Starcross (15 page)
Authors: Philip Reeve
‘I suppose that must be a sand clam,’ said Jack, as the thing slowly closed itself up and sank back into the sand. ‘I don’t think they’ll be much trouble to us. Just look out for the little ridges where their shells break the surface, and stay clear of them.’
‘Thank you, Jack,’ I said, quite regretting my earlier harshness.
He smiled at me most kindly. ‘I still say that’s a pretty dress,’ he said. ‘What does the other tassel do?’
‘I believe that releases a distress flare, in case one finds oneself adrift at sea,’ I replied, and I looked down, blushing, for I suddenly found
myself
all adrift upon a sea of the most confusing emotions. And after a moment, I felt a light touch
upon my hand, and guessed that Jack had sensed how I was feeling, and was standing close behind me. I could feel his breath against my neck, and I confess it made me tremble.
‘Oh, Jack,’ I said softly, ‘why did you not reply to any of my letters?’
‘What’s that?’ called Jack, and I raised my eyes and saw that he had walked on without me, and was already far down the beach towards the sea.
So whose was the breath I felt upon my neck?
I grew cold, despite the sturdy wool serge of my costume. Whose fingers were those, tracing aimless patterns on my palm? My trembling increased. With a great effort of will I made myself turn and look.
For yards around me the surface of the desert seemed to be undulating and crumbling and breaking open, and from beneath it was rising a fat, bag-like body, from which sprouted a myriad snaky, jointless limbs, one of which had come groping blindly through the air and found my hand. These limbs, of which there were far more than I could count, were studded all along their length with fearsome barbs, and as I stood there, staring in utter horror, the name that Mother had mentioned when she spoke about the predators of ancient Mars came back to me.
‘Jack!’ I screamed. ‘The Crown of Thorns! A giant land starfish is upon us!’
And at my cry the monstrosity swung a broad, tubular trunk towards me, and a gale of wind seemed to grip me, fluttering the skirts of my bathing costume. I was dragged, still crying out plaintively, towards the ghastly opening. The horrid creature was endeavouring to suck me up, just as a hoverhog might suck up a drifting muffin crumb! A storm of sand flew all about me, and small pebbles and knotweed leaves went racing past and whirled up that trunk into the wet bag of the creature’s body, which was palely translucent, and inside which I could dimly make out the forms of other luckless creatures like
myself, churning and swirling in the acids of its stomach!
Suddenly Jack was by my side, helping me fight against the wind. As we were dragged closer to the feeding tube, he struck at it once, twice, thrice with his knife. Some glutinous liquid broke from it, and the trunk left off its sucking and withdrew, shrinking back into the creature’s body like the eye-stalk of a snail.
Thorny limbs writhed over us, black against the pale sky as the Sun came up above the sea. One wrapped itself around Jack’s arm. He severed it with his knife, then helped me up. A tentacle found my shoulder, but at its thorny touch one of my life-preserving leg-of-mutton sleeves burst and the hiss of expelled air made it flinch back, allowing me time to escape.
We ran towards the sea’s edge, hoping that the Crown of Thorns would be too slow-moving to catch up with us. And for a few moments it seemed our hopes would be fulfilled, for the beast dragged itself cumbrously down the slope of the beach, and its tentacles and feeding tube wove about in a way which made me sure it was blind, and could not track us unless we made sounds that it could follow.
Then, as we hurried out on to the wet, shining sand where the small waves were breaking, disaster struck. Jack
suddenly went down, almost dragging me with him. I thought that he had slipped, and made to help him up, but he gave a terrible cry, and I realised that he had fallen into the open maw of a sand clam! Weeping, I tried to pull him free, but the fanged lips of the trapdoor were closed tight on his left leg, just below the knee.
He tried to be brave, poor Jack, but the pain was terrible. He cried out again, and the Crown of Thorns heard him, and came slurping and flolloping towards us, and that awful suction tube swung down to snort me up.
‘Oh, Jack!’ I remember crying, as I was dragged backwards.
He held both my hands and pulled me towards him. The suction from the starfish’s feeding tube increased, and I felt my feet rise up into the air. I was playing the part of the rope in a tug-of-war between Jack and the monster, and a most uncomfortable and undignified role it was!
‘Myrtle!’ cried Jack. Poor Jack, he looked quite grey with pain, and the left leg of his trousers was soaked through with gore! ‘Myrtle,’ he shouted. ‘Just a bit closer, if you can …’
He was drawing me towards him, closer, closer, and I closed my eyes and raised my face to his, in expectation of
one last kiss. I confess that I was somewhat disappointed when he let go of my hand and reached out to tug one of the tassels on my bathing costume.
‘Jack!’ I said indignantly – and an instant later he released my other hand, too, and I was whirling through mid-air in a most unseemly manner, sucked head-over-heels into the wet mouth of that hideous tube.
But Jack’s plan, which I had been so slow to understand, had worked. Even as I flew, the inflatable raft concealed within my bustle expanded, so that by the time I reached the starfish I had become too large a morsel for it to swallow. I wedged in the feeding tube like a cork in a bottle, my head inside, my feet out in the open air, kicking frantically and all in vain, since they had nothing to kick against. For what
seemed a distressingly long while I stayed there, shaken up and down by the thrashing of the tube and half smothered by the vile fumes from the monster’s stomach.
Poor Jack,
I thought.
He tried so hard to save me, but he has failed, and once I am dead the beast will suck him up too, unless that wretched sand clam eats him first!
And it seemed so dreadful to me that Jack should be eaten by a starfish
and
a clam that I had a quite uncharacteristic flash of inspiration.
The other tassel!
I thought suddenly, and groping about upon my bodice, I found it, and gave it a sharp tug.
In a spray of smoke and sparks my costume’s distress flare was released from its concealment. The tube which held me captive filled with acrid, choking smoke as the flare went soaring through it into the very belly of the beast, there to explode in the internationally recognised colours of maritime distress.
The starfish shuddered convulsively, and collapsed. The tube in which I was stuck thudded into the wet sand. Tremors and quiverings still ran through the great corpse, but corpse it was! My action had destroyed it!
Some months ago, my brother Art contrived to cause a monstrous squid to explode in the upper airs of the planet
Jupiter, and he has been boring people rigid with the story of it ever since, oft remarking upon the sense of triumph it gave him, his resemblance to St George and other heroes, etc., etc. Yet I felt no thrill of victory as I contemplated the explosion and demise of the Crown of Thorns. Perhaps it is because I am female, and therefore above such primitive emotions, or perhaps because I was still stuck inside its slimy, stinking feeding tube.
At last I found the release valve on my life raft, and managed to deflate it. Beslimed and shuddering, I crawled out, and looked up in awe and wonder at the carcass of that great beast which Providence had lent me the strength to defeat. Bits of its stomach lay scattered all across the beach, and small pieces were still falling from the sky, landing with damp, sticky noises on the sand about me. At first I could not see Jack, and I thought that he had been eaten up entirely
by the sand clam. Then I realised that he lay just beyond the carcass, hidden from me by that hill of rent blubber and twitching tentacles. He had been trying to use his pocket knife to free himself from the clam, but his efforts had been in vain, and he had collapsed exhausted on the sand, his leg still clamped inside the creature’s jaws, his blood spreading in a river down the sand to stain the waves pink.
The awfulness of our predicament almost overwhelmed me. ‘Help! Help!’ I shrieked, turning to shout across the empty beach, until my cries echoed plaintively among the bluffs and crags inland. But I knew that even if they echoed all the way to Earth it could do me no good, for in the remote era we were trapped in there would be no one there to hear me. How piteously alone I felt! And how I feared that I should soon be still more alone, for I did not see how Jack could long survive!
And then, miraculously (as I thought), my cries received an answer! Unexpectedly, impossibly, a voice called out, ‘Miss Mumby?’
I looked about me and saw, emerging from the drifting smoke which still poured across the beach from the carcass of the dead starfish, a wicker bath chair.
