Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (44 page)

“Yes,” said he, “they were married last week, and are now at Dawlish.”

Elinor could sit no longer. She ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease. Edward, who had till then looked anywhere, rather than at her, saw her hurry away, and perhaps saw—or even heard, her emotion; for immediately afterwards he fell into a reverie, which no remarks, no inquiries, no affectionate address of Mrs. Dashwood could penetrate, and at last, without saying a word, quitted the room, and went for a happy walk along the beach—leaving the others in the greatest astonishment and perplexity on a change in his situation, so wonderful and so sudden.

Marianne, though, ventured to add one note of concern: “Doesn’t this mean, however, that Robert Ferrars will be, or has already been, consumed by the sea witch?” But none present felt that possibility was much to be concerned with, or regretted.

U
NACCOUNTABLE AS THE CIRCUMSTANCES
of his release might appear to the whole family, it was certain that Edward was free; and to what purpose that freedom would be employed was easily pre-determined by all. For after experiencing the blessings of
one
imprudent engagement, contracted without his mother’s consent, as he had already done for more than four years, nothing less could be expected of him in the failure of
that
, than the immediate contraction of another.

His errand on Pestilent Isle, at the rickety house known as Barton Cottage, was a simple one. It was only to ask Elinor to marry him—and considering that he was not altogether inexperienced in such a question, it might be strange that he should feel so uncomfortable in the present case as he really did, so much in need of encouragement and fresh air. He paced on the beach for a full five minutes, as Mrs. Dashwood peeked at him through the bay window. She once shouted “Watch out!” and would later relate that Elinor’s moment of great happiness was nearly undone before properly contracted, when a giant bivalve mollusk tried, and barely failed, to snap itself shut around his unprotected ankles.

How soon he had walked himself into the proper resolution, however, how soon an opportunity of exercising it occurred, and how he was received, need not be particularly told. This only need be said—that when they all sat down to table at four o’clock, about three hours after his arrival, he had secured his lady, engaged her mother’s consent, and was not only in the rapturous profession of the lover, but one of the happiest of men. His situation indeed was more than commonly joyful. He had more than the ordinary triumph of accepted love to swell his heart, and raise his spirits. He was released without any reproach to himself, from an entanglement which had long formed his misery, from a woman whom he had long ceased to love, and who (he was now informed) was an immortal and evil spirit, who had emerged from a cave many fathoms below sea level to secure a victim, from whom to suckle the very stuff of life for her own diabolical use. He was brought from misery to happiness—and the change was openly spoken in such a genuine, flowing, grateful cheerfulness, as his friends had never witnessed in him before.

His heart was now open to Elinor, all its weaknesses, all its errors confessed, and his first boyish attachment to Lucy treated with all the philosophic dignity of four and twenty.

“When first I met her, Lucy appeared everything that was amiable and obliging. She was pretty too—at least I thought so
then
; and I had seen so little of other women, that I could make no comparisons, and see no
defects. I did at times notice, now that I think of it, that her eyes, on odd occasions, would flash the deepest, most crimson red, and that when she laughed at a jape, she would cackle rather alarmingly. Considering everything, therefore, I hope, foolish as our engagement was, foolish as it has since in every way been proved, it was not at the time an unnatural or an inexcusable piece of folly.

“And now,” he concluded, his eyes firmly affixed on Elinor’s beaming countenance, “I feel that the world has shifted under my very feet.”

There was a long silence, in which all present realised that Edward’s choice of phrase, if accidental, bore a literal as well as a figurative accuracy; the room had, in fact, shifted beneath their feet; and even as they all adjusted to this slight but discernible tilt, it jerked in the other direction, and they all were thrown violently to the ground.

“My God!” cried Sir John, emerging from the instinctual barrel roll he had gone into at the room’s first moving, and standing with legs spread far apart, firmly balanced himself against the alarming angle of the floor.

“Goodness,” echoed Mrs. Jennings from under the tea table. “What is happening?”

“
It is beginning
,” came a raspy voice from the doorway of the cottage, and all eyes turned to find young Margaret—although no longer did she look young, nor even like a girl at all—but like a fearsome, troll-like creature of the darkness: Her head pin-bald, her cheeks caked with dirt, her eyes squinting against the daylight.

“Margaret!” said Mrs. Dashwood with a wail. “My darling!”

At her approach, with arms outstretched, Margaret hissed like a snake, baring razor-sharp teeth at her mother. “Come no closer, woman of earth! Leviathan wakes—we must be girded for its waking!” And then, throwing back her head and screaming in a loud, unnatural voice, “
K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!
”

This ejaculation received the predictable startled reaction; all present exchanged concerned expressions, before they were distracted as the house trembled once more, and tilted dramatically, from forty-five to
eighty-five degrees in the opposite direction. Mrs. Jennings rolled wildly out from under the table and slammed with a resounding thud against the pianoforte.

“It was all true,” Sir John moaned. “Palmer warned me—I wouldn’t listen—it is all true!”

“K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!” shouted Margaret again.

Elinor, having tumbled from the heights of happiness into a miasma of terror—and from one end of the parlour to the other—found herself now staring wide-eyed out the southerly aspect of the cottage. There she saw Mount Margaret, a streak of grey-black smoke pouring forth from its top, while all along the craggy hillside hideous troll-like creatures crawled like insects towards the summit.

“What?” she cried out to Edward, who was bleeding copiously from a cut he had received in the first roll of the room. “What is happening?”

This was the last phrase anyone was able to emit for a long time. In the next instant, the entire house and all inside it, were lifted a hundred feet up in the air, and tossed into the sea.

* * *

Elinor surfaced in the cold, choppy waters off of the Devonshire coast, grasping for a scrap of furniture on which to secure herself, and thinking longingly of the Float-Suit she had worn in Sub-Marine Station Beta. Bits and pieces of Barton Cottage were borne past her by the agitated churning of the water: wood beams from the doorframe, several steps from the rickety wooden staircase; the piano bench; her collection of driftwood sculptures—all of it so much sea-borne rubbish now, as, she feared, was she herself.

And then—straight ahead of her—Elinor saw the most horrible sight her vision had yet comprehended. Pestilent Island, her home, was lifting itself out of the water—in a long, fluid motion the four-mile sweep of the island rose and rose and rose, revealing beneath the surface the irrefutable aspect of a
face
—it was a beast of impossible size, and the island that had been their home was merely the head—no, merely the
crest
of the head. Up it rose, with sea-water streaming down around it on all sides, a wall of mighty waterfalls crashing into the ocean.

THE LEVIATHAN LOOKED THIS WAY AND THAT, ITS GARGANTUAN EYES ROLLING WILDLY.

The whole fearsome head lifted itself from the water, and a pair of huge rolling eyes, surveyed the horizon line; two barbed and scaly claws, each as big as a battleship, set to thrashing about in the water. The Leviathan looked this way and that, its gargantuan eyes rolling wildly, as a blast of steam shot upwards from the blowhole on the very crest of its head—what Elinor now realised they had called Mount Margaret for all these many months. The whole head was dotted here and there with flexing, viscous gill-like slits and holes; it was one such gill-set, she thought, where she and Marianne had sat and talked last of Willoughby, where she had watched the mist roll in and out of the pond, one minute facet of the massive operation of the Thing’s respiratory system. The pool had not
seemed
to breathe, it
did
breathe.

As she watched, the Leviathan brought one gigantic claw down into the water, scooped up a school of monstrous tuna, each one as big as a cow, and tossed them into its maw like peanuts.

The island was awake, and it was
hungry
.

Elinor swam. She swam as fast as she could, kicking and paddling, setting her eyes for Allenham, the next island in the chain, though she knew it to be four miles, and too far a swim for her to make; and could not she hope to outswim the creature that, simply by outstretching its gigantic front claw, could scoop her up in an instant.

Where were her mother and Marianne? Had the Leviathan already consumed them, like it had those tuna? And
where
was her dearest Edward?

On she swam, banishing all thoughts, thinking only of breathing, of swimming—of survival.

What a rapid turn of events this day had wrought! First, that great change which a few hours had wrought in the minds and the happiness
of the Dashwoods! And now this—a race for life, to stay ahead of the sleep-hungered Leviathan that once had been her home.

On she swam, until her arms grew tired and her head grew heavy; the impossibility of her task weighed on her as much as her heavy woolen frock; she would never make it. With despair she began to feel a powerful tidal pull beneath her—though there was no undertow, not out here, miles from shore. Glancing back over her shoulder she confirmed her fear: The monster had brought its snout down to the water line and opened its mouth, and was simply sucking in sea-water. The water was rushing into its insatiable mouth, and dragging Elinor with it. She fought the undertow with all her ability; she kicked furiously, battling the tidal force with all the strength in her body.

“That’s it!” shouted a voice. “Those are the calves I love!”

She turned her head, raised it from the water, and beheld her dear Edward, swimming beside her. He held out his hand to her, and she hers to him; just by touching, their energies combined, and each felt their individual power increase. They swam that way, as one swimmer, stroking simultaneous, towards the safety of the schooner.

A schooner? Indeed—for here was Mr. Benbow, with the familiar scowling face and feathers tied in his beard, calling from the prow of the
Rusted Nail!

“Ahoy!” he called, as his mates appeared; there was Mr. Palmer and One-Eyed Peter and Two-Eyed Scotty and gentle Billy Rafferty—and even Mrs. Palmer, laughing cheerily with babe in arms. The crew lustily cheered Elinor and Edward forward, urging them on with foulmouthed piratic exhortations. In a moment the pair pulled free of the monster’s tidal force; in another instant they were climbing the ropes and ladder tossed from the bow, and were aboard the schooner.

“Hard to port, Peter!” called Mr. Benbow. “Hard to port and steady as you go. We must escape this island-turned-fiend, or we’ll all be swimming in its dank digestive juices by sunset!”

Marianne, Mrs. Dashwood, and the rest had already been plucked
from the sea, and in a quarter hour’s time, they had sailed clear of the Devonshire coast and the Leviathan. All were wrapped in blankets, seated with cups of hot grog on the fo’c’sle of the
Rusted Nail
, listening to Mr. Palmer’s solemn-voice explanation of what they had just witnessed.

“What my wife insists on calling
drollery
,” said he, “and what others call
bitterness
or
dyspepsia
, I can call what it is in truth: The kind of desperate soul-deep melancholia that comes from having looked into the dark eye of time and seen the darkest secrets of the earth.

“It was on a sea journey, some half dozen years after I left His Majesty’s service to go adventuring with Sir John and his crew, in search of whatever tribal curse it was that affected the Alteration. We ran aground on a patch of rock several hundred nautical miles north-northwest of the Tasmanian shore. There we lived for fourteen terrible months, sacked out on rocks, under makeshift tents we stitched from pieces of our ravaged sail; by day we wandered, hunting wolves and apes for food; at night we slept, at constant peril from the lash of the wind and the sting of a thousand different species of mosquito and night crawler.

“One day I found a cave; from within its depths, I saw a pair of gleaming eyes inside, and heard a queer chanting. Wearied by tedium of our island life, and certain regardless that my life would soon be meeting its end, I saw no risk in venturing after the source of the mystery. And so I decided to explore the cavern—how bitterly I have wished, every subsequent day, that I had decided otherwise!