We Give a Squid a Wedgie

by C. Alexander London

  Its hull was a pile of driftwood lashed together with vines and torn plastic bags. Underneath, they’d attached an old fisherman’s net and filled it with empty plastic water bottles to make it float better. They had two masts made out of the hollow plastic pipes that one sometimes sees on construction sites, and two sails made from the yellow plastic of the ruined airline emergency raft.

  Oliver almost felt hopeful as the wind blew through his hair, the salt spray splashed his face, and they raced after Sir Edmund’s ship. Behind them, the island burned and cracked apart, vanishing into roiling sea and thick smoke as they fled. Glancing back at it as they left, Oliver truly understood the meaning of the word cataclysm. If that’s what had happened to Atlantis ten thousand years ago, it was no wonder no one had found it since.

  “Your mother will be so proud!” Dr. Navel called out from his position on the rudder, which was made out of a broken paddle tied to the rusty propeller of an old airplane. “We’ll call this raft the Trash-Tiki!”

  “What’s that?” Oliver asked, not even embarrassed to show his father that he was curious. It was the first time he could remember ever actually being impressed with his dad.

  “After the Kon-Tiki.” His father smiled. “The famous raft Thor Heyerdahl used to cross the Pacific in 1947. He was an amazing explorer. We almost named you after him!”

  Oliver didn’t feel much like a Thor, so he was glad his parents had decided against that name. The kids at school would have mocked him ruthlessly if he was named Thor Navel.

  “So what do we do when we catch up with Sir Edmund’s ship?” Oliver asked.

  “I’m not sure we can,” said his father. “The best we can do is follow them for now, and make sure they don’t get away with your mother and your sister.”

  “And what about Corey?”

  “He’ll be okay for a while,” said Dr. Navel. “The pirates will want to ransom him, so they won’t hurt him.”

  It wasn’t exactly a comfort, but Oliver figured they could only follow one ship at a time. As they raced after Sir Edmund’s big whaling ship, the pirate cruise ship got farther and farther away. Somehow, though, Sir Edmund’s ship wasn’t getting farther away from their raft. It was getting closer.

  “Look!” Oliver pointed. “Sir Edmund’s ship has stopped. We’re gaining on them!”

  “We are!” Dr. Navel smiled. “We might just catch up with them yet!”

  “We’ll need a plan,” said Oliver, walking back to where his father was steering the Trash-Tiki. “We can’t just storm the ship and demand they let Celia and Mom go, can we?”

  “We could always try the Kathmandu Caper,” said Dr. Navel.

  “What’s the Kathmandu Caper?” Oliver asked.

  “Well, one of us will act like an angry goat while the other collects as many jellyfish as he can, and then—oh no!”

  “What?” Oliver asked. His father pointed in the direction of Sir Edmund’s ship.

  Oliver saw a dark shape in the water racing from the ship toward the Trash-Tiki. It was bigger than any shark or whale Oliver had ever seen on TV. It was bigger than their entire raft and it was moving much faster.

  “Coming about!” Dr. Navel yelled. “Evasive maneuvers!”

  Oliver ran to the forward sail and let the rope go free as Dr. Navel tried to turn the raft and get some speed in a different direction from whatever was coming at them. There was no time. The shadow was on them in seconds, an inky splotch in the ocean, blossoming beneath them with eight impossibly long arms. It hung for a moment in the water.

  “The kraken,” Dr. Navel gulped.

  “But Beast Busters said there was no such thing,” Oliver objected, just as the tentacles came alive, snapping tight and breaking the surface with slimy suckers glistening. As the tentacles rose into the sunlight and towered over their raft, sharp black fangs, each bigger than one of Oliver’s fists, unsheathed themselves from the suckers along the undersides of the tentacles.

  “You can’t believe everything you see on TV,” said Dr. Navel as the first tentacle slashed the mainmast clean off. The rope attached to it whipped into the air and he dove to knock Oliver out of the way. Oliver hit the deck when his father pushed him, but another tentacle slapped down between them and coiled itself like a boa constrictor around his father, hoisting Dr. Navel toward the sky.

  Oliver screamed. He tried to stand and catch his father’s foot, but the raft lurched violently to the side. One tentacle had wrapped around the back and the other around the front. The kraken pulled itself up halfway on the deck, its weight tearing the raft in two.

  “I have an idea,” yelled Oliver, grabbing one of the old ropes they’d used to build the raft. “We have to give this squid a wedgie!”

  “How do we give a squid a wedgie?” his father yelled, wriggling to free his arms from the giant tentacle.

  “Catch the other end of the rope!” Oliver tossed the rope to his father. “Now pull!”

  Oliver pulled his end and Dr. Navel pulled his end, and the rope tightened underneath the squid.

  “It’s working!” Oliver called as the rope wedged itself into the monster’s underside.

  Oliver, however, was hardly an ichthyologist, and failed to understand the basics of squid science. The underside was where the giant squid had its mouth, and the kraken, being the most fearsome of giant squid, had a mouth filled with fangs. Its jaw snapped shut and the rope snapped in two. Then the monster sucked the rope into its mouth the way one might suck in two strands of spaghetti.­ The slurping sounds echoed for miles across the ocean.

  Oliver fell backward and the monster dunked Dr. Navel underwater and scooped him up again in a violent flurry of tentacles.

  “I fear the kraken is wedgie proof!” his father spluttered, spitting seawater.

  Oliver grabbed the forward mast and clung to it as the enraged kraken lifted the whole Trash-Tiki out of the water. Its terrible face rose from the frothy foam—two heavy-lidded yellow eyes on either side of its head and a giant round mouth with rows and rows of pointed teeth. One leftover bit of rope was stuck between two of its fangs like a piece of floss. Water splashed in all directions. The tentacles flailed, so one second Oliver and his father were close enough to touch and in the next Oliver and the raft slammed into the water and his father was flung toward the sky again.

  “Hold on, Ollie!” Dr. Navel yelled.

  “AHH!” yelled Oliver back, shutting his eyes, too terrified to watch his dad shoved into the terrible jaws of the sea monster. He didn’t even object to being called Ollie.

  And then, with a splash, all was quiet. Oliver was lying on his back on the deck of the Trash-Tiki. His father, panting, hung off the side, pulling himself out of the water. The giant squid was gone.

  “What happened?” Oliver choked out.

  “He just dropped me,” said Dr. Navel. “He just let go and vanished underwater again.”

  Oliver pulled himself up onto his knees and looked at the water below their broken raft. There was no inky shadow to be seen.

  But then he heard shouts from Sir Edmund’s ship and looked up to see the giant black form speeding toward it. There on deck, now close enough to see, were Celia and their mother and Professor Rasmali-Greenberg and Beverly and Patrick, huddling together in terror.

  There wasn’t just the one kraken around Sir ­Edmund’s ship, there were five, and they were all bigger than the one racing back toward them. As soon as it arrived, the pod of giant squid broke the surface of the water together to wage a new attack. This time on the research vessel Serenity.

  43

  WE KIBITZ WITH THE KRAKEN

  CELIA WATCHED as the first massive tentacle burst from the sea and, with one swipe, smashed the mainmast clean off of her father’s little raft. Another thick tentacle rose from the frothy water and wrapped itself around the back of the raft, a third whipped up and circled around her father, and even with the distance between them, Celia could hear her brother scream.

  “Stop it!” Celia y
elled. “Stop it!”

  Sir Edmund looked down on her from the bridge.

  “I’m afraid the kraken knows no mercy,” he said. “Now, what are you all doing out of your cells?”

  Celia looked back toward the water, seeing her father hoisted high in the air and the gaping, fanged mouth of the giant squid rising from the water. Oliver was clinging to the half-shattered raft as it was tossed back and forth by another of the giant squid’s arms.

  Celia felt a tugging at her stomach, and the bitter taste of adrenaline rose at the back of her mouth. She had to do something. She heard her brother’s screams across the water. She thought of those hours of The Squid Whisperer he’d made her watch. She had no idea how to get a squid’s attention, but she put her fingers to her lips and blew out as loud and as long of a whistle as she could.

  “What did you hope that would do?” Sir Edmund laughed. He was about to order his crew to surround the escaped prisoners when the words froze on his lips.

  The kraken dropped Dr. Navel and vanished beneath the surface. Celia relaxed as she saw her father­ hoisting himself back onto the wreck of his raft. Celia noticed that it appeared to have been made entirely out of garbage. No wonder the giant squid ripped it apart so easily.

  “How did you do that?” Professor Rasmali-Greenberg asked.

  “I don’t know,” Celia told him. “I just panicked and whistling seemed like the thing to do. I didn’t have a bagpipe.”

  The professor lowered his eyebrows, wondering what a bagpipe had to do with anything (he had never seen The Squid Whisperer). Then he pointed to the sea.

  “I fear you’ve done more than you bargained for,” he told Celia.

  Giant shadows rose from the depths all around Sir Edmund’s ship, their eight humongous arms spreading wide as they neared the surface.

  “The baby’s coming back!” one of the crewmen shouted and pointed at the water, where indeed the kraken was racing back toward their ship.

  “That one was a baby?” said Celia. “You kidnapped a baby kraken!” she yelled at Sir Edmund. He shrugged. It wasn’t the first time he had kidnapped a baby mythical creature. It was kind of his hobby.

  “They’re attacking!” Janice yelled as the whole family of giant squid raised their tentacles from the sea.

  We should not be surprised to note that Sir ­Edmund did not pay his crew nearly well enough for calm and discipline to prevail under attack from a pod of mythical sea creatures. A lone kraken had been known to drag ships down to the bottom of the sea for the sheer joy of it. There was no telling what a family of kraken bent on revenge would do. Sir Edmund’s crew were neither explorers awed by the majesty of the sea nor warriors daring to face the beast and conquer it like heroes from ­storybooks.

  To put it more bluntly, as the krakens’ dark shapes blossomed underneath the research vessel Serenity, everyone went crazy.

  Members of the crew scrambled, bumping into each other and climbing over each other and punching each other in the nose to get to safety. All thoughts of locking the escaped prisoners up again were quickly forgotten.

  Sir Edmund stood with Janice by his side, his mouth agape, watching the sea creatures lay siege to his boat.

  “We have to do something!” cried Janice. “Call them off! Don’t they obey you?”

  Sir Edmund didn’t answer her. His mouth hung open, his arms hung limp at his sides. His plans were falling apart.

  He was, in a word, nonplussed.

  The first of the creatures’ tentacles wrapped around the bow of the ship and yanked it down toward the water. Sir Edmund grabbed the railing, ignoring the shrieks of his crew as kraken snatched them up with other tentacles. As one long, slimy, tooth-encrusted tentacle reared above him, he broke out of his stupor and dove to the side. The tentacle smashed the railing where he’d been standing and ripped it right off the boat.

  “AHH!” his first mate screamed, hauled into the air in a coil of the monster’s arm. Another kraken had begun tearing apart the back of the boat, opening a huge hole in the side, where water rushed in.

  “Impossible!” Sir Edmund shouted, getting to his feet again. He pointed at Celia with eyes ablaze. “Only an heir to Atlantis can command the kraken! And the Council are the only rightful heirs! Tell me how you did that!”

  Celia shrugged.

  As tentacles ensnared crewmen right and left, it seemed that those around Celia were safe. All around, crewmen were being snatched from the deck and sucked unceremoniously beneath the waves. Their screams didn’t even have time to echo.

  “You are not an heir to Atlantis!” Sir Edmund shouted, rushing down the stairs to the main deck and waving his finger at Celia, as if she were his greatest concern, not the monsters tearing his ship to shreds and eating his crew. “You are a Navel! And a lazy one at that! You watch too much television!”

  “There’s no such thing as too much television,” shouted Celia.

  “The kraken are mine! All of them!”

  “It sure doesn’t look that way to me,” Celia ­answered, crossing her arms.

  The ship tilted dangerously. The kraken had lined up along the starboard side and were slowly rolling the ship over. Their terrible mouths gaped and their cat-yellow eyes gazed up at the terrified crew. Sir Edmund turned and stood directly in front of the row of monsters, unafraid.

  “I command you all back to the depths!” he yelled.

  They didn’t move.

  “I will not stand here and kibitz with you!” he yelled. “Return to the deep!”

  “Kibitz?” the professor wondered.

  “It means chit-chat,” said Celia. “And we don’t have time for it! This boat is sinking!”

  With all the chaos on the ship, one cannot be too certain what happened next, but it appeared that the baby giant squid spat a thick black loogie onto Sir Edmund, covering him from head to toe.

  Janice pulled him out of the way just as one of the creature’s tentacles slapped down where he had been standing, tearing into the metal deck with its clawed suckers.

  “Trust me,” Janice told Sir Edmund, pulling him along, “you don’t want to stay and chat. Let’s get out of here. Where are the life rafts?”

  “There aren’t any,” said Sir Edmund.

  “What?” Janice let him go.

  “I will not lose my kraken and my ship on the same day!” Sir Edmund declared, wringing thick squid ink out of his mustache. “And I will not lose them because of Celia Navel. She’s a child!”

  “She’s a tween,” Janice corrected him.

  “What does that even mean? It’s not a real word!” He didn’t wait for Janice to answer. He ran to the harpoon gun.

  Celia knew that the ship was sinking. They needed to get off fast.

  But she didn’t see Beverly the lizard and Patrick the monkey anywhere. Oliver would never forgive her if something happened to Beverly. And Patrick was practically a member of the family.

  “We can’t leave without the monkey and the lizard,” she said.

  “There!” The professor pointed.

  Beverly was perched on the harpoon gun, hissing at Sir Edmund, and Patrick had jumped on ­Janice’s back, clawing at her hair.

  Celia whistled at them as loud as she could. She figured that if it worked on a kraken, it could work on a monkey and a lizard.

  It didn’t.

  They ignored her.

  The kraken, however, did not. Six pairs of giant eyes turned to look at her.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t whistle at these monsters until you know what you are saying,” suggested the professor.

  “Too late,” Celia squeaked. All six giant squid dragged themselves along the side of the ship until they had come directly to Celia.

  “Those are some big calamari,” Celia’s mother whispered.

  “So, uh, what do I do?” Celia said, staring into the giant eyes of the kraken. The largest of the giant squid reached out with one of its great tentacles. It didn’t whip it at Celia or encircle her. It simply exte
nded it, stopping just in front of her face.

  Celia thought of Valerie-at-Large. Even though Valerie would never really be friends with the mean girls in the Six Sisters Club, they shook hands with each other at the end, because they had an understanding. They couldn’t change who they were, but they could change how they treated each other. Celia guessed maybe the kraken felt the same way.

  She reached her hand out and touched the tip of its tentacle. It was wet and much harder and rougher than she’d thought it would be, but oddly gentle. It tickled her palm.

  “This will teach you to disobey!” Sir Edmund shouted, pointing the harpoon gun right at the biggest sea monster. It looked his way and Celia was certain she could see its eyes widen with what had to be fear. Sir Edmund was about to fire when, instead, he screamed.

  Beverly’s jaws were clamped tight around his ankle.

  “Beverly, you traitor!” He groaned as he slumped against the harpoon gun. Even his mustache sagged as her poison began to course through his veins. “I hate lima beans.”

  Janice tried to jump to the gun, but Beverly hissed at her and she stopped.

  “Good lizard,” she cooed. “Be a nice lizard, good lizard.”

  Beverly hissed again and Janice fainted.

  “Go,” Celia said to the giant squid. “Go … and … uh, don’t sink any more ships, okay?”

  The kraken looked to Celia, then back to Sir Edmund groaning in agony, and then back to Celia. It let go of the ship and slipped back into the ocean, vanishing with one stroke of its eight massive arms. The others followed.

  “Below the thunders of the upper deep; / Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, / His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep, / The Kraken sleepeth : faintest sunlights flee,” Celia’s mother said.

  “Great,” said Celia. “Mom’s crazier than ever.”

  “That was from the poet Alfred Tennyson,” said the professor. “He wrote The Kraken in 1830.”

  “So are we just going to stand here and recite poetry now?” Celia wondered.

  “We should get off this ship before Sir Edmund recovers from that bite,” the professor said.