cried, suddenly stopping his rowing and moving in a crab’s crouch to lean over Davy and pick up the anchor.
Their eyes met for a moment, and Davy saw the fear in his father’s face. Then his father looked away and dropped the anchor over the side.
It made a splash, dropped, and the line played out nearly to its length before it found purchase.
“It’s done, then!” his father said, seemingly to himself.
Behind them, off through the sheeted rain, the slapping waves and roar of the storm, came a sound from the finger of rocks: the wailing cry of his mother calling to them.
Davy’s father stood, squinting back into the storm.
Now Davy could see the tiny yet growing image of the dinghy, his mother’s tiny form huddled within, rowing.
“Damn her,” his father spat, then turned to look down at Davy.
“I said ‘twas done.” His father loomed over him, lashed by rain. He seemed diminished as a man. He seemed to have shrunk into his oil cloth, hands dropped limply at his side. Davy looked into his face. There was anger and fury and determination in his eyes, but defeat, shame, and, that bolt of fear, too.
“Go ahead, father,” Davy said. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
“This should never have happened to begin with,” the old man said, his words leaden, and then he grasped Davy in his two hands, tightening his grip, and lifted him up unresisting and threw him into the water.
At that moment, off through the rain, Davy heard his mother call out to him.
The ice-cold hands of the sea enclosed Davy for a moment before he rose. As his head broke the surface, he saw his father straining at the oarlocks, turning the boat around toward shore. His father’s eyes stared down into the boat, then up quickly at the dinghy, which approached through the lashing rain and rising waves.
“
Davy cried out once before the sea took him down again.
The world became as seen through green glass. His body, head to toe, was cold and wet.
He looked down; below him, long slow shapes moved deep in the water, blacker against cold darkness, moving one over another, making and unmaking shapes. Davy’s numb hands felt suddenly oiled. And now, beneath his clothes, he felt his body bump and squirm, as if alive in its parts. His bones moved painfully against their sockets; it was as if his arms would yank free from his shoulders, legs from his thighs. His neck felt slick and alive.
The squirming shapes pulled up closer.
With a sudden kick and spasm of unmouthed protest, Davy fought against his sinking, and began to claw and drive his way back up to the surface.
“
He broke free into the roiling waves. The rain felt oddly warm against his face.
He gulped, spit water, focused his moist eyes on the twin boats twenty yards away, bobbing together as if wedded. His struggling father was trying to climb from the rowboat into the dinghy.
His mother’s defiant form stood straight in the smaller boat, her eyes blazing with hatred.
“Then you’ll lose me, too!”
“Ellie! No!” his father beseeched, his hand seeking to reach Davy’s mother.
Davy tried to call out. He raised his hand but it went unseen as the sea began to weight him down. His limbs became cold lead, his mouth filled with water, his grasping hands now found only water.
He sank. He went inexorably down. Off through the darkening cold, he saw the roped straight line of the anchor on his father’s boat. It made a line linking heaven and earth, disappearing into the depths below.
Davy looked down. The roiling black shapes were growing closer.
Beneath his clothes, he slowly began to break free.
His arms became black oily things, squirming like wet thick ropes. Up under his armpits the pulp of their live flesh thumped against his arm sockets in little pulses, even as his torso lengthened, pulling his head and face into a thick, snakelike shape.
His legs and arms broke away, swimming from his clothing, which floated off.
The boiling, excited, living, vast plateau of eels was just below him.
He dropped into their midst.
Flat welcoming eyes turned to look at him.
And, somewhere far above, he heard a splash, then heard his mother’s voice assuring him that she would soon be there.
LETTERS FROM CAMP
By Al Sarrantonio
Dear Mom and Dad,
I still don’t know why you made me come to this dump for the summer. It looks like all the other summer camps I’ve been to, even if it is “super modern and computerized,” and I don’t see why I couldn’t go back to the one I went to last year instead of this “new” one. I had a lot of fun last summer, even if you did have to pay for all that stuff I smashed up and even if I did make the head counselor break his leg.
The head counselor here is a jerk, just like the other one was. As soon as we got off the hovercraft that brought us here, we had to go to the Big Tent for a “pep talk.” They made us sit through a slide show about all the things we’re going to do (yawn), and that wouldn’t have been so bad except that the head counselor, who’s a robot, kept scratching his metal head through the whole thing. I haven’t made any friends, and the place looks like it’s full of jerks. Tonight we didn’t have any hot water and the TV in my tent didn’t work.
Phooey on Camp Ultima. Can’t you still get me back in the other place?
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
Maybe this place isn’t so bad after all. They just about let us do whatever we want, and the kids are pretty wild. Today they split us up into “Pow-wow Groups,” but there aren’t really any rules or anything, and my group looks like it might be a good one. One of the guys in it looks like he might be okay. His name’s Ramon, and he’s from Brazil. He told me a lot of neat stories about things he did at home, setting houses on fire and things like that. We spent all day today hiding from our stupid robot counselor. He thought for sure we had run away and nearly blew a circuit until we finally showed up just in time for dinner.
The food stinks, but they did have some animal-type thing that we got to roast over a fire, and that tasted pretty good.
Tomorrow we go on our first field trip.
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
We had a pretty good time today, all things considered. We got up at six o’clock to go on our first hike, and everybody was pretty excited. There’s a lot of wild places here, and they’ve got it set up to look just like a prehistoric swamp. One kid said we’d probably see a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but nobody believed him. The robot counselors kept us all together as we set out through the marsh, and we saw a lot of neat things like vines dripping green goop and all kinds of frogs and toads. Me and Ramon started pulling the legs off frogs, but our counselor made us stop and anyway the frogs were all robots. We walked for about two hours and then stopped for lunch. Then we marched back again.
The only weird thing that happened was that when we got back and the counselors counted heads, they found that one kid was missing. They went out to look for him but couldn’t find anything, and the only thing they think might have happened is that he got lost in the bog somewhere. One kid said he thought he saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it was the same kid who’d been talking about them before, so nobody listed to him. The head counselor went around patting everybody on the shoulder, telling us not to worry since something always happens to one kid every year. But they haven’t found him yet.
Tonight we had a big food fight, and nobody even made us clean the place up.
