to catch anchor around this island. We rainged along its shore in search of a suitable landing but high cliffs gird the island completely. Our hopes frustrated and not wanting to spend more time than we had, I had every body to stations to put about, when at half past 4 oClock in the PM a man spotted a Fissure from which water streams down the cliff, staining it dark. Mr Grafton believed it could be reached by Longboat, and so I emmidiately put down one boat, and the men took some Barrecoes to fill.
‘We collected Three Barrecoes of freshwater from a trickling waterfall inside the Fissure. However, we lost one man dear to us in the effort, Stephen Frears–a true man, and strong made, whom we shall all terribly miss, and judged the risk of another man too great.
‘Upon the urgings of our Chaplain, and having determined that the island was neither habitable nor accessible by the blackhearts of HMS Bounty, we departed with haste and heavy hearts, our heading due West to Wellington, where we all are looking forward to a friendly harbour.
–Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders,
21st August, 1791’
Glyn folded the worn printout Nell had given him. ‘That’s it–the only reported landing. If we can find a way inland, we will be the first to explore Captain Henders’s forgotten isle.’ Glyn nodded and smiled at Nell.
There was a rowdy round of applause, and Copepod barked.
‘So the storms served a good purpose, after all,’ Captain Sol told them. ‘Poseidon has put us on a course to help a fellow mariner in distress. And we’ll have a chance to visit one of the final frontiers on Earth, where no man has gone before!’ Captain Sol raised his fist skyward, a ham at heart.
7:07 P.M.
‘God bless Captain Sol,’ Cynthea muttered in the control room, jabbing her pencil eraser at different screens as everyone cheered and toasted. ‘We’ll have to lay in some music behind Glyn’s speech and edit it way down.’
‘Yeah, that nearly killed us,’ Peach agreed.
‘Find some sea shanty thing, like something from Jaws when Robert Shaw is talking about sharks and battleships. Lay it in behind that speech and it’ll be a thing of beauty. Then can it and zap it, Peach. Get it to those bastards in L.A. before the assholes in New York can say no.’ Cynthea spoke through her headset to her camera crew. ‘OK, boys, we’re done. Eat some dinner. Nice work, darlings!’
7:08 P.M.
Spirits soared following the announcement, and when the annoying lights and cameras finally shut down everyone cheered again, sarcastically.
Nell glanced over at the next table.
Still puffed up from his starring debut, Glyn had seated himself across from Dawn. He seemed terribly interested in what she was saying.
Nell stifled a giggle at the almost inconceivable coupling. Dawn looked like she would eat Glyn alive.
Zero sat down across from Nell at her table and commandeered an unclaimed plate of food. Gouging a bite out of a filet of orange roughy, the lead cameraman looked at her. ‘So what made a gal like you want to be a botanist?’ He broke off a chunk of fish and fed it to Copepod.
Nell sipped her ice water as she mulled over his question. ‘Well, when my mom was killed by a jellyfish in Indonesia, I decided to study plants.’
Zero lifted a forkful of fish to his mouth, surprised. ‘For real?’
‘Of course, for real!’ said Andy, who was sitting next to Nell protectively, as always, though it was usually she who protected him.
Nell had persuaded Andy to leave his cabin after his earlier tantrum, and he had changed into a more subdued blue plaid flannel shirt open over a yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on the chest. The vintage shirt said, ‘Have a Nice Day!’ with no ironic bullethole in its head or anything out of the ordinary–just a smiley face waiting for the world to deface it.
Nell squeezed Andy’s wrist and patted Zero’s hand, instantly charming both men with her brief touch.
‘My mother was an oceanographer,’ she explained to Zero. ‘She died when I was a kid. I never saw her much, except on television. She was abroad most of the time, making nature documentaries in places that were way too dangerous for children.’
‘You’re not the daughter of Janet Planet, are you?’
‘Um, yeah.’
‘“Doctor Janet explores the wild planet!”’ he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. ‘Right?’ A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.
Nell nodded. ‘Yeah. You remember the show?’
‘Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?’
Nell laughed. ‘Our last name didn’t play well on television.’
‘So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.’
‘Except that I chose botany,’ Nell protested, parrying with her fork. ‘Plants never eat people.’
‘Right on.’ Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. ‘Conquer your fears, right?’
Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. ‘Something like that.’
August 23
6:29 A.M.
She sat in the blue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.
An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet–Saturday morning cartoon clichés in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless detail.
Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky. Just as it always did.
Nell screamed, soundlessly–the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…
Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.
Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.
She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.
So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.
Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.
Today, on Henders Island, she would find a new flower–and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.
And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too–by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.
12:01 P.M.
A sliver of shimmering light appeared on the horizon, and then the guano-crowned cliff began to rise from the ocean like a snow-capped ridge.
Nell and the others gathered on the mezzanine deck to watch the island as it was raised.
‘What a wall!’ exclaimed Dante De Santos. The muscular twenty-three-year-old cook’s assistant had Maori-style tattoos on his tanned arms,