Lost Children of the Far Islands (26 page)

The sea mink slashed viciously at the fox, who screamed in surprise and pain. For just a moment, Ila loosened her hold on the monster, and as she did, the mink slid into her place, closing his razor-sharp teeth on the Dobhar-chú’s neck, just behind the snapping jaws.

The struggle was bloody and terrible. The mink hung on grimly, even as the Dobhar-chú whipped his powerful body back and forth, smashing the clinging sea mink against the rocks. Then the Dobhar-chú’s second set of jaws shot out of its mouth and fastened on the back of the sea mink.

The mink let out a muffled scream as the jaws ground down through flesh and into bone. His legs kicked spasmodically as the jaws reached his backbone, but still he did not release his grip on the Dobhar-chú’s neck. The Dobhar-chú let out a long, gurgling wail, and then the second set of jaws released the mink as well as a gout of the Dobhar-chú’s black blood, and with one final twitch, the Dobhar-chú was still. The mink released its grip and collapsed on the rock next to the dead monster.

Ila Turned back into a child. With blood running
from three parallel gashes on one cheek, she went to the sea mink, crouching low and stroking its head.

Gus and Leo, still seals, watched as the mink’s beautiful coat shimmered once in the moonlight. Then Ila was kneeling at the side of the Bedell in his torn and bleeding human form, his eyes closed in his chalk-white face. Ila leaned close and whispered something in the man’s ear. He smiled slightly and opened his eyes, and then, looking directly at Ila, the Messenger died.

The silence around them was immense, encompassing the night sky and the scattering of late stars wheeling over their heads. Ila took a deep, shuddering breath. As they watched, wisps of smoke began to rise up around the man, enveloping him. But although the wisps moved like smoke, they whispered like creatures. It was just possible to see the shapes of sea minks as they wound around the Bedell. The dark shadows sighed and swirled and settled on the Messenger, covering his body like a cloak. Then, abruptly, there was nothing there but the darkness, laid as flat on the rock as a blanket stretched tightly over an empty bed.

Gus and Leo Turned. Leo took off his T-shirt, and Gus used it to wipe the blood from Ila’s face.

“I’m fine,” Ila said, squirming away from Gus’s touch, just like the old Ila would have. The three of them stood for a moment as the moon began its descent. The long night was coming to an end.

“Home,” Ila said.

Gus nodded. She was trying not to look at the torn
body of the monster lying on the rock. She could smell it, though, a stench of rancid oil and blood.

“Yes,” she said, her stomach rolling over. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We don’t have the boat,” Leo said.

“I know where it is,” Ila said. Her hair seemed to brighten as she spoke, and then she was sitting on her haunches, a fox once again, gazing up at them.

Ila led them quickly and surely over the moonlit rocks to where the skidbladnin lay abandoned. Without speaking, they climbed aboard the little boat, Ila a child again, and Leo pushed them off and into the sea.

As the boat began to move, Gus closed her eyes. The face of the Móraí rose up in her mind, indescribably old, her bright eyes gentle and sad. And next to her, the Messenger, in his overcoat and his fingerless gloves. As she watched, they both smiled. When Ila took her hand, she opened her eyes and turned to face the open sea. The boat knew where it was going, and they slipped through the water as though in a dream, moving without thought, just motion.

They woke to a sea on fire. It was morning, and the sun was just rising. They had to squint against the vivid intensity of the reflected light.

As the boat neared the shore of Loup Marin, Gus took in the fire of the sun on the water, the quick dartings of fish just under the surface, and the sound like a heartbeat that was the ocean itself, breathing in time with her. Without thinking or planning, she Turned and slipped off the boat into the welcoming water. With a bark, Leo splashed down next to her, and then the red fox leapt into the water as well, paddling in circles around the delighted seals. Leo and Gus dove and rolled in the still water, and then they popped up and swam slowly to shore, side by side with the paddling fox.

The seals Turned and splashed through the shallows to the rocky beach, where they lay down to dry their wet clothes in the morning sunlight.

Ila was still a fox. She sat nearby, with slight wisps of steam rising off her red coat. Her tongue was out, and Gus could have sworn that she was laughing.

Ignoring the little fox, Gus rolled onto her stomach and closed her eyes. Leo joined her, and it was some time before they opened their eyes. When they did, Ila was a little girl again, sitting near them making a wobbly tower of small rocks.

“Let’s go to the house,” she said.

Grief clutched at Gus’s heart when they reached the small cottage.

The bright blue door was faded and hung open on broken hinges. The carving of the leaping fish on the door was just visible as faint, gray scratches in the peeling blue paint. Gus laid her hand over the fish, but she already knew what she would find. The image was cold and still. Inside, the cozy living room with its lamps and brightly colored couch and piles of cushions was chilly and dark. A stiff sea wind blew in through a broken window. The lamps were in pieces on the floor along with small bones that looked like they might have belonged to mice. The couch was shredded and the low coffee table broken on the blue woven rug, which was covered in mold.

They moved around slowly, touching things, remembering, and silently mourning the old woman who had fed, cared for, and died for them in the end.

“The book!” Leo suddenly remembered. They searched among the piles of ripped and tattered books that littered the floor. But
The Book of the Folk
was gone.

“I’m sorry, Leo,” Gus said.

Leo stood with his back to her, his shoulders shaking just a bit. Gus knew it wasn’t just the book. It was everything. The ruined house, the lost Móraí, and the missing book, with its glorious stories and memories and links to a family they had never known they had.

“It’s all lost,” Leo said.

“But not us,” Ila said.

Leo shook his head. He pulled off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “I’m going to the lighthouse,” he said as he shoved his glasses back on.

He left, and Gus and Ila went into the kitchen.

Spiders scuttled from the dry sink when Gus tried to turn on the water. The oven door of the cast-iron stove hung open on its rusty hinges. Inside was a frothy mouse nest made of grass and what looked like shreds of the curtains that used to hang in the girls’ room. The damp sea air blew forlornly through the house, ruffling the dust that lay over everything.

After a while, Gus left Ila in the bedroom, where she insisted on searching for Bear, and went to the lighthouse to check on Leo.

Inside the lighthouse everything had changed. In the watch room, the bed with the bright blue quilt was gone, as were the telescope and the rocking chair where the Móraí had sat on her night watches.

In the lantern room, the beautiful Fresnel lens was shattered, the floor around it strewn with bits of glass that glittered in the sunlight.

“What’s happened?” Leo said when Gus came into the room. He was standing in front of the ruined Fresnel lens. When he moved, the reflected light from the shards on the floor winked on his glasses. “What’s going on?”

“Maybe we were gone for years,” Gus said, panic beginning at the edges of her mind. “Maybe everyone is … gone.”

They stared at one another in horror. Everyone gone? Their parents, old and buried? Their classmates adults, or perhaps even older than that, perhaps also grown old and died without ever knowing what had become of the Brennan children, who had all disappeared without a trace when they were young? Gus sat down on the floor next to Leo. Her head was spinning. Just then, Ila came into the room carrying something. It was her bear.

“Bear is fine,” she announced, and indeed he was, his fur as soft and new as before, his overalls fresh and clean, without any dust on them.

“I found our backpacks too,” Ila said. She led them back to the house, to the little bedroom where the girls had slept. The mattresses had been pulled from the beds and shredded, as had all the bedding, which lay in a filthy, ruined heap on the floor. But in the closet lay two backpacks. Like the bear, they were fresh and clean.

Leo came in carrying his backpack. “And look,” he said, pulling out his watch from the front pocket, where
he had tucked it for safekeeping when they left the motel in the middle of the night with the Bedell, so long ago, it now seemed. It was an old watch, handed down from Pop Brennan to their father to Leo, that required winding.

“It hasn’t run down,” Leo pointed out. He showed the girls the face of the watch where, sure enough, the hands were ticking steadily. Carefully Leo tucked the watch into the pocket of his jeans.

“And food!” Gus said triumphantly. She pulled the sandwiches that the Móraí had made for her and Ila out of her backpack. They were fresh, the bread not even stale. There was also a bottle of water.

“Starving!” Leo said.

They fell on the food, which was made even more wonderful by the discovery of four oatmeal cookies tucked in the bottom of Gus’s pack. For a while, the only sound was contented chewing.

“Phew,” Gus said. She wiped a bit of honey off her lip. “That feels better. I guess we’re still in our time, right? If the sandwiches are still good? I was afraid—” She laughed unsteadily. “But if it’s not a hundred years later, then what happened here?”

“I think,” said Leo thoughtfully, “I think the magic—that is, the Móraí, and the Messenger—isn’t here anymore. So without them, the house is—”

“Ruined?” Gus said skeptically.

“No,” Leo said. “Not ruined. Just old. The way it
really is. The way it would be if the Móraí had not been keeping it young.”

They all remembered the frail old woman standing before the howling, snarling wolf pack. Tears came to Gus’s eyes.

“Let’s go back to the beach,” Ila said.

So they retraced their steps to the rocky shore. The water was flat and calm. The sun was high in the sky and the afternoon was very warm. After a while, all three of the children fell asleep on the warm black rocks.

Gus was awakened by a sound like someone blowing out a great whoosh of air. She knew before she opened her eyes what it was, but her delight was still sharp when she saw the seals. They were lying on the flat rocks, floating in the calm sea, and popping up in the water like gophers in a pasture, here, there, everywhere, with the whooshing sound that had awakened Gus.

“Ila, Leo, wake up!” Gus said as her brother and sister stirred and then, with cries of delight, took in the creatures all around them. Ila shimmered just slightly, her red hair looking for a moment like fur lying close to her head, but then it faded and she was just Ila again, laughing at a baby seal who had shoved its nose into her outstretched hand like a curious puppy.

Suddenly the seals grew still, and then, as though at a signal, they all slipped off the rocks and into the water. They hung there, silent and watchful, their large eyes just
visible. Another seal was approaching. As it broke the surface near the edge of the closest rock, they could see that it was not the bright white of the baby seals or the richer brown of the older ones. This seal was lustrous silver, the color of the moon on a cloudless night in winter. It was swimming very slowly. When it came closer, they could see why—it bore several unhealed gashes on one side of its body. The seal’s right eye was gone, the skin around the empty eye socket bloodied and torn by sharp teeth that had gouged and bitten.

“It’s the Móraí,” Ila said softly.

“Oh!” Gus said, feeling a rush of joy so strong she had to sit down to keep her balance.

One by one, they each went to the seal.

Gus went last. The seal’s nose was wet and soft in her palm. When she looked into its one remaining eye, she knew that Ila was right. And she knew that the seal was saying thank you.

“You’re welcome,” she whispered.

The seal swam back to Ila and looked into her green eyes with its one brown eye.

“She’s sorry she couldn’t come to us,” Ila said softly. “But she can take us home, if we go slowly. And she wants—ugh—she wants me to be a big, stinky seal.”

“How do you know that?” Leo asked.

Ila shrugged. “I just do.”

“Can you be a seal?” Gus asked.

“She says yes,” Ila reported. “I say yuck.”

Leo laughed. “Just try it, Ila. You might like it.”

Ila looked more like a fox than ever as her hair flared red and the green starbursts in her eyes lit up and spread over the brown.

“Fine,” she said. With a sigh, she shrugged her shoulders, and then, sitting before them was a very small seal. Its body was a creamy white with light splotches that shaded to dark fur at its head and back flippers. Its face was a mask of creamy white fur, and its eyes, rather than the soft brown of a seal, were incandescent green.

“You’re not supposed to be able to do that until you’re eleven,” Leo pointed out mildly. The seal let out a bark that sounded like laughter.