Lampfish of Twill

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  By now, Eric had come out on what he supposed must be the ocean’s surface. The air was so full of salt spray and the swells were so mountainous that at first he did not see how wide the sky had spread overhead. He was being pushed away from the whirlpool’s center, however, and the fury of the water was beginning to die down. Not that he was out of danger. His strength was failing, and his arms and legs had turned numb from the frigid water. He was more at risk than ever of sinking under the waves, and in another few minutes might well have given up and let himself go. But his blurry eyes spied something in the sky. It came through the gray storm clouds and raced toward him. A huge flapping bird it appeared to be at first. But as the creature approached, Eric saw that it was composed more of belly than wing and was accompanied by numbers of small winged figures that flew at its head and along its flanks.

  Winged figures! Eric closed his eyes and looked again. Underwhirl’s weird sights had certainly rearranged his mind. They were plain and ordinary sea gulls, of course!

  “Here! I’m here!” he tried to yell.

  The formation passed over him and went on to circle the whirlpool’s center. Now Eric saw that the strange bellied creature was none other than a big net held aloft in the bills of at least a hundred gulls. It slapped and blew in the storm winds as it went over the spout.

  “Help!” Eric cried, waving feebly. He felt comforted to know that Gullstone had fought through to Mr. Cantrip’s crew. The bird, at least, was safe on dry land. As for Eric, he was beginning to sink. His arms and legs were rebelling. They refused to move when he issued an order.

  “Swim!” he commanded. They lay like logs in the water. “Thrash!” he cried. They settled lower and limper. It was as if he no longer had charge of his body, as if he were a captain doomed to go down with the ship. And he did go down! He had just slipped under the water when three scout gulls caught sight of him and alerted the net carriers with squawks.

  In seconds, they were above him, dropping the net, scooping him up. Compared to a lampfish, he must have seemed featherlight. He came out of the water with a zip and a flash. And though, afterward, Eric tried to remember his remarkable trip to shore, and even imagined looking down gratefully at Twill’s foaming coast, in fact he saw nothing more that day than the inside of his own eyelids. He did not get six feet into the air before he passed dead out from exhaustion and fright.

  16

  “ERIC?” THE VOICE BLEW toward him across a dark plain. There was something familiar about it.

  “Eric!” For one heart-stopping moment, he thought it was his mother come to fetch him at last in the cabin by the sea. Then he remembered that she was dead, and with a sad sigh he allowed himself to drift away out of hearing again.

  “Eric!”

  The voice would not let him go. It sounded rather irritable, as if it was his turn to cook supper and he’d come home late again.

  “Hello, Aunt Opal. Here I am at last.”

  “Well, I should say you are! And not in the best condition either.” This remark came from a second voice sounding twice as irritable as the first.

  “The Blaster had his hands on you, there’s no doubt he did,” this voice continued. “Took your boots, tore your shirt. And what are these nasty old socks he’s stuck onto your feet? I guess you’ll be careful after this what you say about him. It’s a warning, no less.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Holly,” said Eric, opening his eyes. He tried to smile at her, and at his aunt. Never had he seen two whiter faces staring into his.

  “Well! Harrumph!” They could not bring themselves to hug him yet. They had been so frightened. Now they were in a rage.

  “It’s a good thing you washed up when you did, or we, personally, would’ve come out and drowned you!” Mrs. Holly announced. Eric really did smile at this. It was how he always felt after Gullstone came through danger. He glanced around the room. He was lying on his own bed.

  “Where’s Gully?” he asked. “Asleep near the fire, I bet. He’s the one who almost drowned. We went down Cantrip’s Spout.”

  An odd bubble came up his throat as he said this, and he thought for a minute that he was going to start laughing.

  “We had given you up for lost,” Aunt Opal said. “Some fishcatchers found you this morning cast up on Strangle Beach after the storm. It’s been three days, Eric, since you disappeared at sea. You were sighted, you know, out alone rowing after dark, heading toward the whirlpool with a flock of gulls.” She looked at him doubtfully. “It didn’t sound like you.”

  “It was,” Eric assured her. “But I wasn’t alone. Zeke Cantrip was with me, and you won’t believe what we saw out there. Lampfish! Coming up the spout! And that was just the beginning. Wait until you hear about our trip to Underwhirl. And the tree settlement, and the clouds that turned out to be lamps. What about Mr. Cantrip, by the way?” He raised himself on one elbow. “Has he turned up onshore yet?”

  Mrs. Holly’s mouth fell open at this, for old Cantrip was years dead, as anyone in his right mind knew.

  “Stop garbling your words,” she snapped. “I can hardly understand what you say.”

  Aunt Opal bent forward and put her hand on his forehead. “Don’t push yourself,” she murmured. “You’ve had a terrible ordeal. Just lie back and sleep. You’ll be better soon.”

  “But I am better,” Eric insisted. “There’s nothing wrong with me at all. I only wanted to know if Zeke Cantrip was rescued. By his gull crew. They were the ones who rescued me, in Zeke’s big net when I came up the spout. Do you know that it’s the lampfish that have caused our whirlpools? They spin themselves up here to escape from Underwhirl, though every one knows what the end must be.”

  This simple speech produced such dismayed expressions on the faces in front of him that Eric couldn’t help laughing.

  Mrs. Holly turned pale and backed away several steps.

  “He’s been touched!” she shrieked. “It’s the whirlpool, all right. I’ve never heard such a twisting of words in my life. Or such cackling. Except once before,” she added, in an ominous lower tone.

  “Eric!” cried his aunt. “Take hold of yourself. There is nothing funny about Cantrip’s Spout.”

  “It’s not the spout,” Eric cried, “but coming home! It’s seeing both how alive and how deadly Twill is, and feeling the back and forth pull of its tides. And the swirl!”

  With this, he jumped off his bed and began a strange circling walk. Round and round he went, moving clockwise, dodging the furniture in the room at first, then tramping straight through it as the pace of his rounds increased. Mrs. Holly fled to the kitchen when she saw how it was.

  “Opal! Come away. He’s as mad as old Zeke. It’s The Blaster’s handiwork. Come! Come away!” With a final shriek, the front door was thrown open, and there was a clatter of rapidly departing feet.

  But Aunt Opal stood her ground, bristly pine tree that she was, and sat on the end of Eric’s bed to wait for the walking fit to pass. When it did, she drew him back to bed, and tucked him in. She told him not to mind Mrs. Holly, the silly old goose. Whatever was wrong with him, it was sure to come right soon. She was only glad to have him back safe, and besides she didn’t put much stock in other people’s opinions, as he knew quite well. This was his home, wasn’t it? He must stay and be cared for, Old Blaster or not. She wanted him to know that he’d always be welcome no matter where he’d been or what had happened or how he talked. (She paused for breath and looked at him with great fondness, but also a bit of uneasiness.) No matter what terrible thing happened next.

  “What do you mean, ‘terrible thing’?” Eric demanded, sitting up in alarm There was something odd about her tone. “What terrible thing? I want to know!”

  “Eric,” she said, in the softest of voices, “Gullstone’s still out. He never came home.”

  There was no doubt where the big bird would be. Strangle Beach was the place broken things washed ashore. Its shape caught them up, as the fishcatcher had said.

  “The crazy gull mus
t have tried to fly back with the crew,” Eric exclaimed, reaching for his clothes. “He never knows when to stop. He tore his wing in Underwhirl by always trying to fly.”

  For all her sympathy, Aunt Opal could not see what he meant.

  “Crew?” she repeated, as if his mind was confused. “Under-what, did you say? Why shouldn’t a bird fly, I’d like to know? Look here, I strongly recommend clam broth and bed rest!”

  Despite her protests, Eric was out the door two minutes later. He might have gotten to Strangle Point even faster except for his boots. They were an outgrown pair dragged from the back of his trunk, and they pinched his feet fiercely on the run across the fields.

  “Gullstone. Wait!”

  Why he yelled that, he didn’t know. He came to the edge of the rise and looked down. His eyes were as sharp as a hunting hawk’s. The small, drab mound on the beach below would have been invisible to anyone else.

  “Wait for me, Gully. I’m coming!” he screamed.

  The amazing thing was, the gull did wait. How he managed to hang on, torn apart that way, smashed and rolled across the sand, Eric never knew. He’d always had unusual strength. He’d come through so many storms before.

  “All right, Gully. It’s me. I’m here.”

  The beach was still windy, the surf high. Sand blew through the air. Clumps of dirty foam quivered like jelly in wet hollows. Gullstone had been thrown in a hollow of his own. Luckily the tide was falling. The waves left them alone.

  “Don’t move until I see what to do,” Eric said, then bit his lip when he saw the mangled wing. The dark stains in the sand underneath weren’t from salt water or rain. “There is something twisted in your back, I think. There’s a rather deep gash on the side of your neck.” His voice seemed, suddenly, not to belong to him. It kept reporting things he didn’t want to see. “And your leg is broken, and your stomach is scratched. Well, not scratched exactly, more…”

  When he saw what more, he drew the gull all together in the middle of his arms and sealed his lips against the voice. He held Gully gently, so he’d know he didn’t have to wait anymore. He could go when he wanted. He, Eric, would let him go, because you can’t hold back what has to go on. The fishcatcher had said that, and he was right. There was no one who wanted to go on more than Gullstone at that moment. Even so, the faithful bird did not like to disappoint. When, at last, his powerful lungs began to falter, he gazed at his friend with such shame and distress in his lemon-colored eyes, that Eric’s heart nearly broke.

  “It’s all right, Gully,” he told him, tears slipping down from his eyes. He touched his cheek to the great feathered head. “I’m letting you go, anytime you want. Anytime,” Eric wept. “Go ahead. Go.”

  They buried Sir Gullstone in a high field just back of the Strangle Point ledges. In the rain. Without the fishcatcher. He didn’t turn up. Eric looked and looked.

  “He said we’d meet again, and I hope it’s soon,” he told the gull crew in a trembling voice between shovel loads of dirt. “There are quite a few things that need to be explained.”

  Eric hadn’t expected to have help from the birds. But there was the crew, every last one of them, sitting on the roof of the fishcatcher’s shack as he came, staggering under Gully’s weight, up the rocky path from Strangle Point beach. They knew what had happened. Every sea gull knows when another has fallen. And when Eric laid Gully’s body down on the shack’s front stoop, every gull on the roof came forward to look. Some flew down and walked distractedly about.

  They had been waiting for the fishcatcher, too, Eric saw. The yard was littered with droppings and jimmied mussel shells. The shack had the smell of a closed-up place. While every gull watched, Eric marched in the door, lit a kerosene lamp, and held it over his head.

  “I need a box,” he announced to those milling near the door. More birds fluttered to the ground. They gathered around the stoop and looked up at the sky. It was beginning to rain again.

  “A tight, covered box,” Eric said, hearing the drops on the roof. His own eyes were in a state of constant overflow.

  Outside, the gulls strutted and stretched their wings, and with odd clucks and whoops seemed to conference among themselves. Then, as if some decision had been reached, the flock moved over to surround an ancient tackle shed in the yard. In moments, they had set up such a rasping chorus of bleats and caws that Eric came to investigate the trouble. And there, in the shed, he found a fine wood box of the sort that long ago might have held exotic tea.

  Gullstone’s body was arranged inside with such attention to detail (every feather was made clean and straight) that it also gathered strangeness and a foreign air. When, before shutting the lid, Eric paused to look one final time, he saw that Gullstone really had gone off somewhere. The bird was no more in that box than any one of them. After this, he was able to take steadier breaths. He nailed the lid down with solid strokes and didn’t worry that there was anything left trapped inside.

  The rain was falling continuously now, and when the place for the grave had been chosen, and the hole had been dug, and the fine box put into it and covered with earth, all hands returned in silence to the shack. Eric fired up the creaky wood stove and made a kettle hot for tea. He placed candles in the one window, as many as he could find, and lit them all at once as tradition required. Anyone who wanted to laugh at him for making a weep for a bird, could laugh. Fortunately, there was no one of that sort about.

  The gull crew did not hesitate to accept his invitation to come indoors. They perched in orderly groups on various antique prods and barrels and nets around the room, and respectfully eyed some bins of dried fish that the old man had put aside for the Season of Storms.

  In fact, everything necessary for a long, comfortable evening, and for many evenings, was there somewhere in that jumbly place. So much so, that Eric decided to stay on for a while. He dispensed with the time-consuming business of feeding the Old Blaster, and they all, despite their gloom, munched on biscuits and leftover fish stew, along with a well-cured salami found hanging beneath the eaves.

  “I don’t think Zeke would mind putting us up for a few days, under the circumstances, do you?” Eric asked the gulls. They glanced about, as if they thought the fellow might appear at any time. Surrounded on all sides by the old man’s weird collection, Eric also felt his nearness, but with such a mixture of emotions that he hardly knew what his true feelings were. For sometimes, thinking of their adventure, it seemed that he’d been in the hands of a wily trickster who was out for a bit of sport. And other times, his companion had seemed a wise traveler and friend. And then again he remembered the man’s horrible giggling and periods of madness, and at the same time his plain fishcatcher’s humor and humble ways.

  He recalled his shaky legs and his treacherous cape, his honest advice and his deceptive ears. Above all, the picture that haunted Eric was of Zeke Cantrip standing tall with his powerful arms lifted toward the sky. But this was such an unsettling memory, and raised such disturbing questions about the fishcatcher’s real identity, that he pushed it aside. There was only one way to find out what everything meant, how the confusing pieces of their journey added up, and that was to speak to the fishcatcher again.

  “I suppose he must have known where he was taking us all along,” Eric said to the crew. “And yet…” He paused and, thinking of Gully, he shook his head in disbelief, and his eyes filled with bitter tears.

  The fishcatcher did not come to Gullstone’s weep that night, nor did he appear the day after, or the next day, or the next. While they waited, Eric and the crew did odd jobs around the shack or went fishing for Aunt Opal if the weather permitted. The season had now officially changed. Rough seas were the rule off Twill’s rocky coast. The sky was often dark and foreboding, and The Blaster was much on people’s minds. When would he strike? Whom would he snatch?

  The muttering on street corners began in town again. Eric saw small groups of townsfolk gathered when he came in to buy supplies. He noticed heads turn as he passed b
y, and saw suspicious, half-frightened glances sent his way. Since his return up the spout, there’d been no friendly words or congratulations.

  “They haven’t started calling their dogs home yet, but I think it’s only a matter of time,” he told Aunt Opal one evening during a visit to her cabin. “For some reason, they’ve linked me up with The Blaster in their minds. It’s superstition of the silliest kind.”

  “Mrs. Holly, I’m afraid, has spread a bit of gossip,” she replied. “We’re not speaking, at the moment, on that account. But Eric, if you’d only consider coming back here to live, we might fix things up. It’s staying out there by yourself with those birds that has folks comparing you to one who went before.”

  “To Zeke Cantrip, you mean.”

  “Well…” Aunt Opal dropped an uncomfortable glance toward his feet. There were many resemblances, she could not say there weren’t. “Those very boots you’re wearing have a strange look to them. Where’d you come across a peculiar pair like that?”

  “They’re old ones of Zeke’s,” he said, while she turned a paler shade. “To tide me over, that’s all. He’ll want them again if he ever comes home.”

  He could not go back to live with Aunt Opal. He was different now. Everything was changed. He missed Gullstone badly and often walked the slippery ledges, glaring at the sea. The spout spun there, reminding him of Underwhirl. On moonless evenings, the lampfish rose and glowed, or swam in their marvelous caldrons of light. Then Eric felt a strong wish to go out among them again, and to look back at Twill from their alien sea. Perhaps, after all, he was a traveler at heart. Like the rosy-hued fish, he’d acquired a taste for risk.

  He liked to listen to the surf crash on the beach at night. The wind in his face, the spray from a wave, the roar of water over rock—after Underwhirl he liked to hear and see and feel all these, all the time. In blacker moods, he wished The Blaster would get on with his game of slowly blowing Twill apart. Eric longed for a storm, a great violent swirl. But the old tyrant was playing particularly sly and cruel that year, holding off on his attack for weeks beyond the usual time. Everyone in Twill was on tenterhooks. Every loose object had been hammered or cinched or cleated to the ground. The sheds had been reinforced. The boats were triple moored. Twickham’s weather windows were boarded up and nailed tight.