“Gotcha, Jimmy! Did you hear that boys?” he called without looking up from his task. “There’s a bleedin’ wall in the middle of the Indian Ocean!”
Lumpy shook his head, grinning, and kept at the moldy vegetables. The fog closed in around him.
In the wheelhouse, Captain Englehorn was seeing for himself this impossibility—a gigantic obstruction that loomed out of the night and the fog before the ship as though the Great Wall of China had appeared suddenly before them. The wall was two hundred feet high, at least, dwarfing the Venture. In the misty darkness it was impossible to get a clear view of its monstrous structure, but it looked jagged and spiny, as though meant to keep anyone from coming near.
As if anyone would have sailed up to it by choice.
From above, he could hear Jimmy still shouting in the crow’s nest, voice tight with fear.
“Wall!” the boy cried. “Dead ahead! Look!”
Englehorn spun the wheel hard to starboard. “Stop engines!”
Hayes slammed the telegraph to the stop position. The order went through the ship and the thrum of the engine began to subside. Below, in the engine room, the engineer was shutting the power down.
Through the windows of the wheelhouse, the captain could see Denham move to the railing at the prow, staring up in awe at the vast wall that towered above them.
“Ten fathoms!” shouted the crewman with the lead line.
Englehorn gripped the wheel and held his breath. The Venture slowed…slowed…but its weight carried it forward, and with a grinding crunch, the prow struck the wall.
“Give me some power!” he shouted at Hayes. “Half astern, both!”
At his hands and beneath his feet, as though he were one with his vessel, he could feel the Venture lolling without power in the heavy swells that swept up against the wall. There came the heavy throb from below as the engines regained their strength, and the reverse propellers kicked in. The ship began to pull away from certain doom, but at low power and with the swell of the ocean, Englehorn still didn’t have adequate control of her.
They were at the mercy of the sea.
Ann careened along the corridor, the rolling of the ocean casting her from one side to the other, and she kept her hands up to protect herself as she was thrown from wall to wall. When she reached the door she hung onto the frame and then stepped out onto the deck. Her heart hammered with fear, and she gazed around at the panic that had gripped the sailors, who ran to and fro in wild attempts to get the vessel under control.
Then she saw Jack. He stood at the rail, holding on and staring into the darkness and the thick fog. She started to go to him, and then paused, looking past and above him, as a huge, jagged peak thrust out of the fog off the starboard bow.
“Rocks!” Jack shouted, pointing, turning toward the wheelhouse, trying to warn the crew.
“Rocks to starboard!” came a voice from above. Ann looked up and saw Jimmy, practically hanging from the crow’s nest as he pointed. “To port!” he said, looking around wildly. “Rocks everywhere!”
Ann said a silent prayer.
Englehorn rushed to the wheelhouse door. “Take the wheel, Hayes!”
He burst onto the bridge, the moist fog heavy on him. With horror he stared around at the rocks looming from the shroud of night and mist, and he realized the Venture was trapped in the midst of a huge reef. His ship was out of control, and in every direction lay her destruction, and perhaps the death of all aboard.
The Venture tilted in the water. Ann reached out and grabbed hold of the railing at the top of the stairs from the lower deck to keep her balance. Steadied, she let go, and even as she did the sea rolled again and she reeled with it, staggering across the deck and careening into Jack Driscoll. His arms encircled her at the instant the ship scraped the rocks with a shriek of metal.
Then the Venture was rising on another wave and it was clear the rocks had not done any real damage. Not yet.
“Are you okay?” Jack asked.
Ann was stunned into silence by fear and shock, and she could see that Jack was just as horrified by their fate.
She nodded to him. They just held each other for several seconds, not speaking. Then the ship gave another lurch and they were torn away from one another.
For those few moments she’d felt safe in his arms, as though everything would be all right, and Ann grabbed at the space where he’d been, wishing to feel that again. But Jack was beyond her reach.
The Venture was in a slow, long spin. As the captain had tried to get control of her, to maneuver her, he’d been unable to give it enough power to really get moving in one direction. The rocks were just too close on all sides to risk it. As another wave rolled by and the ship dipped into a low trough after it, more rocks were revealed all around the hull. Any second they might tear right through and scuttle her.
Jimmy figured they were all going to die. The thought was strangely comforting. If he was going out, this was as good a way as any—with Mr. Hayes and the crew of the Venture. He’d never expected to be a part of anything, really, so to be part of the crew…if this was the end of things, that wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen.
But he wasn’t giving up just yet.
Frantic, he tried to see through the rocks that loomed up seemingly on all sides. It was as though the ocean bottom had thrust up gigantic fingers of stone to clutch at the ship, maybe to drag them down to a watery grave. The fog churned and the night shrouded the reef, but there had to be a way out. Somehow, trying to pull away from the wall, they’d managed to sail into the reef, and if they’d gotten in—
There was an opening ahead, a place where the cloak of night was blank, swirling with the whiteness of the fog and nothing else.
Jimmy smiled, heart skipping a beat. “It’s clear ahead!” he cried. “There’s a gap!”
Englehorn heard the boy and for a second wondered if he’d imagined it, wished the words into being. But no, Jimmy’s voice echoed in his head. He turned to the wheelhouse.
The ship rode another swell and it sent him staggering through the door. He raced to the telegraph and slammed it forward, heard the engines roar as they responded, and felt the Venture surge toward the gap.
“Full ahead!” he shouted.
Hayes looked at him, and Englehorn had never appreciated his first mate more, for he was the only man now on the ship who did not have fear and desperation in his eyes.
The captain took the wheel.
The ship rose on the surf, engines and ocean carrying it toward the gap in the reef, and Englehorn gripped the wheel tightly, knuckles white. The impact threw him forward, slamming him into the wheel.
A sickening groan of metal and a creak of stress upon the hull met his ears, then a grinding noise from below. The Venture shuddered as Englehorn closed his eyes and cursed whatever gods there were.
The Venture had run aground.
Denham had been thrown to the deck of the marooned ship. Now he picked himself up and staggered to the railing. The waves were still slamming the hull all around the ship, and it dipped and rose a bit with each swell, but it was not high enough to lift the Venture off the rocks.
The engines churned and joined with one last ocean surge, pushing at the vessel, and it slid further up onto the rocks, lodging even more firmly there. Even as it did, Denham looked up into the fog shrouded around the ship, at the walls of stone that were all too close, and then he spied a face…an outcropping that had been hewn into a huge, stony face. Weathered, eroded, made by the hands of some ancient people, the face looked down on him with a blank, baleful gaze, and Denham stared up at it in awe.
The engines shut down, and the Venture settled on the rocks, stuck fast. Englehorn had taken the first chance presented to turn the ship around, and yet fate’s irony had delivered them here regardless.
Denham thought back to the map that had led him here. There could be no doubt. In his heart he had been sure, and the fog had been proof enough, but now there was utter certainty.
The words written on the map had given a name to his destination.
“The Island of the Skull,” he whispered to himself.
Pandemonium erupted on deck. Sailors were shouting at one another, running around to make sure everything was tied down, slipping below decks to check the damage, and those who weren’t occupied dashed to the railing to survey for themselves just how dire their situation.
And dire it was. They weren’t going anywhere without a hell of a lot of effort and a whisper of a miracle, and maybe not even then.
Dawn was not far off. Through the fog, which now began to melt away, Denham saw the eerie silhouette of a small island. Jagged peaks rose from its rocky shoreline. On barren cliffs along the coast in either direction there were crumbling ruins, some clinging to precipices high above the water. It was without a doubt the most inhospitable landscape he had ever seen. There was no opening, no cove in which a ship might set anchor. There were only the ruins and cliffs, the rocky reef, and in the mist off to port, that strange wall of rock and earth and wood, shafts like spears jutting out of it from every angle.
It wasn’t a place that invited visitors.
Denham sensed someone approaching and turned just as Preston arrived. He was startled to find the younger man carrying his Bell & Howell movie camera. Preston presented it to him as though it were some sort of prize, and in this instance, perhaps it was.
“Like you said,” Preston told him, “defeat is always momentary.”
A feeling of relief and gratitude swept through Denham. The kid had had him worried for a while—Preston had seemed to lose his way, to forget what being a filmmaker was really all about. But if Denham needed any proof that he was thinking straight again, here it was. They were aground off the coast of the very place Preston feared, the whole crew was focused on repairing the ship and freeing her from the rocks, and Preston had the camera all prepped and ready to go.
To do the job they came for.
Denham smiled.
A door swung open across the deck and Bruce stepped out. He was dressed in his pajamas, unshaven and yawning, stretching as though he’d just woken up. And obviously he had, for he glanced at the shoreline of Skull Island with an air of utter indifference.
“So this is Singapore, huh?”
Dawn had arrived, but Hayes hadn’t seen a glimmer of it. He was in the engine room, sweat running in rivulets down his face and the back of his neck. Metal plates had been riveted to the hull to cover holes torn by the rocks—some of them he’d installed himself—but still jets of water were shooting through cracks between the plates. His boots were in several inches of water and the situation was getting worse.
“Faster! Come on, open those valves! Without those pumps—”
He let the words hang there. The crewmen down in the engine room with him were not novices—they knew the consequences if the damage couldn’t be repaired, and if the water couldn’t be pumped out.
The stokers were frantically working to open valves on the pumps, getting the water flowing faster out of the Venture, a race against the water leaking in through the riveted plates. Hayes snapped at a few of the men, who were holding mattresses up against the leaks.
“Shore up those holes!” he shouted, frustrated that they could not keep the mattresses in place. Hayes looked at one of the stokers. “Get extra pumps in here! Now!”
As the sailor ran to fulfill this command, Hayes saw Captain Englehorn step into the engine room with an expression grim and knowing.
“She’s taken a pounding,” Hayes told him.
Englehorn gave a small nod. “What about the prop?”
“Shaft’s not bent, far as we can tell,” Hayes replied, the only piece of good news, though even that was complicated. “But she’s stuck hard against the rock…”
He was interrupted by a loud groan as the ship shifted on the reef.
Jimmy suddenly burst into the engine room, eyes wide and wild. “Captain! You’d better come quick!”
Hayes narrowed his gaze. What now?
Englehorn went to follow Jimmy up to the deck, Hayes following out of curiosity. When they emerged, he was somewhat relieved to find that the fog had thinned considerably and that morning had already come while he was below. The landscape around them was the most forbidding he had ever seen, even in war, but there was something about even this diffuse daylight that lifted an invisible weight from his shoulders.
With morning there seemed hope.
Hayes and Englehorn followed Jimmy to the railing and the boy pointed toward the island. There was no mistaking what had gotten Jimmy so anxious. A whaler, one of the smaller lifeboats, was being rowed away from the Venture toward the shore, where a tiny inlet appeared to be the only real access to the island that didn’t involve scaling craggy cliffs or that impossibly huge wall.
They’d made a good distance already, but by the dawn’s light, Hayes could see Denham at the prow of the whaler, along with Driscoll, Miss Darrow, and Mr. Baxter, and the sound and camera men who worked with the filmmaker. Four sailors were ferrying them to the shore, all of them packed into that little boat.
“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Hayes asked, unable to comprehend the scene.
Englehorn lifted one corner of his mouth in sarcastic sneer. “It looks like Mr. Denham’s mounting a one-man invasion.”
Hayes looked at him. “And why would he want to do that?”
“He doesn’t need a reason, Mr. Hayes. He’s an American.”
Several crewmen ran past, and Englehorn turned to bark orders at them. “Have you checked the fo’c’sle and cargo holds? Come on, move it!”
Hayes kept his eyes on the diminishing lifeboat. “You want me to bring them back?”
Englehorn fixed him with a dark look. “I don’t give a damn about Carl Denham. I want this ship fixed and ready to float on the next high tide. We’re leaving, Mr. Hayes.”
12
THE SURF LAPPED THE sides of the whaler, sea spray dampening all of those Denham had either hired or shanghaied for this trip ashore. After the long night of fog and terror, Ann felt grateful for the return of the sun, though there was still a sheen of light mist that she thought might always cloak this spot, this strangely ancient place called Skull Island.
The sailors who were ferrying them ashore worked in grim silence. Bruce, Jack, and Denham’s film crew were all equally subdued, and Ann wondered if they were as breathless as she, staring up at the great stone ruins that jutted out of the water all around them.
What kind of ancient civilization was this? she wondered. And what happened to the people who once lived here? The accomplishment of the statuary alone spoke of an advanced society, far from the primitive culture she would have expected from a remote, tropical island centuries in the past.
And that wall.
More than anything, it was the wall that chilled her, the wall that she was sure gave them all pause. It was a feat of construction no less extraordinary than the great pyramids, towering hundreds of feet in the air. It began in the water and ran up onto the shore, creating a barrier that effectively cut this part of the island away from the rest. It ran inland from here, and disappeared into the jungle, but it stretched as far as she could see, possibly all the way across the island.
The overall effect of the intimidating environment was that they were all sober as judges, and silent. All except Carl Denham, who seemed like a boy on Christmas morning. When he looked at Ann, she saw his eyes sparkling with excitement. He seemed to jitter in place, ready to jump out of his skin…or out of the boat, impatient to reach shore.
Can’t you feel it, Mr. Denham? she thought. Don’t you have the same chill that’s touching the rest of us?
Denham balanced himself in the front of the boat, camera on his shoulder, filming as the sailors rowed them ashore. Herb was the camera operator, at least technically, but Denham almost always preferred to do the filming himself, leaving Herb to act the squire to Denham’s knight.
“Can
you believe this, Jack?” Denham quietly asked. “It’s a godsend!”
Jack was staring up at the ruins. Ann followed his line of sight and saw a sea snake writhe from one of the gaping holes in the weathered edifice and slither down into the water. She shivered and drew her rain slicker a little closer around her, then slid a bit closer to Jack. In the midst of this strange new world, surrounded by these surly men, she reached across the private space that separated her from Jack and curled her fingers into his hand. He glanced at her, eyes searching and grave, and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. But she didn’t see that hope in his gaze.
Wind whistled through the gaps and holes in the ruins, an eerie moan that mixed with the deep boom of the waves crashing against the wall to create a mournful requiem.
Ann studied the faces of the statues—the idols—carved into the rocks all around the lifeboat. She glanced ahead at the shore of the small inlet and then her sight drifted along the water until she found herself looking over the side of the whaler, wondering if they were near enough yet to see the bottom.
She uttered a tiny gasp as she saw, beneath the water, a hideously distorted face staring back at her. The head of a fallen statue, tumbled by entropy.
The boat lurched forward and the image was washed away. Ann looked up and focused on the shore again. At the bow, she saw Denham look up from filming to glance shoreward, and the rapt expression on his face was beatific, as though he’d waited his whole life for this moment.
Ann felt as though she—all of them, in fact—were simply being swept along in the wake of Denham’s quest. Yet she wondered what the object of that quest was, and whether or not even Denham truly knew.
The tiny inlet they had discovered led to a narrow, stony beach. A little ways in from the shore, sheer cliffs rose straight up. The carved faces of stone statues glowered down all around them. They’d run the whaler right up onto the little beach and then begun to unload the equipment for the film. It was as though the ancient civilization that had once called Skull Island home had created this place just for them, as though it was some macabre theater or forum.
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