– from inside. At least, I was inside for what seemed about five minutes, until I came screaming and drowning and kicking up to the surface, and coughing out streams of fierce salt water – only to have all my coughing undone the next moment by a huge great wave, which came and hit me slap in the face, and sent me under again. I came up again pretty fast. I didn’t care that nothing could stop a Homeward Bounder. I didn’t believe it. I was drowning.
It isn’t true what they say about your life passing before you. You’re too busy. You’re at it full time, bashing at the water with your arms and screaming “Help!” to nothing and nobody. And too busy keeping afloat. I hadn’t the least idea how to swim. What I did was a sort of crazy jumping up and down, standing in the water, with miles more water down underneath me, bending and stretching like a mad frog, and it kept me up. It also turned me round in a circle. Every way was water, with sky at the end of it. Nothing in sight at all, except flaring sunlit water on one side and heaving grey water on the other.
That had me really panicked. I jumped and screamed like a madman. And here was a funny thing – somebody seemed to be answering. Next moment, a sort of black cliff came sliding past me, and someone definitely shouted. Something that looked like a frayed rope splashed down in the sea in front of me. I dived on it with both hands, which sent me under again, even though I caught the rope. I was hauled up like that, yelling and sousing and shivering, and went bumping up the side of that sudden black cliff.
It was like going up the side of a cheese-grater – all barnacles. I left quite a lot of skin on there, and a bit more being dragged over the top. I remember realising it was a boat and then looking at who’d rescued me. And I think I passed out. Certainly I remember nothing else until I was lying on a mildewy bed, under a damp blanket, and thinking, “This can’t be true! I can’t have been pulled out of the sea by a bunch of monkeys!” But that was what I seemed to have seen. I knew that, even with my eyes closed. I had seen skinny thin hairy arms and shaggy faces with bright monkey eyes, all jabbering at me. “It must be true,” I thought. “I must be in a world run by monkeys now.”
At that point, someone seized my head and tried to suffocate me by pouring hellfire into my mouth. I did a lot more coughing. Then I gently opened one watery eye and took a look at the monkey who was doing it to me.
This one was a man. That was some comfort, even though he was such a queer looking fellow. He had the remains of quite a large square face. I could see that, though a lot of it was covered by an immense black beard. Above the beard, his cheeks were so hollow that it looked as if he were sucking them in, and his eyes had gone right back into his head somehow, so that his eyebrows turned corners on top of them. His hair was as bad as his beard, like a rook’s nest. The rest of him looked more normal, because he was covered up to the chin in a huge navy-blue coat with patches of mould on it. But it probably only looked normal. The hand he stretched out – with a bottle in it to choke me with hellfire again – was like a skeleton’s.
I jumped back from that bottle. “No thanks. I’m fine now.”
He bared his teeth at me. He was smiling. “Ah, ve can onderstand von anodder!” That is a rough idea of the way he spoke. Now, I’ve been all over the place, and changed my accent a good twenty times, but I always speak English like a native. He didn’t. But at least I seemed to be in a world where someone spoke it.
“Who are you?” I said.
He looked reproachful at that. I shouldn’t have asked straight out. “Ve ollways,” he said – I can’t do the way he spoke – “we always keep one sharp look out coming through the Boundaries, in case any other Homeward Bounder in the water lies. Lucky for you, eh!”
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 for ever, 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 mould 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 recognise 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 smelt of mould, 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
