Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

Since it is difficult to shake hands with a seal, they bowed their heads politely, and Herbert’s mother came closer and said something, speaking in a low voice and in the selkie language. The children thought she was asking them to help Herbert make up his mind about whether to be a person or a seal and, when they were back in their rooms, Fabio had an idea. “We could just cut him with a knife. Not hard. Just a nick — then he’d become human and that would be that.”

“Oh, we couldn’t!”

“I don’t see why not. Then Myrtle would have a friend. He could learn the piano and they could play duets.”

But when he thought about it, Fabio knew that Minette was right. He couldn’t make even the smallest nick in that smooth and shining skin.

It was on the next afternoon that the children had a shock. They had taken yet another load of seaweed to the boobrie and were shovelling it into the nest when the bird gave the loudest honk they had heard yet. For a moment they thought it might be an egg, for the honk was a welcoming one.

But it wasn’t. The boobrie was looking at the loch.

The children turned to follow her gaze — and gasped.

A head had appeared in the middle of the lake.

But what a head! White and smooth and enormous…like the front end of a gigantic worm. After the head came a neck…also smooth…also white…a neck divided into rings of muscle and going on and on and on. It reared and waved above the surface of the water, and still more neck appeared…and more and more. Except that the neck was getting fatter, it couldn’t all be neck — the bulgier part must be the body of the worm: a worm the size of a dozen boa constrictors.

The boobrie honked once more and the children clutched each other, unable to move.

The creature was still rising up in the water, still getting longer, still pale and glistening and utterly strange. Then it turned its head towards them and opened its eyes which were just two deep holes as black as its body was white.

“Whooo,” it began to say. “Whooo”—and with every “oo” the air filled with such a stench of rottenness and decay and… old ness…that the children reeled backwards. And then it began to slither out of the water…it slithered and slithered and slithered and still not all of it was out of the lake — and suddenly the children had had enough. Leaving their wheelbarrows where they were, they rushed down the hill to the house and almost fell into the sitting room where the aunts were having tea.

“I didn’t expect you to knock,” said Aunt Etta, putting down her cup. “One knocks at the doors of bedrooms but not of sitting rooms when one is staying in a house. But I do expect you to come in quietly like human beings, and not like hooligans.”

But the children were too frightened to be snubbed. “We saw a thing…a worm…”

“As long as a train…Well, as long as a bus.”

“All naked and white and smooth and slippery…”

“It said ‘Whoo’ and came at us, and its breath…” Minette shuddered, just remembering. “It came out of the lake and now it’s coming after us and it’ll coil round and round us and smother us and—”

“Unlikely,” said Aunt Etta. She passed the children a plate of scones and told them to sit down. “It seems to be very difficult to get you to listen,” she said. “I’m sure that all three of us have told you how unpleasant we found the whole business of kidnapping you.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Coral. “That loathsome matron like a camel.”

“So it is not very likely that we would go to all that trouble to feed you to a stoorworm,” said Etta.

Being safe in the drawing room, eating a scone with strawberry jam, made Fabio feel very much braver.

“What is a stoorworm?”

“A wingless dragon. An Icelandic one; very unusual. Once the world was full of them, but you know how it is. Dragons with wings and fiery breaths in the skies. Dragons without wings and poisonous breaths in the water. The wingless ones were called worms. You must have heard of them: the Lambton Worm, the Laidly Worm, the Stoorworm.”

But the children hadn’t.

“If his breath is poisonous…he breathed on us quite hard,” said Minette. “He said ‘Whoooo’ and blew at us. Does that mean we’ll be ill or die?”

Aunt Coral shook her head. “He’s only poisonous to greenfly and things like that. We use him to spray the fruit trees. And he probably wasn’t saying ‘Whoooo’, he was saying ‘Who?’—meaning who are you? He talks like that; very slowly because he comes from Iceland and they have more time over there.”

But Minette was still alarmed. “Look,” she said, staring through the window. “Oh look, he’s slithering down the hill…He’s coming closer…He’s coming here!”

Aunt Myrtle came to stand beside her. “He’ll be coming to visit Daddy,” she said.

“They’re good friends,” explained Coral to the bewildered children. “They think alike about the world — you know, that the old days were better.”

Standing by the open sitting room door, they watched bravely as the stoorworm slithered into the hall, slithered up the first flight of stairs, along the landing, up the second flight…In his bedroom they could hear the Captain shouting, “Come along, my dear fellow, come on in,” and the front end of the worm went through into the Captain’s bedroom while the back end was still in the hall trying to lift its tail over the table.

Fabio had stopped feeling frightened but he was becoming very suspicious. “Is there anything we have to do to the stoorworm?” he asked. If the mermaids needed scrubbing and the seals had to be given a bottle four times a day, and the boobrie’s food had to be wheelbarrowed up a steep hill, it seemed likely that the stoorworm too would mean hard work.

And he was quite right. “It’s a question of seeing that he doesn’t get tangled up,” said Aunt Etta. “In the water he’s all right but you will see a few trees we’ve stripped of lower branches — those are stoorworm trees and when he’s on land we help him to coil himself round them neatly, otherwise he gets into knots. It’s best to think of him as a kind of rope, or the flex of a Walkman.”

Fabio didn’t say anything. He had already gathered that when Aunt Etta said “we” she meant him and Minette — and she went on to explain that the worm was a person who liked to think about important things like Where has yesterday gone? or Why hasn’t God made sardines without bones?

“The trouble is he’s so long that his thoughts don’t easily get to the other end, and that upsets him,” said Etta. “He wants to have an operation to make him shorter, but you must make it clear that we will not allow it. Plastic surgery,” said Aunt Etta, fiercely tapping her nose, “is something we could never permit on the Island.”

“If you’re bothered by his breath you can always give him a peppermint,” said Coral. “Though why everyone in the world should smell of toothpaste is something I have never understood. And now you’d better go and fetch the barrows from the hill.”

“We must start to think seriously about running away,” said Fabio sleepily.

“Yes, we must,” agreed Minette, yawning.

They had gone on saying this each night — it was almost like saying their prayers — but they hadn’t got much further. It wasn’t just that they would have to steal the Peggoty from the boathouse, they would also have to know in which direction to sail her. And of course running away has two parts to it. There is running away from somewhere and there is running away to somewhere.

“It’s all right for you,” Fabio said. “You’ve got two proper parents. All I’ve got in this country is an awful school and awful grandparents.”