by Philip Reeve
Cliff went right up to the wreck. He nudged it with his head and tugged at it with his stumpy, stony arms. At last it shifted and rolled gently sideways.
Oliver jumped up. “That’s it!” he hooted, although Oliver knew the Rambling Isle couldn’t hear him. “You’ve done it! Now come up!”
Cliff settled the weight of the ancient submarine on his head and began to rise, carefully, carefully, with swirls of sand glittering in the sea around him. He came up under the dinghy in a great roaring and rushing and bubbling of water and a flopping and floundering of stranded fish. Most of them were washed back into the sea as Cliff continued to rise and the waters poured off him. Soon there was beach beneath Oliver’s dinghy again. On the top of Cliff’s head lay the Water Mole, all wet and startling and shiny in the sunlight. The striped eel had slithered off and the gilded bowsprit glimmered faintly, pointing at the sky.
It was the finest wig an island ever wore.
“Yay!” shouted Oliver, jumping out of the submarine and doing a victory dance among the rock pools.
“Yay!” said Iris, flopping ashore and wringing out her hair.
“Yay!” rumbled Cliff, and “Yay!” cawed Mr. Culpeper. Only the sarcastic strands of floating weed were unimpressed. “Showy,” they complained, still keeping a safe distance from Cliff’s shores. “Shipwrecks are so last season.” But they were only seaweed, so who cared what they thought?
Then Mr. Culpeper, gliding down to perch on the coral-encrusted flagstaff, said suddenly, “What’s that?”
Oliver turned to look. There behind him on the weedy sea, an island stood. He could not believe that he hadn’t noticed it before.
It was not really an island, of course. It was another Rambling Isle, and it had crept out of a nearby fog bank and sneaked up behind Cliff while everyone was distracted by the raising of the submarine.
Although Oliver did not recognize it, it was one of the same islands that had been resting in Deepwater Bay the day his parents disappeared. He had not been able to see it from his bedroom window because the headland hid it, but Mr. and Mrs. Crisp had seen it as they motored away from the beach in their dinghy and had steered straight towards it, because they could tell at once that it was easily the most interesting.
It was tall and rocky, and on its summit dark trees clustered. Among the trees stood a ruined temple, crumbly and overgrown. Around the temple towered huge stone heads with empty eyes and open mouths. They looked a bit like the famous statues on Easter Island. (In fact they were where the Easter Islanders had got the idea from, for this Rambling Isle had passed close to Easter Island long ago.)
“Remarkable!” Oliver’s dad had shouted as the dinghy bounced across the waves of Deepwater Bay. “Polynesian? Pre-Columbian?”
“A whole unknown civilization!” declared Oliver’s mom, snapping photos of those weird stone heads as the dinghy swept into the island’s shadow and they circled it, searching for a place to land.
There was a beach on the seaward side. A beach of black sand, with steps carved in the cliff behind it, winding up past crumbled walls and watchful statues to those strange ruins on the summit.
Poor foolish Crisps! They were so eager to explore that they did not bother dragging their dinghy up above the tide line, which everyone knows is one of the first rules of exploring. They just left it there upon the shining sand and ran up those stairs. The clicking of their cameras echoed among the ruins, and so did their excited cries, until they reached the ruined temple.
It was not quite as ruined as it had looked from sea level. Someone had put double glazing in its windows, and a chimney poked from the roof, puffing out little curlicues of wood smoke.
“Oh! This island is inhabited!” said Oliver’s dad, trying not to sound too disappointed, even though he had hoped to be the first person to discover a lost civilization.
“But inhabited by whom?” asked his wife, imagining lost tribes, priest-kings, and ancient wisdom.
That was when the island shivered. That was when it shook. “Earthquake!” cried Mrs. Crisp, and “Volcano!” yelled her husband. The island sank a little. Down on its shore, waves swirled up the beach, lifted the abandoned dinghy, and carried it gently out into the bay. And from the open mouths of all those stone heads there came a noise: a rustling, a whispering, a scrabbling, a jostling, a strange, demented jabbering that grew louder and louder as the island started moving out to sea….
—
And now here it stood, a few hundred yards from Cliff, with Oliver staring at it in surprise.
“Look at all those creepy old heads!” said Iris.
Cliff turned beneath them, looking. “Oh dear!” he rumbled. “Oh no! It’s the Thurlstone!”
“What’s the Thurlstone?” asked Oliver.
“It is very old, and very bad,” Cliff said. “Bad men did human sacrifices in that temple on its top long ago, and the blood trickled down inside it and turned it wicked. They say it’s quite hollow, and rotten to the core. Oh dear!”
The Thurlstone lifted itself a little way out of the water. Massive weedy shoulders rose into the sunlight. Water drained out through cracks and fissures in the isle’s sides. Its mean black eyes stared hard at Cliff through veils of falling water. A mouth like a sea cave opened and a stony voice said, “Nice shipwreck you have there.”
“It’s ours!” Iris shouted back. “We found it!”
Her voice sounded very small and thin and shrill after the thunder of the Thurlstone’s. It boomed again. “Don’t like the mermaid, though,” it said. “Mermaids are vulgar.”
Now that he came to look properly at it, Oliver saw that the Thurlstone was wearing quite an elaborate seawig. Loads of plaited seaweed were arranged around its cliffs, glittering with bits of broken glass and shiny metal. Old flip-flops dangled from the branches of those dark and twisted trees, and among the rocks where the temple stood a trawler and a rusty battleship were perched. From the cliffs on either side of its face two big glass globes dangled in cradles of knotted rope, like earrings, or baubles on a Christmas tree. Inside the globes, something moved.
Oliver snatched his rucksack and ferreted inside it for his binoculars. He focused on one of those glassy danglers. The thing inside it was his mom. He yelped and swung the binoculars. There inside the other globe was Dad. The explorers seemed quite unharmed. Oliver began to jump up and down on the beach. He waved and shouted. When he looked through the binoculars again, he saw that his mom had spotted him. He saw his dad scribble something in his explorer’s notebook and press it flat against the inside of his glass prison for Oliver to read.
—
Now his mother was scribbling too, and pressing a note of her own to the glass.
But the Thurlstone was coming closer. Ignoring mean comments and backhanded compliments from the floating weed, it shouldered its way through the sea. Octopuses writhed their tentacles among its eyebrows, and a shark fell out of its nose like a fierce booger. Up on its forehead a little platform had been built, and there a boy stood, looking down.
The Thurlstone was so close by then that Oliver didn’t need his binoculars anymore. He could see the boy quite clearly without them. He was older than Oliver: a tall teenager, balancing precariously on bean-sprout legs and about to tumble clumsily into adulthood. He wore sea boots and a sailor’s uniform with all sorts of gold braid and medals and fancy finery all over it.
When the gap of open water between Cliff and the Thurlstone had narrowed to a stone’s throw, the Thurlstone stopped in a swirl of foam and spoke again. “Want it,” it said, staring at the Water Mole.
Up on its brow the boy picked up a big brass megaphone and bellowed through it.
“Ooh, of all the cheek!” squealed Iris. “We found it! It’s ours!”
“You’re not having my wig!” rumbled Cliff.
Oliver just cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Give me back my mom and dad!”
The other boy threw back his head and laughed. It was the sort of laugh
that told you instantly he was not about to let poor Mr. and Mrs. Crisp go. “Ha ha ha!” he cackled. “So they are yours, are they? Well, you should have taken better care of them. They make nice additions to the Thurlstone’s seawig, don’t you think? But not as nice as that fine submarine your island’s found. Hand it over now, and spare yourself a lot of unpleasantness.”
“Who are you, anyway?” asked Iris. “You’re very full of yourself.”
“My name,” the boy said importantly, “is Stacey de Lacey.”
“But that’s a girl’s name!” blurted Oliver.
Stacey de Lacey’s face turned a dark shade of red. “Silence!” he shouted. “Stacey is one of those names that can be for a boy or a girl! Like Hilary, or Leslie, or…um…Anyway, when the Night of the Seawigs rolls around, my Thurlstone shall have the finest wig of all! That submarine is just the thing we need to top it off, and if you won’t give it to us, we shall just have to take it!”
“Mad,” said Iris in an undertone, “quite mad.”
Stacey de Lacey clapped his hands. “Come, my lovelies!” he shouted, and laughed with wicked glee.
From the giant statues that grinned and snarled upon the Thurlstone’s massive head, there came a rustling, a whispering, a scrabbling, a jostling, a strange, demented jabbering….
—
No wonder Stacey de Lacey sounded gleeful. It was quite a new feeling for him, giving orders. When he’d been growing up, nobody had ever taken much notice of him. His parents, who were rich and busy, barely paid him any attention. The other children at school all hated him. And why did they hate him? Well, actually it was because he was a nasty, boastful bully, but Stacey didn’t realize that: he was sure it was just because of his name. “Stacey can be a boy’s name too,” he would tell them when they laughed at it. They never believed him. Angry and all alone, he took long walks on the beach near his house, dreaming of the terrible revenge he would take on them when he was older.
All sorts of things washed up on that beach. As Stacey de Lacey strode along with his hands in his pockets, he was forever kicking aside old flip-flops, fisherman’s floats, and plastic bottles with mysterious foreign labels. One day, after a storm, he found a shingle covered with stinking seaweed, uprooted from some deep hollow of the seabed. It was a type of seaweed that he had never noticed before. It had thick stalks, each as tall as Stacey, with a fat green bulb at the top. Stacey picked up one of the stalks and began cracking it like a bullwhip as he stomped along. He imagined lashing his classmates with it.
“Stacey is not a girl’s name!” he shouted. Crack! “You’ll be sorry when I’m famous and powerful!” he yelled. Crack! “Just you wait!” he hollered. “One day I’ll…”
Crack, squelch, splat!
The green bulb at the end of the sea whip burst and out came a splurt of dirty water, and something else, something that moved, scrabbling and burrowing its way down into the tangles of dead weed that were heaped along the tide line.
Stacey went closer and prodded the weed piles with his toe. Something was definitely rustling around in there. He bent down for a closer look. Suddenly the weed was torn aside and a hideous little fanged and grinning face stared up at him. Then two little web-fingered hands seized the toe of his sneaker and the creature sank its teeth into the rubber.
“Yow!” shouted Stacey de Lacey, doing a triple backwards somersault in his surprise. The creature flew off his shoe. By the time he had clambered up and dusted the sand out of his eyes, it was crouching on a nearby rock, watching him. It looked like an ugly little monkey with webbed hands and feet and greasy green fur.
“Get lost!” he yelled angrily.
The sea monkey cowered and crept away over the top of the rock, out of sight.
Stacey was impressed. He wasn’t used to people doing what he told them.
“Come back!” he shouted.
The monkey reappeared.
“My name is Stacey de Lacey,” he said, and watched the monkey suspiciously. It didn’t laugh; it didn’t even giggle.
“Stacey is not a girl’s name!” he said. Still nothing. Feeling encouraged, he told it, “You’re mine! You will do everything I say!”
The monkey drew itself to attention and saluted.
If Stacey de Lacey had been a different sort of boy, he might have thought, “I’ve found a friend!” But Stacey had never really wanted friends. He thought, “I’ve found a servant!”
He looked around.
All about him, the beach was littered with whips of the strange weed, each with its sea-green bulb. Was there a monkey in every one? There must be loads of them! Hundreds! He picked up a strand and squeezed the bulb until it popped like a pimple.
Out tumbled another monkey. Excitedly, Stacey popped another, and then another. “Help me!” he ordered the chittering, jittering monkeys, and they ran with him along the tide line, squeezing and popping, squeezing and popping, until a whole army of sea monkeys was scuttling behind him.
Stacey de Lacey knew his parents would never let him keep anything as stinky and repulsive-looking as these monkeys. Luckily, there was a particularly large and slimy rock pool that he knew of, around the curve of the cliffs, where nobody but him ever went. He led the monkeys there and watched them pour into the pool. They were as happy underwater as above it. They crouched in the shadows of the pool and looked up at Stacey with wicked, wary eyes.
“I am your master!” he said proudly.
—
After that, Stacey de Lacey turned his thoughts to the sea. If sea monkeys were real, then what other strange things might the oceans hold? Between trips to the rock pool, where he fed and gloated over his growing monkey-band, he talked to sailors at the harbor. He peered at old books in secret libraries. He learned of the Hallowed Shallows. He learned of mermaids and drowned cities. He learned of the Rambling Isles, and of the gathering that they held on the Night of the Seawigs.
“Monkeys are all very well,” said Stacey de Lacey to himself, “but if I had my own Rambling Isle, think how powerful I’d be then!” He liked the idea of roving the world on his own island, being mean to people.
So he started scouring the beach for interesting things the sea washed up and leaving them above the tide line on a tall rock just offshore. If the Night of the Seawigs was real, he thought, no Rambling Isle would be able to resist such top-notch wig ingredients. And sure enough, one foggy evening, he heard great sloshing footsteps move through the waves towards that rock, and saw a giant shape moving in the mist. He heard the Rambling Isle grumbling to itself as it sifted through the pile of driftwood and old fishing nets he’d left. “This stuff’s no good,” he heard it say. “This won’t help me win….”
“Hey, Island!” shouted Stacey de Lacey. The grumbling stopped. The thing in the fog stood listening. “You want to win this stupid Seawigs thing?” Stacey yelled. “You should steal the best stuff from other islands’ wigs. And if you can’t do that, just nobble them: ruin their wigs so they can’t win!”
As luck would have it, the island Stacey was talking to was none other than the bad old Thurlstone, meanest of all the Rambling Isles. The Thurlstone liked the way this boy thought. “How?” it asked.
“With my help!” said Stacey, and as the Thurlstone loomed out of the fog to peer down at him, he spread his arms out proudly to show it the gibbering, jabbering swarm of monkeys crowded on the shingle behind him.
“I have an army of monkeys!” he said.
—
That’s what the green tide was, pouring out of the mouths and eyes of the Thurlstone’s old stone heads and rushing across the sea. Sea monkeys! Small and smelly in their coats of greasy green fur, they giggled horribly as they swam towards Cliff, or scampered across the mats of drifting weed. “Don’t mind us,” grumbled the weed mats, but the sea monkeys were immune to sarcasm.
Up Cliff’s beaches they rushed, knocking poor Iris off her rock.
They sank their teeth and claws into the orange inflatable dinghy and popped i
t, just for laughs. Oliver tried to stop them. He picked up monkeys and hurled them back at the sea, but more were landing all the time and they were scary and dangerous-looking. They bared their dirty yellow fangs and screeched at him.
The monkey tide sloshed up onto Cliff’s bouldery summit and lapped around the Water Mole. The sea monkeys were so small that Oliver did not think they could shift the submarine, but there were so many of them that they did. The Water Mole lifted from its perch, afloat again on a sea of snot-green fur. Oliver and Iris had to jump out of the way as the chattering monkeys rushed back with it into the sea. The Thurlstone dipped down, until only Stacey’s balcony and the old stones and the trees around the temple showed, and the monkeys swam and swirled and struggled and shoved the Water Mole onto his head.
“So long, losers!” called Stacey de Lacey. “We’ll see you at the Hallowed Shallows—if you still think it’s worth turning up, of course.”
The Thurlstone turned and moved off. The glass orbs that were Oliver’s parents’ prisons bobbed on either side of it, towed on their tethers of rope, with Mr. and Mrs. Crisp waving sad goodbyes inside them. Sea monkeys went scurrying back to their nests in the old stone heads. The Water Mole shone so brightly in the slanting sunlight that Oliver could see the gleam of it long after the wicked island had dwindled to a speck on the horizon.
As the Thurlstone vanished, all Cliff’s newfound hopefulness drained away. The fight went out of him. Iris and Oliver felt him slump. They couldn’t blame him. Poor old giant! So much of his golden sand and drifts of flotsam had been washed away when he stooped to fetch the Water Mole. Now that it was gone, his stony head was even barer than before.
