“Professor?”
He looked up in surprise. “Boy!”
“It’s Harrison,” I said. I don’t think I’d ever told him my name.
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me that. Names are dangerous. I wouldn’t want to spill the beans.”
“Right. So is that the book you were looking for?”
“This? No. This is just something someone left lying about. I know it’s close, though. I can feel it.”
“Well. That’s … good.”
“And what brings you to the library today? It is day, isn’t it? I lose track of time. The light’s always the same here—so bright.”
“It’s afternoon, sir.” I didn’t add that this was the most dimly lit library I’d ever been in. “I have a question for you.”
“Excellent! Fire away.”
“What’s a scrimshander?”
The doctor lurched in his chair, a look of fear on his face. “Why do you say such a thing? I can’t … I can’t be heard discussing—”
“Please. I’m just trying to figure this out. A scrimshander does carving, right?”
The professor seemed to regain some of his composure. “Oh. The craftsman. You would like to know about a scrimshander in general?”
“That’s a good start. They carve whalebone, right?”
Professor Freytag removed his glasses, blew into them, and set them back on his face. “Whalebone, yes. Also teeth, and tusks. The artworks they produce on these carvings are called scrimshaw.” He hopped up from the chair and strode away. I jogged to catch up.
“It started centuries ago,” the professor said as he walked. “Whaling is too dangerous to do at night, so the sailors had time on their hands, not to mention plenty of material to work with. Whalebones, baleens—that’s cartilage, looks like an automobile’s radiator grill, perfect for filtering out krill. Whales evolved it over fifteen million—”
“Scrimshaw?” I said, trying to steer him back to the topic.
“Ah, yes! Sailors began etching designs upon these materials with sail needles, then special knifes, and the practice soon evolved into quite the art form. I have a book, a diary…” He marched down one row, then abruptly turned left. “I know it’s here somewhere. Ah!”
He pointed at a high shelf. “Up you go.”
“Pardon?”
“Climb! It’s that green one that’s slightly sticking out from its mates.”
I set down my backpack and eyed the shelves. Professor Freytag didn’t offer me a hand, so I put a foot on the lip of one of the shelves and stepped up. The bookcase seemed sturdy. Immovable, even. I reached up to another shelf and pulled myself higher. The green book was just out of reach. I stretched on the toes of one foot, got my fingers around the green spine, and in one motion yanked it free and dropped back to the ground.
The professor seemed pleased. “That’s it! Tobias Glück: A Scrimshander’s Diary.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
“There are questions in that book,” the professor said. “Important questions, buried in page after page of interminable droning. Isn’t that always the way, though?”
“I was kind of hoping for answers,” I said.
“You can’t have quality answers without quality questions,” he said.
* * *
The class gong sounded as I left the library. The hallways filled, and I surfed along the crowd, aiming for the front door. I was maybe five yards from a clean escape when Lydia appeared in front of me, scowling.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Are you mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“You’re always looking at me like that. With your angry face.”
She frowned. “I have an angry face?”
“I take it back. That’s just your default expression.”
This time the scowl was more definite. I pushed past her, and she said, “Why did you go in the bay if you’re afraid to even go in the pool?”
Now it was my turn to scowl. “I’m not afraid of going in the pool. And who said I was in the bay?”
“Nurse Mandi.” She glanced left. Mrs. Velloc was coursing toward us like the ship of Death in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “This way,” Lydia said, and pulled me outside to the front steps. Students moved past us in waves, heading home.
“Some of us heard her telling Coach Shug about finding you in the middle of the road Friday night.”
“Mandi was talking to the coach?” I asked.
Lydia looked at me curiously. “You sound happy.”
“It’s just … nice.”
“She said you could have died from—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—exposure.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“So what was Chief Bode doing at your house Saturday? Did they have news on your mother?”
“No, that was about—wait, are people watching my house?”
“It’s a small town, Harrison.”
Mrs. Velloc appeared at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Harrison. I thought that was you.”
I put on a smile. “Hi, Mrs. Velloc.”
“Your aunt told the office that you were suffering from a cold.”
That was kind of the truth. “I’m feeling better. I just came to, uh…”
“Get his homework,” Lydia said.
“Right,” I said. I hefted the backpack. “I don’t want to fall behind.”
“Excellent idea. Lydia, could I speak with you a moment?”
“Of course,” Lydia said. She glanced at me, and rubbed her index finger and thumb together. “Talk later,” she whispered.
* * *
After “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (ROAM as I now thought of it) and now Tobias Glück: A Scrimshander’s Diary (TGSD? That sounded like a disease), I was becoming a specialist in old-fashioned books. This new one was a historical artifact—Tobias’ actual diary, not a copy. The cover was stiff cardboard like a modern book, but inside were the original pages of his journal. The paper was off-color and brittle, the edges ragged and tinged brown. The new cover was probably made after the first one had fallen apart, but it seemed like a disguise, as if someone had been trying to smuggle this old thing into the future—into my hands.
Tobias’ handwriting was hard to decipher, and the dark brown ink on the discolored paper was barely legible. You couldn’t miss the title, though. Tobias had written it in letters three times larger than his normal script, and had taken time to make extra loops and whorls around the characters.
Tobias Glück, his Book Consisting of Different ports & ships that I have sailed in since the year 1824, Aged 13.
Thirteen! He was just a kid.
I turned the stiff pages slowly, afraid to break them. Tobias wrote a lot about ships, chores, the habits of his crewmates, and especially food. He couldn’t stop talking about food. A whole page was about a “pasty,” and by the end of the description I still didn’t know what it was.
A few pages in I found the first drawing, one Tobias had made himself, of an elaborate ship with two masts, flying dozens of flags from ropes. The caption read, “A poor drawing, but perhaps will make a better etching.”
He’d drawn dozens of pictures, almost all of them as practice for his scrimshaw. Some were of seabirds with strange names—petrels, haglets, kittiwakes—but his favorite subjects were ships and whales. I flipped through the diary, and he got better with each passing year. During that time he worked on several different whaling ships, and seemed to visit every port on the Atlantic and a few in the South Seas.
All the things the kid had seen! Tobias had left home when he was thirteen, but he was already doing man’s work, and seeing the world. If I hadn’t hated the ocean so much I might have been jealous.
“You have the strangest homework,” Aunt Sel said. We were having a dinner courtesy of “Chef Mike”: frozen Mexican food that had been microwaved into submission. I told her I thought I’d go to bed ear
ly tonight.
“Why would anyone do that?” she asked. “Nothing good happens until eleven.”
“I’d head out to the Dunnsmouth nightclubs with you, but they’re all so crowded.”
“Good point.”
“I guess I’m still wiped from my dunk in the bay,” I said, and felt only slightly bad for lying to her. I lay in bed with the covers up to my chin. The diary rested on my chest, but I wasn’t really reading it. After a while I turned out my bedside lamp.
And waited.
Sometime around ten, I heard a tap-tap on my window. I slid out of the bed. I was still wearing my leg—and jeans, shirt, and socks. I pushed up the window. It squeaked, but not too loudly.
Lub smiled up at me. “Ready for another swim?”
“Not so loud,” I whispered.
He was dressed as on Friday night, by which I mean he was barely dressed at all: in knee-length shorts and nothing else. His gills were folded back along his neck.
I pushed a paper sack out the window, and Lub caught it. Then I pulled on my shoes and hoodie and climbed out the window.
“Finally you’re awake,” the fish boy said. “I’ve been here the past two nights.” I kept trying to place his accent—which was silly, considering the place he came from.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
Lub was already looking through the bag. In it were three paperbacks: Newton and Leeb on Patrol; Newton and Leeb Can’t Fail; and Liquid Gunship 7. He held up the Gunship book questioningly.
“It’s manga,” I said. “From Japan? You’re going to love it.”
“Okay. Cool.”
“You can keep them if you want.”
“Really?” He looked up. “But … why?”
“You saved my life.”
“If I do it again, will you give me the Treasury Edition?”
“That’s just crazy talk.”
Lub put the books back in the bag. “I’d like to show you something. Can you stay out for a while?”
I looked back at the house. Would Aunt Sel check on me? And if she did, would she mind if I’d skipped out? Hard to say if she’d be angry or proud. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Lub led me through the trees, then uphill between two dark houses. It was chilly, and I was happy we were moving. “Tell me about the Scrimshander,” I said.
“I’d never seen him before the other day,” Lub said. “I’d heard of him, though. He’s always been around. The Elders call him—” He made a weird moaning sound.
“That’s Voluntary language,” I said.
“Nope, that’s my language.”
“I mean, I’ve heard kids at school using words like that. Singing them.”
“Some people in Dunnsmouth like to copy us,” he said.
“Who’s ‘us’?”
Lub stopped. “We call ourselves the First. The lubbers call us the Dwellers, or sometimes the Dwellers of the Deep. But really we don’t live all that deep—nine or ten fathoms.”
“Lubbers?”
“Landlubbers.”
“But your name is—”
“A nickname, okay?” He raised a webbed hand that I could barely see. “My siblings think I’m strange because I spend a lot of time up here.”
We arrived at a clearing. We’d climbed the ridge behind Ruck’s Engineering and the other bay-side buildings. The sky was clear for once, a deep black full of stars. The half-moon seemed to be admiring its reflection.
Lub pointed northeast. “Can you see that outcropping, out by the nose?”
“Barely.” It was a nob at the tip of what would have been the crocodile’s upper jaw.
“Just swim straight out from that point and you’ll get to the shoals. Then swim for another five minutes after that, and dive. That’s where we live.”
“You live underwater? That’s pretty cool.”
“It’s b-o-o-o-ring. No books, no TV, no Internet.”
“That sounds like Dunnsmouth, actually. Except they have books.”
“Well, we have rocks that are kind of like books, except—well, let’s just say that they’re not exactly Newton and Leeb. And most of us who live there are old. Really old. A lot of them barely do anything but make nets.”
“You should totally come to my school.”
“I’d love to go to school,” Lub said. We walked along the ridge, following some path I couldn’t see. “I’ve been stealing textbooks for years, but it’s just not the same. Oh. How’s my English? Good, right?”
I stumbled and had to put out a hand to steady myself. Lub never seemed to lose his footing, even though his feet were big and webbed. Maybe he just knew the area better. Or maybe his night vision was better. Those big eyes had to be good for something.
The walk turned into a climb as we moved up into the cliffs of the bay’s north side. I was breathing hard, but Lub kept up a steady stream of talk. He seemed very excited to learn I was taking geometry. “I can tutor you,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff my people can do with geometry.”
Near the top of the cliffs, bushes and trees had taken root between the rocks. Scrawny pines leaned into the air, daring each other to jump. I used their trunks and limbs as handholds to pull myself the last of the way up, to a rocky lip.
We stood on the skull of the crocodile, looking down at the bay and the scattering of lights that indicated the homes of Dunnsmouth. It was so dark. Back home there would have been brightly lit piers, rows of streetlights, gleaming buildings. But this could have been the shore as it looked to starving pilgrims.
“Man, all those stars,” I said. I’d never seen so many, so close.
“Stars, right,” Lub said. “This way.”
The forest began a dozen feet from the rocky lip. I followed him into the trees, and we walked for another five minutes. I could hear the ocean—but it was coming from ahead of us instead of from the bay behind us.
We stopped before a pile of rocks. No, a stone structure, about five feet high.
“This used to be a lighthouse,” Lub said. “But it fell down.”
He led me through a gap in the wall. Inside, it was pitch black. “Hold on,” Lub called, and a few seconds later a bright light came on. He’d switched on a big plastic flashlight that hung from a wire. The rafters seemed to be tree limbs.
“My secret hideout,” he said.
It was about as big as my bedroom in the rental house. One wooden kitchen chair and one aluminum lawn chair were set up in the middle of the dirt floor. A wooden packing crate served as a table. Along one wall was a tree trunk propped up on two stacks of wall stones. This makeshift shelf was crammed with books held in place at each end by hunks of rusty metal. So many books: textbooks, comics, novels, blue binders that looked like automotive repair manuals.…
An orange extension cord draped across one corner, from which was hung a fancy wooden picture frame (empty), a bicycle wheel, and a stop sign. Every recess and niche that wasn’t crammed with books seemed to hold some piece of random junk: a rusted trumpet missing a mouthpiece, an elaborate green bottle that looked suitable for housing a genie, a miraculously intact Christmas snow globe.
“Flotsam and jetsam,” Lub said.
“Pretty cool for stuff you just found washed up on a beach,” I said.
“No—my pets.” Lub pointed. Two pairs of tiny eyes stared up at us from a hole under one wall. “The one on the left is Flotsam.”
“Whoa!” I said. The eyes disappeared. “Rats?”
“They’ve got a bad reputation,” Lub said. “But they’re really quite nice.”
Even with the rats, the cave was the coolest place I’d ever been in. Then I thought, No, the rats made it even cooler. “I always wanted a secret hideout,” I said. “I never even got a tree fort.”
“I kind of need one,” Lub said. “My people make your people nervous.” He popped his gills and leaped at me, hissing through those sharp teeth. I jumped back, then burst out laughing.
“R
ight?” he said. “I’m utterly terrifying.” He looked around at the cave. “I hang out here a lot. You’re the first human I’ve ever shown this to. First … anyone.”
“Don’t your parents wonder where you are?”
“Uh, ‘parents’ is kind of a different concept with us. But in general, the Elders don’t pay much attention to us youngsters.” He sat down in the aluminum chair, which seemed more rickety than the wooden one, and set the books I’d given him on the packing crate. “They spend most of their time in church.”
“They go to church?”
Lub paused. “Maybe that’s not the right word. I’d guess you call it … worship? Ritual? They’re all into the God Urgaleth, the Mover Between Worlds. Go on and on about it. We’re all supposed to be, uh, missionaries? Preparing for the day Urgaleth returns, and then it’s all heaven here on earth, punishment of the wicked, yabba dabba doo.”
“I think you mean ‘yadda yadda yadda.’”
“Anyway, they’re all excited about it again. This happens every so often, when Urgaleth is supposed to be coming. They start having these big meetings out on the water, and that’s where … well…”
“What?”
His gills flapped in agitation.
“You saw her,” I guessed. “That’s where you saw my mom.”
He nodded. “Only the Elders are invited, but I followed them.”
“I thought you weren’t into religion.”
“I was bored. Also, they clearly didn’t want us younglings finding out what they were doing. They were practically daring me to spy on them.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
Every few weeks, Lub said, fifty or sixty of the Elders went out at night to a certain spot far from the bay. They rose to the surface where humans in a white boat—the Albatross—would be waiting. The humans would lean out over the rails and call down to the Elders in First language. Lub was never close enough to hear what they were saying.
“That’s the way it went, week in, week out, until a few days ago,” Lub said. “Shortly after the meeting started, a second boat showed up—a lobster boat, which was strange because they’re usually back in port by that time of night. The boat’s spotlight hit the Elders and they dove for cover, but they knew they’d been spotted. They hate that.
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