Douglas Preston: Riptide

"Maybe the skull's around here somewhere," Johnny replied.

They poked among the rocks, finding nothing but a dead dogfish with goggle eyes. As they rounded the point, a wrecked barge came into view, left from some long-forgotten salvage operation. It was grounded at the high-tide mark, twisted and pounded onto the rocks, buffeted by decades of storms.

"Look at this," said Johnny, interest rising in his voice. He scrambled out on the heaved, buckled deck. All around it lay rusted pieces of metal, pipes, busted gears, and nasty snarls of cable and wire. Malin began looking through the old junk, keeping an eye out for the gleam of a pirate doubloon. He figured that the pirate, Red Ned Ockham, was so rich he'd probably dropped a whole lot of doubloons around the island. Red Ned, who'd supposedly buried millions and millions in gold on the island, along with a jeweled weapon called St. Michael's Sword, so powerful it could kill any man who even looked at it. They said Red Ned had once cut a man's ears off and used them to make a bet in a dice game. A sixth-grade girl named Cindy told him it was really the man's balls that Red Ned cut off, but Malin didn't believe her. Another time Red Ned got drunk and cut a man open, then threw him overboard and towed him by his guts until the sharks ate him. The kids at school had a lot of stories about Red Ned.

Tiring of the barge, Johnny motioned for Malin to follow him along the rocks that lay scattered at the bottom of the bluffs on the windward side of the island. Above them, a high dirt embankment rose against the sky, roots of long-dead spruce trees poking horizontally from the soil like gnarled fingers. The top of the embankment was lost in the clinging mists. Some of the bluffs were caved in and collapsing, victims of the storms that slammed into the island every fall.

It was chilly in the shadow of the bluffs, and Malin hurried on. Johnny, excited now by his finds, was bounding ahead, heedless of his own warnings, whooping and waving the bone. Malin knew his mother would throw the old bone into the ocean as soon as she found it.

Johnny stopped briefly to poke among stuff that had washed up on shore: old lobster buoys, busted-up traps, pieces of weathered planking. Then he moved toward a fresh gash farther up the bluffs. A bank had recently caved in, spilling dirt and boulders across the rocky shore. He leaped easily over the boulders, then disappeared from view.

Malin moved more quickly now. He didn't like having Johnny out of sight. There was a stirring in the air: it had been a sunny day before they disappeared into the Ragged Island mist, but anything could be happening out there now. The breeze felt cold, as if weather was coming on, and the sea was beginning to break hard over the Ragged Island ledges. The tide would be close to turning. Maybe they'd better start back.

There was a sudden, sharp cry, and for a terrible moment Malin feared Johnny had hurt himself on the slippery rocks. But then the cry came again—an urgent summons—and Malin scrambled forward, clambering over the fallen rocks and around a bend in the shoreline. Before him, a huge granite boulder lay at a crazy angle, freshly dislodged from the bank by a recent storm. On its far side stood Johnny, pointing, a look of wide-eyed wonderment on his face.

At first, Malin couldn't say a word. The movement of the boulder had exposed the opening of a tunnel at the foot of the bank, with just enough room to squeeze behind. A clammy stream of stale air eddied from the tunnel mouth.

"Cripes," he said, running up the slope toward the embankment.

"I found it!" Johnny cried, breathless with excitement. "I bet you anything the treasure's in there. Take a look, Malin!"

Malin turned. "It was my idea."

Johnny looked back with a smirk. "Maybe," he said, unshouldering his satchel. "But I found it. And I brought the matches."

Malin leaned toward the tunnel mouth inquisitively. Deep down, he'd believed his father when he said there never was any treasure on Ragged Island. But now, he wasn't so sure. Was it possible his dad could be wrong?

Then he leaned back quickly, nose wrinkling against the stale smell of the tunnel.

"What's the matter?" Johnny asked. "Afraid?"

"No," said Malin in a small voice. The mouth of the tunnel looked very dark.

"I'm going first," Johnny said. "You follow me. And you'd better not get lost." Tossing his prize bone away, he dropped to his knees and squirmed through the opening. Malin knelt also, then hesitated. The ground was hard and cold beneath him. But Johnny was already disappearing from sight, and Malin didn't want to be left on the lonely, fogbound shore. He squirmed through the opening after his brother.

There was the snap of a match, and Malin sucked in his breath unconsciously as he rose to his feet. He was in a small antechamber, the roof and walls held up by ancient timbers. Ahead, a narrow tunnel led into blackness.

"We'll split the treasure fifty-fifty." Johnny was talking in a very serious voice, a voice Malin hadn't heard before. Then he did something even more surprising: He turned and shook Malin's hand with a childlike formality. "You and me, Mal, equal partners."

Malin swallowed, feeling a little better.

The match died as they took another step forward. Johnny paused and Malin heard the scratch of another match, followed by a flare of feeble light. He could see his brother's Red Sox cap haloed in the flickering flame. A sudden stream of dirt and pebbles rattled down through the timbers, bouncing across the stone floor.

"Don't touch the walls," Johnny whispered, "and don't make any loud noise. You'll cave the whole thing in."

Malin said nothing, but unconsciously moved closer to his brother.

"Don't follow so close!" Johnny hissed.

They went forward along a downward incline, then Johnny cried out and jerked his hand. The light went out, plunging them into darkness.

"Johnny?" Malin cried, feeling a surge of panic, reaching out to grasp his brother's arm. "What about the curse?"

"Come on, there's no curse," whispered Johnny scornfully. There was another scratching sound and the match flared. "Don't worry. I got at least forty matches in here. And look—" He dug into his pocket, then turned toward Malin, a big paper clip held between his fingers. He stuck the lit match into one end. "How about that? No more burned fingers."

The tunnel took a gentle turn to the left, and Malin noticed that the reassuring crescent of light from the tunnel entrance was gone. "Maybe we should go back and get a flashlight," he said.

Suddenly, he heard a hideous sound, a hollow groan that seemed to erupt from the heart of the island and fill the narrow chamber. "Johnny!" he cried, clutching his brother again. The sound sputtered away into a deep sigh as another trickle of dirt fell from the timbers overhead.

Johnny shrugged his arm away. "Jeez, Malin. It's just the tide turning. It always makes that noise in the Water Pit. Keep your voice down, I said."

"How do you know that?" Malin asked.

"Everybody knows that."

There was another moan and a gurgle, followed by a loud creaking of timbers that slowly died away. Malin bit his lip to keep it from trembling.

A few matches later, the tunnel turned at a shallow angle and began sloping downward more steeply, its walls shorter and rougher.

Johnny held his match toward the passage. "This is it," he said. "The treasure chamber would be at the bottom."

"I don't know," Malin said. "Maybe we'd better go back and get Dad."

"Are you kidding?" Johnny hissed. "Dad hates this place. We'll tell Dad after we get the treasure."

He lit another match, then ducked his head into the narrow tunnel. Malin could see that this passage wasn't more than four feet high. Cracked boulders supported the wormy timbers of the roof. The smell of mold was even stronger here, mingled with seaweed and a hint of something worse.