by Susan Cooper
“Outrageous!” he said, peering at the drawings. “Unthinkable!”
“What’s up, Grand?”
Grammie smoothed the batter in her cake pan with a knife. “Have you called the National Trust?” she said to him.
“Calling won’t help,” Grand said crossly. “I’ll go to Nassau.”
I put down the bowl and looked over his shoulder. The top page was some sort of plan, with sketches of buildings. “What’s the matter?” I said.
“Just the death of your favorite place in the world, that’s all,” Grand said. “Someone applied to develop it. They want to turn it into Miami Beach.”
“Develop Long Pond Cay?”
Lou made a small noise, and put down the beater on the floor. Grammie poked him with her foot, and he picked it up again and reached it up to the sink. But he was looking at Grand.
“Look,” Grand said. He made room for me to look at the plans. “Look what these idiots want to leave for your generation. Dredge out the channel, bring in fill to build up the beach—and build condominiums all along the bay, with a hotel in the middle.”
“You can’t build there!” said Grammie, her voice high and upset. “The beach shifts—the first big storm will take it all out!”
“That’s not all. Look at this.” Grand flipped over two sheets. “Block the tidal inlets, drain the bonefish flats, put in tennis courts and a swimming pool. And a nine-hole golf course!” He turned over another page, and jammed an angry finger down on the next drawing. “And a casino!”
“They can’t do that!” Grammie said.
“Oh yes they can, if they get planning permission. You know how they’ll sell it to the government—encourage tourism, our biggest industry—boost the out-islands’ economy, bring in dollars for the local merchants, create jobs for school-leavers—”
Grammie flopped down on a kitchen chair next to him, as if she were suddenly very tired. “Those people,” she said flatly. “They always the same. Any dollars they bring into these islands they take right out again. Most of the money doesn’t even come in. Package holidays—the customers pay for them before they leave home, pay their checks right into the bank in America.”
“Or in France,” Grand said. He held up a glossy advertising folder with a picture on the front of brilliant green palm trees and a bright blue sea. “‘Sapphire Island Resort,’” he read. “‘Your own private Paradise.’ Run by Offshore Island Enterprises, Fort Lauderdale and Paris. There’s a bunch of Frenchmen behind it, I’m told.”
I said, “Sapphire Island?”
“Normally known as Long Pond Cay,” said Grand.
I looked at the picture. Under the palm trees, a smiling dark-skinned man in a white jacket was bringing a tray with two glasses on it to two light-skinned people in swimsuits. I said, “You can’t grow palm trees on Long Pond. There’s not enough water.”
“They thought of that,” Grand said. “They’ll have a desalinization plant to make fresh water out of seawater. They’ll have sprinkler systems sprinkling it over their palm trees and their golf tees. As for the rest of the golf course, they say they have a special grass that will tolerate salt water.”
“I don’t believe that,” Grammie said. She’s a plump, cheerful lady with a round friendly face, but her eyes didn’t look friendly now.
“But the government might,” said Grand, “if enough experts tell them it’s true. What they’ll see is foreign capital investing in this island and paying taxes, and not costing them a thing. Not asking for anything except planning permission. We’ll just be selling our climate.”
“And our beaches,” Grammie said. She looked at her cake pan, sitting there full of batter, and got up to put it in the oven.
I felt suddenly cold, in spite of the oven. “Grand—this isn’t really going to happen, is it?”
Grand pushed all his papers together. “I don’t know, Trey. Some of us going to make as much noise as we can. But these Frenchmen have gone a very long way, very quiet and soft—these are detailed plans, and we only just heard about them today.”
I said, “There were three men on Long Pond today who could have been French. They had some sort of measuring instruments with them, and cameras. They were asking where the fish hawks nest, but I didn’t tell them.”
“No more fish hawks if the bulldozers come,” Grand said.
Lou was fidgetting, the way he does when something’s upsetting him. He can’t keep still then; he moves to and fro like a penned-up dog. He wandered out from the kitchen into the living room, and I saw him squat down near the porch in that suddenly intent way he has. He’d discovered something. He brought it back to show us, opening the palm of his hand to Grammie with a mischievous little grin.
It was a shiny black millipede, curled up into a circle. Lou’s loved playing with them ever since he was a baby, and Grammie hates them.
“Oh Lou!” she said, as usual. “Let it rest! I wish you wouldn’t touch them.”
“They don’t sting,” I said mildly. “Not like centipedes.”
Grand said, always the teacher, “They don’t need to. They give off this little whiff of cyanide gas that kills their enemies.”
Lou looked interested. He peered closely at his millipede and sniffed it, and Grammie squawked.
“Don’t worry,” Grand said, “Lou’s not their enemy.” He stood up, his beard jutting, and held up the papers in his hand. “These people the enemy.”
THREE
Right after supper that night, my mother telephoned. She always called twice a week, to make sure we were okay, and to check up on things. It may seem odd to you that she didn’t live with her children, but the reason was money, and there was no way round it. My parents had split up when Lou was a baby, and my father just took off to live with another lady, leaving Mam with us two children and no money. He’d never sent her a penny from that day to this. So Mam moved in with Grand and Grammie, and got the only job she could find, checking out groceries in the general store in town.
She always wanted to earn more, to help support us, so for four years she spent all her spare time doing a degree course at our island’s Resource Centre, where teachers from the College of the Bahamas come to teach people who can’t leave home to go to college. When she’d passed her exams she got a much better job in Nassau, and she moved there, to live in a little room in Grand’s brother’s house.
It was a horrible wrench for all of us, but Mam couldn’t find another job on our own island, and we couldn’t go with her; Nassau is a big city and a tough place, and she didn’t want us kids growing up there. We miss her, but I think she was right; I’ve been to Nassau twice and I don’t like it. Too much stuff going on, too much dirt and noise.
So Mam calls us twice a week, and comes home whenever she can.
“You still fooling around in that boat?” she said, distant in my ear.
“Sure, Mam. Lou loves it.”
“You be careful now.”
“I always careful. Ask Grand.”
Then she said in a different, tighter voice, “Trey, baby, you remember you father?”
“No,” I said at once. I felt angry whenever I thought about my father, angry at him for running off with someone else, but I had no real picture of him in my head, and we only had one photograph. It showed him with Mam and me when I was about two. About all you could tell from it was that he was about her same height, and wore a baseball cap, and that his skin was lighter than hers.
I’d always taken care never to wear a baseball cap. I didn’t want to be like my daddy.
She said, “I saw him the other day. He wants to get in touch with you, and I said no.”
I said quickly, “I don’t want to see him, not ever.”
“I just wanted to warn you,” said my mother’s distant voice. It sounded sad, and a bit scared. “You wouldn’t ever go off with him, would you?”
“Mam!” I said, horrified. “Of course not!”
“Just watch out. But don’t worry. Grand kn
ows all about it. I love you, sweetheart. Is my baby there?”
“Here he is. I love you, Mam.” I gave the telephone to Lou, and as he listened he started to smile. They couldn’t have a proper conversation, of course, but somehow Mam managed to have long talks with him, all her words punctuated once in a while with a hoot or a little grunt from Lou.
One day about a year ago, Mam had taken Lou to Nassau to see some famous American doctor who was visiting the hospital there. He examined him, and told her there was no physical reason why Lou shouldn’t talk. He said it was psychological, and so were his seizures; that something was wrong inside his mind, and that he could probably be put right if she sent him away to live in some special school in the United States.
Mam said no, she’d rather have a quiet little boy who lived at home.
I used to think about that doctor sometimes and wonder if he was right. That was before I found out the things that were so strange and special about Lou, things no doctor would ever be able to understand.
Three days later, Lou and I went back to Long Pond Cay. It was our first time together since we’d heard about the developers. You can’t get to the cay except by boat, so I knew Lou couldn’t have gone there without me unless Grand took him—and Grand had gone off to Nassau with Mr. Ferguson, the high school headmaster, to talk to the government’s Lands and Surveys Office about saving the cay from development.
Me, I’d been staying in town for two nights with my friends from school, Lyddie and Kermit Smith. This happened every so often, whenever Grammie decided I needed a change from being way out where we lived—“in the sticks,” she put it—looking after Lou. The sticks seemed just fine to me, but that was Grammie, always thinking about ways to improve life for other people. Mrs. Smith was one of her friends from the bank, who said she was always glad to have me because I kept Lyddie and Kermit from killing each other. They were twins, about my age.
I’d asked the Smiths if they had heard about the Frenchman’s plans, but they hadn’t, and they weren’t really interested. They’d never even been to Long Pond Cay—it was way up our end of the island, too far, too isolated.
“We sure could use some development,” said Mr. Smith heartily. He was a cab driver. “Jobs. Opportunities. Anything to keep you young people on the island when you finished with school.”
“You dreaming, Daddy,” Lyddie said.
“Off to Nassau, me,” said Kermit. “New York. Los Angeles.”
Lyddie grinned at her father. “You’ll still have Trey around,” she said. “Writing some old book.”
I was glad to get back to the sticks, and to Lou.
We went out very early that next time. The tide was going out, but there was still time to get over to the cay before full low. It was a beautiful clear day, and the sky light blue, with a few tiny shreds of cloud that would grow, during the day, into round puffballs drifting in a long row. A pair of whistling ducks flew low over our heads as we puttered up the channel, though they weren’t whistling; you could just hear the faint swish of their wings. I was surprised to see them in daylight; usually you see them when it’s beginning to get dark. But lots of things were unusual, that day.
We landed, and the beach stretched ahead of us broad and gleaming white, as the tide crept out. Terns swooped in low, calling to each other. We went inland, across the storm-carved slabs of sandstone, through the scrub and the trees, to the lagoon in the center of the cay. The sand there felt different underfoot, soft, squishy, half-mud, with the little spiky shoots of new black mangrove poking up everywhere like nails.
Lou stood staring out at the shallow water of the lagoon, looking for the silvery flash of bonefish, as they butted their heads down into the sand hunting for crabs and shellfish. They feed on the ebbing tide, and again when it begins to come back in. Lou’s always loved the bonefish. He can already see a moving school of them quicker than I can. Grand said to me once, “We don’t have to worry about him—for all his problems, he’ll make a wonderful bonefish guide.” And so he will.
But I wasn’t thinking about Lou then, just about the fish; like him, I was looking for that dimpling of the water that their tails make as they go headfirst down at the sand, and the quick glint as their silver backs catch the sun for an instant. There were none to be seen, though. The water was too low; it had retreated into gleaming pools and bays left among huge expanses of shining white sand-mud, and the schools of bonefish and snapper had gone out with the tide. Out into the open sea.
It must have been that hour between tides, when the sea is as low or as high as it will go, and everything is sort of suspended, waiting for the turn of the tide.
And then, as I stood there in the silence, looking out over the flats, I thought I saw the air begin to shimmer, blurring the edges of things, as it had that other day in the cave. My heart sank; I didn’t want this to happen again. I shook my head and I blinked my eyes hard—but still the shimmering was there, the air wavering as if heat were rising through it.
The wet flats became a shining blur, and the line of palmettos and trees on the opposite side of the lagoon seemed to be reflected in it, double, like a mirage.
And gradually I began to hear that sound again, coming from nowhere, the sound like the wind in the casuarina trees. It grew and grew, rising, whining, filling the shivering air, though when I glanced out of the corner of my eye at a casuarina I saw nothing stir, not a branch or needle move.
The noise filled my head; I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I was so scared that I felt sick. I knew I was on the edge of real panic, and I looked over quickly at Lou.
He hadn’t moved. He didn’t look the least bit frightened, this time. As I watched, he began to walk slowly forward, over the mangrove-prickled sand, toward the shining stretches of the lagoon. It was a sort of measured walk, not the way a kid moves, and as he went, he did something even stranger, more adult—ancient, even. He raised both his skinny arms into the air, spread wide, as if he were going out to embrace someone.
He stood very still, just stood there, holding his arms out like that. It looked so weird, it sent a chill through me. I moved nervously up toward him, a few slow steps forward.
Then all the sound stopped, and the air wasn’t shivering, and there was dead silence.
And out there in the lagoon the water seemed to open, and roll back and disappear. We stood there watching, scarce breathing, and a great shining city rose up before us, growing out of the earth.
It sprang up with a noise like a high wind, a forest of tall towers and cliffs and gleaming straight lines: grey, silvery skyscrapers, scraping the sky. Lou dropped his arms and turned to me; his face was a little boy’s face now, frightened, and he grabbed my hand. It was as if he’d become a different person just for a few moments, and now abruptly he was himself again. On all sides the city was springing up, so that the buildings were all around us: we were held in a world of stone and concrete and black brick. Long Pond Cay was gone, and so was the sunlight and the blue sky. The whole world had changed.
FOUR
I stood there with Lou’s hand in mine, on a grey concrete paving, in this strange Otherworld city that had swallowed us up as if we lived there, as if we had never lived anywhere else.
No sun shone there; the sky was a grey haze, what you could see of it. The air was very warm, and full of new noise. We were standing on a sort of small paved island where three roads met, two coming up from either side behind us and one stretching out ahead, with cars and buses roaring by us on all sides. I couldn’t see a single person walking, anywhere.
Lou let out a high wail of fear. He was clutching my hand with both his own, so hard that it hurt. I looked at his face, all tight with terror, and had no comfort for him because I was in the same state myself. Everything was so different, so suddenly different, that I couldn’t think straight. Where were we? What was happening? I wanted to curl up into a ball and hide, until it had all gone away. But I couldn’t do that; I was in charge of Lou.
; The air felt thick; it caught at my throat. I choked and coughed, but I couldn’t hear the sound over the roar of the traffic thundering by. I tried to look at the buses—at least I supposed they were buses: big, sleek silver cylinders full of windows, flashing past in a white blur. Maybe we were in Nassau. Maybe it was New York. Or any big city.
But I’d been in Nassau, and what was going on around us was spookily different from a normal big city. There were no people to be seen anywhere. The cars flashed along in an endless stream, as evenly as if they were on rails, and they all seemed smaller than normal cars, and brightly colored, gleaming red, blue, yellow, orange, green. They rushed by so fast you couldn’t see who was driving them.
Over our heads then something came humming loudly, low and fast, and we ducked instinctively. It was a tiny helicopter, much, much smaller than the U.S. Army helicopters that buzz our island every day looking for drug smugglers. I watched it fly away—and then it tilted, paused, curved round and came back toward us. I felt panic rising like a lump in my throat. The helicopter was coming straight at us, and there was nowhere to hide. It paused over our heads, roaring louder than the traffic, and a huge amplified voice came down from it.
“FOOT TRAFFIC BANNED ON THE ARTERY!” it boomed.
I looked frantically up and down the streets. There seemed to be no break anywhere in the moving streams of cars, no way to cross over and escape. The helicopter started coming slowly down toward us.
But at the same time, suddenly a great cloud of black smoke puffed up from the pavement where we stood, swallowing us up. My eyes watered, and I coughed and spluttered, and clutched Lou close to me in alarm—and then, just visible in this dark fog, at our feet a wide disk swung up from the concrete, a kind of cover that I hadn’t noticed was there. A man was leaning out of the round hole in the pavement, a bearded man with a black band tied round his forehead, his face anxious and intent. The dark smoke was billowing up out of a kind of cylinder in his hand; he set it down on the concrete and beckoned us.
