The Castaways Read Online Free PDF

bodies. Boggis threw the cover back, and it fell ajar across the sides. We saw the hold crammed full of coconuts and breadfruit that were rotting in the heat. It was no wonder that the ship carried such a stench along with it.
    We left the hatch ajar and continued on toward the stern. The flies buzzed in a flurry around us, scattering up through the rigging and over the deck. When we reached the end of the waist, where a staircase rose to the poop deck, I told the others to wait. I took a breath and started up the steps.
    “If it’s the Dutchman,” said Midgely, “he’ll be wearing a cloak. His face will be like a skull. He’ll have only bones for fingers, and …”
    I didn’t want to hear any more. I hurried to the higher deck. I found the helmsman at the wheel.
    Despite the sun and heat, he was dressed in heavy oilskins, in a cape that hung stiffly from his shoulders. He was staring straight ahead, as though as blind as Midgely.
    True enough, he was thin as a skeleton. He had a scraggly beard, and scraggly hair that blew about him like cobwebs. He wore the hideous look of a man who had barely survived the fever. I might have believed he was dead already, yet there he stood on his own pegs, steering a deserted ship.
    His eyes didn’t move, his head didn’t turn, as I stepped around behind him. It seemed he hadn’t moved in ages. But the ship’s bell was mounted on the binnacle in front of him—and there was no one else who could have rung it.
    Boggis came up the ladder. He trudged toward me, muttering half aloud. “I don’t care at all for this,” he said. “A hold full of coconuts and flies, no one aboard, and the ship breathing and—” He stopped in his tracks at the sight of the helmsman. “Cor! Is that the Dutchman, Tom?”
    Gingerly, I reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. I knew the fever might still lurk in his skin and his blood, and so was careful to touch only his oilskins. I half expected that he would fall apart like a pile of stones, rattling into a heap by the wheel. Instead he came alive.
    First, he drew a breath. He raised his head and looked back; he turned it so slowly that I almost heard the creak ofhis neck bones. Then his right hand flew from the wheel and grabbed hold of my arm. The movement sent a ripple through his cape, and it was as though a great bird had swooped upon me.
    I tried to pull away, but his bony hand was a clamp. He fixed me in his hollow stare and said, “Where did you come from?”
    “Why, we came from the sea,” said I. “In a boat, but it sank.”
    “How many?”
    I held up my fingers to show him the count.
    “Five?” He breathed rasping breaths and repeated the number. “That might be enough to hold them off.”
    “Who?” I asked.
    With a wrench at my arm he pulled me to his side. “Take the wheel. Steer nor’east, boy; full and bye. That’s Land’s End where the surf’s breaking ahead.”
    I could see the compass in the binnacle, the card tilting on a southerly heading. The sails sagged and flapped; the ship staggered to windward. Yet in the mind of the helmsman it was driving home to England with the canvas full of wind.
    Boggis came no closer. “Where’s the rest of the crew and the captain?”
    “Dead and gone,” said the helmsman. “It was murder, I call it.”
    The deck leaned heavily. The man’s cape fluttered, and the bell—of its own accord—tolled sharp and clear.
    “Murder and death,” said the helmsman. “But no fear now; we’ll hold them off. It’s—”
    He stopped in midsentence. A fly had landed on hissleeve, and he was staring at it as though in fear. Another landed beside it, and a third settled on my wrist.
    “You’ve let them loose!” he cried. “You fools. You bloody fools, you freed them.”
    They came by the dozen then, spotting the man’s cloak with their black bodies, alighting on his hands, on his beard. He shook himself violently, flinging them off, and his fear turned to horror.
    “They’s only