MARIO LET HIM leave early. The last hour had been quiet and most of the cleaning was done.
“Of course,” the big man said, holding the shutters in the air for Sep to duck under, “all the fridges have stopped working, is very strange—but I can finish here myself. You go. And remember, my Sep: is difficult to have friends; sometimes your pride is needing a spoonful of sugar maybe.”
Sep stood in silence, so Mario rubbed his head and laughed. “You’ll come in tomorrow afternoon, to help clean the cold store?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got that application to finish—”
“Is no problem,” said Mario, shaking his head. “I will manage.”
“No, I’ll come in, I’m sorry,” said Sep. “I can do the form after.”
Mario beamed. “Thank you, my Sep. You are good boy. You remember the cold-store locking code?”
“It’s . . . I do. It’s—”
“The special day of Mario and Greece.” Mario laughed. “Everything else you remember! Now be quick; there is a storm coming—and be careful of the greasy boy on your way,” he added before the shutters rattled down. “If he comes for you, hit first. My father always say: ‘Big men do not have wooden balls.’ Kick him there and he will sink like lead balloon, yes?”
Sep rolled his eyes, but he left his headphones in his bag and walked, leaving his board strapped up. The music and the grind of wheels would fill his head with sound, blinding his good ear, and he wanted to be ready if Daniels was waiting for him.
And now that he was outside, his tooth was really hurting.
He looked at the sky. The clouds were too thick to see stars, never mind the comet. But Sep wondered if it was out there, filling his head with cosmic agony.
Across the water, the mainland’s streetlights glowed like scattered jewels. The idea of the college and its freedoms glittered incorruptibly inside him, and this stupid distraction, this . . . bullshit, would not get in his way. He turned onto the thin strip of beach, avoiding the main street and Daniels’s usual haunts, each step taking him deeper into his own mind.
His guts boiled.
The others were so casual, sitting in his chip shop and blaming him for—what? Some ridiculous paranoia? Well, he would find Arkle tomorrow, tell him to back off—they could chase their own wild geese.
He marched over the little worm towers that sat like knots of spaghetti among the ribs of the old tide. Slow clouds of salt hissed from the rocks and the bay sang with the tinkle of swinging masts, the sand shining silver as the earth lurched away from the sun.
As the island turned beneath his feet, he thought of his mother sleeping in her chair, gray skinned and off her food. Memories of the last time she’d looked that way—the treatments in the mainland hospital, and the waxy tack of her skin—struck his mind like hailstones on tin, and he shook his head, turning the pads of his headphones.
He thought of the sacrifice box—and the guilt he’d put inside it. After years of forgetting, he’d been surprised by how bright and clear the memories had felt when Lamb mentioned it—how immediate the emotions had been.
“No,” he said aloud. “She can’t be getting sick again. Not again.”
His tooth throbbed suddenly, the pain running through the tubes of his head and into his deaf ear, while a smell of dampness and soil stirred his memory like footprints in dust. He sniffed.
The rock beside his foot leaped up.
Sep fell into a stream, his jeans soaking as he splashed backward. The crab, a sharp-limbed boulder in jagged skin, unfurled slowly, mouthparts whirring as it balanced on the awls of its enormous legs, pincers held in warning.
Sep froze.
The crabs did not do this. It was too hot for them—in winter they filled the beach like rats, but in summer they stayed below the water. Even at night.
The creature poised on the tide’s edge, white surf bubbling through its needle feet.
They hurt someone every year. Badly. Island kids were warned about them as soon as they could walk—Don’t let them grab you, because they won’t let go—but tourists always got too close, hunting for photographs, or trying to impress their friends. The year before Sep was born, the crabs had killed a little boy who fell off the pier.
As the animal finally eased into the water, step by agonizing step, Sep ran—heart flapping in his chest, headphones loose around his neck—all the way up the hill and along the silent streets until he reached his house and clattered through the front door, muscles seized up in terror.
He breathed out, clicked the buttons on his Walkman, and let the soft scent of his house gather around him, making the world normal, making everything secure.
The TV was hissing on standby, and his mum was asleep on the sofa—still in her uniform, a plate of untouched chicken beside her on the floor. Sep tucked a pillow under her head and cleared away the dinner things. He filled a glass with water and sat it next to the chair, covered her with a blanket, then grabbed the remote and tried changing the channel.
Every station was the same: snowy static filling the darkness with ghostly light. He pulled the plug out of the wall.
In his bedroom he picked his way across the messy floor and swung the telescope to the window. But the clouds were as thick as wool, and he found nothing.
He lay awake long after his mum’s snoring had subsided, watching the shadows grow in the blue of his bedroom. The house was silent but for the familiar click and ping of pipes as the building settled. A gap in the curtains spilled milky light across his feet. He shifted his legs. Flipped the pillow. Turned onto his other side.
Arkle’s toothy face, all deep-lined concern, kept flashing in his mind. He wondered if the others had remembered that was their favorite table at Mario’s—if they’d sat there tonight by instinct or choice. He thought of what it had felt like to be with them again—sitting in the chip shop just as they’d done that summer, eating Mario Specials while bike sweat cooled on their skin.
They were genuinely worried. He knew that. And it was strange, his mum asking about Arkle and Lamb for the first time in years—the same day they showed up in the shop.
He shook his head, thought of his application and the college—of his longed-for escape from Hill Ford. But an image came, unbidden, of the hospital gown gathered around the lumps of his mum’s knees as she was wheeled into surgery. He closed his eyes against it, but it burned there anyway.
Sep lay for an unknown age, clicking his Walkman on and off as his waking thoughts muddled on sleep’s gummy edge—when a moment settled on the house that lasted much longer than a moment. The world slowed, the blood swelled in his good ear, and when he opened his eyes the shadows had deepened. A car passed, the blades of its headlights slicing through the room.
The tingle of old, forgotten fears lit his veins, and he sat up sharply. He felt the skin of his younger self crawl inside him, alert to the darkness with a child’s precision, and he searched the corners of his house with his mind like a tongue probing teeth. There was a sound, invisible on the edge of silence, like the drumbeat of his own heart.
He was not alone.
He sensed that something was on the other side of the window, watching him with cold patience, the way a lizard watches a fly.
A shadow moved on the curtains.
“There’s no way it’s the box,” he said aloud, pulse closing his throat, then sat up and threw the curtains wide.
Three pairs of dark, gleaming eyes stared back at him.
Sep looked at the crows. Their terrible beaks were touching the glass, and their wings bristled, light playing through the blacks and blues and purples of their moonlit feathers—and as he met their stare a wave of cold gripped his body. He grit his teeth, snapped up the latch, and opened the window, hard, sending the birds flapping silently into the night.