Lost Children of the Far Islands (24 page)

“Ow,” she whispered, wiping at the stinging places on her legs. Her hands came back with blood on them. She dropped down into the surprisingly dark space next to Leo.

Even with entire pieces of the roof missing, the sunlight did not reach the room. It smelled of mildew and rot and something darker and heavier underneath the more familiar smells.

“Phew, it really stinks in here!” Leo said. “Like BO but way worse.”

Gus’s foot touched something soft, and as her eyes adjusted to the gloom she could see it was the ripped red pelt of a rabbit. The rotten stink in the room seemed even stronger now that she could see what it was from.

“I want to get out of here,” she said.

“I think it was a church,” Leo said, ignoring Gus.

It did seem to be a church, as it was a single open space with a raised platform at one end. Here and there, broken chunks of rocks lay where they had fallen from the walls. As they moved slowly around the room, Gus
felt something crunching under her feet like dry twigs in a forest. Looking down, she stifled a scream when she realized that she was walking on bones. The entire floor was strewn with them—fish skeletons, but also what looked like rabbits and field mice, and then, to her horror, she saw a human skull lying amid the other bones. She let out a tiny moan.

“Look at this,” Leo called quietly to her.

“Leo,” Gus said urgently, “I think these are human—”

But Leo was not listening to her. He was at the far end of the room, under a stone arch. Gus hurried after him. She did not want to be alone in this place.

Under the arch shone a large, still pool of water. In the half-light its surface looked thick and black. Gus instinctively took a step back, and then another.

“Should we try it?” Leo said.

Gus shook her head. “I don’t know. If she’s not there …” Her voice trailed off.

She and Leo stared into the pool. Its oily surface gave off an ugly, sullen gleam. Gus shuddered. “Ugh.”

“We have to try,” Leo said.

Gus nodded. “OK,” she said. “Let’s Turn.”

Their seal bodies saved their lives. As soon as they entered the water, a powerful current yanked them down and flipped them end over end, like sticks caught in a whirlpool. They were thrust into another tunnel. This one was much longer than the others. Even as seals they were pushed to the very end of their air reserves. Gus
and Leo thrashed their powerful bodies, moving faster and faster in the darkness. They swept the water for other tunnels, but there was nothing branching off from this one. Then finally the water thrust Gus upward and flung her, huffing and gasping, to the surface. Leo’s sleek head popped up next to her. He drew in three great gulps of air.

They were back in the sea. They had surfaced in a tide pool that had formed between slabs of rough, barnacle-covered basalt. A seagull perched at the edge of the pool, cocking his head to observe the two seals, first with one bright eye and then the other.

The shoreline consisted of the same jagged rocks and crashing waves as the place where they had come ashore. Here, however, a long, flat rock reached out above the water like a jetty. At the very tip, tucked into a hollow smoothed by hundreds of years of waves breaking, slumped Ila, dirt-streaked in her soaking wet nightgown. And below her, something swam back and forth in the water, just under the surface, something dark and massive and unmistakably evil.

At the sight of their sister, both Leo and Gus burst out of their seal bodies in the freezing tide pool. Instantly, color rushed in—the red of Ila’s nightgown, the navy blue of the dusky sky, and the crimson sun lowering itself toward the fog that surrounded the island.

Leo grabbed Gus’s shoulder and yanked her down in the pool. His teeth were chattering as he hissed at her.

“Stay down! The Dobhar-chú’s in the water.”

“I know!” Gus whispered back. “We have to get Ila!”

Instead of answering, Leo Turned. With one last glance at the dark rock and her sister on it, Gus Turned and sank below the surface. Leo was waiting for her.

“You human and I swim,” he twittered.

Gus was confused. Surely Leo didn’t mean to swim in the water with that creature?

“I swim,” he said again. “You run. Get Ila.”

“No!” Gus said. “No, no, no! We Turn and run. Get
Ila …” Her voice trailed away. There was nothing else to say. They had no plan for killing the monstrous creature that swam so close to their sister. “Wait for Móraí,” she said, finally.

Leo hung silently in the water. His dark, round eyes looked sad.

“Wait for Móraí,” Gus said again.

Slowly, Leo nodded, and they swam to the surface, Turned, and slipped out of the tide pool. Crouching low, they began to edge toward the long rock. As they moved, Gus caught sight of what looked like a pile of clothing heaped under a low rock. With a shock, she recognized the Bedell’s overcoat and realized, in the same second, that the pile
was
the Bedell. With an effort, she forced herself to look away from the broken heap that had been the dapper little Messenger. She needed to focus on Ila. But her eyes blurred with tears as she followed Leo.

Then a voice stopped them. “Well, hello and welcome,” said the Dobhar-chú.

Gus and Leo froze on their hands and knees behind a cluster of boulders.

“So noisy underwater,” the voice continued. “All that chitchat. Not very sneaky, are you, little sea dumplings? Now come out and show yourselves. If you value your sister’s life, that is.”

Gus and Leo stood up and looked out across the water. Directly below Ila, just breaking the surface of the sea, was the great head of the Dobhar-chú. It was much, much bigger than they had imagined it would be. Dark,
leathery skin stretched over bone like a thing out of a museum, some ancient monster that once roamed the earth. The head turned toward them and then rose out of the water on a long serpent’s neck. They could see gills fluttering on either side of its muzzle and down to where the creature disappeared into the water. The King of the Black Lakes observed them with unblinking eyes the color of hot tar.

“Come closer,” he said.

Neither Gus nor Leo could move. They were pinned down by horror and fear like specimens in a display case. Gus thought about the creature’s claws, hidden by the water, that could tunnel through rock.

The creature stretched out its thick, long neck and nuzzled Ila gently in a parody of tenderness.

“No!” Gus screamed.

She and Leo ran, stumbling and falling, to the long, dark rock where their sister slumped. But as soon as they reached the end of the rock, the Dobhar-chú spoke again. “That is close enough, I think.”

“Ila!” Gus said desperately. “Ila, we’re here!” Her entire body was trembling with the effort it took to keep from running to her little sister.

Ila did not respond. They could see now that her eyes were closed. And at least some of the dirt on her face was actually an ugly purple bruise.

“Ila?” Gus said, her voice breaking.

The King of the Black Lakes opened his jaws to Gus and Leo, showing them row after row of jagged teeth. “I
suppose I don’t
have
to kill her,” he said, and winked. The gesture was grotesque on the bony face.

Leo lunged forward, but Gus grabbed the bottom of his T-shirt and held him next to her.

“Not yet,” she murmured. They just needed to wait for the Móraí to arrive. Surely all of them together could fight the monster.

“But I do so want to!” the Dobhar-chú said merrily. “And, you know,” he added, lowering his voice as if to tell them a secret, “you are Folk, after all. Must wipe you all out, I’m afraid. And then, I suppose, more killing, more fear, more despair. Much, much more. What fun it will be!”

“Ila?” Gus whispered. She could feel the tears running down her face.

The creature showed his teeth in a snarl. “Now,” he said, “where is the old woman?”

“She’s on her way!” Leo said angrily.

“Well, then,” the creature said, settling himself down in the water like a cat on a cushion. “In that case, we shall just have to make ourselves comfortable and wait. It would be such a shame to kill you three and still be stuck in this place. With her gone, I can finally see a bit of the world!”

“Gills,” Leo murmured.

“What?” Gus tried to speak without moving her mouth. Every cell in her body was screaming to her to get to Ila, to run and snatch her little sister out of this place.

“He’s half Femori, and he has gills,” Leo whispered. “That means he needs the sea. The Femorians couldn’t leave the water. It would kill them. He’s only half, but we need to get him out of the water, Gus.”

“Great,” Gus muttered.

“What’s that?” the Dobhar-chú called. “No whispers, little sea slugs. So impolite.”

But as the Dobhar-chú spoke, Gus’s attention was caught by something beyond the monstrous creature. Out to sea, the fog bank was shifting. For a few wonderful seconds, she thought that it was the Móraí arriving.

But then Leo said, “Oh no,” in a soft voice so full of grief that Gus knew what she was really seeing. The fog was lifting.

It shimmered like a curtain in a light breeze, and then it began to thin. The setting sun, which had disappeared behind the bank, glowed through the increasingly transparent skin, staining the sea red.

The Móraí was not coming to help them. They were on their own. The three of them against the creature in the sea, who now turned his head to follow the spreading light on the water.

“Oh, I think the game has changed,” the Dobhar-chú said quietly. “It seems you are all alone, my small friends.”

The Dobhar-chú gazed down at Ila where she half sat, half lay on the cold stone, and his glowing dark eyes shifted from black to burgundy to incandescent red.

“Here I come, little fox,” he whispered.

The wind had dropped to the stillness just before dusk. It was so quiet, with no seagulls shrieking or waves crashing against the rocks. The sea had gone purple, and the lowering sun gilded the air around them, lighting Ila’s pale throat.

Leo began to run.

Gus knew he would never get there in time. So she did the only thing she could think of. She stepped forward, opened her mouth, and began to speak. “On this night,” she said. Her voice was a small, thin thing, just a thread hanging in the air. “This darkest hour,” she said, her voice gaining strength. “This hearth, / This house, / This hold.”

Leo had reached Ila. Kneeling down, he gathered her in his arms, shielding her with his body. Above them, the Dobhar-chú’s head on its long neck was poised to strike, but something held him. His eyes turned slowly back to black, an inky stain that spread over the red like darkness overtaking fire.

“No,” he said, but his voice was a whisper.

Gus’s voice was loud and strong now, calling out the poem easily, remembering the words as though she had heard them every night of her life:

As she spoke, the Dobhar-chú roared, and the sound rolled out and across the rocks, knocking Leo and Ila over. Gus staggered backward and then began to run to her brother and sister.

As she reached them, the Dobhar-chú roared again. There was no blocking out the sound of his fury. It blasted into their bodies and shook the air around them, pressing them to the ground and filling the night with desolation, and terror, and endless hunger. Covering their ears did no good. The sound came in through their skin, their eyes, and worked its way between the fingers they had pressed over their ears.

Out of nowhere, a driving rain began to fall, soaking the children and obscuring their vision. Thunder rolled across the ocean. Gus moaned in fear as a jagged lightning bolt zigzagged down over the rock on which they crouched. Another bolt lit the sky and illuminated the King of the Black Lakes. Higher and higher the creature rose, a nightmare of darkness and fury. His head whipped back and forth on his long, thick neck as water rolled off his body in sheets. Another lightning bolt lit the sky as he threw back his head and roared, his mouth growing wider and wider. A second set of jaws pushed forward from his mouth, thrashing and wailing and baring its own set of jagged teeth.

Crouched on the wet rock with Leo and Ila, who still had not opened her eyes, Gus gasped out the rest of the poem, forcing the words out against the driving rain and the slashing wind:

Suddenly the creature in the sea went quiet. The storm fled, as abruptly as it had appeared. The night was falling fast now, with a fat, full moon rising up over the edge of the dark horizon. Soon the moon would light the water, but for now the Dobhar-chú was just a dark shadow. The second set of jaws clacked and hissed inside his mouth.

Gus huddled on the rock. She could feel Leo’s arms around her and Ila. She thought she could feel her sister’s heart beating. She had a sudden flash of anger with the Móraí, for sending them against this monster with nothing but a poem as defense. Shouldn’t they have had weapons of some sort? Now they were as helpless as rabbits spotted on the ground by a sharp-eyed eagle, their only options to freeze or to run.