by Simon Clark
I sat beneath the perspex canopy and slept fitfully.
Sometimes I opened my eyes to see a wide-eyed face peering down at me, watching me as I slept.
Although this shook me, by morning I discounted these visitations as nothing more than dreams. Yet, as I briskly walked around my seaborne estate and tried to forget, in my mind's eye I could still see the wild girl's laughing face.
My father once wrote that there is in humanity an inability to sustain a tragic mood. The mind has a phoenix quality, rising again and again from the ashes of despair.
After a while my mood did indeed lift. I thought more about escaping the floating island. I began to work with my knife on the creepers that twined around a sturdy-looking yacht. I reckoned that in a couple of days I could cut her free and perhaps somehow strike a course for land - due north should take me either to the Isle of Wight or at least to the mainland coast. As I worked I had to keep my wits about me. Triffids constantly skulked nearby. The moment they closed in I'd slip on the helmet and snap the visor down. Working thus was stuffy and uncomfortable but at least the damnable plants could not harm me.
For my first few days on the 'island' I'd often hear the staccato drumming of triffids. Gradually, however, they fell silent. Later, a sleepless hour in the cockpit brought to mind one of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms. Didn't one of his quips go something like: 'There's only one thing worse than being talked about… and that's not being talked about'? Perhaps the triffids had said all they had to say about me. Maybe they found me uninteresting. Or, on the other hand, beyond their reach when I was safe either in my plane or in my pressure suit. For whatever reason, it seemed that they chose to ignore me, which lent them a surly rather than a sinister air.
At first, the sudden silence made me uneasy. But as they continued to ignore me I can't say I felt that snubbed. Besides, I was receiving attention from elsewhere. There was no shortage of rats. I fancied they saw me as breakfast, lunch and tea and so made a few sorties against me as I worked. But I dug out a five-foot length of chain from the bridge of a tramp streamer. This made a highly effective weapon when I whirled it around my head. Quickly the rats scuttled back to their bilges where, no doubt, they glared at me with hungry eyes.
Occasionally high seas would send spectacular convulsions through the triffid raft. These could be so powerful that the 'ground' would rise and fall to the height of my head. Then standing became impossible and I'd be bounced about the turf like a jumping bean.
Rain clouds brought darkness. Then I'd be forced back to the cockpit of the jet. There I dozed or chewed the triffid leaves that would flood my mouth with their bitter-sweet juice. Or I'd while away half an hour or so by cleaning my revolver and checking the distress flares.
Hope is a fragile creature at the best of times. Even though it might be guarded closely, cherished and nourished with tit-bits of optimism, it can so easily expire. I continued, nevertheless, to have my hopes. One of them was that I wouldn't be very far from land. I knew the currents off the southern coast of England would sweep me in a south-westerly direction for a while. Then they would merge with those of the Atlantic's Gulf Stream that would then bear me north, past the tip of Cornwall and towards the Irish Sea. Home and family couldn't be that distant. Or so I hoped…
As time went on I began to develop the sneaking suspicion that I was no longer alone. I've already mentioned that some nights I'd wake in the cockpit to see a face looking in at me. I fancied I saw a wild mane of hair and two blazing eyes. In the morning I'd convince myself that this night-visitor was part of a dream.
However, bit by bit I began to discover a little more objective evidence. Two rats with broken necks lay on the plane's wing when I returned from work on the yacht. They were laid neatly side by side as if they were an offering. One morning I heard what sounded like a distant human voice. It sang in a soft, rhythmic voice. 'Dad-dad. Dad-dad-dad…'
Seagull cries distorted by distance? Maybe.
So I conducted a little experiment. One afternoon I tied a piece of biscuit to a length of bandage from the first-aid kit. I hung this from the guard rail of the yacht. There it should have been noticeable - while being beyond the reach of even the most athletic rat.
Then I took a walk on my undulating promenade by the sea. When I returned an hour later the bandage fluttered lightly on the breeze; the biscuit had gone.
After that, the rust-coloured sky no longer seemed quite so oppressive. And within a few moments of beginning my work on the yacht again I noticed something that took me by surprise. I was whistling. Actually whistling! And the light of optimism had begun to glow somewhere inside of me.
***
By the tenth day I'd become quite the Robinson Crusoe. I'd found enough driftwood to light fires. From the tail of the jet I'd torn away a sheet of metal that I'd beaten into a pot shape in which I could boil water.
Into this I dropped triffid shoots and crabs selected from among those that constantly scuttled across the island. I didn't even have to catch them: they walked up to the cooking pot by themselves. The flavour of the resultant stew might be best described as 'raunchy'. A blend of sweets and sours with an overlying salty sharpness. With a better diet, I enjoyed a better frame of mind. My work went faster. I even derived a good deal of satisfaction from my efforts. The yacht would soon be cut free.
Moreover, I now harboured a deep-rooted belief that I was not alone on the island. Somehow - by some miracle that puzzled me yet that also delighted me more than I could say - I knew that the feral girl had survived the plunge into the thicket of triffids. True, she was still shy of me. And too fearful of the gun to reveal herself. But I would work on that. Just as I worked on cutting away the thousands of vines that held fast the yacht. A little tact and some gifts of biscuit should rebuild some bridges.
So I made my plans for my homeward journey - one with an astonishing passenger on board.
However, the best-laid plans of mice and men…
On the morning of my eleventh day as a contemporary Crusoe I looked up from my labours to see a steamship running alongside the island.
I knew then that I'd never complete the job of cutting free the yacht. It took only one quick moment to find and fire off a distress flare.
The ship quickly reversed its engines and pulled stern-on towards the island. I saw the faces of strangers looking at me from the decks. For them this was evidently an interesting sight: what might have been a spacesuited - and shinily helmeted - figure brandishing a blazing flare on a raft of vegetation. While my attention, in turn, was taken by an unfamiliar flag that fluttered from the steamship's mast.
It is trite to say that life is full of surprises. However, I knew that, once again, events had taken an unexpected turn.
CHAPTER NINE
EMBARKATION
THERE was a welcoming party. A large one. It crowded the ship's deck - a curious, if oddly silent throng.
Still panting from the exertion of climbing the rope ladder, I unbuckled my helmet at last before pulling it free of my head. A heavily built man of sixty or thereabouts, with broad Herculean shoulders, stared at me from beneath a pair of eyebrows that bristled fiercely with thick white hairs. From his stance - feet wide apart, hands together behind his back - I had no doubt I faced the ship's master.
At last the man spoke. The depth and power of his voice made the helmet vibrate in my hand. 'Welcome aboard, sir.' His gaze fixed on me, his glare powerful. 'Some of these folk - those who've read too much Old World trash, I reckon - took you for a spaceman. I did not, sir. Good thing, too. Bosun here was minded to put a bullet in your belly.' With a lift of his bearded jaw he indicated a man with a rifle. 'For safety's sake, you understand?'
'Then I'm glad you persuaded him to hold his fire.'
'I did not, sir. I favoured placing a bullet in your leg. But I have passengers who did their darnedest to steer me on a different course.'
'Passengers?' Now I was as much bewildered as breathless. My sudden rescue from the
floating island, then being confronted by a bunch of tough harum-scarum seamen had left me more than a little bit disorientated. Moreover, the captain's heavily accented tones made understanding him properly an uphill struggle.
'My name, sir,' continued that formidable man in his booming voice, 'is Sharpstone. Master of the steamship Beagle Minor, And I take it you weren't on that scrap o' flotsam through choice?'
Come on, David, I told myself. Get up to speed. He's asking you what happened. Feeling decidedly light-headed now I said, 'Er, no. I had to make a forced landing several days ago.'
'Forced landing. You're a pilot then?'
'Yes.' I nearly added bitterly: A damn unlucky one. Two forced landings in as many days.
Captain Sharpstone continued: 'Any passengers?'
'Ah… there was one, but-' I explained how I came to be stranded on the island and told Sharpstone about the death of Hinkman.
'That's infernal bad luck,' the captain told me, his voice softening a little. 'Infernal bad luck.' Briefly he turned to the man with the rifle and, it seemed to me, issued a string of orders. But because of that heavy accent of his I couldn't make out more than a word or two. Then he turned back to me, saying breezily, 'I dare say we can offer you a few creature comforts - could you use a shower and a square meal?'
Yes, I told him, I could, and I thanked him.
'But first, for the log, another formality or two. Your name and where you hail from, sir?'
'The name's David Masen. I'm from the Isle of Wight.'
'How would you be spelling "Masen", sir?'
I told him.
'Thank you very much, Mr Masen, and welcome aboard.' Gravely, the big man shook my hand. The grasp, as I had anticipated, was of steel. 'Now, if you'll excuse me I have my duties to perform. However, my passengers will attend to your basic needs. I dare say they will also ask questions of their own.'
As he turned to go, I felt the throb of the engines coming up through the deck to the soles of my boots. Smoke poured from the ship's single blue funnel, a glaring white plume against the red of that eerie sky. We were leaving.
'Wait,' I said, all of a sudden. 'Wait. We can't go yet.'
Captain Sharpstone turned to give me a stern yet questioning stare. 'Indeed, Mr Masen? I was given to believe I was still master of this ship.'
'I'm sorry,' I stammered. 'I - it's just that there is someone else on the island.'
'You told me there were no surviving passengers on your aircraft.'
'That's right… but there was a girl. She-'
'A girl?' He raised a knowing eyebrow, glancing towards his men who were standing nearby. 'What kind of girl?'
At that moment I'm sure he had me down for a raving lunatic, babbling about imaginary girls, mermaids perhaps, who sunned themselves on that floating weed mat.
'Look, Captain. I'm sorry I'm not explaining this at all well. But I found a girl living on that island. She's around fifteen or sixteen years old. She doesn't seem capable of speaking.' I saw him turn his gaze to the island, looking for some glimpse of the girl. 'She's taken to hiding herself away.'
'Hiding herself?'
'I frightened her - unintentionally - when I fired my revolver at a triffid.'
'But we saw no sign of a girl, Mr Masen. We observed yourself and a crop of triffids, but little else.' He turned to a middle-aged man. 'Set a course, Mr Shea. South-east. Ten knots.'
'Yes, sir.' The man headed off briskly towards the wheel-house.
'Now, Mr Masen.' The captain looked me up and down, with what my mother would have described as 'an old-fashioned look'. 'You have that hot shower, then the ship's medic will run an eye over you.'
I all but yelled at the man. 'Captain. There's a young girl out there. Stranded with nothing but filthy rats to eat and blasted triffids for company! She will die if we do not find her!'
Captain Sharpstone did not flinch at my outburst, any more than if he'd been hewn from granite. But his eyes told me I'd end up clapped in irons or some such nautical restraint if I continued in this vein.
'Mr Masen. You've endured an unpleasant ordeal. I recommend you take a moment to simmer down, then accept our hospitality.'
By now the ship was drawing away from the floating island. Triffids stood there in the bleak light. I thought of the beautiful, lively girl watching the ship - her only hope of survival - disappearing into the distance.
Fuming, I swung the helmet down against the guard rail with a crash. 'No. You can't leave her here!'
'Mr Masen, I-'
'Return me to the island; I'll bring her back myself.'
'There is no girl, Mr Masen. Now, for your own good my men-' his gaze caught that of a pair of burly deckhands '-will escort you down below.'
Two men, both with hands the size of shovels, grabbed me. This was insane. Why wouldn't the man take me seriously?
I tried to struggle free of their grasp. A futile effort. The men were walking slabs of muscle. Without much effort on their part they hauled me in the direction of a doorway. Nothing I could do, nothing I could say would alter what would happen now. The girl would remain on the island. There, from starvation, from cold, from a triffid sting, she would die. No doubt about that. No doubt at all.
'Put Mr Masen in a cabin,' the captain ordered. 'See that the door is locked.'
'Captain Sharpstone. Just a moment, please.' The voice I ' heard couldn't have been more different from the sailors' rough accents. This was soft, educated and, most definitely, female.
'Take a look back at the island for a moment, Captain,' continued the female voice. 'There is something you ought to see.'
Hardly a dignified arrival on my rescue ship, you'd allow. But after leaving a short trail of corpses in my wake over the last week or so I was determined that I wouldn't be responsible for another death so quickly.
At least now I could stand aside as the deckhands released me. I watched with a fair amount of satisfaction as the crew raced around the deck, making ready to turn the ship around.
The captain issued orders with practised ease. 'Turn her one-eighty, go in sharp end first. Dead slow, Mr Shea. I don't want any of that rat-tat muck fouling the screws. Get ready with the rope ladder once more, Mr Lieberwitz. Steady as she goes.'
I leaned forward over the rail. Above me hung the sun - a grim red disc at its zenith. There was precious little light. Just enough to make out the sinister, lurking forms of the triffids and the humped mounds that were the weed-smothered graves of yachts and tugboats. It should have been a desolate, depressing scene. But at that moment, by heaven, I felt a surge of triumph go crackling through me, from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair.
Hair standing out like a huge dark dandelion clock around her head, there stood my feral girl. Her gaze, bright with excitement and - I dare say - fear, was fixed on the ship with its funnel belching smoke, its propellers churning the water white. A sight, I imagine, that she'd never witnessed before.
I was so pleased to see her. My heart surged with a simple, idiotic happiness. I was right. She hadn't died in the thicket of triffids. But God alone knew how she'd survived.
She stood as close to the water's edge as she could get, poised nervously on that dangerously fraying mat of vegetation. Clutched to her breast was a briefcase. She waited for the ship to nose its way slowly towards her.
I willed her not to lose her nerve and bolt back to her hidey-hole again. The sight of the monstrous ship looming over her would have been as awesome as it was frightening. But she must have realized that it was her only hope of survival. So, despite her evident terror of it, she stayed rooted there, hugging the case to her as fiercely as a mother protecting her baby.
'It's good to see you smiling, Mr Masen.'
I looked back to see the owner of the soft female voice.
She was around twenty-five, I suppose. Slim without being skinny. A wash of hair that was somewhere between red and blonde floated lightly around her shoulders in a style that I'd never seen before. Her
eyes were clear, intelligent and a curious shade of green, while her fresh complexion was ever so slightly dusted with freckles. She wasn't there to handle the deck machinery: I could tell that from her well-shaped and far from callused hands. She radiated that indefinable quality some call 'breeding'. Yet she was dressed in workman's blue denim, a checked shirt and sturdy boots. Her down-to-earth choice of clothes was mitigated by the softening effect of a pink scarf.
She smiled, amused. 'It's not every day that someone stands up to the fearsome Captain Sharpstone. Congratulations.'
'I just wanted him to believe me. Although I made a ham-fisted job of it.'
'But you got the result you wanted.' She nodded down at the waiting girl as the ship inched its way towards the floating island. 'Who is she?'
'I don't know. She must have been swept out to sea on that thing when it broke free of the mainland.' I looked back at the young woman beside me. My mind must have been working particularly slowly that day because only then did I place the accent, despite having watched hundreds of old Hollywood films in the faded splendour of Sandown's Imperial Picture Palace. 'You're American,' I said, surprised.
'You Brits are one heck of a perceptive race.' Smiling still, she ran her hand lightly over my arm that was still clad in the rubberized pressure suit. 'Is this what all the fashionable young men are wearing on your side of the Atlantic?'
I found myself smiling back. 'Hardly. I'll actually be glad to get this off my back after ten days. Uh, and sorry about that, by the way.'
'Sorry about what?'
'Stating the obvious. That you're American. I didn't mean to sound so blindingly dense. But it's been an unusual few days, to put it mildly.' I turned to watch the sharp prow of the ship press against the floating weed mat, splitting the vegetation with the ease of a knife blade cutting through a cabbage. At that moment the engines reversed, halting the vessel. A deckhand lowered the ladder. Almost to myself I said, 'Floating islands, triffids, feral girls, days that are darker than nights. It takes some getting used to.'
