Then he stopped dead. Propped against the corner of the room was Myrtle’s cello case. The cello wasn’t inside it; he could see it leaning against another wall, half covered with a shawl, so the case would be empty.
Lambert crept closer. He knew he had been carried away in it though he could remember nothing. He had overheard Myrtle talking about it to her sisters.
And that meant that anything he had been holding when he was snatched might still be there!
Lambert’s face was flushed with excitement, his thin lips were parted. If only the case wasn’t locked!
And it wasn’t! He tried the clasp, and it opened easily. The inside of the case was lined with blue velvet, faded and torn in places because it was so old.
At first there seemed to be nothing there except a crumpled silk scarf and a spare bow. Then as Lambert groped about in the back of the case, his hand found something dark and small which had been covered by the cloth.
Lambert’s fingers closed round it with a cry. He had found it. He had found his mobile telephone!
He would get away now! He was safe. Hiding the telephone under his shirt, Lambert went back to his room and pulled the chest of drawers across the door. Then he crouched down like an animal with its prey and began to dial.
Three days after Lambert found his telephone, the children woke shortly after midnight to find Aunt Coral and Aunt Etta standing by their beds.
Fabio was so sleepy that he thought at first it was the full moon and he was expected to dance the tango with Aunt Coral, but it wasn’t that.
‘Put some clothes on,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘And clean your teeth.’
‘We cleaned them before we went to bed,’ said Minette.
‘Well, clean them again. No one with gunge on their molars is worthy to hear what we have to tell.’
Still half asleep, the children stumbled up the hill after the two aunts. At the top they found Aunt Myrtle sitting over a fire she had made, ringed by stones, and it was by the flicker of the flames and to the sound of the sea sighing against the rocks below that the children learnt what they wanted to know.
‘Mind you, what I’m going to say won’t mean much to you unless you know your history, and I doubt if you know a lot of that,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘So let me start by asking you a question. What does the word kraken mean to you?’
Fabio was silent but Minette said shyly, ‘Is it a sea monster? A very big one?’
Etta nodded. ‘Yes. It is a sea monster, and it is bigger than anything you can imagine. But it has nothing to do with all the silly stories you hear. Nothing to do with rubbish about Giant Blobs or outsize cuttlefish or octopuses that pull people down to the ocean bed. No, the kraken is … or was … the Soul of the Sea. It is the greatest force for good the ocean has ever known.’
Fabio and Minette looked at her surprised. This wasn’t at all the way that Aunt Etta usually spoke.
So then she began to tell them the kraken’s story. It took a long time to tell and the fire had burnt down and been rekindled many times before it was finished, but the children scarcely stirred.
‘There was a time when everyone in the world knew about the kraken,’ Aunt Etta began. ‘They knew about his huge size and that when he rested, and his back was humped out of the water, he was taken for an island. They knew that when he reared up suddenly, the sea churned and boiled and no ship that was near him had the slightest hope of avoiding shipwreck.
‘But they knew too that for all his size, the kraken was a gentle creature. His eyes were full of soul and when he opened his mouth one could see that instead of teeth he had rows and rows of tendrils which were the greeny-gold colour of a mermaid’s hair. Through this forest of tendrils, the sea poured in, and it was the sea which nourished him: the tiny invisible creatures which make up plankton were all that the kraken needed for food.
‘They knew that the kraken came from the Far North and that the language he spoke best was Polar, though he understood other languages also. But mostly the kraken did not speak. The kraken sang. Or perhaps singing is not quite the right word. What the kraken did was to hum. It was a deep, slow sound and it was like no other sound in the world, for what the kraken hummed was the Song of the Sea. It was a healing song. If you like, it was the Breath of the Universe. Whales can hum too and Buddhist monks who spend their lives on high mountains trying to understand God … and small children when they are happy — but the sound they make is nothing compared to the sound made by the kraken.
‘For many years the kraken swam quietly round the oceans of the world humming his hum and singing his song and stopping sometimes to rest. And when he stopped, people who did not know much said: goodness, surely there wasn’t an island out in that bay before, but people who were wise and in touch with the things that mattered, smiled and felt honoured and proud. Because when the kraken came, they remembered what a splendid thing the sea was: so clean and beautiful when it was calm, so mighty and exciting and awe-inspiring when it was rough. It was as though the great creature was guarding the sea for them, or even as though somehow he was showing them what a treasure house it was.
Look! the kraken seemed to be saying. Behold … the sea!
‘In those days the kraken made it his business to circle the oceans of the world each year and whenever he appeared, people started to behave themselves. Fishermen stopped catching more fish than they needed and threw the little ones back into the sea, and people who were dumping their rubbish into the water thought better of it, seeing the kraken’s large and wondrous eyes fixed on them. And when he went on again it was to leave the sea — and indeed the world — a better place.
‘It was like a blessing, to have seen the kraken,’ said Aunt Etta now. ‘It brought you luck for the rest of your life.’
‘Did you ever see him?’ asked Minette.
Aunt Etta shook her head. She looked very sad. ‘No one living now has seen him. He hasn’t been seen for a hundred years or more. He was dreadfully hurt once and he went into hiding.’
The hurt that was done to the kraken was not to his body. The skin of a kraken is a metre deep and no other animal can threaten him. No animal would want to — he travelled with a whole company of sharks and stingrays and killer whales who would have died rather than harm him.
But human beings are different. They always have been: interfering and bossy and mad for power. No one knew what kind of whaling boat had shot a harpoon into the kraken’s throat. Was it a Japanese ship or one belonging to the British or the Danes? Did the whalers mistake the kraken for a humpback whale, or were they just terrified, seeing a dark shape bigger than anything they had ever seen rear up in front of them?
Whatever the reason, they let off the biggest of their harpoons and hit the kraken with terrible force in the softest part of his throat.
The kraken probably didn’t believe it at first. No one had ever tried to harm him. Then he felt the pain and saw the dark dollops of his blood staining the sea.
When he understood what had happened, he began to thrash about, trying to rid himself of the harpoon — and the rope snapped. But the pain was still there and the kraken reared up, trying to dislodge the hooked horror in his neck. As he did so, the tidal wave made by his body tossed the whaling boat up, and drew it under the sea, and every one of the men was drowned, which was as well because the sea creatures who had travelled with the kraken would have torn them limb from limb.
And the kraken swam away to the north, the harpoon still in his throat. The pain died away and presently an old sea nymph came with her brood of children and cut the hook out of the kraken’s flesh with razor shells and soon there was only a small scar left to show where it had been.