The fishcatcher turned and tapped softly on the aquarium’s glass. Inside, the lampfish rippled and flashed forward. Eric jumped back, but a moment later the creature had withdrawn and begun to nibble a mass of seaweed near one side of the tank.
“I’ve been tending lampfish for a while now. Maybe the word’s gone out,” Mr. Cantrip said, “because they’re always well behaved when they’re up here with me. They know I’m trying to help. And mostly, I can. I’ve learned some tricks over time. What works, what doesn’t. This one’s got to go back in the sea tomorrow, fixed or not. You can’t keep lampfish penned for long, or they get weak and die. We want to save them, but we don’t want to kill them doing it. Now as I was saying about your sea gull—”
“Wait a minute!” Eric interrupted. “How could any of this be true? For one thing, the coast is crawling every day with fishcatchers fishing from their boats and casting off the ledges. If bright pink lampfish are being flown around Strangle Beach in nets by bunches of sea gulls, why has nobody ever seen it?”
The fishcatcher shrugged. “Don’t ask me why people choose to see one thing and not another. I’ve been wondering about it for a long time myself. That’s not the least of it, either. For years I’ve been telling people about the currents and the spouts and the lampfish around Twill. I’ve been talking and talking about how there’s more between them than what appears, how there’s another scheme at work, should anyone care to look. Which nobody does, of course. They’re too busy fishing and watching the weather and going to weeps. Loony, they call me, when I try to pipe up. ‘Talks in circles,’ they say. ‘Keep him away from the dog.’ ”
“That’s true,” said Eric, trying to hold back a grin.
Mr. Cantrip nodded. “I used to be a lampfish hunter, same as everybody in Twill. One of the best, in fact. I don’t hunt them anymore, though. I try to warn them away from people. It’s what my crew and I are up to most of the time these days, as if you hadn’t guessed already.”
“I did a little,” Eric said. “You were always turning up at the worst possible moment, making the most possible noise.”
“Right you are!” crowed the fishcatcher. “Do you know there’s been only one lamp caught so far this year? We’re proud of that. We’re pleased as can be.”
“But why?” asked Eric. “We need the lampfish for hooks. We’ve always used red bone hooks on the coast of Twill.”
“Bone hooks? Fishwash! Twill is stuck in a rut with its bones. These days you can make a hook a hundred other ways. You can order steel ones by the bushel from the trading cities. Lampfish are special creatures.”
The fishcatcher lowered his voice and leaned toward Eric. “They come from below.”
“From where?”
“Up the spout, young fellow. Up the marvelous spout!”
Then, in another wild swing of mood, he grabbed Eric’s arm and nearly crushed it with excitement.
“Have you never been out among the lampfish? Then ship with me tonight! The moon will set early, and the wind will drop. It’s a perfect night to show you the sights. How the big fish rise and speak among themselves. A sort of music it is. Or a pulse or a beat. And the swirl. Oh, the swirl! Who can tell how it is. The closer you come to the spinning edge…the more the surge takes hold of your boat…the quicker the spray flies up in your face…”
Suddenly, Zeke Cantrip could contain himself no longer. He struggled to his feet and began an awkward stride around the room. Around and around he walked, circling clockwise, dodging the clutter at first, later tramping through it as the pace of his rounds increased.
Watching him, Eric knew he was in the grip of something strong, some ever-quickening current that moved him along. Round and round and round he went, muttering and murmuring, shaking his head from side to side. He was in the whirlpool, Eric saw. Inside his mind he was there again as certainly as when his body had been there, hurled inside the giant spout, all those years and years ago. Round and round and round before Eric’s frightened eyes, and then the fishcatcher began to laugh.
8
AN HOUR LATER, THE old man’s cackle still echoed in Eric’s head, though five miles lay between them by this time. Eric covered his ears. He was on Goose Wing Beach with his fishing gear spread around him. The noise rose in an even greater crescendo as a flock of sea gulls passing overhead let out a series of high mocking shrieks.
“Stop it!” Eric screamed back at them. “Scram. Get away!”
He was half-afraid they were spies. Were they members of Mr. Cantrip’s band sent to track his movements? The fishcatcher was lonely. Perhaps, like many lonely people, he did not like to let go of his guests so easily. Certainly, he was a powerful talker, a man who sought to draw people near him with words. And then, after a while, he had come to believe in his own fantasies, Eric supposed. Lampfish flying through the air, flocks of gulls taking orders. Eric shivered. Back there in the cabin, he’d nearly been convinced. The creature in the tank had dazzled him. Now, outside in ordinary daylight, he wondered if a lampfish was what he’d really seen. Everything in the cabin had seemed so shifty and unreal. And the fishcatcher had looked rather too eager to impress him. And the light was poor, which is often a sign that tricks are being played.
Tricks, were they? Or spells.
Another flock of gulls flapped overhead. This time, Eric refused to look. Only Gullstone, sitting on a nearby rock, watched the group pass with attentive eyes. He was leashed again, and the string had been shortened.
“Well, what do you expect?” Eric had snapped at him. “You’re completely irresponsible. You go off with anyone the moment you can, without a thought for the people who really care about you.”
This was not strictly true, as Eric knew. His fright had made him exaggerate. Gullstone had been waiting patiently on the fishcatcher’s roof when he’d come hurtling out the cabin door at Strangle Point. While the man hooted and howled inside, they had made their escape together up the long slope to the high fields, and then home. There Eric had gathered his traps and equipment while Gullstone stood by faithfully. But once at Goose Wing Beach—for they certainly could not go back to the ledge at Cantrip’s—Eric had tied the gull up. “So I can get some work done!” he’d declared.
It was early afternoon, still time to make a decent catch, and Eric turned his mind toward fishing. The crab traps were soon baited and submerged between rocks at the swirling water’s edge. Moving along the beach, Eric began casting a lightweight surf net into incoming waves, and drawing the net through the water with a practiced hand. Goose Wing was a good place for catching the plump, wing-finned fish called angel-fins by Twill’s fishcatchers. In the first three casts, Eric netted two big ones.
Up the beach, other fishcatchers tossed and pulled nets in rhythms similar to Eric’s. They did not try to speak or shout to one another. The surf’s roar would only have drowned out their words. Singly, they labored, gaunt forms at the sea edge. As the sun descended the sky, their shadows tossed and pulled and ran in the sand behind them, growing longer and thinner than the catchers themselves, and finally fading to nothing when the sun dipped below the horizon.
The evening’s first star had just appeared, and the sea water was changing from dark blue to inky black when Eric finally stowed his net in a knapsack and packed up the last of the crab traps.
“Gully? Time to go.” He stroked the dozing sea gull’s back. “We didn’t do so badly today after all. Twenty angelfins and fifteen green crabs. Aunt Opal will be pleased. Even better, it’s her turn to cook dinner!”
They had fresh angelfin filet dipped in johnnycake meal and fried golden brown for supper. And tiny wild strawberries picked by Mrs. Holly in Hurricane Hollow that morning. Aunt Opal had agreed to watch the older woman’s fish lines on the ledge above Dead Man’s Beach, so she’d had time to find the ripest berries. They often pooled their work this way, to the advantage of both.
“And yet, we’re so different I sometimes wonder how we ever get along,” Aunt Opal mused at th
e supper table. “Holly’s all roundness and good humor, always wanting to please others and not cause an upset, whereas I am straight as an old pine tree and like to stand my ground in a rather bristly way. You’d think we’d have nothing in common, but we have. I suppose it’s that we’re both alone but have managed to get by. Respect is what’s between us, though we may disapprove of each other’s methods.
“Which reminds me,” Aunt Opal went on. “Holly says Zeke Cantrip’s been dead for years, so that old fishcatcher at the point can’t be him.”
“What?” said Eric. “How does she know?”
“Whisper and prattle.” Aunt Opal shrugged. “Not my cup of tea. Holly isn’t one for utterly groundless gossip, though. Her information’s often reliable, in my experience. Apparently, the old fellow spent his last years in a shack on Strangle Point. He’d come to town for supplies every once in a while, as I told you. Then he stopped showing up. This was some years back. Those who knew him said he got too old to work a boat and finally drowned quite naturally one day after falling overboard.”
Aunt Opal nodded approvingly. “It’s the way decent fishcatchers go if they last that long. And a fitting end for us all, let me add.”
“Wait a minute!” Eric exclaimed “How do people know for sure that he drowned? Did they find him afterward?”
“Of course not! His boat washed ashore on Goose Wing Beach. Some folks kept it a while in case there was a mistake. Then they made use of it, along with the rest of his gear. His shack’s stood empty these many years. That was the last of him, all right.”
Eric was disturbed by this news, but he did not allow his aunt to see it. He had not mentioned his visit that morning to Strangle Point. Now, he could not speak of how the cabin had been occupied. It was all too strange, too uncertain to talk about. After Aunt Opal had gone to bed, he sat outside in the shed yard with Gullstone, wondering what Mrs. Holly’s information could mean. For if the person at Strangle Point wasn’t Ezekiel Cantrip, why was he bothering to pretend that he was? And if he was, what could be the use of pretending to be dead all these years?
The more Eric thought about this, the less he trusted the old fishcatcher, with his feathery crew and uncanny knowledge of the weather. He promised himself never to set foot in the crooked little shack again. And nothing, he swore, not even the promise of seeing the lampfish, could tempt him out in the old man’s boat at night.
“Keep away from that madman,” he warned Gully, patting the bird’s strong back. “I think he wants to add you to his flock of slaves. He knows you’re a free, civilized bird and he doesn’t like it. Stay with me, and you’ll be all right.”
He tested Gullstone’s rope and stood up to go in. The moon had already left the sky, he noticed. The night was clear, just as the fishcatcher had predicted. It was quiet and windless. And deeply, densely dark.…
Eric was getting ready for bed when an odd ripple of longing pulsed through him. It was a wish to go out into the night. This was a stupid idea, he knew. He had to be up early to fish the next morning. There was no reason to get dressed and go back outside. He snuffed his candle and lay back on his pillow. He pressed his eyes shut, but the dark called him. Its blackness made him think of the lampfish. He imagined them rising, fiery red, from their underwater holes. He felt the breeze from their close-passing bodies, the currents made by their powerful fins. These currents pulled him along, drew him forward like wind in an alley. Am I dreaming? he wondered, and clung to his bed.
Outside, a great wind had come. Bushes scratched against the window. They were calling him, too, and he imagined getting up. Before him, the road to Strangle Point appeared, then the fields and the cliffs. He saw the ocean gleaming with lampfish. Below, on the beach, he saw the old man hunched by a boat. He was waiting to take Eric out among the fish, to show him the spout from which the creatures rose. While he waited, the wind whirled around him and clouds circled his head, as if he were the master of some invisible force and controlled more than sea gulls along Twill’s cruel coast.
Eric wrenched himself away. He refused to be taken. In his mind, he turned from the fishcatcher and ran. Though the lampfishes’ current seemed to drag him back, he drove his legs on and fought with his arms. In bed, he fought also, and fled beneath the blankets. At last, quite suddenly, the current gave in and cast him free. He was thrown back together, bed and mind together. Outside, the wind died. The bushes stopped beating against the window. The night became silent. He lay with thundering heart within the walls of his room. It was a dream, wasn’t it? Yes, of course, a horrid dream.
Eric had gone indoors and was rustling about in his bedroom when Sir Gullstone Sea Gull first noticed the disturbance. Out in the shed yard, he stopped pecking at the string that bound him to the woodpile and turned his beak to the sky. Something was coming. His gull detection system was picking up signals: slight vibrations in the night air. His feathers quivered, but several minutes passed before he could make out the nature of what approached. He waited, straining against his bond.
He smelled the thing at last—the wild, briny stink of the open sea. Then he saw it, a pale cloud of gulls flying swiftly with the wind out of the northwest. There were a hundred birds, perhaps more. Gullstone’s lemon eyes widened as the flock veered in flight and dropped toward Aunt Opal’s cabin.
They passed like a massive wave within inches of the roof, swept away, circled, and passed again. And again! Their bodies and wings shone bone white in the dark. Their formation was so dense that each sweep created a strong current of air. It caused the branches of nearby bush clumps to thrash and lift toward the sky. Straw thatches on the roof were sucked up by the draft. In the shed yard, Gullstone’s feathers rose off his back. The pull was tremendous. He braced his feet to keep his body, also, from rising. And again they came. Again and again and again.
Then, as if some inaudible command had been issued, the gulls wheeled as one and ascended to a higher altitude. They spun and wove themselves into a traveling cloud once more and sped away into the night. For several minutes, Gullstone stared after them, sniffing the air in the direction of Strangle Point. Afterward, he bent his head and went to work fiercely on the string around his ankle.
Inside Aunt Opal’s cabin, Eric lay in bed with wide-open eyes, and a long time passed—and many queer thoughts—before he dared to close them again.
9
ERIC WOKE TO THE ringing of bells. From the coast the clamor came, in through his window with the barely risen sun. Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Lampfish!
He was up in a flash, pulling on his pants, struggling with his boots. Aunt Opal was quicker after all her years of experience. He heard her run past his door before his first boot was laced.
“I’m ready!” he shouted. “I’m coming. Just wait!”
She made no reply, and why should she? Better to save her breath for the race to the coast, for the loading and unloading of nets, prods, spears, harpoons, ropes, and pulleys. And for the grueling lampfish hunt itself, yes, best above all to save breath for that.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
No breakfast today but what could be grabbed going by. No time to wash a face, button a shirt, untie a leashed sea gull. Gullstone stood miserably by the woodpile, his rope stretched to its fullest extent. His feathers were dirty, and his ankle looked raw.
“Come on!” yelled Aunt Opal. “We’ll be last at this rate.” She had pushed the big net onto the road and was already starting out.
“Sorry, Gully,” Eric panted, rushing past. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” His arms were full of ropes and prods, which made running extremely difficult. It was several minutes before he was able to catch up with his aunt on the road. But even this pace was not enough for Opal, who was in a state of high excitement.
“Faster!” she roared, as road dust billowed up in their faces. “It’s Dead Man’s Beach, I’m sure. The belling comes from there!”
She was right, as usual. They arrived to see Timothy Crimm swinging his ancient h
and bell on the ledge above the beach. This was the very ledge from which Aunt Opal and Mrs. Holly had yesterday cast their lines. Now the scene was entirely changed. From every direction, net trolleys rumbled in, ropes and knapsacks tumbled out, and people scrambled to untangle their gear and set up the lifts.
“Where’s the fish?” someone called. “Who’s manning the boats?”
Timothy Crimm pointed to the wicked stretch of rocks on the southeast end of the beach. A dory hovered offshore there, riding the rocking waves. In the boat stood a young woman with an oar held straight in the air.
“Angela Hawkins saw it first,” old Tim bellowed. He was always fair when it came to giving credit. “There she is, standing by. I took up the belling from her so the lamp weren’t scared off. There’s a crew of catchers rowing round from the harbor. Be here any moment.”
“There they are!” shouted Eric “They’re here! Get the nets!”
The scrambling increased to a feverish pace at this. Two fishcatchers with forearms the size of cider kegs drove a series of metal lift pins into the ledge. Then the pulleys were threaded with ropes, the complicated lifts were rigged, and five big nets were connected to them and readied for action. Two were lowered off the ledge directly into the water, two were spread on the adjacent sand in case the big fish rushed the beach. The last was kept hidden on the lowest part of the ledge, so that it might be dropped over and snapped shut quickly should the lampfish pass under there.
All this preparation required the work of many hands. Fishcatchers of every age and description thronged the ledge and the beach, the rocks, and shallows. Everyone from town had come, it seemed, and even little-seen folk were arriving from up the coast where lampfish alarms could rarely be heard. The day had dawned quiet, and the bell had carried to distant points. And with only one lampfish caught that year, people were glad to break routine.
Lampfish of Twill Page 5