Page 6 of Dauntless
Getting thrown out of the Dauntless Island Museum by a man who called me a “crazy fantasist and dirty historical revisionist” hadn’t been on my bingo card.Yet here I was, hours later, listening to the rain drumming on the roof of my tent and wondering what the hell I was going to do to kill time for a week until I could get back to the mainland.Work on my thesis, I supposed.I’d brought my laptop because I’d envisioned at least a little cafe or something where I could set up in a corner with a mug of coffee and work for a few hours.Except I hadn’t seen any signs of a cafe down in the village, and I was pretty sure John Coldwell wouldn’t be very pleasant if he saw me lurking down there anyway.
I wriggled my arms out of my sleeping bag, then dragged my backpack close enough to unzip.I pulled my laptop out and opened it.The light from the screen was warm and welcoming and familiar.I opened a browser window, hoping to check out Tripadvisor or something, but there was no Wi-Fi.I thought about setting up my own hotspot and checked my phone—no bars there either.So much for getting the inside scoop on things to do on Dauntless now I’d burned my bridges at the museum.
I closed my laptop and sighed.
So maybe I’d had a couple of fantasies about walking into the museum and having the owner say something like, “You’re writing your thesis on the mutiny?And you have a personal connection to it?That’s wonderful!Please feel free to have a look around.Oh, and by the way, here’s an entire chest full of old letters and documents written by the mutineers that nobody else knows about.Why not take a read of those while you’re here?”
Okay, so part of that was the result of playing video games when I was growing up.I was way too conditioned to the idea that people just left valuable items in chests for wandering adventurers to find.On the one hand, John Coldwell might have hit close to the mark when he called me a crazy fantasist.On the other hand, it wasn’ttoocrazy.The wreck of theHMS Dauntlessand the subsequent mutiny were niche subjects.If there were any primary sources waiting to be discovered, they’d be here, because who the hell else would have been interested enough to come and whisk them away to the National Archives?Not that it mattered, because I wasn’t going to get invited to look at any dusty documents now, was I?
A sudden gust of wind made the walls of the tent shudder.
Jesus, it was cold.
I pulled my beanie tighter over my ears and huddled back down inside my sleeping bag.I hadn’t checked the time when I’d had my phone.I had no idea if it was 9 p.m.or past midnight.I didn’t like my chances of getting any sleep with this weather, but I couldn’t help hoping that if I just closed my eyes, it would suddenly be morning.One less day to spend on this island!
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was still pitch black.
And now, in addition to the pelting rain and the howling wind, I was thinking about the lighthouse.Not the hot guy who looked after it, but the fact that it was the highest point on Dauntless Island and probably the spot where the mutineers had hanged George Hawthorne.I didn’t believe in ghosts or anything, but I didn’tnotbelieve in them enough to laugh at the idea.Especially in the middle of a stormy night, very close to the place where my great-great-great-whatever grandfather had been hanged by a bunch of murderous mutineers.
It was cold, but I wriggled my arms out of my sleeping bag once more so I could play a very bright, very loud game of Candycrush.I thought of Joe Nesmith as I played.Tall, broad, and as climbable as a tree, if he was into that.Maybe he was.He hadn’t looked offended at my lighthouse line.Then again, he hadn’t looked like he’d got that I was flirting in the first place.Either I wasn’t very good at flirting—and I had the lacklustre romantic history to prove it—or he wasn’t very good at picking up my weird signals.Or maybe both of us were equally and oppositely terrible at both flirting and being flirted with, which would be just my luck.
A crack of lightning illuminated the world outside my tent, and my heart froze as I saw what looked like a silhouette looming.Then the night was plunged back into blackness, and I couldn’t see a fucking thing except my phone screen.
“Just a tree,” I told myself aloud, even though I was fairly sure I would have spotted it before now if that was the case.“Or just your stupid imagination, and definitely not the ghost of George Hawthorne come to rattle his bloody chains at you.”
I turned my phone facedown on my chest and watched the wall of the tent, waiting for the next flash of lightning.
God.This was stupid.I was in the middle of nowhere, halfway down a cliffside track, and it wasn’t like anyone would be out walking in this weather.And ghosts werenotreal.If they were, George Hawthorne would be waving a noose, not chains, anyway.Ghosts were one thing, but I wasn’t going to entertain historical inaccuracy, not even for a second.
Another gust of wind shook my tent, and I hugged my torso.The ridges of Henry Jessup’s diary dug into my forearm.I’d wrapped the book in several plastic bags because I was so paranoid about it getting wet and damaged, and then slid it under my shirt so that I didn’t trample on it in the close confines of my tent in the dark.
I remembered the thrill I’d felt when Theresa had told me about the diary.She’d bought it online, not knowing if it was legit, from someone who’d suggested in the description that it could be taken apart and used forscrapbooking.Nothing against the scrapbooking crowd, but Jesus Fucking Christ.It still made my blood run cold.Anyway, I’d been one of Theresa’s undergrads then, but she knew about my interest in theHMS Dauntlessmutiny, so she’d shared the diary with me.It had taken months to get it authenticated, and I’d lived on tenterhooks, afraid that the latest museum curator, antiquarian book conservator, or naval historian would tell us we’d been scammed.The day we found out it was real, we’d bought a bottle of cheap red wine each, and got really drunk over celebratory fish and chips.The next morning, hungover and queasy, I’d officially started my thesis.And okay, the wider world wasn’t going to give a shit that the romantic narrative about a two-hundred-year-old mutiny was wrong, butIcared.So did John Coldwell, apparently, but in the opposite direction, and vehemently.
Another flash of lighting lit up the sky outside, and I flinched, but I didn’t see any looming shape standing beside my tent.
Of course I didn’t, because it had all been in my imagination.
Then, suddenly, another crash, but this one wasn’t the storm.Still blinking away the afterimage of the lightning, I had no idea what the hell was going on, except that my tent was collapsing, I tried to spring into action—not that I knew what that action should be—but I was still zipped into my sleeping bag.Instead of leaping to my feet, I made it halfway up and then toppled sideways and crashed headfirst into my backpack.My left hand landed on my jacket, which I grabbed.
There was another crash on the roof of my tent.Was a tree falling?I had no idea.
I wrenched the sleeping bag downward but couldn’t find the zip.Instead, I shucked the bag off like a snake shedding its skin, wriggling and thrashing until my feet were free.I dived for the tent flap and couldn’t findthatzipper either.I had no idea what was going on, but I knew I didn’t want to be trapped inside my tent while it happened.
Another flash of lightning shuddered across the sky.It gave me enough light to grip the tab of the zip and wrench it upwards.It also gave me enough light, in horror movie strobe effect, to see something bash down heavily on the tent and collapse it all the way to the ground, right above my crumpled sleeping bag.
I dived out into the dark and the rain, hands and feet scrabbling in the mud, and suddenly I heard a loud crack—somehow heard it before Ifeltit—and then I was tasting mud.I tried to get up, but I couldn’t get my knees under me.Then the slow realisation came to me that I’d been hit, and that I needed to fucking movenow.
I rolled sideways just in time to dodge the next blow.I still couldn’t see anything except afigure, and my brain was so flooded with panic that I don’t think I would have retained anything I did see anyway.There was no room for anything in my throbbing skull exceptrun!run!run!
So I don’t know how I did it, but I fucking ran.
It was so wet and so fucking cold.I think I kind of managed to get my jacket on without veering too far off the narrow path, but the rest was a blur.I don’t know how I made it up the steep path without stumbling, but when I crested the hill and saw the lighthouse and the welcoming little sandstone cottage beside it, I almost burst into tears.Over the roar of the wind and the pelting rain I heard the low bark of a dog, and then a rectangle of light appeared as Joe Nesmith opened his kitchen door.
Hiccup rushed out to meet me.
“Eddie?”Joe yelled out.“Is that you?”
