Monster Mission (17 page)

‘I spoiled her,’ wailed Loreen. ‘She always had the best shells and the prettiest pearls for her hair.’

‘Now don’t carry on so,’ said Ursula. ‘It isn’t your fault Queenie turned out so flighty.’

‘She didn’t—’ began Oona – but Loreen only put another piece of gum in her mouth and went on wailing. ‘I’ve been a rotten mother, and it’s all my fault,’ she said again, and she picked Walter out of the washing-up bowl and slapped his tail though he hadn’t done anything except grizzle and whine in his usual way.

‘We must tell the aunts,’ said Fabio.

‘Oh dear, must we?’ cried Loreen.

But Old Ursula said yes, it was best to own up. ‘Get some wheelbarrows and we’ll go up to the house,’ she said.

So the children came back with three barrows and Art, because flopping about overland made the mermaids’ tails sore, and no one took any notice of Oona who went on croaking that her sister had not
liked
the muscleman.

The aunts were very much upset. Not because Queenie was flighty, which they’d known all along, but because it meant that Mr Sprott now knew that there were mermaids on the Island – and maybe other things too.

‘I wonder if he knew before he came to lunch,’ said Coral. ‘Do you think that was why he wanted to buy the Island?’

‘Perhaps he’ll come back with photographers?’ faltered Myrtle.

Fabio and Minette looked at each other. They had lived in the world outside long enough to know that Mr Sprott might come back with something much more serious than that.

A day passed, and half a night, and then they heard the sound they had been dreading: the noise of a boat coming into the bay. So Sprott was back already!

In an instant the aunts were out of bed. Etta ran for the Captain’s blunderbuss, Coral fetched Art’s catapult, Myrtle grabbed the long-handled brush she used to scrub her back.

Outside, the night was black and moonless but they could make out the boat nosing in beside the jetty. The engine died … the cargo was unloaded … and almost instantly the boat went into reverse and moved away.

The aunts, clutching their weapons, peered into the darkness. Then suddenly Etta broke the silence with a great shout and ran towards the jetty. And there, standing tall among her suitcases, was a woman in a long raincoat holding what seemed to be a frying pan.

‘Dorothy! Oh my dear, how wonderful to see you!’ She hugged her sister, unable to keep back her tears of happiness and relief.

It was only then, as the other aunts came forward, that Etta could make out two small figures standing behind the luggage.

‘Good heavens, Dorothy, what have you got there?’ she asked, shining her torch.

‘You may well ask,’ said Dorothy, and pushed Boo-Boo and the Little One forward into the light.

Having Betty’s children to stay would have been bad at any time. Now with Queenie gone and everyone so jittery, it was a nightmare.

They were awful children. Not awful like Lambert but awful all the same. It wasn’t their fault; they’d been brought up to behave like idiots. Boo-Boo (who was a boy called Alfred) wore a bow tie and kept asking Art for shoe polish.

‘It’s got to be
tan,
not brown,’ he said to poor Art, who was trying to prepare mash for the boobrie chicks and take the Captain his meals and cope with the extra people to feed.

The Little One (who was a girl called Griselda) began to cry straight away because Dorothy had forgotten to pack the hankie with a picture of a flower fairy on it which she kept under her pillow, and both the children were terrified of germs. Fortunately they were so wrapped up in their silly fusses about which pyjama case was which that they didn’t even notice the strange animals or the danger they might be in. They just went on dusting the chairs before they sat down in them and looking at themselves in mirrors and complaining because their underclothes hadn’t been ironed, exactly as if they were still in Newcastle upon Tyne. If Fabio hadn’t been so busy with the kraken his temper would certainly have got the better of him but as it was he hardly saw them.

But having Dorothy made up for everything.

Dorothy knew that there was evil in the world. She had met people like Stanley Sprott and she had seen some dreadful things abroad – ‘monsters’ that were supposed to be mermaids kept pickled in jars, or deformed beasts put in cages for people to gawp at – but she was not afraid. It was Dorothy who filled the Captain’s blunderbuss with carpet tacks and set up tripwires behind the house and showed them how to make a cosh.

But when at the end of the first day Etta took her sister down to see the kraken, the tough, hard-faced woman changed into someone very different.

‘Oh Etta,’ she breathed, looking down at the little creature as he slept, ‘that I should live to see this day!’

Queenie sat in Mr Sprott’s bathroom on the
Hurricane
up to her waist in scented water. The bath was a jacuzzi, with water bubbling up from all sorts of places. The taps were gold and so were the shower fittings and on shelves all round were cut-glass bottles full of wonderful things: coloured crystals and glittering hair sprays and creams for making the body firm and more creams for making it soft once it was firm and more creams still for making it not just soft and firm but also pink.

The creams belonged to Mrs Sprott, but she wasn’t there so Queenie had the bathroom to herself. It was exactly the kind of bathroom she had dreamt of when she heard stories about mermaids marrying princes and going to live in palaces, but as she splashed more water over her tail, the tears kept welling out of her eyes and she was shaken by terrible sobs. She had never in all her life been so unhappy and afraid.

For Oona had been right. Queenie had not swum away to be with the muscleman. Queenie had been most cruelly caught by Mr Sprott’s henchmen and this bathroom was as much her prison as any cell in a cold and dirty dungeon.

She had gone out for a moonlight swim and when she got to the end of the bay she found a net under the water stretched between two rocks. At first she thought the net had been put there by fishermen but as she tried to free herself it was pulled tighter and tighter still, and she was towed away behind the dinghy and hauled aboard the
Hurricane
like a slab of dead meat.

‘Oh, why didn’t I listen?’ cried poor Queenie. ‘My mother told me to stay out of the way of men.’

She would have given anything now to see Loreen chewing her gum or Old Ursula with her toothless smile; she even missed Walter. But the person she longed for most was Oona. She understood now how Oona had felt on board Lord Brasenott’s yacht; no wonder the poor girl had lost her voice. The round window of the bathroom had a curtain but Des and the two horrible men who guarded the boat had pulled it aside and every so often their faces leered in at her.

‘Oh, what is to become of me!’ cried poor Queenie, and felt so sad that she wanted to die.

And while Queenie wept in the bath, Lambert snivelled in his father’s cabin.

‘I don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother,’ he whined. ‘I don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother
anyway
and I certainly don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother who isn’t really there.’

‘Don’t be silly, Lambert,’ said Mr Sprott. ‘One doesn’t marry mermaids, and anyway your mother is still alive.’

But he sighed deeply as he said it for Queenie was much prettier than Mrs Sprott with her purple hair and her claw-like fingernails and her greedy eyes. Mrs Sprott was a kind of dung beetle, only instead of collecting balls of nice soft manure she collected clothes and shoes and jewels and furs and dumped them in his house before going out for more.

‘They’ll laugh at me at school if I have a mermaid for a stepmother and I don’t like fish. Even half a fish I don’t like … even a fish that isn’t really there,’ moaned Lambert.

‘Oh be quiet, Lambert,’ said Mr Sprott. ‘No one’s going to marry her. We’re going to show her off in a tank and make a fortune out of her. But first she’ll have to tell us where the other creepy-crawlies are to be found. I’m going to catch the lot of them and then—’

But he didn’t finish what he was going to say. Lambert couldn’t be trusted not to blab. Not till the weird beasts were on board and tied up and on their way across the Atlantic would he say anything. He had decided to set up his funfair on an island off the coast of Florida which belonged to a friend. Or rather to a business partner. A man like Stanley Sprott did not have friends.

But first he had to cross-examine Queenie and see how much of his son’s babble was true. He found Des ogling the mermaid through the bathroom window, while Casimir and Boris grumbled that it was their turn.

‘I found her,’ Des was saying. ‘So I get the longest turn. She’s mine really and the old man ought to—’

He turned to see Mr Sprott standing behind him. ‘If any of you lay a finger on this mermaid you’ll go straight overboard,’ he said, and told Des to board up the window. Then he opened the door and drew up a stool beside the bath.

‘Now, dear,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a few questions to ask you. It’s about your family. You’re not alone, are you? You’ve got a mummy and a daddy?’

‘I haven’t got a daddy,’ said Queenie, pulling Aunt Myrtle’s bodice tighter round her top.

‘But a mummy … and little brothers and sisters?’

‘Only one of each and my great-grandmother.’

Queenie was too frightened to realize that she was being trapped.

‘And of course there are the other … unusual creatures on the Island. Lambert told me about a worm. White, isn’t he?’

Queenie nodded. ‘He’s very clever,’ she said.

‘And what else is there on the Island?’

Now at last the mermaid saw where this was leading. ‘Nothing,’ she faltered. ‘Just the aunts.’

‘Oh, I think there are,’ said Mr Sprott. ‘Perhaps if I take the plug out of the bath it will help you to think.’

‘No! Oh please, no!’

To take water from a mermaid is the most terrible thing you can do. But Mr Sprott had already pulled it out; the water was draining away. Now he picked up the electric hairdryer.

‘No!’ she cried again, trying to protect her tail from the terrifying heat.

Mr Sprott turned it off.

‘You’ve remembered something else?’

‘There’s a big bird … a boobrie.’ Surely he wouldn’t want the boobrie? What use would she be to him?

‘And where is it to be found? Is there a nest?’

‘No … I don’t know … It’s up on the hill. Oh please put the water back.’

But Mr Sprott did not put the water back – and now he put on the dryer again and let the ghastly heat play over her tail till the freshness of the silver became dull and dead … Queenie’s tail had been her pride and joy and now it looked as though it had been on a fishmonger’s slab for a week.

She held out as long as she could. Then she said pitifully: ‘There are some selkies. They’re just seals really. There’s nothing to them.’

But Mr Sprott wasn’t to be fobbed off so easily.

‘What sort of seals?’ He had dropped the hairdryer. Instead he had taken a pair of scissors and was holding a hank of her golden hair, ready to chop it off. ‘Go on – answer. Don’t keep me waiting. I don’t like to be kept waiting.’

‘I don’t know,’ whispered poor Queenie. ‘It’s just stories. People say they can turn into humans if someone drops seven tears into the water or if they’re touched with cold steel.’

Mr Sprott’s eyes glittered. He saw the circus ring … a seal on a tub … then a sharp pronged fork in its backside and lo, a woman jumps down. A transformation scene, better than a pantomime.

‘Go on – what else is there? What else?’

But though he threatened her again with the hairdryer Queenie kept silent about the little kraken. For she knew that the end of the kraken meant the end of the sea as she knew it – and thus the end of her world – and Mr Sprott did not dare to hurt her any more or she wouldn’t be worth putting on show.

‘I’ll speak to you again tomorrow,’ he said, turning the water on again. ‘Don’t think I’ve finished with you, because I haven’t.’

But as he gave his orders – the hold to be cleared, reinforced nets and lifting gear to be got ready, and harpoon guns to stun the beasts before they were hauled aboard – he did not realize that the greatest prize on the Island was still unknown to him. Neither Queenie nor Lambert had mentioned the kraken’s son.

The great kraken had reached the warmer southern seas. The fishes who joined him were brilliantly coloured, with fan tails and exotic spikes, and from the islands flashing birds with crests of crimson and orange came to welcome him and perch on his back. The water was clear and calm and the corals on the sea bed were of every colour under the sun.

As he swam the great kraken hummed his Healing Hum, and the turtles who had lumbered out of the sea to lay their eggs on the sandbanks were left in peace, and the rich men who had come to slaughter the porpoises pulled in their harpoons as the swell made by the kraken’s passing reached their boats.

Yet the kraken was not happy. The dolphins and seals that swam round him felt this and were puzzled. He was smiling less; his golden eyes sometimes had a clouded look.

But why? He did not know – only that somehow he felt uneasy. He was missing his son of course, but there could have been no safer place to leave him than the Island of Aunts.

‘I must pull myself together,’ thought the kraken. ‘I do not belong to myself; I belong to the sea.’

And he put aside his vague and troubled thoughts and swam on.

Two days after Boo-Boo and the Little One came to the Island, Old Ursula disappeared. She had swum out to say goodbye to Herbert’s mother and never came back.

The other mermaids were frantic.

‘I should have been nicer to her,’ wailed Loreen. ‘I shouldn’t have said her tail smelt. It did smell but I shouldn’t have said it.’ And Oona wept because time and again she’d left the old creature flapping in the sink instead of helping her.

As for the aunts, they now knew once and for all how great was the danger they were in. Great-grandmothers do fall in love but they aren’t often silly about it when they do. Old Ursula could not have eloped, she must have been snatched – and that meant that Queenie too had been taken by force. And sure enough, when they searched the bay, they found a net stretched between two rocks.