by Jim Butcher
I said, “You’ll have to come back to the base. You’ll have to come back with me.”
~
I’m a practical man. I’m not a scientist like Mal; I’m an engineer. I fix things. I fix plumbing and generators and wireless masts and chemical toilets, when they need fixing. So I’m practical, and I’m rational, but where I come from they do have the seal stories. I thought the superstitions and the myths and the legends all came from the same place I did. It never occurred to me there could be others. I didn’t know there’d be an equivalence, a balance in the round globe, a mirror image of the north, if you like, which was the south.
I thought they made the seal stories because common seals look so human: gentle and intelligent and empathetic. But those seals of the south don’t look human. Or if they do, it’s another kind of human altogether.
I should have thought. But I didn’t think. I didn’t think at all in the months, turning into years, when Elin was mine.
~
Mal counted the leopard seals and studied them, and he loved them and respected them, but he feared them properly too. He stayed out of the water when the ice was in the bay, and he stayed away from the land’s edge when the penguins flocked like a black-and-white buffet. He didn’t want to be mistaken for one, he said, laughing.
Elin liked Mal. She laughed when he laughed, but I was never jealous. It never occurred to me that she’d be unfaithful; she was too possessive, too passionate for that. She didn’t want to go back, she said, to the small fishing settlement on the other side of the island. She liked scientists, that’s why she’d come. She liked engineers too, and me best of all.
She got pregnant, of course. I hadn’t exactly thought to stock up on supplies that might prevent that. I wanted her to leave the island then, to come with me on the red-hulled supply ship when it next called. She refused.
Unnervingly, she refused any help at all. The pregnancy couldn’t have been as long as it seemed; I must have lost count of the months. She was restless and discontented, and liked to be alone, and one day she didn’t come back for all my searching and screaming, or Mal’s. She simply reappeared the next day with her infant.
She smiled, her dappled hair plastered to her head, but the dampness wasn’t sweat, because when I kissed it and kissed it, holding onto her fiercely, it smelt of seawater, and ice, and penguin-shit, and blood.
I loved our baby so ferociously, fear settled into me and wouldn’t leave. Children change things. Not outwardly, though; not for a while. I was too embarrassed to confide my suspicions to Mal, and I didn’t want to argue with Elin, so as usual we’d sit in the evenings, all three of us—four, with our quiet, ravenous daughter—and we drank rum and talked and laughed and spoke about the fur seals and the supply ship and the weather coming in across the razor-edged hills.
Elin got along great with Mal, but nobody stays on the base forever; nobody, it seemed, except her. And now me, and our child. Mal’s replacement, when he chose to leave, was a spiky little man called Thewlis. I didn’t especially want a replacement for Mal, but then the base didn’t belong to me or the others who came through. The base wasn’t Elin’s. A replacement for Mal had to come to count the penguins and the fur seals, to record them and measure them and send the data back.
Thewlis respected the leopard seals as much as Mal did. He’d get out of the water if there was one there with him. They weren’t aggressive, only curious, but you never knew. You never knew, and you could only remember Shackleton’s wild stories, and take account of anecdote and an earlier, less scientific age.
Thewlis understood a lot less about children than about sub-Antarctic fauna, but that was hardly his fault. He simply couldn’t understand us keeping Sylvie in the wilderness. We beggared his belief, he said, when he got to know us better. It was mad, bringing up a child here. And soon she’d be of an age for school, and the nearest school was two islands away, and then what were we planning to do?
I hadn’t planned anything, but I didn’t like to admit that because I’d sound downright gormless.
Thewlis didn’t like or understand Sylvie, but that didn’t stop him worrying about her. She needed proper pediatric care and a decent education. He wanted us to take her away.
That’s not quite true. I was useful; I knew the base and its innards. He wanted Elin to take Sylvie away.
It’s not right, he’d say, stroking his little beard, all concerned. It’s no environment for a youngster.
Elin said that Sylvie ruined the environment for him; that was his trouble.
“I think it’s only right,” he told me quietly, one evening after he finally browbeat me into agreement, the evening before the red-hulled ship was due to dock again and take us north to civilisation and nursery school and pediatricians. “The older she gets, the more she’ll need to be away from here.”
I knew he wanted the bleak beauty of the place to be child-free, but I also knew he was right. So I drank too much, and Elin stormed out in a temper, pulling her fur wrap around her winter clothes and slamming the door. She must have expected to be very cold. Indeed, she was gone all night and between alcohol and anxiety I didn’t sleep at all. I turned over and stared into the dark and worried till the palest streak of dawn let me get up.
Stiff and bleary, I opened the blind. There was ice in the bay.
I saw Thewlis close to the base; he’d only just set out on his rounds of the ragged shoreline. He glanced up at me, waved. I waved back, and thought about the glitch with the generator and how I could fix that one last thing before I left.
I sighed and blinked hard at my headache, and that’s why I didn’t quite see the lunging shadow. If I saw it at all it was a blur on the edge of my vision, like a fleeting, flaring cataract.
I heard his hoarse howl, and then I was running, grabbing my boots on, not bothering with my anorak. I hoped Thewlis could keep his hold on the frayed edge of the ice, because he wouldn’t live if he went in the water, not when something had pulled him there like a striking snake.
I thought I ran fast, but by the time I reached the brink of the land, scattering offended penguins, there was nothing on the ice but a smear of blood.
We found Thewlis later that day: me, two fishers, and my own replacement plus the supply ship’s crew after it docked. We hunted for hours, and I thought we might not see him again at all. One of the fishers from the little town brought a pistol; it was too late for that, but I didn’t say so.
When we found his sodden corpse, Thewlis was barely touched; I thought he might even be alive, till we rolled him over and saw his skull, crushed by a single bite.
When we told Sylvie she ran sobbing in shock to her mother, who stood soberly at the base door and wrapped the girl in her arms and kissed her dappled hair.
~
Later, the two of us argued so badly that the others left us alone to it, going outside to try to smoke in air that was minus ten and falling.
“It was a leopard seal,” I yelled at Elin. “I’m not changing our plans. We’ll still take Sylvie when the ship leaves. It’s dangerous here.”
“It isn’t dangerous for her,” she spat. “Thewlis antagonised it. He must have.”
“You’re being selfish,” I shouted. “Because you don’t want to leave.”
“And neither does she. And she never will.”
And of course she flew out again, slamming the door so hard it bounced. I rolled my eyes. Her rage was too much of a habit for me to care. Instead of caring I drank more, and laughed with the crew and the new engineer and the men from the settlement, and drank even more. Sylvie played quietly in the corner of the room with her plastic Sea Life animals, and looked morosely, but only occasionally, towards the door.
I drank beyond the point of not caring, to a state of suddenly caring very desperately. I was drunk and maudlin and angry, so when I stood up fast, I knocked over the chair.
I blinked, and stared at the abandoned Sea Life set. “Where’s Sylvie?”
~
“No,” I screamed. “No.”
It bared dinosaur teeth as ancient as death. Sylvie hesitated, looked back at me, then at the seal. I was drowning its growls with my furious frightened yells, and I was outpacing the men behind me. I’d scared her. Sylvie began to cry.
“Daddy,” she wailed.
As I hurtled towards her I saw that blurred shadow lunge again, and the seal had her leg.
And I had her arm, but only just. I looked at the seal and I knew it would tear her in half sooner than let her go. It glared hatred, my daughter’s blood on its teeth, and suddenly I wasn’t drunk any more. I wasn’t drunk when I yelled “Shoot it! Shoot it!” and the man running up behind me fired a shot into the sleek reptilian head.
But my vision was blurred all the same, and my eyes stung with awful grief, and the head was sliding under the surface, wolf-eyes turning dull, full of hatred, then full of nothing but death, and then lost in the deep cold water, trailing a single tendril of blood.
~
I took Sylvie home. I didn’t love the island any more. My daughter had health checks and hospital treatment and an education, but she walked with a limp ever after, a limp and a faraway sadness. She limped down the aisle on her wedding day, and she limped to the boy Culley’s baptism, and I daresay she limped the day she went to the sea at last and didn’t come back.
On that day and many days after, Culley’s father howled with grief, so I got him drunk and patted his shoulder, but I knew I shouldn’t cry myself because, after all, I’d cheated the sea of her for long enough.
And I did have Sylvie’s son, because Sylvie was better than her mother. She was just selfish enough to go to the sea, but not quite selfish enough to take the boy with her.
Still I worry. I go down to the bay that’s a mirror reflection of one in the far south, and I shiver in the darkness and count seconds, and wait for Culley to not-come-back.
And sometimes him not-coming-back isn’t the worst thing I imagine, when he smiles at me and his canines gleam in moonlight, and his hug is so strong and fierce it could drag me under.
I keep the rifle in the Land Rover.
It’s not as if I’ll need it.
A KNOT OF TOADS
~
by Jane Yolen
“March 1931: Late on Saturday night,” the old man had written, “a toad came into my study and looked at me with goggled eyes, reflecting my candlelight back at me. It seemed utterly unafraid. Although nothing so far seems linked with this appearance, I have had enough formidable visitants to know this for a harbinger.”
A harbinger of spring, I would have told him, but I arrived too late to tell him anything. I’d been summoned from my Cambridge rooms to his little white-washed stone house with its red pantile roof overlooking St Monans harbor. The summons had come from his housekeeper, Mrs. Marr, in a frantic early morning phone call. Hers was from the town’s one hotel, to me in the porter’s room, which boasted the only telephone at our college.
I was a miserable ten hours getting there. All during the long train ride, though I tried to pray for him, I could not, having given up that sort of thing long before leaving Scotland. Loss of faith, lack of faith—that had been my real reason for going away from home. Taking up a place at Gerton College had only been an excuse.
What I had wanted to do this return was to mend our fences before it was too late to mend anything at all. Father and I had broken so many fences—stones, dykes, stiles, and all—that the mending would have taken more than the fortnight’s holiday I had planned for later in the summer. But I’d been summoned home early this March because, as Mrs. Marr said, father had had a bad turn.
“A verrry bad turn,” was what she’d actually said, before the line had gone dead, her r’s rattling like a kettle on the boil. In her understated way, she might have meant anything from a twisted ankle to a major heart attack.
The wire that had followed, delivered by a man with a limp and a harelip, had been from my father’s doctor, Ewan Kinnear. “Do not delay,” it read. Still, there was no diagnosis.
Even so, I did not delay. We’d had no connection in ten years beside a holiday letter exchange. Me to him, not the other way round. But the old man was my only father. I was his only child.
He was dead by the time I got there, and Mrs. Marr stood at the doorway of the house wringing her hands, her black hair caught up in a net. She had not aged a day since I last saw her.
“So ye’ve left it too late, Janet,” she cried. “And wearing green I see.”
I looked down at my best dress, a soft green linen now badly creased with travel.
She shook her head at me, and only then did I remember. In St Monans they always said, “After green comes grief.”
“I didn’t know he was that ill. I came as fast as I could.”
But Mrs. Marr’s face showed her disdain for my excuse. Her eyes narrowed and she didn’t put out her hand. She'd always been on father’s side, especially in the matter of my faith. “His old heart’s burst in twa.” She was of the old school in speech as well as faith.
“His heart was stone, Maggie, and well you know it.” A widow, she’d waited twenty-seven years, since my mother died birthing me, for the old man to notice her. She must be old herself now.
“Stane can still feel pain,” she cried.
“What pain?” I asked.
“Of your leaving.”
What good would it have done to point out I’d left more than ten years earlier and he’d hardly noticed. He’d had a decade more of calcification, a decade more of pouring over his bloody old books—the Latin texts of apostates and heretics. A decade more of filling notebooks with his crabbed script.
A decade more of ignoring his only child.
My God, I thought, meaning no appeal to a deity but a simple swear, I am still furious with him. It’s no wonder I’ve never married. Though I’d had chances. Plenty of them. Well, two that were real enough.
I went into the house, and the smell of candle wax and fish and salt sea were as familiar to me as though I’d never left. But there was another smell, too.
Death.
And something more.
It was fear. But I was not to know that till later.
~
The study where evidently he’d died, sitting up in his chair, was a dark place, even when the curtains were drawn back, which had not been frequent in my childhood. Father liked the close, wood-paneled room, made closer by the ever-burning fire. I’d been allowed in there only when being punished, standing just inside the doorway, with my hands clasped behind me, to listen to my sins being counted. My sins were homey ones, like shouting in the hallway, walking too loudly by his door, or refusing to learn my verses from the Bible. I was far too innocent a child for more than that.
Even at five and six and seven I’d been an unbeliever. Not having a mother had made me so. How could I worship a God whom both Mrs. Marr and my father assured me had so wanted mother, He’d called her away. A selfish God, that, who had listened to his own desires and not mine. Such a God was not for me. Not then. Not now.
I had a sudden urge—me, a postgraduate in a prestigious university who should have known better—to clasp my hands behind me and await my punishment.
But, I thought, the old punisher is dead. And—if he’s to be believed—gone to his own punishment. Though I was certain that the only place he had gone was to the upstairs bedroom where he was laid out, awaiting my instructions as to his burial.
~
I went into every other room of the house but that bedroom, memory like an old fishing line dragging me on. The smells, the dark moody smells, remained the same, though Mrs. Marr had a good wood fire burning in the grate, not peat, a wee change in this changeless pla
ce. But everything else was so much smaller than I remembered, my little bedroom at the back of the house the smallest of them all.
To my surprise, nothing in my bedroom had been removed. My bed, my toys—the little wooden doll with jointed arms and legs I called Annie, my ragged copy of Rhymes and Tunes for Little Folks, the boxed chess set just the size for little hands, my cloth bag filled with buttons—the rag rug, the over-worked sampler on the wall. All were the same. I was surprised to even find one of my old pinafores and black stockings in the wardrobe. I charged Mrs. Marr with more sentiment than sense. It was a shrine to the child that I’d been, not the young woman who had run off. It had to have been Mrs. Marr’s idea. Father would never have countenanced false gods.
Staring out of the low window, I looked out toward the sea. A fog sat on the horizon, white and patchy. Below it the sea was a deep, solitary blue. Spring comes early to the East Neuk but summer stays away. I guessed that pussy willows had already appeared around the edges of the lochans, snowdrops and aconite decorating the inland gardens.
Once I’d loved to stare out at that sea, escaping the dark brooding house whenever I could, even in a cutting wind, the kind that could raise bruises. Down I’d go to the beach to play amongst the yawls hauled up on the high wooden trestles, ready for tarring. Once I’d dreamed of going off to sea with the fishermen, coming home to the harbor in the late summer light, and seeing the silver scales glinting on the beach. Though of course fishing was not a woman’s job. Not then, not now. A woman in a boat was unthinkable even this far into the twentieth century. St Monans is firmly eighteenth century and likely to remain so forever.
But I’d been sent off to school, away from the father who found me a loud and heretical discomfort. At first it was just a few towns away, to St Leonard’s in St Andrews, but as I was a boarder—my father’s one extravagance—it might as well have been across the country, or the ocean, as far as seeing my father was concerned. And there I’d fallen in love with words in books.