Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters Read Free Book Online Page B

challenged them from almost every window of the cottage to seek the enjoyment of air on their summits; towards one of these hills did Marianne and Margaret one memorable morning direct their steps, attracted by the rare appearance of sunshine in the claustrophobic gloom of their surroundings. Margaret was insistent on trekking to the centre of the island to ascend Mount Margaret and find the source of the column of steam she still swore she had seen, and Marianne was pleased to oblige. This opportunity, however, was not tempting enough to draw the others from their pencil and their book; Mrs. Dashwood sat composing short verses about sailors dying of influenza, whilst Elinor drew again and again a cryptic five-pointed symbol that had appeared to her in a fever dream on the night they first arrived in the islands.
    Marianne gaily ascended the downs, trying to keep up with Margaret as she plunged forward, using the bent branch of a kapok tree for a walking stick. Together they traced the upward journey of a sprightly brook— which Margaret suspected had its headwaters at the apex of the little mountain—rejoicing in every glimpse of blue sky, and catching in their faces the animating gales of a high southwesterly wind, despite the keen odor of rot and decay it curiously bore. Marianne took little notice of the peculiar chill in the air, and the fact that the wind only increased as they rambled, seeming indeed to moan, as it swept through the trees, with the restless voices of the damned.
    “Is there a felicity in the world superior to this?” asked Marianne with a grin. “Margaret, we will walk here at least two hours, and if we are set upon by any sort of man-beast with giant lobster claws, I shall swiftly butcher it with this pickaxe I brought for that purpose.”
    Margaret gave no reply to her sister’s flight of fancy, remaining keen and alert as they tromped. She jumped, as they turned one sharp corner of the path, when suddenly she heard muted voices, mumbling in a kind of ragged chorus, a menacing, polysyllabic chant:
K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah. K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah. K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah.
    “Do you hear that?” Margaret asked her sister.
    Marianne, busily composing romantic couplets dedicated to their new island home, responded with an airy, “Hear what?”
    Indeed, the chanting had abruptly stopped; Margaret jerked her head, peering into the trees beside the brook for the source of this puzzling refrain. For a fleeting moment she glimpsed a pair of gleaming eyes, and then another—before they disappeared in the dark heart of the underbrush.
    She shook her head and pressed on.
    The sisters pursued their way against the wind, resisting it for about twenty minutes longer, when suddenly the fog that hugged the coast lifted and united into a sudden cloud cover, and a driving rain set full in their face, every drop noxious to smell and sulfurous upon the skin. Chagrined and panic-stricken as they imagined what fresh peril this sudden, acrid downpour must portend, they were obliged to turn back, for no shelter was nearer than their own house. Their hearts pounding with horror, they ran desperately down the steep side of the craggy hill which led immediately to their garden gate.
    Marianne had at first the advantage, but a false step brought her splashingly into the brook, newly swollen and rushing with rainwater, where she was suddenly submerged from head to toe in the icy cold water. Margaret was involuntarily hurried along by the steepness of the hill; her face was a rictus of fear as she heard the chilling splash of her sister entering the water, and words appeared in her mind unbidden:
It’s them.
The people she had spotted for those brief moments in the underbrush.
They will not let us ascend. They protect the geyser… . Them …
    Marianne, meanwhile, lay face down in the brook, her pickaxe thrown from her grip. Freezing, waterlogged, and pummeled by stones carried by the swift current, she drew