The ferry is floating on soft swells like a dozing seabird, the ferryman sitting on a strange box on top of the boards. He appears to be breathing fire. Smoke billows out from behind his cracked white hand, but then his fingers move to reveal that he is pulling with fleshless, sallow lips on a cylindrical piece of paper. He breathes in, the paper burning redly at the end, and then opens his mouth and emits a rolling, graceful flood of oyster-colored smoke.
Janey walks toward the raft, more hesitant now, and he looks up at her abruptly. He is wearing his strange hat with a brim just on the front, beaten and weathered to the point of colorlessness. His iron-hard face is all slabs and angles: broad sheets of cheekbone, a once-broken nose that shies away toward the right, a thin mouth pulled up into a sneer by a scar on the upper lip. His eyes are all but hidden by the shadow of his hat and by the dimness of evening.
Janey opens her mouth, then closes it and waves the man forward weakly. The man stares at her, his eyes shrouded in black, and then shrugs more slowly than she thought it was possible for a man to shrug. Languidly, he picks up his pole and pushes once more toward shore. Janey turns to Mary and holds out her trembling hand.
Interlocking fingers, they walk slowly to the ferry: two girls, one tall and red-haired, one small and brown-haired, leaning into each other like they could not stand without the other. When the ferry touches the reeds, the ferryman spreads his hands as if to gesture, Well?
With a deep breath, Janey and Mary take off their shoes. The water bites frozen at their calves as they wade to the ferry and awkwardly clamber on. Janey wonders if she is dreaming, if this vessel only occupied by wanderers and exiles is real beneath her feet.
Up close, the ferryman smells of smoke and metal and something rotten. His face is swathed with small scars, from the slice on his upper lip to a smattering of pockmarks roughening his cheeks. The gray light catches his narrow eyes under the brim of his hat.
“Hello,” says Janey in a shy voice she has never heard emerge from her throat. “I suppose you’re not used to having girls on the ferry.”
Frowning, the ferryman stares at them.
“You see,” she says, growing louder, “we want to talk to you. We think…we think that you have valuable things to tell us.”
He coughs wetly into his fist and resumes gazing at them.
“About the wastelands,” continues Janey. “You’re from there. You live there. Unless you live on this raft, but that seems unlikely. We need to know things.”
Bringing the strange paper cylinder to his mouth, which Janey can now see is filled with what look like wood shavings, he inhales and then blows a cloud of gloom over them. She inhales to speak, coughs, and then starts again.
“You see, it’s…” She pauses. “We’re trapped here. We don’t know anything. About what happened, or how things are now.” She shifts and the ferry moves alarmingly under her. “We need to know what it’s like. In the wastelands. We have…questions.”
The ferryman sighs impatiently.
“I said we have questions. Will you answer them?”
He stares.
“No, that’s not—you need to—so my first question is about the scourge. What…” And she trails off because he is opening his mouth to speak.
Underneath the current of fear that consumes her, Janey feels a thrill run through her skin like the tingle before lightning strikes. Whatever this dark prophet says will be something new, uncharted, forbidden. She leans forward into his smoke-and-rot smell, his charcoal stare.
He is opening his mouth slowly, shakily, as if struggling against some unseen force that binds it shut. His lips splay wider and wider, and now Janey wonders if his jaw will dislocate, or if his cheeks will split and ooze like the skin of a smashed fruit. She feels an urge to run, but her morbid fascination is stronger. The ferryman gestures at his open mouth with a crooked finger. As if in response, a ray of sun splinters through the clouds to bathe the island in light.
Janey follows the ray into his mouth and then croaks, a strangled indrawn breath. She sees a carcass, a rot, obscene folds of flesh.
The ferryman has no tongue.
It is not a clean cut; half of his tongue was shorn at the stump, but a few trembling muscles bound by scarred flesh remain and twist dumbly, like a trapped, eyeless creature straining toward the light.
Mary shrieks. Janey manages not to, but gives a guttural moan, and they both turn and leap off the ferry into the icy water, their legs raw and shivering, and splash frantically toward shore. Forgetting their shoes, they take off barefoot, their soles sliced by half-frozen grass as they race away from the water. Janey’s lungs smolder and her skin erupts in chill sweat. “Home,” mutters Mary unconsciously, and at that Janey stops her.
“No!” screams Mary, turning to look back wildly over her shoulder, even though they are far out of sight from the ocean, from anyone, and are standing in a field next to Mr. Balthazar’s plum trees.
“Stop,” says Janey, also out of breath. “Stop. We’re safe.”
“Who cut out his tongue?” cries Mary. “Was it the wanderers? We spoke to him, what if he tells—what if he tells—”
“Breathe,” commands Janey shakily, her face nearly bloodless. She tries not to think of the tongueless ferryman exhaling fumes. “Just breathe in and out.” Mary starts to cry, falling to her knees. Janey kneels and wraps her in a tight embrace. “Breathe,” she says again.
“What if he follows us?” asks Mary suddenly, whirling to see behind her.
“He won’t,” says Janey.
“He could. He could be going to the wanderers right now, to tell them. He could be furious—”
“He doesn’t know where they live. And he’s not furious. Didn’t you hear as we were running away?”
“Hear what?”
“He was laughing at us. It was hard to tell, but that’s what it sounded like.”
“Laughing at us? Why?”
“Because we were afraid.” Janey tucks a windblown strand of hair behind Mary’s ear.
“What kind of thing would make someone cut out your tongue?” sobs Mary. “What if he does it to us?”
“He’s old, isn’t he,” says Janey, more to herself than Mary. “Very old. He’s survived out there a long time. Did you see his clothes?”
“No,” says Mary, sniffing. “I didn’t notice them.”
“They were filthy, and old, but well made. Very well made. And his shoes were…complicated.”
“Do you think he’s still sitting there?” whispers Mary.
“No,” says Janey brusquely. “I don’t. I think he’s gone back to out there.” She sweeps her hand in an extravagant gesture.
“We need to tell the other girls—”
“No.” Janey’s face is hard and cold, and her eyes burn into Mary’s. “We will never tell anybody.”
“Why?”
“It just…If we don’t tell anyone, it stays between us, it’s our secret. I just can’t have everybody knowing.”
“But why?”
“Because it was—” And Janey’s lower lip quivers until she has to catch it in her small white teeth, and bite hard. “They’re so young, and the way he—” She wraps her arms around herself. “Besides, if someone found out we’d been on the ferry, if it got back to a wanderer…Just don’t tell anyone. Please.”