Hester was about to reply when the door behind her opened and Caul came in. She turned on him instead. “Come to gloat over your prisoners?”
Caul would not meet her eye. “You’re not prisoners,” he said. “I just didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And I didn’t want you to make Uncle leave. He’s an old man. He’d die if he leaves Grimsby.”
“He’ll die if he stays,” said Hester. “Unless he’s a really good swimmer.”
Caul ignored her and spoke to Freya and Tom. “He’s asleep now. He’ll sleep for hours, with luck. That gives you time to get away.”
“And what about you?” asked Freya.
Caul shook his head. “I have to stay. I’m all he’s got.”
“Well, you’re more than he deserves,” said Tom indignantly. “You do know he’ll never really be able to rebuild this place, don’t you?”
“You don’t understand,” said Caul. “Seeing him like this, so old and mad and miserable… Of course Grimsby’s finished. But Uncle doesn’t realize that. I’m the last of his boys, Tom. I’ve got to stay with him till the end.”
Freya was about to try to reason with him, but Hester butted in. “Fine by me. Now, how do you suggest we leave?”
Caul grinned at her, glad of a practical question at last. “The Naglfar. She’s the cargo submarine we saw in the pens when we first got here. She’s old, but she’s trusty. She’ll take you back to Anchorage all right.”
“Then you’ll have to come too!” said Freya, relieved. “I can’t drive a submarine on my own, or pilot it, or whatever you’re supposed to do to them.”
“Tom and Hester will help you.”
“Tom and Hester are taking the Screw Worm and going after Brighton,” said Hester.
“No,” Caul told her. “You’ve got to go with Freya. I have to stay with Uncle. I’ll help you fuel and provision the Naglfar. You can take her back to Anchorage and then, once Freya and the children are safe, you can carry on to Brighton and find Wren.”
And so, for one last time, the limpet pens of Grimsby were filled with the sounds of a submarine being made ready for sea. The Naglfar was a rusty, ramshackle old tub, but Caul said that she would swim, and there was room enough in her spacious hold for all the children. He did not tell them what else he knew about her: that she was the submarine that Uncle had stolen years before from Snowmad scavengers and used to begin his underwater empire. Nor did he mention where her name came from—in the legends of the Old North, the Naglfar was a ship built from dead men’s fingernails in which the dark gods would sail to battle at the world’s end. He didn’t want to give the children nightmares.
So Tom and Caul concentrated on testing the old sub’s engines while Hester filled her tanks with fuel and Freya made some of the older children show her Grimsby’s food stores, where they collected armfuls of provisions to keep them going on the journey back to Vineland.
Everything had to be done quickly. Metallic moans and grumbles kept rolling down the passageways of the building, as hull plates that had been damaged by Brighton’s depth charges slowly shifted and gave way under the pressure of the sea and the bulkhead doors slammed shut to seal off the flooded sections. No one had forgotten that Uncle was still up there in his chambers with his mad dreams. But Uncle seemed to be sleeping soundly for the moment; at least when Tom opened the Naglfar’s hatches and looked up at the shadowy roof, he could not see any crab-cams on the move.
He leaned against the open hatch cover for a moment, glad of the cold, for it was growing hot and stuffy in the Naglfar’s engine room. He had been overdoing it down there and worrying too much about Wren, and his old wound was hurting him again, sharp, jabbing shards of pain, as if his heart were full of broken glass. He wondered again if he was going to die. He didn’t think he was afraid of dying, but he was afraid of dying before he found Wren.
He decided to worry about Caul instead of himself. He climbed out of the submarine and found Hester coming across the dock.
“What are we going to do about Caul?” Tom asked softly, drawing her aside. “He’s still set on staying here. Has he forgotten that Uncle tried to have him killed?”
Hester shook her head. “He’s not forgotten,” she said. “I don’t think he wants to stay, exactly. It’s just that he loves Uncle.”
“But Uncle nearly killed him]”
“That doesn’t make a difference,” said Hester. “Uncle is the nearest thing Caul’s got to a mother or a father. Everybody loves their parents. They may not always realize that they love them, they may hate them at the same time, but there’s always a little bit of love mixed in with the hate, which makes it really… complicated.”
She stopped, unable to explain herself, thinking of her own complicated feelings for her dead father and her missing child. She wished Wren loved her as much as Caul loved Uncle.
“Freya told me Caul has dreams about this place every night,” said Tom. “He dreams about Uncle’s voice, whispering to him the way it used to when he was a child. Why would Uncle keep talking to them all, over the speakers, even while they were asleep?”
“Maybe he was sort of brainwashing them,” said Hester.
“That’s what I think,” Tom agreed. “Putting a kind of hook in their minds that would always pull them back to Grimsby, no matter how far they tried to run or how much they wanted to get away.”
“We’ll overpower Caul,” said Hester. “Knock him on the head and drag him away. He’ll come to his senses once we’re at sea.”
“Maybe,” said Tom. “Maybe, once this place is gone and Uncle’s dead, he’ll be able to forget it.”
From the conning tower of the Naglfar came a piercing, childish scream. “The cams]” shouted a boy called Eel, whom Freya had told to keep watch because he was too small to do anything else. “The cams are moving]”
Tom and Hester looked up. Above them, crab-cams were scuttling along the rusty jibs of the docking cranes, clambering over each other as they trained their lenses on the pool where the Naglfar wallowed.
“The old man’s awake,” said Caul, scrambling out of the submarine’s forward hatch and climbing down onto the dock with Freya close behind.
“So what?” asked Hester. “He can’t stop us leaving now.”
“Who said anyone is leaving?” asked Uncle’s scratchy voice. “Nobody’s leaving.”
He came limping toward them between the empty moon-pools, Hester’s gun looking huge in his papery, quivering hand. Above his head the old balloon hung like a moldy thought-bubble, and the globe of screens beneath it flickered with pictures from the crab-cams. He heaved the gun up and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet clanging into the metal of the Naglfar’s conning tower. The sound echoed away between the shadowy docking cranes, and as if in answer a stressed bulkhead somewhere on the upper levels let out a long groan, like some huge creature dying slowly and painfully of indigestion.
Uncle ignored it. “Uncle Knows Best!” he shouted shrilly. “Stay here and help me rebuild Grimsby, and you will be well rewarded. Try to leave, and you’ll be flushed out the water-door to feed the little fishies.”
The children twittered. Hester stepped protectively in front of Tom. Caul ran toward the old man. “Uncle,” he said, “I think Grimsby is damaged worse than we reckoned.”
“Well?” asked Uncle, looking up at a close-up of Caul on one of his screens. “So? It was worse off than this when I first came down here.”
“Mr. Kael’ Freya called softly. “Stilton?”