Lampfish of Twill

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  She paused to watch her nephew ladle her up a steaming bowl of fishmeal. It was his week to make breakfast and do the washing up. She was in charge of dinner and stoking the wood stove. Next week, they’d switch jobs, according to a schedule they had followed from their earliest months together.

  “Ezekiel Cantrip’s his name,” Aunt Opal went on, when Eric had served himself. “Zeke, people used to call him. He was an old fellow even when your father and I were children, and that was years after the spout spat him back.”

  “He looks about two hundred years old now,” Eric said. “And he wears oilskins the way the old-time fishcatchers did.”

  Aunt Opal nodded. “I remember,” she said. “Nobody wanted to get near him because he acted so oddly, whispering to himself, muttering, ignoring what people said to him. And then he’d go into one of his wild fits of laughing. People kept their young ones away whenever he came into town for his groceries. They’d call their dogs home. He’d been a traveler, you know, even before his run-in with the spout, so there was fear on that account as well.”

  “A traveler?” Eric looked up from his bowl.

  “Oh, yes. He left Twill for months at a time, sailed to the trading cities with the traders. And beyond. It made you think twice when you saw him. You wondered what sort of strange ideas he had stored in his head.”

  “He has some strange idea about the lampfish,” Eric said. “He doesn’t like us hunting them. Twice he’s come bothering me when he thinks I’ve gotten too close. And the way he looks at me, it gives me the shivers.”

  Aunt Opal smiled. “When I was small, there was a story passed among the children that old Zeke had unusual powers and could put a spell on you if you looked him in the eye. Some even believed he was related to The Blaster. Of course we all ran away when we saw him coming. And because he frightened us, we used to yell things at him. Nasty things, I’m afraid. He didn’t seem quite human, you see.”

  “Maybe he isn’t,” Eric replied. “He predicts things, and they come true. It’s almost as if he had some way of making them happen. He predicted the big storm.”

  “In Twill, anyone can do that,” said Aunt Opal. “I can predict a big storm right now, and it’s sure to happen. Maybe tomorrow, in fact. The Season of Storms is nearly upon us.”

  “Well, Mr. Cantrip predicted his storm five minutes before it came out of a clear blue sky. And last night he all but told me that Gullstone might escape. And now he has!”

  Eric got up and went to look out the dim window for the tenth time that morning. “Unless Gully got put under some mysterious spell himself, and stolen,” he added, darkly.

  “If I were a bird and someone tied me up at the end of a string, I’d try to escape, too,” Aunt Opal pointed out. “And eventually, I’d succeed. There’s no mystery in that.”

  It was all she had time to say because Twill’s red sun appeared on the horizon at that moment, and worries over the day’s catch pulled her thoughts away.

  “Please pay attention to your crab traps today and not to that idiot gull, who is bound to turn up when he wants and not a minute before,” she told Eric, rather severely, as she left. “We’ve fallen behind our usual catch totals and must work harder than ever if we’re to save enough to last through the bad season.”

  But Eric stood on by the window after she had gone, hoping to glimpse a familiar pair of wings. He went out back of the cottage and whistled and shouted into the vacant sky. The sun rose up, a brisk southwest wind took charge of the day, and still no sea gull appeared.

  He was wasting precious time, he knew, and he began to feel guilty. Aunt Opal would be furious if she came back and found him there. Actually, he was furious at himself. There was no excuse for this kind of hanging around. Gully would come back. He always came back. And if he didn’t come back…well? Well, what? Eric asked himself.

  “Well, I just wouldn’t be able to stand it,” he heard his voice say with an odd little quiver. “I just wouldn’t.

  “Gully!” he yelled again. He began to run across the fields toward the sea. Shortly after, he began to race, feeling rather that he’d slipped a leash himself as Aunt Opal’s cabin shrank into the distance behind him

  Is it possible that a person can live in a place all his life and not see the most obvious facts about it? Eric stood in a high field looking down at Twill’s coast. He’d combed the beaches and ledges near Cantrip’s searching for Gullstone, with no result. Now he had climbed up again to get a wider view, and though the point before him was one he knew well, he saw it suddenly in a whole new way.

  Strangle Point. He’d always assumed the place was named for horrible deaths that had occurred there: for people choked by their nets or wedged between tidal rocks or caught in the treacherous tangle of a lampfish’s mustache.

  Now he realized, looking down, that it was the shape of the point that accounted for its name. A thick neck of beach shot out into the sea, but halfway along its length the ocean had made inroads. It had eroded the neck, narrowing it in one spot to some fifty yards across, before the land swelled back to its proper width. Strangle Point was itself being strangled by the sea. To Eric, this seemed more ominous than his old sense of the place, and he hung back for a minute, deciding whether to go down.

  Below him, the distant forms of three sea gulls rose into the air and soared out across the water. He caught his breath. Was one Gully? A tiny sod-roofed cabin that he’d never noticed before stood in a clearing set back from the ocean. The birds had been perched there or somewhere close by, he thought. He started down the slope at once, and had not taken many steps when he saw the unmistakable figure of the old fishcatcher appear beside the cabin.

  “Congratulations! Congratulations, there!” The words swept up to him on the wind, shrill and alarming and irritating all at once. They bleated in his ears, over and over, until, looking up, Eric saw that the racket was not coming from the man below at all, but from the trio of gulls he had spotted earlier. Somehow, they had circled around without his noticing. They were flying directly overhead, keeping abreast of his descent.

  “Caw-qwawk! Caw-qwawk!” Congratulations indeed! What a strange mistake to make. He supposed it must come from feeling nervous about Gullstone. His imagination had leaped out and taken the upper hand. And yet, as he neared the figure waiting below, he thought he heard the words again, and others weirdly entangled in the shrieks of the gulls. This, combined with his new view of the point, seemed more than a little peculiar, and if not for Gully, Eric might well have turned around and gone home.

  Zeke Cantrip raised an ordinary hand in greeting, however, when he reached the cabin.

  “Ahoy, there! We thought you might blow in today!” The fellow looked larger than Eric remembered, perhaps because of his outfit. He was decked out in full deep-water fishing regalia: coat, hat, gloves, boots. A long black tarpaulin cape was tied over the top of everything.

  “Are you expecting bad weather here this morning?” Eric asked, glancing at the sky.

  “Not a bit!” roared the old man. “Just giving you a proper welcome. Your bird’s over there on the roof. Perfectly fit, he is. A worn place on his foot where the rope—”

  “Gully!” cried Eric, whirling around and catching sight of him. “There you are, you crazy gull!” He was nestled on the sod amid a mangy flock of wild sea gulls, looking unusually pleased with himself. But he flew down to Eric’s arm the moment it was offered.

  “He’s been just as worried as I was,” Eric said. “He’s not used to spending the night out all by himself in a strange place.”

  “What’s that?” The fishcatcher waggled an ear with his hand. “Speak up. Speak up.”

  “All alone in a strange place!” Eric yelled. “My sea gull!”

  “He’s had plenty of company, don’t trouble yourself on that score,” the old man shot back. “I wonder he’s not more suited to free-wandering nights with his own kind than the smoky backyard of a fisherman’s hut.”

  “Well, he isn’t,�
� Eric declared. He was now quite sure how Gullstone had come to be here. “And I’d appreciate it if he didn’t come again.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I said, leave him alone. He likes being with me!”

  “What, trussed and tied like a dinner table turkey?” Zeke Cantrip’s ancient eyes fixed themselves on Eric. “You can’t hold down what wants to fly up, nor keep a thing back that’s made to go on.”

  “You don’t understand. I keep him safe,” Eric protested.

  “Safe? Hah!” The fishcatcher turned and began to hobble toward his cabin. “Come along with me,” he called back. “I’ll show you what’s safe.”

  This did not seem very likely to Eric. In fact, his every sense was signaling danger. Strangle Point had a nasty reputation along the coast, and though the weather was calm at the moment, he did not trust either it or his eccentric host. Despite what he pretended, Mr. Cantrip seemed to hear and see perfectly well when he wished. Eric lowered Sir Gullstone to the ground and whispered to him fiercely,

  “You stay here. No going off by yourself anymore. I’ll be back in five minutes. Five minutes!”

  Then he followed Mr. Cantrip toward a shack that looked, on closer inspection, as if it had been built bare-handed, by a Robinson Crusoe deprived of tools and nails. The walls bristled with driftwood and seemed more woven than constructed. The roof sprouted weeds and brambles. The chimney was a leaning tower of tin cans stuck end on end together. Why the whole house hadn’t collapsed years ago or, more likely, gone up in flames, Eric didn’t know.

  “That chimney of yours is a fire hazard,” he couldn’t help telling the old man as the front door opened before him. He stepped forward bravely and marched inside.

  7

  IF ZEKE CANTRIP MADE a reply, Eric never heard it. Inside the cabin door, his mouth fell open. He stared at the walls and into corners of the room. He looked up at the rafters—at least he supposed the rafters were somewhere there. With everything hanging down, crowding against everything else, it was hard to tell. In some places, a person would hardly be able to walk upright.

  “What is this?” he gasped. “What is all this stuff?”

  Across the floor, Mr. Cantrip was lowering himself stiffly onto a homemade barrel chair and didn’t immediately answer. He glanced up a moment later, though, and seeing the expression on Eric’s face, smiled and raised a hand.

  “My collection!” he announced, proudly. “Let me introduce you. My small collection of relics. From the beaches, you know. Over time. And a pinch of gear from the old days.”

  “A pinch of gear! But you’ve got tons of equipment here. I don’t even know what half of it’s for. I’ve never even heard of it!”

  The fishcatcher smiled.

  “What is this, for instance?” Eric grasped a prickly looking object.

  “Well, in the ancient days it hung from your belt, and when you spotted a crab far out in the current you’d throw it and—”

  “And this?” interrupted Eric, holding forth a grisly, hairy clump of something.

  “Ah, yes. A lampfish mustache. Fascinating, isn’t it? I came across it one day after a storm when I was—

  “And this!”

  “Well, I—”

  “And this!”

  “Yes, one day I happened to—”

  “And this!”

  Each thing was stranger than the last. There were shiny mirror stones and a pearl the size of a pear. There were glass water masks and deadly darts and javelins. (“Used to be more underwater work done here in the olden times,” the fishcatcher explained.) There were traps of every shape, made out of every material, employing every trick ever known for catching fish and crabs. There were compasses and old maps, ships’ rudders and transoms, spyglasses and shark fins, rope ladders and eel skins. The items dangled from the walls or were draped from the ceiling or piled in corners along with many, many other objects unrecognizable to Eric. Or if recognized, they looked so oddly out of context—a group of stuffed seahawks, for instance, gathering dust on a ship’s wheel—or were such a strange color—everything was bathed in a rather eerie reddish light—that it was easy to confuse the ordinary with the unusual, the real with the imagined, the disgusting with the beautiful, the fragment with the whole.

  In the midst of all this, Eric turned and turned, gazed and gazed, touched and drew back, until his eyes fell again on the old man. He was grinning and nodding and offering random comments from his seat:

  “It’s a nice collection, yes. That’s a red herring, did you guess? Those false teeth were carved from a whale’s jawbone. I like to remind myself how far we’ve come since the early days. A nice collection, I always say. Will you sit down for a minute? No need to hurry off, now that you’ve come such a way. Your bird’s safe on my ground. We could talk of certain things. We could—”

  Eric let out a cry. He had identified the source of the reddish light, and now he moved toward a glass tank half-hidden by a curtain behind the fishcatcher’s seat. Its glow was so powerful that his eyes were dazzled, though only a portion of the tank was in view.

  “But what is this?” he exclaimed. “What have you got here? It looks like a…But it couldn’t be. Still, it does look exactly like the glow of a…”

  When he hesitated again, Zeke Cantrip reached out to pull away the rest of the curtain and, with brilliant light flooding the room, supplied the word for him:

  “A lampfish? Dead on course you are! I thought you might be interested. This lamp’s smaller than most I’ve run into. I think it must’ve lost its grip on the current and been swept away. I found it washed up on Strangle Beach after the last storm. Are you amazed?” he asked eagerly, rubbing his hands together.

  Eric was amazed. He was dumbfounded. He could not at first see the creature, because of its bright light. But in a moment, an outline appeared to him. Then the great mustaches showed themselves, swirling gently against the glass sides of the tank. He saw a pair of intelligent green eyes turn to examine him through the water. The huge pink body wallowed, then stilled, rippled, then rested. Every bone was visible, every organ and every vein At its center throbbed the heart, steadily, monstrously, like a great bass drum beaten from within.

  “How’d you ever get it here?” Eric managed to ask, after several attempts to activate his voice had failed.

  “I’ve got a crew!” The fishcatcher winked at him. “Good workers, tried and true. Been with me for years. You saw them on the roof coming in.”

  “On the roof! The only thing on the roof, besides my Gullstone, that is, was a bunch of wild sea gulls!”

  “That’s my crew! They know how to take an order. Understand every word. Used to be, when I first moved out here by myself, I had nobody to talk to. So I’d talk to the gulls just to hear my own voice. ‘Congratulations!’ I’d call out, every morning getting up. ‘It’s a fine day for fish.’ Or if the sky looked bad: ‘It’s a black day for fish’ I’d yell. ‘D’ya think the wind’ll change?’

  “It got so they began to expect my talking, and they’d hang around and wait for me to start. And then, after a while, I guess they began to see what I was talking about, because I’d mention some little thing, like a trap snarled in weed, and they’d look into the problem with me. So gradually we got to working together, with them being my manpower and my crew. Of course, they don’t exactly say ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ like a real captain gets.”

  The fishcatcher went into a brief laughing fit about this remark, while Eric looked worriedly over his shoulder. This was strange talk if ever he’d heard it. He remembered uneasily how the squawks of the gulls ushering him down to Strangle Point had seemed to contain words.

  “I think I’ll just go out for a minute and see if my bird is all right…” he tried to say, but the old man’s hearing had taken a drastic turn for the worse. He plowed right over the top of Eric’s words and proceeded to tell a story. It was a loony story, and it was told with such alarming scowls and giggles that Eric began to feel even more nervous.
He edged closer to the cabin door.

  “There it was, a lampfish floundering on the sand!” Zeke Cantrip was saying, though any sane person in Twickham would tell you it was impossible. Lampfish didn’t flounder on dry land. “I saw it and I knew it was too big for my crew to handle. They mostly are. So I ordered my birds to call in reinforcements, and pretty soon a whole crowd of gulls turned up. Maybe your sea gull was one. Did he go off suddenly on the morning after the last storm?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Eric replied tartly. “He was inside Aunt Opal’s cabin with me.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. It’s always a big show when we take a lampfish off the beach. Gulls come from everywhere, up and down the coast.”

  “You’ve found lampfish before?”

  “Sure we have. Many times. After the big storms. Strangle Beach catches them up the way it’s shaped. As I was saying, when the gulls all got here, I told my crew to pass on the order to fetch my big net down to the beach, which they did. Then we tried to shove the fish onto the net. The lamps don’t like that much, have their pride like anyone about being pushed around. So it thrashed pretty bad before we finally got it set. Then the birds took hold of the net and tried to fly, and after a lot of beating and flapping (I wish you could’ve seen it!), the net was lifted off the sand and they flew the lampfish out to deep water.”

  “They flew a lampfish through the air?” Eric said.

  “We’ve got to, to help them out. The fish get quiet on the way. They can see what’s happening, that we’re not out to murder them like everybody else on this coast. But in the case of this one, it was injured. We all saw it right away. Something was wrong with its balance, and when it went into the water, it couldn’t swim. Kept rolling over backwards.

  “So we got the net around it again and flew it up here, where I have this old aquarium left over from the last century. People used to stock up on fish for the Season of Storms, you know. It was an idea that never worked very well, though. You couldn’t keep ’em alive long enough to last even halfway through the season.”