Gargantis

by Thomas Taylor

  “No!” cries Blaze, pulling back the drive lever and thrusting it forward again, repeatedly but uselessly. “No, not again!”

  “What happened?” says Vi.

  “Here, take the wheel!”

  It’s me he’s talking to. My hands fly out automatically. And now I’m holding the wheel of an actual real-life boat, exactly as if a mechanical monkey with a mermaid’s tail has never dispensed me a copy of The Cold, Dark Bottom of the Sea by Sebastian Eels.

  Blaze slams up a hatch in the wheelhouse floor and jumps down into the dark beyond. An oily and electrical tang wafts out from the hatchway.

  “We’re still moving, aren’t we?” says Vi, joining me at the wheel.

  Somehow I manage to nod. We are moving, just very, very slowly. The boat bobs in the rolling sea, seeming smaller and more fragile the further we get from shore.

  “So much for the fastest boat in Eerie Bay,” Violet says, and sighs. “But at least we’ve put some distance between us and them.”

  I look back at the quayside.

  The fishermen are still there, watching in silent menace as we make our low-speed escape to nowhere. In the other direction, across a horizon black with storm, a bolt of lightning tears across the sky.

  We’re on the rolling sea, in a boat with almost no power, heading towards the greatest storm anyone in Eerie has ever known. And I suddenly realize that the nearest land is straight down – down on the cold, dark seabed below.

  THE SEAFARER’S APPRENTICE

  THERE’S A GREAT DEAL of banging and clanging coming from down below the hatchway, and a lot of very colourful seafarer language.

  “Blaze?” Violet calls through the hatch in alarm. “What’s happening?”

  A head appears, blackened with engine grease and topped with waving red hair raised by static. Blaze Westerley pulls himself up onto the deck, slumps beside the wheel and flings down a spanner.

  “It’s no good,” he declares. “I can’t fix it. Uncle Squint was right. I’m just not ready.”

  Violet and I exchange a look.

  “If the battery only charges from the windmill,” I say, trying out my helpful voice, even though I’m not really in the mood, “maybe it just needs more time. The turbine isn’t that big.”

  “It’s been charging for days!” Blaze throws up his hands. “With all the wind from the storm, the battery should be bursting with power. I’m the problem, not the engine.”

  “Herbie’s good at fixing things,” says Violet brightly. “Maybe he could take a look.”

  “Him!” Blaze glares at me. “It would take a nautical genius to understand Uncle Squint’s engine. All he’s done since he’s come aboard is make squeaking noises and turn green.”

  I’m annoyed by this. I feel my face go red (not green), and underneath my cap the hidden light crackles with stinging sparks. I should just take my cap off. That’ll give Blaze something to talk about!

  “Herbie hasn’t been on a boat for a while, that’s all,” Violet says, avoiding my eyes. “Besides, he’s doing his best. And Herbie’s best is better than a lot of people’s.”

  Blaze stares at his boots. Then he lets out a sigh.

  “Must be nice,” he mumbles to me, “to hear something like that.”

  I’m not sure if this is supposed to be an apology, but it seems as though pretending that it is will help the situation. I pick up the fallen skipper’s cap and give it to Blaze. He takes it, but he doesn’t put it on.

  “I can’t promise anything,” I say, curiosity getting the better of me, “but I’d love to see Squint Westerley’s engine anyway.”

  Blaze gets to his feet and presses a switch to lock the wheel.

  “We’ll be safe out at sea for a while yet,” he says.

  Then he indicates the hatchway with a bob of his head.

  I straighten my Lost-and-Founder’s cap, pull the front of my uniform flat and lower myself down into the hull of the Jornty Spark.

  It’s dark down here. The air is heavy and close and smells like spent fireworks. There’s a small galley kitchen, crazily cluttered with kettles and plates and signs of an unfinished breakfast of toast and eggs. Two hammocks swing with the motion of the sea, and in the light of four portholes, I spot a shelf of well-thumbed books and lots of charts and papers pinned to the wall. Above all these, like a totem, is a dog-eared postcard of Saint Dismal. The old saint scowls at us with a stormy expression, the star bright over his head.

  “You live down here?” says Violet to Blaze as they both join me. “You and your uncle?”

  “Aye,” says Blaze, ducking to avoid clonking his head on the low ceiling. “There’s bags of room really.”

  But I’m not paying attention. Even my discomfort at being at sea is forgotten as I stare at the object that fills the back half of the area below deck.

  Hulking in the gloom is a mass of gleaming green ceramic, braced against the hull by girders wrapped in rubber. Along the back of this extraordinary object are two rows of glass domes, each filled with copper coils in a faintly glowing liquid. The whole thing is festooned with bunches of wire that emerge from one place, only to loop around and re-enter somewhere else. It’s a battery, it has to be, though it’s like no battery I’ve ever seen. The air around it feels stiff with electrical charge, and beyond it lies the aluminium casing of the powerful electric motor that drives the boat.

  “I can’t fix this,” I say eventually. “This is bonkers. Your uncle built this?”

  “Took him years.”

  “I’m starting to think,” I reply, “that he really was a genius.”

  “Yup.” Blaze rubs a smudge of oil from his nose and looks proud.

  “But … why?” Violet says.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did he build an electric engine?”

  Blaze stares at us both a moment, before throwing a quick glance at the papers and sketches on the wall.

  “He had his reasons.”

  Violet walks over to a big chart pinned up in the galley. It shows Eerie Bay in its entirety, with the town just a detail on the coast. The chart is very old and has handwritten notes all over it. As Violet peers at these closely, she gasps.

  “Eerie Script!” she declares, jabbing at the paper. “Some of this is written in Eerie Script. Like on the side of the bottle. Look, Herbie!”

  “What’s that?” I say, spotting a peculiar swirl drawn on the map. There are several messages near by in Eerie Script.

  “That,” says Blaze, “is the Vortiss.”

  “The What-iss?”

  “The Vortiss. Haven’t you heard of it?” The teenager looks surprised. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t have, not being fisherfolk.”

  Then his voice suddenly sounds much older, as if he’s repeating something told to him many times.

  “Deep in the furthest reaches of Maw Rocks, where no chart can be trusted, there’s a place where we fishermen must never go. The currents are terrible and combine to a neverending and inescapable whirlpool known as the Vortiss.”

  Blaze spirals his fingertip around and around the drawing on the chart as he speaks.

  “They say there are strange lights and treacherous winds there. They say it’s the place where storms are born. Lightning will explode a diesel engine, and the wind will shred your sails. Either way, it’s a quick drowning for any who approach it, so none ever do, by order of Saint Dismal himself. I doubt there’s a fisherman alive who’s even clapped eyes on the Vortiss and lived to tell it. Except…”

  “Old Squint Westerley.” Violet’s voice is a near-whisper. “Your uncle.”

  Blaze nods.

  “And you?”

  The shyness comes back over the boy, and he says nothing.

  “Blaze, please tell us what happened,” says Violet. “What’s Squint’s story? Why did he sail to the Vortiss? And what’s the connection with Gargantis?”

  Blaze’s head snaps up.

  “Who said there’s a connection with that?”

  �
��You did,” says Vi. “By the way you just reacted.”

  “It started years ago.” Blaze leans back into a hammock. “Long before I became his apprentice. My uncle was just one of the regular fisherfolk then, like generations before him, trawling the bay for a net of mackerel, and bringing in a garshark or a gazbaleen when his luck was in. Out in all weathers by day, and then down the Whelk & Walrus by night, telling tall tales of the one that got away over pints of Clammy Dodger. It would have been a good life for a fisherman, if it hadn’t been for one thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Curiosity?” Violet and I say together.

  “Aye,” says Blaze. “Uncle Squint was riddled with it. It wasn’t enough to make a good catch, he had to know the how and the why of it. He wanted to understand. But we fisherfolk don’t need to understand, that’s what Boadicea Bates said. We just need to follow the laws of Saint Dismal, as we’ve always done. And no law is more strict than the one forbidding us to approach the Vortiss.”

  “But why did your uncle want to do that?” Vi asks.

  “Fish have always been more plentiful around Maw Rocks,” says Blaze. “Uncle just wanted to know why, and to see the Vortiss for himself. So he began exploring. Just a little at first, but soon he was sailing deeper and deeper into the maze of rocks, battling the currents. Then one day, he went too deep. Terrible winds engulfed him, and strange lightning, and the Jornty – she was just the Jornty back then, with canvas sails – lost her mast. Uncle was swept overboard and swallowed into the swirling mouth of the Vortiss.

  “They found the Jornty the next day, drifting far out in the open sea, battered and barely afloat. But of Squint Westerley there was no sign – he was lost for good. Or so everyone thought.”

  “He came back?”

  Blaze nods.

  “A few days later, he crawled up onto the beach. He was in a terrible state. They carried him to the pub and brought him back to life with brandy and a slap. They were agog to hear his story, so he told them there and then a strange tale of an underwater world beneath Eerie Rock, where lie the wrecks of all the ships the Vortiss has gobbled up over hundreds of years. And the skeletons of all the men who were gobbled with them, too. And there was something else. Something huge. Something coiled in the deepest part of the cavern.”

  “Something?” I manage to say, my throat suddenly dry.

  “Yes,” says Blaze. “Something monstrous.”

  SOMETHING MONSTROUS

  “IT WAS THAT PART OF HIS STORY that made the others laugh at him.” Blaze thrusts his hands into his pockets and looks angry. “They said Uncle had gone too far with his tall tales this time, that the only person who ever survived the Vortiss was Saint Dismal himself, and then only by a miracle. No one in Eerie-on-Sea has taken Uncle Squint seriously since.”

  “But when you say ‘monstrous’,” asks Vi, “what do you mean, exactly?”

  Blaze shrugs.

  “The more people laughed, the less Squint talked about it. Even to me.” Then he points at the little shelf of books, piled higgledy-piggledy above the stove. “But the less he talked, the more he read. He’d go up to the book dispensary in the town, to get more books.”

  “Wait!” Vi’s eyes flash. “These books were chosen for your uncle by the mermonkey?”

  Blaze nods.

  “The more he read, the less time he spent fishing. It didn’t stop him exploring Maw Rocks, though. He began mapping them, updating the old charts, understanding the currents. And then he had the idea to build this electrical engine. He became obsessed with reaching the Vortiss again.”

  “There are books here about weather –” Violet pokes around the bookshelf – “about local legends, and electrical engineering, and—”

  “Do you believe him?” I blurt out over Violet. “About the monstrous something at the bottom of the sea, and the skeletons?”

  Blaze glares at me from under his flop of hair.

  “If my uncle said there were skeletons, there were skeletons.”

  I close my eyes and try not to think of the white figures falling into the abyss on the cover of The Cold, Dark Bottom of the Sea by Sebastian Eels. But the boat rolls sharply, and I can’t help thinking about them anyway.

  “Besides,” Blaze adds, “Uncle didn’t come back empty-handed. He came back with proof of what he’d seen.”

  “What proof?” says Vi.

  “Surely you’ve seen it,” Blaze says. “On the prow of the Jornty Spark? The tusk? It’s massive! It’s not the tusk of any known animal. At least, so people say.”

  “Do you think I could copy these?” Violet asks Blaze then, pointing at the inscriptions in Eerie Script on the chart. She gets her big piece of paper out of her pocket.

  “Aye, go ahead.” He shrugs. “I’m more interested in getting this blasted engine fixed.”

  And he gives the great ceramic battery a kick. There’s a flicker, and electrical light shimmers through the glass domes, but the engine remains sluggish.

  “You haven’t told us what happened to Squint in the end,” Violet says as she draws. “How did he drown?”

  Blaze blows the hair out of his eyes.

  “The truth is, Uncle was struggling to finish the engine. We aren’t rich, and he kept running out of money and parts. But then, a few weeks ago, a stranger came to the harbour wall and offered to help.”

  “A stranger?” I say. “What sort of stranger?”

  Blaze shrugs again.

  “The strangest kind. I never saw his face clearly. He always kept it hidden in the shadows of a deep hood.”

  Violet and I exchange looks.

  “But Uncle agreed. Suddenly there was gold to spend, and the work got finished. After years of tinkering and test runs, the new electrical Jornty Spark was complete, and it ran like a dream. We were finally ready for our trip to the Vortiss. The stranger wanted just one thing in return.”

  “Yes?”

  “He wanted to go with us.”

  “To the Vortiss?” Violet says. “And Squint accepted this?”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” says Blaze. “My uncle was the only person who knew how to get there, and thanks to this stranger’s money, he finally had a boat that could make the voyage too. It seemed a fair exchange. They made the deal and the stranger came aboard. After a few preparations, we set out.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We entered Maw Rocks from the north. The channels are wider there, and the currents are easier to navigate, at least at first. The Spark was battered by ferocious winds, but we had no sails to rip. Strange sparks of lightning circled us and danced along the hull, but we had no diesel engines to explode. And so, we came to the Vortiss. Then, with the engines roaring and the wheel locked to keep position, I lowered my uncle, and our passenger, into the sea in a barrel.”

  “What?” we both cry.

  “That was the plan!” Blaze shouts back defensively. “The deal we made. Only…”

  “Only something went wrong?” says Vi.

  Blaze gives a desperate nod.

  “The barrel was halfway to the whirlpool when the two men started fighting. Uncle had his axe out, and I didn’t know what to do. I was just about to winch them in again when the man in the hood got an arm free and threw something at the Spark. You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I think it was a bomb.”

  “A bomb?”

  “It landed in the water close by and went off with an almighty bang. I was thrown to the deck. By the time I got up again, the barrel, Uncle Squint and the man in the hood were all gone, the rope cut clean through. They were swallowed by the Vortiss!”

  “Down to the cold, dark—” I start to say, but Violet nudges me in the ribs.

  “Bits of the explosion got into the Spark’s engine,” Blaze continues, his eyes wet and wide as he stares into the memory. “Everything went haywire! I managed to go full reverse, and get out of the currents, but the battery began to lose power. It took me hour
s to get home. Hours to think about Uncle Squint …”

  Blaze clenches his fists.

  “… and how I lost him!”

  Just then there’s a jolt. The boat shudders and tips alarmingly.

  “What’s that?” Violet says, clutching the bookshelf as the boat continues to tip. “It almost feels like … like something heavy is…”

  There’s another jolt, and the boat creaks as the back end of it is pulled down even further.

  Blaze snaps out of his despair.

  “Someone’s climbing aboard!” he exclaims. “Pulling themselves out of the sea!”

  Then he runs for the ladder and scurries up it.

  “I’m coming, Uncle! I’m coming! I knew you’d find your way back!”

  We rush after him, as the boat continues to tip. But when we get out on deck and see what is heaving itself onto the Jornty Spark, we know immediately that it isn’t Squint Westerley.

  THE LAST OF THE WESTERLEYS

  THE FIRST THING WE SEE is a tentacle.

  A glistening pink tentacle that is wrapped around the brass railing at the back of the boat, suckering onto it and heaving up some great weight.

  “An octopus!” cries Violet, clutching my arm.

  I rub my eyes in terrified disbelief.

  How can there be an octopus?

  But when I look again, there is no tentacle, no octopus at all, just a powerful human arm. And then another, followed by a leg.

  The owner of these limbs drags himself aboard, and a tall, ghastly figure stands erect on the deck of the Jornty Spark, streaming with seawater. One hand is clutching the handle of a metal-bound box that I’ve seen before, while the other hand is rising towards us. Where his face should be is nothing but the shadow of a hood.

  “Herbert Lemon,” Deep Hood drawls in his disgusting voice. “I know what you took from the bottle.”

  I clutch my cap and stagger back into the wheelhouse, Violet at my side.

  “Herbert Lemon,” Deep Hood burbles on, “give it to me!”