Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

Minette looked and looked and looked. The sea in the morning light was like a crystal mirror; she could hear the waves turning over quietly on the beach. There were three black rocks guarding the bay and on them she could make out the dark round heads of seals. White birds circled and mewed and the air smelled of seaweed and shellfish and wind. It smelled of the sea!

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she whispered.

But of course she would not be allowed to go outside. Kidnapped children were kept in dark cupboards and blindfolded. Any minute now someone would come and deal with her. She looked round the room. Old furniture, patchwork rugs, and by the bed — and this was odd — a nightlight. She had begged and begged for one at home but neither her father nor her mother had ever let her have one.

A small snuffling sound made her turn quickly. It had come from behind a screen covered in cutouts of animals in the corner of the room.

A fierce dog to guard her? But the noise had not been at all a fierce one.

Her heart pounding, she tiptoed to the screen and looked round it. On a camp bed lay a boy of about her own age. He had very dark hair and sticking-out ears and he was just waking up.

“Who are you?” he asked, staring at her with big round eyes.

“I’m Minette. And I think I’ve been kidnapped by an aunt.”

The boy sat up. “Me too.” He blinked. “Yes, I’m sure. I was supposed to be going back to my grandparents. She gave me a hamburger.”

“Mine gave me a cheese and tomato sandwich.”

The boy got out of bed and stretched. He too was wearing his own pyjamas. “We’ll have to try and escape,” he said. “We’ll have to.”

“Yes. Only I think we’re on an island. Come and look.”

She didn’t know why, but she had had the feeling at once that the sea wasn’t just in front of them but all around.

“Wow!” Fabio too was struck by the view. “What a place.”

Minette had gone over to the door. “Look, it isn’t locked!”

“I’m going out,” said the boy. “They don’t seem to have taken our clothes away. They’re crummy kidnappers.”

“Unless it’s all a trap.” She thought of the films she had seen — holes suddenly opening in the ground with man-eating piranhas or sharks. “Do you think they’ve kidnapped us to feed us to something?”

He shrugged. “You’d think they’d choose fatter children than us. Come on, get dressed. I’m going out.”

There was no one in the corridor; there was no one on the stairs.

Then, from behind a door across the hallway, they heard a scream, followed by a thump, and then a second scream. Someone in there was being tortured — and it sounded like a child.

Minette leant back against the wall, white-faced and trembling.

“Come on — quick!” Fabio clutched her arm.

The children ran out across the turf, over the dunes, along the perfect crescent of sand. The tide was out; it was a shell beach; there were Venus shells and cowries and green stones polished like emeralds. No one stopped them; there was no one to be seen. It would have been like Paradise except for that ghastly scream.

“Look,” said Fabio.

A group of seals had swum towards the shore and were looking at them, swimming in a semicircle, snorting and blowing…With their round heads they looked like a group of Russian dolls.

The children were silent, looking at the seals, and the seals stared back at them. Then suddenly they turned and swam back into the deep water.

All except one, a bull seal with white markings on the throat, who came close to the shore, and closer, till he was in the shallows with his flippers resting in the sand.

“It’s as if he’s trying to tell us something.”

“He’s got incredible eyes,” said Minette dreamily. “He doesn’t look like a seal at all. He looks as though inside he’s a person.”

“Well, seals are persons. Everything that’s alive is a person really.”

But that wasn’t what she’d meant.

They took off their shoes and walked on the firm wet sand between the tidemarks towards a cliff covered with nesting kittiwakes and puffins and terns. The tide was still going out, leaving behind its treasures: pieces of driftwood as smooth as velvet, crimson crab shells, bleached cuttlefish bones, whiter than snow. There was no sign of any ship. They might have been alone in the universe.

“What’s that noise?” asked Fabio, stopping suddenly.

A deep and mournful sound, a kind of honking, had come from somewhere inland.

“It must be a foghorn,” said Minette.

But there wasn’t any fog, nor any lighthouse to give warning if there had been.

They listened for a few moments but the sound did not come again, and they ran on along the shore. It was a marvellous island; it seemed to have everything. To their left was a green hill; two hills, actually, with a dip between, the slopes covered with bracken and gorse. The far shore would be wilder, exposed to the wind.

“If we climbed up there we could see exactly where we are. There might be other islands or a causeway. If we’re going to escape we’re going to have to know,” said Minette.

They had to get away — that terrible scream still rang in their ears — but Minette couldn’t help thinking of where she would be if she hadn’t been kidnapped. In her father’s dark sitting room trying to get interested in a book till he came back from the university.

Fabio seemed to be having the same sort of thoughts. “I can’t help wondering if my grandparents will pay the ransom for me. They’re horribly mean and they don’t like me.”

Minette tried to think if her parents liked her enough to pay a lot of money to get her back but when she thought about her parents her stomach always started to lurch about so she said, “There’s a little path there to the top of the hill.”

They began to run towards the gap in the dunes, forgetting the lives they had left behind, forgetting even that awful tortured scream. The wind was in their backs; it was like flying. No one could imagine anything dangerous or dark.

And then it happened! From behind the hummock of sand that had hidden them, there arose suddenly the cruel figures of two enormous women.

It was the evil aunts!

The sinister kidnappers glared at the children, and the children, terrified, stared back. Here was the tall bony aunt with her fierce eyes who had drugged Minette’s sandwich, and here was the plump mad person with her scarves flying in the wind who had given sleeping powders to a defenceless boy.

The children reached for each other’s hands. Minette was shaking so much she could hardly stand. What punishment would they be given for escaping from their room?

It was the tall bony aunt, Etta, who spoke. “You’re late for breakfast,” she said in her fierce and booming voice.

The children continued to stare.

“Breakfast,” the other one went on. “You’ve heard of that? We have it at seven and the cook gets ratty if he’s kept waiting. Go and wash your hands first — the bathroom’s at the top of the stairs.”

The children ran off, completely puzzled by this way of kidnapping people, and Etta and Coral followed. They were talking about Myrtle, who hadn’t stopped crying since she came back.

“She’s got to stop blaming herself,” said Coral. “Mistakes can happen to anyone.”

“Yes. Mind you, Lambert is quite a mistake!”

Breakfast was laid in the dining room, a big room with shabby leather chairs, which faced the patch of green turf and the bay. All the windows in the L-shaped farmhouse had at least a glimpse of the sea. Even the bathroom, with its huge claw-footed bath and ancient geyser, looked out on the ledge of rock where the seals hauled out of the water to rest.