Free Darkness Creeping by Neal Shusterman Page B

really a shack in a row of other shacks, where ancient people cling to their last days.
    It smells old here. It smells salty, like the sea. And Greaty’s always eating the fish he catches.
    “Good to see you, Tommy,” he said to me at the door, smiling his long-toothed smile.
    Whenever I see his smile, I run my tongue along my braces, feeling the crooked contour of my own teeth, wondering if one day mine will look like his, all yellow and twisted.
    “Ready for a good day of fishing tomorrow?” he asked.
    “Sure, I guess.”
    My parents left me here to spend a night and a day. They do this every year, four times a year. It started when I was little. It had to do with my fear of water. Mom and Dad decided that the best way for me to get over it was to send me out with Greaty on his big fishing boat. Then I’d see how much fun water could be.
    But it didn’t work that way.
    Greaty would always tell tales of sharks and whales and mermaids who dragged fishermen down to their watery graves. Going out with him made me more afraid of the water than I had been before, so afraid that I never learned to swim. Still, I went out with him and continue to go. It’s become a family tradition. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to say, I hope for the day when Greaty joins his two wives, two sons, and one daughter so I don’t have to go out to sea with him ever again.

    It is an hour before dawn now. Greaty and I always set out when everything is cold, dark, and still, and my veins feel full of ice water. I watch him as he prepares his boat. It’s an old fishing boat, its wooden hull marred with gouges from years of banging up against the dock. When a wave lifts it high against its berth, I can see the barnacles crusted on its belly. It has been years since Greaty has bothered to have them scraped off.
    He calls his boat the Mariana , “named after the deepest trench in the ocean,” he once told me. “That trench is seven miles deep, and it’s where the great mysteries of the world still lie undiscovered.”
    I sometimes think about the trench. I think about all the ships and planes that have fallen down there in wars. I imagine being in a ship that had seven miles to sink before hitting bottom. That’s like falling from space.
    We set out, and by the time dawn arrives, we are already far from shore. I can tell that the day is not going to be a pleasant one. The sun is hidden behind clouds. There is a storm to the north, and it’s churning up the surf.
    Greaty heads due north into the choppy waves. He stares at the horizon and occasionally says something to me just to let me know he hasn’t forgotten me.
    “Today’s going to be an exceptional day,” he tells me. “One day in a million. I can feel it in my bones.”
    I can feel it in my bones, too, but not what Greaty feels. I feel a miserable sense of dread creaking through all of my joints. Something is going to happen today—I know it, and it is not something good. I imagine giant tidal waves looming over us, swallowing us in cold waters and sending us down to the very bottom, where it’s so dark the fish don’t have eyes.

    Half an hour later, the shore behind us is just a thin line of gray on the horizon. Greaty has never taken me out this far before. Never.
    “Maybe we’d better stop here,” I tell him. “We’re getting kind of far from shore.”
    “We’ll stop soon,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
    Almost where? I wonder. But Greaty doesn’t say anything more about it. His silence is strange. I don’t know what he’s thinking—I never do.
    And then something suddenly strikes me in a way that it has never struck me before—I don’t know my great-grandfather. I’ve spent days and weekends with him every few months for my entire life, but I don’t know him. I don’t know what he thinks and what he feels. All I know about him is the way he baits his hooks, the way he talks about fishing. I can’t get the feeling out of my head that suddenly I’m out on