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Phantom Island
After the copyrights on the Larry Peters books lapsed, and the publishers of the books had ceased to exist, the world that I had imagined for the Peters clan was mine. I could do what I wished with it. I began to remake the series, beginning with a new book, Phantom Island. The following is a chapter from that book.
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Chapter 1
Lucy Is Bored
Lucy, my adolescent sister, stretched herself beside me on our blanket on the sand. She yawned elaborately. It was a stage yawn, meant to tell me, and anyone else who might observe it, that she was bored, and not merely bored in the way that everyone is bored halfway through summer, but bored in the way that one who has seen it all becomes bored with life, though, like me, she had seen almost none of it. It was, in short, a pose, Lucy’s latest.
“I heard on the radio that an African creation myth attributes the creation of the world to boredom,” she said.
“You mean boredom predates creation?” I asked, my keen mind intrigued by the possibility.
“I guess so, at least according to this guy on the radio.”
“In the beginning, there was boredom?”
“According to the myth, or at least according to what the guy on the radio said about the myth, in the early days of the universe, before there was the sun or anything else, when all was a void and unformed, there was someone, and this someone was bored.”
“What did he do?”
“To alleviate the boredom, you mean?”
“Yeah. What did he do? Or she.”
“He, actually. But I’ve forgotten his name. He made a thumb piano.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Well, he kind of had to, because that was the advice he got from a god, or somebody powerful.”
“So he made a thumb piano.”
“Yes, and it alleviated his boredom.”
“Mm.”
“And it led to the creation of the world, and everything, because each time he plucked a note on the thumb piano something appeared, like the sun . . . the earth . . . people.”
“Mm.”
We lay in the morning sun in silence for a while.
“But he — whoever he was — didn’t eradicate boredom,” she said, “because it’s still around today, right here, right now, on this stretch of the shoreline on Kittiwake Island. Here it is the absolute midpoint of summer vacation, and we’re bored out of our skulls.”
“You know what Dad would say to that.”
“‘People who are bored are people who are boring.’”
“Right.”
“But he doesn’t have to endure a summer on this island with nothing to do. He has his work, and that occupies most of his waking hours.”
“Much of his dream time, too, I suspect.”
“You know,” she said, animated for a moment, raising herself to look at me earnestly, “just at this moment I envy him his work. I wish that I had something like that to occupy me so completely that it would keep the deadly stultifying boredom at bay.”
“How about making a thumb piano?” I asked. “It might alleviate your boredom, even if it doesn’t eradicate all the boredom in the world.”
“Not really,” she said, and sighed. She let herself fall to the blanket, on her belly. I ran my eyes along the length of her. She was maturing nicely.
“Want me to undo your top?” I asked.
“Get lost,” she said.
“Maybe you should invite some of your girlfriends over,” I suggested. “That might be fun.”
“Oh, they all complain that it’s too hard to get here.”
“Yeah.”
“Dad’s put so much work into making this place impregnable that nobody wants to come here.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re practically prisoners on this island.”
“Yeah.”
“Like Napoleon on Elbow.”
“Elba.”
“What?”
“Elba, not Elbow. Napoleon was exiled to Elba.”
“An island, right?”
“Right.”
“He must have been bored out of his skull.”
She rolled onto her back and put her sunglasses on.
“There is absolutely nothing to do here,” she said.
“We could offer our services to dad for the summer. He’d find plenty for us to do. He’s always got extra work on the new fall line of gewgaws and whatnots.”
She lowered her sunglasses and looked at me over the top of the frame.
“Please,” she said.
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