Up There: Voyage 1—Snake Island
Start of a new series: Black Jack O'Toole's adventures with shoulder angel and devil Angie and Seph.
Up There: Voyage 1—Snake Island
Epigraph
All it knows of a changing world it has to Guess from children, who conjure in its plenum, Now an eyrie for two excited sisters, Where, when Mother is bad, her rage can’t reach them, Now a schooner on which a lonely only Boy sails north or approaches coral islands. --”Thanksgiving for a Habitat. V Up There,” WH Auden
Voyage 1—Snake Island
It was the first of July. The O’Tooles were moving into the Dupont home. For as long as John could remember, they had spent their summers there. John’s parents were schoolteachers. John had never met the Duponts. Mom and Dad said they were a family of four, mother, father, two daughters, who lived in the big house in the fall, winter, and spring. They traveled in the summer, and the O’Tooles looked after the house for them. John didn’t understand what “looked after the house” meant, except for living there and mowing the lawn.
The house was in Rye, New Hampshire, a small seacoast town. Rye Beach and Harbor were an easy bike ride from the Dupont home. John loved the house. It reminded him a little of Misselthwaite Manor, the big mansion in The Secret Garden. Of course, the Dupont home was not as big or mysterious as Misselthwaite Manor. But it was a big house that had secret nooks and hiding places for John to find.
John was six years old. He would be starting first grade in the fall. He had heard that kids learned to read in first grade. But John could already read. Mom read books to him, running a finger along the text as she read, and he followed along. Dad would listen as Mom read, but Dad never read books aloud himself. He said Mom was much better at it.
Rye had a small library. Already that day Mom had taken him there and gotten him a library card all his own. The librarians were two white-haired ladies. They showed him where the tiny children’s section was. (The children’s section was tiny, not for tiny children, he corrected himself silently.)
“Do you like books?” one of the librarians, Mrs Carter, asked.
“Yes,” he said, a little embarrassed at this direct questioning.
“Do you like Dr Seuss?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” he answered. “I liked the books about Horton the Elephant. But some Dr Seuss books are boring, like The Cat in the Hat.” He stopped, realizing that might be rude, if Mrs Carter liked The Cat in the Hat.
Mrs Carter answered, “You know, I agree. Horton Hears a Who is my favorite Dr Seuss book,” and John felt better.
“What other books have you read?” Mrs Bush, the other librarian, asked.
“Mom read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson to me and Dad. Then I read it by myself. That was good. Then I read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. That was really good”
“You read The Secret Garden all by yourself?” Mrs Bush asked.
He nodded. Mrs Bush looked at Mom, who also nodded.
“How long did that take you?” Mrs Bush asked.
“I spent a whole day reading it,” said John. “I didn’t want to stop.”
“You read The Secret Garden cover-to-cover in a day?” Mrs Bush asked.
“What does cover-to-cover mean?” John asked.
“Well,” said Mrs Bush, “You know a book has a front cover and a back cover…”
“Oh!” interrupted John, “Cover-to-cover means the whole book, from front to back?”
“Exactly,” said Mrs Bush, beaming.
“We have other books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Frances Hodgson Burnett,” said Mrs Carter. “Do you think you’d like to read more books by them, or try some other authors?”
“Just for today,” Mrs Bush added. “You can always come back tomorrow for different books.”
“I think I’d like to try other authors. Have you read every book in the library?”
Mrs Bush laughed and said, “No. There are thousands of books here that I have never read.”
Later John came to suspect she was being modest. He never found a book that Mrs Bush and Mrs Carter didn’t know.
That day they gave him a book called Charlotte’s Web and another one called The Pink Motel. They explained that he could have two books out at a time. When he finished a book, he could bring it back to the library and swap it for a different one. And he had to bring each book back in two weeks, even if he hadn’t read it.
#
It was a good summer. John didn’t go to school in Rye, so he didn’t know most of the other Rye kids. Two of the neighboring families had kids, and sometimes they would ride down to the beach together on their bikes. In the evenings they would play long games of hide-and-seek around their homes.
But actually, he spent the summer mostly alone. He always had a book. Every day he went to the library and got one or two new ones. Weekends were hard, because the library was closed Sunday. Mrs Carter made a special rule for him. He was allowed to take out three books on Saturday. Also, she and Mrs Bush found longer books for him to take home on Saturdays. He read all seven of the Narnia books that summer. They also suggested a book named The Hobbit. It took him three days to read the whole thing. It was hard. There were a lot of words he didn’t know. And there were words he did know, but used in a way he didn’t understand. What was a “curious chance”? “Curious,” he knew, meant someone who wanted to know things and asked lots of questions. How could a chance be curious?
There were no pictures in The Hobbit. (Well, there was a map, but no other pictures.) He had not realized that you could have a book without pictures. How would you know what the people in the story looked like? But even without pictures, he thought he knew what Bilbo looked like, and Thorin and Balin and Fili. And of course Gandalf was easy—he had seen pictures of wizards in other books.
When the weather was good, he would ride his bike to the beach and read there, or sit in the back yard with his back to a tree and read. The first time it rained, he explored the Dupont home, like Mary exploring Misselthwaite Manor.
That was how he found the attic. There was a trap door in the ceiling of one of the third-floor rooms. It was next to one of the walls, and there was a wooden ladder attached to the wall that you could climb to get to it. Luckily for John the trap was not too heavy for him. With some effort he could lift it open and climb up there. He shut the trap behind him. That way it was his secret place. If Mom and Dad didn’t know he was there, he didn’t have to ask permission.
It was different up here. It was hot and dry, even though it was raining outside. There was no real ceiling. He was right under the roof. From underneath the roof seemed to be made of a lot of thick rectangular pieces of wood that sloped from the sides up to a kind of ridge in the center. They were about four feet apart. He thought they were what held the roof up. And there was another one of those rectangular pieces of wood at the top that ran lengthwise. And of course the whole thing was covered by ordinary-looking boards. He would have to ask Mrs Bush and Carter for a book about roofs later and learn the names of all those pieces of wood.
At each end there was a window. One window looked out over the front lawn, and the other over the back yard. Because of the rain, the light from the windows was dim that day. A light bulb hung down from the ceiling on a cord. A string hung down from the light socket. When he pulled the string the light came on. When he pulled it again, the light turned off.
It was a perfect place to pretend to be a sailor. The attic was full of junk in boxes and in chests. It worked perfectly for the hold of the Hispaniola. He found some old sheets up there, too. He brought up some clothesline and used it to rig the sheets up across the open space at one end of the attic. It became the deck of his ship, and the sheets the sails.
It seemed natural to John to bring a notebook up to the attic and to write down some of the voyages he imagined.1
Black Jack O’Toole named his launch the Sea Devil. It was big enough to sail the high oceans, but small enough to be handled by him alone.
He had found the old map in a chest in the attic of his grandfather’s house. It showed a distant island. The writing on the map named it Snake Island. Something like a snake was drawn in the water around the island. On the island itself the map showed landmarks—woods, cliffs, and sandy beaches. There was a big X near the center of the island.
On the back of the map were some written notes. These notes said the island was in the Indian Ocean East of Africa and told how to find it. The notes didn’t say what was at the X. Black Jack supposed it must be something valuable—why else make a map to show how to find it?
He set sail from Rye Harbor. Six months later, in the Indian Ocean, his telescope showed clouds on the eastern horizon. He steered that way and saw that there was indeed an island there. It was shaped like the island on his map. He could tell by the breaking waves that it was surrounded by a coral reef.
More than that, as he approached he saw something like a gigantic snake swimming through the water between him and the island. It approached him, then its head came up from the water to loom over Jack. The snake’s head was as long as Jack was tall.
And then, to Jack’s surprise, it spoke to him. It had a deep, clear voice. It sounded almost human. and Jack realized he understood it. “This is Snake Island, and it is mine. Who are you? Why are you here?”
“I am Black Jack O’Toole. I followed a map here. I came to get what the map shows.”
“Who gave you this map? Who gave you permission to take anything from Snake Island?”
“The map came from my grandfather. I am the only child of his only child. The map and all it shows are mine!”
“This is my island. Nothing here is yours! The grandson of a thief is also a thief! Begone, or I will eat you!”
Jack raised his six-shooter, pointed it at the snake’s head, and fired. It was point-blank range, impossible to miss. The snake screamed, a hideous sound so loud it hurt Jack’s ears, and fell back into the water. Jack could see it swimming away.
Snake Island was surrounded by a coral reef. Jack’s map showed a way through the reef into the harbor within. He anchored there.
The Sea-Devil carried a small folding canoe. Jack put it in the water, threw a shovel and a paddle into it, and paddled to shore with the map. He quickly found the spot marked by the X, In fact, there was a stone marker there. Scratched on its soft sandstone were some letters.
They read, “Jonathan Murphy, his sea-chest. Beware the snake!”
Jonathan Murphy was Jack’s grandfather’s name. Jack dug in the sand beneath the stone marker. He found a small sea chest. Inside it was a cache of very fine pearls, as many as would fill a pint jar. There was also a paper with marks on it—lines and dots in black ink. It was some sort of code—Jack could not read it.
Feeling as if the snake was still after him, Jack hurried back to the beach with the chest. He jumped into his canoe and paddled quickly back to the Sea Devil. He raised the anchor, set sail, and steered for the harbor exit.
As he fled, he heard a roar. He recognized the snake’s voice. “Black Jack O’Toole!” it called. “You have not escaped me! I will hunt you down!”Writing was harder than John had realized. He read the sheet and cringed.
“He had found the old map in a chest in the attic of his grandfather’s house.”
Gosh, that was lame. He thought, though, that he had slightly fixed the lame beginning once he got to the island and had Black Jack discover that his grandfather had been there. That explained why a map to Snake Island was in his grandfather’s attic.
Well, the embarrassing writing didn’t matter. No one but John would ever read this notebook.
#
A year passed. Once again, it was July 1, and the O’Toole’s were moving into the Dupont home. John’s first order of business was to bike up to the library. He had kept his library card from last summer. Mrs Carter and Mrs Bush confirmed that he could still use it, so he rode away with two books, The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Mrs Carter said they were two of her favorite books.
Then he went up to the attic. His notebook was there, but it wasn’t where he had left it. When he opened it, he found writing on the third page, the one after the two pages he had written. Someone had read his story! John blushed in embarrassment.
The reader had added to the story.
As he fled Snake Island, a small figure appeared on Black Jack’s O’Toole’s left shoulder. It was dressed in red and had a tail and little devil’s horns on its head. It said, “Hi, Jack. My name is Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, but you can call me Seph.”
A second figure appeared on his right shoulder. It was dressed in white. It had beautiful white wings and a halo. It complained to the left shoulder devil, Seph, “Why do I have to be the good angel? That’s so boring.”
Seph answered, “Jack, meet my sister shoulder angel Angelica. You can call her Angie. And, by the way, congratulations on the way you shot that snake! Bang! Six-shooter bullet in the head! That’ll teach him, or her, or it.”
Angie said, “I don’t know, Seph. Do you really think shooting was justified?”
“Oh, don’t be such a drip, Angie,” Seph answered. “It was only a snake.”
“You shouldn’t be cruel to animals! And this one was a snake that talked! Almost people!”
“Well, it was going to eat Jack. Shooting it was only self-defense.”
“But he was going to steal stuff from the snake’s island!”
“It was my grandfather’s stuff!” Black Jack interjected.
“Well, well. Faults on both sides, I guess,” said Seph. “Neither of you comes off as morally spotless. I like you both already!”
“Hmph!” grunted Angie. “But it is good that you didn’t kill the snake. I guess it would take something bigger than a bullet to kill a giant sea serpent.”
They turned to look at him, rapt.
“So, what happened next?” asked Angie.
“We are agog!” said Seph. “I especially want to know what’s in that coded message your grandfather left in the chest.”
“Will he be able to read it?” asked Angie.
“I bet it’s in a pirate code,” said Seph.
“What pirate code?” asked Angie.
“Black Jack knows, I’m sure,” Seph replied.All chapters
Afterword
“Thanksgiving for a Habitat” is a series of poems by WH Auden. Each poem is about a place in a home. The fifth poem, entitled “Up There’ is about the attic. This is the last verse:
All it knows of a changing world it has to Guess from children, who conjure in its plenum, Now an eyrie for two excited sisters, Where, when Mother is bad, her rage can’t reach them, Now a schooner on which a lonely only Boy sails north or approaches coral islands. --”Thanksgiving for a Habitat. V Up There,” WH Auden
The cover image is a phase portrait of f(z):
A phase portrait is a visualization of a complex function introduced by Elias Wegert in Visual Complex Functions: An Introduction with Phase Portraits. I modified the color mapping so that the root representing the Dark King would be black.
That’ll work
From The Emperor’s New Groove.
Substack offers only a small number of fonts in text posts. John and Seph and Angie’s handwritten pages are rendered in monospace code blocks.
This is great, I feel like it’s the start of an excellent adventure!
This is so much fun! :D
I love the main story and the story within the story, and having the story within the story have multiple authors makes the tale even more intriguing!
And that’s impressive how well John can read when he’s still so young! I think I was pretty good at reading at a pretty young age, but I wasn’t quite as good as John at it and certainly wasn’t as fast at reading! 📚📖📚
Excellent storytelling, and I’m looking forward to finding out how the story continues! 💯