The Homeward Bounders Read online

  I stared at his huge hollow face. “Are you one? Do you call us Homeward Bounders too?”

  “That is the name to all of us is given,” he said to me sadly.

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought I’d made it up. How long have you been one?” A long time, by the look of him, I thought.

  He sighed. “You have not heard of me in your world maybe? In many places I am known, always by my ship, always sailing on. The name most often given is that of Flying Dutchman.”

  As it happens, I had heard of him. At school—good old boring chapel-shaped Churt House—one rainy afternoon, when all the other Dominies were down with flu. The one Dominie left had told us about the Flying Dutchman, among other stories. But all I could remember about him was that long, long ago he had been doomed to sail on forever, until, unless—It didn’t matter. It was probably the same as me.

  “What happened? What did you do to annoy Them?” I asked.

  He shivered, and sort of put me aside with that skeleton hand of his. “It is not permitted to speak of these things,” he said. Then he seemed sorry. “But you are only young. You will learn.”

  “What world do you come from, then?” I asked. “Is it permitted to speak of that? Is it the same world as me?” I sat up then, in great excitement, thinking that if we were both from the same place, then we were Bound to the same Home, and I could do worse than sail with him until we got there. Sitting up gave me a view of the cabin. I was not so sure after that. Cobwebs hung in swags from all the corners and beams. On the walls, black mold and green slime were fighting it out to see which could climb highest, and every piece of metal I could see was rusty, including the candlestick on the wormy table. The cabin floor had dirty water washing about on it, this way and that as the boat swung, and swilling round the Dutchman’s great seaboots. “Is yours the same world?” I said doubtfully.

  “I do not know,” he said sadly. “But I shall know if I am back there. There will be some rest then.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you about my Home,” I said. “You may recognize something. First, my name’s Jamie H—”

  But he raised his skeleton hand again. “Please. We do not give names. We think it is not permitted.”

  Here, one of his crew came to the door and did a jabber-jabber. He was a man too, but I saw why I had taken him for a monkey. He was so stick-thin. He was more or less naked too, and the parts of him that weren’t burnt dark brown were covered with hair. Men are very like monkeys really.

  The Dutchman listened for a little. Then he said, “Ja, ja,” and got up and went out.

  It was not very interesting in the cabin and it smelled of mold, so after a bit I got up and went on deck too. The sea was there, all round. It gave me the pip at first, just like the wide-open cattle country. But you get used to it quite soon. The sailors were all scrambling about the rakish masts above me. They were struggling with the great black torn sails, and they seemed to be trying to hoist a few more. Every so often, a rotten rope would snap. There would be some resigned jabber, and they would mend it and carry on. This made it quite a long business, getting any extra sails up.

  The Dutchman was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the reason for all this pother. It was another ship, a beauty, about midway between us and the horizon. It was like an arrow or a bird, that ship—like everything quick and beautiful. I had to gasp when I saw it. It had a bank of white sails, white as a swan. But, as I watched, I could see frenzied activity among those white sails. Shortly, a whole lot more white sails came up, some above, some overlapping the others, until there were so many sails up that you thought the thing was going to topple over and sink from sheer top-heaviness. Like that, the white ship turned and, with a bit of a waggle, like a hasty lady, made her way over the horizon. Our sails were still not set.

  The Dutchman sighed heavily. “Always they go. They think we are unlucky.”

  “Are you?” I asked, rather worried on my own account.

  “Only to ourselves,” he sighed. He gave out some jabbering. The monkeys up aloft gave up struggling with the sails and came down to the deck again.

  After that, I was sure they would be thinking of breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and I was starving. Well, I suppose a Homeward Bounder can never exactly starve, but put it this way: it never feels that way, and my stomach was rolling. But time went on, and nobody said a word about food. The monkeys lay about, or carved blocks of wood, or mended ropes. The Dutchman strode up and down. In the end, I got so desperate that I asked him right out.

  He stopped striding and looked at me sadly. “Eating? That we gave up long ago. There is no need to eat. A Homeward Bounder does not die.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it makes you feel a whole lot more comfortable. Look at you. You all look like walking skeletons.”

  “That is true,” he admitted. “But it is hard to take on board provisions when you sail on, and ever on.”

  I saw the force of that. “Don’t you ever fetch up on land then?” And I was suddenly terrified. Suppose I was stuck on this ship, too, forever, without any food.

  “Sometimes we go to land, ja,” the Dutchman admitted. “When we come through a Boundary and we can tell we have time, we find an island where is privacy, and we land. We eat then sometimes. We may eat maybe when we come to land to put you ashore.”

  That relieved my mind considerably. “You should eat,” I said earnestly. “Do, to please me. Can’t you catch fish, or something?”

  He changed the subject. Perhaps he thought catching fish was not permitted. He thought no end of things were not permitted. I had opportunity to know how many things, because I was on that ship for days. And a more uncomfortable time I hope never to spend. Everything about that ship was rotten. It was half waterlogged. Water squeezed out of the boards when you trod on them and mold grew on everything. And nobody cared. That was what got me so annoyed. True, I could see they’d been at this game for ages, a hundred times longer than I had, and they had a right to be miserable. But they took it to such lengths!

  “Can’t you wear a few more clothes?” I said to a monkey every so often. “Where’s your self-respect?”

  He would just look at me and jabber. None of them spoke much English. After a bit, I began to ask it in another sort of way, because it got colder. Fog hung in the air and made the damp ship even wetter. I shivered. But the monkeys just shrugged. They were past caring.

  I thought it was another piece of the same when I looked over the side of the ship on about the fourth foggy day. By then, anything would have been interesting. I noticed there were two big iron holes there, in the front, each with a length of rusty chain dangling out of them. I had seen pictures of ships. I knew what should have been there.

  “Don’t you even carry anchors?” I asked the Dutchman. “How do you stop?”

  “No,” he said. “We threw them away long ago.”

  I was so hungry that it made me snappish. “What a stupid thing to do!” I said. “That’s you lot all over, with your stupid negative attitude! Can’t you think positive for once? You wouldn’t be in half this mess if you did. Fancy throwing anchors away!”

  He just stood there, looking at me sadly and, I thought, sort of meaningly. And suddenly I remembered the crowned anchor on the front of the Old Fort. I knew better than to mention Them to him by then. He never would come straight out like I did and call them Them. He always put it impersonally: It is not permitted. But of course he knew that anchors had something to do with Them—probably better than I did. “Oh, I see,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “We took them off,” he said, “to show that we are without hope. Hope is an anchor, you know.”

  A bit of good came of this, though. He got worried about me, I think. He thought I was young and ignorant and hot-headed. He asked me what kind of Boundary I had come in by. “I am afraid,” he said, “that you may have got on a circuit that is sea only, and next time I will not be by. I shall put you on land, because I think it i
s not permitted for us to stay in company, but you may still end up in the water all the same.”

  Oh he was a cheery fellow. But kind. I told him about the stone Boundary and the strange sign.

  “That is all right,” he said. “That is RANDOM. Look for the same again and you will unlikely be drowned.”

  It turned out that he knew no end more signs than I did. I suspect that he’d been Homeward Bound so long that he may even have invented some of them. He wrote them all out for me with a rusty nail on his cabin door. They were mostly general ones like UNFRIENDLY and GOOD CLIMATE. I gave him a few particular ones I knew in return, including one I thought would be really useful: YOU CAN NICK FOOD HERE.

  “I thank you,” he said solemnly.

  A day later, thank goodness, we came to some land. It was not my idea of heaven. I could hardly see it in the fog, for a start, and what I could see was wet rocks and spouts of wave breaking over them. It made me feel the ship was not so bad after all.

  “Maybe we should go on a bit,” I said nervously to the Dutchman. “This looks rough. It could break your ship up.”

  He stood somberly beside me, with his navy coat and his beard and his hair all dewed with fog, watching the spouting waves come nearer through the whiteness. “The ship does not break,” he said. “It does not matter. There are seven holes in the underside and still we float. We cannot stop. We go on floating and sailing forever.” Then he did something I never thought to see him do. He took his fist out of his pocket and he shook it, shook it savagely in the air. “And we know why!” he shouted out. “All for a game. A game!”

  “I bet that’s not permitted,” I said.

  He put his hand in his pocket again. “Maybe,” he said. “I do not care. You must make ready to jump when we are near enough. Do not be afraid. You cannot be hurt.”

  Well, we came near, and I sort of flounderingly jumped. Perhaps I couldn’t be hurt, but I could be pounded and grazed and drenched and winded, and I was. I was so weak with hunger too that it took me ages to drag myself out of the surf and scramble up onto a wet lump of granite. Then I turned to wave to the Flying Dutchman. They all crowded to the side and waved back, him and the monkeys. I could hardly see them through the fog. It looked like a ghost ship out there, ragged and sketchy, like a gray pencil drawing, and it seemed to be tipping to one side rather. I suspect there were now eight holes underneath it. There had been a lot of grinding and rending while I was struggling up the rock.

  It simply melted into the fog as I looked. I stood there all alone, shivering. I remembered then what my teacher had said, that rainy afternoon at Home, about the Flying Dutchman. It was supposed to be a ghost ship.

  But it wasn’t, I told myself. Nor was I a ghost. We were all Homeward Bound, and I for one was going to get there. I just wished I wasn’t on my own. The Flying Dutchman was much better off. There was a crowd of them, to my one. They would be in clover, compared with me, if only they could have brought themselves to care about things a bit more.

  After this, I set off inland, climbing, slipping and sliding, to where the strangest thing yet happened to me. It was so strange that, even if They’d done nothing, there would still have been times when I would have sworn it was a vision or something, brought on by lack of food. But I know it happened. It was realler than I am.

  IV

  I was very thirsty. It was worse than the hunger. You’d have thought with a wet ship like that, I’d have been all right, but it was all salt, apart from the fog. And the salt I’d swallowed getting on land made me thirstier than before. I don’t know how the Flying Dutchman managed. The only drink they had was the firewater he had choked me with, and I think they saved that for using on people they’d fished out of the sea.

  But as soon as I got high enough up the rocks and far enough inland not to hear nothing but sea, I could hear water trickling. You know that hollow pouring sound a little stream makes coming down through rocks. I heard that, and it made my mouth dry up and go thick. I was so thirsty I could have cried. I set out scrambling and slithering through the fog towards the noise.

  That white wet fog confused everything. I think, if I hadn’t been so thirsty, I’d never have found it. The rocks were terrible—a total jumble. They were all hard, hard pinkish granite, so hard that nothing grew on it, and so wet that I was always slithering onto my face. That hurt at least as much as scraping up the side of the Flying Dutchman’s ship. You know how granite seems to be made of millions of grains, pink and black and gray and white—well, every one of those grains scratched me separately, I swear.

  After a while, I had got quite high up somewhere, and the lovely hollow pouring sound was coming from quite near, over to the right. I slithered over that way and had to stop short. There was a huge split in the granite there, and a great deep hole, and I could hear the pouring coming from the other side of the split.

  “Unprintable things!” I said—only I didn’t say that. I really said them. But I hate to be beat. You know that by now. I went down into the hole and then climbed up the other side. I don’t know how I did it. When I dragged myself out the other side, my arms felt like bits of string and wouldn’t answer when I tried to bunch my fists up, and my legs were not much better. I was covered with scratches too. I must have been a sight.

  The pouring was really near now, from the other side of a lump of crag. I crawled my way round it. It was a great rock sticking up at the top of the hill, and there was a ledge on the other side about eight feet wide, if that. And there I had to stop short again, because there was a man chained to the crag, between me and the water.

  He looked to be dead or dying. He was sort of collapsed back on the rock with his eyes shut. His face was tipped back from me—I was still crouching down, weak as a kitten—but I could see his face was near on as hollow as the Flying Dutchman’s, and it looked worse, because this man hadn’t a beard, only reddish stubble. His hair was reddish too, but it was soaking wet with him being out in the fog and the rain like this, and you could hardly tell it from the granite. His clothes, such as there was left of them, were soaking too, of course, grayish and fluttering in strips in the sneaking chilly wind there was up there. I could see a lot of his skin. It was white, corpse white, and it shone out against the rock and the fog almost as if it were luminous.

  The chains he was locked up in—they were luminous. They were really queer. They shone. They were almost transparent, like glass, but whiter and stonier-seeming. A big link of the chain between his right arm and leg was lying on the rock just in front of me. I could see the grains of rock magnified through it, pink and black and gray and white, bigger through the middle of the link than at the edges, and with a milky look. It was like looking through a teardrop.

  He didn’t move. My strength came back a little, and I couldn’t see him harming me in that state, so I got up and started to edge my way along the ledge in front of him to get at the water. When I was standing up, I was surprised to find how big he was. He was about half as big again as an ordinary man. And he wasn’t quite dead. The white skin was up in goose-pimples all over him, with little shivers chasing across it. That was why I said what I did about Art, earlier on. He must have been frozen. But I could tell he was pretty far gone. He had a serious wound round on his left side, a bit below his heart. I hadn’t seen it till then, and I didn’t want to look at it when I did see it. It was a real mess, gaping and bleeding, with bits of his torn shirt fluttering across it and getting mixed up in it. No wonder he seemed to be dying.

  I was almost right in front of him, trying not to look, when he moved his head and looked at me. “Be careful not to touch the chains,” he said.

  I jumped, and stared up at him. He didn’t speak at all like someone who was dying. There was a bit of a shiver caught at him as he said it, but that was not surprising, considering how cold he must have been. But his voice was quite strong and he was looking at me like someone with sense. “Why mustn’t I touch them?” I said.

  “Because they
’re made to act like the Bounds,” he said. “You won’t get your drink if you do touch them.”

  I shuffled backwards an inch or so. I didn’t dare go further, for fear of falling off the ledge. “What are they made of?” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

  “Adamant,” he said.

  That is a sort of diamond—adamant—the hardest thing there is. Granite must be almost the next hardest. I could see the big transparent staples driven into the granite on either side of him, holding him spread out. “You must be awfully strong, if it takes that to hold you,” I said.

  He sort of smiled. “Yes. But there was meant to be no mistake.”

  It looked that way to me too. I couldn’t think why he was so much alive. “You’re not a Homeward Bounder, are you?” I asked doubtfully.

  “No,” he said.

  I went on staring at him, trying to keep from looking at that wound of his, and watching him shiver. I was cold myself, but then I could move about to keep warm. He was chained so that he could hardly move a foot in any direction. And all the while I stared, that water ran and poured, away to one side, with a long hollow poppling which had me licking my lips. And he was chained so he could hear it and not get to it.

  “Are you thirsty?” I said. “Like me to get you a drink?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d welcome a drink.”

  “I’ll have to get it in my hands,” I said. “I wish I’d got something to hold it in.”

  I went edging and shuffling round him, keeping well away from the chains. I could see the stream by then, pouring down a groove in the rock, just beyond the reddish spiked thing that all the chains were hooked into. The ledge got narrower there. I was thinking that it was going to be difficult to climb over that spike on the slippery rock without touching a chain, when I realized what the spike was. I went close and leaned over it to make sure. Yes it was. An anchor. One spike was buried deep in the granite and all of it was orange wet rust, but there was no mistaking it. And all the chains led through the ring on the end of the shank.