by Ted Bell
“Either drop the gun, or I break your wrist, choose one, chica,” his old man said. It seemed his father wasn’t hurt nearly as badly as the boy had feared! One eye to the slit, Alex held his breath, praying as he never had before.
please let him be okay please let him be okay please let him be—
The gun went off then, not one shot but hundreds, it seemed, a deafening staccato filling the tiny compartment, splinters of wood and glass flying everywhere. And so much smoke Alex couldn’t even see who had the gun now, but then his father was backing toward him, pointing the gun down at the long-haired man who was slowly getting to his feet. He was holding his bare shoulder, and blood was streaming through his fingers, splashing on the floor. He hissed something at Alex’s father in Spanish, but stayed where he was.
His father, his old gray T-shirt soaked with blood, had his back pressed against Alex’s hiding place. Alex could hear him breathing heavily, strongly. Alex’s heart heaved in his chest, sheer joy filling him inside, as his father, his great hero, spoke.
“There is no goddamn map, señor,” his father said, holding out his forearm so Sniper could perch there. “How many times did I tell you up on deck? No map, no treasure, no nothing. Just me, alone on this old boat, trying like hell to have a little fun. Then you showed up. Now you get the hell off my boat, comprende? Or I’ll spatter your brains on that wall right here and now.”
“Señor, I beg you,” the man said, in good English now. “It’s all a big mistake. Listen. Was not your yacht last week down in Staniel Cay? My brother, Carlitos, he say a descendant of Blackhawke the famous pirate is down here in the Exumas, looking for the famous lost treasure of de Herreras and—”
“I got it. So you decided to smoke a little ganja and row out to a total stranger’s boat in the middle of the night, carrying a bloody machine gun, and hoping to find some nonexistent map, right?”
“Oh, no, señor, I only—”
“Shut up, please!” Alex heard his father say, pulling back on the slide that cocked the machine gun. “You’re losing a lot of blood, old chap. You need to get yourself to a doctor. Put both hands on your head and turn around, got that? Right now!”
His father moved away from the door and Alex could see the compartment again. Pressing his eye to the slit once more, he felt something warm and sticky on his face. His father’s blood. He watched the ponytailed man moving toward the door with his hands on his head. Suddenly, he stopped, and turned to Alex’s father with a horrible grin on his face.
Sniper let out a blood-curdling screech and fluttered his big black wings wildly.
“Oh, God, Kitty,” he heard his father say in words that sounded broken and full of pain.
In the doorway, two more men stood on either side of Alex’s mother. One man, tall, whose bald head was glistening with sweat, held his mother roughly by one arm. Her long blond hair was matted and wild, her pale blue eyes red, brimming with unshed tears. She was clutching the remains of her torn nightgown with her other arm, terror plain on her beautiful face. The other man was fat and had a big gold cross hanging from his neck. He had a long flat knife at Alex’s mother’s throat, right under her chin.
Sniper squawked and flared his wings angrily.
“Sniper, no!” Alex heard his father say, and the bird calmed itself and remained perched on his arm.
In the fat man’s other hand, he clutched a handful of sparkling jewels. Diamond necklaces and bracelets and the pretty thing his mother had worn in her hair the night before. A tiara. The boy had told her it made her look like a fairy queen.
“Ah, la señora, eh, the beauteous Lady Hawke, no?” the ponytailed pirate said, smiling now. He bowed from the waist. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am called Araña, the spider, but my name it is simply Manso. And these are my two brothers, Juanito and Carlos. It was mi hermano, Carlitos, who served you, dear lady, all that rum at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club.”
“Sí, I am Carlitos,” the fat young Cuban said to Alex’s mother. “Remember me now, dear lady? We celebrated the New Year’s Eve together!”
“My brother, he is the bartender there, see?” Manso said. “He hears many things. And my brother, he tells me all about your great beauty. And how you dance up on the bar. And, of course, your husband’s search for the lost treasure of Blackhawke. A treasure, señora, that the English pirate stole from my ancestor, Andrés Manso de Herreras, the greatest Spanish privateer of them all! It is a story passed down through my family for endless generations.”
The man stepped closer to Alex’s mother and stroked her cheek. “So, please, Señora Hawke, would you be so kind as to come in and join our little fiesta?”
A small sob escaped his mother’s trembling lips. Alex saw her angry blue eyes and pale cheeks in the moonlight that was still streaming down through the opened hatch. His eyes pressed against the narrow slit, he could see that his mother was fighting desperately to hold back her tears.
She reached out to her husband. “I’m so very sorry, Alexander. So very, very sorry.”
Now the boy had tears of his own, burning his eyes. He wanted to shrink back from this, away from the door. Crawl down under the chains. Disappear back into his dreams. A little red ball, riding the crest of a breaking wave.
But he couldn’t look away. He knew his father was locked in a desperate struggle to save his mother’s life and his own. He had to be there for his father, even if he could not help him.
The fat Cuban called Carlitos said something in Spanish that caused his mother to wrench her head around and spit in the man’s face.
Then the tattooed pirate called Araña gripped the fat Cuban’s hand, the one holding the machete to his mother’s throat.
“No, Carlitos,” Araña said. “Not until she shows us the map. He won’t do it. But I can make her do it, that I can promise.”
But the fat man, anger and spittle on his face, disobeyed and drew his blade slowly across his mother’s taut skin, leaving a thin red line that instantly became a torrent of blood.
“Carlitos! You stupid fool!” the ponytailed man screamed.
Alex shrank back from the vents, clawing his way across the chains, as far as he could go into the sharp V-shaped space of the bow. He squeezed his eyes shut and stuffed the blanket into his mouth to stifle the deep sobs welling up from his throat.
There was a murderous cry from his father and fast upon that furious shrieking from Sniper and screaming voices in Spanish and English; then his father’s terrible wails made him clamp both hands to his ears to shut it out, shut it all out.
The last thing he heard was something slamming hard against the little locker door, hard enough to splinter it inward.
Bahamian fishermen found Seahawke adrift nearly thirty miles off Nassau four days later. She was dismasted, her anchor ripped from the bow by a fierce tropical storm that had roared northward up the Exuma Sound just the day before. Finding the yacht abandoned, the owner of the fishing boat and two crew boarded her. Starting at the stern, Captain Burgess McKay and his two paid men worked their way forward, shocked at the amount of destruction that had been wreaked inside the beautiful yacht. Nothing aboard had escaped someone’s fury. Nothing and no one could have escaped such blind ferocity.
At some point they noticed a faint hum coming from somewhere toward the bow of the boat. They moved slowly along the companionway, gaping at the ruinous destruction of compartments to both sides. They searched the whole of the dead and drifting yacht. Someone had taken an ax to all the pretty mahogany woodwork, all the furniture, all the beautiful fixtures. The vessel was ruined, destroyed. Bad.
In the main stateroom they found an open safe, empty. A robbery at sea, piracy, was not all that uncommon in these waters. And the yacht flew a large British Union Jack flag at her stern. That made her a likely target for the growing number of island people, all descended from slaves, who were coming to despise their former British masters.
There was still a strange hum emanating from the forward comp
artment. They all mistook it for a noisy generator. But when they arrived they saw that it was nothing but a lone fly batting itself again and again against the door, as if trying to get in. One crewman swatted the fly away, but it was only momentarily distracted from its efforts. They tried the knob. The door swung inward.
The first thing they saw was a blood-caked machete. Then, the bodies. The two crewmen were suddenly staggering backwards into the captain.
He prodded them forward into the compartment, but, unable to stomach the buzzing flies, the stench, and the spattered walls, they quickly scrambled up the ladder and instantly heaved their breakfasts into the sea. The captain tore off his shirt, covered his mouth and nose, and remained below. Taking a deep breath, he entered the compartment.
Two nude and mutilated bodies. One, a woman, had had her throat slashed. There were other wounds, but the captain quickly averted his eyes. The other victim was worse. It was a man, and he was pinned to the forward bulkhead wall by two stiletto daggers driven through his hands. The captain stared at the corpse in disbelief. The man had clearly been crucified. He had also been disemboweled.
There was something else on the cabin floor. A large black bird, its feathers matted with blood. The captain saw faint movement of one wing and lifted the bird in his hands. It was badly hurt but still breathing. It squawked weakly as he cradled it in his arms.
Staggering backwards through the door of the small compartment, he made the sign of the cross.
“Mother of God,” he said softly to himself.
He fell back into the corridor and collapsed against the wall. He found himself struggling for breath. It was oven-hot in the little cabin, and he turned away, headed for the stern to fill his lungs and gather himself for what he knew he must do. He had only taken two steps aft when he stopped, listening carefully.
There was another sound coming from the compartment, different from the sickening buzz of the countless black flies. It was the sound of short, sucking breaths. Human. Somehow, there was a living being in that room.
McKay filled his lungs with air and stepped once more through the door to the horror inside. It seemed impossible, but the sound of breathing seemed to be coming from the man impaled on the wall.
He went up to the hanging corpse. There was no possibility that this man was alive. Still, he could hear it. Fast, shallow breathing.
It was coming from behind the body.
Captain McKay gritted his teeth and placed the injured parrot carefully on the floor behind him. He reached up and pulled both stilettos from the palms of the dead man. He had to step back as the body fell toward him and collapsed at his feet.
On the bloody wall where the man had died was a small door. It had three small vents. There was a gaping crack down the middle, as if the man had been hurled against it with great force. The sounds were coming from behind that door. He turned the knob. Locked from the inside.
Looking around desperately, he spied the blood-caked machete propped up against the back wall. He grabbed it and quickly pried the small door open with the blade’s edge. He bent and peered inside, his eyes adjusting rapidly to the darkness. The breathing was replaced by a low, keening whimper.
There was a figure, a small child, curled into the V-shaped sides of the bow. Not moving, but breathing. Small, shallow breaths. The captain climbed up inside the locker and gathered the child to his chest. It was a young boy, plainly delirious, and he was whispering something rapidly and repeatedly. Captain McKay put his ear to the boy’s lips.
three knocks three knocks three knocks three knocks
Lifting him out, the captain was amazed the boy was still alive. It must have been days since he’d eaten, and the child was obviously dehydrated. In an instant, the captain realized that this child must surely have witnessed the murder of his parents through the three ventilation slits.
He covered the boy’s eyes with his free hand, shielding him from the sight of the two bodies, and stepped out into the companionway.
In his mind the captain could see it now. How it might have been. The crucified man had hidden the boy in the locker. And died shielding the little door, and behind it, his son.
The captain went quickly to the stern of the yacht and gently handed the boy up to a crewman aboard the fishing vessel. Then he quickly returned for the wounded bird, gathered it up, and closed the main hatch on the horror below. Once the boy was safely aboard their vessel, they left the mutilated yacht untouched. Rigging a line to her bow, they took her in tow, and Captain McKay in the pilothouse got on the radio to the Nassau Constabulary.
The poor fishermen were shocked at what the child must have witnessed and endured. He was barely alive. They prayed for him all the way back to Nassau Harbor. The captain relinquished his berth and the three men tended the boy round the clock. The black parrot, who recovered quickly, never left the boy’s side. The only thing the child could keep down was some weak tea. He didn’t speak at all, other than to whisper a strange phrase over and over during his few brief spells of consciousness.
three knocks three knocks three knocks three knocks
The fishing boat, Misty II, towed the big yacht all the way into the main dock at Nassau Harbor, where a waiting police ambulance took little Alex Hawke, along with his parents’ bodies, to the Royal St. George’s Hospital. His grandfather was contacted in England, and immediately began making arrangements with the naval secretary to bring them all home.
He then flew to Nassau and spent every day at Alex’s bedside, holding his hand, telling him stories about his dog Scoundrel’s latest adventures at home on Greybeard Island.
It would be several weeks before Alex was well enough to travel. During that period, the Nassau police investigating the crime visited the hospital, hoping to learn something, anything, about what had happened aboard the Seahawke. They quickly realized the boy, mercifully, had no memory whatsoever of the terrible events.
One nice policeman continued to come every afternoon. He was a kind man with a big smile, and he never asked any questions. Every day he’d appear in the doorway, and he always brought some new toy along. A small bird he’d whittled or something from the straw market.
When Alex was about to be discharged from the hospital, the navy secretary at the admiralty in London sent two senior staff officers to the Bahamas to accompany the elderly Admiral Hawke and his grandson home.
The big Royal Navy plane flew from Nassau to Heathrow, refueling at Bermuda and Madeira. Alex sat with his grandfather, sleeping or holding his hand most of the way. His parents were somewhere in the back of the plane, he knew. Something bad had happened to them, he knew. Something terrible. He couldn’t remember.
They finally landed in England. A thick fog blanketed everything. They took his parents, who were in narrow metal boxes covered with flags, and put them into the back of a long black car.
The next day, more black cars took them all to a naval cemetery. It rained hard. It was very cold. Sailors fired rifles into the air. As his mother and father finally disappeared into the ground, he saw his grandfather salute. He did, too.
He couldn’t cry anymore, so he didn’t. He wanted to go home with his grandfather.
Home was on the smallest of four small islands in the English Channel, just off the coast of France. The Channel Islands, they were called. Alex’s island was named after the dense fogs that often swirled around its peaks and valleys.
Greybeard Island.
The pirate dreams finally stopped when little Alexander Hawke was about nine.
So the nights were better, and, as Alex grew, the days were never long enough. The sun always stopped before he was ready for it to disappear. He rose each morning at first light and ran down the twisting steps to the sea. Scoundrel was always right on his heels. He loved diving from the rocks into the cold water of the channel with his dog leaping in right behind him. Later, he would sit for long hours on the craggy hillside, looking out to sea, listening to the crispy sound of late-afternoon breezes
in the canopy of trees above his head.
There were long weeks at sea with his grandfather aboard the Rambler. They often sailed the schooner north, off the coast of England, sometimes as far as Portsmouth before turning for home. The boy learned to hand, reef, and steer by the stars. He learned to keep one eye aloft, looking for the telltale luff of lost wind in the mainsail.
On endless sunlit days, when Alex had the helm, he would sail the boat through vast floating fields of red krill, cheering the leaping dolphins and whales as they feasted there. Minkies and Humpies, the whales were called, and he came to recognize and love them.
He was learning something new every day. His grandfather taught him the names of the stars and shells, birds and fish. How to tie a bosun’s knot. How to knot a bow tie. How to gut a fish. How to write a poem. How to cook fresh clams and mussels in seawater. How to sew a sail. How to spell Mississippi.
He even tried to learn the art of falconry, using his pet parrot, Sniper. Sniper was not interested in becoming a falcon, however, and little Alex soon gave this up. He’d learned the bird’s genealogy from his grandfather.
The bird and its descendants had been in the family for generations. Sniper’s ancestor had belonged to Alex Hawke’s ancestor, the famous pirate Blackhawke, who always kept the bird perched on his shoulder. Pirates, Alex learned, had for centuries taught the wily birds to warn them of unseen attackers. Each generation of Hawke parrots had been taught these old pirate ways and Sniper was no exception.
Alex Hawke said his prayers every night, kneeling beside his bed and always blessing his grandfather and also his mother and father in heaven. Then he climbed up into the big four-poster bed. Through the open window beyond his bed, he could see the stars shining over the black surface of the English Channel. And hear the waves crashing against the rocks far below his grandfather’s house.