Piper was relieved. She’d thought Perch might revive the idea of going home.
Creeper was pouting again, probably mad at Tad for shooting down his ghost theory. His arms were crossed and his chin was tucked close to his slight chest. He had such a big personality that Piper never thought of him as fragile, but seeing him now, tiny and dejected, it was hard not to fear for him. This wild place was dangerous. She wished she hadn’t allowed him to come. Her goal was to save Grace, not put her brother’s life in jeopardy too. But he was here, and there was little she could do, other than try her best to get Creeper back to Jesup in one uneaten piece.
They motored west for a distance, a couple of klicks by Macey’s count. (Piper was beginning to sense that a klick was the same as a kilometer.) Like the alligators, the turtle was following the boat. At times the massive terrapin disappeared under the water, but only for short intervals. It always came back up. It too was keeping a set distance.
“Look! Eels!” Creeper pointed to several long and thickly muscled creatures with black rubbery skin, writhing around in the algae soup. They looked like fat snakes to Piper, and she thought they might be cottonmouths.
“I hate to correct you, but them are sirens,” Perch said. “Big salamanders with tiny forelegs and no back legs at all. Evolutionary throwbacks to when fish grew lungs so they could attack prey loitering on the shore. Mostly they stay in the water, but at night, during a rain, they can wriggle their way across land for short distances.”
“They’re gross,” said Piper. “Why is everything in this swamp so gross?”
“Oh, it gets grosser,” said Perch. “During times of extreme drought, a siren will stay moist by surrounding itself in a cocoon of mucus.”
“Are they poisonous?” Creeper asked. “They look poisonous.”
“No, but even if they were, their teeth are located in their throats, not their mouths,” Perch said. “They can gum us, but they can’t bite us.”
Piper gave the final verdict on the sirens: “Disgusting.”
Shortly after that, they spied another alligator snapping turtle. Not quite as big as the first, but still a giant. They passed tiny islands and drew more alligators too. They came sledding down the banks on their bellies, splashed into the water, and swam out to join the bizarre flotilla.
“Take a gander at that one,” said Macey. An enormous bull alligator lay asleep in the mud. From tip to tail, it had to be eighteen feet long. “I thought only saltwater crocs get that large.” The monster’s eyelids slid open, and with yellow dragon eyes it observed the boat. The giant reptile crawled forward, slipped below the waterline, and vanished for a very tense minute. No one had to tell Piper that a beast that size could capsize their boat. They breathed a collective sigh of relief when they spotted it again, swimming away to join the other gators. This didn’t mean it wasn’t a threat—just that it wasn’t a threat right now.
“Did you see that?” Tad asked, jumping up from his seat. He scrambled toward the starboard side for a better look. He gripped one of the tie-off cleats so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
“See what?” Piper asked.
“It’s gone. It moved so fast,” said Tad. “It came up out of the water—just a head.”
“Ahead of what?” Perch asked.
“Not ahead. A head. It was a snake. A huge snake.”
“Cottonmouth, probably,” said Macey. “They’re the biggest in the Oke.”
“No, I’ve seen a cottonmouth in person,” said Tad. “This snake was a lot bigger than a cottonmouth.”
“I doubt that,” said Perch. “Can you give us a little more description? ‘Huge’ isn’t much to go on.”
Tad kept his eyes on the fading ripples, hoping the snake would resurface. “I only caught a glimpse. It had two dark marks on its face, like it was crying black tears. Seen anything like that before?”
“Yes, but not in the Oke,” said Perch. “Sounds like you’re describing an anaconda. I already told you, they don’t live here. You probably saw another snapping turtle. Snappers have pretty big heads. You know that from experience.”
“Maybe,” Tad said. But he didn’t believe it for a second. He knew what he saw.
“Let’s unpack the facts and spread ’em out on the table,” said Macey. “We’re the grand-marshal float in a very strange parade. This isn’t some random behavior. Those critters are following us like cans behind a wedding limo. They’re definitely stalking us.”
Piper thought of another possibility. “What if they’re actually prodding us toward something?”
Perch furrowed his brow. “Prodding us toward something? You mean herding? You think they’re behaving like sheepdogs?”
“Yes,” said Piper. “Exactly like sheepdogs.”
“And what do you suppose these scaly, aquatic sheepdogs are herding us toward?” Perch asked.
“I know!” Creeper said. “The Island of the Daughters of the Sun, that’s what.”
Piper shot Perch a dirty look. “See what you’ve done?”
“Don’t blame him!” Creeper snapped. “Perch didn’t make up that story; he just repeated it. And I think it’s true!”
“Creeper, stop talking nonsense,” Piper scolded. “You can’t take Perch seriously. It’s just an old campfire tale. There’s nothing behind it. There are no boogeymen in the Okefenokee!”
“What about Mergo?” Creeper asked. “You believe everything on that map, so explain Mergo! I think Mergo is an evil spirit and Cole was trying to warn us!”
“Cole wasn’t trying to warn anyone!” Piper was exasperated. “Look, the truth is, Cole made Mergo up. As a joke.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Tad. “How could you know that?”
“I read it in the journal last night while you were all asleep. Tad, I told you I recognized the word. That’s because I’d seen it before in one of Cole’s entries. We both did, but you forgot. There is no Mergo. His guides were superstitious. They got scared and claimed there was an evil spirit in the swamp, so Cole made up a name for it. He didn’t believe his guides; he was just poking fun.”
“Did he explain what Mergo means?” Tad asked.
“You were right,” she said. “Mergo is Latin. It means ‘I drown, I bury, I overwhelm.’ But again, it was just a joke. So let’s just drop this whole mystical body-snatchers thing, okay? Mergo means nothing. Mergo is nothing.”
Creeper wouldn’t let it go. “If the word doesn’t mean anything, then why did he write it in on the map? In blood!”
After two dips in the swamp and all the weirdness with the animals, Piper’s nerves were fried. She’d had enough of her brother’s ridiculous ideas. “Yeesh, Creeper, will you shut up about this?” she snapped. “I can’t listen to your nonsense anymore! Read my lips: there are no ghosts, demons, aliens, vampires, or any other monsters in the Okefenokee. So shut up!”
Creeper pounded on his bench with his fist and exploded. “No, you shut up, Piper! You shut up! All you ever do is put me down and laugh at me! I get it. I’m stupid and my ideas are silly and I should just leave you alone forever, because you hate me anyway. You hate me! Admit it, you hate me and you wish I’d never been born!”
“What on earth are you talking, about?” Piper asked. “I don’t hate you! You’re my brother!”
“Exactly!” he roared. “I’m just your stupid little, pesky brother! The one you never wished for! Not on a star or a comet or even a lump of dog poop in the backyard. Well, I’m sorry I was such a huge disappointment! I’ll do you a big favor—once we find the silver flower, you don’t ever have to talk to me again, okay? I’ll stay out of your way and you can pretend like it’s just you and Grace and it can be like I don’t exist, which is exactly the way you want it!”
Creeper’s words were a slap in Piper’s face. A wake-up slap. Her brother’s sour mood since the campfire had been her fault. She hadn’t considered his feelings at all when she’d gone on and on about wanting a sister.
“Creeper�
�Monty…” she started.
“Just leave me alone.” Creeper leaped up and went to sit next to Macey at the back of the boat. Macey put her arm around his head and drew him in close, like a mother hen. Creeper buried his face in her overalls, hiding his tears from the group.
“We can’t keep going like this,” Perch said. “I don’t care about that stupid vasculum anymore. With every new mile, things have gone from bad to worse. I’ve been used, lied to, and nearly drowned by killer vines—I don’t care what you say, Big Brain, I know they were tryin’ to kill me. On top of everything, my boat was just attacked by the King of the Turtles! And now we’re turning on each other. Ghosts or no ghosts, there’s something foul about this place, and I can’t see no good coming from overstaying our welcome.”
“Please don’t turn us back now,” Piper pleaded. “I know things are bad, and I admit it, I’ve been a horrible passenger. And a horrible sister to Creeper. And a horrible sister to Grace, and a horrible friend to Tad…I probably don’t deserve anyone’s help. To be honest, I feel like diving out of the Mud Cat and letting the gators do their worst. That’d be a fitting end to Pageant Princess Piper Canfield, and I’d be okay with that. But please…please keep going. I’m begging you, Perch. Get us to the flower, and then you can leave me behind, for all I care.”
Perch stuck out his lower lip and blew a puff of air up his face to clear a sopping flap of hair from his eyes. He reached into his pocket and fished out a dime. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. No more bargaining. Instead, we’ll leave it to chance. We’ll flip for it. I can’t be any fairer than that.”
Grace’s life hinged on the flip of a coin. It seemed vulgar and wrong, but Piper understood that Perch had already gone further for her than most people would be willing to for strangers. After the turtle attack, she couldn’t blame him for wanting to give up. She might too, if the Mud Cat were her boat and Grace weren’t her sister. She would accept the result of the toss, no matter how it landed.
“Heads,” she called. “Heads we keep going.”
“All right, then,” said Perch. “Tails we concentrate on finding a way out of here. Not sure how we’ll get past Turtlesaurus and the Gator Gang, but we’ll come up with a plan. Ready?”
She gave a sharp nod and dug her nails into the plastic of her bench seat.
All eyes were on Perch as he made a fist and balanced the coin on the back of his thumbnail. His eyes met Piper’s and lingered there for a moment. Then he flicked his thumb, catapulting the coin high into the air.
Piper whispered a one-word prayer. “Please.”
The dime tumbled over and over, sparking in the afternoon sun. Perch held his palm out to capture it.
Without warning, something big bumped against the port side of the boat, launching the Mud Cat sideways across the water. Perch grabbed the gunwale with one hand to keep from falling overboard and grabbed at the coin, but the boat had been pushed too far and the coin was beyond his reach. Just before it hit the water, the biggest fish Piper had ever seen raised its head through the thin pellicle of algae and opened its mouth wide, exposing a lining of alligatorlike teeth.
“Whoa!” Perch jumped back in surprise.
The dime disappeared inside the saggy pouch of the fish’s lower jaw, then its mouth snapped shut. The fish rolled on its side, giving the group a good look at its torpedolike body. It was covered in thick, diamond-shaped scales that interlocked like chain mail. The fish was at least as long as the Mud Cat and looked positively prehistoric. With a swish of its tail and a burst of frothy spray, it was gone.
“What was that…thing?” Tad asked the captain, but Perch was busy counting his fingers to make sure he still had them all.
“That was an alligator gar,” Macey answered. “I’ve never see one here. We have lots of the smaller Florida gars in the Oke, but the gator gar is native to the Gulf States. All the monster-size gator gars were fished off years ago.”
“Apparently not,” said Tad.
“Did you get a look at those scales, Mace?” Perch asked.
“I got eyes, don’t I? Native Americans used the gator gar’s thick scales as arrowheads. Makes a lot of sense now, having seen them up close.”
“I bet you couldn’t get a knife through them if you tried,” said Perch.
“I hate to be the one to point this out,” Tad said, “but the fish swallowed the coin. Anyone see how it landed?”
“No,” said Perch. “I was busy tryin’ not to follow the coin into the gar’s mouth. Anyone else?”
“I did,” said Creeper, still red skinned and pink-eyed from his blowup with Piper. “It landed on heads.”
Perch eyed him suspiciously. “How could you have seen that from the back of the boat? You’re not just saying that, are you?”
“We all saw it,” Creeper said. “It landed in a head. A fish head. And that counts.”
Macey smiled and patted Creeper’s back. “He’s got ya there, Perch. It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.”
Perch huffed. “Fine. We’ll keep going. But there’s something we need to consider.”
“What’s that?” Piper asked. She was afraid he was going to suggest another sleepover or tell them they were low on gas.
“Piper, you had the theory that all these critters are behaving like sheepdogs, right? You think they’re herding us somewhere?”
“Yes, it feels that way,” she replied.
“That’s exactly what I was afraid of.” Perch’s brow puckered above his nose. “Sheepdogs have masters, right? Did it occur to anyone that maybe these critters have a master too?”
The group looked back at the horde of animals churning the water with frenzied impatience as they let Perch’s point sink in.
The afternoon stretched as the waterways narrowed. Stands of giant pond cypress rose from the water and closed in on them. The canopy of trees arched over the boat, forming a sheer tunnel, casting deep shade that bordered on gloom.
“Those are the biggest trees I have ever seen in this swamp.” Perch craned his neck toward the sky to take them in. “All of the giants were cut down by the nineteen thirties. Before the lumber companies came, some of the cypress trees in the Oke were a thousand years old, although it’s hard to determine their age because they grow hollow—no rings to count. We figured they were all gone. This part of the swamp looks completely untouched by humans.”
As the corridors became more claustrophobic, the animals following the Mud Cat bottlenecked behind the boat. Their line stretched back fifty yards or more, with new animals joining as they passed. Piper was worried. What if they suddenly found themselves at a dead end, cornered like rats? But then they saw a brightly lit vista at the end of the tree tunnel, which could mean only one thing—open water.
The Mud Cat left the confines of the narrow and glided out into a crescent-shaped lagoon. On the far side, the lagoon was surrounded by forested land. Real land. This was either the western edge of the Oke or a very large island that extended as far as they could see in both directions.
Floating in the middle of the lagoon was a lone hammock of peat. It was maybe thirty feet across from all sides.
The hammock wasn’t the most interesting thing in the lagoon. That distinction went to the massive, leafless plant stalk rising up from the water through the hammock’s center. The lime-green stalk was at least forty feet tall, and as thick around as a telephone pole. Tad had never seen a stalk that size, not ever, not even in books. None of them had.
Macey throttled down the motor until the boat came to a stop. The Mud Cat continued to drift toward the hammock under the power of its momentum. “Lord Almighty, is that what I think it is?”
Tad and Piper glanced at each other. Their internal reactions were uneven. In Tad’s case, this was the sudden death of his disbelief. For Piper, it was belief rewarded.
“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” Piper breathed.
High atop the stalk, as silver as a newly minted quarter, was the l
argest, most dazzling flower Piper had ever beheld. It did exist. Dr. Cole had been right all along.
Tad snapped a photo with his disposable camera. Then a second. And a third.
“We found it,” Creeper said, transfixed by wonderment. “Cole’s flower is really real.”
“Not Cole’s flower,” said Piper. “Grace’s flower. It belongs to Grace.”
“What are we waiting for?” Creeper raised his arms in victory. “Let’s go get it for her.”
In their exuberance they forgot something.
Behind them, the creatures of the swamp funneled into the lagoon and spread out inside it like a disease. Gliding silently underwater, they began to close the gap that had until now separated them from the Mud Cat.
The Field Notes of Botanist Dr. Brisbane Cole
August 28, 1823
We are being followed. It has been more than three hours since we entered the mysterious emerald corridors and the first alligator began shadowing our canoes like a stray mutt keeping cautious distance behind a baker’s cart. Soon several others joined the first, and now they swim in a convoy of a hundred strong behind us. Nokosi believes they are prodding us toward our doom, but I am certain there is a commonsense explanation for this unusual animal behavior. Simple curiosity, perhaps. Regardless, we have no choice but to continue, for to double back would send us straight into their toothy midst.
The trees, laden with drapery of gray moss, conceal much of this realm from view, but what is visible is both mesmerizing and cause for deep concern. This is an unnatural realm, full of secret life.
A large insect of the pond skimmer family skittered up Nokosi’s paddle and speared his finger with a sharp beak the length of a sewing needle. Nokosi flicked the bug away, but the damage was done. Blood streamed out of the wound, and the finger turned an angry red to the knuckle. He tried to stanch the flow of blood, but for a good while it continued unabated. Perhaps my friend suffers from hemophilia, a rare condition in which the blood is unable to clot properly, but it’s entirely possible that the insect secretes some form of anticoagulant in the bite wound so that it may drink its victim’s blood at leisure.
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