Monster Mission

But of course she didn’t want seventy-two omelettes—she didn’t care for omelettes anyway—she wanted living chicks. ‘The next part is going to be messy,’ she warned.

But the children stayed to help, dipping rags into the hot castor oil and handing them to her as she dabbed and swabbed at the opening.

‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘But if this doesn’t work …’

‘Could she… die… ?’ asked Minette in a quavery voice.

‘Anyone can die,’ said Etta snubbingly. ‘Including you and me.’

But before she marched the children down again she took them up the further hill, which was the highest point of the Island.

The view was incredible. To the west, miles and miles of unbroken water with the sun making a golden path between the clouds, and to the east, a long way off but with their outlines sharp and clear, two islands; one hilly, one low and long.

And on a grassy ledge overhanging the wild northern shore was an ancient burial ground, with leaning and broken gravestones covered in lichen and battered by the rain.

‘There’s supposed to be a ghost here,’ said Etta. ‘But she only turns up every hundred years or so.’

‘What sort of a ghost?’

‘A good ghost. A kind of hermit. She was called Ethelgonda and she lived on the Island and looked after the creatures.’

‘Like you,’ said Minette.

‘Not in the least like me,’ said Aunt Etta crushingly.

‘I didn’t think good people became ghosts,’ said Fabio.

‘Well, a spirit then.’

The children spent the rest of the day collecting the special seaweeds that the boobrie ate and harrowing them up to her nest. Each time they watched anxiously for a sign of an egg but nothing seemed to be happening at all.

They were getting ready for bed that night when Myrtle came upstairs excitedly, her long hair flying.

‘Come down for a minute,’ she said. ‘Herbert’s mother has come and she wants to meet you.’

She hurried them down to the rocks and there, sure enough, sitting beside Herbert was a smaller seal, a cow with the same whitish mark on her throat as her son. Herbert’s mother was old—there was something weary about the way she held her head—but she lumbered up to them, and snorted in a very welcoming way, while her son looked on proudly.

‘This is a great honour, you know,’ said Myrtle, hopping about like a young girl. ‘She doesn’t come out of the water often now; it tires her to be on land. Herbert will have told her about you.’

Since it is difficult to shake hands with a seal, they bowed their heads politely, and Herbert’s mother came closer and said something, speaking in a low voice and in the selkie language. The children thought she was asking them to help Herbert make up his mind about whether to be a person or a seal and, when they were back in their rooms, Fabio had an idea. ‘We could just cut him with a knife. Not hard. Just a nick—then he’d become human and that would be that.’

‘Oh, we couldn’t!’

‘I don’t see why not. Then Myrtle would have a friend. He could learn the piano and they could play duets.’

But when he thought about it, Fabio knew that Minette was right. He couldn’t make even the smallest nick in that smooth and shining skin.

It was on the next afternoon that the children had a shock. They had taken yet another load of seaweed to the boobrie and were shovelling it into the nest when the bird gave the loudest honk they had heard yet. For a moment they thought it might be an egg, for the honk was a welcoming one.

But it wasn’t. The boobrie was looking at the loch.

The children turned to follow her gaze—and gasped.

A head had appeared in the middle of the lake.

But what a head! White and smooth and enormous … like the front end of a gigantic worm. After the head came a neck … also smooth … also white … a neck divided into rings of muscle and going on and on and on. It reared and waved above the surface of the water, and still more neck appeared… and more and more. Except that the neck was getting fatter, it couldn’t all be neck—the bulgier part must be the body of the worm: a worm the size of a dozen boa constrictors.

The boobrie honked once more and the children clutched each other, unable to move.

The creature was still rising up in the water, still getting longer, still pale and glistening and utterly strange. Then it turned its head towards them and opened its eyes which were just two deep holes as black as its body was white.

‘Whooo,’ it began to say. ‘Whooo’—and with every ‘oo’ the air filled with such a stench of rottenness and decay and… oldness… that the children reeled backwards. And then it began to slither out of the water … it slithered and slithered and slithered and still not all of it was out of the lake—and suddenly the children had had enough. Leaving their wheelbarrows where they were, they rushed down the hill to the house and almost fell into the sitting room where the aunts were having tea.