Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

“I’m going to shut off the waste pipe.”

His mates put down their beer mugs and stared at him.

“Why? What’s got into you? It’s always on at night.” This was true. The outlet pipe spilled its filthy sludge into the water night and day.

“I dunno,” said Dave, “but I’m shutting it off.” And he did so…and the kraken swam on.

On the Island, Herbert was the first to know.

His mother had come out of the sea a few days before and had tried to nag him again.

“You must make up your mind, Herbert,” she had said in the selkie language they spoke when they were alone. “You’re not young any more; and I won’t be around for ever. If you’re going to stop being a seal and start being a man you must do it now.”

For a while, Herbert only looked at her. Then: “Listen!” he said in his quiet and serious voice.

She had listened, and she had heard it because selkies are famous for the sharpness of their ears. Not the Great Hum with which the kraken sent out long-distance messages, but the quiet, thrumming noise he made when he was patrolling the ocean.

“This is not the time to be human, Mother. I shall greet him in the water, and proudly, as a seal.”

It was because of Herbert that Myrtle understood more quickly than the other aunts how near the kraken was. She had tried to play Herbert one of his favourite pieces — a minuet by Mozart. Usually he listened to this with his eyes closed, absolutely enchanted; Mozart was his favourite composer. But now he was restless, eagerly looking out to sea, and then he shook his head once as if to excuse himself and dived into the waves.

Soon it wasn’t only Myrtle who guessed. Aunt Etta saw three snow geese — birds she had never seen on the Island before — and Coral came back from a shell hunt, dancing with excitement.

“The sea is changing colour,” she said. “Only slightly, but it’s changing.”

Then suddenly it seemed as though everyone knew that the time was coming and the last-minute preparations began.

In his bed, the old Captain sat with the telescope glued to his eyes and tried to be gloomy.

“Of course he won’t be like the kraken was in the olden days. He’ll be smaller, like the seals are smaller and the sheep, and the bosoms of the ladies. Maybe he won’t be any bigger than a whale,” said Captain Harper. But if anyone tried to take the telescope away from him he became absolutely furious and, as the kraken came closer, he scarcely slept.

As for the aunts and the children, during those days they seemed to be welded together into one band of workers who thought of nothing except to make the best possible welcome for the kraken when he came. It was impossible to imagine that Fabio and Minette had been drugged and kidnapped against their will not three weeks before. There was no need to give them orders; they knew what needed doing almost as soon as the aunts and they, like the aunts, never spared themselves.

Then one day they too heard the Hum once more. It was the kraken’s Daily Hum, his Working Hum, the Hum with which he cleaned and healed the sea, and it was getting closer, and closer…

There was only one thing which puzzled the aunts. Every so often the Hum stopped and they heard a low rumbling which might have been the kraken speaking. They couldn’t understand the words from that great distance — and in any case none of the aunts spoke Polar — but they could understand the tone, and the feeling they had was that whoever the kraken was talking to was driving him a little mad.

But who could it be? The kraken had always been a loner.

They were soon to find out.

The Great London Aunt Hunt was still going badly. The pictures of Etta and Coral and Myrtle went on flapping on the walls of police stations everywhere but the people who came to say they had seen one or other of them were obviously barmy. A man came and said a lollipop lady who was helping schoolchildren across the road in Kensington had a moustache and was certainly Aunt Etta, but she wasn’t. Another man said he had seen Aunt Myrtle busking outside a cinema, but he hadn’t. And anyone weighing over a hundred kilos and wearing jewellery was apt to be hauled off by the police in case she was Coral.

“Don’t call me ‘aunt’,” terrified women were begging their nephews and nieces all over London’s streets and, by the time the children had been gone three weeks, the word had almost disappeared.

Minette’s mother, as the days passed with no news, smoked three packets of cigarettes a day, couldn’t sleep without slurping a full tumbler of whisky and allowed her flat to get into even more of a mess than before. Of course in some ways it was easier without Minette who kept trying to tidy up and open windows. All the same, Mrs Danby couldn’t help wishing she had let her have a nightlight.

“And I should have taken her to the seaside — she always wanted to go,” she said to her latest boyfriend.

“You can take her when she comes back,” he said, dropping his empty lager can over the side of the sofa. “Though I’ve never seen much point to the seaside myself. The water comes in, the water goes out — what’s the sense in that?”

Professor Danby too wished he had done some things and hadn’t done others. He had promised every time she came to take Minette to the ice rink and there’d never been time, and he’d known really that she didn’t want an encyclopaedia without pictures for her birthday.

But when they telephoned each other for news of Minette, the Danbys quarrelled as much as ever. They had decided that she had run away, and of course they blamed each other.

“I’m surprised she lasted so long in that pigsty you live in,” the professor said.

“Well, really,” Mrs Danby would reply. “Considering that your place would make an underground tomb on a rainy Sunday look like Disneyland, you’ve got a nerve!”

The Mountjoys were not sorry about anything they had done. They were sure that Fabio had had everything he needed in their house and that in sending him to Greymarsh Towers — and paying for it — they had treated him better than any poor child from the back of beyond had a right to expect. But they did wonder whether they should tell Fabio’s mother that he had disappeared, and his other grandparents in South America.

“I really can’t face the thought of having a lot of foreigners coming here and waving their arms,” said Mrs Mountjoy. “They probably paint their faces and don’t wear shoes.”

Old Mr Mountjoy agreed. “Still, she is the boy’s mother. We’ll give it a few more days and then if there’s no news we’ll have to let them know.”

Both the Mountjoys and the Danbys were angry with the police. “You’ve gone cold on the case,” Mrs Danby accused the superintendent.

But she was very wrong. Discovering the third kidnap and the third aunt had given the police a new and important lead. Two days after Stanley Sprott came to report that his son was missing, an “Aunt Myrtle” was seen in Putney swimming baths. She had long greyish hair and an open mouth, which is a silly thing to have in a swimming bath, so it had to be her.

The police wearily pulled her in and sent an officer to Mr Sprott’s house to ask the housekeeper to come and identify her — and learnt that Mr Sprott wasn’t there.

So where was he, they wanted to know. He was supposed to be standing by in case there was news of Lambert.

At first no one would tell him, but when the policeman threatened to get a search warrant, the secretary admitted that he had gone away in his yacht.

“That’ll be the Hurricane,” said the superintendent thoughtfully when the officer got back to the station.