Lampfish of Twill

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Eric had been glancing about during the last part of this explanation. Now he interrupted in excitement. “Do you suppose my parents could be here somewhere? They were swept away in a storm like many of these others. And were never seen again!”

  “You can go around and look if you wish,” the fishcatcher replied, “but it’s not very likely, I’m afraid. The folks you see here are the lucky few who survived the drop. For every one of them, hundreds of others perished on the trip down. Or, what’s more probable, they perished in the sea and never made it into the whirlpool at all.”

  Despite these discouraging words, Eric insisted on examining each and every one of the grove’s inhabitants, unless they had entirely vanished behind bark. He questioned those who could be questioned and checked the fringes of the settlement for recent arrivals. (His parents would have looked like spring chickens in this venerable crowd.) But in the end, he came away with nothing and sank down on the ground so sadly and limply that the fishcatcher was alarmed and spoke up.

  “Listen here, young fellow. It takes a rare caliber of traveler to navigate the spouts to Underwhirl. You should be proud that you yourself have managed, though it was with the help of an old hand like me.” The fishcatcher’s eyes glittered.

  “What’s more, I have a return journey to think about and can’t take the chance of being weighted down by a moper. It’s a dangerous business, the return. Not something any of these folks ever dreamed of trying.” He motioned at the firmly rooted settlement.

  “And that’s why I’d advise you to shake a leg, and keep your eyes bright, and walk about whenever possible,” Mr. Cantrip went on in a louder voice. He peered at Eric with more concern. “And don’t be caught napping if you want to get back to Twill!” he shouted.

  Unaccountably, Eric was nodding off. A blissful tiredness was invading his bones. The old man’s voice became a buzz in his ear. He lay back in the grass between tree roots and gazed through the boughs at the sky. The lampfish were there, drifting about. Once again Eric was soothed by their peacefulness and envied them the safety of this extraordinary world so far from Twill. He was about to close his eyes and dive head first into a long and delicious sleep when—

  “The gull! The gull! Something’s wrong with the gull!” Mr. Cantrip’s voice rang out like a bell.

  Good grief, what a jolt! Eric had completely forgotten Sir Gullstone since their arrival at the settlement. Now his eyes alighted upon a heap of feathers fallen in the midst of the grove. It was a heap that, even as Eric watched, made a painful leap into the air and crashed to the ground like a broken kite.

  “Oh, no! Gully!”

  “That’s the trouble with birds. They never give up,” Zeke remarked, as Eric rushed wildly to the sea gull’s side. “The poor thing’s been slamming himself around ever since we got here. He’s not going to last very long at this rate. We may have to cast off sooner than I’d planned.”

  “He’s not a poor thing and he is going to last!” Eric practically screamed as he knelt on the ground. He picked up Gullstone and set him on his feet, but the big bird winced and cried out and jumped away. Then he crouched down and gave Eric a hard look.

  “He’s hurt somewhere! That’s what he does when he’s hurt.”

  “It’s his wing, most likely,” the fishcatcher said, “from trying so hard to fly. If you can get your hands around him, I’ll take a closer look. There’s a way to make a splint that might do him some good.”

  So Eric approached Gullstone and tried to take him in his arms, but the bird got away and hid in a bush. From the bush he fled behind Captain David Jones and nestled in his roots. And from there he ran squawking out of the grove, and though he did not move very fast, Eric moved slower, it was apparent that Underwhirl’s insidious slowing process was very much at work on them both.

  Gullstone had panicked by now. He could not stop hurling himself forward even after Eric had dropped behind and halted. On and on he ran, appearing briefly on rises, then vanishing into dips in the land and reappearing further off. His anguished cries traveled back to Eric. The bird was trying to launch himself again, despite the wound in his wing.

  “No, Gully. Stop that! Come back here. We’ll fix it.”

  He would not come. When Eric looked around for the fishcatcher, he saw that the old man had abandoned the chase. He was crouched on the ground just outside the settlement, and with his head thrown back, he was shouting at the sky. What he shouted Eric could not hear, because his voice was erased by the weighty distance between them. In the other direction, Gully’s cries were being muffled, too. They grew fainter as the bird moved further away.

  “Help!” Eric shrieked. “Gullstone’s going off!” The fishcatcher could not hear him and paid no attention. As Eric watched, he stood up and raised his arms slowly into the air, assuming the same powerful stance as he had on the high rock that morning when the lampfish at Dead Man’s Point was killed. He appeared to be conjuring or calling for something.

  And then Eric saw that he was being answered. One of the lampfish was dropping toward the ground. It moved in Mr. Cantrip’s direction and hovered for a moment, blimplike, over his head. Then the fish dropped the remaining feet to the ground and cut off Eric’s view of the old man. A moment later, it rose. But when its body cleared the ground—Eric stared in horror—Mr. Cantrip had disappeared. He no longer stood where he had been, nor was he anywhere around the settlement.

  The lampfish went up lightly into the air. It drifted away, becoming lost in a rosy flotilla of other fish. A long and dreadful silence followed. Looking down, Eric found himself alone upon the vast sweep of Underwhirl’s landscape. He turned toward the rise where the gull had last appeared.

  “Gully! Please come back!”

  There was no movement there, or anywhere in the whole unchanging land. And though he tried to go after the bird with brave bursts of running and walking, it wasn’t long before Eric also became a stationary part of the view. The weight of the place overwhelmed him. He could not even retrace his steps to the settlement, for what little use that might have been. Without Gullstone, it no longer mattered where or when or how he was. He dropped down to rest for the third or thirteenth or thirtieth time (it was impossible to keep track) and in the end he simply could not get up.

  15

  EVERY ONCE IN A while, Eric yelled, “Gully!” Or, “Zeke, you rat! Come back this minute!” Or, despairingly as time passed, “I’m here. Here!”

  Time was not really passing, he reminded himself, because nothing passed in Underwhirl. It was his own mind that made time seem to pass, that had learned time so well, it could not stop dividing before from after, now from then—even when there was nothing left to divide.

  He yelled to let off steam.

  “Aunt Opal! Mrs. Holly! Here I am!” Up in Twill, his voice would have made some mark, even if his aunt hadn’t heard. A gull flapping by might have looked at him warily. An echo might have started up. The air might have vibrated a little. An ant might have scuttled away. Here in this unmoving countryside, his yells left no trace of having been. Nothing received the noise and nothing reacted. Or if, somewhere, something heard, it paid no attention. It ignored him in the same way the ancient trees in the settlement had ignored him, because he was small and short-lived and their attention was fixed on the long-range view.

  Eric turned his face to the sky. Overhead, schools of lampfish streamed and floated. Sometimes they came together in clumps, sometimes they drifted apart. Sometimes they were high up and small to the eye, sometimes they dropped low, eclipsing half the sky. Aimless they looked, mindless and meaningless, and yet Eric wondered if there wasn’t some pattern at work up there, some rhythm or order that might help him if he could only see it. It was the way of things in Underwhirl, he was beginning to understand. The pattern might not be easy to detect. In some cases, like the long-range tree conversations, it might be beyond the reach of ordinary, time-ridden senses. But, maybe, if he looked long enough, a key would emerge. Even now
, sharpening his eyes, he noticed something interesting. Scattered as the lampfish appeared, they were all moving in a similar direction.

  Eric sat up. As he watched, a haphazard mass made up of hundreds of fish began to assume peculiar forms in the sky. The sprawl gathered into a luscious-looking cream puff shape, then became a potbellied stove, then rounded again into a flushed moon that gradually began to flatten. Meanwhile, through all these transformations, the fish continued to drift in a counterclockwise direction. Their rotation was picking up speed.

  Eric got to his feet. Now the rosy bodies were overlapped and beginning to blend together. Round and round the lampfish flew, their great mustaches rippling and entangling, whipping up the air. A light breeze blew down and crossed Eric’s cheek.

  “Wind!” he cried, and reached his hand up for more.

  There was more. In no time, a small gale was blowing across Underwhirl’s lands, and the lampfish had become a glowing wheel of current in the sky. Eric’s hair whirled around his head. He swept it back from his eyes and shouted with excitement. After the weight, the terrible stillness of Underwhirl, these old feelings of sweep and swirl, of drag and pull, seemed almost unbearably thrilling.

  But something else was beginning to happen. The revolving wheel was changing. Its center was falling in, dropping with a funnel-like shape toward the ground while the rim went on spinning high above. Down and down came the whirling form, nosing here and there in a shortsighted way, as if it were searching for something. Eric knew what it was by now. He cried out for Gully one last time and, though the wind was strong, raised his arms in the air.

  In a moment, quite gently considering the turbulence, he felt himself lifted. He rose off the ground and was held briefly at some calm center, as if his weight were being assessed and a certain balance sought. Then—whoosh—he was drawn upward, and though he knew that many lampfish surrounded him, they seemed to meld before his eyes into one great body that spun and spun him rosily up the spout.

  For that was what it was, of course. The spout. The whirlpool. Even as Eric watched, it began to take more recognizable shape around him. He saw how its energy came from the lampfish alone, how their powerful swirl set a current in motion that drove up toward Twill like a furious drill. So, it was the lampfish who’d kept the channel open all these years, playing against the moon and the upper world’s rule of change. Lights the fish were, yes. And guides when need be. But before all else, they’d made the spouts for themselves. To escape from Underwhirl, Eric guessed, just as he was doing now. To break the iron grip of their world and rise up to the wild, free currents above. But, what was that?

  “Gully?”

  A vague outline of something was paddling toward him. He saw the glimmer of a feather, the golden flash of an eye. A rubbery thunk, thunk reached his ears, as of tarpaulin moving through water.

  “Mr. Cantrip! Is that you?”

  “Ahoy! Ahoy!” came the answer, and Eric’s heart leaped. It was both, man and bird! They were approaching side by side along the spout’s slow-turning wall. Since this was now composed almost entirely of seawater, there was much floundering and not a little coughing and sputtering as the three came joyfully together.

  “Watch the gull!” Zeke warned. “He’s torn his wing. I had the devil of a time trying to find him down there. He’d crept into a hole and couldn’t be spied from the air.

  “But where were you!” Eric demanded, angrily. “You left me all alone.”

  The old man shook his head and addressed himself to Gullstone, who had rushed headlong for Eric at the first sight of him and now crouched snugly inside his arm.

  “How do you like that for a show of thanks? Here I perform miracles of search, find, and escape, and the boy complains about a few minutes left alone.”

  “A few minutes! It was hours,” Eric said. “Or maybe even days. What were you doing going up in that fish? You made a spell, didn’t you. I saw it happen.”

  “Up? Spell? What do you mean? You’re making me sound like some small-time wizard.” The fishcatcher winked at Gully, who gave Eric the sort of unreadable yellow stare that sea gulls are famous for.

  “Gully! You’re no help at all! Whose side are you on anyway?”

  Next, Zeke Cantrip was struck by another infuriating case of deafness. He would not hear a single word put to him, though Eric was dying to report his discovery about the lampfish and the spout, and to press the old man for more systems and schemes. Flocks of new ideas were rising in his mind, and new explanations for things he had seen in Underwhirl. But suddenly, there was no time to interrogate Zeke anyway, or even to feel relief at having escaped that leaden land. The spout had begun to spin faster.

  All the while, the group had been slowly ascending with the current, moving around and up the bowl-shaped wall of the whirlpool. When Eric looked down, he saw the rosy glow of the Underwhirl lampfish shining up toward them. The fish had stopped rising and were now being left behind. As their warm light receded, the water itself cooled and then turned cold.

  Looking ahead, Eric saw the watery walls over his head begin to churn and race, to bulge and tear loose from the confinement of their sides. These renegade surges crashed together, producing clouds of spray. Higher up, when the spray cleared, Eric could see mountainous swells and waves flying toward one another. They smashed together with such terrific force that the vibrations shivered the whole of the spout’s tremendous bowl.

  Beside him, the fishcatcher clutched his arm. “Now, Eric,” he said, “final instructions before the fray. And listen carefully, for we’ve arrived amidst a storm.”

  The old man’s face had turned as gray as the water around them, Eric saw. There was no sign of his usual teasing and good humor.

  “It’s Twill, isn’t it? We’re coming home.”

  “Aye, Twill. What else? Our marvelous coast.” The trace of a giggle flicked through his voice. Eric grabbed his shoulder.

  “Tell me quickly,” he said. “Say what we need to do.”

  Zeke Cantrip wet his lips and gazed for a moment at Gullstone. Then he spoke, low and fast.

  “First, expect no help from the big fish above. They are as much at the mercy of Twill’s storms as you, and must guard themselves. A dwindling species they are, and know it all too well. Those who die above are replaced by those below, but in Underwhirl, as you have seen, nothing new is ever made. The cloudfish there are the last of the lot. Where they once rose in droves to our restless upper world, now they replace themselves frugally, one by one. So many in these later years have been killed.”

  Over their heads, two giant waves collided and broke, sending strong ripples down the walls of the whirlpool.

  “What else,” cried Eric. “Quick. Hurry!”

  “Don’t try to hold the bird,” the fishcatcher went on. “He’s hurt already and would certainly be crushed by your arms when the big waves start. Let him go as he will, this time above all others. As for you, move with the swirl—don’t pit yourself against it. And if you make the ocean’s surface, howl and rage toward the sky.”

  “Howl and rage!” said Eric. “But why? What shall I howl?”

  “Anything!” shouted the fishcatcher. The current was beginning to carry them upward faster, and to drown out his voice. “Yell, scream, and shriek! The trick is to be heard, to show them where you are.”

  “Who?” shouted Eric. “There’ll be no one out in this!” Despite the old man’s warning, he drew Gullstone against his chest.

  The waves were turning fierce. Mr. Cantrip was rolled away from them. He was tossed and turned around like a twig in a gale, and sucked out of sight and thrown near them again. Gullstone screeched when he saw this, and beat his wings, breaking Eric’s grasp. Then, finding himself suddenly airborne, he veered toward the fishcatcher. He landed with a squawk on his shoulder and clung with all his strength.

  “Away, you crazy bird. There’s no use staying with me!” the old man roared, trying to knock him off. “Save the boy, do you hear? Go and gath
er the crew. Fly off and bring them here. Fly, I say! Fly!”

  “No, Gully! Come!” Eric cried in a panic. Even as he did, a wave bore down on them from above. Gullstone flapped weakly into the air as it broke over their heads. Eric was blinded by a tremendous gush of surf and felt himself thrown and twisted and dragged through the water. When he got his eyes open again, the bird was nowhere in sight and the fishcatcher had been cast a great distance away.

  “Mr. Cantrip!” he choked out. The waves were driving them apart. “Zeke! Where’s Gully?”

  In answer, over the crashing water, Eric heard a sound more terrifying than the roar of any storm. Faint it was at first, just an intermittent chuckle and hoot. But gradually the laughter broadened and grew continuous, and as the fit came full force upon the old man, he twisted and shrieked in the waves and seemed barely able to keep himself afloat. Finally, from far across the water, a voice rang out powerfully above the water and wind.

  “Farewell!” it cried. “Till we meet again!” And then, from further away, “Keep your eye on the sky!”

  After this, there were no more sounds, though Eric yelled repeatedly and begged for an answer. He was in grave danger, often so buried in the troughs of waves that he could not tell up from down. Whenever he could, he gave a shout in what he thought to be the skyward direction. But he was out of breath most of the time, always gasping for air before the next terrible wave.

  “Rage!” the fìshcatcher had said. “Howl! Show them where you are!” But how can you rage when a sea rises against you? At such times, it is hard enough simply to stay afloat.