Monster Mission

The children had lit candles and put them on the ledges, and the flames flickering on the stone lit up the colours of the rock.

‘It’s like Merlin’s crystal cave,’ said Minette dreamily, and she was right. Because the kraken was his father’s son, all sorts of creatures came to be near him in the water: crimson crabs and clusters of pipefish and families of sea mice … But if it was beautiful in the cave, keeping the kraken quiet and happy was hard work. Fortunately he was learning English so fast that they could sing to him and tell him stories.

‘More Snow White,’ he would command, or ‘More Puss in Boots.’

But the stories he liked best were the ones they made up about his father—about the great kraken and his adventures as he swam though the oceans of the world.

Where the sides of the grotto sloped to the water there was one place which was almost flat and it was there that the children had made a kind of camp. They had brought sleeping bags and plenty of food and of course the tin of boobrie buns. If the kraken got restless and swam too near the opening of the cave, they only had to bang with a wooden spoon on the tin and he would hurry back, his mouth already open for his treat.

Even so, the aunts were worried about them and, sometime in the small hours, Etta and Dorothy stopped patrolling the Island and went down to the grotto again, determined to make the children come up to the house and go to bed.

The kraken was asleep, his head just out of the water. And on either side of him, curled up on the ledge so that their arms were almost touching him, slept Fabio and Minette.

And the aunts turned back and said nothing, for it was clear that these three lived in a circle of friendship that nothing now could break.

There was no attack from Sprott’s people that night, but just before dawn something did happen.

Down on the point, Herbert’s mother slipped quietly from life. Her eyes filmed over; she sighed deeply, her whiskers trembled … Then she spoke her son’s name once—not in the selkie language but in proper human speech so that Myrtle too could understand.

‘Herbert,’ said Herbert’s mother. She didn’t say anything more but from the way she said it they knew that she thought Herbert had been a good son and she was thanking him. Then she hoisted herself slowly to the very edge of the rock, lifted her head once towards the sky—and gave herself to the sea.

It was a beautiful death—exactly the kind of death the old seal had chosen—but of course for Herbert it was a moment of great sadness, and when it was over, Myrtle would not leave him even to get her meals.

Her sisters were worried about this. Myrtle had always felt things too much. When she was small she had tried to bring a tin of sardines back to life by floating the headless fishes in a wash basin, and they did not think she should be out on the point on a night when there might be danger.

But Myrtle in her own way was obstinate.

‘I can’t leave Herbert alone with his sorrow,’ she said—and she wrapped her legs in an old grey blanket and settled down beside her friend.

There was a time when Queenie would have hated sharing a bath with old Ursula but now she was touchingly glad of her company. The old mermaid was as tough as old boots and she didn’t give a fig for Mr Sprott’s threats.

‘He can’t do anything to me. I’m old and I don’t care,’ she said.

Mr Sprott hated her. She spat at him and cursed him and tried to bite him with her single tooth, and when Des came anywhere near she screeched at him.

‘Don’t you dare ogle my great-granddaughter you plug-ugly,’ she yelled.

‘You can’t put that old horror on show,’ said Des. ‘Nobody’ll pay to see the likes of her!’

Mr Sprott shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll sell her to medical science to be cut up,’ he said. ‘No one knows how a mermaid’s tail is joined to her body.’

Seeing Ursula so angry and unafraid did Queenie good. But of course they both knew what danger they were in. And sure enough, later that evening Boris and Casimir came in with blindfolds which they tied roughly round the mermaids’ eyes. Then they were wrapped in coarse sacking and felt themselves raised up, swaying on steel hooks, and then lowered, still swaying horribly, into some deep cold place.

When they could see again, they found that they were sitting in a crude, rusty tank filled with water. The tank was in the corner of a large, dark, empty space, stuffy and evil-smelling. There were no windows and no lamps, and all they could hear was the slap of the water against the ship’s sides.

They were in the hold of the Hurricane which Sprott had prepared, like a slave ship of old, for his prisoners.

‘Don’t worry, you won’t be by yourselves much longer,’ jeered Des. ‘Lots of your little friends will be along soon.’

Then he climbed up the steel ladder, pulled it up after him, and shut the trapdoor, leaving them alone in the foul-smelling darkness.