“I can’t believe we didn’t see it,” Sukey said, pointing to the little sea horses distributed across the blue ocean, some on the horizontal lines and some in between them. “Five compass roses. Five lines in a musical staff. It’s a piece of music.”
I was already trying it out, blowing through the mouthpiece and pressing my fingers over the little holes. “Coleman said that each one is different. You can play different tunes by covering the holes, like a flute or a recorder. It must make a song. Maybe the song is the message to us. Anyway, we’ll figure that part out.” I blew. “It’s not really coming back. What note is that?”
“Give me that,” Sukey said impatiently. “We have to figure out what key it’s in so we’ll know how to play the music.” She covered all the holes and blew. “That’s the lowest note. It’s D. So now let me see the map. She covered one hole and blew again. “B,” she said. She covered two holes. “A. That’s E.” In a couple of minutes she’d figured out how to play the whistle. “All right. So the song goes like this.”
She played it.
“Does that sound familiar?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not even really a song, is it?”
“Here, you try.” She handed it to me and I played the little sequence of notes. “Nope, doesn’t sound familiar to me either.”
I played it a few more times, but now I was pretty sure I’d never heard it before.
I felt suddenly dejected. I was so sure I’d had it.
“That has to be it, though,” Sukey said. “That has to be the code on the map.”
“But if I can’t figure out what the song is,” I said. “What good does it do me?”
“We’ll get it. We’re just so tired. Our brains aren’t working right.” She sounded exhausted. Already, the lines and notes on the map were fading and I put the map back in the pocket of my vest and the whistle back around my neck.
We sat there silently, staring out at the ocean, when Sukey said, “Kit? Is there something down there? On the sand?”
“What do you mean?” I stood up and looked down toward the shoreline. It took a couple of seconds to see what she meant. Something was moving on the sand.
“It looks like a fish,” I said.
“It’s coming up on the beach, though.” Sukey backed up a little, looking alarmed. “It’s . . . slithering. That’s not a fish.”
Whatever it was, it was hard to see in the darkness, but when I turned on my vestlight, I saw that the things were wriggling up all over the beach, lots of them, coming out of the water and moving from side to side like snakes. Except they weren’t snakes.
Sukey scrambled backward as they came toward us, struggling to climb to her feet.
I couldn’t stop staring at the strange creatures. There were about a hundred of them, writhing along the sand. They were each about two feet long, slimy, shiny black, with a sharp red fin running along the tops of their heads to their backs. They twisted and turned, their muscular bodies rippling over the sand. I stood transfixed until one got so close that I could see its mouthful of sharp white teeth, and I came to my senses.
“They’re eels,” I said. “Hundreds of them. And they’re coming up the beach! Run!”
We sprinted up the beach, the beam from my vestlight bobbling on the sand, and found our shelter, climbing in and pressing our backs against the trees. I dug through the pockets of my vest, coming out with a knife and the spearfishing tool. I handed the knife to Sukey and held the spearfishing utility out in front of me, ready to shoot the first eel that came over the threshold.
“I can’t look, I can’t look,” Sukey whispered. “Are they coming? Are they coming?” She was hiding behind me, trying to burrow into the tree.
“Uh . . .” The truth was that I didn’t want to look either. I was terrified. But I pointed my vestlight out at the darkness. They moved in a wriggling mass. I could hear the wet sound of them slithering up the beach, but they weren’t coming our way. They were heading for the trees.
“I think they’re climbing,” I whispered, poking my head out of the shelter. “I think they’re climbing . . . up the trees.”
The eels were climbing, like tree snakes, and pretty soon we heard a crunching sound coming from the tops of the palms.
“They must be eating the coconuts,” I told Sukey. “We wondered why there weren’t any on the beach.”
“Can all eels come out of the water like that and climb trees?” Sukey whispered.
“I don’t think so. Maybe they’ve evolved to be able to come up on land. It must be an unknown species. But at least they don’t seem interested in us.”
“This is crazy,” Sukey said. “A new species of eel. Bioluminescent jellyfish. Zander would have loved this.”
“Yeah, he would have.”
We were both silent, thinking of Zander.
“Kit,” she said, after a minute. “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it? We’ll find them. We’ll get off this island.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just pulled her into a hug and we sat there like that for hours, leaning against into other and listening to the eels chewing on the coconuts up in the trees. At some point, we must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was very early morning, the sun staining the sky pink as it rose.
Sukey was still fast asleep and I carefully got up so as not to wake her. I walked down to the edge of the water. There was no sign of the eels now, and the waves softly lapped at the shore, the breeze salty and gentle on my face.
I walked for a while, following the shoreline as far as I could before it ran into the sharp rocks of the cliff. I still felt frustrated by Dad’s map. I had figured out the musical code. That should have been it. And yet there was some other mystery to discover. I felt suddenly angry. What was Dad thinking? We’d almost died and he was playing games, teasing me with maps and clues.
Except I couldn’t quite believe he’d do that. If what the Explorer had said was true, that Dad was leaving these clues for me and me alone, then these puzzles must have some purpose. I was missing something.
I pulled the whistle out from under my shirt and put it to my lips. I’d memorized the notes, and I played the piece through a couple of times, but no melody emerged. I wracked my brain for songs that Dad had sung to us, tunes he whistled while he worked, ballads he liked to sing in the bath, but nothing matched the notes on the map. I was about to turn away and head back down the beach when something made me look out at the water.
And look again.
The sun was very bright now. I wondered if I was hallucinating.
Emerging from the sea and onto the beach was a sea turtle as big as an elephant.