The Castaways by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online

me queasy.
    Midgely was already awake. I said, “The sea’s getting rough.”
    “No, it’s the ship.” There was a smile on his face. “She’s sailing again.”
    He was right, as I learned when I stepped out of the cookhouse. Sails that had flapped from their stays now bulged with wind, pulling nicely. The ship leapt through the waves, flinging spray from the bow that pattered all over the deck. It was the sort of sailing my father had loved, and I could picture him grinning out across the sea with his clothes in a flap and his salt-covered beard in a tangle.
    I imagined that a shift in the wind had sorted out the sails. But it certainly seemed that a ghostly crew had gone aloft to set and trim the canvas, missing only the main topsail. High above the deck, it was strangled and throttled by snarls of rope, flailing in the wind.
    With the decks at a slant, the seas roaring by, we began to hear again the knockings in the ship. They followed each shuddering blast of a breaking wave, and came in chorus with the terrible moans from the timbers and planks. Wecould see the masts shaking, and hear the slosh of water rising in the bilge, but those moans sounded too human to come from mere wood.
    Through the day we stormed along. But at nightfall the wind eased again, and the ship passed slowly through a field of ice. The southern sky lit up in glowing beams and arcs of light, so that the heavens seemed to cloak themselves in shimmering colors. The strange light played on the ice, and Midgely nearly cried because he couldn’t see the shining castles and the slabs.
    In the morning the field was behind us. There was only one bit of ice to be seen, and it lay straight ahead. A thick slab with a hummock in the middle, it was not very big, nor very tall, but it stood out plainly on the ocean. The hummock was stained a deep red, as though the ice still held the glow of heavenly lights.
    Not until we were up close did I see that the ice was stained with blood, and that on its back rode a pair of ragged men.

seven

THE CASTAWAYS COME ABOARD
    My skin crawled at the sight of the men on their icy raft. A trick of wind and tide might have brought us together, but for a moment I believed that Midge was right, and that his
Flying Dutchman
was very real.
    In that instant I didn’t doubt that the ship would stop of its own accord, and the men would join us, and off we’d go to somewhere else. We gathered at the base of the big bowsprit, with no one at the wheel. Weedle’s red sash whipped round his waist in the wind.
    We saw white puffs rising from the ice, and thought the men were signaling with guns, though we never heard the cracking sound of the shots.
    Each minute brought us thirty yards or so toward the ice.Each minute made the scene before us more strange and terrible.
    The two men stood at the low summit of their little island, not six feet above the sea. It seemed at first that they were dancing, for they reeled round and round at the top of the ice, their arms waving, their feet kicking. It seemed the fury of their dancing set their small world tilting to and fro beneath them. But it was really the ice that moved the men, and their dance was only a struggle to keep their balance. All around them the sea was white with froth, and great black fish kept bursting from the foam, battering at the ice.
    I had to explain it for Midgely, who must have doubted my every word. “Fish don’t come out of the water,” he said.
    Well, these ones did. They were long and fat, their black hides mottled by patches of white. From their backs rose enormous triangular fins, while their gaping mouths were full of teeth that a bear would have envied. Puffs of white spray shot up from the tops of their heads, scattering away on the wind.
    Those black fish, like small whales but fierce as wolves, hurtled right from the water and crashed their bellies on the ice. Their tails churning the water, they drove themselves up onto the little island, until their