Kid vs. Squid

by Greg Van Eekhout

He swept his arm in a gesture that included all the exhibits: the Feejee Mermaid, the shrunken heads, the sea bishop, the water-goat, Little Mister Fishy Pants, and the Sea Dragon Who Wears a Hat. “Here’s her legacy of evil,” Griswald said. “My friends who dared to stand up to her. People once as real as you two, now transformed to these abominations.”

  Trudy stopped writing. She gazed around the room, her eyes passing over the glass cases and the hideous things stored within. “You’re saying…”

  Griswald nodded. “Thatcher, Trudy, meet the Keepers.”

  I waved at the exhibits. Nothing waved back.

  “I got lucky,” Griswald said. “I almost managed to outrace Skalla’s voice as she was in the middle of casting a curse on me.”

  “Almost?” Trudy repeated.

  Griswald pointed to his head, shaking his finger as if he were scrambling an egg. “She did this to me. So much of what I knew is lost, my thoughts scattered like flotsam on the sea. And it’s frustrating. There are ways to beat the witch. There are artifacts in my museum that could help us, if only I could remember. So many of my memories remain beyond my reach, just over the horizon. There was a submarine death trap, I think, and a harpoon cannon.”

  I supposed a death-trap submarine and a harpoon cannon could be pretty traumatic.

  “But we’re here now,” Trudy said. “Maybe we can help you remember.” She poked at a tottering pile of boxes in the corner.

  “Not so fast,” I said. “How do we know we should trust him? Just because he says he’s an enemy of Skalla’s doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes people lie.”

  “Thatcher’s right,” Griswald said to my surprise. “The witch changes people. Warps ’em. She even warped me. Here. I’ll show you.”

  He lowered himself to a stool. “Skalla destroyed an entire city, and even that didn’t sate her appetite for cruelty. She casts her curses out of anger. She casts her curses to get revenge. She casts them to get her way, and sometimes she casts them for pure, malicious amusement.”

  He looked down at his leg. I didn’t want to see what he was about to show us, but if we were going to survive the summer, we had to know everything.

  “Griswald … I mean, Uncle Griswald. What did Skalla do to your leg?” Another of my rude questions. It was turning out to be a rude kind of summer.

  He began rolling up his pant leg. Instead of the stump I was expecting, his leg ended in something much worse.

  The fish tail where his knee should have been was covered in scales as blue as the sea on a sunny day.

  CHAPTER 9

  Griswald turned out to possess a surprising talent for charming Trudy’s mom. We all trekked over to her bookstore and within minutes he’d gotten himself invited for dinner. By the time we’d picked our way through a meal of grilled haddock and green beans, Ms. McGee was nearly insisting that Trudy spend the night over at the museum.

  “What. The heck. Was that about?” I demanded of Trudy once we returned to the museum.

  “What?”

  “My uncle and your mom! I’m surprised she didn’t send us home with pie!”

  “Oh, she did,” Griswald said guiltily, wiping meringue from his beard.

  “I don’t know,” Trudy said. “But she always had crushes on the waiters at Captain Shrimp’s Seafood Shack.”

  “Never underestimate the influence of a good chowder,” Griswald said.

  At thirty minutes to midnight, we all loaded into Griswald’s car and headed off for Neptune House, the Atlanteans’ summer palace in the old, destroyed amusement park. Griswald drove down the two-lane road hugging the beach in his 1972 Ford LTD, a big tank of green steel that creaked and swayed on its springs with the slightest motion of the steering wheel. The ride felt like being on a boat in rough seas and, sitting in the back seat, I looked around for a life jacket. Griswald peered into the fog and muttered a sea chantey about shipwrecks and sharks.

  “Do you have any tips on dealing with the king?” Trudy asked him. She still had her notebook out and had been peppering Griswald with questions, but she didn’t get much out of him since his mental focus seemed to have gone out with the tide.

  When we’d left the boardwalk at least a mile behind, a loud pop came from the right side of the car. I’d been in a car with a flat tire before, so I knew what it felt like. We flappety-flapped along for a few more yards, but once we hit a particularly rubbly patch of road, it was clear we weren’t going to get anywhere this way.

  “I hope you have a spare,” I said, getting out to inspect the damage.

  “Why, of course I have a spare,” Griswald said with indignation. “It’s the jack I’m not so sure about.”

  Five minutes of rooting around in the trunk turned up a lot of things—some rope, a golf scene carved into a sperm whale tooth, and something that might have once been a Twinkie—but no jack.

  “Don’t you worry,” Griswald assured us. “When you’re at sea, you make do with what you have. I remember the season I spent on the Mad Guppy. She was a ninety-foot trawler sailing out of Dutch Harbor and as fine a ship as you could want. So what if her hull was a bit rusty—”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Before you finish this inspiring anecdote, let me ask you one thing: Where’s the Mad Guppy now?”

  “Well, she’s on the bottom of the Bering Sea, but that’s not my point—”

  “It’s ten minutes to midnight,” Trudy said. “We were hoping to beat the Atlanteans back to the palace. We’ve got to get moving.”

  But we wouldn’t be going in the car. We’d either have to wait for a tow truck or find another way.

  Trudy unfolded a map. “How far is it to walk?”

  “That depends,” Griswald said. “It’s not the same distance every time. Depends on the tides, the moon, and the stars. And you can put that map away, missy. Nothing concerning the Atlanteans is down on any map. True things never are.”

  Trudy shot him a suspicious look. She still didn’t trust him any more than I did. “Then how were you planning to get there?”

  He didn’t answer right away, chewing his gum as though he was trying to come to a decision. With his fish leg, there was no way he’d be able to hike far, and I figured he’d try to talk Trudy and me out of going on our own. But he just sighed and pointed down the road.

  “Set a course that way and go until you can go no farther,” he said. “I’ll get this tire fixed somehow, and if you beat me to the palace, I’ll at least pick you up to take you home.”

  Trudy cinched up her backpack, and I cinched up my pants. Cinching just seemed like the kind of thing you do before heading off into unknown territory. We set off without another word, but after a few yards I stopped and looked back at Griswald. He was leaning on his crutch and fiddling with the rope from the trunk. Only a day before I’d have been happy for any excuse to get away from him. Now, even though I still wasn’t sure about him, I felt bad about leaving him behind.

  “Don’t you worry about me,” Griswald said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had allies, and allies can give even an old hardtack biscuit like me some freshness. I’ll be fine. You just look after yourselves. You’re each other’s lifeboat. Never forget that.”

  We left Griswald alone in the fog.

  The road beneath our feet grew more and more crumbled, and the air before us thickened into a wet wall that swallowed Trudy’s flashlight beam. We passed a junkyard where a Doberman rushed the fence and growled, jolting us into a run until we figured out it was just a dog, and then we kept going, our hearts kicking in our chests. There was a welding yard, and a burned-out building that might have once been a bar, and then we left the town behind us. A lone, mournful truck horn faded in the distance, but we saw no traffic.

  The road ended at a wall of tangled brush. We pushed our way through, into a field of dry scrub. In the still air, I could hear waves crashing ashore. Somewhere a seal barked.

  Rusty contraptions like the remains of squashed steel spiders punctuated the field: roller-coaster tr
acks and whirly rides abandoned in place when the amusement park was wrecked almost a hundred years ago. I felt like we were walking through the graveyard of a lost civilization. And then I remembered that, in a sense, we were.

  We kept walking until Trudy’s light landed on a monster. Or at least a plaster sculpture of one. A shark the size of Griswald’s car was entwined by ivy, its gaping maw a nest of windblown straw and spider webs. Even in its decrepit state, I recognized it from the book back at Trudy’s.

  Trudy roved her flashlight across the shadows and revealed a great, towering mass of plant growth, in which were trapped mermaid figures and a Spanish galleon. We’d come to the right place.

  We waded through the weeds and found a pair of doors, thick with grime and powdery dust. “Should we knock?” Trudy asked.

  “Nobody ever answers the door at a haunted house,” I told her in my very best lecturing tone. “You have to slowly swing the door open, take a couple of steps inside, and then the door slams shut behind you and locks you in. Then you and your friends go your separate ways and get slaughtered one by one.”

  “My mom doesn’t let me watch those kinds of movies. She says they’ll give me nightmares.”

  I took hold of the doorknob. It turned with buttery smoothness, and I slowly pushed the door open. Trudy and I took a couple of steps inside.

  Behind us, the door failed to slam shut with a diabolical will of its own.

  Trudy shined her flashlight across the vast circular hall. A chandelier of conch shells and pearly abalone hung from a domed ceiling sixty feet above our heads. A grand staircase swept gracefully to upper galleries. Over the windows hung beaded curtains of sea glass and coral, chiming soft music in the breeze we made with our movement. I could imagine young couples dancing to orchestra music back before color television, when everything was still black and white.

  On the walls were painted strange, flat figures, sort of like you’d find in an Egyptian tomb. Trudy and I moved slowly along the curve of the wall to examine them, Trudy snapping pics with her camera while I held the flashlight.

  The pictures seemed to tell a story, like an ancient comic book: a great city rose above the waves, slender towers reaching for the clouds. Below, people played musical instruments, made paintings and sculptures, pointed telescopes at the stars. The next scene showed the interior of a palace where, surrounded by piles of gold and jewels, a figure in leopard-seal robes and a seashell crown sat on a throne. I recognized the person in the painting. She was depicted in cartoony two dimensions and was younger, with her head attached to her body, but there was no mistaking the expression of evil glee on her face: it was Skalla, the witch.

  In the next set of pictures, Skalla gathered more and more treasure while the people below grew thin and hollow-eyed, their ribs drawn in stark lines across their torsos. They tended kelp fields and labored in smoke-belching factories, with slave-drivers cracking whips across their backs.

  But one man with a great curly beard raised a black sword above his head. Leading a wave of people hefting sickles and clubs and trident spears, he stormed Skalla’s throne and cut her head off.

  The eyes in Skalla’s head remained wide and staring. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and the city fell apart into sharp fragments, like shards of glass. Flames and waves consumed the island, and the people floated like garbage on the open sea.

  In the second to last picture, Skalla’s head landed on a shore. I recognized the rock-and-driftwood beach, the shape of the cliffs. It was Los Huesos, and Skalla was surrounded by monsters: giant squid and strange hybrids of humans and sea creatures.

  In the very last scene, the people of Atlantis washed up on the same beach. Skalla and her creatures were there, waiting for them.

  “This is everything,” Trudy whispered. “The whole history of the Flotsam, right here before our eyes. Skalla ruled as a tyrant, but the king, Shoal’s dad, rose up against her and gave his people freedom.”

  I turned away from the wall. “And then she made him pay. Him and everyone else. But where are they now? Let’s check upstairs.”

  But we wouldn’t be getting up to the second floor, at least not under our own power, because lining the elegant ballroom stairs, dressed in faded and worn clothes, unshaven, red eyed, glaring fiercely, were at least a dozen men and women. They all held three-bladed spears pointed at Trudy and me.

  One of them stepped to the front of the group. She was tall, her eyes glinting like green sea glass in the sun. I was certain I’d seen her before. Yes—she worked at the bike and skate rental on the boardwalk. The blades of her spear were stained reddish brown. I hoped it was just rust.

  “Greetings, mud walkers,” she said. “Welcome to the summer palace of Coriolis, King of Atlantis Lost.”

  Overall, this hadn’t been the friendliest of welcomes, but it could have been a lot worse.

  Then the bike lady said, “Prepare to suffer.”

  That was more like it.

  CHAPTER 10

  At a gesture from the bike lady, the Flotsam rushed us and threw us to the floor. I kicked and flailed as a man pressed his elbow into the back of my neck, grinding my head into the hardwood slats. He yanked my arms behind me so hard I thought every tendon from shoulder to wrist would snap. Through the corner of one blurry eye, I could see Trudy getting the same treatment. Griswald had warned us we might not get a warm welcome, but he hadn’t said the Atlanteans would attempt to kill us on sight.

  I tried to tell them we were friends of Shoal, but with my lips mashed against the floor, my words came out as garble.

  “Utter not a sound, mud villain,” the bike lady said. “You do not face vendors of candies and amusements now. At this moment, we are the Atlantean royal guard, and whether our home be a paradise or a hovel, we shall protect it. Give us a reason, and you will see what becomes of our enemies.”

  I had a feeling whatever she was threatening might involve filleting. Possibly battering and deep-frying too.

  Our attackers yanked us to our feet, the jagged tips of their spears hovering inches before our eyes.

  “The girl,” Bike Lady said. “Take her bag.”

  One of the Atlanteans produced a long serrated knife that looked like the kind of thing whalers would use to remove blubber. He held it against one of the straps of Trudy’s backpack.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  The spear points were suddenly even closer to my eyes.

  The man with the knife paused, checking with Bike Lady to see if he should go ahead and saw through the strap, and maybe through Trudy’s arm.

  Bike Lady stepped up to face me, her eyes as hard and sharp as coral chips. “Speak, mud boy.”

  Trudy sighed. The last time I’d conversed with a strange and dangerous person, I’d gotten the Flotsam curse cast on us.

  “Okay, see, it’s like this: Skalla’s head is inside the backpack and supposedly she’s sleeping because I ticked her off and she responded by using magic against us and I guess it tired her out. But that was hours ago, so maybe she’s waking up. There’s tape over her mouth to make sure she doesn’t say anything but it’s not like tape’s a magic substance that never gets unsticky, especially in the damp and salty air and—”

  “Silence!”

  I bit my tongue. Hard.

  Bike Lady looked really upset, as if she’d just lost control of things and didn’t know what to do next. She motioned at the knife guy to step away from Trudy. Her clenched jaw bulged so much, I was sure she’d be spitting out broken teeth. They’d be sharp fragments and would probably go through my heart.

  Thinking about it, I should have mentioned right from the start that we were friends of Shoal.

  “Can I just say one more thing?”

  “No,” Trudy and Bike Lady both said at the same time.

  “Take them to…” Bike Lady paused, unsure. I figured the next word would be “dungeon.” Or “torture chamber.” Instead, she said “kitchen.”

  Since kitchens w
ere places with more knives, not to mention boiling pots of oil, I was in no way relieved.

  They frog-marched us into a cluttered room of dirty tile floor and walls that might have once been black-and-white checkerboard. Battered pots and pans and cleavers hung from hooks. The cleavers bothered me. At a stove, a stoop-shouldered old man in chef whites (or almost-whites) stirred a dented cauldron of soup. He took no notice of me or Trudy or the Flotsam until Bike Lady cleared her throat.

  “Fin?”

  “Busy. Cooking.”

  “Fin, we caught these intruders—”

  “Busy. Cooking. Soup.” He continued stirring.

  Exasperated, Bike Lady tried again: “Fin, these children … they are with the witch.”

  “Hmm. Come here and taste this.”

  “Fin—”

  “Soup! Dinner! Taste it!”

  Bike Lady’s hands balled into fists, but she went forward and took a slurp. “Cabbage soup, yes, very nice. As I was saying—”

  “Yes, cabbage soup. I suppose you are disappointed it’s not polar kraken,” the cook said. “Perhaps if somebody had caught a polar kraken, I would prepare polar kraken for His Royal Highness. Alas, His Exalted Majesty’s hunters were only able to spear three heads of cabbage, so that is what you will be served at His Extreme Grace’s table. Speaking of whom, where is our king?”

  “Leading a search party to find the princess,” she answered, her face turning red in frustration. “And as these intruders have brought with them our most terrible enemy, I have no doubt they know the princess’s fate.”

  “We do,” Trudy said, straining against the two Flotsam clutching her arms. “Shoal was swallowed by a monster fish. We’re her friends, and we’ve been trying to help her.”

  At that, the Flotsam gasped. Except for Fin.

  He offered his spoon. “Would you like some soup?”

  “No, I would not like some soup! If you’re not going to help us help Shoal, then let us go!” Trudy was steamed, and in a roomful of angry Flotsam with trident spears and racks hanging with ugly cleavers, I didn’t think anger was a good idea. Not that I could blame her, but I wanted to make sure we didn’t end up as key ingredients in Fin’s pot.