EXCERPT from THE RAPSCALLION CLUB

Chapter 13
SOCCORRO

Alex was flat on his back staring up at the wide blades of the palm frond fan. The fan was on, but it did little to dispel the heat. The room felt hot and small and Alex couldn’t sleep. Noneck, on the other hand, snuffled soundly on a second cot only a few feet away. The fan turned round and round. A loose wire hung down from the ceiling mount, intersecting the fan’s cycle and making it tick like a clock.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Alex opened his book, but he didn’t feel much like reading. Instead he flipped to the glossy pages, the pictures of explorers, hard men in helmets, their steel combs half mooning from their heads like saw blades, their thrusting black beards jutting from their chins like boot toes, their white ruffs oozing from their high necked coats like cake frosting.

Crap, thought Alex. He had missed Percy's birthday. The frosted frill had reminded him. Not that the Rapscallions ever decorated their cakes. Certainly never did ruffled borders. If he knew his uncles, the cake had looked more like the flat, dry marl from which Alex had gently pried two tumi knives and a human tooth on his last dig. He looked at the present on his dresser. It was wrapped in map paper. The paper was full of coiling serpents and sea dragons which, Alex knew, Percy liked. It was folded so that one of the dragons unfurled elaborately across the top, its blow hole right under the knotted cross of white ribbon that tied the package. Noneck had curled the ribbon's ends so they looked like whorls of exhaled water. Noneck was good at those little touches.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Noneck’s enormous feet stuck up from the clump of sheets bunched at the bottom of the cot, and his big toes twinkled bluely in the moonlight. Alex chuckled. He remembered the time he and Noneck were camping in the Amazon. They had drunk too much Pisco and had passed out by the fire. Noneck had woken in the middle of the night and had somehow mistaken his huge, glinting nails for the eyes of a wild peccary. He’d hit his feet twice with a stick.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Suddenly, the sheets, black in relief against the gray of the room, moved. Noneck himself was still, but the sheets, mounded like the body of a small animal or the head of a large one, slid slowly up his legs. As the mound moved, it watched Alex. It watched him with Noneck’s blue nails. Soon it sat in the center of Noneck’s chest and blinked. Noneck’s feet still stuck up, but they no longer shined. Clearly, the eyes were Noneck’s nails. They’d somehow been pulled, silently, painlessly, without waking Noneck, from his toes. The thing rose and fell irregularly as Noneck snorted and wheezed. It stared at Alex and Alex stared at it.

“Soccorro,” it said.

Then Alex batted his lids, which had gone dry, once, twice, and rubbed them with a fist. And the sheets returned to the end of the cot, and the eyes turned back to nails, and the nails slid neatly into the tips of Noneck’s big toes, square and gleaming, like blades sliding into the slots of a razor.