‘Whooo,’ it began to say. ‘Whooo’ – and with every ‘oo’ the air filled with such a stench of rottenness and decay and … oldness … 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.’
Chapter Six
‘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.’
‘Yes.’ But Minette was doubtful. If she ran away to her father, her mother would be cross and if she ran away to her mother, her father would be cross. ‘I’d just like to wait till the boobrie’s laid her egg.’
And in the end, before they could make further plans, the children always fell asleep.
But as the days passed there was one thing that really annoyed Fabio, and that was Lambert.
Fabio didn’t mind working hard. All the same, he and Minette both had blisters on their hands from trundling the wheelbarrows up and down to the loch; Minette had strained her wrist trying to get a comb through the old mermaid’s tangled hair; and both of them were bruised by the young seals bumping and flopping against them as they gave them their bottles. And there was Lambert doing nothing – absolutely nothing – except kicking and screaming and throwing his food about.
‘Why doesn’t someone thump him?’ said Fabio crossly.
But nobody did. Aunt Myrtle wasn’t a thumper and the other aunts said that using force when training animals never worked. As for Art, he might have killed a man once but that was as far as it got. So each day Lambert was brought his food on a tray and each day he kicked and yelled for his father and his mobile telephone while Fabio and Minette did his share of the chores.
It was at the end of the first week that Fabio cracked, and it was because of the stoorworm.
The children had grown very fond of the worm. He ate the peppermints they gave him without fuss and the questions he asked were interesting, like Why don’t we think with our stomachs? or Why are we back to front in the mirror but not upside down?
But wrapping him round a tree was an awful job. It wasn’t just his thoughts that got stuck halfway down his body, it was all the messages which told his lower end what was happening, and on a day when they had spent a whole hour disentangling him from a bramble thicket, Fabio suddenly snapped.
Art was just making his way down to the boathouse with Lambert’s lunch on a tray.
‘I’ll take that for you, Art,’ said Fabio.
Art handed over the tray and Fabio opened the door.
Lambert looked up. Then he did what he always did when someone came into the room; he picked up whatever was closest to him and threw it hard. This time it was a sawn-off log ready to go on the fire.
Fabio ducked neatly. Then he threw the tray at Lambert. The tray contained a bowl of lentil soup, a slice of bread and butter, fried tomatoes on toast and a banana milkshake. All of these landed on Lambert except for the bread and butter which went slightly wide.
‘Yow! Whee! Yuk!’ Lambert spluttered and danced round the room, blinded by the tomatoes which were the large splodgy kind with a great many pips.
Fabio gave him a few moments to clean himself up. Then he said, ‘Right. You’re not getting anything more to eat till you come and work. Minette and I are sick of doing the jobs you ought to be doing.’
‘I won’t! I won’t come and work!’ Lambert tried to stamp his foot on the floor but stamped it into his soup bowl which split in half and skidded across the room. ‘I won’t stay here on this horrible island and I won’t stay with these creepy women and I won’t do anything. I want my father and I want my mobile telephone and I want to go home.’
Fabio waited. ‘I don’t care what you want,’ he said. ‘Minette and I want things too, but that doesn’t mean we get them. From now on you’re going to do your share and if you don’t I’m going to thump you.’
Lambert had cleaned the tomato out of his eyes now. ‘You’d better not,’ he said. ‘I’m bigger than you.’
This was true but it didn’t bother Fabio. ‘You may be bigger but you’re weedier.’
Lambert was a coward, but Fabio was very small and slight. Lambert put up his fists and danced forward. He had never boxed but he had seen people do that on the telly.
Fabio on the other hand had boxed. He didn’t care for it but it was taught at Greymarsh Towers as part of making people into English gentlemen. He let fly with his right hand and landed a blow on Lambert’s chin.
‘Oow! Eeh! … You’ve bust my jaw. I’m going to tell my father. My father’s rich and … Oowee …’ Lambert was crouching down on the floor nursing his chin and moaning.
‘Get up,’ said Fabio.
‘I won’t.’
‘Yes, you will. Get up or you’ll be sorry.’
Lambert got slowly to his feet. The bruise on his chin blended nicely with the colour of the tomato smeared on his collar. Then suddenly he went for Fabio, tearing at his cheeks with his fingernails.
It hurt, but to Fabio it was a relief. He knew about fighting dirty. He had been doing it ever since he was three years old in the streets of Rio and if that was what Lambert wanted it was fine with him. Ignoring the blood streaming down his cheeks, he took hold of a handful of Lambert’s hair and yanked the snivelling boy’s head backwards, knocking it against the wall. Then he kicked him extremely hard on the shins.
‘Ow!’ moaned Lambert. ‘Stop it!’
‘I’ll stop it as soon as you say you’ll come and do your share of work.’
‘I don’t want to. I want my father. I want my mobile tele—’
Fabio yanked his head forward, then pushed it back again hard against the wall, and went on kicking.
‘Are you going to come out and work or not?’
‘No.’
Fabio kicked again – and suddenly Lambert crumpled up and collapsed on the floor.
‘All right,’ he blubbered. ‘I’ll work, but stop it.’
Fabio stopped at once. ‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘You can help me muck out the chicken house.’
The aunts saw the boys come. Fabio was carrying the remains of Lambert’s lunch on the tray, including the broken soup bowl.
‘You can take it out of my pocket money,’ he said, handing them the pieces.
‘What pocket money?’ asked Aunt Etta.
‘Even kidnapped children have to have pocket money,’ said Fabio firmly.
So Lambert began to work. He worked badly and he worked slowly. He complained because the television was on the blink and whenever he could, he crept off to look for his mobile telephone which he was sure Myrtle had hidden somewhere. But when he stopped for too long, Fabio just looked at him and he picked up his tools once more.
Everyone agreed that such a tiresome, blathering boy had to be kept away from the unusual creatures
- the selkies and the boobrie and the stoorworm – so they gave him jobs to do in the house or with the animals on the farm. But a couple of days after Fabio had beaten him up, Lambert crept down to the shore with a lemonade bottle he had stolen from the larder. Inside the lemonade bottle was a message he had written to his father telling him to come and rescue him, and he was going to throw the bottle into the sea.
But he never got as far as doing that. Instead he dropped the bottle, which smashed on the stones, leaving a dangerous mess of broken glass, and came back to the house blubbering and screaming at the top of his voice.
‘I saw a thing! I saw a horrible creepy thing!’ His whole body shook with terror. He looked as if he was going to have a fit.
‘What sort of a thing?’ asked Fabio.
He and Minette were sitting at the kitchen table, shelling peas for supper.
‘A girl … all queer and horrible. She didn’t have any legs – not any!’ He sobbed and gulped again and a runnel of snot ran down his nose.
Minette handed him her handkerchief. ‘What do you mean, Lambert?’ she asked.
‘The bottom end of her was a monster. She had a tail all covered in scales. It was growing from her body.’ Lambert retched and turned his head away. ‘I saw it. I saw it. I won’t stay here, I won’t!’
Minette and Fabio exchanged troubled glances.
‘What was the top of her like?’
‘I don’t know … she had sort of green hair – and when I screamed she flopped her tail – I heard it flop …’ He shuddered. ‘And then she dived into the water.’
‘It sounds like Oona,’ said Minette in a low voice. ‘Of course it would be her – she’s been frightened enough already by that ridiculous Lord Brasenott. I’ll go and comfort her. If only it had been Queenie, she’d have seen Lambert off.’
She slipped out and Fabio was left alone with the blubbering Lambert.
He had had an idea.
‘Lambert,’ he said. ‘Listen to this, because it’s important. When Minette and I first came, we saw all sorts of strange creatures – mermaids like you’ve seen and a long slithery worm and a giant bird – oh, all sorts of things – but then we realized they weren’t real. They couldn’t be real because creatures like that don’t exist. I mean, there aren’t any such things as mermaids, are there?’
Lambert had stopped crying. He was actually listening.
‘No,’ he said. ’There aren’t.’
‘So what has happened, Lambert, is that you’re imagining them. It’s like having a vision or a dream. And it’s because of something that Art puts in the food. He uses a flour made of seaweed and it has a drug in it that makes you see things. He doesn’t mean to harm us but it’s the only kind of flour you can get here.’
‘They aren’t really there?’ asked Lambert, sniffing the snot back into his nose. ‘She wasn’t there – that horrible girl and the awful tail that she flopped with – that wasn’t there either?’
‘No it wasn’t. And anything else you see like that will just be a dream. You’ve heard of drugs that give you visions, haven’t you? They’re called halluci—’ But here Fabio gave up, not sure of how to pronounce hallucinogenic or even if that was the word he meant. ‘And it’s best not to say anything to anyone – even if you think you see other things. Just don’t take any notice, and if you get back to your father don’t tell him, he’d only laugh at you.’
It worked. Lambert gave a few more gulps; he was still blotched, he was still hiccuping unpleasantly, but he was calm.
And from then on, if Lambert saw anything unusual he was sure it was because of something in the food.
The aunts weren’t happy about Fabio telling lies, but it seemed safer than letting Lambert go screaming all over the Island and hurting the feelings of the creatures that he came upon.
And so the days passed. Minette and Fabio still talked about getti
ng away but they always fell asleep before they could work out how to do it, and slowly the beauty of the place – the great wide skies, the flaming sunsets and the never-ending sound of the sea – seemed to be becoming a part of them.
But meanwhile in London all hell was breaking loose.
Chapter Seven
Eight days after Minette ate her drugged cheese and tomato sandwich, Minette’s mother, Mrs Danby, rang Edinburgh to ask if Minette could stay with her father for an extra week. Minette’s term had started but that was not the kind of thing that bothered Mrs Danby.
‘I have the chance of a job filming in Paris,’ she said.
This wasn’t strictly true. What she did have was yet another boyfriend who said he’d take her to France for a bit of a ‘jolly’.
Professor Danby, whom she’d interrupted as he was preparing an important lecture on The Use of the Semi-Colon’, did not at first understand what she was saying.
‘I can hardly keep Minette longer, when I haven’t got her,’ he said in his dry, irritable voice.
There was a pause at the other end while Mrs Danby fought down the slight fluttering in her stomach.
‘Don’t be silly, Philip. I sent Minette to you more than a week ago. She’s been with you since the fifteenth.’
‘No, you didn’t. I had a telephone message to say you were keeping her with you and taking her to the seaside. I remember it quite clearly.’
The professor had in fact been rather pleased because the lecture he was giving was part of an important series – ‘The Use of the Semi-Colon’, ‘The Use of the Comma’, ‘The Use of the Paragraph’ and so on – and he needed to get on with his work without being bothered by a child.
Now, though, he too began to feel as though his stomach was not quite where it should have been. But of course being the sort of people they were, the Danbys immediately began to blame each other.
‘You must be mad, not letting me know she hadn’t arrived.’
‘I must be mad?’ hissed the professor. ‘You must be mad. Any normal mother would ring up to see that her daughter had arrived safely.’