North of Nowhere

by Liz Kessler

  “Don’t say it,” Sal said.

  She was right. We couldn’t even entertain the thought that Peter had met with some kind of accident out at sea. However likely or possible it might be, it simply wasn’t something we could think about right now.

  “OK, look, let’s think positively,” I said. “As long as we assume nothing terrible has happened to Peter, I reckon there are two options. Either he came back to the mainland on the boat . . .”

  Sal shook her head. “If he’d done that, he’d have come back to see us. I’m sure he would. There’s no way he’d have left us worrying if he was nearby. What’s the other option?”

  “That he got to Luffsands and got off there. And somehow he lost the boat. Maybe he didn’t tie it up properly, and he got stuck over there.” I thought for a moment. “And I guess there’s a third possibility as well,” I added.

  “What’s that?”

  “That he never took the boat out after all. Only, that would have to mean that he tied the boat up and then, for some reason, took off his coat and left it on board before getting off.”

  “Why would he do that?” Sal asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  No, it doesn’t, I thought. None of this made sense.

  “OK, then,” Sal said. She nodded slowly, as if making a deal with herself. Then, her jaw set firm, she came to stand by my side. She gave me a tiny look, and even though she didn’t say anything, I knew what she was thinking.

  I moved to one side. Sal took my place at the wheel.

  As she steadied herself and looked at all the dials in front of her, I took the compass out of the bag and reached over to the stand above the steering wheel. The stand was loose, as though the compass had been pulled out of it too roughly. I tightened a screw on its side and then very carefully placed the compass inside it. It clicked firmly into place as though it belonged there.

  Which was, of course, because it did.

  Sal turned to me and raised her eyebrows. Still without a single word passing between us, I nodded. She nodded back. Then she turned the key. The engine sputtered to life.

  Part of me was screaming, What on earth are we doing?

  Another part of me — the stronger part, and the part I was listening to — knew exactly what we were doing.

  We were going to find Peter.

  Sal heaved the wheel around so the boat was facing out to sea.

  “You do know how to drive it, don’t you?” I asked as we motored out of the bay, heading toward Luffsands.

  Sal replied without turning around. “I did the course too, you know. Peter might have been the one to get all the praise from the fishermen, but I think that’s only because he’s a boy. While they were all telling him how clever he was, and showing him how to prepare a line for catching mackerel, I drove the boat just as much,” she said. “And just as well!”

  Yes, and for all we know, Peter drove the boat into life-threatening danger.

  I was glad Sal was facing away from me. I didn’t want her to see my face and guess what I was thinking.

  “I trust you,” I said. And I meant it. I had no choice. This was the best plan we’d come up with so far. Well, it was the only plan. I had to believe Peter would be at Luffsands, and I had to believe Sal would get us there safely. As I glanced back at the coastline — already quite a distance away — I knew there was no option B.

  “Can you imagine their faces if we turn up at the pub with Peter?” Sal asked as she drove.

  “If?” I replied, mainly to show her I’d meant what I’d said about putting my trust in her. “Don’t you mean when?”

  Sal briefly turned around to grin at me. I found myself relaxing a little and smiling back. Anyway, she was right. How awesome would it be to go back to our families, not just saying we’d put a few posters up but that we’d found Peter and brought him home!

  “OK, which direction is Luffsands?” Sal asked.

  I thought back to Dee’s letters. “North.”

  Sal consulted the compass and gently turned the wheel this way and that, correcting the direction as she went, and taking us farther and farther out to sea on water that was so still and clear I could see the bottom, even when we were a long way out from the cove.

  I began to relax. If it hadn’t been for the reason we were doing this in the first place, I might even have enjoyed it.

  I looked around us while Sal drove. I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly. It’s not as if I was expecting to see Peter out here in the ocean waving to us to bring him home. The thought made me shudder.

  After a little while, the island was clearly in view. The side we were coming in on was covered in trees, still bare from a long winter.

  “We have to go around the island,” I said. “The village is on the other side.”

  Sal turned the boat.

  As we rounded the side of the island, I glanced at the compass. The arrow was pointing exactly north. At that moment, a breeze caught the boat from the back, making it lurch so that I slipped and fell against Sal.

  “Whoops, sorry,” I said. Just then, the wind caught us again. This time, we both fell.

  “Wow, it’s getting windy,” Sal said. “Do you think we should —”

  She didn’t get to finish her question, as the boat suddenly lurched sideways. A massive wave had come from nowhere and hit us sideways, bucketing water onto the deck. I crashed against the wheelhouse door, nearly falling out onto the deck myself, as the boat dipped sharply backward. Another wave was rearing up toward us. It was heading straight for the side of the boat. What was going on?

  The sea had been as calm as a pond a second ago. Suddenly, it was a raging torrent of mountainous waves. The sky had blackened and rain was now lashing down so hard it was almost impossible to see. The window was streaked with rain and was beginning to steam up.

  “What’s happening?” Sal screamed over the sound of the rain and waves.

  “I don’t know!” I cried, grabbing on to the wheel with her, to help her steer us around so that the next wave didn’t hit us from the side, too. They seemed to be coming from every angle, but the ones hitting us sideways were the worst. “Freak storm? Maybe it’ll pass in a minute.”

  I glanced at the compass to get some bearings, and I saw the strangest thing. The arrow was spinning around and around, pointing every which way.

  “Sal — the compass.”

  Sal looked at it. “What’s it doing?” she gasped over the thunderous waves.

  “I don’t know. Just keep heading in the same direction, and hopefully we’ll get around to Luffsands soon.”

  “Maybe if we can get closer in, the sea will be calmer,” Sal said. “I need to change course. Hold on.”

  I held on while Sal swung the boat to the left so we approached the waves at an angle that felt safer. The boat stopped veering so violently from side to side, and I stopped thinking we were going to capsize at any moment. We climbed up waves that were twice the size of our boat, and slid down the other side, holding our breath each time — but at least we had stopped plunging around like a rodeo horse.

  The rain seemed to have eased off too, and I went back outside to wipe the window down and look around.

  “Sal, look!” I called, pointing over to the left. “Luffsands! We’re almost there!” We were approaching the village from the eastern side. “We have to reach the harbor.”

  The only problem with that was it meant we had to go sideways to the waves again, and they were even worse now that we were around on this side of the island — the side that was open to the ocean rather than facing the mainland. I held tight as the boat climbed and plunged and rocked, water spraying over the sides like a waterfall with every wave.

  “Here!” Sal called to me. She was holding out Peter’s coat. “Put it on. You’re getting soaked.”

  I grabbed the coat from her. It was at least two sizes too big for me, but I didn’t care. We weren’t exactly at a fashion show. I put it on.

  Eventually, the ha
rbor came into view again. Or, to be more precise, it came and went, rising and falling with the waves. Every now and then, the island disappeared from sight completely as the swell continued to beat its way toward the harbor, lifting us high, then dumping us down into dark, watery wells.

  Tight-lipped, Sal managed to steer us toward the harbor. But that was when we realized — there was no harbor! Or at least, not one that we stood much chance of getting into.

  The outer wall was just about there, but once we got close, we could see that the water had risen so high there were no jetties to aim for. Even the harbor wall itself was much lower than the one in Porthaven — it had sunk beneath the rising water!

  “What are we going to do?” I asked. “How can we get the boat near enough to shore to get off it?”

  Sal was scanning the harbor, as I was. There was absolutely nothing high enough above the waterline for us to tie up to. I didn’t like our chances, anyway. The waves were so vicious they would have thrown us against what there was of the wall and broken the boat up.

  Sal shook her head. “We can get into the harbor, but there’s no way we’ll be able to tie up — not without getting smashed to smithereens.”

  “I know,” I said, all the hope I’d felt earlier draining out of me. It drained even quicker a moment later, when the rain eased enough for me to see beyond the harbor itself and into the village.

  “Sal,” I said hoarsely. “Look.”

  The sea wall at the bottom of the village had been completely destroyed. Chunks of bricks and broken pieces of rock lay scattered in the water. The sea had dug massive craters in the sand below.

  The front row of houses had all but collapsed. There were seven of them, but they had all lost their roofs. Two had gaping holes instead of windows and sloped at an angle, as though trying hard not to slip completely into the sea, but knowing they were about to fail. The other five, which were slightly farther forward than the rest, were only visible from the second floor upward. Their ground floors were totally submerged.

  I tried to calm my breathing. Had all this damage only just happened? How could that be possible? The storm had only just begun. Surely it hadn’t had enough time to wreak destruction like this?

  Dee’s house. Where was it? I tried to remember if she’d told me where it was.

  Sal edged the boat closer and closer to the shore. Now that we were inside the harbor wall, the sea was calmer. We still rose and fell with the swell, but the waves weren’t beating against us or hurling us down into dark canyons anymore.

  I scanned the houses, looking for anything familiar from Dee’s descriptions. Looking for any signs of life.

  And then I saw a group of houses that I recognized from Dee’s diary; a group of three that stood on a piece of ground slightly higher than the front row. They were nearby, but given our chances of getting to them, they might as well have been a mile away.

  All three houses were standing in water that reached to their second floors, and all the top windows had been blown out. The first two houses had no roofs. The third still had a partial roof.

  Wait! There was someone on that roof — waving and calling!

  I rubbed the salty spray out of my eyes and realized that it wasn’t just one person, it was two.

  And one of them was Peter.

  I could see a long jetty jutting out from the northern end of the seafront. The only trouble was, it was almost completely submerged. Every now and then, as a wave subsided, we could just see a pole sticking out of the waves, but it wasn’t tall enough to tie up to without running the risk of the boat being dragged underwater by the swell.

  We couldn’t pull up to the beach, either — or what had presumably been a beach at some point, anyway. The whole of the front of the village was rubble and rocks, with more falling from the front row of houses all the time. It was too dangerous to attempt it.

  There was simply no way in.

  “How are we going to get to them?” Sal asked, panicked.

  “I don’t know!” I was searching all along the shore, but could see nothing that would help us. Waving my arms in the air to let them know we’d seen them, I kept my eyes on Peter and the girl with him, who must have been Dee.

  They waved back.

  “Sal, we’ve got to rescue them,” I said hoarsely.

  “I know.”

  Sal brought us as near to the harbor wall as she could, edging closer to the shore a tiny bit at a time, creeping in on the swell but keeping a safe enough distance out that the waves couldn’t hurl us against the wall. She held our position as carefully as she could. She had been right. She was excellent at driving the boat.

  “This is the best I’m going to manage,” she said when we were still quite a way from the sunken jetty. “It’s just not safe to go any farther in.”

  I waved across at Peter. Then I cupped my mouth with my hands and shouted as loudly as I could, “Can you get down?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “They heard me!” I called to Sal. She gave me a thumbs-up sign while she continued to grip the wheel and keep us away from the rocky edge of the island.

  “Can’t leave roof!” Peter called. “Beams collapsed on top floor. Ground floor totally flooded.”

  “How did you get up there?” I called.

  “Chimney!”

  They’d climbed up through the chimney?

  “I got thrown from the boat by massive wave. Tried to get back on board, but the boat disappeared. Thought it had sunk!”

  “We found the boat!” I yelled, kicking myself for stating the obvious — we’d obviously found it. We were on it! “Are you OK?” I called.

  “Kind of. We were trapped inside for hours. I think the rescue workers have come — everyone else seems to be gone!”

  Rescue workers? If they’d been here, how come we hadn’t heard anything about it?

  “Mia, help us!” Peter shouted. He sounded so desperate — it broke my heart, and strengthened it at the same time. We had to get them out of there.

  “We’ll save you!” I called back. “Just hang on.”

  “Dee’s mom — she’s inside! Trapped under a beam. We can’t get her out.”

  I stared at Peter, trying to comprehend how Dee must be feeling. She hadn’t even spoken yet. She was gripping the roof of her home with both hands, barely even looking our way, her face as white as the foam from the breaking waves all around us.

  “Be quick! Please!” Peter yelled.

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t know what to say. “We’ll get you all out,” I managed eventually.

  I was about to turn away when I remembered something. The note — the one he’d presumably left for us.

  “We got the package.”

  “What package?”

  “The compass. From Shipshape. Why did you leave it for me? When were you there?”

  Peter shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “The —” I stopped myself. It was hardly the most important thing right now, and my voice was hoarse from shouting. “Doesn’t matter,” I yelled. “Just hold on.”

  With that, I went back inside the wheelhouse to see how Sal was doing. Her face was as white as Dee’s. Her hands were even whiter, gripping the wheel as hard as they could.

  “Will you take the wheel for a second?” She turned to me. “I have to talk to Peter.”

  “Of course!”

  “You don’t need to do anything,” she said. “Just hold this position. Don’t let us get any closer. Do you think you can do that?”

  I nodded. “But be quick.”

  She ran outside, leaving me holding a ship’s wheel — and our lives — in my hands.

  “We need to go back and get help,” I said when Sal came back in. Thankfully, she’d taken the wheel from me again. “We’ll go back to Porthaven and get the lifeboat people to come out. They’ll come over as soon as we tell them what’s happened. We just can’t do it ourselves.”

  “You’re right,” S
al agreed. “Even if we could get the boat onto the shore, how would we get them out of the house?”

  “Come on, let’s go. It’s the only thing we can do.”

  Sal hesitated. “I know,” she said. “It’s just . . . I can’t bear to leave him here, trapped like that.”

  I put my hand on her arm. “I’m guessing it’ll be an hour, max, by the time the lifeboat gets here,” I said. “Peter and Dee look like they’re holding on OK. They’ll manage an hour.”

  Sal nodded. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  I went back outside. “We can’t get anywhere near you,” I shouted. “We’re going to get the lifeboat. Hold on. We’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Thank you!” Peter called. And, with that, Sal turned the boat around, and we headed back out to the open ocean and the mountainous waves. My stomach dipped and lurched as much as the sea when I thought of going back out there. But we had no choice.

  Sal guided us carefully away from the harbor. “I’m going to go out a bit farther before turning, so we don’t get thrown against the rocks,” she said.

  So we headed out again, out toward the open sea. Out on the rodeo horse of an ocean that lifted and dropped us like a giant playing with a toy, booming with every wave like the sky was filled with the biggest bass drum in the world. And then Sal turned the boat and we headed back around the side of the island again. The waves were steeper than ever. The deck was like a swimming pool.

  I think I stopped breathing. I was almost ready to say my good-byes to this world. Surely we weren’t going to survive this storm.

  “Sal! Careful!” I yelled as we rose up high enough to see ahead. A huge rock had come into view not far in front of us. Sal turned the boat sharply to the left and narrowly avoided the rock.

  Just as she turned, a blast of wind whistled toward us, grabbed the boat from the back, lifted us high on the waves, and —

  And it stopped. All of it. Stopped. The storm, the huge waves, all of it.

  One moment, we were driving through blinding rain, raging angry seas, enormous peaks and troughs. The next, the sea calmed, the rain stopped, the wind died. The sun even shone brightly on the water, making it sparkle and twinkle in the light.