Kid vs. Squid

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Call it off,” I said again, “and I’ll give you back your body.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Skalla halted the wave.

  It loomed like a skyscraper, curling over us, rippling like a monumental slab of Jell-O. The flying fish soared in wide circles around Griswald and the hanging Flotsam. Gulls wheeled overhead but didn’t cry.

  “What did you say?” Her whisper was low and dangerous. If she decided to let the wave go, everything around would be crushed to splinters and slop, including us.

  I pointed at the board from the construction fence. “I remember where I’ve seen those sea horse tattoos.” Trudy nodded triumphantly. “I know where your body is. I can take you to it.”

  Skalla’s withered lips moved. The tidal wave above shimmered.

  “Why would I care?”

  “Because your wave will destroy your body too.” I waited while she calculated.

  “Show me,” Skalla said.

  “Free the Flotsam and Griswald first.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation, boy!” Skalla roared. “Take me to my body or I’ll let my wave pound you down to the center of the Earth.”

  Shoal stepped forward, her fingers curled into fists. “Don’t give her anything, Thatcher. Not until she frees my family.”

  Trudy nodded in vigorous agreement.

  Skalla stared straight at me, unblinking.

  “Better decide, sand flea. I won’t keep my wave frozen forever.”

  How could I trust her? What if I gave Skalla her body back and she still drowned everything? How did this decision ever fall on me? What a stupid summer vacation.

  “Follow me,” I said.

  Skalla left most of her creatures behind to guard the Flotsam, but a contingent of lobster men flanked us as her sea turtle sloshed down the flooded boardwalk to Griswald’s museum. Her chin cut through the saturated air like the figurehead of a pirate ship.

  Sinbad hissed at us from atop a display cabinet when we entered the museum. The storm had shattered the windows, tossing things around like soggy confetti and flooding the whole place a foot deep. Shards of shattered exhibit jars littered the shelves. The octopus with sneakers cowered in a corner. The shrunken heads bobbed like apples in the water, moaning with dread. The sodden air smelled like cat pee and fish puke. But the mummy’s sarcophagus was still in its place, resting on its sawhorses.

  Like Skalla’s head, Griswald had found the mummy washed up on the beach. He hadn’t known what he was keeping in his museum. Maybe he’d never seen pictures of a whole-bodied Skalla with her sea horse tattoos.

  Would my plan work? Offering Skalla her body back was one thing, but once she saw the condition it was in, would she even want such a shriveled, mildewy piece of wreckage?

  “Show it to me,” Skalla commanded.

  I lifted the lid open and one of Skalla’s lobsters carried her over and angled her head above the mummy. She stared at it for what seemed like hours.

  “Thatcher, give me your blade,” Shoal hissed at me. “If you won’t kill her, let me.”

  With her hand on her throat, Trudy nodded.

  Maybe they were right. Maybe I was just making things worse.

  But when I saw a single tear trace a path down Skalla’s chalky white cheek, I knew I’d made the right decision, no matter how things ultimately turned out.

  “It’s my body,” Skalla said at last. “I thought it was lost with the island-city. But it’s me. I could have my body back. I could walk on two legs. Swim through the waves like a porpoise. Be strong. Whole.”

  She didn’t seem to know or care that the rest of us were still in the room with her. But I needed to snap her back to reality. What if she forgot the only thing keeping the tidal wave at bay was her magical will? I could feel it, like a gigantic fist cocked back and ready to smash.

  I shut the lid of the sarcophagus. “Call off your wave. Free the Atlanteans and Griswald. Remove the curse. Then you can have your body back.”

  The sumo lobster man’s antennae twitched, and I remembered what he’d said in the Tunnel of Love. I remembered Tommy and Dicky and their grandmother and Zoltan.

  “And restore your creatures to the way they were,” I added. “Tommy and Dicky and the kelp guys. And the Keepers too. All of them.”

  The sea turtle nodded approvingly.

  Skalla coughed. “I’ll try.”

  Skalla’s gaze landed on me, then Trudy, then Shoal, and then back to me, as if standing in her glare somehow marked us. “Your heart pumps seawater,” she said. “The sound you hear when you cup your ears is the ancient ocean tide. The ocean is the bloodstream of the world. Stir the pot and the sea responds.” She drew breath through her withered lips. “Now, fill the sarcophagus.”

  Using a salad bowl I found floating in the hallway, I scooped water into the sarcophagus until it leaked through the seams. The mummy floated like a sliver of soap. Under Skalla’s direction, we weighed it down with dumbbells from Griswald’s bedroom.

  “It will suffice,” Skalla said, supervising. “Now, put me in.”

  I took her head from the lobster man and gladly dunked her under the water. Her eyes remained open. Bubbles dribbled from the corner of her mouth. I let go of her head and watched her sink.

  Then … nothing.

  The room grew quiet. I heard my own breathing, and Sinbad’s purr, and plinking drips all around the flooded museum, steady as clockwork. Outside, the vertical ocean roared and gloshed.

  Then, several things happened at the same time:

  The water in the sarcophagus turned gray white, like skim milk, the color of Skalla’s face.

  Every lightbulb in the museum exploded in a puff of glass.

  My ears popped.

  Thunder boomed, rattling the windows.

  Sinbad coughed up a hairball.

  The hairball didn’t have anything to do with Skalla’s magic, as far as I knew.

  The witch’s nose broke the surface, followed by her chin, and then the rest of her face. Her lips moved as she said something too low to hear. I leaned over the edge of the sarcophagus to get closer.

  “It didn’t work,” she croaked. “I don’t have enough magic in me.”

  “That’s not our fault,” I protested. “We did everything you told us to.”

  Her eyelids closed heavily. “Not enough.”

  “I knew she would have an excuse,” Shoal said. Her voice was like ice. “Let me kill her.”

  “If we kill her, we lose,” I said. “The wave comes down. The curse remains. All her monsters stay monsters. Thousands die.”

  “But at least then she won’t rule a counterfeit Atlantis,” said Shoal. “Her crimes must stop here. We must stop the tide forever.”

  We were both right.

  I raised the Atlantean blade. My face stared back at me, reflected in the volcanic glass.

  And I slid the edge of the blade across my palm. It hurt worse than I thought it would, and bled more. Wincing, I let the magic stream into the sarcophagus.

  “Thatcher, no!” screamed Trudy.

  I gently shoved her away.

  “Leave me alone, Trudy.”

  “You’ll bleed to death!”

  “She doesn’t have enough magic,” I explained. “But there’s still some of it left in me. If I give it back, maybe it’ll be enough.”

  I would give the witch as much as she needed, all of it, if that’s what it took. As long as she used the magical soup ingredient to save the town and save my friends, I’d accept anything that happened to me. And that’s what I was thinking as I started to feel light-headed. That’s what I was thinking when my vision went watery and closed down to a tighter and tighter tunnel of black. I was still thinking it when Trudy and Shoal eased me to the floor.

  I wanted to keep bleeding into the sarcophagus, but I was too weak to shove Trudy and Shoal off and get back to the very important work of bleeding.

  “Go into the bathroom and bring me first aid supplies,” Trudy barked at the sumo l
obster, and I guess he did what she told him because after a fuzzy moment when I must have faded out, Trudy was wrapping my hand in gauze.

  “Ow,” I said with numb lips. “Hurts.”

  “Of course. Tourniquets hurt. Dummy.”

  “More magic,” I said. “She needs more.”

  Trudy fastened her knot.

  “Ow,” I said again.

  “You’re brave and funny when you’re not getting on my nerves. And also smart, even though you’re dumb.”

  She watched me until I could sit up on my own, and then she took my blade. With a quick intake of breath, she cut her own palm and bled into the water.

  She bled for a very long time.

  A while later, Shoal took the kelp-gardening implement from her. She stared down at the witch. Her eyes glittered. Tension drew her narrow face into a tight mask. The witch had taken so much from her, and if Shoal didn’t want to give her magic but decided to drive the blade right between her eyes, I wouldn’t blame her.

  Instead, Shoal sliced open her palm.

  Standing together in pain, my friends turned the water red.

  CHAPTER 19

  And so, at the end of summer, I went home. My parents met me at the airport in Phoenix. They gave me a T-shirt from Singapore. It said, “My parents went to Singapore and they didn’t even get this T-shirt from there.” They thought it was hilarious.

  On the first day of school my new English teacher made us write an essay about our summer vacations. I wrote down everything, exactly the way it happened.

  I wrote how Skalla rose from the mummy’s sarcophagus, her eyes gleaming like sunlight on the sea. The sumo lobster man offered a claw to help her out, but she waved him off and climbed out by herself. She was young, the way she must have looked before Coriolis cut off her head. She was whole.

  Unaccustomed to having her head attached to her body, she wobbled on her feet, but it didn’t take her long to find her balance. I gave her a Los Huesos souvenir T-shirt and a beach towel to wear as a skirt, and that’s how she walked out of Griswald’s museum. We followed her, terrified that she’d let her wave annihilate the town. If she spoke anything that sounded like magic, I swore I’d take her head right back off.

  The fog clotted, thick as mashed potatoes, and I lost sight of her. Frantically, Trudy, Shoal, and I searched through the fog. But after a few minutes, I knew she was gone.

  I felt like an empty grocery bag. Lifeless. Drained of more than just blood.

  “I should have known,” I said. “I should have found a way to force her. I should have—”

  Shoal put a hand on my shoulder. “It is not your fault, Thatcher. You did everything you could …”

  She didn’t finish her sentence. The fog cleared, as if sucked into the sky by a giant vacuum cleaner. Sun shined down from a blue sky.

  Skalla was still nowhere in sight.

  But neither was her tidal wave.

  “She actually did it,” said the sumo lobster, dancing down the boardwalk. He was no longer a lobster man. Now he was just a really big guy with a buzz cut and an I Los Huesos T-shirt. He looked like a three-year-old about to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. “Look at me!” he shouted gleefully. “I’m not a stupid fish! I’m a guy! A man! A dude!”

  “Technically speaking, you were never a fish,” Trudy said. “Lobsters are crustaceans.”

  “Okay! Whatever! Okay! Hey, I committed a lot of crimes in this town, so I am out of here!” And he took off laughing.

  As we hurried down the boardwalk toward the Ferris wheel, we encountered big men with dreadlocks. Pointy-featured guys smoking cigarettes. And Tommy and Dicky, popping wheelies on their bikes with their pale but very human faces tilted skyward to bask in the sun.

  The boardwalk was crowded with people blinking in the bright light, some looking confused, some looking fearful, but many of them relieved and happy. A short man rubbed his eyes. He was wearing trousers made of fish and was speaking excitedly to a trio of men with small, but not quite shrunken, heads.

  And there was a red-faced girl with deep scratches marking her bare arms. I caught her shy look and she turned her head, but I’d already recognized her by her eyes.

  “Hey,” I said, approaching her.

  “Hey,” she said, not looking at me.

  “I’m sorry about your arms.”

  She rubbed her scratches. “It’s okay. They’re already healing. I’m sorry I squeezed you so tight.”

  “It’s okay. You were a squid.”

  “Yeah.”

  We stood in awkward silence, and she threw her arms around me in a rush. Even as a regular girl, she had an amazing grip.

  “Thanks,” she said, and she ran off before I could get too sniffly.

  Farther down the boardwalk, we found Griswald, bewildered and completely soaked, but alive. One of his feet was still inside his big, clomping boot. The pink toes of the other poked out from the bottom of his pant leg. He wiggled them. And looked sad.

  “If Skalla’s restored all my exhibits to their former state, I guess the museum’s out of business,” he said.

  “I think you can probably buy freaks on the Internet.”

  He considered this a moment before breaking out in a broad smile. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. I could branch out into three-headed chickens and UFO babies. Besides, the sea always bestows wonders. Ever find a piece of sea glass in the sand, all polished round and smooth? One out of every thousand pieces of sea glass came from the very first Atlantis. Think about that.”

  Skalla had healed his foot, but maybe not his brain. Maybe not all the way. Or maybe she had, but Griswald was just fundamentally a strange person. And maybe that was okay.

  I turned to my friends and noticed the expression on Shoal’s face. She wasn’t happy. She was scared. Terrified.

  “My family,” Shoal said to Griswald. “Did Skalla … ? Are they … ?”

  And, yes, apparently Skalla had, because the Flotsam came toward us, covered in bandages, but alive.

  Shoal jumped into Coriolis’s waiting arms, and watching them embrace warmed me like a mug of hot cocoa, complete with whipped cream and an extra drizzle of chocolate syrup.

  Fin and Concha the bike lady came up to me and Trudy. Concha looked down at us, her face a stern mask.

  “You gave the witch her body back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now she can do everything she did before. She can rest and brew her magic until she’s ready to strike again. And next time, she’ll be doing it on two legs.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t need that anymore,” Trudy said.

  Fin chewed his lip. “I suppose we’ll see. If the sea calls us back again at the end of summer and we find ourselves trudging across the beach, letting ourselves sink into the waves and fall into the Drowning Sleep—”

  “The tide pulls at the earth,” Coriolis said. “It tugs the sand. It reclaims stone and wood. The sea is relentless. It reaches with greedy fingers, and one day it will reclaim this entire beach. Yes, it will take the boardwalk, and Los Huesos, and all of California. And the lands beyond that. Eventually, the sea welcomes everyone back to her cold, churning embrace.” He smiled down at us, squinting in the sunlight. “But not, I hope, for a very, very long time.”

  My essay was really good. It was thorough. And I got a zero on it because I never turned it in. The only people who wouldn’t accuse me of making it all up were hundreds of miles from me.

  The school year went on. I took thirty-three math quizzes. I did six book reports. I memorized and forgot all the Articles of the Constitution.

  Internet and phone access in Los Huesos still stank, so I exchanged a grand total of 174 letters and postcards with Trudy and Shoal.

  I thought about signing up for tae kwon do again, but I found a different school where they taught kung fu. I liked it there. It was good to start fresh. I wasn’t very good at it, but that wasn’t important. Every time I did a push-up, I thought about Trudy, training herself to
be a superhero/detective. Every time I struck the punching bag, I thought about Shoal, relentless and fierce.

  My parents were worried about me. They said I was acting strangely. They sent me to talk to the school counselor. I admitted I’d had a weird summer vacation but that I’d made good friends and I missed them and Phoenix didn’t feel right. Phoenix wasn’t the same because the world wasn’t the same. There were witches and monsters in it, but also superheroes and princesses from lost cities.

  I didn’t tell anyone about the specifics.

  Around February I started begging my parents to let me spend another summer with Griswald. Now they knew for sure there was something wrong with me. But by June, they’d surrendered.

  On the last day of school, when the final bell rang, my suitcase was waiting for me on my bed when I got home. I’d packed it before breakfast. My folks drove me to the airport, and just a few hours later I was standing amid the stink of kelp on the sand-flea-infested beach of Los Huesos.

  Trudy had grown an inch. Her biceps were bigger than mine. Shoal looked about the same. She wore a Barracudas Swim Team sweatshirt. The Barracudas were the mascots of Los Huesos Middle School. Trudy had been helping Shoal catch up on land-dweller things, such as algebra.

  In some ways, Los Huesos was even a little weirder than before. People thought the colossal wave from last summer had something to do with global warming. And as for the monster squid and other oddities, surely eyewitnesses had gotten carried away in their descriptions. Scientists were studying the place. And the Atlanteans were making money by selling the scientists T-shirts and non-nutritious snacks. They used the money to convert Skalla’s Ferris wheel tower palace into an attraction: New Atlantis. Adult admission was four bucks, and people were paying it. One day, it would be a true Atlantis, and a good one.

  We stood on the sand together, Trudy and Shoal and I, staring out at the sea. The waves came and went, came and went. I figured I’d also be coming and going. To and from my friends, maybe for the next few years, maybe for the rest of my life. Wherever I went and whatever I did, a part of me had washed up on these shores, and I’d always leave a part of me behind.