Monster Mission

by Eva Ibbotson

  A mattress swam past them, then the galley table with the third boobrie chick clinging on by his yellow feet.

  ‘Keep still, Aunt Etta,’ came Queenie’s high-pitched voice above the sound of the waves. ‘You mustn’t wriggle.’

  The twins were holding Aunt Etta up between them as she spluttered and kicked her feet.

  Hanging on to Herbert’s back took all Minette’s strength, but she was still searching desperately for Fabio.

  ‘Please, Herbert, we must find him.’

  After he and Minette were torn apart, Fabio had sighted the lifeboat which had been thrown clear when the Hurricane sank. He managed to swim towards it … to get a hand on the gunnel … If the people inside it would help him he could pull himself up.

  But the people inside it were Stanley Sprott and his crew.

  Sprott looked over the side and saw the struggling boy. ‘Get rid of him,’ he said.

  And as the small hand came up, Boris hit it with an oar and pushed the boy back into the water.

  There was not much hope for Fabio after that. He was going down for the last time when Herbert found him.

  ‘Hold on to my shoulder,’ he ordered. ‘And don’t talk.’

  Herbert was an amazing swimmer but he knew that to support two children all the long way back to the Island might be beyond his strength. Even a seal would not try to swim with two pups on his back.

  Everyone was in difficulties. The raft on which the boobrie chicks balanced was sinking and above them the boobrie mother squawked in anguish, not knowing which of the two to pick up in her beak. The worm’s tail muscles had gone into cramp from holding up the waterlogged Aunt Coral …

  Herbert measured the long way to the Island and set his teeth.

  ‘Come on, everybody, follow me,’ he called manfully.

  One could only do one’s best.

  *

  The kraken had found his son. He cared for nothing else. He swam away from the shipwreck with the child on his back. Anger still coursed through his body. He was not the Healer of the Sea now. He was a father whose child had been hurt. Let everyone else beware for he and his son were on their way!

  But after the first joy of being safe, the little kraken wriggled forward so that his mouth was right against his father’s ear, and began to talk very fast in Polar. He was explaining what had happened and how the people on the Island had tried to keep him safe.

  And then he said the word which the great kraken had spoken when he first swam into the bay.

  ‘Children?’ said the little kraken. And again, looking back at the wreckage: ‘Children?’

  But it was not really a question. It was an order. The little kraken was growing up.

  And the great kraken sighed because he wanted above all to be away from the shrieks and the splintered wood of the wreckage and be in the quietness of the sea. But he heeded his son – and he turned and swam back to the wreck and to the struggling creatures trying to hold each other up in the water.

  Then Minette and Fabio felt something below them … the strong living island of muscle that was the kraken’s back … and felt it rise and rise till everyone was safely gathered on it – the aunts and the creatures, the boobries in their cage … and they themselves, sliding off Herbert’s weary shoulders to feel firm ground beneath their feet.

  It was an incredible, magic journey that they took after the panic and terror they had been through – floating secure and safe on the great creature’s back, until the Island was in sight, and there was no more danger and no more fear.

  But the kraken had not saved everybody.

  Stanley Sprott lay sprawled across the bottom of the battered, leaking lifeboat. Boris, only half conscious, was clinging to the gunnel. Des was hanging over the side, trying to be sick; he had been drinking seawater. Lambert was curled up like a baby between the skipper and the mate.

  Casimir had drowned in the struggle to reach the lifeboat after the Hurricane was rammed.

  They had been drifting for a long time. The sea was still strange; slate colour one minute; the colour of blood the next. No rescue ships were setting out in this awesome ocean.

  In the lifeboat there was no more water and no more food. The men’s lips were blistered. Their swollen tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths. Befuddled as they were, they tried to make sense of what had happened.

  Only they couldn’t. No one could make sense of it.

  ‘An island?’ muttered Sprott. He could see it, bigger than anyone could believe, moving towards them with the speed of a comet.

  But how could it? How could an island move?

  ‘It wasn’t there,’ said Lambert suddenly. Weakened by hunger and thirst, those were the only words he could still say.

  Sprott’s head was a jumble of pictures.

  A mermaid holding up … an aunt. But had there really been mermaids? And a great bird the size of an elephant flapping over the wreckage …

  No, it was ridiculous. It was impossible. He fingered the bruise on his forehead. He must have concussion.

  ‘Not … really there …’ murmured Lambert. He wouldn’t last much longer unless they were rescued soon.

  I’m going mad, thought Sprott. I’ll have to be careful. We’ll all have to be careful or they’ll put us in a loony bin if we’re rescued. All that happened was that a storm came up and the Hurricane was wrecked. Everything else is nonsense.

  ‘Not … there …’ said Lambert faintly.

  Sprott looked at his son. He had always despised Lambert but he was sorry now. Lambert was right. He had said all along that the … things … weren’t really there and they weren’t. How could they have been?

  ‘Quite right, Lambert,’ said Stanley Sprott, and leant back and closed his eyes.

  If they were rescued he’d say nothing – and see that the others said nothing too. He wasn’t going to be locked up as a loony, that was for sure …

  The last days on the Island were strangely happy. The children knew they would soon be fetched away but they were able to enjoy each moment as it came and being in an adventure seemed to have done everybody good.

  The stoorworm no longer complained about being too long for his thoughts.

  ‘If I’d been any shorter I couldn’t have held up Aunt Coral in the sea,’ he said and stopped talking about plastic surgery once and for all.

  As for Loreen, when Aunt Myrtle fetched Walter out of the washbasin and put him in his mother’s arms she let out a shriek of joy.

  ‘He’s grown hair!’ she cried.

  ‘He’s grown a hair,’ said Queenie who was giving herself airs because she had saved Aunt Etta.

  But the most exciting thing happened to the boobrie. After she waddled up to her nest with her three bedraggled chicks she found somebody sitting in it.

  The boobrie paused, hissed … stretched out her neck. Who was it who dared to sit on her nest? Hooting, honking and complaining, she flapped her wings and prepared to attack.

  Then suddenly she stopped. She lay down in front of the stranger, she clapped her beak against his … her eyes rolled with welcome and with love.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Fabio. ‘It’s her husband. He’s come back!’

  And he had. He didn’t seem to be a very intelligent bird but knowing that there were two boobries now to look after the chicks was a great relief to everybody.

  Herbert was of course a hero, but not at all conceited. He began straight away to tidy up the aunts’ house and to label Art’s storage jars and to show him how to cut the heads off fish.

  But it was Myrtle who had been his special friend and he did everything he could to help her. He told her when her skirt was on back to front and he corrected her when she played a tune too fast on the cello, and he insisted that she had swimming lessons twice a day.

  ‘Oh, Herbert, the water is so cold!’ Myrtle would cry.

  But Herbert said it was dangerous to live so close to the sea and not be able to swim, and every morning and every evening Myrtle
had to get her rubber ring and put on her chill-proof vest and Aunt Etta’s navy-blue bloomers and go into the sea.

  But the important thing – the thing that was on everybody’s mind – was what was going to happen to the kraken.

  After he had brought them safely to the shore the great kraken had moved a little way away to the mouth of the bay. He stayed submerged most of the time and out of sight and his son stayed with him.

  ‘He’s thinking,’ said Aunt Etta and she was right.

  He was thinking about what to do next. Should he give up his healing journey around the world and go back to the Arctic? Or should he find somewhere else to leave his son? For he knew without being told that things were going to be different on the Island.

  Then one morning Ethelgonda appeared, shimmering above her tombstone, so they knew that it would be an important day.

  And sure enough by noon the great kraken swam slowly into the bay with his son on his back. It was a most anxious moment. No one could blame the kraken if he turned his back on human beings once again and left the sea to spoil, and it was as though all those who waited by the shore were holding their breath.

  Then he began to talk. He talked in Polar and it was his son who translated.

  ‘Although people deserve that I should leave them to their mess and their wickedness, I have decided to go on with my journey around the oceans of the world. But I shall not take one year and one day to make the journey. I shall take two years and two days … or even three years and three days, so that my son, who has been restored to me, can come also and be with me at my side.’

  When he said that a great cheer went up and Fabio and Minette hugged each other because it was the closest to a happy ending they could hope for.

  That evening when it was quiet, the little kraken came and said goodbye all by himself to the children who had cared for him. There was just one bun left in the boobrie tin but when Fabio gave it to the kraken he did not at once open his mouth. He said: ‘Share!’

  So the children broke the bun into three parts and everybody had a piece. It was a most squashed and sorry-looking bun, with cracked icing and a wilting Smartie clinging to the top … but afterwards the children remembered it as tasting like a bun in Paradise.

  The next morning the kraken and his son had gone.

  And only a few hours later the noise they had been expecting was heard over the Island: the sound of a helicopter. But not one … three … and coming from them a whole posse of policemen with guns and handcuffs and body-armour – come to fetch back the children and arrest the aunts.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral had been in prison for several weeks before their trial for kidnapping came to the courts. The children were not allowed to visit them and so the first time they saw them was in the dock at the Old Bailey, handcuffed to the policewomen who brought them up from the cells.

  For Minette and Fabio, seeing them like that was like being kicked very hard in the stomach and Minette gave a gasp of distress which the people in the courtroom heard.

  ‘Poor little thing – look how frightened she is,’ they whispered – and it was true. Minette was very frightened and so was Fabio – frightened for the aunts and what might happen to them; very frightened indeed.

  Etta had always been thin but now she was all bone, and Coral’s bulk had gone so that her skin hung in folds. It wasn’t the prison food or the other prisoners that had worn them down, it was waking up day after day to the grey walls which closed them in. It was their loss of freedom.

  The courtroom was very dark and very old. The judge sat high above everyone else like God, and below him were men in gowns and wigs: a ferrety-looking man who was the prosecuting counsel and had to prove that the aunts were guilty, and a man with a round face like a Christmas pudding who was the defence counsel and had to try and show that the aunts were innocent. The jury – three women and nine men, sat on the judge’s right. One of them, a lady with a large bosom and red hair, kept fanning herself with a piece of paper. Minette’s parents sat on benches facing the judge, as far away from each other as possible, and the old Mountjoys were in the back row.

  It was only Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral who were being tried. Myrtle had been allowed to return to the Island because Mr Sprott was in a clinic in America and too muddled to accuse anyone of kidnapping his son. Etta and Coral were glad of that. They thought that Myrtle would probably have died in prison.

  The case had attracted a lot of attention. Killer Aunts Brought to Justice screamed the newspaper headlines and the strange pictures of Etta and Coral that had been on the walls of the police station were printed again, making everyone certain that these were the most evil women in the world.

  ‘Will the prisoner stand,’ said the clerk of the court – and the children drew in their breath for the prisoner was Etta.

  The charge was read out.

  ‘Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’ she was asked.

  ‘Not guilty,’ said Etta, holding her head high.

  Then the witnesses were called. Minette’s mother came first, tripping towards the witness box and patting her hair. She was sorry the trial wasn’t shown on the telly because her hat was exactly right – serious and dark but very flattering – and because she had been an actress she swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth in a very dramatic way.

  ‘Is this the woman who met you at King’s Cross Station?’ asked the prosecuting counsel who looked like a ferret, pointing at Etta.

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘And did you think she was a fit person to have charge of your daughter?’

  ‘Yes, I did, because she came from an agency. But I thought she had a sinister face.’

  ‘Could you tell us what you mean by sinister …?’

  Minette’s father was called next and described the false message he had had to say that Minette would not be travelling to Edinburgh.

  Then it was Minette’s turn.

  There had been a lot of argument about whether Fabio and Minette were old enough to give evidence, but in the end it was decided that they could. So Minette too swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then a footstool was fetched so that her head came over the edge of the witness box and the ferrety man began.

  ‘Now, Minette, will you tell us what happened when you travelled with this person to Edinburgh,’ he said. ‘Just take your time,’ he said, speaking very carefully, as though Minette was three years old.

  ‘We talked about things,’ said Minette.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Seals … and whether there were ghosts or not … and then I asked her if there was a third place.’

  ‘Could you tell us what you mean by that?’

  Minette bent her head, thinking. ‘All my life I’ve kept going backwards and forwards between my parents … and when I got there they were always horrible about each other so I got … tired. And sad. And I asked Aunt Etta if there was a third place. A place that wasn’t either or or – and she said there was, there was one for everybody. Only they had to be brave and want it.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘I fell asleep. And when I woke up I was there. In the third place.’

  ‘I see. You woke up in a completely strange place. And were you frightened?’

  Minette smiled – a slow, very sweet smile which lit up the dark courtroom like a beacon. ‘No. Not for long. I had a nightlight you see. I was frightened in London and in Edinburgh because of the dark and the cracks in the ceiling. I used to think I saw tigers … and my parents both thought I was silly. But there when I woke, the first thing I saw was this light.’

  The ferrety man in the wig didn’t like her answer. His job was to prove how wicked the aunts were and she wasn’t helping. ‘Are you telling me that you woke up in a completely strange place having been kidnapped and you weren’t frightened?’

  Minette lifted her chin.

  ‘I wasn’t kidnapped,’ she
said clearly. ‘I was chosen.’

  That evening the newspapers quoted her words. ‘I wasn’t kidnapped, I was chosen,’ says child snatch victim, and they all carried pictures of Minette.

  The next morning it was Aunt Coral’s turn and it was Fabio who went into the witness box and climbed on to the footstool. Again it was the ferrety prosecutor who asked the first questions.

  ‘Now, my boy, will you tell us what happened on the way to Greymarsh Towers.’

  ‘I was sick,’ said Fabio.

  ‘Is that because you were frightened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were frightened of that lady there?’ he asked, pointing to Aunt Coral.

  ‘No. I was frightened of going back to school. It was a horrible place. They put my head down the toilet and kicked me and hung me out of the top-floor windows by my ankles because I came from Brazil and wasn’t like them.’

  There was a sympathetic murmur from the public gallery and the lady with orange hair stopped fanning herself and made a clucking noise.

  ‘I don’t think we need to hear about your school,’ said the ferret, but the judge leant down and said Fabio should tell his story in his own way.

  ‘So Aunt Coral went to talk to the matron and then she came back and said I couldn’t go to school because they were in quarantine and I was terribly pleased. But then I realized it meant going back to my grandparents and that was almost as bad. They made me kneel on dried peas and they kept saying how vulgar my mother was. And then I realized that Aunt Coral knew how I felt because she was rather a magic person and I knew I could trust her.’

  ‘So you were drugged and kidnapped,’ the prosecutor went on.

  Minette at this point had smiled but Fabio didn’t. He glared, but the words he said were the same.

  ‘I wasn’t kidnapped,’ he said. ‘I was chosen.’

  By the next day the newspapers were writing rather differently about the trial and some strange things were happening. Those children who were old enough to hear about the trial began to ask their parents for different bedtime stories: stories about magical aunts who came and took children away to islands where they didn’t have to go to school.