Island of Fog (Book 1) (13 page)

“Well,” Hal said slowly, “I like that idea better too. But what about the manticore? What if it attacks us again? It might take us by surprise next time. And even if we change and fight it off again, that’ll be another set of clothes down the drain. And what if . . . what if the fog really does filter the air and keep us safe from the virus?”

But Robbie appeared not to hear that last part. He sat up and tapped a finger absently on his nose. “What if we tell Miss Simone or our parents about the manticore? Maybe they’ll get rid of it. Shoot it with those long rifles they go hunting with.”

A horrible thought entered Hal’s mind just then. “If they kill the manticore . . . and then roast it . . . we’ll be eating Thomas Patten for dinner.”

“Oh, gross!” cried Robbie, and threw a pillow at Hal.

There was another long silence. “Anyway,” Hal went on, “if our dads go out hunting in Black Woods, they might find our clothes lying around, ripped to shreds.”

“And they’ll start asking even more awkward questions,” Robbie said, nodding. He grimaced. “There must be
something
we can do!”

“Well, Abigail also suggested breaking into the lighthouse.”

Robbie nodded. “Yeah, she wants to go to the top to see if we can see out over the fog.”

“Which we can,” Hal said, growing excited. “My mom said so. If we can get to the top of the lighthouse, above the fog, we might actually see Out There. And if we can see Out There, then we might spot people walking around. If everything looks normal, well, then we’ll know Miss Simone and all our parents are lying to us. But if we see a bunch of crazy people running around, then—”

“Then Miss Simone might be telling the truth,” Robbie finished.

Hal’s brain was starting to hurt. “You know manticores and dragons and ogres and faeries are make-believe, right?” Seeing Robbie’s puzzled expression, Hal nodded. “Yes, they’re all fantasy creatures, nothing but myth and folklore.”

“But . . . they
are
real,” Robbie said.

“Right. As real as that blood-sucking butterfly you found. That’s something else that doesn’t exist, according to all the books on wildlife I’ve ever read.” Hal groaned. “I can’t think straight anymore.”

Outside, something blew over with a thud, and together they glanced outside. There wasn’t much to see; Robbie’s room faced the rear garden, but the fog was so thick and dark they couldn’t even see the surrounding hedges and trees, just a bank of clouds that drifted fast across the grass.

Then a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. Hal grinned at Robbie. “Cool. Haven’t had thunder in ages.”

“Mom’ll freak out,” Robbie said. “She hates storms.”

There was a sudden spatter of rain on the window, and Hal wondered if he should go home before it really got started or wait and see if Robbie’s parents would offer dinner. He glanced at the clock on the wall, and frowned.

“It’s stopped,” Robbie said, following his gaze. “Forgot to wind it. Hang on, I’ll check the time in the living room.”

“Hey,” Hal called as Robbie reached for the door. “Think I can stay for dinner? Then we can watch the storm and talk all night, otherwise I’ll have to get back before it starts pouring down out there.”

Robbie nodded and disappeared from the room. He returned a minute later, grinned and said dinner was fine, then took the clock down from the wall. He wound it and set it to four-fifteen.

“Is that all?” asked Hal, surprised. “It seems later. So much has happened this afternoon, and it’s so dark out.”

“Yeah. Come on, we’ll watch the storm from the deck, out back.”

They went out back to the large screened-in deck that filled the corner space formed by the L-shaped house. The roof had been extended so the space was completely protected from rain.

They sat in lightweight chairs facing the garden and stared across the lawn. Visibility was very poor—there wasn’t much to see at all except the spectacle of fast-moving fog, and the occasional spatter of heavy raindrops on the grass. There were a couple of bright flashes, and then the thunder boomed loudly.

“It’s getting closer,” Hal said.

The familiar smell of musty storm air wafted through the screens. Strong gusts of wind tugged at Hal’s hair. Then the rain started hammering down, and another bright flash of lightning lit up the fog in a ghostly white glow.

“Cool,” Robbie said over the noise of the rain. “Wouldn’t like to be out in it, though. We’d be soaked in seconds.”

The rain was coming down so hard now that the edge of the deck had turned a shiny black, and large drops were bouncing toward Hal and Robbie. They backed their chairs out of range.

Thunder cracked and rumbled, dying away slowly. Lightning flickered, and suddenly a tremendous crash of thunder shook the deck and almost deafened the boys. They whooped with delight.

Robbie’s mother poked her head out the door. “Hal? Your mother knows you’re here, right?”

“Yes, Mrs. Strickland,” Hal said.

“Well, good. Dinner will be ready soon.” She disappeared back inside.

Another blinding flash lit up the garden, and the thunder boomed once more. The wind began howling now, and the fog twisted and spun as if performing some kind of weird smoky pirouette on the lawn. It was mesmerizing, especially with the lightning flickering every few seconds.

Impossibly, the rain came down even harder, driving sideways under the force of the wind, luckily away from the deck or the boys would have been forced to finally retreat inside. The roof rattled, and an old slate tile suddenly worked loose and slid off, flipping over the gutter as it went. It landed with a plop in the mushy grass. Although he couldn’t see beyond the fog, Hal could clearly hear the trees swaying at the foot of the garden. And, somewhere out in the street at the front of the house, a metal bucket went skittering along the paved surface.

Then Hal heard shouts from somewhere, and he glanced around. “Hear that?” he called over the wind and rain. Robbie said something, but the thunder crashed just then and drowned him out. The boys stared wide-eyed at each other and listened carefully.

More shouts—a woman’s voice, followed by a number of low, deep voices. Hal couldn’t make out anything they were saying. Perhaps the storm was wreaking havoc with someone’s house. It certainly was a wild one.

Then there came a panting, snorting sound, and heavy footfalls mingled with the squelch of sodden turf and shallow puddles.

Hal leaned forward in his chair, searching the twisting fog and sheets of rain. And then, out of the fog, a shadowy figure emerged. It slowed to a stop and stood restlessly at the far end of the lawn.

“Look!” Robbie said, pointing.

“I see it,” Hal replied, squinting. “What
is
that? A horse?”

As the lightning continued to flicker, the boys saw that the figure was large, and at first glance it did appear to be a horse, with a man or woman on its back, hunched forward as if cowering from the rain. One of the men back from the farm, perhaps? But something was wrong. If only the lightning would flicker again.

“Oh!” Hal exclaimed, stunned, as a flash of light lit up the garden for half a second. For that brief moment the horse and rider were silhouetted side-on, a sleek, powerful shape trotting across the far end of the lawn.

Only it wasn’t a horse and rider.

“A centaur!” cried Robbie with excitement, jumping to his feet. “Look! A man with a horse’s body!”

Or a horse with a man’s head
, Hal thought absently, staring into the darkness. The night sky lit up again, and the creature—the
centaur
—glanced around furtively, a stout figure whose black, rain-soaked flanks gleamed in the sudden glare of the flashing lightning. More shouts came, closer now, and the centaur’s man-head snapped around, panting steam.

The night was plunged once more into foggy darkness, but the centaur seemed to retain traces of discharged energy and its body glowed with a faint luminescence. It reared up, and then, with a stamping and splashing of hoofs, galloped away into the woods.

Astonished, Hal could only stare after it in silence. Robbie turned to him, his face alight with excitement, but before he could say anything, Hal jabbed a finger into the fog once more. “Look!”

A woman had appeared, running after the centaur with a long robe billowing behind her. Her movements seemed eerily disjointed as the strobe lightning effect caught her in various poses across the lawn. Her voice suddenly pierced the hammering rain and blustery wind. “This way! I can smell it!”

It was Miss Simone, her long blond hair plastered over her shoulders and her face glistening wet. In a moment she was gone, and behind her came what seemed like a hoard of children—but there were six, eight, maybe ten of them, all heavyset and stout, grunting and occasionally shouting with deep, guttural voices.

Hal and Robbie watched as they stampeded across the garden. Then they were gone, and the thunder drowned out any further sounds.

It was several minutes before Hal spoke. He leaned over and whispered as loudly as he could, trying to make himself heard over the storm but suddenly fearing that Robbie’s parents might hear. “Robbie, tell me you saw all that too!”

Robbie nodded, his eyes wide. “A centaur,” he said, “being chased by Miss Simone and . . . and . . .”

“And some short people,” Hal finished, puzzled. “I couldn’t see them very well, but they were too short to be adults and too big and heavy to be the other kids.”

“And there were too many of them,” Robbie agreed. “I counted maybe ten.”

They stared into the flickering darkness once more, half expecting something else to come bounding out into the open. A vision of the manticore popped into Hal’s head, looming out of the fog with a grin on its face, and that terrible tail curled up and over its head, swaying in the air with quills bristling.

Hal shivered, suddenly realizing there was nothing to stop the creature from leaving Black Woods and roaming all over the island. What if it was lurking in the nearby bushes right now? Worse, what if it leapt on him as he headed home later in the evening?

“Where do you think it came from?” Robbie asked suddenly.

Hal blinked. “What, the manticore?”

Robbie looked puzzled. “No, the centaur. And those funny short people.”

Hal shrugged. “Same place the manticore came from, probably. Same place Miss Simone came from this morning, and went home to after school. We’ve got to get to the top of the lighthouse. I think that’s the safest plan. We’ll do that first, and then we’ll talk about blocking up the fog-hole.”

“Straight after school tomorrow,” Robbie agreed.

Hal arrived at school the next morning at eight on the dot, having suffered through a breakfast full of curious stares from his parents. On several occasions, one or the other had started to say something, only to clam up and continue eating in silence. Hal guessed they had been trying to ask him about physical changes, but seemed unable to phrase the question.

It was strange that they didn’t just come out and ask,
Are you turning into a monster?
But on the other hand, what if they believed he was telling the truth and was
not
undergoing odd transformations? How would an ordinary twelve-year-old boy take to a question like that, if he really knew nothing of dragons, manticores, ogres and faeries?

As he headed to school, deep in thought, Hal realized that Miss Simone’s project had a great deal of uncertainty attached to it. It had taken longer than expected for most of them, excluding Thomas, to start changing, and perhaps this had led Miss Simone and all the parents to believe that the project was not going well. If Fenton’s physical change was considered a “successful result,” and Miss Simone was to take him away somewhere, then what would happen to the rest of them if they never changed? He supposed nothing at all would happen—they’d simply remain on the island forever, scraping up the last of their supplies and doomed never to see a blue sky.

So were his parents hopeful that he would change so they could move on to wherever Fenton was headed? His mom had said it was nice there, with sunshine and blue skies—a better place, she had said. But what if Miss Simone had lied about that too? What if there was no such place? What if Miss Simone just wanted to keep up the pretense until the children started changing, and then do away with the parents and steal the children for experiments?

Hal felt a chill as images of doctors in white coats filled his mind, standing there on the other side of glass walls, holding clipboards and writing notes and nodding to each other as Hal found himself changing into a dragon . . .

With his head full of dark thoughts, he trudged into school. Miss Simone was already there, and she watched like a hawk as Hal entered the classroom and made for his seat. Most of the others were there too, sitting in silence at their desks. Miss Simone’s presence killed any chance of conversation, so Hal contented himself with a few wordless glances toward Robbie and Abigail. Dewey and Darcy filed in a few moments later, and after the scraping of their chairs ceased, absolute quiet fell on the classroom.

Then Miss Simone spoke, her voice pleasant enough but her eyes hard and cold. “Good morning, class. I trust you finished your homework? I’ll collect your essays in a moment.”

There was a momentary shuffling as each classmate retrieved a single sheet of paper from his or her backpack. Hal had finished his essay just before going to bed—he’d almost forgotten it, but had hurriedly scribbled some words on the paper, keeping his writing deliberately big to fill the space. Miss Simone had wanted them all to write a quick essay about “a boy or girl who has magical powers.” Yeah,
right
. As if Hal was going to give the game away and write about being a dragon at a time like this! Miss Simone’s little plan was as transparent as the glass in the window frame.

“Now,” Miss Simone said, remaining in her seat with her hands clasped on the desk, “today I’ve decided not to discuss the past. I know you’re anxious to learn of the world your parents came from, and why you’re all here on the island today. But if I discuss the past, I might also hint at the present and future, and I can’t do that unless I know for sure that . . .” She paused. “Well, you see, great things will come to those who confide in me their secrets. Fenton, for example—”

She rose and padded across the floor, barefoot as she had been yesterday.
Does the woman not have any shoes?
wondered Hal.

Miss Simone stopped behind Fenton’s desk and put her hands on his shoulders. He looked uncomfortable with the contact. “Fenton here is undergoing a few remarkable changes. You’re all aware that his teeth have completely altered, yes? Well, as insignificant as this may sound, his teeth are of the utmost importance to me. They signify something far greater than you can imagine.”

Hal smiled to himself.
I think I can imagine pretty well, thanks.

“This will be Fenton’s last day on the island,” Miss Simone went on. There were a number of gasps. “You see, Fenton is moving to a better place, where the sun shines and there are many, many people to welcome him and his parents.”

A vision of doctors in white coats filled Hal’s mind again. Fenton’s struggling parents were secreted away in the night, to be tossed off a cliff . . .

Hal shuddered as Miss Simone continued innocently. “His family is ready to start over in a new place, far from here. And all because of his teeth.”

She paused for effect. Hal caught Abigail glancing his way, and he wondered what she was thinking. She had that defiant look in her eye.

“Please, Miss?” asked Emily, raising her hand. “Are you saying he’s going Out There?”

Simone shook her head. “If you mean the mainland, then no. There’s another place. It’s . . .” She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s just elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere,” Emily repeated quietly.

Miss Simone flashed a smile of white teeth around at the class, and in that moment she looked radiant, entrancing. “So you see, children, it’s in your own interest to, ah, confide in me. The quicker we leave this island, the better.”

There was a long silence. Miss Simone looked around carefully, her gaze resting on first one and then another classmate. But nobody said a word. Silence reigned. Her broad smile faltered a little, and then began to fade altogether.

“Miss?” asked Abigail.

Miss Simone’s head whipped around eagerly. “Yes, Abigail?”

With that mischievous gleam in her eye once more, she said, “What if we have nothing to report? I mean, none of us have teeth like Fenton’s. I think we’re all perfectly normal.” She looked around. “Aren’t we?”

Everyone nodded vigorously.

Miss Simone said nothing. She stood there with her hands still on Fenton’s shoulders. Her face slowly reddened. Hal could almost feel the atmosphere thicken, and could have sworn the room grew darker. Although Fenton couldn’t see her face, it was obvious from the way he flinched that he detected the change in her mood. Or perhaps Miss Simone’s fingers were digging into his shoulders.

“Children,” she said finally, through gritted teeth. “Why do you test me so? Everything I’ve done here has been for your benefit as much as mine. The only reason I’m here at all is because of you. Why don’t you trust me?”

Nobody said anything for a while. But then Hal cleared his throat. “Um, Miss Simone? Perhaps if you told us a bit more, then we might feel ready to trust you. Even if we were, um, changing—like Fenton I mean—well, what would happen to us? What’s going to happen to Fenton?”

“I told you—he’s going to a better place.” Miss Simone looked puzzled. “Why don’t you believe me? Why would I lie? Look, you were only supposed to be here eight years. Eight years is normally how long it takes. But it’s been twelve years already and my people are getting desperate—”

She broke off, biting her lip.

“You may be our last hope, you know,” she murmured, her gaze turning to the window. “Communications are failing badly, people are dying as a result . . .”

With a sudden angry toss of her golden locks, she turned and grabbed a sheet of paper from Dewey’s desk—his essay—then moved on and grabbed Abigail’s, then Robbie’s. As she whipped Hal’s off his desk, the strong scent of ocean wafted under his nostrils and he had a split-second vision of her diving off the cliff and plummeting to the sea below.

“Get on with some work,” Miss Simone commanded. She thought for a second, then shrugged. “Open your history books and copy the text from any chapter onto paper.”

Hal wasn’t the only one who found this a very strange request. He glanced around and saw a number of puzzled looks. Emily dared to put her hand up. “Um, please, Miss? May I ask why we—”

“No, you may not,” Miss Simone said shortly. She was scanning the essays and her face was reddening even more. “What
is
this nonsense? Darcy wishes she could read minds, Hal would like to invent a potion that makes him small so he can ‘crawl under a rock and stay there,’ and Abigail—” Miss Simone snorted with derision. “—Abigail wishes she had ‘the power to make little blue pimples appear all over Robbie’s face because that would be really funny.’”

There was resounding laughter, and even Robbie turned to give Abigail a big grin. It was more than just funny though, Hal realized. It was a sense of camaraderie between them all, a friendship that had been taken for granted up until recently. Now, with the arrival of Miss Simone, an untrustworthy stranger who was threatening to take them all away from everything they’d ever known, it was a clear case of ‘us against her.’

The next few hours passed without incident. Miss Simone seemed bewildered and frustrated that the class wasn’t coming forward with tales of amazing transformations, and tried several different approaches to get them to talk throughout the course of the morning. After she had thrown the ridiculous essays into the trash and calmed down, she turned on her friendly smile again and went around the class, sitting on the corner of each desk and trying to sweet-talk one classmate or another into letting her into his or her secrets. “You can tell me,” she whispered, leaning so close that her blond locks tumbled into Hal’s face.

When this didn’t work she tried emotional blackmail. She made out that all the parents were worried sick and that they’d have to remain on the island forever, and even tried to convince the children that some of their parents had reported symptoms of a virus. “It’s breaking through the fog,” Miss Simone said, putting on an anxious voice and frowning deeply. “If we could only leave here . . . but of course only Fenton can leave, because he’s the only one who is experiencing physical changes.”

Abigail spent much of the time rolling her eyes at Hal, and he had to agree that Miss Simone was making a fool of herself. Did she really think her feeble lies were convincing? Clearly she had spent very little time with children before, and completely underestimated their intelligence.

Later, Miss Simone tried a matter-of-fact approach. “Okay, let’s level with each other,” she said. “I’ll tell you something about this place Fenton and his parents are going to, and in turn one of you agrees to be honest.”

This was actually quite an interesting proposition, and the class listened carefully as Miss Simone explained that her world—which Emily insisted on labeling Elsewhere—was full of rolling green countryside, huge forests with trees reaching high into the sky, lakes and rivers of crystal clear water, and plenty of sunshine: blue skies, little puffy white clouds, and a brilliant sun that rose round and orange in the morning and cast perfect rainbows during showers. She told of the wildlife too: horses, cows, and sheep just like on the island, but manymore creatures besides,
fantastic
creatures that had once roamed both lands, thousands of years ago.

“Many of the creatures I take for granted are extinct in your own land,” Miss Simone explained. “The ties between our worlds have long since been severed. There used to be holes linking the worlds, like doorways, but now there are just a few left in existence. That’s why this island was chosen; along its eastern shores are a few holes that allow passage between my world and yours.”

This was of enormous interest to the class, particularly Hal, Robbie and Abigail, who had seen Miss Simone diving off the cliff into the sea. That had been along the eastern shore.

“Do you have a boat, Miss Simone?” asked Robbie. “To get to your land?”

“No, I don’t need one,” she replied. “I’m a good swimmer. I arrive on the island through a hole out in the ocean, and swim ashore. But this hole is along the south eastern shore—quite a walk to the school in the morning, I can tell you! So I leave another way, a much quicker route. Unfortunately it means, uh, jumping into the sea from fairly high up, so it’s sort of an exit route only. There’s another hole I know of too, but I can’t use it.”

This was truly some useful information! Hal exchanged glances with Robbie and Abigail. Finally Miss Simone seemed to be explaining things. And telling the truth, by the sound of it.

But here she stopped. “Now, it’s your turn. Someone—anyone—please be honest with me. Has anyone experienced anything strange lately? I don’t have to explain to you what I mean by strange. If something was happening, you’d know about it. The structure of Fenton’s teeth changed overnight, which is frankly impossible in most humans. How about anyone else?”

There was a long pause. Hal wondered why, directly in front of him, Lauren was wriggling her shoulders and squirming in her chair. He hoped she wouldn’t give anything away.

“Anyone?” Miss Simone urged. “Please. Fair’s fair. I told you a little about my land. Now tell
me
something.”

Lauren squirmed some more, and she reached behind her, trying to scratch an itch on her back.

Miss Simone’s face was growing red again. “Stop fidgeting, Lauren,” she snapped. She glared around the class. “Somebody talk to me. Right now.”

But nobody said a word. Everyone did a very good job of looking bewildered, although to be fair Emily and Darcy probably
were
bewildered.

Hal happened to glance at Lauren just then. She had finally reached the itch on her back, but in doing so, something startling happened that almost made Hal jump up in surprise. He quickly looked away in case Miss Simone saw him watching. If she saw what Hal was seeing, then the game would be up for Lauren.

****

They made it to the end of class without being strung up by the hot-tempered stranger. Hal eagerly got together with Abigail and Robbie and herded them outside away from Miss Simone. He led them under the low-hanging oak tree and kept his voice down.

“Did you see Lauren’s thumb?” Both Abigail and Robbie frowned at him, perplexed. “It changed!” Hal said.