“Mr. Cantrip!” Eric called. He reached out to grab the shaking shoulders. “Zeke! The whirlpool’s reversed again. Look! We’re starting to move.”
His words made no impression on the poor man. He was caught in another of his horrible fits and could no more guide a boat than a baby at sea. Meanwhile, the current was picking up. Eric heard the slap of waves under the dory’s bow. With a quick movement, he slipped past the fishcatcher and grabbed the oar that still hung from the stern.
He began to scull. Though he didn’t have a tenth of Zeke Cantrip’s skill or strength, the boat started to move away from the spout’s center. Slowly, in ever-widening circles, Eric sculled. He kept an eye on his mad companion, jumping up when necessary to haul him back into the middle of the boat. The fellow was in danger of laughing himself over the side and into the soup.
It was now, of all worst possible moments, that Gullstone chose to appear. Perhaps he’d been watching Eric’s struggle from the air. With an awkward flap, he landed on the bow just behind the fishcatcher, and looked anxiously at his friend.
“Gully! Watch out! You’ll end up in the water!” Eric cried. The bird was big and his perch unsteady. The dory plunged and rose on the waves. He staggered, flapped his wings, caught himself, and lifted away. But immediately he tried to land again.
“No, Gully. Get away from here! Fly with the others.
The sea gull seemed determined to stay. He moved to a place further inside the boat, spreading his wings for balance whenever the boat rocked hard. The current under them had become strong. Eric was still making headway, but he needed all his concentration to guide the boat. His sculling arm had begun to ache.
He was looking back at the whirlpool’s black surge when Zeke Cantrip sprang up and placed one precarious boot on the gunnel. The dory lurched and listed in the water. Gullstone lost his perch and flapped rapidly. Eric whirled around, but it was already too late. The fishcatcher was on his way into the sea, knocked over by the sea gull’s powerful wings. They had become entangled in his cape. With a half-strangled cry, the gull was pulled into the water on top of Zeke Cantrip. Eric threw down his oar and tried to grab them. But the surge whisked them beyond his reach. He held out the oar to the old man.
“Take hold. Take it!” Beyond, Gully was being swamped by the cape. It had wrapped around his body and now threatened to drag him under. He squawked and flapped desperately.
“Grab the oar!” Eric yelled, again. To his relief, the old man did, and for a few seconds they were carried together by the current. Round they went in the cold black stream, boat and oar, fishcatcher, and gull. And though the situation was extremely dangerous, Eric still hoped they might save themselves.
“I’m pulling you in!” he shouted to Zeke. “Keep a tight hold.” He didn’t see the grin that flicked across the briny face.
“Ahoy!” shouted the madman. “I’m pulling you in!” Before Eric could help himself, he was yanked into the water. The dory rebounded away, and he was swept into the whirlpool’s treacherous current.
12
ERIC’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS that the water was icy, and that he must kick off his boots, which were beginning to drag him down. When he had managed to free himself, he looked around for Gully. Or rather, since he swirled in utter blackness, he listened, and heard somewhere off to his left the sound of struggling. He struck out, swimming with the current in that direction. Not far away, he ran into a glove drifting just beneath the water’s surface, and then another piece of clothing, which seemed to be a hat.
Ahead, the struggling noises continued, but some minutes passed before he was able to catch up. At last, he made out dimly, by starlight, the thrashing form of the fishcatcher, who was trying to rid himself of his cape.
“Your gull’s gone under!” he cried when Eric reached them. “He’s dragging me down! We’re wrapped up together in this dratted piece of tarp!”
Immediately Eric dove, and feeling a lump of sodden feathers below the old man’s churning feet, he hauled it up with all his strength. By sheer luck, Gullstone’s head rose clear and uppermost from the water. Eric was able to untwist the heavy cloth from the gull’s body while keeping his bill above the surface. This loosened the garment’s hold on Zeke Cantrip, as well, and shortly he flung the cape away.
His mania had passed in the furor of the moment, and been replaced by a strangely buoyant good humor. He thanked Eric for coming to his rescue and complimented him on his excellent swimming. And though he looked worried when Gullstone choked and spat up seawater, he appeared generally unconcerned about the danger they were in. Rather, he seemed to relish the situation.
“Glad you decided to join me!” he shouted as they coursed along together with the current. Apparently he’d forgotten pulling Eric into the water. “So pleased to have you here! What a night for it, eh? Not a cloud in the sky.”
To Eric, this was madness of a different order and, in its way, more unsettling than a fit of laughter. He tried to paddle away from the wretched man. But the insistent flow moved them always together and also foiled every attempt to swim from its grip.
“We’re lost,” Eric gasped to Gullstone, after some frantic kicking had proved completely useless. “There’s no hope of getting free. Why I ever agreed to come out here at night, I don’t know. It’s my fault, Gully. And now you’re caught, too.”
He tried to lift the gull up where he might flap a bit and shed enough water to launch himself into the air. But the great bird was exhausted from his battle with the cape He could barely raise his head, let alone two sodden wings. Eric clung to him to keep him from sinking again.
“Never say you’re lost!” the fishcatcher’s voice boomed cheerfully beside them. “You’re never lost till you’re lost, and that you never know. As for us, there’s a lampfish coming up on our starboard bow.”
Eric floundered around to what he thought might be his right-hand side. An eerie red glow was seeping up through the water Just then, however, Sir Gullstone went limp. Perhaps the cold had undone him, or exhaustion, or a wrong gulp of water had lodged in his lungs. His head flopped over into the sea, and the weight of his body seemed to double. Eric’s heart jumped with fear.
“Wake up, Gullstone! You can’t die now.” He shook the bird wildly. “Open your eyes! Don’t give up. Oh, please don’t give up.”
Beside them, the lampfish surfaced like a small mountain and cruised to within a dozen yards, as if to investigate the cause of their struggling. It moved easily through the current, trailing foaming streams of mustache and carrying its luminous body high in the water so that light poured unobstructed into the night and across the sea. Eric was blinded, and so frightened that he stopped shaking Gullstone and cowered in the water. But soon the current spun him along, and since the creature made no move to follow but continued to wallow in place, flashing its pale green eyes, he dared to breathe again. He cradled Gully in his arms and persuaded himself that warmth still came from the bird’s body.
The fishcatcher had drifted away from them, Eric noticed in the blaze of light. He lay on his back some ten yards off, looking up at the sky. Perhaps he was hoping his gull crew would appear.
Eric followed his gaze, and for a moment, it seemed possible that help might come from this quarter. He remembered the story of how the gulls had lifted lampfish off the beaches in nets. But then his eyes came back to the rosy-lit sea, and Eric saw how foolish even this meager hope was. For though in the dark it had seemed that they were being swept along the surface of the ocean, the lampfish’s light now revealed that they swam upon a vast, sloping wall of water. Whether they had passed unknowing over the whirlpool’s lip, or the ocean had simply been sucked away beneath them, there was no telling. They were inside the immense bowl of the spout. Above and below them the sea revolved. The motion was slow, almost lazy in the upper reaches where they presently drifted. But as the funnel narrowed lower down, the tilting, watery wall increased its speed.
Looking around, Eric guessed that he and G
ullstone were only about a third of the way down the whirlpool. Each round they made sent them noticeably lower, however. Far below, he watched the funnel’s sides spin closer and closer, and finally slurp together. There was no gnashing of waves or flying spray, no alarming roar of surf. Somehow, this simple, final slurp was more frightening than any violence. Methodical and precise the whirling water seemed, as if, after endless centuries of destruction, the spout no longer bothered with theatrical ragings and foamings, but prepared for its kill with a deadly indifference.
Eric hardly breathed as he thought these thoughts and took in the terrifying view. He hugged Gully’s poor, wet body closer. It was no drag on him now. He was pinned, weightless, to the spout’s whirling side. No amount of swimming or thrashing would have changed his course an inch. Ahead, the lampfish floated, a fiendish torch. Of Ezekiel Cantrip there was no sign. Once, glancing up, Eric saw what appeared to be a distant flock of birds hovering against the fast-shrinking circle of the sky above. But, by then, rescue was far beyond question. A little later, he thought he heard an echo of riotous laughter. The water’s incessant circling had made him dizzy, though, and he could no longer be sure of what he saw or heard.
They began to spin more rapidly still. The whirlpool’s pit drew steadily closer. Eric shuddered and closed his eyes. Above the monotonous noise of rushing currents, he caught the sound of a rather ordinary gurgle. It reminded him of emptying sink drains he’d heard in his life, and he knew he had only a short time left.
He began to whisper hurried good-byes to Aunt Opal and Mrs. Holly, and to his friends at school. He bade farewell to his dead parents—he wished he could remember them better—and to Twill itself, though his existence there had not been happy.
When he finished, he buried his face in Gully’s wing and tried to wait bravely for the end. There was nothing to get upset about, really. A quick turn, a tiny slurp, and the thing would be done. A person might even feel a little disappointed at the idea of being polished off so easily. Especially when everything you’d heard about whirlpools had led you to believe that going down into one would at the least be exciting, in a desperate, struggling, bone-crunching way. One slurp? How pathetic. One tiny swallow? How unfair! How degrading and infuriating, actually. How…!
Eric was clenching his fists underwater and beginning to fight the current again when a flash of light exploded in his face and he was engulfed in a fiery mass. He was so terrified that his arms flew apart and he dropped Gullstone with a shriek. Then all that had been around him fell away, and a black, breathless space opened up.
So this, he thought, is how it feels to meet one’s end. An odd slithery-ghostly sensation. A certain rising. And floating.
So this is how…Eric’s heart stopped pounding. He wondered vaguely if it was beating at all. Everything felt so unreal. It would be easy to mistake the scene, to think oneself dreaming or drugged or in the grasp of a powerful book. He called out to Gullstone in case the bird, wherever he was, hadn’t got the idea: “All right, Gully! Don’t worry, it’s over! We are now thoroughly and completely killed!”
So this was how it was to be dead, yes, dead. They were done for and done in, yes, yes, yes. They were finished, wiped out, washed up, bumped off, passed on, shot down, belly up dead.
Eric’s last words were, “Gully, I know you can’t believe this but, guess what? We really are…”
13
OPEN YOUR EYES, YOUNG fellow. You’re missing the sights,” said a voice in his ear.
Eric’s eyes snapped open.
“No use being a traveler if you don’t take a look at where you’ve come.”
It was the fishcatcher. He was lounging, soaking wet, against a large moss-covered boulder. In his lap sat Sir Gullstone, wildly tousled. Whole clumps of feathers had been broken off or bent in half. His wings were soggy gray, and water dripped from his bill. But there was an outraged look in his lemon-colored eyes that Eric knew from their earliest days. The bird was all right. The tough old thing had survived yet again.
“Oh, Gully!”
The old man spoke testily. “There’s no need to stand there gurgling over his condition. I did my best to keep him together under the circumstances. You look like a double-drowned guttersnipe yourself! And where are your boots? You didn’t go and kick them off up there, did you?”
Eric opened his mouth. He was unable to speak. He was so surprised to be alive, and so thankful that Gullstone had been saved, and so pleased, in spite of himself, to be back with the fishcatcher again, that he could only stare.
“Didn’t I yell to keep ’em on? I suppose you’ll say you didn’t hear in all that ruckus and commotion. You could’ve used them down here. Never mind. We’ll think of something.”
Eric reached out to touch Gullstone gently. “You crazy bird. I thought you were dead.”
“You mean you thought you were dead,” Mr. Cantrip declared. “I’ve never seen such a wilted flower act as the one you put on coming down. I’ve been yelling and yelling for you to open your eyes. You missed the Underwhirl lampfish, you know. Hundreds of them came up to fetch us. They lit our way brilliantly during the whole passage down. It’s a big event for them when visitors make the drop from the upper world.”
“I was sure we were killed,” Eric replied. “I remember seeing a great fiery light. And then…”
He closed his eyes again and sighed. He was feeling so sleepy and happy. Every bit of fear had been swept away. He sat down beside the fishcatcher and stretched his bare feet out luxuriously. The air had the lazy warmth of a summer day. The ground felt as soft as a carpet. After the mad swirl and pull of the whirlpool, the quiet here was like the sudden calm in Twill that came sometimes at the end of a storm. To Eric, it was deeply soothing.
“Can we stay here?” he murmured. “I don’t feel like moving for about the next three years.”
“Well, you’ve certainly picked up the spirit of the place,” the old man said, squinting at him. “Most people take a little longer to put their roots down.”
“Is this really Underwhirl?”
“It is.” Mr. Cantrip looked around with satisfaction. “And completely unchanged from my last visit here. I’d begun to doubt it, you know. Time passes up above. A person gets old. And forgetful. ‘Did that really happen to me all those many years ago?’ you ask yourself. ‘Did I dream it or read about it in a book?’ There are some things you like to be sure of before the end. I decided to take a chance and come for a second look. Trusting in the lampfish, you understand. After all I’ve done for them, I was hoping they’d see me through. Not everybody makes the journey in one piece, as you’ve probably figured out already.”
He turned and glanced at Eric. “And speaking of that, I hope you won’t hold your trip down here against me. It’s lonely traveling single, and you kept announcing how you were ready to go. Of course, at the time I couldn’t give you the exact details of departure and arrival and mode of transport because—”
“Because I never would have come!” Eric angrily finished for him. “That goes without saying. I never would have come within a hundred miles of that creepy shack of yours, or of Strangle Point, if I’d known. And neither would Gully. Especially not Gully!”
There were a few minutes of rather strained silence after this, during which Eric stared at the sky and thought what a terrible risk they had run, and of the needless dangers they had just barely survived. Meanwhile, the fishcatcher ran his fingers through his damp, white beard, and looked uncomfortable.
“So this is where you came before when you went down the spout,” Eric said at last. He was quite angry still. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone? People in Twill would be interested. It’s peaceful here.”
The old man looked relieved that Eric had spoken. He shook his head and raised pleading shoulders.
“I tried!” he protested. “Didn’t I say I tried? They couldn’t hear me. Absolutely could not hear. People have ideas of their own in a place like Twill, cast-iron ways of thinking tha
t cannot be changed. For them, there’s no hearing or seeing what doesn’t fit the known order of things.”
“But this is real!” Eric exclaimed. “You should have told them it was real. I can see it myself, and it’s really here.”
He gazed about at the tranquil landscape, so different in every aspect from Twill’s rugged coast. Here sparkling fields rolled away from them in easy folds toward a horizon that promised more of the same. Here, everything was green and seemed to bask in a golden light, though no sun actually appeared in the sky. A number of large, pink clouds drifted lazily over their heads. Eric kept expecting to feel a fresh breeze against his cheek, as he did in Twill when the weather was clear. But the air remained still despite the movement above.
“I suppose next you’re going to tell me that’s the reason everybody in Twill thought you were dead all those years,” Eric said to Zeke. “They couldn’t see what you were talking about, and after a while, they couldn’t see you.”
“Right you are!” cried the fishcatcher, with a grin that Eric didn’t particularly trust. “That’s exactly what happened. After they found my boat, which had got loose one night, there wasn’t any persuading them that I wasn’t drowned. Of course, I wasn’t going into town much anymore, being so disgusted with the way people yelled and ran off. To be truthful, I didn’t care what they thought by then.”
Gullstone climbed over onto Eric’s lap at this moment and started a strenuous bout of grooming. He pecked and pulled his back feathers, and smoothed down his tail feathers, and combed and recombed (with his bill) the downy parts of his stomach and breast. Then, with a burst of flapping he tried to fly up, but Eric held him fast.
“You can let go of your bird,” the fishcatcher said, nodding. “He’s not going anywhere down here. It’ll be a wonder, in fact, if he can get off the ground.”
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