The Vanishing Island (2 page)

W
hen Jacob Beenders was a boy in Holland, his mother told him stories about the Night Demon of the Netherlands, a black-clad bogeyman with fangs and shredding claws.
He hides under your bed
, she said,
or in your wardrobe, and there he stays if you are good. But woe betide the children who misbehave.

The Night Demon had caused Jacob many sleepless nights as a child. But the child had grown into a man, who had been a sailor now for more than half his life. This was when men crossed oceans in wooden ships, guided by the stars, at the mercy of fickle winds and even more fickle
gods. The Age of Discovery, they called it, when mariners began to map the places that had once been imagined with dread: seas of monsters, strange continents, the abyss at the edges of the world. Jacob had been to the edges and back again. He had seen men torn apart by cannonballs, gashed by swords, and eaten by sharks. He had watched a fellow crewman walk the plank, his hands bound, and seen the terror in his eyes as the waves swallowed him whole. Jacob Beenders was no longer frightened by childish things.

But that was before Murmansk—a desolate port on Russia's northwest coast, inside the Arctic Circle. While his crew slept, Jacob went alone to a tavern, crowded with Volga sailors. Every ruddy face seemed to watch him, as if they knew he was the captain of a doomed ship. Jacob drank one beer, then another, and at some point glanced up to see the man sitting alone in a corner of the tavern, a man dressed in black, who, when he raised his cup to his mouth, seemed to grip it with a pale, sinuous claw.

His mind was playing tricks on him, of course. Jacob had barely slept; his crew was now half gone, lost on a fool's errand in search of the Northeast Passage. He kept his eyes on his drink as the sounds of the tavern swirled around him, and after several strong beers was relieved to find that the phantom stranger was no longer there.

Jacob pulled the collar of his wool coat above his ears before leaving the warmth of the tavern. The streets were
empty, swept clean by the winds off the Murman Sea. Still, he couldn't escape the sensation of being followed. Taking his eyes off the uneven path to look around him, he stumbled, cursing as his hands hit the frozen cobblestones.

He picked himself up and began to walk faster, unable to separate the thumps of his feet on the stones from the beat of his heart.
Were his footsteps the only ones echoing through the darkness? Did he dare look over his shoulder? Just one glance. There. No one.

He gained the harbor and scurried up the gangplank of his ship, rousting his crewmen on night watch, huddled over a makeshift fire: “Cut the mooring ropes and draw up the plank. We're setting sail now.” They didn't understand but they obeyed their captain. Jacob stood at the rail, staring at the harbor through a fog of sleet until his ship finally nosed away from the pier and out to sea.

Damp with sweat despite the cold, Jacob went below to his cabin. He lay on his cot and closed his eyes, and suddenly the terrors of childhood came back to him. He stared at the door of his wardrobe; he imagined the Night Demon's clawed hands rising up from beneath his cot.

Jacob leaped out of bed, short of breath. He lit a sea lamp, but the light's lurching shadows only made things worse. He needed fresh air. He splashed water from a bedside pitcher on his face and dressed, but before going on deck he opened his locker and removed a small leather
coin purse, and from it withdrew what looked like a single coin—bronze and round, embossed with strange script and crowned by the head of a roaring lion, its mouth forming a small hole. Jacob threaded a leather lanyard through the hole and slipped the makeshift necklace over his head. He picked up the mirror on his nightstand and looked at his weathered face, now scarred with age. “You've become a silly old man,” he said.

On deck Jacob stood under the mainmast and looked up at the crow's nest. Many years ago he had overcome a fear of heights to take his first lookout on his first ship. He had grown to enjoy the solitude, and the view of the vast horizon. Up there everything seemed within reach. He tried to remember the last time he went aloft, and, giving in to impulse, he began to climb.

It was more difficult than he remembered. The rolling sea tried to pull him from the mast, and the darkness and the bitter cold made it hard to hold the ropes.

Halfway there, he heard a noise below . . . the chuffing of boots against wood. Someone was climbing after him. He looked down but it was too dark to see. “Is that you, Abram?” said Jacob. But the head of the night watch didn't answer. “Abram!” he called, loud enough for anyone on deck to hear. Still no one answered.

Jacob looked up. The crow's nest was at least twenty
feet away. He climbed faster.

When he reached the nest he looked around for a grapple or a spyglass—anything he could use as a weapon. At the very top of the mast the orange flag of the Netherlands whipped violently in the wind,
thump, thump, thump, thump.
Or was that his heart? He looked down, and first one clawlike hand and then another reached up out of the darkness.

Jacob kicked at the fibrous fingers, slamming the heel of his boot over and over into the moon-grey hands. Failing to dislodge them, he climbed higher on the mast, until he reached a rope angling from the mainmast to the foremast. Struggling to grip the thick rope with frozen hands, gulping air as if he was drowning, Jacob slid forward, the rope burning his palms, until he was standing atop the spar that held the foresail. Balancing there, he looked back toward the crow's nest.

This high up, the moonlight shone on them like a pair of actors upon the stage, and Jacob saw the shadowy man throw back his head, laughing at him. Then, to Jacob's horror, the man extended one hideous, crooked finger and made a slow slashing motion from ear to ear, as if threatening to slit Jacob's throat. A moment later Jacob felt a searing pain across his neck, and when he reached up to grab himself, his hand filled with blood.

In an instant, the memory of the time he had been closest to death flashed in Jacob's mind. A sperm whale had destroyed his ship, and he had somehow clung to the shattered mainmast for days until, by some stroke of luck, another ship had passed by. Now, nearly paralyzed with fear, unsure if his crew was alive or dead, hearing the waves lap the hull, he thought,
All I have left is the sea
.

And so Jacob began inching his way through the web of ropes to the end of the yardarm, marching to the mournful drumbeat of wind-snapped sails, until beneath him was only darkness and all its imaginary terrors. He took a deep breath and gave in to the temptation to look back once more, where the man in black had stepped out of the nest, his cloak billowing, until the dark fabric began to fray, the fibers gradually becoming feathers and the outspread cloak a pair of wings, and just as the figure launched himself from his perch, Jacob threw himself into the deep.

T
he summer began with the grim warning that the wolves were running again. In Britannia, this was code. It meant that Her Majesty's navy was in need of fresh bodies to replace all the seamen lost during the year to disease, desertion, or battle. Crimping, they called it. Men and older boys kidnapped and forced to enlist, for the good of God, queen, and country. Britannia, after all, was just one of many nations fighting for nothing less than to control the world.

One boy who didn't have to worry about being crimped
was Bren Owen of Map, the dirtiest, noisiest, smelliest city in all of Britannia. (He had heard rotten things about London, too, but he'd never been there.) Bren was what they called spindly—tall for his age, but unsteady, like a chair you might be afraid to sit on. He had been born in Map because he'd had no choice in the matter.

But that didn't mean he had to stay here. And now, too skinny for the wolves, he had been forced to take matters into his own hands.

He finished the last of three letters he was writing and sealed each of them with a few blobs of candle wax. Two of the letters he stuffed into his knapsack; the third he left on the kitchen table, under a half-empty bottle of cabbage wine, before slipping out of the shabby clapboard house he shared with his father.

Bren's first stop was a pub called the Gooey Duck, which like all pubs was located near the harbor. Map was Britannia's most western port, barely attached to the tip of the Cornish peninsula, and it had become one of the most important destinations for sailing ships in that part of the world. Day and night, dockworkers loaded and unloaded merchandise that circulated through the brokers, the guild masters, the shopkeepers, and the craftsmen. Bren was hoping no one would notice one more face in the crowd.

The moment he walked into the Duck, a serving maid
named Beatrice grabbed his sleeve and steered him to a small table in the corner. “Where have you been at, Bren Owen?” she said. In a minute she was back with a steaming potpie and stale bread. “Eat! You're all cheekbones and no cheeks, boy!”

He poked at the savory pie's bubbling crust, which pulsated like a lung. Everything in Britannia was served in the form of a pie, a pudding, or a leg, and you were better off not knowing much more than that. But Bren had never come to the Duck so much for the food as for the conversation. This was a place where stories were told, by men practiced in the art of telling them.

It was here that he had overheard the man who claimed to be part of the expedition that found Sir Walter Raleigh's Virginia colony missing. At the very table he was sitting at now, he had listened with awe to a Spaniard describe a city of gold in the jungles of the New World, and the warriors who guarded it. He had once sat next to a Venetian who claimed to be the great-great-something of Marco Polo, whose adventures in China still fired men's imaginations.

Sometimes he would be caught eavesdropping and a grizzled seaman would give him the snake-eye, often with the only eye he had left. But Bren didn't care. The Knights of St. James' Sword, the Order of Santiago, the Brotherhood of the Drake . . . these were just a few of the
fraternities of explorers he had longed to join at one point or another. It was one thing to see a New World appear on a map for the first time, but it was something else entirely to imagine being the one to discover it.

Tonight, though, Bren was focused on just one sailor. A Brit named Roderick Keyes, of the Royal Expeditionary Naval Ship
Tempest.
Bren had first noticed him three days ago. Actually, Keyes was impossible to miss, with a mustache the size of buzzard wings. The
Tempest
was bound for Britannia's new colony in Jamaica, where apparently they had grass made out of sugar. Bren, who had eaten a steady diet of root vegetables his whole life, could imagine nothing better.

More important, his spying on Keyes and the
Tempest
told Bren that perhaps it wasn't the most rigorously guarded ship in Her Majesty's navy.

When the sailor Keyes ordered coffee, Bren made his move. First, he handed two letters to Croak, the bartender. When Croak saw that one of them was addressed to Beatrice, he looked confused.

“I know she's right here,” said Bren. “But I need to be gone first, okay? And you know Mr. Black. The tall, bony man who comes here three times a week.”

Croak nodded and stuck the letters inside his apron.

“Are you sure I can't give you something for the food?” Bren said when Beatrice noticed he was leaving.

“And what would you pay me with, Bren Owen? The dirt from your bellybutton?”

They had the same conversation every time he came in, but he felt it was polite to ask anyway. Beatrice would be one of the few things he missed about Map. She secretly handed him a piece of plum cake wrapped in waxed paper and then shooed him out, into an early summer night that felt more like late winter.

Bren ate the sour plum cake on the bluff overlooking the harbor, huddled inside all the clothing he owned—wool trousers, a wool vest over his shirt, boots, and an oiled-cloth field coat.

His clothes did little to fight off the whipping wind—or calm his nerves—but he warmed himself with thoughts of the Caribbean and its sugar grass. He had dreamed of joining one of these ships for as long as he could remember: the French and British galleons coming and going from their plantations in the Carib Islands; the Iberian carracks that plundered gold from the Americas; merchant vessels from Italy, Greece, and Phoenicia. Or, if he was especially lucky, one of the legendary yachts of the Dutch Bicycle & Tulip Company, bringing the rarest of spices, fabrics, and other wonders from their colonies in the Far East.

Before long, Bren spotted Keyes. He reached inside his shirt and pulled forth a crude necklace—a black stone in an
iron setting, threaded onto a leather lanyard—kissed it for good luck, and then fell in with the throng of men descending the jagged steps to the harbor.

On the dock Bren navigated crates, barrels, and canvas-covered heaps, following Keyes to where the
Tempest
was moored, until he saw the harbormaster, Mr. Hannity, coming right at him. The one man who might recognize him. Bren knelt as if to lace his boots and then slid behind a large crate, sitting with his back against the slatted wood. He reached inside his knapsack, where he had stashed bread and cheese and a few of his favorite adventure books, and pulled out something that looked like a dead terrier—a coarse brown and white wig he had stolen from Swyers' Fine Wigs, Powders & Pomades.

He slipped the wig on and leaned back against the crate, and as he did, he felt warm, wet breath on his neck and something pulling his hair. Out of the corner of his eye he could read the words
LIVE ANIMAL
painted on the crate, just before whatever had his hair let out a low, guttural growl. Bren froze, then slowly peeled his head and body away from the crate, grateful the two were still attached, and turned around just in time to see Swyers' fine wig being withdrawn into the darkness.

“What are you bloody doing?”

Bren jumped: standing above him, beside the barrel he
was leaning against, was Roderick Keyes, more mustache than man. The jig was up.

“Me?”

“You're the cargo man for these, yeah?”

Bren thought about it. “Yes, sir!”

“Then let's go,” said Keyes. “Start with this one.”

Bren bent his knees to lift the barrel and nearly separated his arms from his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” said Keyes. “Roll it, man, roll it!” He took a closer look at Bren. “Gah, you're just a boy!”

“I just started,” said Bren.

With a deep sigh, Keyes pushed the barrel on its side. “Like this, boy, like this.”

Bren helped Keyes roll the barrel along the pier and up the gangplank onto the deck. It was still almost more than Bren could manage.

“By God, you're spindly, boy!”

“I know,” said Bren, panting. He looked back at the dock. Only six more to go.

It was perhaps an hour later when they finished, and Bren knew he had to think fast. He had read dozens of books about ships and seafaring, planning out the best way to sneak aboard and the perfect place to hide. But when he looked around, Roderick Keyes was gone, and the hatch below was wide open.

It can't be this easy
, he thought, not wanting to jinx it. But he couldn't help himself—the feel of the gently rocking ship beneath his feet thrilled him, and he had to fight the urge to go running across the deck and climb the mast. Despite his best efforts, he thought of his father, Mr. Black, and Beatrice, and guilt gnawed him.
I'm not really running away
. He would be back, eventually. And with enough gold to pay for every meal Beatrice had ever given him and to buy his father a house with a real roof.

Bren went to the hatch leading belowdecks, planning to hide in the cargo hold, but someone was coming up, so he scampered to the front of the ship, up the steps to the forecastle deck, and hid behind the mast. Peeking out, he watched as a man sat down on the top step, pulled out a pipe, and began filling it with tobacco.

Suddenly, someone yelled, “No smoking on deck!”

“Since when?” said the smoker.

“Since all that black powder came aboard,” replied the other.

Bren realized he was talking about the barrels he had helped load. They were full of gunpowder. As the man's bowl of tobacco glowed a threatening red, Bren felt something tickle his leg. He scratched himself with his other leg. Bren looked down and saw a black wharf rat the size of an otter, and before he could stop himself, he screamed and kicked the thing away with such force that it flew all
the way across the forecastle, hitting the smoking man in the back.

“Who's that?” said the man, jumping up and spinning in Bren's direction, reaching for the pistol at his side and in the process dropping the lit pipe.

Everything seemed to stop. Bren looked at the man, who looked at Bren. They both seemed to be thinking the same thing—one small pipe couldn't possibly ignite a sealed powder keg.

That was the last thing he remembered before the explosion.