by Perrin Briar
There was something on board. His men were unlikely to willingly sacrifice themselves to save their crewmates, but one man versus three was not much of a challenge. Especially if that one man was Skinny.
But Skinny was in luck.
The oars of another ship’s boat pushed through the water. The noise seemed loud in the silence.
“We should warn them to stop rowing,” Smithy said, rising to his feet.
Stoneheart put his finger to his lips and shook his head for emphasis. Smithy sat back down. The other ship’s boat was making good progress, scything through the water. With just a little more time they may have been able to reach the island, make it to safety.
But it wasn’t to be.
A rush of water, like something moving rapidly across the surface, steamed toward the noise of the oars of the other ship’s boat. They were not visible, and that was just as well. The men’s screams were enough to paint a picture.
Stoneheart nodded, and the rowers picked up their oars again. They rowed carefully at first, and then picked up speed as the munching of the feeding frenzy died away.
49
ADMIRAL FLOATED in a sea of darkness. There was little to guide him, no stars or moss growing on the polestar side of trees. He was alone, a halo of light in an eternal darkness, with only the gentle hum of his pod to keep him company. It was quiet. Too quiet.
He’d lost track of the ship’s boats some time ago, and though he was loathe to, he knew he would have to surface to see where they were. He couldn’t wait much longer for fear they might be getting close to the island already.
He turned the handles in his little pod and caught sight of something out the corner of his eye.
His muscles immediately felt weak.
What he’d seen was a slimy skin-like flesh, dark, and yet it reflected what little moonlight filtered through the thick fog above. But it hadn’t seen him yet. At least, he hoped it hadn’t.
Admiral turned the lights off and sat in darkness, his breaths loud in his ears. If he was silent, perhaps the monster wouldn’t see him. And so he waited.
The pod jerked to one side. Something had seized it, wrapping around the weak front windscreen.
Admiral turned on the lights and engine. He hit the pedal in the floor to zip away, but he didn’t move anywhere. He turned the pod around, its harsh bright light catching circular rows of pointed teeth. Something was caught between them. Admiral retched when he recognized them as human limbs.
So, the stories were true. The superstitious sailors and pirates had been correct. There was a monster. And Admiral was its next meal.
The monster flexed its rubber-like body, a movement both alien and yet fluid, beautiful. Worse, it was powerful, and seized the pod in its jaws. It shook the pod side to side.
Admiral bounced off the walls like a rag doll. The metal cage was tough and wouldn’t break so easily. But something snapped, and the cracks grew wider in the front window. The water rushed in, filling the tiny compartment.
Admiral fell back in his seat. He wouldn’t let himself be so easily defeated. He reached behind his chair and took out his remaining explosive.
The metal was bending and crunching beneath the monster’s powerful jaws, crushing the pod around him. Admiral repositioned and levered himself up, curling his legs and kicking at the glass pane. He struck it again and again. It crunched and snapped, but would not give away. Then the monster, somehow, impossibly, bit harder, and the glass shattered.
Admiral shoved a timer into the explosive and let it fall to the floor of the pod.
Eat this! Admiral thought. Careful, it might give you heartburn!
Admiral pushed himself out of the pod and pulled himself through the water. Something struck him on the back, knocking him forward. He lost an all-important bubble of air. He kicked toward the surface. He could see it shimmering, the moonlight playing across its surface.
Something wrapped around his ankle.
No! Admiral screamed in his mind. No, no, no!
He struggled against the monster’s tendril, kicking and flailing, grasping toward the water’s surface, using what little oxygen he had to attempt an escape. If he could just stretch a little farther he could gasp a mouthful of oxygen. It was so close! But he couldn’t. The tendril was so strong.
It pulled him deeper, into the darkness. Admiral could see with terrifying clarity the bumps on the monster’s arm, thick and powerful, wrapping around him, its suckers pressing at Admiral’s face as it squeezed him tighter and tighter, forcing the air from his lungs.
Admiral counted down the seconds to the explosion. It should have gone off by now. Had it malfunctioned? Was the timer broken?
A sense of calm came over Admiral, resigned to his fate. He was doomed, but he did not have to enter it with fear and anger. He actually felt ready for this.
He was ready to die.
An incredible burst of light emanated from below. A great groan of agony issued from the giant beast, and a powerful pulse pushed Admiral back, up to the surface. He was quick to fill his lungs, filling himself with sweet life, thanking his lucky stars for still being alive.
And then he began to sink.
The tendril wrapped about him lost its power and hung from a severed end, but it was heavy, and dragged Admiral down, down, down.
Admiral struggled with newfound courage. His arms found some give, and he used his shoulders like an escape artist to find enough space. He kicked and felt the monster’s giant suckers pull disgustingly at his skin. He forced the tentacle loose.
He rose toward the surface. He was running low on oxygen again, on vapors. There was no way he was going to make it. Or could he?
50
BRYAN AND ZOE felt the explosion rattle through their oars. The water rushed, like a waterfall. The family couldn’t see the explosion, nor what the target had been, but it was too much to hope meaty pirate chunks were part of the material raining down on the sea.
The family pressed on, passing the island that had been their former prison, working their way around it to the adjacent island. Aaron and Cassie leapt from their ship’s boat and ran as fast as they could, to put as much distance between themselves and the sea as they could.
“Wait!” Bryan said. “We’ll need the ship’s boat! Help me pull it in!”
It was with heavy feet that Aaron and Cassie walked back to the water’s edge. Still, walking had never felt so good to Cassie. She could understand why some people, after experiencing a traumatic event, often got down on all fours and kissed the ground. She felt like doing it herself, but there was work to be done.
She helped the others drag the ship’s boat into a small inlet, and draped leaves over it.
“It won’t stay hidden for long,” Bryan said. “But it might give us some time.”
“Buy us time for what?” Cassie said.
“To protect ourselves,” Bryan said. “These are pirates we’re talking about. They’re dangerous. And Stoneheart won’t stop till he has had revenge on us.”
“I’d like to say you were wrong,” Jim said. “But, assuming he survived the explosion we heard earlier, he won’t stop. Not until he gets what he wants.”
“Why does he want us?” Cassie said. “We haven’t even done anything to him!”
“That’s not the way he sees it,” Bryan said. “We outwitted him, escaped his clutches, and to a man such as him, that’s too much to bear. Especially with his reputation to uphold.”
“We should get dry first,” Zoe said. “There’s a cave here. We can get warm in there.”
They gathered dry reeds and carried them into the cave. Bryan tried his lighter, but it was soaked and useless. He went outside and searched the rocky outcrop until he came across a pair of flint rocks. He smacked them together, producing sparks.
It took ten minutes before he managed to get anything to catch. He gently blew on it to help it alight. He added it to the main body of reeds, wood, and other flammable materials the others had gathered
.
The family sat back and let the warmth take them. Though they were tired, they dared not sleep for fear of waking with pirates standing over them.
They sat fashioning weapons, sharpening sticks into sharp points. Cassie sat a stick to one side and picked up another. She paused and looked at the cave wall. There was a stick man figure drawn on it in blue, holding a bow and arrow. The light flickered and gave the impression he was moving.
Cassie moved toward the drawing, putting her fingers to it. The light flickered again, stirred by a light breeze from the entrance, and uncovered another painting. This one of a yak or wildebeest.
“Guys,” Cassie said. “I think there are cave paintings on this wall.”
“Cave paintings?” Bryan said. “Why would there be cave paintings here? No one lives here.”
“Now they don’t,” Zoe said. “But in the past they might have done.”
She snapped off a fingered branch and scooped some of the fire and its kindling onto it. She brought it around so the others could see the drawings. The wall was littered with them.
“What are these things?” Jim said. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
He pointed to a drawing of a long square box with people inside, running on a parallel set of lines. Tracks.
“They’re called trains,” Bryan said. “They’re used to carry people from one place to another.”
“What about this one?” Jim said.
This drawing was of a large room with a screen at the front, and people sat beneath a beam of light.
“That’s a cinema,” Aaron said. “People go there to watch movies.”
“Movies?” Jim said.
“Stories,” Aaron said. “But made to look real. Recorded using cameras… It’s hard to explain. One day you’ll get to see them, when we get back to the surface.”
Jim didn’t comment, and pressed his fingers to the drawings, to what his ancestors had wanted to pass on, to hand down to their children.
“It’s a recording,” Zoe said. “Of everything the people here came from, the kind of world they left behind. A modern world, to their eyes. I don’t understand. Why would they want to rebuild society like they have now and ignore everything from the modern world?”
“Because they had no choice,” Bryan said. “It’s much easier to rebuild a society from an earlier time than the modern world. You need so many more materials and complicated systems to operate.”
“And look here,” Zoe said. “They knew there was a monster in the water. Whoever stayed behind watched as the people left, managing to escape its clutches. And there’s something else here, a treasure of some kind.”
She put her hand to her mouth in shock.
“You don’t think the treasure is really here?” Bryan said.
“Could be,” Zoe said. “But why hasn’t anyone discovered it before now?”
“Because the only people who could come here, pirates, were the same people who refused to because of the monster,” Zoe said. “Cartographer was right. The treasure never was on the British side of the world. It was on the pirate side.”
“Are you telling me the treasure was under our noses this whole time?” Jim said.
“Yes,” Zoe said. “Only they would never find it because they refused to face the monster.”
Cassie peered closer at the drawing.
“Wait,” she said. “There’s something else here. A spiral with a key drawn above it. They wrote ‘HOME’ next to it. Do you think it could be the Passage?”
“Yes,” Bryan said. “This could be our way out of here. Maybe this was the treasure the whole time—the history of this place, and the knowledge the inhabitants could have gotten from it. Knowing these things could have helped with making discovers.”
“What about the key?” Cassie said with a frown. “What does that mean?”
“I can answer that,” Jim said. “I think I’ve seen it before.”
He reached into his back pocket and withdrew the pirate map. He unfolded it and pressed it against the wall.
“We never drew the Demon Isles,” Jim said. “We thought it was bad luck, that the monster would be able to steal the soul of whoever knew its home. But the treasure was in front of us this whole time. If only we’d taken the time to look at the map properly.”
He pointed to where the Demon Isles were located. In their place had been drawn a mythical monster with the head and torso of a man, his legs replaced by intertwined tentacles. The man held something in each of his hands. In his left, a large old-fashioned key, in the other, a treasure chest.
Bryan looked back at the swirl with a key over it.
“If we hurry, we might not have to fight the pirates after all,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
“The swirl is located at the back of the island,” Zoe said. “How do we get there?”
“Look next to the image,” Bryan said. “There’s an arrow. I think we’re supposed to head this way.”
The family scooped up what few weapons they’d made and headed into the deep darkness of the cave. They each carried a flaming torch. The family held out their free hands and felt along the rough craggy walls as they crept through the damp corridor, taking care to place their feet.
51
THE TUNNEL snaked through the mountain, first up, then down, then a long left and sharp right. They were being led into the bowels of the island, to its hot magma center. Except it wasn’t getting hotter, but cooler.
The breeze didn’t just come directly at them, but from all sides. Bryan ran his hands over the wall’s surface, fingers slipping into little holes there, momentarily plugging the gaps closed.
There was the occasional squeak above them, from soft hairy bodies of what they all knew to be—bats. The family whimpered, crouching down low at a flock of the winged rats. One slapped Bryan’s face. Another clung to his shin. He kicked to dislodge it, succeeding only in striking Aaron on the thigh.
The family, relieved, heard the sea long before they saw it. The sound was magnified by the hard rock on either side, a gentle soft shushing.
The family cupped hands over their eyes when they emerged into the light. They breathed in the fresh salty sea air and let the breeze wrap around them.
There was something strange about the noise. Usually, the water that brushed against the land was a soft sound, inhaling and exhaling, gentle and calming. This sound was not relaxing, but a great churning rushing roar, a waterfall, or aggressive rapids over a precipitous rock formation.
Jim recognized the sound first, and edged forward, peering over the cliff, careful to lean back slightly in case the rock beneath him gave way and he needed to make a dive onto more solid ground.
He gasped at what he saw.
The family joined him and exclaimed their own surprise.
The sea swirled in a great circular arc, thick and unyielding. The whirlpool had to be two hundred yards in diameter. Anything that fell into its embrace was doomed to wind up on the seabed, a visible patch of yellow-brown an indiscriminate distance away.
“Well,” Zoe said. “That explains the fog, at least.”
“What are you talking about?” Cassie said. “It doesn’t explain anything, especially not where the Passage is meant to be.”
“Fog is simply a cloud that lacks the will to fly,” Zoe said. “I think this whirlpool plays an important role in that. And I think the whirlpool is our way out of here.”
“How do you know that?” Cassie said. “Because of a drawing on an old piece of paper?”
“The ancestors of this place knew the way out of here,” Zoe said. “They drew on the cave wall to show they knew. This whirlpool is the spiral. Above it was a key, to unlock the door and go home.”
“You think this might be it?” Bryan said. “You think this might be the end of it all?”
“It’s the end of this world, after all,” Zoe said. “Why wouldn’t the end of the world have a door out
?”
“Why not indeed,” a voice behind them said.
The family spun around to find Stoneheart and the remains of his crew behind them. Smithy, Earl and Skinny. They had their pistols drawn, pointed at the family. All but Stoneheart, who had no weapon drawn at all.
“Jim, come stand by me,” Stoneheart said. “These people kidnapped you. I know it’s not your fault you left us.”
Jim’s eyes lowered. He took a shuffling step forward, and then paused. He looked up at Stoneheart and seemed to come to a decision.
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Stoneheart’s look of confusion turned to a glare.
“What?” he said.
“These are good people,” Jim said. “They didn’t force me to do anything. I wanted to leave you. I just wasn’t brave enough to take the final step and do it.”
“Come here,” Stoneheart said, pointing to the ground at his feet. “Now.”
“No,” Jim said.
Bryan stepped forward and placed his hands on Jim’s shoulders.
“You heard what he said,” he said. “He’s staying with us.”
Stoneheart tore his eyes from Bryan and focused on Jim.
“This is your final decision?” he said.
There was something in his eyes, Bryan thought. Mirth? Amusement? Whatever it was, it was at odds with the anger he was exuding.
“So,” Stoneheart said, “after all these years, you’re finally ready.”
“Ready?” Jim said. “Ready for what?”
“To assume responsibility,” Stoneheart said. “For yourself, for others. You see, long ago, someone decided that the only leader worth his salt was the man who wanted to leave. He didn’t want to stay for gold or glory. He wanted to go. He didn’t care about other people. He cared only about what was right. People’s opinions of what counts as ‘right’ varies, of course. But not by that much.”
Jim frowned.