by Susan Cooper
“Fish hawks up there,” I said to Grand. “You think it’s our pair from Long Pond Cay?”
“I doubt it,” Grand said absently. He was busy keeping an eye out for the side road that led to the Plantation.
But Lou nodded, firmly. He kept looking up at the sky, even after the ospreys had drifted out of sight.
Although it was a really hot day, Grand had made us wear jeans and sneakers, with socks, because we were going to be in the bush, which is full of fierce prickly vines and shrubs as well as unfriendly kinds of spiders. He’d brought a machete with him, to carve a way through. A little while after he turned onto the Plantation road he found the place he wanted, where an overgrown trail led into the trees, and we followed him along it.
The bush thinned out after a bit, and we came across a piece of an old wall about three feet high, made of crumbling old blocks of limestone. A tree had grown out of it, and the roots had pushed some of the blocks to one side. Grand hacked away at the scrubby bushes until you could see the other three walls as well: a rectangle of tumbled blocks, the outline of a place that once, years and years ago, had been somebody’s house. Grand had us stand there while he took pictures, so our height would be a measure.
Then we wandered off into the bush while he set up his tripod and took more pictures without us. I don’t think either one of us was looking for a star shell here; we were just exploring. We weren’t near the sea, and this had been a settlement of farmers, not fishermen. I took Grand’s machete, which I’d been allowed to do for two years now, once he felt he could trust me not to cut off anybody’s leg, including mine. I even had a smaller machete of my own, at home.
I was chopping a way through some branches throttled by the miserable wiry creeper that they call love vine, when I suddenly heard Lou shout. I put my head out of the branches, and saw him pointing upward.
There were the two ospreys again, swooping down over our heads, amazingly low. I’d never seen them so close before. They were wonderful: great grey-white wings spread wide, slowly flapping, banking sideways. One bird drifted above the other, then the other rose above the first, like a sort of dance. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing here; they’re birds of the sea and the shore, they live on fish. Were they hunting frogs or mice, for a change?
It was only when they began to whistle their fluting call every time they swooped over Lou that I realized they were trying to tell him something. Trying to lead him somewhere.
I came out into the open patch where he was standing and saw him moving forward, looking up, following the direction in which the great birds were slowly taking him. I went along beside him, doing my best to clear a way with the machete without damaging either of us.
“Peeeu, peeeu,” went one of the ospreys, and it swooped down and actually landed on the top of a seven-year apple tree about twenty yards ahead of us. Lou was making soft sounds to himself, excited, as he struggled through the bush. The bird stayed there, with its mate drifting to and fro overhead, as we got closer and closer. It took off only at the very last minute, when we came almost up to the tree.
Then we saw that the tree was growing out of the middle of another rectangle of broken-down walls, the ruin of another long-gone house, though higher than the one where we had left Grand.
The ospreys circled overhead, calling.
Lou went into the hollow of walls, and I followed him, pushing aside creepers with the machete.
I think we both saw it at the same time. In the center of the top block of crumbling lichen-patched limestone, in the tumbledown wall, there was a round gap like the one we had seen in the wall of the labyrinth, in the Otherworld, and in the gap was a small grey fossil star shell.
ELEVEN
Neither of us had the smallest doubt about what we had to do next, of course. When I had chipped the fossil shell out of the limestone with the tip of the machete, and Lou had put it carefully in his pocket with the other one, we went back toward Grand. He was already headed our way, so he spotted the second ruin, and was delighted.
“You can even see the doorway!” he said, and he spent about an hour taking photographs of it from every possible angle, while we fidgeted about, trying not to look impatient. Then on the way home he stopped in town and bought us both hamburgers as a reward, which was so unusual that he certainly wouldn’t have believed us if we’d said we didn’t want them. He saw several friends in the café, of course, and they all had a long gloomy chat about long Lond Pond Cay and told us how big we were growing. Those deep voices rumbled on and on till I thought we would never get home.
When we did, Lou slipped away to Grand’s desk and brought me the tide table. I knew we wouldn’t get out of the house again that day; it gets dark before six at night in our islands. So I looked for next day’s low tide, and it was in the middle of the afternoon.
“Two o’clock tomorrow,” I said to Lou. “God spare life.”
He grinned. That’s what all the grown-ups say when they mean cross fingers.
I finished my weekend homework that night, to Grand and Grammie’s surprise. We sat like quiet little angels in church next morning, and when we’d changed out of our good clothes I asked if Lou and I could go just one last time to Long Pond Cay.
“Please? Only for an hour or two. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left to see.”
Grammie sighed. “That’s true,” she said. “For two pins I’d go with you, for a last look.”
Lou was standing behind her, and he instantly looked so horrified I almost giggled. I said, “Uh—it’s an awful small boat.”
Grammie laughed her rolling deep laugh. “I wouldn’t go in that little skiff of yours if I were a hundred pounds lighter,” she said. “Off you go. But home before sunset, Trey.”
Grand was busy at his desk, working out next month’s bonefishing schedule. He glanced out of the window at the treetops. “Watch the wind,” he said. “It may be shifting. And keep away from the development.”
So we went to Long Pond Cay, and I didn’t need telling to keep away from the end of the beach where development had begun; I was much too afraid my daddy might be there. When I think about it now, I wonder if danger was one of the things that brought our two worlds together, so close together that Lou and I could cross to and fro. Long Pond Cay was in danger of being changed forever; our family was in danger, from my father threatening to take me away. And Pangaia, if you could believe the Underground, was in danger of being completely wiped out. We were all linked together by threat.
It was a pretty day. I couldn’t tell if the wind was really shifting, there was so little of it. A line of puffy little white clouds hung over the blue sky, and there was a low band of cloud on the horizon in the north, but nothing was moving. On the way out, I grabbed a hunk of bread from the kitchen and shoved it in the pocket of my shorts in case we needed a snack, and I took my machete.
I never did know quite why I took it. Maybe it was just in my mind from having used Grand’s machete the day before.
Lou was so tense with excitement, it was as if electricity was coming out of him. He sat up in the bow, staring ahead at the water. I headed out a long way offshore, toward the far end of the long white bay, though our dinghy draws so little water there was no chance of us going aground even at this low tide. It wasn’t the shallows that I was trying to avoid, it was anyone from Sapphire Island Resort. Since it was Sunday, I hoped there’d be nobody around.
We were out in open water when I saw the powerboat. It was roaring down the newly dredged channel between Lucaya and Long Pond Cay, going so fast that its wake, curving up from the stern, was the thing I saw first. It seemed to be heading for the open sea, but then it slowed down, and the wake dropped. They’d seen us. After a moment the boat curved round and began heading in our direction.
I pushed the engine up to full throttle but it was hopeless: a little fifteen-horse outboard is like a newborn puppy compared to a big powerboat. And this one had the long bow and pointy shape of a cigarette boat, th
e high-speed boats that are called by that name because they’re so skinny and fast. There used to be a lot of cigarette boats in the islands when I was very tiny, in the big days of drug smuggling. Planes would fly over from South America at night and drop floating packages of drugs in the water, in amongst the dozens of little cays on the south side of Lucaya, and the boats would come out at first light and pick them up. A really powerful cigarette boat could get to Florida with a million-dollar load of drugs in half a day. Grand said he’d come across one when he was bonefishing, once: a huge sleek grey cigarette boat hidden in the mangroves, waiting for its owner to jump into it at dawn.
The boat came roaring up to us, and Lou scrambled back toward me from the bow, staring. There were three men in the little cockpit, behind that enormous bow full of engine. They were all Bahamian, and one of them was our father.
He was standing behind the man at the wheel, with a beer can in his hand. He was laughing. “Little Trey!” he bellowed. “I got you! You comin’ with me!”
“Come to Daddy, baby!” yelled one of the other men, and I knew they were all drinking, and maybe all of them drunk.
Lou was hunched right back by me in the stern of the dinghy, and I was still going full speed toward Long Pond Cay, though the powerboat was keeping level with me without even trying. The man driving the boat nudged up its speed a little and began curving round ahead, to cut me off.
You have to understand one of the things about my daddy. Some of it I only know from Mam telling me. He took off and left her after I was born, and then when I was about five years old he came back again, and said he loved her and he would stay. Around then is the time of that photograph I saw, I guess. She looked happier than she does now. But then Lou was born, and he went off again. The worst thing was that because Lou looks more like Mam than I do, with the darker skin, he refused to believe he was Lou’s daddy. Specially when it turned out Lou didn’t talk. He paid him no attention, just as if he didn’t exist—even though he is Lou’s daddy, certain sure.
And it was the same thing today. He was pretending Lou wasn’t even in that boat—and if he could have got hold of me he would have left him there alone, seven years old, alone on the sea.
“Trey!” he yelled. “Come on here, baby baby!”
There was just one thing I could do.
“Hold on, Lou!” I said, and I turned hard to one side so that we shot past the stern of the big boat as it was curving to cut us off from the shore. We bumped over its wake, and then I was heading for the shore across a part of the bay where the water was so shallow nobody would ever cross it at low tide. I knew the powerboat couldn’t get over it without hitting the sand, and I wasn’t even positive that we could, but it was worth trying.
We whizzed along, over water so shallow you could see the white sand clear through it. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the big boat had turned to come after us, but that sure enough it was stuck. What I didn’t see, at that moment, was that my daddy had jumped overboard and was swimming after us.
Even our little propellor hit sand before long, so I cut the motor and we both jumped into the water and pulled the two anchors out to the full length of their lines, at each end of the boat. Then we set them in the sand so the boat would float up and stay there when the tide rose. Lou knew just what to do without being told, and we were very quick—but not quite quick enough.
I grabbed my machete out of the boat, and we ran. We splashed through the shallows and ran up the beach, and into the tall oat grass on the dunes. I looked back to check the boat, and saw my father stumbling ashore on to the sand. He could see us; he was yelling. He began to run after us.
We plowed up through the dry sand, as fast as we could. A dozen things were darting around my mind. Where could we go? He could catch us by sea, he could catch us by land—Long Pond Cay was Sapphire Island Resort now, where he worked with his powerful friends. The way we were running, we were headed only for the flats, where the soft mud would catch our feet. We’d have to go sideways instead, along the edge of the flats, away from the new development and over to the windy seaward end of the cay, where a ridge of trees grew.
I called to Lou, “Go left! This way!” and as I turned past the casuarinas fringing the dunes, I tripped and went sprawling on the sand. The machete flew out of my hands and into a bush. Lou saw me fall, and came back to help. I shrieked at him to run, but he kept coming. I scrambled up, and groped around in the bush for my machete.
Overhead I heard that familiar thin cry, “Peeeu, peeeu,” and knew that the ospreys were wheeling about, high up, watching.
My fingers found the handle of the machete, and I was up on my feet again, turning inland. My father came running over the dunes, among the casuarina trees. Ahead of me, Lou let out a strange high hooting sound that I’d never heard before; it echoed eerily over the gleaming mirror-still bonefish flats.
I could hear my father’s heavy breathing as he ran at me. Suddenly I was paralyzed; I turned desperately forward and back and didn’t know which way to go. I faced my father, holding out my machete like a sword, and stood there screaming at him. “Get away! Get away!”
He paused for a moment, panting, his face stiff with anger.
And a wind sang in the casuarina trees, and the air shivered all around us. I felt Lou take my free hand. The light was dying, and I knew that the Otherworld was there behind me, and that one more step would put me there, out of reach. So I reached my foot backwards.
My daddy’s face changed. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened a little way in horror, or astonishment, or plain disbelief. I don’t think he saw the Otherworld, I don’t think you can see it touching ours unless it’s calling you. I think we simply vanished away from him.
And he vanished from us, and Lou and I were standing in half-darkness, in cold air, at the entrance to the labyrinth.
In the beginning nobody was there, not Bryn nor Gwen nor Annie. Two lighted lanterns were on the ground, filling the tunnel with dim light. Our shadows were huge on the roof. We stood there facing the rough, damp stone wall, with the three engraved words above our heads, and beside them the three round holes with a small rock star in the first.
Rigel
Bellatrix
Betelgeuse
We were still gasping for breath after the running and the fear, yet some other things from our own time were quite gone. Though our clothes had been soaked from splashing through the sea, and our sneakers heavy with sea-water and sand, now they were dry. The hunk of bread in my pocket was dry too, though it should have been squishy and soaked. So was the machete in my hand. I noticed these things without wondering about them; the front of my mind was too busy feeling relief that now my daddy couldn’t carry me away from Lou. But right on the heels of that came the other fear, the one that belonged to the Otherworld: what was the thing that we had to do here?
That seemed never to have frightened Lou, and it didn’t now. He reached into the pocket of his shorts, and brought out the two fossil star shells: little chunks of grey rock in the shape of ten-pointed stars. Holding them out to me, he looked up at the two round gaps in the wall, and made a little questioning sound.
“I know,” I said. “They need to go in those holes, for sure, but how do we get them there? No way we can reach, even with me holding you up.”
Lou was still staring up at the gaps, thinking. He turned to me, facing me, and patted me on the shoulders. Then he bent and patted his feet.
“Hmm,” I said. I didn’t think that would work. But when I went and stood next to the wall and reached up both my arms, my fingers weren’t much more than a foot from the nearest hole. And Lou was a lot taller than the length of my arms. He was right; if we could get him up to stand on my shoulders, he could reach.
This was something we’d never done before. I crouched down facing the wall, with my hands flat against it, and Lou tried to get a foot on my shoulder. He couldn’t, it was too far up. Then he tried to do it by standing on my knee first, and I
fell down, and so did he. He laughed. I’d banged my knee, so I didn’t laugh right that minute, but I wasn’t going to give up yet.
“Try sitting on my shoulders,” I said. We knew how to do that—at any rate, we’d done it a lot in the sea, fooling around. I got down again, and Lou cocked his leg over the back of my neck and grabbed my head, so that he was more or less sitting on my shoulders, and with a lot of effort, and him clutching at the wall as well as my head, I managed to stagger up to standing. He was a whole lot heavier than he’d felt when we did it in the water, I can tell you. But he made a little crowing sound, and I could tilt my head just enough to see him fit one of the star shells into the lowest gap in the wall.
There was a tiny, spooky flash of light, and a click, and the shell was resting in the gap. But though he stretched as high as he could, he couldn’t reach up to the third hole to put the last shell in place.
That was the moment when we heard a rustling, thudding sound behind us: the sound of feet running. I felt a crazy flash of fear that my father had somehow been transported to the Otherworld, to chase and catch me, but as the feet skidded close we heard Bryn’s voice, deep and urgent.
“Wait, Lou! Wait a moment!”
He was level with us now, and he swung Lou up off my shoulders. But instead of reaching him up higher, he set him down on the ground. Annie was there too, and Gwen, in the same rough dark clothes as before. They all three looked worried, and very serious; I suppose they’d been afraid they might not reach us in time. In time for what?
Annie crouched beside Lou so that she was looking him in the eye. She took him by the shoulders. She said, “Are you quite sure?”
Lou laughed, as if she had made a joke. He nodded, very hard.
Gwen said softly into my ear, “You see, this is a danger that you are going into. This mystery of the words on the wall.”
I heard myself say, “For love of life.”
She still looked serious, but she punched me lightly on the arm, like saying right on. We really could have been friends, Gwen and me, in spite of her being older. She said, “And you came out of danger this time, didn’t you, you came running. I felt it.”
