The Castaways (4 page)

Thirty yards away, the great shark that had followed us now slowly turned. Its fin came through the water with a spray feathering up on each side.

We found a strength I wouldn’t have thought we still possessed. Benjamin Penny scrambled up the ladder with Weedle at his heels. Boggis tried to haul both me and Midgely, but the weight was too much even for him. “Go up!” I shouted, and let go of his wrist. I plunged with Midgely into the sea, bobbed up on the crest of a wave, and barely managed to grab the ladder as the ship went sailing past. I held on to the last inch of rope as it dragged us through the water.

Boggis was a big and clumsy fellow. He moved as slowly
as treacle. But neither Penny nor Weedle appeared again to help him, and I dangled there as he struggled on. The waves kept passing, so that the water covered me now to my knees, and now as high as my chest. The shark was coming faster, a plume of spray rising round its fin.

Boggis climbed the ladder and hooked an arm across the railing of the ship. He reached down and bellowed, “Take my hand.” But I couldn’t let go of the ladder and still hold on to Midgely.

The ship rolled slowly. The water fell away along its planks, baring my waist, baring my knees. The shark came twisting through the sea, thrashing with its tail, and I drew up my feet just in time. I heard the snap of its jaws. I felt a scraping against my legs as it turned for another attack.

The ship was already rolling us deeper, the sea slurping over barnacles and sponges. Boggis tumbled over the rail and reappeared a moment later, lying across it on his belly. He grabbed the ladder with both hands and hauled it up, rung
by rung, the ladder and me and Midgely too. His muscles bulged, his eyes popped wide, but he hoisted away. As my fingers met the rail, Walter Weedle reached out and hauled me to the deck.

We all lay in a heap, with Boggis more exhausted than I’d ever seen him. He gasped for breath.

There was not a sailor in sight, nor any sign of a crew at all. It was an eerie thing to lie on that open deck, below the sails and the towering masts. My father’s ship had been forever busy, like a small town sailing the sea, but here was only the sway of ropes and the flap of canvas, and the faint tolling of a bell that came in time with the ship’s steady roll. From empty davits—where a boat had hung—now dangled useless ropes.

“It’s creepy, ain’t it?” said Weedle. “Where’s the captain? Where’s the crew?”

He was frightened, I could see. He had hauled me aboard for his own comfort, not for my safety, but still I thanked him for it. The word rather stuck in my throat, and when I blurted it out he didn’t answer. He was peering up toward the high deck at the stern.

“I think there’s a fellow up there,” he said. “I think I seen him moving.”

We heard again the toll of the bell. But now it came in three quick strokes, as though a hand were ringing the time.

“Someone go and look,” said Penny.

We all went together, in a cluster, with Midgely stumbling behind me. After the wild pitching of our steamboat, the slow roll of a solid ship threw us off balance. We went crossways up and down the deck, reaching out for support.

In the center was the high-sided hatch to the hold. We rested there, leaning against it, none of us too eager to see who was steering this ghostly ship. Boggis sat atop the hatch, then quickly leapt off as though it were fiery hot.

“There’s something inside there!” he said. “Listen to the breathing.”

I could hear it plainly when I put my ear to the wood. A murmuring sort of sound came in waves and rushes. It
did
sound like breathing. But it reminded me more of another time and place.

Boggis loosened the lashings. He kicked the iron dogs from their catches, then put his back to the hatch cover and raised it half an inch.

The sound grew louder. It took me back to the cannibal islands, to a dark and empty hut. I had heard the same thing there, only to come face to face with a clutch of shrunken heads hanging above a fire. Now I knew exactly what would come rushing from the hold, but it was too late to warn Boggis.

Through the crack he’d made, up from below and past his hands, came hundreds and thousands of flies. They came in a solid mass, overwhelming us in a cloud of wings and bodies. Boggis threw the cover back, and it fell ajar across the sides. We saw the hold crammed full of coconuts and breadfruit that were rotting in the heat. It was no wonder that the ship carried such a stench along with it.

We left the hatch ajar and continued on toward the stern. The flies buzzed in a flurry around us, scattering up through the rigging and over the deck. When we reached the end of the waist, where a staircase rose to the poop deck, I told the others to wait. I took a breath and started up the steps.

“If it’s the Dutchman,” said Midgely, “he’ll be wearing a cloak. His face will be like a skull. He’ll have only bones for fingers, and …”

I didn’t want to hear any more. I hurried to the higher deck. I found the helmsman at the wheel.

Despite the sun and heat, he was dressed in heavy oilskins, in a cape that hung stiffly from his shoulders. He was staring straight ahead, as though as blind as Midgely.

True enough, he was thin as a skeleton. He had a scraggly beard, and scraggly hair that blew about him like cobwebs. He wore the hideous look of a man who had barely survived the fever. I might have believed he was dead already, yet there he stood on his own pegs, steering a deserted ship.

His eyes didn’t move, his head didn’t turn, as I stepped around behind him. It seemed he hadn’t moved in ages. But the ship’s bell was mounted on the binnacle in front of him—and there was no one else who could have rung it.

Boggis came up the ladder. He trudged toward me, muttering half aloud. “I don’t care at all for this,” he said. “A hold full of coconuts and flies, no one aboard, and the ship breathing and—” He stopped in his tracks at the sight of the helmsman. “Cor! Is that the Dutchman, Tom?”

Gingerly, I reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. I knew the fever might still lurk in his skin and his blood, and so was careful to touch only his oilskins. I half expected that he would fall apart like a pile of stones, rattling into a heap by the wheel. Instead he came alive.

First, he drew a breath. He raised his head and looked back; he turned it so slowly that I almost heard the creak of
his neck bones. Then his right hand flew from the wheel and grabbed hold of my arm. The movement sent a ripple through his cape, and it was as though a great bird had swooped upon me.

I tried to pull away, but his bony hand was a clamp. He fixed me in his hollow stare and said, “Where did you come from?”

“Why, we came from the sea,” said I. “In a boat, but it sank.”

“How many?”

I held up my fingers to show him the count.

“Five?” He breathed rasping breaths and repeated the number. “That might be enough to hold them off.”

“Who?” I asked.

With a wrench at my arm he pulled me to his side. “Take the wheel. Steer nor’east, boy; full and bye. That’s Land’s End where the surf’s breaking ahead.”

I could see the compass in the binnacle, the card tilting on a southerly heading. The sails sagged and flapped; the ship staggered to windward. Yet in the mind of the helmsman it was driving home to England with the canvas full of wind.

Boggis came no closer. “Where’s the rest of the crew and the captain?”

“Dead and gone,” said the helmsman. “It was murder, I call it.”

The deck leaned heavily. The man’s cape fluttered, and the bell—of its own accord—tolled sharp and clear.

“Murder and death,” said the helmsman. “But no fear now; we’ll hold them off. It’s—”

He stopped in midsentence. A fly had landed on his
sleeve, and he was staring at it as though in fear. Another landed beside it, and a third settled on my wrist.

“You’ve let them loose!” he cried. “You fools. You bloody fools, you freed them.”

They came by the dozen then, spotting the man’s cloak with their black bodies, alighting on his hands, on his beard. He shook himself violently, flinging them off, and his fear turned to horror.

“They’s only flies,” said Boggis.

But the man turned and bolted for the rail. He crossed the deck in a clumsy shuffle, flailing his cape at the flies. He leapt to the rail, then swung back and looked at me.

“She’s yours,” he said. “All yours now, and the devil take you, for he will. You’ve let his demons loose.”

The flies swarmed over him. They covered his scalp like a gleaming cap. They crawled on his beard, on his arms and his hands. There were so many flies that they made a cloud all around him. Then, with one backward step, he launched himself to the sea. I saw his wild hair streaming, his eyes all agog. There was no sound but the flutter of his cape.

I threw myself against the rail, and Boggis hurried to my side. But the man was gone; he’d vanished.

“Sank like a stone,” said Boggis.

I didn’t think so. To my mind’s eye came a picture of the strange man swimming down toward the blackest depths, his feet kicking, his arms spread so that he sailed like a bird on the wings of his cape. He would dive so deeply, I thought, that there would be no chance he could ever come back.

The fin of the shark carved a circle in the sea and slid below the surface. It was the last I would ever see of that beast.
Within moments a bubble of red was welling up on the waves. The man’s cape appeared again, now torn to tatters, and it fell away in our wake.

There was a groan and a tap, a creaking of wood. We saw the wheel turning, the ship swinging away from the wind. The sails flapped again as some filled and others collapsed. “The ship’s going back to fetch that cove,” said Boggis. But with a clang of the bell it steadied on the new course, wallowing through the swells.

It was heading nearly due south. I spun the wheel to bring its bow toward the north, but the ship only staggered like a stubborn old horse and plodded along to the south. I wasn’t surprised. Even I knew there was more to steering a ship than turning the wheel. The sails would have to be set and braced and sheeted, and I doubted that five starving boys could do it.

“Where do you think she’s off to?” said Boggis.

I shrugged. “Where the winds go, I suppose.”

“But where’s that?”

“Down to the south,” said I. “To the ice and the storms.”

“Lord save us.” Boggis made the sign of the cross. “We’ve come from the fat to the fire, haven’t we, Tom?”

We searched the fo’c’sle and the cabins in the stern, going everywhere in our little tangle of a group. It took all our courage to venture into the darkness, for we thought we’d find the hammocks and the sea berths full of corpses. But there was not a soul, living or dead.

In the fo’c’sle were the wooden chests of the sailors, the forks and bowls, the bits of handiwork half finished, now all in a ruin scattered across the floor. Only Weedle helped himself to the belongings of the vanished sailors. He put on a red stocking cap and a bright neckerchief. Round his waist he tied a crimson sash that hung to the deck. He must have fancied himself the image of a pirate, but in truth he lacked only
a wooden sword to complete the picture of a boy in a dress-up game.

He strutted through the ship with that red sash flying as we searched every space. We found the same disarray in the cabins at the stern, though it was made of prettier and finer things. In what Midgely called the wardroom, a long table lay on its side, and six wooden chairs wrestled each other in the corner with their arms and legs interlocked. In the great cabin—the captain’s quarters—everything imaginable could be seen on the floor. There was a string of pearls, the ruins of a harpsichord. There were small things, strange things, that must have been collected from every corner of the globe. There were clothes of silk, and polished shoes, and a beaver hat with a cricket bat driven through its top. But mostly there were books; there were books by the score.

There was something there to catch the fancy of each of us. We were boys, after all, and that cabin was like a secret cave, like the storehouse of a king. Even Midgely crawled through the heaps of debris, and cried out in great joy to find a wooden model of a sailing ship. Boggis unearthed a burst-open chest and its contents of figs and dates and chocolate. Weedle and Penny picked out the captain’s jewelry, his rings and clasps, his watches with dangling fobs. As for me, it was the books I went after, and I rather lost myself as I sorted through the titles. With many came memories—some happy, as though of pleasant excursions I’d taken, others like terrible illnesses.

We were all gloating over our treasures when we heard the ghosts, or the spirits, or whatever it was that haunted that
ship. There was a knocking like footfalls, and then a long groan of sadness. A rustling murmur, as though of breathing, came from the very hull.

We looked at each other, then scrambled as one for the deck. We dropped our little goods and fled from that space. I pulled Midgely along, stumbling over the piles of things in our way.

On the open deck was a cookhouse, and there we set up shop. If we sat too long in silence, and listened hard enough, we could still hear the hauntings from below. But the room was airy and bright, with a row of round windows in the wall, and we felt safer there than penned below with the ghosts. Boggis lit a fire in the cook’s big stove, and soon the smell of boiling beef overpowered the stench of rot.

Of food, we had plenty. Of water, enough. There was a barrel by the hatch, half filled, though its contents were green and thick. In London I would have turned up my nose at the look of it, let alone the smell, but now I thought I’d tasted nothing finer.

Best of all, we had light. We had lanterns and lamps and candles, and on the first night we lit every one we could find, mindless of any pirates, and turned the ship into a great beacon of shimmering light.

Over the next few days we regained our strength as the ship carried us south. How it gladdened my heart to see the improvement in Midgely. I tried to confine him to bed; I told him he had the fever. But he admitted that he’d been drinking from the sea, and now claimed that the ship’s green water was sweeter than honey. Certainly, it drowned the madness that had swollen inside him, and I was much relieved to see
that my friend was not at death’s door. As soon as I thought him well enough, I asked how we could steer the ship to England.