Oliver and the Sea Monkeys

by Philip Reeve

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Philip Reeve

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2013 by Sarah McIntyre

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover as Oliver and the Seawigs by Oxford University Press, Oxford, in 2013, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Random House Children’s, New York in 2014.

  Yearling and the jumping horse design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:

  Reeve, Philip.

  Oliver and the seawigs / by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre. — First Random House edition.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in hardcover by Oxford University Press, in 2013.”

  Summary: “When Oliver’s explorer parents go missing, he sets sail on the rescue mission

  with some new, unexpected friends” — Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-385-38788-0 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-385-38791-0 (lib. bdg.) —

  ISBN 978-1-5247-1927-2 (ebook)

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Islands—Fiction.

  3. Mermaids—Fiction. 4. Explorers—Fiction. 5. Missing Persons—Fiction.

  6. Humorous stories.]

  I. McIntyre, Sarah, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.R25576Oli 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013043653

  Ebook ISBN 9781524719272

  This books has been officially leveled by using the F&P Text™Leveling System.

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Authors

  Excerpt from Cakes in Space

  Oliver Crisp was only ten years old, but they had been a busy and exciting ten years, because Oliver’s mother and father were explorers.

  They had met on the top of Mount Everest.

  They had been married at the Lost Temple of Amon Hotep, and had spent their honeymoon searching for the elephants’ graveyard. And when young Oliver was born, they simply bought themselves a back carrier and an off-road baby carriage and went right on exploring.

  But at last there came a day when Mr. and Mrs. Crisp realized there was just nothing left to explore. They had trekked to the headwaters of all the great rivers, and stood on the summits of all the unconquered mountains. Thanks to them, the Lost City of Propacopaketl was lost no longer; the Mystery of the Mokele Mbembe Marshes had been solved. There were no more blank spaces left on the map.

  So they packed their belongings aboard their explorermobile and drove home to the house that they owned but had hardly ever lived in, by Deepwater Bay, near the little seaside town of St. Porrocks. “No more exploring for us,” they told each other sadly. “It’s time we settled down.”

  Oliver wasn’t sad, though. He was excited. He was tired of living the explorer’s life. The house he was coming home to was one he’d only seen on vacations, brief two-week breaks before fresh expeditions. Ten years on the move! No time to make friends, or feel at home anywhere. No time to go to school. He’d never even had a proper bedroom of his own, just a bunk in the back of the explorermobile, and all his things were hidden away in trunks and storage boxes in the spaces under the explorermobile’s seats. He thought it would be exciting to have a whole house to live in, and wake up every day to the same view. At Deepwater Bay he would have his own bedroom and bathroom, and he would be starting next term at the school in St. Porrocks. (That might not sound so good to you, but Oliver had never been to school, and he was excited about that too.)

  He perched between his parents as Mom steered the explorermobile carefully along the winding lanes. He was waiting for the moment when Deepwater Bay came in sight.

  “It’s not a very pretty house,” his mother reminded him. “It’s really rather old and creaky, and the wind blows right through it. It needs lots of work, but we never found the time. Or the money. There’s not a lot of money in exploring.”

  “OK,” said Oliver, but he didn’t stop feeling excited.

  They came over a sudden headland and there it was, the blue bay all dotted with shaggy, steep-sided islands. The house stood at the top of the beach. It was big and gray, with orange lichen dappling its roof.

  “Wow!” said Oliver.

  “Wow!” said his dad.

  “Wow!” said his mom, stopping the explorermobile on a curve of the steep lane and just sitting there, staring in sheer amazement.

  “Wow!” they all three said again. Oliver was pleased that his parents sounded just as thrilled as he was. Then he looked at them, and saw that it was not the house that they were looking at, but all those scruffy islands in the bay.

  “Where have they come from?” asked his father. “I don’t remember them….”

  Mom was rustling the map. “They are not marked here!” she gasped.

  “Nine…ten…fifteen…,” Dad muttered. “They must be new islands! Volcanic, probably….”

  “Unmapped!” said Mom.

  “Uncharted!” said Dad.

  “Unexplored!” they whispered, both together.

  Oliver sighed. He’d seen them like this before, whenever they heard of a vanished city or a forbidden tomb. Still, he thought, at least they can explore these islands from home. He looked happily at the house while Mom, with her eyes on the islands, started the explorermobile again and took it screeching down the zigzag lane to the beach.

  Oliver started unpacking at once. While his mother and father fetched down their inflatable dinghy from the explorermobile’s roof, he unlocked the house and carried boxes and bags and suitcases inside. He walked through the big, echoey, dimly familiar rooms, whisking dust sheets off the armchairs that had waited so long for someone to come and sit in them again. He ran upstairs to his room and bounced on the bed. He loved his room already, the way the sunlight came into it and made long golden stripes down the wallpaper. He opened the window to let in the air, and the sea wind, and the cries of the gulls.

  “Oliver!” called his mother and father. They were down at the sea’s edge, ready to go off and explore the new islands. They stood in the shallows, waving.

  Their inflatable dinghy tossed between them as the waves broke under it. “Oliver! Come with us!”

  “I’m busy!” Oliver shouted back. “Why don’t you go and have a look around without me? I’ll be all right.”

  He sighed. He knew his parents loved him. It was just that, sometimes, he had the feeling that they loved exploring more.

  The little dinghy’s outboard motor drowned out the seagulls with its angry-bee buzz as Mom steered through the
surf. It circled a small island just offshore, then took off with a roar across the bay towards the larger ones.

  Oliver brought his suitcase upstairs and opened it. Carefully he set out his favorite things on shelves and on the windowsill. He arranged his books on the shelf beside his bed. He hung up his clothes in the cupboard. The bars of sunlight moved along the wall. And suddenly Oliver realized that it was quite a long time since he’d heard the outboard or his parents’ voices.

  —

  He went to the window and leaned out. Deepwater Bay was deserted, and the evening sun shone golden on the waves. There was no sign of Mom and Dad. The islands had vanished. There was only the orange inflatable dinghy, washing back to shore upon the evening tide.

  Most people would be a bit alarmed to find that their parents had disappeared along with a whole bunch of uncharted islands. They might feel inclined to call the police, or the coast guard, or just run about shouting. Not Oliver. He was a Crisp, and made of sterner stuff than that. He hadn’t panicked when his baby carriage was carried off by an eagle on the expedition to the Forgotten Mesa. He hadn’t lost his cool when his parents took him on that ill-advised cycling trip around the crater of Mount Firebelly. (“But it’s supposed to be an extinct volcano!” Dad had yelled while lava bombs bounced off their cycling helmets.) He had barely batted an eyelid when a bear stole his sleeping bag on the north face of Mount Rainier. He barely batted one now: just ran downstairs and out onto the beach, looking around in case his parents had come ashore without him noticing.

  But the beach, in the wintry afternoon sun, was long and empty and completely parent-free. The orange dinghy rasped against the sand, down on the shore where the small waves kept spreading neat doilies of foam under it.

  Oliver pulled it further up the beach and wondered what to do. Then he noticed that there was still one island left in the bay. It was the littlest and lowest and least interesting of them, the one his mom and dad had ignored when they went motoring off to explore the taller ones. Even from the shore, with the low sun shining in his eyes, Oliver could see that they were not on it. But perhaps it held some clue to where they’d gone….

  He ran back to the explorermobile and packed a rucksack with Useful Things. Then he locked the house up and put a note on the front door that read:

  How he hoped he would be!

  He scampered to where the dinghy waited, and shoved it out into the sea again. Wap, wap went the waves, slapping its blunt orange nose. Oliver heaved himself aboard. He couldn’t work the outboard motor because his arms weren’t strong enough to tug the starter cord, but there were oars stowed neatly on the bottom boards and he pulled them out and started rowing. It didn’t take him long to reach the island, where he pulled the dinghy up on the sheltered, shoreward side.

  The island was just as small as it had looked from the beach. Clumps of grayish grass sighed softly as the sea wind stirred them. There were snaggles of driftwood, festoons of weed, a length of old tarred rope. There was a ramshackle heap of twigs balanced on the pile of boulders that were the highest place on the island. That was all.

  It took Oliver less than a minute to walk right across the island to the far shore, where he stood looking out to sea. All his hopes of finding clues faded, like the foam that kept washing around his toes and melting into the wet sand.

  “Mom!” he shouted. “Dad!”

  The echoes came back at him from the cliffs around the bay. Echoes, but no reply.

  “Mom!” he shouted, louder still. “Dad!”

  “Oh, put a sock in it, won’t you?” grumbled a creaky voice behind him. “Some of us are trying to sleep!”

  A pair of beady blue eyes was glaring at Oliver over the brim of that twig heap on the island’s crown. The heap was a nest, and the eyes belonged to the bird who owned it.

  “But birds don’t talk!” protested Oliver.

  “Parrots do,” the bird said.

  “Not really, not properly,” Oliver protested. “And anyway, you’re not a parrot.”

  “Indeed I’m not,” the bird sniffed.

  It stood up in its nest and spread its enormous dirty-white wings. “I am a Wandering Albatross. Diomedea exulans. Though you may call me Mr. Culpeper. And now you had best get back to shore, or you will be a wanderer too.”

  “What does that mean?” Oliver asked.

  “Tsk,” the bird said, “don’t they teach you youngsters anything these days? Not all islands stay where you put them. Some move about. Here one minute, gone the next. This is one of them. That’s why I nested on it, of course. I’m not stupid. Why go flapping about the world when I can just roost here and let the island do the wandering?”

  Oliver looked down at the island. Between his feet he saw rock, sand, grit, dune grass, and ground-down seashells. It didn’t look as if it were going anywhere.

  “How do they move?” he asked.

  “Who cares?” said Mr. Culpeper, shrugging his wings.

  “Where are they going?”

  “Who knows?” said Mr. Culpeper. “But all the others have gone already, so this one won’t stay much longer.”

  As he spoke, the island shuddered. Small stones spilled and rattled, trickling down.

  “Hop in your boat and be off with you,” said the albatross.

  “No!” said Oliver. “Not me. I’m staying. Wherever those islands went, I must go too. My mom and dad were on one of them, you see.”

  “That noisy couple?” said Mr. Culpeper. “Suit yourself, but you’d be better off without them, if you want my opinion.”

  Oliver wasn’t listening anymore. The island lurched, almost throwing him off his feet. He crouched down. He curled his fingers and toes into the sand like roots, clinging on. The island sank a little. Water bubbled whitely around its edges. Then it turned slowly around and started to move out of Deepwater Bay, following the golden pathway that the evening sun had painted on the waves.

  As soon as he was used to the movement, Oliver ran around to where he’d left his boat and made sure it was still safe above the tide line. Looking back, he watched the shore fall swiftly behind. A fiery shard of the sunset reflected for a moment from the window of his own bedroom, and he felt very sad that he would not be sleeping there that night. He almost launched the boat and rowed back to the beach. It was not too far, not quite, not yet….But there would be no point in going home without Mom and Dad. Without them, it wasn’t really home at all.

  So he turned his back on it, and watched the sun dip down into the western sea, and ate a sandwich.

  “What’s that you’re eating?” asked Mr. Culpeper.

  “Tuna mayonnaise,” said Oliver.

  The albatross snorted. “Newfangled muck.” He spread his wings and soared out over the ocean in the twilight, dipping down to snatch a fish out of the waves.

  Oliver sat watching the empty sea, hoping for a glimpse of the other islands. He watched until it grew too dark to see anything at all, and then curled up in a grassy space among the rocks, put his rucksack under his head for a pillow, and slept.

  All through the night the island kept moving. Oliver slept soundly, soothed by the island’s steady motion and the snore of the sea upon its shores. Then, through his dreams, he heard another sound.

  “Doof,” it went. And, “Ow!”

  Oliver sprang awake. The sky was palest gray, and a few last stars were fading. A wind from the west whispered the grasses.

  “Bother!” said someone nearby.

  It wasn’t Mr. Culpeper. The albatross was sleeping still, safe in his scruffy nest with his head stuffed under his wing.

  “Mom?” said Oliver hopefully. “Dad?”

  He clambered over the rocks to the beach. There on the shore sat a mermaid, rubbing her nose. “Who put this island here?” she asked.

  “Not me,” said Oliver.

  He had never seen a mermaid before. In fact he had thought they were just in stories. But then he’d never seen a moving island or a talking Diomedea exulans until yesterda
y, so he wasn’t as surprised as he might have been. The mermaid seemed to be about his own age, and she was starting to get a black eye.

  “There I was, swimming along, minding my own business,” she said, “and suddenly there’s an island in the way. It’s a danger to shipping, that’s what it is. It’s a wonder I wasn’t knocked unconscious.”

  “Have you seen any other islands?” asked Oliver. “My mom and dad are on one. I’m looking for them.”

  “Sorry,” said the mermaid. “I didn’t even see this one. My eyesight isn’t very good. I can hardly see you. Come over here; you’re just a blur.”

  Oliver went closer. The mermaid frowned at him with vague blue eyes.

  “Well,” she said, “you’re an odd-looking character.”

  Oliver thought that seemed pretty rich, coming from someone who was at least half fish, but he was a polite boy and did not try to argue. Instead he said, “My name’s Oliver.”

  “Mine’s Iris,” said the mermaid. “You don’t know of a place called Farsight Cove, do you? I was told there’s a beach optician there. That’s where I was going when your silly island got in my way.”

  This was not the first time her nearsightedness had got Iris into trouble. Apart from anything else, it made other mermaids laugh at her. Well, it was one of the things that made them laugh. All her sisters and cousins were beautiful creatures with eyesight as clear as their singing voices, and they liked to sit on rocks with comb in one hand and mirror in the other and sing eerie songs at passing sailors. Perhaps it was because mermen were all rather dull, stay-at-home sorts who didn’t much like mermaids’ company and preferred to lounge about in their grottoes reading newspapers and discussing the latest finball results. At any rate, the mermaids enjoyed the thought of all those sailors going home and telling everyone about the lovely mermaids who had sung to them, and being haunted by their singing ever after.