“HIYA,” CHESTER SAID as he emerged from the shack and saw Will lounging in a chair on the porch. “Martha chucked me out. She’s giving Elliott a sponge bath.”
“How’s she doing?” Will asked him.
Yawning, Chester stretched his arms wide. “We managed to get some more broth into her,” he said, then sank into the chair beside Will. “Martha’s doing everything she can to keep her strength up.”
“That’s good. But she’s not getting any better, is she?” Will said.
Chester shifted uneasily in response. Neither of them had voiced their concerns to each other that Elliott might actually die, just as Nathaniel had. The subject was almost taboo.
“No,” Chester finally said.
For a while neither boy said anything as they gazed down the length of the garden, so deep in thought they barely took in the display of colors that fluxed and pulsed in the air like a scaled-down version of the aurora borealis. Will cleared his throat. “Um, Chester, something’s been bothering me,” he said.
There was concern in Chester’s eyes. “What is it, Will?” he asked.
Will lowered his voice and looked in the direction of the door. “Martha’s out of earshot, isn’t she?”
“She’s still in with Elliott,” Chester confirmed. “Tell me, what’s the matter?”
“Well,” Will began uncertainly. “I know Martha’s been brilliant, and she’s doing everything she can for Elliott, but could we be doing more?”
Chester shrugged. “Like what?”
“We’ve been here for weeks now, and we’ve become so reliant on Martha that we haven’t even considered that there might be someone else around who could help Elliott — really help her,” Will said.
“But Martha says —” Chester started.
“I know what Martha says,” Will cut him off. “But we don’t really know her, do we? What if there are other people down here, with medicine, or someone like Imago, who could help Elliott?”
Chester looked at him blankly. “But why on earth would Martha keep that from us?” he asked.
“Because she’s basically a lonely old woman who all of a sudden has got a couple of stand-ins for her dead son,” Will said.
“That’s harsh.”
“Yes, but it’s also true,” Will replied. “Don’t you ever kind of get the feeling that we’re prisoners here? Martha tells us there’s no one else in these parts, and we shouldn’t risk going outside by ourselves because of the spiders, and how it’s too dangerous to take us to see the ships her son found, and that there’s no way back up to the Deeps, and nothing down below….” He paused to draw breath. “I reckon she’s doing everything she can to keep us right here.” He tapped his index finger against the arm of his chair to emphasize the point.
Will was watching Chester intently, trying to see if any of what he was saying was raising a doubt in his friend’s mind.
Chester gave a small nod. “So, if what you’re saying is true, what then?” he asked. “We ditch Martha and trog off into the darkness? We drag a sick girl out of her bed in the hope that we might just bump into someone?”
Will blew through his lips. “Maybe I’m completely wrong and it would all be some terrible mistake, but I think we both know how this is going to turn out, don’t we?”
Chester didn’t answer.
“Come on, Chester, if we don’t do anything, the same thing that happened to Martha’s son is going to happen to Elliott. She’s going to die. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about that,” Will said. “And maybe — just maybe — we can take Elliott with us and get some help for her. Maybe we could find a way back up the Pore and contact Drake or something, or one of the other renegades.”
Chester banged his head against the back of the chair. “I don’t know, Will,” he murmured. “I just don’t know.”
“We’ve got nothing to lose, have we? Or rather, Elliott’s got nothing to lose, has she?” Will said desperately.
Over the next week, Elliott showed no sign of improvement. Will, Chester, and Martha watched her, fed her, and tried to keep her temperature down, and on the occasions the boys were alone neither one of them brought up the subject of leaving again.
It was as if an oppressive pressure had descended over the shack, one in which it was wrong to laugh or to permit themselves to have fun because their friend’s future hung in the balance, and that was all that mattered. The boys spoke in muted tones even when away from the shack, as if they might somehow disturb Elliott. The atmosphere even seemed to affect Bartleby, who spent most of the day sleeping in front of the hearth or scratching around in the land at the rear of the shack, sometimes giving himself dust baths.
When he wasn’t on “Elliott Duty,” as he and Chester called it, Will continued to play chess against himself. He also set himself the task of putting the pages of his father’s journal in order the best he could. It was important to Will because they were his father’s legacy, and it was his duty to preserve them in case he ever made it back to the surface again.
Many of the pages were badly creased, but Will smoothed these out, weighing them down to flatten them. Where Dr. Burrows’s writing or sketches were faint because they had been immersed in water, Will meticulously traced over the lines to make them more legible. When he had finished, he laid out all the pages on the floor, to see if there was anything he could glean from them. But try as he might, the strange letters and hieroglyphs recorded by his father were meaningless to him and didn’t offer up anything useful.
While making an inventory of what kit remained in his rucksack, he came across his camera. Amazed to find it still worked, he now put it to use, taking a few snaps of the journal pages before placing them carefully in one of the map chests. He figured they’d be safe from the damp there, and from Martha, who had the habit of bunging anything vaguely combustible on the fire to keep it burning.
Then he went to one of his favorite haunts — a small outbuilding that housed a multitude of items Martha’s son had brought back from his expeditions. The hut was crammed with trunks of nautical oddments, and Will was in his element as he opened them and sifted through their contents. He tried not to rush the task, rationing himself to one or two trunks at a time so that he had something to look forward to every day. Much of it was just scrap metal, such as iron brackets, thick pins that looked like they’d been made by a blacksmith, pulleys, and even some cannonballs.
But in among all this, Will found a huge ship’s compass. And in the same trunk there was a battered leather case, inside which he discovered a rather wonderful brass telescope. Will couldn’t believe his luck. He immediately took it to the front of the shack to try it out. Although it wasn’t much good either in the darkness or the limited confines of the strangely colored garden, Will didn’t care. As he handled it, his imagination was filled with thoughts of the seafaring people who had once used it and might also have been responsible for building the shack.
At the bottom of another trunk he also found a stethoscope. It was made from a dull silver metal and black plastic or rubber, which showed not the slightest sign of deterioration. To Will’s eye it looked very modern. He used it to listen to his own heartbeat, then chucked it back into the trunk, not giving it a further thought as he continued his search for more exotic objects.
