The fishermen didn’t speak to David. They were too busy heaving the squid into the Venus II. They looked like pall-bearers at a funeral, men with strong arms who had only hard and sorrowful work ahead of them. All the time his stepfather had been explaining, they had really been waiting for the tide to turn so that the boat would be sucked out into the bay.

David felt as if he was fighting history – not just his own, with his future being made right in front of his eyes, but all history, ever, of men and women, of the land and the sea, of the great forces of creation and destruction, the terrible balance of the universe that had no interest in whether he survived this test of his strength and bravery.

“Be a man,” his stepfather kept saying as the men grabbed David’s skinny arms. “Show us how grown up you are. Wys ons.”

The fishermen ignored his protests and bundled him into the boat. At first David was determined not to plead or shout but in the end he screamed himself hoarse, like Faces did that night at the fence.

“No! No! No! Please!” mocked Kendell in a high voice, and David knew that it was useless. I wonder if that dog can hear me now, he thought. I wonder if anyone can. Surely there must be someone awake in all of Ocean View and Soetwater and Masiphumelele! Just one soul who hears the screams and calls the police!

But the residents always locked their doors and closed their curtains: they knew better than to get involved. The fishermen pushed the boat into the moon-spattered shallows. David saw how greedily the kelp wrapped its strands around their legs. The men waded into the water beyond the breakers.

Then the tide took the boat in a sudden sucking lunge, the Venus II making the familiar trip across the ocean – but this time there were no nets aboard. David knew the sea, how useless it was to try to fight it. In a single minute he was already too far away to swim.

And who knew what lay beneath? Would the rotting sacrifice be enough to calm a true monster of the deep? The package seemed small now when he looked at it, the dead squid a pathetic offering.

David lay down in the bottom of the boat, panting, tired with a weariness that made him feel as if he wouldn’t get up again. He wanted to cry but he couldn’t gather the energy. He wanted his mother, her tightly packed flesh in her pink-checked housedress; her hands hot from the soapy dishwater.

He shivered from the night air against his damp skin. Alone, out in the darkness, with the rough wood on his back, David saw everything up close, the poor, dead tentacles slopping out of the plastic on the bottom of the boat. That squid must also have had a family, once, been a mother or a child. What was the point of all the violence? A life for a life. Wasn’t that what the myths and legends book had said?

He was just like the picture of the boy in the boat. David remembered the ropes in the boy’s hands, lowering the sacrifice into the water for the monster. His terrified face.

David sat up in sudden shock and understanding. The boy in the picture wasn’t lowering a sacrifice overboard. The ropes weren’t around the offering. His hands were tied with the ropes.

It was the boy who was the sacrifice.

David’s mind accepted the news tiredly. It made sense. Why hadn’t he seen it before? His stepfather had sent him out as a sacrifice in Kendell’s place. This had always been his plan, whether David passed his exams or not: his stepfather had marked him as the real bait.

David looked at the bundle in the plastic. These rotten remains were a teaser – something to enrage the monster of the bay so that not a scrap of David’s flesh floated to the surface, not a strand of hair or a splinter of this ancient boat ever washed ashore. His mother would never know what happened unless Kendell told her. Every night she would lie down next to the man that killed her boy. There were monsters that walked the earth, too.

David leaned over the side of the boat and peered down. Through the inky water he made out a light, like a reflection of the moon, a pale and shimmering circle.

But it was growing bigger as it rushed up from beneath.

An eye!

It was a huge, angry, terrifying eye.

The bone-juddering thump lifted the boat right up out of the sea. David shouted and grabbed at the sides to keep from sliding out into the deep blackness.

Here it was! The giant squid had come for him!

***

Tell us what you think: Do you think that Kendell is evil, or just cowardly?