Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

He tried to turn his head. His eyes were still bewildered.

“Humming is what krakens do,” repeated Minette. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.” His voice was very weak but he was following her.

“And you’re a kraken,” she insisted. “Aren’t you? A kraken is what you are.”

It didn’t seem as though the poor exhausted creature could speak again, but he took a weary breath and tried once more.

“I’m a kraken,” he repeated obediently. “A kraken is what I am.”

At first she’d thought it was going to work. There had been a flash of pride in his eyes as he spoke; but almost at once he fell silent and turned away — and then Boris came and pushed her roughly down the ladder.

Now she sat beside Fabio, her head in her hands and knew that it was over. She had done all she could and she had failed.

In the darkness, the wan faces of the captives showed a wretchedness that was beyond tears. The two aunts sat with closed eyes trying to bear what they had done. Facing their own deaths was not so hard but what they had done to Fabio and Minette was not to be endured. Only Herbert was still upright, listening to the sound of the water against the sides of the ship.

Another hour passed…and another…The Hurricane’s engine had been turned off while they waited for the fog to lift, but now they heard it start up again.

Unsteady at first, fainter than before…wavering…but gradually settling into a kind of thrumming rhythm.

Except that the engine hadn’t sounded quite like that…

Fabio who had been dozing, sat up suddenly and dug Minette in the ribs.

Then slowly, wonderingly, the wretched prisoners looked at each other with a dawning hope.

The great kraken had reached the Islands of the Southern Reef. The turquoise water, the coral strands, were staggeringly beautiful.

There was little to do in this paradise. The people who lived there respected the sea and the creatures in it, and they came out to pay their respects to the great kraken, standing with bowed heads. They did not gawp or gape or stare; the legend of the kraken who healed the sea was in their stories and had been for generations.

“He does not smile,” said the old chief, whose great-grandmother had seen the kraken when he came before and told him about the healer’s mouth curving in a bow which made everyone joyous to watch.

“He is troubled,” said the chief’s wife, who was a magic woman.

“How strangely his hum is sounding,” said a child. “There are two hums, aren’t there? A big hum and a little hum.”

“It must be an echo.”

But the kraken had stopped swimming. He was quite still in the water, resting. His head was tilted. Like the islanders he was listening…listening…

What was going on? His own hum was being interfered with. It was being disturbed. This had never happened before. Sometimes there had been an echo from his hum when he swam in a ford between mountains, and sometimes the whales joined in, but this was different. What he could hear was his own hum but it was smaller.

He fell silent, and all the creatures under the water came up to look at him and wonder what was happening.

But the silence was not complete. The small hum, the underneath hum, was still there. It was unsteady, quavery…but it was growing now in strength.

A great judder went through the kraken, sending the resting birds up in a flutter from his back. He made himself absolutely quiet once more, but it was still there — this other fainter hum that wasn’t his own hum…and yet was just exactly that.

Then the people on the barrier reef saw a most extraordinary sight. The great kraken reared up out of the water — and now he did not hum. Instead he roared.

And then he turned.

“I don’t want to watch! I don’t want to!” shrieked Lambert. He tried to hold on to the cabin door but his father dragged him out so roughly that he fell forward on to the deck.

“You will watch, you namby-pamby little shirker. You’ll watch them go overboard and you’ll like it. It’s time you learnt that you don’t get something for nothing.”

Pushing and pulling, kicking Lambert’s shins, Mr Sprott forced his son towards the rail.

He felt hard done by. If the aunts had sold him the island as he wanted he wouldn’t have to drown them now, and the children too. It was their own fault really. There was no way he could get his money-making schemes under way with people blathering and giving the game away. He was going to say that he’d found the creatures wild at sea and rescued them.

“Right, go and get them,” he ordered Des. And then, furiously, “ I thought I told you to stop the thing making that blasted noise!”

Des looked at the kraken, still tethered to the deck.

“I’ve tried, boss. I’ve kicked him and I’ve thumped him but you said I wasn’t to do him in.”

Evil people cannot bear the sound of the hum. They feel it as a threat to all they stand for, and the kraken had been humming now for many hours.

Boris meanwhile had opened the hatch.

“Out,” he said. “Up! Only the peoples.”

One by one they came out. Fabio, Minette, the aunts…Herbert.

On deck it was cold but marvellously fresh after the stuffiness of the hold. Gulls were flying above them; it all looked so normal — except for the look in Sprott’s eyes.

“I don’t want to see them drown, I don’t want to,” yelled Lambert, twisting in his father’s grasp.

The children moved closer together. It was going to happen, then — and almost straight away.

Boris and Des had fetched the weights they were going to tie to their victims’ ankles; not that there was much chance that they would be able to swim to safety. The Hurricane had been steaming steadily away from the Island.

The aunts had come to stand behind the children; Etta behind Minette, Coral behind Fabio as though by some miracle they could still protect them.

Fabio and Minette had linked hands. Everything inside them seemed to have turned to stone.

Don’t let me make a fuss, Fabio was praying. Don’t let me be like Lambert.

“We’ll start with the fat one,” ordered Sprott. “Take her to the rails and get the weights on.”

Des went over to Aunt Coral.

“Move,” he said, prodding her with the butt of his gun — and as he did so, Fabio went mad.

“How dare you!” he shouted and tried to attack the bodyguard with his fists.

Sprott thought this was very funny. “All right, you can go first then if you’re so full of beans,” he said, and the two thugs pinned Fabio’s arms behind his back and started to carry him to the side.

They were trying to fix weights on to his thrashing legs when the skipper put his head out of the wheelhouse.

“Better hurry,” he said. “I don’t like the look of the sky.”

There was nothing to like the look of. Not the sea, not the sky, not the surface of the water, not the clouds. Some dreadful weather was on the way.

The waves darkened, the water boiled; the sun vanished behind a mushroom cloud.

The gulls flew up screeching.

And on the deck of the Hurricane— someone began to scream.

“Hold on to me,” Fabio had shouted to Minette, but they were torn apart at once by the mountainous icy waves.

Minette had thought of herself as a good swimmer but this was nothing to do with swimming — she was being hurled up, then sucked down, rolled over…

And the cold was beyond belief.

All round her were broken planks and debris from the Hurricane. The ship had split in two the instant the great kraken had rammed her. She saw the roof of the boobrie’s splintered cage bobbing close by; two of the chicks were clinging to the top of it — but where was the third?