Drowned Wednesday(4)

‘Yes, it is. . . get out while you can!’

‘I want to see what happens.’ Leaf backed up to the bed and leaned against it. ‘Hey! There’s water coming in under the wall!’

Sure enough, a thin film of frothy water was slowly spreading across the floor, like the leading wash of a wave across the sand. It ran almost to the bed, then ebbed back.

‘I can hear something,’ said Leaf. ‘Kind of like a train.’

Arthur heard it too. A distant thunder that got louder and louder.

‘That’s not a train! Grab hold of the bed!’

Leaf grabbed the rail at the end of the bed as Arthur gripped the headboard. Both turned to look at the far wall just as it disappeared, replaced by a thundering grey-blue wave that crashed down upon them. Tons of seawater smashed everything else in the room to bits, but the bed itself was carried away by the wave.

Dazed, drenched, and desperate, Arthur and Leaf hung on.





Two




THE HOSPITAL ROOM vanished in an instant, replaced by the savage fury of a storm at sea. The bed, submerged to within an inch of the mattress-top, had become a makeshift raft. Picked up by the first great wave, the raft rode the crest for a few seconds, then fell off the back, sliding down and down into the trough behind.

Leaf cried out something, two words lost in the thunder of the waves and the howl of the wind. Arthur couldn’t hear her, and he could barely see her through the spray that made it difficult to tell where the sea ended and the air began.

He felt her grip, though, as she clawed herself fully onto the bed and grabbed his foot. Both of them would have been washed off then, if Arthur hadn’t managed to get his arms wedged through the bars of the headboard.

Fear lent her strength, and Leaf managed to crawl up to the headboard railings. She leaned over Arthur and screamed, ‘What do we do now?’

She didn’t sound like she was enjoying this adventure.

‘Hold on!’ Arthur shouted, looking past her at the towering, office-block-high wall of water that was falling towards them. If it broke over the bed, they would be smashed down and pushed deep into the sea, never to surface.

The crest of the wave curled high above them, blotting out the dim, grey light of the sky. Arthur and Leaf stared up, not breathing, eyes fixed on the curving water.

The wave didn’t break. The bed rode up the face of the wave like a fisherman’s float. As it neared the top, it tipped up almost vertically and started to roll over, until Arthur and Leaf threw their weight against the curl.

They were just in time. The bed didn’t roll. It levelled out as they made it to the crest of the second wave. They balanced there for a few seconds, then the bed started its downward slide once more. Down into another sickeningly deep trough in front of another giant, blue-black, white-topped cliff of moving water.

But the third wave was different.

There was a ship surfing down it. A hundred-and-sixty-foot-long, three-masted sailing ship with sails that glowed a spectral green.

‘A ship!’ yelled Leaf, hope in her voice. That hope rapidly fled as the bed continued to run down into the trough at alarming speed, and the ship surfed down the opposite side even faster still.

‘It’s going to hit us! We have to jump!’

‘No!’ shouted Arthur. If they left their makeshift raft he felt sure they’d drown. ‘Wait!’

A few seconds later, waiting seemed like a very bad decision. The ship didn’t waver in its course, a great wooden missile coming at them so fast that it would run right over them and the crew probably wouldn’t even notice.

Arthur shut his eyes when it got within the last twenty yards. The last thing he saw was the ship’s bow plunging down into the sea, then rising up again in a great spray of froth and spray, the bowsprit like a spear rising from the water.

Arthur opened his eyes when he didn’t feel the shocking impact of a ship ramming them. The ship had turned just enough at the last instant to meet the bed in the very bottom of the trough between the waves. Both had lost speed, so that the bed would be right next to the ship for a matter of seconds. It was an act of tremendous seamanship by the captain and crew, particularly in the middle of such a mighty swell.

Through the blowing spray, Arthur saw two looped ropes like lassoes come down. One loop fell over Leaf. The other, clearly aimed for Arthur, fell over the left bedpost instead. He scrambled for it and started to lift it off. But before he got it clear, both ropes went taut. Leaf went up like a rocket, up towards the ship.

The other rope tipped the bed over.

Arthur lost his grip and tumbled into the sea. He went down several feet, his breath knocked out of him. Through the veil of water and spray, he saw Leaf and the bed spinning up to the ship’s rail high above. The bed went up several yards, then the rope came free and it fell back down.