Nick of Time

by Ted Bell

  “Oh, all right, if I have to, but I’ll never set foot in this rotten old cave again!” Kate said. On “three” she bravely jumped down into the narrow stream of black water that was flowing into the cave. He heard her take a deep breath.

  “Come on, Nicky!” Kate cried. “The water’s cold. But I can smell the sea! It’s that way! Let’s go!”

  As Nick prepared to jump, his match went out. He lit another, perhaps his last, he guessed, and with his foot shoved the sea chest as far back on the ledge as he could, wondering if he’d ever see it again, much less solve its mystery. He jumped from the ledge, cupping his hand around the match to keep it lit.

  The cold seawater was lapping about his ankles. He’d been right, the evening tide was on its way in. Hearing a heavy panting noise above him, he lifted the burning match to see. It was only Jip, still up on the ledge. “Come on, boy, jump!” Nick cried, but the dog stayed put. And that’s when his match went out. The tunnel was plunged again into total darkness. He’d used his last match.

  “It’s all right, Kate,” Nick said. “We just have to follow our noses.”

  “Nicky!” Kate said. “What’s that noise?”

  “It’s only Jip, breathing. He’s a little scared, too, I guess. Come on, boy, jump!”

  “No. Not that noise, Nicky,” she said in a low whisper. “Another noise. Behind us. Far back in the cave.”

  “Another noise? I don’t hear anything, Katie,” Nick said, listening. But, wait, he did hear something! A low, gurgling sound from deep in the cave. It sounded familiar, Nick thought.

  Laughter.

  “Do you hear it now, Nicky?” Kate asked in a trembling voice. “There’s somebody back there, behind us! It sounds like they’re laughing!”

  “Don’t be silly, Kate, that’s not possible,” Nick whispered. “It’s just a trick of the water sloshing around back there inside the—what’s that?”

  Another sound now, from deep in the cave. It sounded, Nick thought, like heavily beating wings. And it was coming closer. Bats, he said to himself. The whole cave must be full of them.

  “Oh Nicky oh Nicky oh Nicky oh Nicky,” Kate whispered feverishly and she clung to her brother in the pitch-black darkness.

  “It’s all right, Katie, it’s all right,” Nick said. “We’re getting out of here right now!” He picked his sister up in his arms and had just started slogging through the black water when there was a huge splash just in front of them!

  “Nicky!” she screamed. “What’s that? What’s that?”

  And Nick, too, was terrified at the loud splash until he heard loud barking fill the cave. “It’s Jip! He jumped off the ledge and now he’s caught the scent of fresh air and is leading us out! We’ll just follow him to the opening of the cave! Hold on, Kate, I’m going to run as fast as I can, so put your arms around my neck and don’t let go no matter what happens!”

  And Nick, with Katie held tightly in his arms, ran as hard and fast as he could, lifting his feet high above the icy water, following the sound of Jip’s loud exclamations up ahead in the darkness, until finally they burst from the mouth of the cave into the open air. He took a deep breath, panting with exhaustion, sucking the cool air into his lungs. It was almost like breathing water. Fog, and a thick one, blanketed the little cove.

  “Christmas!” Nick exclaimed, staggering up out of the tidal flow at the cave mouth and onto some dry scree. “This fog is a real ‘greybeard,’ isn’t it? That’s what blocked most of the sun, see! May I put you down? It’s all right, you can open your eyes now. We’re safely out of it!”

  “Isn’t it too early to be this dark, Nicky?” Kate asked, opening her eyes. “What’s Jip barking at?” Jip was still looking back into the mouth of the cave, barking fiercely.

  “Jip! Come! We’re getting out of here, boy!” Nick said to his dog.

  “What’s in t-t-there, Nicky?” Kate asked, shivering from both fright and her soaked clothing.

  “Bats,” Nick said, hugging her tightly. “That’s what we heard. Whole cave must be full of them.” But it wasn’t bats they’d heard inside the cave. Someone, or something more likely, had been laughing back there. And a bat, as far as he knew, didn’t have a sense of humor.

  “Can we go home now?” Kate asked, tugging on his sleeve. “I’m v-very cold.”

  Cold and frightened, Nick knew, with leagues to go before sleep and a warm bed. And his poor mum wondering where they were once more. He took his sister’s hand in his own. “This way,” he said, mounting a nearby ledge that seemed to lead upward.

  And so the little band made its way, cold and wet, up the slippery steps of the rocky cliffside. As they neared the top of the cliff, the greybeard fog became more and more patchy, and, to their increasing discomfort, mixed with a hard slanting rain.

  Gaining the top at last, they made their way across the rocky headland. Nick tried to ignore the stinging rain and concentrate on the mystery they’d discovered in the sandy cove. The fact that the chest looked so new and happened to bear his own name was curious enough. But the big red bird, he was a mystery, too. Whatever was such a creature doing on this little island? It was passing strange. And now, slogging across the rainswept fields, tired and bone cold, he came to grips with what had been troubling him since they’d run out of the cave.

  The laughter in the cave. He’d heard it before. It had come from the mouth of the red parrot sitting on the sea chest!

  They reached the coast road and Nick made a decision.

  “We’ll stop at Gunner’s, Kate,” he said. “He’s sure to have a fire going on a night like this and I think we could use some warm blankets and a pot of tea.”

  And so where the road forked, the little trio, led by Jip running up ahead, took the turning east for the Greybeard Inn instead of bearing north along the coast road to the lighthouse and home. Although they were late, and he had surely missed supper once again, Nick decided his shivering sister needed some warm clothes and hot tea.

  It would prove to be an unfortunate decision.

  CHAPTER VI

  Billy Blood

  · 5 June 1939 ·

  AT THE GREYBEARD INN

  A brilliant parade of lightning strokes flashed across the rocky headland, marking the old inn in the near distance and the Greybeard Light in the far. Nick longed for the comforts of hearth and home, but his sister was chilled to the bone and shivering badly. An enormous thunderclap rumbled through the low black clouds and across the plain.

  He could just make out the warm glow of oil lamps in the upstairs windows of the inn and, placing his arm round his sister’s shoulders, they hurried up the last rise. The inn wasn’t home, but it was hearth.

  Nick pushed open the heavy wooden door and, sure enough, saw a room lit only by fire. A real corker, too, blazing away in the massive open hearth of the old inn’s public room, the flames licking every corner of the ancient space. Rain beat steadily against the windowpanes and jagged flashes of lightning lit the panes from without.

  Nick saw two strange figures before the fire. One of them, a tall fellow wearing a dark cloak, stood with one boot up on the hearth regarding the new arrivals in brooding silence. He was smoking a long bony pipe and held a rum bottle in one hand. His companion sat hunched in the shadows, a brooding presence just beyond the firelight’s reach. Strangers, on Greybeard Island? It was a day for strange occurrences, Nick thought, there was no getting around it.

  “Master Nicholas!” Gunner exclaimed, coming out from behind the bar to embrace Kate, then Nick, then Jip. “God love you, children! Why you’re soaked to the skin, for all love! Which you surely should not be out on such a night as this! Nor in this bar full of alcoholic spirits, either! Into the sitting room with you, now, afore I lose me livelihood! Blankets!” he exclaimed, and rushed up the narrow wooden stairwell, assuredly in search of blankets, because Nick could hear him shouting the word from the upstairs hall, as if he could call a woolen blanket to come running like a woolly dog.

  “Ch
ildren!” he now shouted from the top of the stairs. “Could you come up and help an old blind man locate the warm and cozies?”

  “Coming right up!” Nick shouted back. He took Kate’s hand and started up the staircase, a puzzled frown on his face. Surely Gunner knew where the blankets were, the same place they always were, stowed on the top shelf of the linen closet at the end of the hallway. Or on the beds in one of the guest rooms.

  When they gained the top step, Nick saw Gunner standing in the darkened hallway, a lantern in one hand. He had his index finger pressed to his lips, signaling them to be quiet.

  “Shh,” he said, “I’ll have a private word with you, Master Nick.”

  “What is it, Gunner? What’s going on?”

  Gunner ignored his question and said, “Katie, dear lass, would you be a wee angel and hurry down there to the Blue Room? I think I’ve left me spare blankets in there.”

  Nick looked carefully at his old friend. This secretive behavior was not like him at all. He watched his sister skip down the hall and enter the last room on the right, the Blue Room.

  “Something’s wrong, Gunner,” he said. “Tell me.”

  Gunner, the proprietor of the inn, was easily the most beloved figure in Nick’s life beyond his own family. Gunner had much to recommend himself to Nick, but foremost was his brisk manner of speech when excited, which Nick found quite jolly, and his general appearance and demeanor, which always put Nick in mind of a Father Christmas who’d spent a lifetime on shipboard. His face was worn and leathered by the years at sea, but his bright blue eyes still held a sparkling clarity, as if the wind and sea had never been quite able to get to them.

  Gunner wore a full, snow-white beard that framed his often rosy cheeks, and little gold wire spectacles that were always sliding down to the tip of his nose. To look at him, you’d never guess he’d spent most of his life behind a twelve-inch naval gun. Or that he’d sent not a few German submarines to the bottom with that gun during the Great War. To Nick, who loved the sea, Gunner’s stirring tales of naval adventure were only icing on an already favorite pudding.

  Now Gunner bent from his waist and put his lips near Nick’s ear.

  “Be wary of them two down there, lad, and keep your wits about ye.”

  Billy Blood and Snake Eye

  “Who are they? What are they doing here?” Nick asked.

  “Very strange visitors indeed. I don’t want to alarm your sister. But I’ll tell you they’ve come looking for something on this island. Something they say rightfully belongs to them. Here to reclaim missing property, that’s all I know, lad. Just be wary, that’s all. And, one more thing. They—”

  At that moment Kate returned, dragging two woolen blankets behind her.

  “Some tea would be nice,” she said, smiling up at Gunner and bouncing down the steps, trailing blankets in her wake.

  “Don’t be a-feared, Nick, we’ll sort these two devils out in short order,” Gunner said, following Nick down the steps.

  Gunner wrapped them up like two wee Indians and sat them side-by-side on the bench nearest the hearth. “Oh. Blood,” he said, tucking in their blankets and nodding to the dark-cloaked man. “Beg pardon, Blood, ha-ha!”

  “Blood?” asked Nick, who was accustomed to Gunner’s vocal peculiarities. Still he found this mention of “blood” incomprehensible, and found himself looking down at his blanket to see if he’d cut himself. “What blood, Gunner?” He saw a spot of red on the floor and reached down for it, but it was only a singularly large feather.

  A red feather.

  “Here’s yer Blood, boy,” came a chilling voice from inside the cloak.

  The stranger grinned a toothsome smile at Nick. His appearance was strange indeed, almost like an apparition one could say, especially here in the warm familiar glow of the old inn. Clenched between his yellowed bony teeth was a long thin yellowish white pipe carved out of some kind of bone. He wore his full black cloak over a scarlet blouse and odd-looking black pantaloons stuffed into beautiful Hessian boots. Nick supposed that many might consider the fellow handsome, with his finely chiseled features, his long dark red hair tied at the back with a black satin bow—but to Nick he didn’t look handsome. To Nick he looked—and he had to search for the word—wrong.

  “Yes, yes, here’s yer old Blood,” said the stranger in that musical voice. It would have been bone-chilling were it not so hauntingly melodious. “And, here be my companion Snake Eye. Leave him be, if I was you,” Blood said, with a warning glance at Kate.

  But Katie couldn’t take her eyes off this other brooding figure. Occasionally, when flames would lick up in the fireplace, she could see his strange face before he turned it away. She shuddered at the sight of him, deciding he’d either been horribly scarred or that his face was covered with the most hideous tattoos.

  Blood pulled his chair forward in Nick’s direction. He half rose up out of it, locking his jet black eyes on Nick’s so strongly that Nick sensed he could almost feel their pull, like moon on tide. There was, too, a strange tinkling noise as the man rose from his chair, and Nick was astounded to see that his full red beard was plaited with braids, and that each long plait was secured with a tiny silver skull! Hollow silver skulls that clinked together musically whenever the stranger moved his head or shook his beard!

  “William Blood be my name,” the man said, with a tinkling of bells. “But suchlike as you may call me Billy.” He drew his thin lips back in something like a smile and regarded Nick and Kate with heavily lidded black eyes. “Won’t you join our little party?” He sucked on his bone and blew a foul yellow cloud of smoke in Nick’s direction. Then the stranger hooked his boot under the bench where the children sat and drew it near to him. A shiver went through Nick’s body as he looked closely at the man’s pipe. It was a bone all right, and looked like one he’d seen in one of his mother’s anatomy books.

  Human anatomy!

  “You look chilled, swabbies. A little rum, perhaps? An ancient old grog, mateys, over two hundred years old.”

  Blood’s voice was indeed oddly musical, but it was not a pretty song, Nick thought. Perhaps his voice was the opposite of music. He held out his open bottle of rum to Nick, black eyes glittering.

  Eyes that narrowed instantly to slits when Nick put his hand over the mouth of his offered bottle.

  “Kind of you, sir,” Nick said, looking evenly at the stranger. “Truly. But our friend Gunner has a pot of hot tea brewing for us. Besides, ‘swabbies’ like my sister and I are not allowed to drink spirits. But we do thank you kindly for the offer.”

  Feeling distinctly uneasy in the man’s presence, Nick turned to Gunner who was busily toweling Jip’s coat dry before the fire. “Gunner, may we borrow some oilskins for the trip home to the lighthouse? I’m sure our parents are worried. We really should be getting home, shouldn’t we, Katie?”

  “Lighthouse?” Blood smiled, his voice dripping with mock kindness.

  “We live in the lighthouse, Mr. Blood,” Kate said. “It’s two thousand years old!”

  “Lovely, a ruin no doubt,” Blood oozed. “My friend Snake Eye here is a connoisseur of antiquity, he is, seein’ as how he’s over two hundred year old himself. The two of us must pay you a visit someday, my child,” he said, and Kate’s eyes went even wider.

  “My parents are probably quite worried, Gunner,” Nick interjected quickly. “Late again for supper and this time I’ve got wee Kate with me in the bargain,” Nick said, looking at Kate nervously. But his sister paid no heed.

  “Can I tell Mr. Blood about the sea chest we found, Nicky?” Kate said. “Down by Gravestone Rock?”

  Nick tried to hold the words back for her, even as they came tumbling out. He threw his sister a stern look but wasn’t sure she had interpreted it correctly. She was incredibly clever, but she was only six and a half years old. She was still learning about “looks” and how they stood for words unsaid.

  “Found a sea chest, did you, dear girl?” grinned Billy Blood. “Fancy tha
t! Me old parrot Bones was tellin’ me such a tale, just afore you swabbies arrived. He seen a chest, too! Would it be the same one as yours, I wonder?”

  He was leaning right into Kate’s face, his lips pulled back into what was meant to be a smile and his black eyes locked on hers. A thin stream of smoke escaped his thin lips, and Katie saw that his yellowed teeth were very large. She drew back instinctively. She had never in her life met a bad man. There simply were none on Greybeard and she had never left the island.

  But she had heard her mother describe bad men in stories and this Mr. Blood here and his scary friend certainly fit the description. Even the air around them felt wrong, even the light. Wrong. Bad.

  “Just what kind of chest might it be, dear?” said Billy Blood.

  “Oh, my, it—” started Kate, and stopped, realizing what she’d done. She looked at Nick for help.

  “Did she say sea chest?” Nick said quickly. “My sister has a keen imagination, I’m afraid. Wasn’t a chest, sir. No, not a chest, just a pile of driftwood and a rusty old lock.” He gave Blood his very best Sunday smile and saw the black eyes go cold.

  “By the way, you mentioned your parrot, sir?” Nick asked, eyeing the large red feather in his hand and desperate to get off the subject of his chest. “A red parrot? If so, sir, I’d ask you to keep that nasty bird away from my little sister because—”

  “Quiet!” Blood roared. “You dare speak to the likes of me in suchlike ways! Why, I’ll have your damned eyes for supper! And Snake Eye your tongue. He likes tongues.”

  Blood suddenly sat back and regarded the boy in silence, peering intently at Nick through narrowed eyes. And Nick could see him trying to decide whether or not this wisp of a lad could be easily frightened. Nick returned Blood’s cold stare, though in truth the man was terribly frightening and Nick’s heart was pounding in his chest. Sheer menace seemed to pour off the man in waves, and he said not a word.

  The silence remained, hanging heavy over their heads. Katie, Nick noticed, was content to stare at her shoes, while Jip was regarding the Snake Eye fellow with a low growl.