and he sneered. Fancy bothering to pick up bits of driftwood and veined pebbles and arranging them on the bookcase as though they were ornaments. There wasn’t a single thing in her room, as far as he could see, that was worth tuppence.

  Then he stopped dead. Propped against the corner of the room was Myrtle’s cello case. The cello wasn’t inside it; he could see it leaning against another wall, half covered with a shawl, so the case would be empty.

  Lambert crept closer. He knew he had been carried away in it though he could remember nothing. He had overheard Myrtle talking about it to her sisters.

  And that meant that anything he had been holding when he was snatched might still be there!

  Lambert’s face was flushed with excitement, his thin lips were parted. If only the case wasn’t locked!

  And it wasn’t! He tried the clasp, and it opened easily. The inside of the case was lined with blue velvet, faded and torn in places because it was so old.

  At first there seemed to be nothing there except a crumpled silk scarf and a spare bow. Then as Lambert groped about in the back of the case, his hand found something dark and small which had been covered by the cloth.

  Lambert’s fingers closed round it with a cry. He had found it. He had found his mobile telephone!

  He would get away now! He was safe. Hiding the telephone under his shirt, Lambert went back to his room and pulled the chest of drawers across the door. Then he crouched down like an animal with its prey and began to dial.

  Three days after Lambert found his telephone, the children woke shortly after midnight to find Aunt Coral and Aunt Etta standing by their beds.

  Fabio was so sleepy that he thought at first it was the full moon and he was expected to dance the tango with Aunt Coral, but it wasn’t that.

  “Put some clothes on,” said Aunt Etta. “And clean your teeth.”

  “We cleaned them before we went to bed,” said Minette.

  “Well, clean them again. No one with gunge on their molars is worthy to hear what we have to tell.”

  Still half asleep, the children stumbled up the hill after the two aunts. At the top they found Aunt Myrtle sitting over a fire she had made, ringed by stones, and it was by the flicker of the flames and to the sound of the sea sighing against the rocks below that the children learnt what they wanted to know.

  “Mind you, what I’m going to say won’t mean much to you unless you know your history, and I doubt if you know a lot of that,” said Aunt Etta. “So let me start by asking you a question. What does the word kraken mean to you?”

  Fabio was silent but Minette said shyly, “Is it a sea monster? A very big one?”

  Etta nodded. “Yes. It is a sea monster, and it is bigger than anything you can imagine. But it has nothing to do with all the silly stories you hear. Nothing to do with rubbish about Giant Blobs or outsize cuttlefish or octopuses that pull people down to the ocean bed. No, the kraken is…or was…the Soul of the Sea. It is the greatest force for good the ocean has ever known.”

  Fabio and Minette looked at her surprised. This wasn’t at all the way that Aunt Etta usually spoke.

  So then she began to tell them the kraken’s story. It took a long time to tell and the fire had burnt down and been rekindled many times before it was finished, but the children scarcely stirred.

  “There was a time when everyone in the world knew about the kraken,” Aunt Etta began. “They knew about his huge size and that when he rested, and his back was humped out of the water, he was taken for an island. They knew that when he reared up suddenly, the sea churned and boiled and no ship that was near him had the slightest hope of avoiding shipwreck.

  “But they knew too that for all his size, the kraken was a gentle creature. His eyes were full of soul and when he opened his mouth one could see that instead of teeth he had rows and rows of tendrils which were the greeny-gold colour of a mermaid’s hair. Through this forest of tendrils, the sea poured in, and it was the sea which nourished him: the tiny invisible creatures which make up plankton were all that the kraken needed for food.

  “They knew that the kraken came from the Far North and that the language he spoke best was Polar, though he understood other languages also. But mostly the kraken did not speak. The kraken sang. Or perhaps singing is not quite the right word. What the kraken did was to hum. It was a deep, slow sound and it was like no other sound in the world, for what the kraken hummed was the Song of the Sea. It was a healing song. If you like, it was the Breath of the Universe. Whales can hum too and Buddhist monks who spend their lives on high mountains trying to understand God…and small children when they are happy—but the sound they make is nothing compared to the sound made by the kraken.

  “For many years the kraken swam quietly round the oceans of the world humming his hum and singing his song and stopping sometimes to rest. And when he stopped, people who did not know much said: goodness, surely there wasn’t an island out in that bay before, but people who were wise and in touch with the things that mattered, smiled and felt honoured and proud. Because when the kraken came, they remembered what a splendid thing the sea was: so clean and beautiful when it was calm, so mighty and exciting and awe-inspiring when it was rough. It was as though the great creature was guarding the sea for them, or even as though somehow he was showing them what a treasure house it was.

  “Look! the kraken seemed to be saying. Behold…the sea!

  “In those days the kraken made it his business to circle the oceans of the world each year and whenever he appeared, people started to behave themselves. Fishermen stopped catching more fish than they needed and threw the little ones back into the sea, and people who were dumping their rubbish into the water thought better of it, seeing the kraken’s large and wondrous eyes fixed on them. And when he went on again it w
as to leave the sea—and indeed the world—a better place.

  “It was like a blessing, to have seen the kraken,” said Aunt Etta now. “It brought you luck for the rest of your life.”

  “Did you ever see him?” asked Minette.

  Aunt Etta shook her head. She looked very sad. “No one living now has seen him. He hasn’t been seen for a hundred years or more. He was dreadfully hurt once and he went into hiding.”

  The hurt that was done to the kraken was not to his body. The skin of a kraken is a metre deep and no other animal can threaten him. No animal would want to—he travelled with a whole company of sharks and stingrays and killer whales who would have died rather than harm him.

  But human beings are different. They always have been: interfering and bossy and mad for power. No one knew what kind of whaling boat had shot a harpoon into the kraken’s throat. Was it a Japanese ship or one belonging to the British or the Danes? Did the whalers mistake the kraken for a humpback whale, or were they just terrified, seeing a dark shape bigger than anything they had ever seen rear up in front of them?

  Whatever the reason, they let off the biggest of their harpoons and hit the kraken with terrible force in the softest part of his throat.

  The kraken probably didn’t believe it at first. No one had ever tried to harm him. Then he felt the pain and saw the dark dollops of his blood staining the sea.

  When he understood what had happened, he began to thrash about, trying to rid himself of the harpoon—and the rope snapped. But the pain was still there and the kraken reared up, trying to dislodge the hooked horror in his neck. As he did so, the tidal wave made by his body tossed the whaling boat up, and drew it under the sea, and every one of the men was drowned, which was as well because the sea creatures who had travelled with the kraken would have torn them limb from limb.

  And the kraken swam away to the north, the harpoon still in his throat. The pain died away and presently an old sea nymph came with her brood of children and cut the hook out of the kraken’s flesh with razor shells and soon there was only a small scar left to show where it had been.

  But the scar in the kraken’s soul remained. He had travelled the world to sing the Song of the Sea and to heal the people who lived by it—and they had stabbed him in the throat. The kraken was two thousand years old, which is not old for a kraken, but now he felt tired. Let human beings look after themselves! He swam still further north, and further still to where the wildness of the sea and the large number of humped islands made him invisible, and he turned his back on the world, and slept.

  And while he slept, people forgot that there had been such a creature, and the stories about him got wilder and wilder until this healing monster was jumbled up in people’s minds with Giant Blobs and vicious triffids and nonsense like that.

  And the sea got muckier and muckier and more and more neglected.

  But of course everyone did not forget. The sea creatures remembered—the seals and the selkies, the mermaids and the nixies, and the people who lived and worked on the islands and by the shore.

  And the aunts remembered.

  “Oh yes, we always remembered,” said Etta now. “Our father told us about him and our grandfather told our father. We have always known, but we never dreamt—”

  She fell silent, overcome by her feelings and the children gazed into the embers of the fire and thought about what they had heard.

  Why am I not frightened, Minette wondered. Once she would have been terrified at the thought of a great sea monster swimming towards them, but now she felt only wonder. And something else: a longing to help and serve this creature she had never seen. She felt she would do anything for the kraken when he came. Which was silly, because how could an ordinary girl do anything for the mightiest monster in the world? But she didn’t feel silly. She felt awed and uplifted as though some amazing task awaited her.

  Fabio didn’t feel quite like that. Fabio felt that the story he had heard needed a celebration. So he did something rather noble. He turned to Coral, sitting in her cloak beside him, and said:

  “Aunt Coral, the moon is full—or very nearly. Would you like to dance the tango?”

  Chapter 9

  Stanley Sprott, Lambert’s father, had had a good time in America. He had bought three factories and a cinema and turned out a family living in a house next to the cinema so that he could bulldoze it and build a Fast Food restaurant. There had been a court case and a fuss because the family had a disabled child and a sick mother, but Mr Sprott had won. He always did win because he knew how to hire the best lawyers and now, as the chauffeur drove him in his Mercedes from the airport, he reckoned that his trip to the States would earn him a clear million dollars.

  Beside him in the car sat his bodyguard, Des, a large man with small eyes and an even smaller brain. Des had only learned to read when he was 25 and he liked to show that he could do it, so as they stopped for the traffic lights he looked at the posters on the wall of the police station and said: “There’s some mad aunts been on the rampage, kidnapping children. They’re offering a thousand pounds reward if anyone’s got any info.”

  Mr Sprott thought this was very funny.

  “Aunts!” he snorted as the car moved on, leaving the pictures of Aunt Coral and Aunt Etta flapping in the breeze. “Trust the police to be fooled by a bunch of aunts!”

  Mr Sprott had a very low opinion of the police, who had tried to interfere with some of his enterprises and been thoroughly foiled.

  Arriving in his house, he stood for a moment in the hallway and looked about him. He had the feeling that somebody who should have been in his house, was not.

  But who? Who was it that was not there? While Des went to turn off the burglar alarms and look for letter bombs, Mr Sprott thought about this.

  Well, for one thing his wife was not there. But there was nothing strange about that. His wife had faxed him from Paris to say she was going to go and buy some more clothes in Rome, and she had faxed him from Rome to say she was going to buy some more clothes in Madrid.

  So it wasn’t Josette Sprott who should have been there and wasn’t, and it wasn’t the housekeeper who always had two hours off in the afternoon.

  Which meant that it was his son, Lambert.

  “Lambert!” bellowed Mr Sprott, standing in the middle of the hallway.

  No answer.

  “Get him on the intercom,” Mr Sprott told Des.

  But though all the rooms were connected electronically, Lambert did not appear.

  Mr Sprott was not alarmed, but he was surprised. He had told Lambert when he was coming back and the boy, though an awful sniveller, was fond of his father.

  Mr Sprott went to his study, sent out for a secretary, and was soon deep in his business affairs.

  But when the housekeeper came back in the early evening, Mr Sprott was reminded of his son once more.

  “Didn’t you bring Lambert, sir?” she asked him. Her voice was hopeful. She really hated the boy.

  “How could I bring Lambert? I haven’t got him. I never had him—he’s staying here with you.”

  “No, he isn’t. There was a message saying he was joining you in America. It was left by the aunt—she said there’d been a call.”

  “The aunt? What aunt?”

  “The aunt from the agency. She took Lambert to the zoo and when I got back the boy was gone.”

  The flapping posters, the notice of the reward, ran through Mr Sprott’s mind. They didn’t seem so funny now.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but—”

  “Be quiet.” Mr Sprott was scowling. “I’m going to the police. Tell Merton to bring the car round.”

  But at that moment, very faintly, a telephone rang upstairs.

  It was his personal phone, or rather one of them. Mr Sprott bought mobiles like other people bought matches and now he couldn’t remember which one it was or where he might have left it. Under his bed? On the lavatory cistern? In the cocktail cabinet?

  “Find it,” he ordered, and
the bodyguard and the secretary and the housekeeper ran all over the house trying to follow the sound.

  It was Mr Sprott who reached it just as it was about to stop ringing. It was under a pile of monogrammed underpants in his chest of drawers.

  “Hello!” he shouted. He was a man who always shouted into telephones. There were some strange noises; a sort of gulping sound followed by a gabble. “Speak up, damn you. I can’t hear you!”

  “It’s me, Daddy. It’s Lambert. I’ve been kidnapped! You’ve got to come and get me!” More gulping, more tears. What a cry-baby the boy was!

  “All right, Lambert. I’ll come and get you, but where are you? Speak clearly.”

  “I’m on an island. It’s an awful place—”

  “What island? Where is it?”

  “It’s in the sea.”

  Stanley Sprott rolled his eyes. “Yes, Lambert, islands are usually in the sea. But where? Which sea?”

  “I dunno—they won’t tell me—but it’s cold. There aren’t any coconuts. I’ve been phoning and phoning you every day.” He broke off, gulping again. “My battery is running out.”

  “Lambert, please think. Are there any other islands near by?”

  “There’s a couple on one side.”

  “What side. East? West? North? South?”

  “I dunno. The sun comes up behind them, I think. It’s awful here—it’s weird. There’s these aunts; they’re mad and they give me drugged food. You’ve got to come, you’ve got to! There’s one after me now!”

  The line went dead. Mr Sprott stood for a while thinking. An isolated island with two islands to the east of it. And—unbelievably—a posse of aunts.

  He gave his orders. “I want the Hurricane made ready. I’ll pick her up at London docks. Get a couple of armed men aboard and see there’s plenty of ammunition. Pick them carefully; this mission is secret!”