THE ISLAND
The boy was bigger now. He had grown considerably over the course of this long year, far faster, Coral reflected, than would a purely human child. Arthur had wandered down to the water’s edge and she watched, with a mother’s pride, as he visibly resisted the impulse to crouch down upon all fours but stayed instead altogether upright. He rolled back his shoulders and sniffed the air. Was he home at last? Coral supposed in a sense that he was.
Their ship had weighed anchor early in the morning and a handsome young midshipman had rowed her and Arthur ashore, to the east side of the island. Coral had asked the sailor to stay with the boat, and the young man, although he had looked at them both with curious eyes, had honoured her request. He was, after all, as all of them were, being well paid. The generosity, once again, of the Reverend Woodgrove, with a small contribution in exchange for being left alone from the politician.
She watched her son gaze out to sea. He had taken off his shoes and socks and his furred toes squirmed in the sun.
They had been here four hours. They had eaten lunch together beneath the shade of a palm tree. It was dream-like for her, almost hallucinatory. She had said to Arthur as they had strolled through the little patches of woodland which spotted this place that it seemed to her that they were walking through the pages of a book, some old story of the high seas. Arthur had looked at her thoughtfully but said nothing. His words were halting in any case, though she was trying her best to teach him. Some days he seemed to have real facility with language; on others he seemed silent and still.
Now he stepped a little further into the ocean, the water rising up to his calves, still inches away from the blue cotton of his shorts. Coral watched him very closely, trusting him to go no further while remaining close enough to be able to run to him should he stumble or slip.
As she stood in the sun, admiring the beauty of the place she felt for a short while very far away indeed from all the many travails which had filled up her young life since the arrival of the mariner at her mother’s boarding house half a decade earlier. It was the briefest of respites and for this she was grateful.
The boy seemed happy now, splashing his feet in the water with carefree glee.
Of course, this had not been the plan when they had decided to come here. She had hoped to find something, some clue or connection to help her understand exactly where her little son had come from and what had become of his fellows. There was some evidence of habitation but it did not look as though anyone but them had been here for a long time. Of the little village which once had housed the Beast People there was only rotting wood, grown over by the jungle. If ever there had been a society here then it was long since gone. Coral wondered where the people of this place were. Already she was full of suspicion.
“Oh yes. I see that.” The voice of Arthur carried on the warm breeze.
Coral looked over. “Darling?”
The furred boy ignored her. He seemed to be addressing his words towards the ocean. “Yes, I thought… We did wonder if that was really true…”
Coral frowned. It was as though the child were conducting a conversation with someone she could not see. He had always shown signs of being an imaginative boy but there was in this something new and disconcerting.
“Arthur!” she called out.
He did not turn but spoke on, his eyes fixed upon the water.
“Arthur!”
He turned now and waved. “Mummy! Come here. Come and see?”
Fretful, Coral hurried to the side of her child. There was something unusual in his voice, a kind of oddly adult exultation which she had never heard there before.
When she reached his side, he was still smiling. “He says my name shouldn’t really be Arthur. He says my father’s name was M’Gari. And that his father’s name was Anse.”
Quickly, Coral took his hand, thick with fur, and squeezed it. “Who does, darling? Who says that?”
“It’s in my head. I don’t know his name. But he says that he’s a friend.”
Coral drew the boy to her side and held him tight. He did not resist. He leaned into her. The warmth of him filled her up with both fear and joy. “Where is he, darling?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice light so as not to unsettle him. “Where is this friend of yours?”
“There,” he said, and pointed out to sea. “See, Mummy? He’s there. Coming up now above the waves.”
Coral looked at where the boy was pointing. “I can’t see anything, darling.”
“Look closer, Mummy.”
And then she saw it: something dark, something moving against the horizon, something both wondrous and dreadful. Something, she realised, that was coming ever closer.
She found herself unable to move, held firm by fascinated horror. “What is it? What is that thing?”
Arthur said nothing and when she looked down to see his face she saw that his eyes were shining.
“He knows,” Arthur said then. “He knows what has happened. And he knows what we must do now. He has such plans… such plans for the future.”
By the time that mother and son returned at dusk to the waiting boat and the handsome midshipman there was scarcely anything at all in them which had not been changed absolutely.