Lost Children of the Far Islands (9 page)

Their father sat on Gus’s bed, and then gathered her up in his large embrace. His sweater smelled like cold night air and the piney aftershave that their mother gave him every Christmas. Gus buried her head in her father’s shoulder and breathed in the smell of him. Finally, he let her go and stood up.

“We are going to be fine,” he said. “Gus? Leo? We are going to be fine.” He bent down and kissed the top of Leo’s head.

Gus noticed that he didn’t say that their mother was going to be fine. In a flash, she knew that everything the small man had told them was true. They were in terrible danger, and their mother was dying. Staying was only going to make things worse, possibly much worse.

“OK,” she told her father, and while it wasn’t quite a lie, it felt like one.

Their father paused in the doorway. The light from the hallway lit him from behind, so that she couldn’t see his face.
I need to see it one more time
, she thought wildly to herself, but her father just said, “Love you, fish,” and eased the door closed.

After a minute, the strange creature—the sea mink—crawled out from under Gus’s bed. He dug in his claws and stretched his body out to an impossible length, and then, with a ripple that ran from his nose to the tip of his long tail, he changed into the Bedell, standing in the middle of the room in his heavy overcoat.

“Not a very sweet girly, are you?” he said bitterly to Gus, fingering a fresh bruise under one eye.

“You were nasty,” Gus told him. “There’s no reason to be mean.”

“Why didn’t you let me tell Dad?” Leo asked Gus.

“Because Dad won’t tell us what’s going on. Don’t you want to know?”

“I guess,” Leo said doubtfully. “I mean, yes. I do.”

Gus fixed the small man with her fiercest look. “So tell us. What’s going on?”

“You must come with me now,” the man said softly. “There is terrible evil rising in the sea. Your mother knows, and your father knows as well, although I do not know if he truly believes it. Surely you have noticed something amiss.”

“The missing boats,” Gus said. “And the high tides?”

“But I thought the tides were from global warming,” Leo said. “That’s what Dad said. The sea level is rising from the melting at the polar ice caps.”

The man shook his head. “That is happening, yes. But the things that are happening here, the tides and the missing boats, are not human problems, I’m afraid. The Móraí will tell you more. But there is very little time. Morning is too late. We must go now.”

“Yes,” Ila said.

“OK, Gus?” Leo said.

Gus was remembering her father’s warning about their mother’s family. But what choice did they have? Hiding at Pop Brennan’s was clearly not going to change anything, and might even put Pop in danger. She looked at Leo.

“Dad” was all she said, but she knew her twin would understand.

“You said Dad won’t tell us anything,” Leo pointed out. “And he wants us to go to Pop’s, which is starting to sound like a really bad idea.”

“Wolves,” the Bedell reminded them. “They would of course kill anyone they found when they arrived,” he added.

“Not Pop!” Ila said. Ila adored Pop Brennan. He had never tried to trick her into speaking, seeming to prefer sitting in silence next to his youngest granddaughter. He also never brushed her hair, something that went far with Ila.

Slowly, Gus nodded. “OK, I guess,” she said. She felt something in the pit of her stomach at the thought of deceiving their father. Not guilt, exactly. It was something sharper than guilt. A feeling like she was breaking something that existed between them, changing their relationship forever. It was just fear, she decided, giving herself a shake. But the look on her twin’s face told her otherwise. He felt it too. They were stepping out of their lives into something completely unknown. And their parents could not be a part of it.

Ila, sitting next to Gus on the bed, suddenly shifted and took Gus’s hand. Ila’s hand was small and slightly sweaty. Gus gave it a squeeze and Ila squeezed back. Leo sat down on the other side of Gus, leaning his shoulder into hers, warm and solid. Sitting between her brother and sister, Gus felt some of that terrible feeling slide away.

“Wonderful,” the Bedell said. He clapped his hands together, the sound muffled by the woolly gloves that he was wearing. His strange, curved fingernails flashed in the light. “Without delay, then.”

“What about a note?” Leo said. “Shouldn’t we leave a note?”

“No need.”

“Well, I’m writing a note,” Gus said defiantly. She jumped off the bed and fished around in the bedside table’s drawer. She found a small black Bible with a fake leather cover and a ballpoint pen. Under the Bible was a pad of paper with the words
Maine: The Pine Tree State
printed across the top of each page. She tore off a sheet and wrote quickly, without thinking about how crazy it might sound.
“Dear Dad, we are going with Bedel—”

“Two l’s, if you don’t mind,” the creature said. “It is the French word for
messenger.”

“Does he even know who you are?” Gus asked the man.

“Most likely, no,” the Bedell admitted. “But that is no excuse for a lack of precision. Two
l
’s, if you please.”

Gus sighed and added another
l. “We are going with Bedell to Loup Marin Island.”

“Actually, it is
the
Bedell,” the man said. “More of a title, you know, than an actual name.”

Gus gave him a dark look.

“But write what you will,” he added hastily.

“Bedell,”
Gus wrote, leaving out the
the
with a small sense of triumph,
“says we will be safe there. Do not worry
about us. We will be home—”
She paused again. “When will we be home?” she demanded.

The man shrugged.

Gus stared hard at him.

“Just say
soon
. Will that do?”

“Fine,” Gus said primly. She finished the note and signed it,
“Your children, Gus, Leo, and Ila.”

“No more lollygagging about,” the man said. “We must move, move, move.”

Ila hopped off the bed. “Let’s go, then,” she said gravely, and the Bedell, taking her hand, made a little half bow toward her.

“To the sea,” he said. Looking at Gus and Leo, he said again, “To the sea. And then we
travel
.”

They followed Bedell, or
the
Bedell, as he insisted on being called, out of the bedroom and through the dark living room, sliding their feet cautiously along. Their backpacks were dark lumps by the front door. They picked them up without speaking and put them on, Leo helping Ila with her straps.

The four small windowpanes in the front door were flat black squares, but when they followed the Bedell outside, they could see gray at the edges of the night—it was not far from dawn. The Bedell led them around to the back of the cabin and across a wide, mowed lawn. The lawn dropped away at its edge to rocks. They could hear, but not see, the waves below them. They sounded far away.

“Go down on your bellies, yes?” the Bedell whispered. He himself merely crouched low to the ground and picked his way down the rocks as though they were a set of stairs.

Gus and Leo put Ila between them. Ila did not hesitate but instead began scrambling so quickly that Gus and Leo had to struggle to keep up with her.

“Just because she can see in the dark,” Leo grumbled. “Ow!” He stopped and rubbed his knee where he had banged it on a rock.

Ila laughed. Her voice carried on the still night air.

“Hush,” the Bedell hissed. He climbed back up to where the children were. “Come, come,” he said urgently.

They slid down the final series of rock ledges, landing on soft sand. The air around them was lightening with morning, and they could see that the beach was actually low, sloping rocks, black and shiny with seawater. Beyond the rocks was a horseshoe-shaped patch of sand, just large enough for the four of them to stand huddled together.

“The sea,” Ila said.

“That’s right, little red hair. Off we go,” the Bedell said. He smiled then, his teeth gleaming. They were small and sharp-looking, coming to points at their ends. He had the same glossy hair and round brown eyes as their mother, but the Bedell seemed wilder than their smiling mother. When the Bedell smiled, he looked hungry.

The Bedell rubbed his hands together as though trying to warm them. “There is no real time, see, no time, that is, uh, for what you might call, ahem,
formalities
. Give me your backpacks.”

“Why?” Ila said. She clutched her backpack and looked at the man suspiciously.

“To keep them safe,” he said. “Now give them to me, please.”

Gus saw the look on Ila’s face, and the way the green sunbursts in her eyes began to spark with a dangerous light. “Bear will be fine,” she said quickly. “It’s OK, Ila. See?” She handed her own backpack to the Bedell, followed by Leo.

The Bedell nodded his thanks and then held out one gloved hand to Ila. “Come, child,” he said, his voice quite gentle now.

Ila snuck a quick kiss onto Bear’s head, which Leo and Gus politely pretended not to see, and then handed over her pack.

The Bedell took Gus’s backpack and put a strap into one of the pockets sewn in the side of his coat. The strap filled the pocket entirely. But as they watched, he tucked the entire backpack into the pocket, bit by bit, like a magician tucking a handkerchief into his closed fist. When the pocket had swallowed the last of it, he put Leo’s backpack into the same pocket.

“Now yours,” he said to Ila. “I will put it in a special pocket.” He tucked Bear’s head into a chest pocket in the coat, sewn over the place where his heart beat. Bear’s head disappeared into the small pocket, followed by the rest of the backpack.

The children stared openmouthed. What they had just seen was not possible. The coat hung smooth against the Bedell’s body, with no trace anywhere of the three backpacks.

“How did you—” Leo began, but the little man, waving his hands in a dismissive way, interrupted him.

“You two,” he said to Gus and Leo. “Have you passed your birthday yet?”

“Our birthday?” Gus said. She found that she was whispering too. “Why?”

“Your eleventh birthday, I am correct?” The little man said. “Have you passed it, yes or no?”

“Uh, no,” Leo said. “Not for a few days.”

“So,” the little man said. “Not so good. But it is OK. I can help you. I will have to Turn the little one anyway, so I will just Turn all three of you, yes?”

“Turn?” Leo said.

The Bedell nodded. “Do not be scared. There is really no choice—we must heffely-lump back to the island or we will not get there at all! Now take hands, you three.”

The three children joined hands and stood in a ragged line in front of the man, who opened the lapels of his long coat like a peddler about to show off watches and gadgets. But instead of trinkets, there was only darkness. It was unlike the darkness of night or of a closed-up room. It was somehow gleaming, as though it had been taken out and polished like a gem and then replaced. The children stared transfixed at the luminosity rolling out from between the little man’s wide-open arms. It danced and swirled like a field of oil on fire.

“Listen to the sea,” the Bedell called, which was easy enough—the sound of the waves crashing seemed to be
growing louder by the minute. “Tip back your face to the spray and then breathe, breathe, breathe!”

Gus could feel Leo’s and Ila’s hands gripping hers, but she could see nothing, and hear nothing but the rushing of wind and water in her ears. She felt the sensation of someone or something
pulling
on her, turning her inside out. She felt sick and, falling, pitched forward as if in a dream when your body plunges into bottomless darkness. She cried out for Leo and threw her arms out to break her fall. From far away she heard Leo call her name and the sound of Ila laughing. She tried to shout for Leo again, but the rushing was too great—it filled her ears, her eyes, her lungs, until she was in the black itself, splintering to glittered fragments—then with a thump, she landed on solid ground.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, breathing. Then she lifted her head and saw in front of her two creatures. One was the sea mink, standing sleek and low to the ground. The other, a rounder creature, balanced on the rocky ground. It was larger than the sea mink, and while most of its coat was gray marked with darker spots, its belly was a creamy white. The animal’s face was the same flecked gray as its body, with big, dark eyes set far apart above its rounded muzzle and black-button nose.

It was a seal.

Gus blinked to clear her vision, but the slightly blurred images did not shift. She also noticed that the sea had gone from blue to black, and the morning sky
above it was a steely shade of gray. She put her hands up to rub her eyes and fell forward heavily with a surprised noise that sounded like the hoarse bark of a dog. Instead of hands, she had two flippers. She was balanced awkwardly on the front of her body, pushing herself up with the flippers so that she could lift her head and look around.

“No time to sit here and think,” the sea mink said sharply.