The Secret of the Lonely Isles (10 page)

He slowed the engine, pushed the gear lever into neutral, and stood at the helm, shaking as the enormity of what had happened – or had nearly happened to them – flooded over him.

‘Where are we?' breathed Maddy.

Zac hauled himself up from the cockpit floor, and Tyler climbed back up the stairway rubbing his head, having tumbled down the stairs during the boat's wild ride. Jem shook his head, and blinked a few times.

‘I dunno – I saw a bird fly into the wall, and something made me follow it. I didn't even know this was here.'

‘Where –?' Tyler was cut off by Maddy's cry.

‘Oh no! Ella!'

Ella was lying on the cockpit floor behind Jem's feet, blood oozing from a gash in her head. She was unconscious. They rushed to her, and knelt around her body.

‘Is she dead?' whispered Zac nervously.

Jem felt for a pulse. It was there, on the side of her neck, fluttering feebly. ‘She's alive, but I think she might be in shock. Um, we have to, we have to …' He searched his brain vainly for the first aid knowledge he knew was there somewhere, but he felt groggy and disoriented.

‘Warm – we have to keep her warm, and check her breathing. Now I remember – check her breathing, put her in the coma position, and cover her up,' Maddy muttered to herself. ‘She's breathing okay, so we'll turn her a bit, like this –' and they rolled Ella into a prone position. ‘Now, get a sheet and cover her, and we'll look at that cut.'

‘I'll get the first aid kit,' said Tyler, and leapt down the stairs.

The gash didn't look too severe, and the bleeding had stopped by the time they disinfected it and wrapped a bandage around her head. They made her as comfortable as they could in the cramped space. There was no way they could get her downstairs and onto one of the bunks.

Jem looked around, and realised with a jolt that they
weren't out of trouble yet. They had escaped out of the boiling strait with its deadly whirlpool, and into a sheltered cove, but
Freya
was now drifting slowly towards the shore, and a grating noise made him realise they were about to run aground. Zac figured this out at the same time, and he knocked the gear lever into reverse, and revved the engine.
Freya
hesitated a few long moments, and then with another grating sound, slipped backwards again. Tyler checked the depth sounder, and when he judged they had enough water under the keel, raced forward and let the anchor go. It hit the bottom in a few seconds, and he let out a bit more chain the way Ella had showed them, and then locked it off. Zac shut down the engine.

Jem gazed around the little cove. The silence after the roaring of the water and the boat motor was almost painful, and his ears rang. The cove was a rough oval shape, maybe the size of two football fields. Looking back, it was hard to make out where they had entered. The cliff walls kind of overlapped each other, and from this angle it was impossible to say where the gap in the wall actually was. Opposite the cliff walls, in the direction
Freya
was facing, was a little beach of black sand at the foot of steep bushy slopes. At one end of the beach was a densely vegetated gully, and at the other a steep cliff, similar to what they had just come through.

‘How'd we get here?' asked Tyler, finally. ‘I thought we were dead for sure, especially when you aimed straight for the cliff!'

‘Yeah! How'd you know to go that way?' said Zac. ‘I didn't see anything.'

Maddy said nothing, just kept stroking Ella's hair, and rocking herself gently to and fro.

Jem frowned. ‘I dunno. I saw this bird, a white bird, just before the whirlpool, and it disappeared into the cliff face, and I just thought – well, I didn't think, really. I just kinda knew that we could follow it,' he ended lamely. He shook his head – how could he have gambled their lives like that? He'd had no idea what he was doing. What if the bird had just disappeared into a crack in a rock, a nesting spot or something? They would have smashed into the cliff and they all would probably have drowned. The same thought obviously occurred to Tyler and Zac too. They both shook their heads, and Tyler whistled.

‘Dude, we are so-o-o lucky.' He looked around. ‘Well, I think we are. What are we gunna do now?'

Maddy stirred, and looked up at them. ‘Get on the radio and call for help of course!'

The boys stared at her stupidly for a few seconds, and then jumped up.

‘I'll do it!' said Tyler. He leapt down into the cabin,
to where the radio sat in the nav area, closely followed by Jem and Zac. Gear was thrown around the cabin, and the contents of several cupboards decorated the floor and the seats in the saloon. But the radio seemed to be undamaged, and Tyler switched the set on, and pressed the call button.

‘Hello, hello? This is the
Freya
. We're in trouble, can anyone hear us? Over.'

There was no sound but the crackle of static. He tried again several times, but it seemed as if they were the only people on the planet.

‘Look,' said Zac. ‘There's a sign here saying how you're supposed to call. You gotta say it that way …'

Tyler pressed the microphone button again, and copied the words from the sign beside the radio.

‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing yacht
Freya
. This is sailing yacht
Freya
. This is sailing yacht
Freya
. We need assistance. We are …' He clicked off. ‘Where are we? I'm supposed to say where we are?'

Jem and Zac looked at each other.

‘It's the Lonely Isles, isn't it?' said Zac. ‘Just call for help. We can talk to 'em when they answer.'

‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing yacht
Freya
. Can anyone hear us? Over?' He kept trying for ten minutes with no response, so they turned the radio
volume up so they could hear it in the cockpit, and went back upstairs.

The sun was climbing. Ella hadn't moved, but she was breathing steadily, and her pulse was less fluttery.

‘What are we gunna do?' said Jem. ‘We can't raise anyone on the radio – maybe it got damaged – there's stuff all over the cabin.'

‘At least we've got plenty of food and water,' said Tyler. ‘And I'm starving. Let's have something to eat while we work out what to do.'

He and Zac went below and clattered around in the galley. They passed up bread, cheese, tomatoes and lettuce, and some leftovers from the previous night's dinner. A little while later, his hands wrapped around a sandwich, Tyler suggested they go ashore in the dinghy and have a look around.

Jem looked worried. ‘We can't leave Ella. What if something happened and we couldn't get back? We should stick together.'

Maddy agreed with him, but Zac sided with Tyler. ‘There's nothin' else we can do for Ella at the moment, so I reckon we should just go and have a look around. We'll be fine. What more trouble can we get into now?'

In the end Jem agreed. It was a good excuse to get off the boat and onto dry land, anyway.

‘Don't take too long!' warned Maddy, who stayed
behind, as they pushed off from the yacht. They rowed ashore and tied the dinghy to the roots of a big dead tree that stuck out into the water. Everything around them was completely still in the warm sunlight, which was already heating up the metallic-looking sand under their feet.

‘How come this sand's black?' said Zac, scuffing his feet and wriggling his toes. ‘All black 'n' sparkly. Weird, ay. Sand's supposed to be yellow!' It glittered in the bright sun.

Jem gazed around at the little bay. It was roughly oval in shape, and completely surrounded by tall dark cliffs, except where the beach intervened. It was impossible to make out the entrance. The cliffs must overlap each other, he thought, so you can only see the gap from the right angle. A solitary seabird glided in the still air. Some skeletons of trees lay along the beach. Behind it, the land sloped upward, covered in sparse dry grass. There wasn't a sound to be heard.

‘Well, let's have a look.' He picked up his backpack, and set off along the beach towards the patch of vegetation at the far end. It turned out to be a tiny creek, trickling from a soak halfway up the gully, providing water for the trees and bushes that grew along it.

‘At least we know there's fresh water here,' said Jem after he tasted it. There was nothing else to see, so they headed back to where they started, and faced the slope.

It was shorter than it looked from the bottom. It only took them a few minutes to find their way up it, and Jem, reaching the top first, stopped suddenly. Tyler and Zac cannoned into him. Below them, on the other side, was a vast green jungle, completely hidden from the outside in a huge cauldron-shaped hollow.

‘Hooley dooley, look at that!' breathed Tyler. ‘It's like something out of a movie!'

They stared wordlessly for a few moments. A pair of sea eagles soared above the treetops and swooped out of sight. The way down into the green forest was easy, and sloped gently. There almost seemed to be a natural path running down into it.

Halfway down, Jem stopped and said, ‘I think we should go back. C'mon, this could take ages and what if we got lost in there? It looks pretty thick, and we don't know where we're going anyway.'

Reluctantly Tyler and Zac agreed, and they turned and went back the way they had come, and rowed back to the
Freya
.

As the dinghy bumped gently against the side of the yacht, Maddy caught the rope and tied them to the stern.

‘Where've you been?' she said. ‘I thought you were just gunna walk along the beach for a bit, not disappear like that!'

‘Sorry,' said Jem. ‘Anyway, we're back now. How's Ella?'

As they climbed into the boat and stepped up into the cockpit, Jem was relieved to see Ella sitting up, drinking a cup of tea.

‘She woke up right after you left,' said Maddy. ‘You really should've stayed.'

‘It's okay Maddy. I'll be fine. It was just a bump on the head.' Ella patted her on the knee.

‘Are you okay? Does it hurt or anything?' asked Jem worriedly.

‘A little. I have a headache, that's all. You did a good job of bandaging me up, thank you,' she smiled, touching the white crepe bandage around her forehead. ‘And you also did an amazing job of getting
Freya
in here and out of that whirlpool! All of you! You must have been paying attention. I'm so very grateful to you.' She blinked away a couple of tears, and smiled at them.

‘So, where are we? This looks like it must be the sanctuary inside the island that the map talked about.' She gazed around, shielding her eyes from the bright sun.

Jem, Tyler and Zac told her what they had seen over the hill. Ella was intrigued.

‘It sounds like a place capable of supporting a few people. We'll have to have a better look.'

That night, Jem dreamt the same dream again. He was standing on a windswept cliff overlooking the sea. There was a figure some distance away, facing out to sea. It was the dark-haired boy, and he leaned into the howling wind as if he was about to jump. His tattered shirt flapped loosely around his thin frame so that he looked like a stick figure, a scarecrow. As Jem walked towards him, the boy turned and began speaking to him. Jem strained to hear what he was saying, but the wind whipped the words out to sea. When he woke in the morning, he lay in his bunk for a while remembering the boy, and wondered again what he was trying to tell him.

The next day, when Ella felt strong enough to climb into the dinghy and go ashore with them, they set off on an expedition into the forest. This time they took some useful things with them, such as torches, matches, some food and water, a small first aid kit, and wore their walking shoes. Stepping onto the shore, Ella bent down to scoop up some of the black sand and studied it.

‘This is volcanic sand,' she said, looking surprised. ‘I didn't think there were any volcanic islands this far south.'

When they climbed up the hill, and the vista of the
green forest spread out beneath them, she shook her head in amazement. ‘It's an old caldera! A volcano erupted here many thousands of years ago, and blew out into this huge bowl shape. Pollux is the other half, and the strait must have formed where it was weakest and most easily eroded away. Over time the rain and wind wore down part of the volcanic rock and turned it into the black beach sand back there, and provided the soil to grow that forest.' She turned to the others. ‘You're in charge of this part of the expedition. I might be the expert on the water, but you are definitely more at home here on the land. I'll follow you,' and with that she waited for them to file ahead of her down the gentle slope.

As soon as they reached the floor of the caldera, they saw strange marks. Here and there among the trees were signs of old stumps, long dead, the saw-marks of some long rusted bow saw still visible in the flat cuts on the surface.