Lampfish of Twill

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  By day, fishcatching families kept their dories close to shore and appointed the younger children to stand watch on the cliffs. At night, every sleeper slept with half an open ear. Nerves grew taut. Patience ran out. And still The Blaster held back and away.

  And then one morning, there he was, just creeping with his capes into the eastern sky. (“Help!” screeched Mrs. Holly, flying into her house.) He turned the clouds in his path the lurid purples of a bruise. He lurched out over the ocean with arrogant tread and fired a lightning bolt and unleashed gale winds.

  The people of Twill were in such a state of nerves by this time that they screamed and trampled one another trying to get inside. Some even went so far as to alert their neighbors by ringing the lampfish bells, which thereafter became a common practice along the coast and led directly to the construction of the many odd-shaped but enormous bell towers for which Twill’s coast, in later years, was known in the world.

  Out on Strangle Point, Eric called Zeke’s gulls together and ordered a general battening down or shack and yard. The birds were devoted to him now and did everything he said. Then he directed the crew indoors and issued generous rations of dried fish from the bins. He asked for cooperation and consideration for others in close quarters, and when order seemed at least on the verge of prevailing (everyone was quite jumpy), he slipped out the cabin door and made for the ledges.

  The storm had struck full force by now, and the sea had been whipped to a fury known only on the coast of Twill. The air was filled with the thunder of surf and the whine of wind. Eric was knocked down twice, making his way across the field. So vicious was the gale that his coat was peeled off his back and up his arms and flew high into the branches of a nearby plane tree, where it thrashed and flapped like a mad bird.

  Anyone watching him might now have decided that some madness had descended on Eric as well. Without his coat, he fought on across the field. He paused by Sir Gullstone’s grave, then moved across to a rocky cliff. Here he stood and scowled down at the beach, leaning at such a reckless angle that he seemed to be taunting The Blaster himself to blow him over. And perhaps, in another minute, a giant windy hand would have come along and done the job, but at that moment, the waves cast two black, soggy items up on the sand below. Eric straightened up and sharpened his gaze. Shoes, they appeared to be. No. A pair of boots!

  He was off the ledge in a flash, dropping down a steep place between the rocks to the beach or, rather, to such beach as was left. The tide was rising, and foaming breakers careened wildly up the shore. But there, yes, at the high-water mark lay two abandoned boots.

  “My boots!” screamed Eric. With an ecstatic leap he snagged them, and drew them safely from the waves’ reach. Then he raised them up in the air to thank the fishcatcher—for certainly the old rascal was at the bottom of this! It only went to prove that he was still out there somewhere.

  “Ahoy!” shouted Eric into the teeth of the gale. “Come back, Mr. Cantrip! Please come back soon!”

  At this, the wind gave out an oddly familiar series of giggles, and a large and thoroughly terrifying wave roared forward and deposited another item at Eric’s feet.

  It was a small, wet sea gull, its feathers swirled and plastered with sand. Even as Eric knelt to look, a tiny head turned fiercely to meet him, and two arrogant legs poked testily at the ground, and a sharp beak zipped forward and pecked him hard on the hand. (“Owl,” cried Eric “Why’d you do that?”) Then the whole miniature contraption rose up and began to limp off with lordly strides. Eric leaned over and snatched it into his arms before the next mountainous wave could sweep it away.

  A Personal History by Janet Taylor Lisle

  I was born in 1947 to young parents starting a life together in a tiny New York City apartment, just after the Second World War. My father had been a bomber pilot flying out of England during the war, a shattering experience for him. Returning from Europe, he took a job at the New York Herald Tribune. City living worsened his anxieties, however, and so my family and I moved to a rented house on a quiet road near the Rhode Island seacoast.

  My first memories are of this place: the woods and fields around my home and the rocky shore nearby, where my father fished and gradually regained his emotional balance. By the 1950s, he had found a job at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. I was the first of five children, and my four brothers and I grew up in outlying Farmington, walking to local schools and later attending private school in West Hartford. But every summer, my family returned to Little Compton on the Rhode Island coast. The place, a natural haven for sea birds and wildlife, was more home to us than any other. It would become the imaginative setting for many of the stories I later wrote, including Forest, The Lampfish of Twill, and The Great Dimpole Oak.

  My father revered fiction. At one time, he had contemplated becoming a fiction writer himself. From our earliest school years, my brothers and I internalized this aspiration. We were a reading and writing family, familiar with overflowing bookshelves and tables stacked with books. We were accustomed to seeing our parents reading in the evenings, and to being read to ourselves. By third grade, I was writing stories and feeling magical about it. My pencil was a wand. I waved it and my imagination fell open onto the page. It was all so easy.

  By high school, though, I had lost this wild and fearless sense of writing. In my classes, I began to read the novels of the great writers, Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf, among many others. I compared my work with theirs and saw my own ineptitude.

  At fourteen, I left my family to attend a girl’s boarding school. It was a completely different world. I missed my brothers and parents, but among my teachers was Miss Arthur, who taught me how to write a tight, well-constructed sentence. Three years later, I entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I majored in English and learned the art of writing a pleasing term paper. But I kept my head down when it came to more imaginative forms of writing. I was self-conscious, thin-skinned, and mortally afraid of criticism. In a way, my education had silenced me.

  The war in Vietnam was raging when I graduated in 1969. Like many young people at that time I opposed American intervention there, including the killing of civilians and the US draft that threatened to put my friends in harm’s way. My new husband was among those at risk. Together, we joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) to shield him from service. For the next two years I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, organizing food-buying cooperatives in the city’s public housing projects and teaching in an early childcare center. The work opened my eyes to a world of poverty I’d barely glimpsed before. My old yearning to write flared up. I went back to school—journalism classes this time—at Georgia State University. It was the beginning of a reporting career that extended over the next ten years.

  Journalism, with its deadlines and demand for clear, straightforward text, has often been a precedent profession for authors. So it was for me. I learned to write all over again, and lost some of the self-consciousness that had dragged me down before. A decade later, when my daughter’s birth kept me at home, I was ready to test a voice of my own, through fiction. “Voice,” in fact, was suddenly my greatest strength. After years of newspaper interviewing, my ear was attuned to catching intonations that can underlie an ordinary remark and reveal unspoken meaning. I could write these kinds of sentences in my stories to bring my characters to life.

  In 1984, my first book, The Dancing Cats of Applesap, was accepted for publication by Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press. “I love your cats! Call me!” he wrote in a letter I’ve kept to remind myself of the moment when I “became a writer.” I had lucked into a talented editor. Jackson’s belief in the power of voice in fiction, and his uncanny sense of narrative timing would soon make him famous in the children’s book world. We worked together over the next fifteen years, publishing some of my strongest titles, including Sirens and Spies, Afternoon of the Elves, Forest, and The Lampfish of Twill.

  Today, I live f
ull-time in Little Compton, Rhode Island, in a gray shingled house near the same rocky beaches I tramped as a child. The area’s storms and tangled woodlands, open pastures and salt water ponds, still make an appearance in almost everything I write. Like my father, I’ve found my balance there.

  Lisle and her mother in Rhode Island in 1948.

  Lisle’s mother reading to her children at their Farmington, Connecticut, house. From left to right: Geoff, age six; Crane, age two; Lisle’s mother; Lisle, age eight; and Hugh, age six. All the cards in the background indicate that this photo was taken around Christmastime, and they are “probably reading ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

  Lisle at age eleven, in Farmington.

  Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, at their Little Compton house in 1978.

  In 1983, Lisle received her first acceptance letter for fiction when Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press, made an offer for The Dancing Cats of Applesap.

  Lisle’s first book signing (for The Dancing Cats of Applesap), at Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1984.

  This photo was taken in Petworth, England in 1986. The tree behind Lisle was her inspiration for The Great Dimpole Oak, published in 1987.

  Lisle and her brothers in a photo taken in the early 1990s at their Warren’s Point house, in Little Compton.

  An elf village built by third graders at East School in New Canaan, Connecticut. The village, which the kids named “Elf Canaan,” was a school project connected to Afternoon of the Elves, inspired by Lisle’s visit to the school.

  Lisle circa 2001 at Warren’s Point in Little Compton, Rhode Island—the setting for the coast of Twill in her novel The Lampfish of Twill.

  Kayla, Lisle’s Siamese cat, at seventeen years old. She often sleeps on Lisle’s writing desk when Lisle works, and she is the model for Juliette in Lisle’s Investigators of the Unknown series. When Lisle does school presentations, she tells children that Kayla is her muse. Perhaps she is.

  Lisle hard at work in her writing room, in 2001.

  Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, in Little Compton in 2005.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1991 by Janet Taylor Lisle

  cover design by Connie Gabbert

  978-1-4532-7181-0

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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