Dark Waters

“This way,” said Ollie.

They wouldn’t have found the boat at all, Brian thought, if it hadn’t been for Ollie’s watch. It was in a little rock cave, gouged in a bank of the beach and then walled up. The water had flooded in, murky, not once but a lot of times, and the outside of the boat’s hull was slimy when they pulled it out.

It was also almost too heavy to lift, and so they had to collect stic

ks to make a path for it to the water. Brian wondered if they should have left their campsite earlier. They’d waited, avoiding the early morning. But the encounter with Sheehan and the walk across the island had taken way more time than Brian would have thought possible.

By the time they got the boat into the water, the sun was dropping, lower and lower.

But they got it into the water at last, and it floated. It didn’t even leak; Phil had been right about the timbers swelling.

They couldn’t find oars, however.

“But there’s a mast, though,” said Phil. “And we can use the emergency blanket and the rope from the Cassie as a sail.”

“We need a boom,” said Brian. “Can you sail it?”

Phil licked his lips, cracked and chapped like all of theirs were. “Yeah, bud,” he said. “I think so.”

“Let’s call the boat the Sheehan,” said Coco, and no one objected.

But it took longer than any of them wanted to rig the rope and the blanket so that it would hold, even a little, as a sail, and it was getting close to night before they finally pushed off. So far there was no sign of the snake. Maybe Sheehan had killed it, Brian thought. He’d probably killed it. Hadn’t he?

The moon hung low in the sky, silvering the water, and all of them were shivering with the May cold.

The wind shoved them back onshore, and shoved them back again. “Just a little farther,” panted Phil in frustration. “I think there’s a breeze there—just rounding the point—you can see the ripple.”

Finally, Ollie hopped out of the boat, teeth clenched and eyes wild, to her waist in freezing water, and began to shove the boat out, and her dad got out to help, and so did Ms. Zintner. They pushed until Ollie couldn’t stand anymore, and her dad helped her back over the side of the Sheehan, and then he and Coco’s mom pushed until he couldn’t stand up in the water either, and by then they’d gone out quite a ways, and it was dead still, dead still over the water.

There were long moments of silence.

They all strained their eyes.

Nothing.

Then Brian felt a breeze on his cheek.

The sail rippled. And rippled again. Suddenly it bellied out, blocky against the sky, and Brian, inexperienced, jammed the tiller sideways, so that it almost went over. But someone must have known what they were doing when he built the boat in the first place, because it did not turn over.

“Orwell is due east,” said Mr. Adler, through his chattering teeth.

“No,” said Ollie. “Or, yes, it is, but not for us. Go around the point, Phil, and head for that fog.”

“But—” said Phil.

“Do it,” chorused Ollie, Brian, and Coco, because through mist and water and through mirrors, that was how you went from world to world.

That was when they saw a silver shimmer in the water. It wasn’t the moon, rising in the dusk.

Brian saw it first. “Guys!” he snapped. His voice came out strangled, if plenty loud. The silver shimmer swam like a snake, sinuous in the water.

There was no chance. No chance to dodge, no chance to avoid; they must only race, wind against monster, over the lake, toward the fog patch that might not even save them.

Ollie’s face was set. Brian saw her measuring distances with her eyes. “You did promise,” she whispered incomprehensibly.

For a second it seemed like the wind was going to save them. The lake monster was swimming slowly—so slowly—and there was something hesitant and stiff in the swaying of its silver coils. Definitely hurt. But it got closer. And closer.

They weren’t going to make it.