Dark Waters, page 13
He reached forward, snatched the radio, and stepped around and in front of Mr. Adler before he could say anything. Brian’s voice rose over everyone else’s, strong and confident: “Captain, I think your men have been asking for you.”
The captain stopped, as though he’d walked into a tree. The axe lowered. “What are you saying, boy?” he growled. “Tommy hasn’t talked to me in oh so many days. Ever since I put him on that bed.”
Brian didn’t answer. Instead he held out the radio.
It immediately came to life, crackling in his hand. Captain Sheehan jerked back a step. “What’s that?” he demanded, looking deeply suspicious. “What’s that thing?”
Gathering his courage, Brian came forward, within range of the axe. The captain didn’t swing it. The radio was still crackling.
“Listen,” said Brian. “Listen.”
Silence. For a moment, there was utter silence in that clearing, except for the sound of crackling. Brian’s heart sank. He could be wrong. What if he was wrong?
But then a voice spoke from the radio:
“Bill,” it said. “Bill, is that you?”
The captain stared. “Tom?” he said. “Tom, where are you?”
The hollow voice said, “Waiting for you, in course. What’s taking you so long?”
“But, Tommy, I didn’t kill the snake. I promised I would and I keep my promises.”
“We’re gone, Bill,” said the soft voice on the radio. “All of us are gone but you. It doesn’t matter anymore. You did your best. You did enough for us. Enough for the old Goblin. Now, you just come along with me. You just come along.”
“I can’t,” whispered Bill. “Serpent’s out there. I haven’t killed it yet. That’s what I meant to do. Kill it. But I was afraid.”
“Not anymore,” said the voice on the radio gently. “Not anymore.”
Brian glanced sideways to see Ollie’s face streaked and shining with tears. Her free hand had closed, white-knuckled, on her watch. There was so much jagged longing in the old captain’s voice. And all of them understood what it was like to feel lonely, although maybe not as lonely as Captain Sheehan. And maybe all of them, but especially Brian, knew what it was like to feel as though you’d failed your friends.
But he hadn’t. He knew that now. And maybe Sheehan was learning it too.
“Over the water, Bill. Into the moonlight,” whispered the ghost on the radio. “I was always close by, my dear. Always. Bill, it’s time to rest now.”
The voice fell silent.
Complete silence in that clearing, in front of the lonely old cabin where a skeleton lay on the bed.
In that silence, they heard the ringing of metal. The chimes, Brian thought. The fishhooks.
“It’s coming,” whispered Phil.
They all spun around, with the cabin at their backs, scanning the forest. Brian, heart racing, thought he saw a glimmer of silver scales, there and gone.
Captain Sheehan stood still. Then he looked at Brian. “Thank you, my boy. You don’t know, but—thank you. I suppose I’ve one fight left in me after all.” His eyes were wet. “I didn’t think I could. But I can. And then I’ll go find Tommy.”
“We need to get into the cabin,” snapped Mr. Adler. “Come on—and block the door.”
“Nay, don’t go in,” said Sheehan sharply. “Cabin’s no more than a trap. Head due south. Do what my men tried to do. Take the boat.” To Brian, “You’ve a compass, boy?”
There was one in the emergency kit. Brian nodded.
“We called it Goblin Cove—it’s where my old girl sank,” Sheehan went on. “Boat’s in a cave, oars shipped.”
The chiming of the fishhooks was getting louder. Closer.
Coco said, “We have to go!”
Sheehan said, “Now, miss, you just make straight for that cove. I don’t know if I can kill the beastie. But I can slow her down. Then I’ll be off. Wait for me, Tom.”
And he hefted the massive axe, standing in front of the old cabin, and his face filled up with a fierce happiness. “Come on, you!” he shouted. “I’m brave enough for this. One more time.”
Brian, turning, got a glimpse of shimmering scales before he dug out the compass.
South . . .
“This way!” he shouted, and ran. Heard the pounding feet as they all ran with him. And behind, in a voice shrill with laughter, he heard Captain Sheehan, of the Goblin, screaming insults at the snake.
Then silence, and they ran together, no one speaking, into the damp morning, while Brian consulted his compass and his shoes stuck in the mud of that cold and lonely island.
16
THERE WAS NO path across the island, of course. They climbed toward the summit anyway, shoving their way between trees. They were soon covered in clammy sweat, not a huge improvement from being cold.
None of them dared say very much. They were all listening. Even Ollie’s dad wasn’t cracking jokes. They crested a rise, finding themselves briefly scrambling on almost-bare rock, at the very top of the island, and then back down into trees. They didn’t even look around, just put their heads down and kept doggedly on, as fast as they could.
The wind was rising. It riffled cold over their heads, over the rock, and over the trees. “Phil,” said Mr. Adler once, abruptly, “what do you think of the haze? There, over the lake?”
Phil wiped his streaming nose and answered, “It usually means that the weather is changing.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Ollie’s dad. “Let’s get on. Not that I want to put to sea—or lake—in a two-hundred-year-old boat, but I really don’t want to do it in a thunderstorm.”
None of them had said what they were really looking for, scanning the beaches, the trees, the water carefully, but Brian knew what it was. They all knew. They were looking for a silver flash, the streaking light of those beautiful, horrible scales.
Down the other side of the rise, out of the wind, and back into the shadows on the other side. This side of the island was steeper, the rocks more broken, and they all stumbled. Coco tripped and tripped again, until her shins were bleeding through her jeans.
On they went.
And on.
Hours seemed to pass. They were all exhausted. They didn’t really dare stop. It was hard to know what time it was, but the shadows were definitely changing direction. Brian started to doubt his own reading of the compass.
Are we going in circles? he wondered.
How big can this island be?
Down and steadily down until they stood on a beach.
And there was no boat anywhere. Brian stared around him in the grayness—gray water, gray clouds gathering.
“The boat should be here,” he said. “We kept going south. We went due south. Like Sheehan said. I’m sure of it. But where?”
“Welp,” said Ollie’s dad, practical and cheerful—the only one of them who was, at that point. “The log said a cave, right? Let’s look around, shall we?”
“We’ll find it,” said Ollie, with a sudden, strange ferocity. “We’re getting out of here.”
And she glared at her watch as though she were talking to it. Mr. Adler looked down at her, frowning, but Ollie didn’t look up, and after a second, as though the watch—the ghost of Ollie’s mom—whatever animated the watch—was reluctant, the screen shifted and became a compass. But a very simple one that had two directions, n and f.
Near and Far, thought Brian.
“This way,” said Ollie.
They wouldn’t have found the boat at all, Brian thought, if it hadn’t been for Ollie’s watch. It was in a little rock cave, gouged in a bank of the beach and then walled up. The water had flooded in, murky, not once but a lot of times, and the outside of the boat’s hull was slimy when they pulled it out.
It was also almost too heavy to lift, and so they had to collect sticks to make a path for it to the water. Brian wondered if they should have left their campsite earlier. They’d waited, avoiding the early morning. But the encounter with Sheehan and the walk across the island had taken way more time than Brian would have thought possible.
By the time they got the boat into the water, the sun was dropping, lower and lower.
But they got it into the water at last, and it floated. It didn’t even leak; Phil had been right about the timbers swelling.
They couldn’t find oars, however.
“But there’s a mast, though,” said Phil. “And we can use the emergency blanket and the rope from the Cassie as a sail.”
“We need a boom,” said Brian. “Can you sail it?”
Phil licked his lips, cracked and chapped like all of theirs were. “Yeah, bud,” he said. “I think so.”
“Let’s call the boat the Sheehan,” said Coco, and no one objected.
But it took longer than any of them wanted to rig the rope and the blanket so that it would hold, even a little, as a sail, and it was getting close to night before they finally pushed off. So far there was no sign of the snake. Maybe Sheehan had killed it, Brian thought. He’d probably killed it. Hadn’t he?
The moon hung low in the sky, silvering the water, and all of them were shivering with the May cold.
The wind shoved them back onshore, and shoved them back again. “Just a little farther,” panted Phil in frustration. “I think there’s a breeze there—just rounding the point—you can see the ripple.”
Finally, Ollie hopped out of the boat, teeth clenched and eyes wild, to her waist in freezing water, and began to shove the boat out, and her dad got out to help, and so did Ms. Zintner. They pushed until Ollie couldn’t stand anymore, and her dad helped her back over the side of the Sheehan, and then he and Coco’s mom pushed until he couldn’t stand up in the water either, and by then they’d gone out quite a ways, and it was dead still, dead still over the water.
There were long moments of silence.
They all strained their eyes.
Nothing.
Then Brian felt a breeze on his cheek.
The sail rippled. And rippled again. Suddenly it bellied out, blocky against the sky, and Brian, inexperienced, jammed the tiller sideways, so that it almost went over. But someone must have known what they were doing when he built the boat in the first place, because it did not turn over.
“Orwell is due east,” said Mr. Adler, through his chattering teeth.
“No,” said Ollie. “Or, yes, it is, but not for us. Go around the point, Phil, and head for that fog.”
“But—” said Phil.
“Do it,” chorused Ollie, Brian, and Coco, because through mist and water and through mirrors, that was how you went from world to world.
That was when they saw a silver shimmer in the water. It wasn’t the moon, rising in the dusk.
Brian saw it first. “Guys!” he snapped. His voice came out strangled, if plenty loud. The silver shimmer swam like a snake, sinuous in the water.
There was no chance. No chance to dodge, no chance to avoid; they must only race, wind against monster, over the lake, toward the fog patch that might not even save them.
Ollie’s face was set. Brian saw her measuring distances with her eyes. “You did promise,” she whispered incomprehensibly.
For a second it seemed like the wind was going to save them. The lake monster was swimming slowly—so slowly—and there was something hesitant and stiff in the swaying of its silver coils. Definitely hurt. But it got closer. And closer.
They weren’t going to make it.
Brian’s mouth was dry as bone.
“How long?” Ollie demanded sharply, and this time Brian saw that she wasn’t asking anyone in particular; instead she was looking straight down at the watch on her wrist.
The watch lit up. Coco saw the answer.
00:30:00 and then words, flashing in quick succession.
love.
proud.
The snake bore down. The fog was closing. They were going to make it! No, they weren’t.
Ollie suddenly shoved a piece of paper in Coco’s hand. “I promised I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “He made me promise I wouldn’t tell. But it’s not the end. There’s a chance. Okay?”
Coco stared at her friend in utter bewilderment, just as Ollie twisted around and jumped into the lake.
Coco screamed. She and Brian were on their feet together, Mr. Adler was turning, and all of them were shouting, “Ollie, Ollie!”
Nothing. The water had closed without a ripple over Ollie’s head. Then she rose again; there was a splash and a check in the movement of the swimming lake monster.
Brian hadn’t known he could scream that loud.
They shot into the fog, and they could see nothing.
It was like being in a cloud. Wet. A thick silence fell; Brian could feel his mouth moving, his throat working. He could see Coco doing the same, but no sound came out.
Then the boat slipped out of the fog again. The island had vanished. So had Ollie. But right before that, Brian could have sworn—always did swear, later—that he heard the unmistakable sound of someone laughing.
Out of the fog bank, everything had changed. There were the lights of Orwell, not that far away. The lake was still and quiet and icy cold. It stretched out to a vague unbroken horizon. No island. There was a faint smell of fish and of springtime earth. There was no sign of Ollie.
“Phil!” Brian snapped. “Mr. Adler! Come on, we have to go back, we have to save her!”
He was already digging the tiller into the water, threatening to send them into the lake. He was crying.
“Easy now,” said Mr. Adler. “Brian, what’s wrong?”
“Ollie!” he cried. “Didn’t you see? Ollie got in the water—to keep the snake from getting us . . .”
Mr. Adler frowned. “Brian, I realize it’s cold, and we’re all super stressed, kiddo. Don’t worry. We’ll get inside soon. Wind’s fair for Orwell.”
“I—but.” Coco was staring at Mr. Adler with a horrified incredulity that Brian knew was echoed on his own face. He realized that Coco was holding—clutching—Ollie’s watch in her free hand, along with a ratty piece of paper. Her face was streaked with tears, the same tears that Brian could feel rolling down his own cheeks.
Brian leaned over and said, “What does the watch say?”
alive
Brian felt himself breathe again.
“What’s on the paper?”
He and Coco looked together. The lines were few and quickly scrawled:
He said I can’t tell. So I won’t.
But I bet with a few clues, you can guess.
1) Remember Jonathan?
2) He promised Dad wouldn’t remember.
3) He wanted a rematch.
4) He always keeps his promises.
“Jonathan Webster,” said Brian. “He made a deal with the smiling man to get his brother back from the dead. What did Ollie do?”
“She must have done it for her dad. To fix his hand,” Coco whispered. “Made a bargain. That’s what she wasn’t telling us.” Her body was shaking all over.
“But what’d she give him in exchange?” demanded Brian. “Did she jump in the lake to—to escape him?”
“No,” said Coco. “She jumped because she knew he wouldn’t let the snake kill her—because that’s not what he promised. Not what she traded. So she’s alive . . .”
Brian’s heart beat fast with horror and with panic; he was cudgeling his brain as hard as it would go, trying to understand.
Something crinkled in his coat pocket. It hadn’t been there before. Without thinking, he pulled out another piece of paper.
This one was thick and written in swirling, raised script. The same script that was on the black spot—the only warning they’d had. The warning of a day, a time, and a place.
It was a note.
Everyone has forgotten her, it said.
Except you.
You have one chance to win her back.
Call it a rematch.
I’ll send an invitation. You’ll know it when you get it.
—S.
“The smiling man,” said Brian. He didn’t feel afraid at all anymore. Only furious—and glitteringly hopeful.
“One chance,” said Coco.
“One chance is all we’ll need,” said Brian, and they looked grimly at each other as their wooden boat ground against the rocky shore and the moonlight silvered the water like the back of a dying monster.
Turn the page to see where Ollie, Coco, and Brian’s adventure began . . .
1
OCTOBER IN EAST EVANSBURG, and the last warm sun of the year slanted red through the sugar maples. Olivia Adler sat nearest the big window in Mr. Easton’s math class, trying, catlike, to fit her entire body into a patch of light. She wished she were on the other side of the glass. You don’t waste October sunshine. Soon the old autumn sun would bed down in cloud blankets, and there would be weeks of gray rain before it finally decided to snow. But Mr. Easton was teaching fractions and had no sympathy for Olivia’s fidgets.
“Now,” he said from the front of the room. His chalk squeaked on the board. Mike Campbell flinched. Mike Campbell got the shivers from squeaking blackboards and, for some reason, from people licking paper napkins. The sixth grade licked napkins around him as much as possible.
“Can anyone tell me how to convert three-sixteenths to a decimal?” asked Mr. Easton. He scanned the room for a victim. “Coco?”
“Um,” said Coco Zintner, hastily shutting a sparkling pink notebook. “Ah,” she added wisely, squinting at the board.
Point one eight seven five, thought Olivia idly, but she did not raise her hand to rescue Coco. She made a line of purple ink on her scratch paper, turned it into a flower, then a palm tree. Her attention wandered back to the window. What if a vampire army came through the gates right now? Or no, it’s sunny. Werewolves? Or what if the Brewsters’ Halloween skeleton decided to unhook himself from the third-floor window and lurch out the door?
