Hook's Tale Read online

  The skeletons were two, dressed in rags rotted by the sea air. For a moment I thought that these were the last survivors of some previous ship that had landed on Long Tom. They had starved, or died through lack of potable water, or perished from loneliness and despair. But closer examination made it plain: they were the unfortunate wielders of the shovels whose task was to bury Something beneath the shifting sands before a third party inserted a musket ball into each of their skulls. We learned this when Long Tom picked one up, affecting to play at Hamlet, and a rusty iron orb fell from Yorick’s eye socket.

  The other two, Sniffles and Bloody Pete, seized the shovels and proceeded to dig with great enthusiasm, hoping to uncover the chest that all four of us imagined buried at our feet. Visions of Spanish gold, Incan chalices, necklaces of precious jewels pirouetted in our heads, and these dreams served only to deepen our horror on finding, instead of a chest, four more corpses, some with flesh still clinging to their browned bones. Two sailors had buried the bodies of the unfortunate others, and these two—when their gruesome task was completed—were in turn dispatched by some third villain: thus was the secret of Long Tom revealed, though its mystery remained unsolved.

  After three of us became thoroughly sick (Tom, our ship’s fool, clapped his hands with delight at the gruesome discovery), all four returned to the longboat. It was then, stumbling in shock across the beach, that I came upon another treasure, one that would change my life forever.

  A flock of gulls was pecking at something buried in a small dune, and as I approached they screamed at me and flew away. I looked closely. A deposit of nearly two dozen eggs lay embedded in the sand; food for the gulls and—better yet—fresh food for us. Whether of turtle or bird I cared not. I called to the others, and soon our shirts were nesting our find. On returning to the boat, we told of the mass grave while handing over our culinary treasure; indeed we were so starved for something other than salt beef and hardtack that the eggs were valued higher than a chestful of doubloons. The cook (whose name was Bill Jukes) snatched them, scrambled them, and the crew ate its fill.

  I have mentioned here some names—Sniffles, Bloody Pete, Bill Jukes—without formally introducing their owners, and while we devour our omelets perhaps I should acquaint you with our crew, even though most of them will disappear before too long and play but minor parts in my tragedy.

  Our captain, Roger Starkey, was also known as Gentleman Starkey, and with good reason. A man in his middle forties, he too had been publicly schooled, like myself, though he had lasted somewhat longer than I at his particular institution (which, for the sake of its reputation, shall remain anonymous). The circumstances of his dismissal were dark and bloody, and I will say nothing of them save that only one boy died, and I’m certain that even in that instance Starkey was soft-spoken and polite as he drew the murder weapon. He was ever thus. In disposing of Captain Styles, Starkey asked him “pretty please” to turn around. Styles obstinately refused, and so it was not Bad Form that forced Starkey to shoot him in the back; it was our late captain’s stubborn pride. One misconception about Starkey, hinted at by the sorry Scotsman, was that he was a “jolly” Roger; Starkey’s smiles were frequent but cold. Our ship, named for him without the adjective, was never Jolly.

  Of the other sailors, the ones who will play some part in my story are quickly enumerated. There was Cecco, very Italian, so Italian that his English was incomprehensible, and whenever he spoke to me I was unable to tell whether he was remarking on the weather, describing his homeland, or detailing one of his many assassinations. Bill Jukes was our sea cook, a pleasant fellow with little affinity for the galley; he had been trained under one John Silver, and his sole innovation was to put apples in every recipe; unfortunately there were no apples to be had on the Roger, so every dish to come from his oven tasted as if it lacked something. Black Murphy was very black and not very Irish; his teeth were filed to points and his earlobes hung loose with large holes for bejeweled insertions that had long since been lost in gambling (one of his many bad habits), so that whenever he became agitated or animated—which was often—these lobes swung like tiny nooses dangling from his shaven head. Noodler, it was rumored, had had his hands removed by Doctor Gin and then resewn on backward; this was patently false, for he suffered sadly from a muscular disease that caused his extremities to contract severely. On land he limped as on a rolling ship—it was only at sea that he walked balanced and upright. Sniffles, a darling name if there ever was one, was anything but darling; he was possibly the most bloodthirsty of us all, if the tales he told of himself were true. He once claimed to have tickled a Frenchman to death with his cutlass; he imitated Monsieur’s dying screams to our delight whenever we held a Night of Talent and Entertainment (a sort of music hall at sea consisting of rum, bawdy jokes, sad songs, rum, bawdy dance, mimicry, and rum). Bloody Pete was neither cruel nor bloodthirsty; his name was derived from the frequency with which he cut himself shaving or hammering his thumbs or running a nail through his hand. He was our ship’s carpenter, and his scars—the one time I saw him naked—were numerous as the freckles on a redheaded seaman. Long Tom, as I have already mentioned, was something of our ship’s fool: his father thought him worthless, and the cruel man’s frequent beatings had literally dented Tom’s head, so that it too bore an elongated shape that may have contributed as much as his legs to his nickname.

  There were many others (and a few to be added), but for the moment my cast list of vital supporting characters is complete.

  After I had eaten my ration of omelet, I went on night watch, climbing the rope ladder to the crow’s nest. The sea was calm and the sky beautifully starlit; Danger was not on the horizon this blessed eve. After the ordeal of the storm, I was certain that most of the crew would sleep soundly, and I spent my nesting hours in dreamy solitude. At one point I reached into my pocket for a smoke (yes, even at fourteen I had begun that delightful habit), and found alongside my tobacco pouch one egg that I had overlooked.

  I pulled it out and studied it by starlight.

  It appeared to be a pale mottled green. What bird had laid it? I wondered. Perhaps, because it was buried on the shoreline, it was not avian-sourced at all, but held a tiny sea turtle within. Indeed the eggs that Bill Jukes had served had had an occasional crunch to them; tiny bones scrambled in among the yolks gave texture to a meal that Bill complained “wanted of apples.”

  This egg was all mine. I contemplated eating it, with no one being the wiser. But the softness of the night had made me think of home, and of my mother, and I suddenly felt sorry for the little one inside. Perhaps its mother was dead, like mine. I resolved to keep the egg a while longer, to hide it from the others, to hatch it if possible, and to raise the tiny creature as I would my own child, offering it all the love I had to give (which was then and is now nearly infinite).

  And so I placed it in a shirt pocket stitched across my bosom. I wondered if it would hear my beating heart.

  * * *

  The next morning dawned bright and early. My more astute readers might respond that all mornings dawn early, but I mean the expression literally: the darkest part of the night seemed to last no more than five or six hours. In fact one of the peculiarities we soon noticed about this stretch of sea was that the twenty-four-hour period we were used to calling “day” lasted here but nineteen or twenty hours. Time was shorter, but the further effects of this curiosity on us we had not begun to realize.

  During the night, of course, Captain Starkey had come on deck to measure with sextant the distance between the crescent moon and other celestial bodies; the problem he encountered was that no stars or constellations above us were recognizable. As soon as the sun rose he was on deck once again, using both sextant and quadrant to determine our precise location. His calculations matched the exact latitude and longitude on the treasure map, though we appeared to be nowhere near where we had encountered the gale that swept us here. Furthermore he learned, as we set sail in what appeared to be a southerly direc
tion (our storm-battered sails having been repaired and replaced during our day of rest), that the latitude and longitude never changed ! Even after the island we called Long Tom had sunk beneath the horizon, his measurements remained fixed. And perhaps what was most remarkable was that, though north and south were clearly indicated by his compass, the sun actually rose in the west ! Of course we sailors knew nothing of this; we assumed that wherever the sun first appeared was more or less east, and where it set was in the direction of the Americas. Starkey kept the astonishing truth to himself, and it wasn’t until some weeks later that we learned of these anomalies.

  That second day after the storm we spent traveling at sea, headed (so far as we knew at the time) in a southerly direction. The day passed without event, but on the morning of the third day we all awoke to the cry of “Land ho!” It was an island decidedly larger and taller than Long Tom, and though Black Murphy had spotted it and therefore should have provided its name, Captain Starkey had always wanted something more than a ship named for him and so claimed the island as his own. Starkey’s Island it was originally called, but soon this was shortened to Stark’s Land, then Starkland, and stark it was. As we sailed closer it seemed nothing but rocks, rocks piled on rocks, culminating in a large round mound in the middle so that the island resembled nothing other than a gigantic bald head (with caves for eyes) rising out of a heap of rubble, with the occasional oasis of palm trees growing askew and clumped like tufts of wild hair about its ears and nostrils.

  No sooner had Starkey gathered us on deck to ask for volunteers for the longboat than we heard a booming sound, followed shortly thereafter by a projectile landing heavily in the nearby water, missing our port side by only a few feet and splashing some of us with sea brine. On turning in the direction of the sound, we spotted, rounding one corner of the island, a ship not unlike our own, its sails spread and flying Her Majesty’s colors. A puff of smoke drifted above the mouth of its large black cannon: it had fired upon us! Before we could reply in kind, the distant cannon fired again, and we could do nothing but watch as a large black ball arced through the air, heading in our direction. Had not a fortunate wind arisen and carried our floating home a few feet farther into the bay, the ball would have poked a terrible hole midships through which the ocean could have pioneered. As it was it missed us by inches.

  Under Captain Styles we had all rehearsed what to do in the unlikely case of attack, and now instinct and habit kicked in. Our one large port-side gun was quickly pulled back from its porthole, then primed with gunpowder and loaded and tamped (by Long Tom) before being pushed back into place. Noodler struck a match and lit the fuse. By this time the enemy ship had had time to fire off a third cannonade, which projectile sailed over our heads, taking out some top rigging and snapping off the tip of one of the masts.

  Our gun fired and sent its missile whistling through the air. It landed very near its mark: Cecco (in charge of the gun) had a near-infallible aim and a second shot was sure to succeed. The cannon was retracted, but a giggling Long Tom was in such excited haste that he neglected to sponge it clean. Instead he inserted powder and ball, then rammed the charge home. Before he could remove the rammer from the mouth of the gun, the heat from the last shot ignited the powder, and Tom, whooping with joy, went sailing with ball and rammer over the water toward our enemy. Those of us watching could see him waving back at us as he traveled, and though one would suppose that the added weight would drop the missile far short of its mark, Tom, rammer, and ball landed instead smack in the middle of the enemy’s deck. A mysterious explosion followed, near the place where Tom landed, followed by screams of men in panic. This, it seemed, was enough to end the battle. Before our gun crew could recover from the loss of Tom and reload, the enemy ship began to turn. We were not prepared to follow them; a sea battle was the last thing we were expecting, and we needed time to catch our mariners’ breath.

  We later learned that Tom had landed on top of the enemy’s powder keg. His clothes, ignited by the cannon blast, were smoldering with tiny embers, and it was his incendiary self that set off the mysterious explosion. The rammer, in turn, had rammed its way through the man in charge of their gun crew, incapacitating him sorely, just as the cannonball itself had unceremoniously slammed a hole in the enemy’s deck before dropping straight through their ship’s rotting wood into the crew’s quarters below. There a snoozing midshipman stopped its descent (to his widow’s regret), else it would have continued down through the hull and sent the ship to the bay’s bottom.

  Our eventful morning ended with a short service for Long Tom, after which we named our port-side gun after him. Ah, to have both an island and a weapon christened in one’s name within the space of forty-eight hours—Tom would have been proud and his father suitably chastised for thinking him worthless!

  * * *

  After we had recovered from our attack, and still scratching our collective heads regarding the presence and identity of our attacker, the crew gathered to elicit volunteers for exploring Starkland. Captain Starkey himself intended to alight, and I asked to tag along. Black Murphy and Bloody Pete joined us, and soon we were skimming across the water toward the rocky beach. As the island was so much larger than Long Tom, we split into four different directions to reconnoiter.

  I headed straight upward toward the two socket-like caves. I still harbored hope for a treasure, and thought that, were I a pirate, I would secure my loot deep in one of these convenient grottoes. But the climb was steep, and the scree over which I initially scrambled constantly gave way under my feet, so that it took me nearly an hour to reach the base of the steeper rock. Then it became a matter of cracks and toeholds, and a refusal to look down. I later learned of an easier way to access the sockets, but for now this was the only path that was apparent, and my boyish sense of adventure reveled in the challenge. After another hour of ascent (and descent and re-ascent in between patches of recovery), I reached the lip of the nearest socket.

  Of course, in my adolescent enthusiasm and lack of foresight, I had neglected to bring a lantern, or any means of starting a fire. The cave was dark, and its coolness and dampness increased the farther I ventured into its depths. So too did the stench, which was sickening, and I soon learned its source, for a misstep stirred a mini–rock slide and in a trice the air around me was filled with the wings of bats, soaring, diving, brushing my hair, my face, my body, so that I could do nothing but crouch and wait for them to tear out into the light. Their guano crunched under my feet, or stuck like glue where it was fresh, and emitted an odor that would have made a charnel house seem a bouquet of roses by comparison.

  Once the bats vacated, I inched forward, holding my breath. Before long I could go no farther; the darkness was so dense as to be impassable. As I waited several minutes for my eyes to become accustomed to the lack of light, I felt with my hand a set of markings carved into the starboard stone wall. They must have been etched into the rock with some sharp instrument, and by tracing them over and over again with my fingertips I was able to make out the letters of two individual messages. The first read “Here a Panther Became a Man”; the second spelled out the sentence “Gunn visited for a time.”

  I never learned who or what Gunn was (in this part of my history, that is), but I did meet the Panther of the first phrase, to my Joy and eventual Sorrow.

  * * *

  Stumped in my exploration of what I will call the “starboard eye socket,” I headed across the bridge of the nose to enter the port-side one. It was here I found a kind of Treasure, one that brought me surprising Delight along with incredible Pain.

  The stench in this particular eye socket was considerably milder; either the bats preferred the other cave, or already I had become accustomed to the odor. I quickly learned that the first choice was probably the correct one, for no sooner had I taken a few steps into the mouth of the socket than I heard a sound, like that of an animal stirring. I quickly picked up a rock; I had never expected to find a living being on the island, a
nd so I had neglected to bring a knife or a gun. I waited with bated breath. I heard nothing more. As I eased forward, rock at the ready, I squinted my eyes to see better into the blackness before me. After a moment I made out a patch of whiteness lying on the ground. I stood very still. The whiteness seemed to shift. I waited. It pounced.

  The attack was unexpected, and even though I had my rock in hand, I was so startled that I dropped it as the thing sprang to my chest, pushing me backward. My head hit the ground behind me; it was a miracle that I retained consciousness. I felt its hot breath, heard its growl. Its face was covered in fur and its teeth were white and flashing. Before it could tear into my throat, I seized its neck and squeezed. Its claws raked my chest, ripping my shirt and drawing blood. It knelt on my groin, and the pressure made me breathless. I knew that if I did not save myself within seconds and break its neck, I soon would be Victim and most likely Meal. My feet found leverage and I heaved my body up and to port side. In a moment our positions were reversed, and I was on top of the beast. I released one hand from its neck and seized hold of the rock that I had dropped, and as I raised the stone to strike, I saw that the beast below me, its eyes wide now with fear, was human.

  I sprang backward in shock, and soon was on my feet again, rock at the ready, for the battle seemed far from over. The man—for it was a man—was on his knees, then on his feet in a squat, ready to pounce a second time. For a long moment we faced each other—I the Crusoe in defense of his life, and he the cannibal Friday crouched to attack. Then he fell to his knees again and bent his head to the ground to grovel at my feet. His sobs were heartrending, and I could do nothing but kneel beside him and stroke his head as I would that of a frightened dog.