Stormchild (26 page)

“I’m discouraging the ungodly.” I fired again. “How’s the girl?”

“She seems to be in shock.” David went back below. The gunman on the trawler splashed a clip of bullets into
Stormchild’s
wake.

I fired one more time, then turned back to
Stormchild’s
wheel. The tide swept us on. I was tempted to escape the trawler’s laborious pursuit by turning into one of the high-twisting chasms that opened off the wide waterway, but I did not know which of the chasms were dead ends or which held shallows that might ground us, so it seemed wiser to retrace our steps and hope to outrun the trawler in our wake.

“They’re calling us on channel sixteen!” David shouted up to me.

“Saying what?”

“That we’re kidnapping this girl!”

“Then tell them to fuck off,” I told him impatiently.

David doubtless told them to desist from their transmissions, but however politely he phrased his request, its only effect was to provoke another flurry of automatic fire from the trawler. I returned the compliment. The old Lee-Enfield was a wonderfully rugged and reliable weapon, but at that moment I would have given a fair chunk of money to have been equipped with an automatic rifle. Half the trick of winning fire-fights is to scare the other side with as much noise and mayhem as can be created, and a single-shot, bolt-action rifle was a poor producer of mayhem and noise. But, like David, I had always been a fair shot with a rifle and my slow, deliberate fire unsettled the Genesis gunmen, whose aim was made inaccurate by the labored shuddering of the panting trawler.

“Be careful!” David kept appearing in the companionway to counsel me. “Don’t kill anyone!”

In the end it was not my marksmanship that saved us, but rather
Stormchild.
She was by far the faster boat. Our enemies’ shots were falling short or going desperately wide, and after a few minutes their firing became sporadic. Their shots echoed forlornly from the cliffs and bluffs that edged the channel. Those shots did no damage, and soon, as
Stormchild
went even farther ahead, they ceased altogether.

Our pursuers still did not abandon their attempts to reach us on the radio. I took out my handheld set and switched it to channel 16 to hear their message.
“Genesis
calling
Stormchild,”
the voice intoned,
“Genesis
calling
Stormchild,
over.” I assumed they had read our boat’s name through binoculars.

“Genesis,
this is
Stormchild,
over,” I responded.

“We’re requesting that you heave-to.” The voice was toneless. “The girl you have on board is a member of our community and needs medical help. Do you understand me, over?”

“Where’s Nicole Blackburn?” I asked.

“We’re requesting that you heave-to,” the voice said again.

“And I’m requesting that you fuck off,” I said, “out,” and I switched off the little radio. My parting insult produced a last fusillade of rifle fire, but the bullets just plopped exhaustedly in our wake. Five minutes later the trawler’s oil-burning engine slowed to a dispirited clank and I saw the craft turn away. We had escaped. It had been a tense few moments, but, as far as I could tell, no one in Genesis had been hurt and we were also safe.

I went down to the saloon to fetch a thermos of coffee and saw that David had cut off the girl’s shackles, and that she was now wrapped in one of our blankets and sitting in front of the saloon heater. Her soaking wet gray suit was hanging over the back of the chart table’s chair. The girl, who looked to be in her mid-twenties, was glassy-eyed, pale, shivering, and terrified, like a creature dragged back from the grave. “Hello,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

She offered me a scared look, but said nothing.

David, his back to the girl, offered me a helpless shrug, as though suggesting that the girl’s wits had fled. David was a good pastor, but not a sensitive one. He offered his parishioners a robust certainty of salvation, but left Betty to deal with their emotional crises. David’s solution to a broken heart was a good brisk walk followed by a stiff whiskey, which worked with some people, but not with most, and was certainly not going to work with the waiflike creature who now shivered in
Stormchild
’s saloon. “Give her some hot food,” I suggested. “I’ll come down when I can.”

By dusk we were thirty miles north of the Isla Tormentos. Our pursuers had long disappeared, and their final plaintive radio transmissions had subsided into a crackled silence. As the sun shadowed the ravines with a purple haze I nosed
Stormchild
into a narrow passage edged with towering black rocks. We seemed to be at the very bottom of the tide, for thick weeds and bunches of mussels showed high above the water-line at the channel’s edges. I crept forward, fearing to hear the scrape of steel on rock as our keel touched bottom, but at last the channel widened into a deep sheltered cove where I was able to rig our mooring lines and drop our anchors. I shut off the engines, and suddenly the world was a place of blessed and wonderful silence. There was not even a wind moaning in the chill, still air. The cliffs soared above us, making an amphitheater of sky in which a thousand thousand seabirds wheeled.

I was tired and cold, but before going below I paddled the dinghy around
Stormchild
’s hull to inspect her for bullet damage. There were some holes in her stern and some long shining scratches on her flanks, but otherwise our escape had been miraculously unscathed. I painted the damage over with white paint, because steel rusts with an appalling swiftness if it is not protected from the salt air, then I went below to find that our guest was now fully dressed in a pair of my trousers and one of David’s thick sweaters. She was also weeping hysterically; her thin shoulders heaving and her breath gulping as she huddled on the cabin floor beside the starboard sofa.

“Has she said anything?” I asked.

“Not a word, Tim! Not a whimper!”

David had been unsettled by the girl’s tears, so, to relieve him, I gave him the rifle and told him to go topside and keep watch.

“You’ll get no sense out of her,” he warned me.

“Go,” I said, “just go.”

He went, and I sat down beside our guest to discover just what she might know about my daughter.

T
he girl, when I crouched beside her on the diesel-reeking carpet, flinched away as if she thought I was going to hit her. “It’s all right,” I crooned, “it’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you. We’re friends, it’s all right.”

She made a noise halfway between a choke and a sob, but she calmed somewhat as I droned on as softly and reassuringly as I could. She was a dark-eyed, black-haired girl, who, I guessed, had once been pretty, but now that prettiness had soured into a narrow, hurt face with sallow skin against which her sunken eyes were so big and dark they looked like bruises. Her hair hung lank. Her teeth looked caried and in desperate need of cleaning. Her bare ankles, protruding from the legs of my thick flannel trousers, showed horrid patches of open sores where the steel shackles had abraded her skin.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She opened her mouth, but only succeeded in making another of the pathetic grizzling sounds.

I raised a hand to stroke her hair, but she immediately flinched away and made another terrified noise. “I’m not going to hit you,” I said, “it’s all right,” and I put my hand very gently on her shoulder and pulled her toward me, and, after a moment’s initial resistance, she fell against me and began to sob with huge racking heaves of her thin shoulders. I stroked her long hair, which was sticky with seawater, and kept asking for her name, but she made no response and I began to suspect that she spoke no English, and then, more alarmingly, I feared that she had somehow lost her tongue or vocal chords and could only make the pathetic glottal noises that intermittently punctuated her sobs.

I stroked and soothed her for a full ten minutes before she startled me by suddenly finding her voice. And when she did manage to speak, she did so with an abrupt and astonishing clarity. “Berenice,” she said. “My name’s Berenice.”

“Berenice.” I repeated the name, then remembered that Jackie Potten’s friend had been called Berenice Tetterman, and I softly pushed the girl away from me so that I could look into her bruised eyes. “You’re Berenice Tetterman,” I said, “and you come from Kalamazoo in Michigan. I know your friend, Jackie. She’s been looking for you. So has your mother.”

My words only provoked another flood of tears, but mixed in with the sobs were enough words to confirm that our tattered fugitive was indeed Berenice Tetterman. She told me how guilty she felt about everything, and how she thought her mother might be dead, so I kept repeating that everything was all right now, that she was safe and her mother was alive. Berenice clung with dirty, chipped nails to my sweater, her face buried somewhere in my chest, and slowly, slowly calmed again. She even managed to blurt out a question that seemed immensely important to her. “Are either of you ill?”

“No, of course we’re not,” I said in the tone one would use to dismiss a child’s ridiculous fantasy of gremlins under the bed or ogres in the night garden.

She pulled away to look into my face. “You promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said very solemnly, “we’re both quite well.”

“Because he says that people are dying everywhere. He says the AIDS virus is like the Black Death.” Berenice’s eyes had widened into terror as she spoke, and then she began to cry once more, but this time without the awful animal intensity that had made her earlier sobbing so distressing. These new tears were ones of exhaustion and sadness, but no longer of despair.

David dropped down the companionway. “All quiet outside,” he reported.

“I can’t believe they’ll find us in this cove,” I said, “but I reckon we should keep watch through the night, don’t you?”

He nodded. “I’ll keep watch until midnight, you until four, then me again?”

“Sure.” I was stroking Berenice Tetterman’s tangled and salt-ridden hair. “Has she eaten?” I asked David.

“She had some toast and coffee.”

“Why don’t you make us all some soup?” I suggested.

David switched on the lights in the galley while I went on stroking Berenice’s hair, and slowly, so very slowly, drew her story out from the thickets of her terror.

Her first fear had been the risk of catching the awful contagion with which Caspar von Rellsteb had terrified his followers. He had somehow persuaded Berenice and the others in the settlement that the outside world had been so stricken with the AIDS virus that normal life in so-called civilization had become impossible. He had persuaded his disciples that their only safety lay in clinging to his barren island. He had succeeded in using the fear of AIDS as a superbly effective means of control; so effective that, even now, faced with our robust denial of von Rellsteb’s terror stories, Berenice half suspected we were deceiving her.

David found a news magazine that had been jammed into a drawer to stop the cutlery rattling. “Look through that,” he told her. “I think you’ll see the world is still fairly normal.”

She leafed through the stained, damp pages, which told of wars and hostages and terrorism, but not of a worldwide plague as awful as those that had decimated medieval Europe. Slowly her look of fear was replaced by one of puzzlement. “We never see magazines or newspapers,” she explained, “because Caspar won’t let us. He says we mustn’t contaminate ourselves with things from outside. We have to stay pure, because we’re going to change the world.” She was crying very softly again. “Some of us wanted to leave a long time ago, when we first came here, but he wouldn’t allow us. One girl tried, and she died, then the AIDS came outside..”

“Who died?” I interrupted her. “What girl died?”

Berenice was puzzled by the swiftness and intensity of my question. “She was called Susan.”

“Do you know Nicole Blackburn?” I asked anxiously.

Berenice nodded, but said nothing.

“Was Nicole at the settlement today?” I asked. Berenice shook her head, but again said nothing, and I sensed that the urgency of my questions was somehow frightening her, so I made myself sound calm and reassuring again. “I’m Nicole’s father,” I explained, “and I’ve come looking for her. Do you know where she is?”

Berenice seemed scared of answering. “She’d be at the mine, if she was anywhere,” she finally said, then launched herself into a long and involved explanation about how she and the others were not really allowed to visit the mine, “although I went there once,” she added, “when they wanted us to clean off a boat. It isn’t really a mine at all,” she explained lamely, “only a limestone quarry with a few shafts, but there are some old buildings there as well.”

“And Nicole lives at the mine?” I asked.

“The crews don’t really live there”—Berenice frowned as she tried to frame her explanation—”but Nicole does. Most of the crews come to the settlement when they’re ashore, but not Nicole. She stays with the boats, you see, and they shelter at the mine because they had real bad trouble with southerly gales at the settlement. The anchorage at the mine is much safer, and they’ve got an old slipway there so they can haul the boats out of the water if the weather gets really awful.”

David brought us each a mug of oxtail soup and a hunk of hot buttered bread, and I remembered, too late, that both Berenice’s mother and erstwhile best friend were vegetarians, which meant this girl could very well be an herbivore as well, but she made no objection to the oxtail; she gulped it down as though she had not eaten in weeks.

Between spoonfuls she told us how strict the division was between the Genesis community’s yacht crews and the settlement’s workers. The workers, as Jackie Potten had envisaged, were virtual slaves to the privileged crew members. The distinction was even sartorial, for the yacht crews wore the Genesis green, while the workers were given the more utilitarian gray clothes. “He’s real strict about that,” Berenice said sadly.