They scream, all three of them.
“What is it?”
“Get back, get back!” shouts Louie, pulling on the oars as hard as he can.
“A monster, a monster!” Noah shrieks.
No, it’s a man.
“Come help me!” Louie shouts again.
Who is after them.
“Come on!”
God, the man is swimming faster than the boat can move.
“But where’d he come from?” says Perrine in a panic.
Louie doesn’t answer, terrified. So the island wasn’t empty. There’s no other explanation—around them, the sea is as smooth as the day before; only the rippling and terrifying spray in their wake, the sound of those huge breaststrokes, brown skin beneath the water. He screams again, Help me!
Perrine grabs the second oar. Louie hands his to Noah, bellows, Row, row! and hunts under the seat for the emergency oar. There’s one on every boat. There has to be.
Not there.
The other seat? With trembling hands and a pounding heart.
He feels it under his fingers at the very moment when the swimmer hoists himself up to their height, grabbing the gunwale with such strength that the small craft heels violently; all three of them are thrown off balance, and the man too, who surely wanted to lean on the gunwale, a fraction of a second, just time enough for Louie to raise the oar and bring it down on him, the way he did with Ades, the image is there before him, with all his strength, smack on the head, yes, exactly the same, except for the piercing scream from Louie’s throat, Noooo! he doesn’t know why he shouted this time, fear, prayer, rage.
And this time too the man tips into the sea. For an instant Louie vibrates with the victorious fear in his guts, the man will wave his arms with cries of rage and terror, he’ll sink, that’s it, just like Ades, exactly.
No, he won’t.
The difference is that when he flipped backwards, either instinctively or with an insane force of will, the swimmer grabbed the oar.
Louie feels it, that he doesn’t have time to let go.
The thought goes through him: he’s caught already.
Off balance, he falls in the water. All he hears is Perrine’s scream and the sound of the water opening to him.
He falls, almost into the arms of the stunned man, who is holding out a hand, an instinctive, animal reaction—grab hold of the kid not to drown. Louie spits out the water from his throat and nose, sees the blood on the man’s face, wants to call out, pulls away from the fingertips touching him as they cling to his T-shirt, a cry at last, to Perrine and Noah, petrified on the boat, Row! Row! And then the words stop, no more room, all he can see is the fingers like claws groping for him, moving through the sea, he slaps his hands, kicks his feet, the man is after him, grazing him every time, Louie dodges, panicking. His gestures are becoming disjointed, from fear, from a lack of breath, from those arms too near, obsessing him, they’re all he can see, those arms and the spray of the sea where they’re struggling, the man will catch him, he will, Louie has no more strength. So he thinks of Pata who used to send him after the wild ducks when they went hunting, Pata who didn’t want to get another dog when his spaniel died, he said it hurts too much when they leave you, so it was Louie who ran through the swamps and swam out to get the birds, it was a game they played, Pata shooting his rifle and Louie swimming out. Yes, Pata said Louie was the best dog he’d ever had, the fastest to sprint over there and slip into the water, lively and nervous, he always found the ducks, the best, the best.
Swim!
He dives underwater, deeper down, getting away from the man and his shouts as he tries to stay on the surface. He filled his lungs just before, now he has slipped into the sea, his arms close to his sides to be as smooth as a fish, his feet kicking the ocean, three seconds, five seconds, ten. No time, no courage to look behind him, until he surfaces with a hoarse intake of breath, Perrine and Noah are on their feet in the boat, and cry out when they see him.
“Louie! Louie!”
He just manages to grab the stern with a shout, Row! Perrine and Noah sit back down at once, grab the oars and try, pull, they’re moving, yes, not fast, but enough for the exhausted man to give up on them. With a huge effort Louie presses his elbows then his arms over the transom, for support, he leans on it, kicks his feet as if he could make the boat go faster, as if he could push it, hard, he doesn’t want the others to stop rowing and he nods at them, Keep going, he constantly looks behind him, oh this horrible sensation that the man is grabbing his feet underwater to drag him down into the depths, but he isn’t, he’s floating, over there, half alive half dead, thirty feet away now, then sixty, Go on, says Louie again.
On the island, several figures have appeared, waving and screaming.
“Who is it?” cries Perrine. “What do they want?”
Louie answers in one breath.
“Our boat. Our supplies.”
“But why?”
“Because they haven’t got anything left, either. Maybe they want to go to the high ground.”
“But who was he?” She points to the man’s head still floating above the water: two adolescents are now swimming toward him from the shore.
“I don’t know. Their father? Keep rowing, don’t look. We have to get out of here, so they don’t try to catch us.”
“We’re too far now.”
“Not far enough. Not yet.”
And he lets the sea carry him, gazing toward the island behind them, at the man who wanted to take everything from them.
“Do you think he would have killed us?” asks Noah.
Louie doesn’t know. The only image he has at the moment is that of the man rising up out of the sea like a monster, a shark, a beast, his arms pressing down on the boat as if to capsize it, oh yes, he was afraid, that the force would take them to the depths of the water, enfold them, suffocate them. Louie’s hands squeezing the boat, he trembles just to think of it, he still doesn’t understand. Those people laid a trap, they were concealed on the island already last night, of course they’d noticed the boat, they were waiting for first light to take it, and maybe they would have thrown the three of them into the water, Louie, Perrine, and Noah, to let them drown, if they wanted everything, yes, for sure they would have; and right now the three of them would be floating on the surface of the sea, their bellies swollen. Louie shakes his head, the tears stream down his cheeks, salt like the ocean. They won’t stop anywhere again, he swears. Ever.
Only after a quarter of an hour has passed does he let the little ones help him back onto the boat. And even then, removing his soaked T-shirt and shorts to let them dry in the sun, he doesn’t take his eyes off the island, of course he can no longer make out the figures of the inhabitants, but he can still feel his hair standing on end, he looks at the sea, a few gentle ripples, what if that were another man. He pushes Noah out of the way, takes the oars, and, as if he had the devil at his heels, rows hard toward what he hopes is the east.
And truly he does hope it is, for the sky has turned grayer, the weather seems stormy, he can sense it, and he doesn’t know where to go, he looks for the place where the light pierces through the clouds, without being sure that the angle he’s trying to follow is the right one, but at least they’re getting away from the island, after that there is only guesswork, only pretending, when the little ones ask him, if he believes in it hard enough, it will be the right direction.