"This is not a good place," said Gilligan through his chattering teeth.
"You can say that again," said the Skipper.
Both men had finally reached the narrow, windswept plateau midway up the Whispering Mountain, where even the birds had fled away from the cold and the damp and the loneliness. Though the Professor claimed that a village had once stood upon this spot, nature had long since devoured it: not a single pole rose from the quivering ferns to mark where the bamboo huts had stood. All that remained of human habitation were the stones, dark with evil memory. Here and there squatted huge lava boulders etched with crude images of men brandishing blades over recumbent forms. In the centre of the village where the temple had stood lay a wide, flat, dark- stained stone slab and the bare, scorched earth of a firepit.
Gilligan remembered the day they had discovered these ancient ruins, cold and dripping in the chill rain. "Beats me why they'd want a picnic table in a place like this," he had said, pointing to the stone slab. "Did they have picnics here, Professor?"
"Of a sort," the Professor had replied dryly. "But I don't think you'd have wanted an invitation."
Gilligan's imagination had supplied the rest. Now, as he cowered near the Skipper, he desperately tried to push those grisly pictures from his mind. He wasn't helped by the presence of the mountain's guardians. "I wish they'dstop staring at us," he whispered, jerking his thumb backwards to where the ground rose towards the mist-shrouded summit. Gilligan didn't even dare to look behind him: once had been enough.
For ranging up the flanks of the mountain, grim and silent under the brooding canopy of the clouds, stood a host of great stone statues. Only heads, but twice the height of a man, they glowered towards the sea with sightless eyes. Some stood straight, some leaned as if under a mortal wound, and some had fallen over altogether. Gilligan had a sense that behind his back, they were moving.
"Kind of look like the ones I've seen on Easter Island," said the Skipper.
"You sure it wasn't Hallowe'en Island?" muttered Gilligan.
"Very funny."
Trembling, Gilligan hung on to the Skipper's arm as though it were a life-preserver. "The Professor said they put one of those creepy things up every time they sacrificed somebody."
"I know, Gilligan."
"And then, one day, the whole tribe just disappeared! With all their stuff left behind!" Gilligan fixed his big buddy with a terrible look. "I know what got 'em. GHOSTS!"
"GILLIGAN!" The Skipper jumped, nearly losing his footing on the wet ground. He grabbed Gilligan's arm and gave him a quick shake, just for good measure. "Cut that out, will you! Now come on! The Professor must have broken some kind of sacred taboo. There's got to be a clue here somewhere!"
"But what kind of clue, Skipper? What exactly are we looking for?"
The Skipper looked around. "Something that's been disturbed, I'd say. Happened all the time when I was sailing these waters. Somebody stumbled onto a place like this and moved something or dug it up or scraped it or took a piece for a souvenir. The spirits don't take kindly to that, let me tell you. Why, I remember once—"
"Skipper!" Gilligan pleaded. "Not right now, huh?"
"Oh...sorry, little buddy." The Skipper patted him on the back. "Just don't touch anything, okay? And watch your step. It's mighty slippery up here."
"Aye-aye, sir."
The Skipper pointed up towards the standing stones. "I'll start looking up there. You try further down."
Gilligan gulped and his eyes widened to twice their size. "What? You're gonna go up there and leave me down here all alone?"
"Gilligan, the sooner we find this thing, the sooner we can get out of this place!"
"B-but..." Though the first mate longed to be out of the cold, it was not just the cold that made his teeth chatter. "What if whatever made the Professor turn evil gets you? Then you'll come after me!"
"That won't happen, Gilligan. We've got these protective charms, remember?" The Skipper patted his blue shirt just under his collar. "And anyway, you can be darn sure I'm not going to do anything to get the spirits mad at me! Just see that you don't, either. I'll meet up with you here in a few minutes." The Skipper squeezed Gilligan's skinny shoulder. "Look: just do as I say, and you'll be fine."
Gilligan gave a reluctant nod and crept away towards the down-sloping ground as the Skipper trudged off in the opposite direction.
The wind was picking up, and Gilligan pulled his cap on tight to keep it from blowing away. He kept close to the scraggly trees, nervous of the sheer escarpment left by a landslide a little further down where one wrong step could send him to his doom. Now the wind hissed like whispering voices as the grey hood of raincloud moved slowly down the mountain and the rain began to fall. Gilligan shuddered as the whipping fronds clawed at his neck and face like the cold fingers of the dead.
"SHRIEK!" The cry sounded right in his ear. Gilligan leapt three feet straight up and frantically grabbed a tree-trunk to keep from pitching down the mountainside.
He dragged his wet bangs out of his eyes and stared around the rain-and-windswept slope. When he saw what had made the sound, he swallowed his heart and forced it back down into his chest. Clinging to a nearby tree was the little brown, black-clad monkey he had seen the previous day. It chattered eagerly to him, waving its wrinkled hand as if in beckoning. Gilligan heaved a great sigh of relief, and then stared. "Hey – you again? What are you doing up here? And where did you get those—"
Suddenly a tall, horribly familiar shape loomed up out of the bushes and shocked Gilligan's heart back into his mouth. He let go of the tree. "What the—aaaah!"
He fell.
For a moment the world twisted as the sky and the earth switched places in a wild kaleidoscope of grey and green. Nightmarish seconds later Gilligan felt the ground vanish from beneath him, and he flung out an arm to claw frantically at the edge. Clinging desperately, he swung and dangled at full arms-length against a nearly perpendicular wall of rain-slicked, ancient lava. Gilligan groped wildly with both hands now, his fingers gouging into the ground, but the thin, muddy soil beneath the plants squished like stale porridge. He scrabbled with his feet at the rock wall, but his wet sneakers slipped and slid along its face. In a mad moment he looked down, down, hundreds of feet down the sheer cliff wall to where the sea roiled and heaved.
"Skipper!" Gilligan screamed, the sound ripping from his throat. "Skipper, help me!"
Some near-lucid corner of his brain told him that the Skipper was too far away to hear him above the noise of the wind and the rain. He screamed anyway. "Skipper! Hurry!"
His feet slithered on the wall; beneath his grasping fingers mud squelched and roots snapped. Gilligan sucked in a horrified breath as the force of gravity won, and he plunged.
One swift screaming second of weightlessness later... came the hand.
It grasped his wrist like an iron band, then hauled straight upward. Eyes clenched shut, Gilligan felt himself drawn up as effortlessly as he might pull a fish from the water. Then the ground was blessedly solid underneath him again and large, warm arms were around him. Gilligan sank against a broad chest, somehow remembering to breathe again. Shivering, he clung to that chest, almost afraid to open his eyes and find that he was really dead. "Oh, thank you, Skipper," he whispered. "I thought I was a goner!"
He was expecting, "That's okay, little buddy," or "Take it easy, pal," or even, "You numbskull! How did you get yourself into this mess?" But all that mattered was that the Skipper was there.
"Ooh Ooh," said the Skipper.
Gilligan frowned. That didn't sound much like the Skipper, either angry or relieved. He opened his eyes, looked at the chest he was hugging and frowned still further. The Skipper hadn't been wearing a black sweater that day. He didn't even own a black sweater.
"Ooh?" Nope. Definitely not the Skipper.
At last Gilligan looked up into the face of his rescuer. Grinning down at him was a cross between a shaven gorilla and a back-alley hoodlum. Aghast, Gilligan screamed for the second time in minutes. "Aaaagh!"
Alarmed, the tall man let go of him as Gilligan scrambled backwards up the wet slope, staring in horror. "Igor!" He barely registered the little monkey crouching next to the man.
But at the sound of the name the little monkey chattered wildly and jumped up and down, gesturing to himself. The tall man, still kneeling on the ground, scratched his head clumsily. Rising on his knuckles, he began to creep cautiously towards the beleaguered first mate.
Gilligan was still crawling backwards, too scared to get up. "Skipper!" He screamed again. "Skipper, where are you?" He braced himself as the tall man gained on him. "You stay back, Igor! The Skipper'll be here in a minute, and he'll tear you apart!"
The monkey looked around nervously. The man, meanwhile, made soft "ooh ooh" sounds as he stopped and stared for a moment at the swaying ferns. He cocked his head to one side, plucked a wriggling grub from a leaf, and after examining it for a moment, popped it into his mouth and swallowed.
Gilligan grimaced in disgust. "Yech – what's the matter with you? Why are you making like a monkey?"
The little monkey was fairly bouncing up and down now, pointing wildly to himself and to the man.
The man, meanwhile, had found a loose stone to play with. He tossed it gleefully over the edge and clapped, gibbering, as at a great joke. At last he hunkered down, scratched under his armpits, and hooted.
Glligan stared at him, stared back at the monkey, and his eyes widened in understanding. "Oh, my gosh, I get it...you aren't making like a monkey - you are a monkey! Dr. Balinkoff and his crazy cabinets! He did this to you! He switched your mind with this monkey's!"
The monkey smote his forehead with his paw as though to say, Finally!
Gilligan stood up slowly, heartbeat and breathing finally slowing to normal, and smiled at the man. "And you saved my life just now! My gosh...thanks, Igor! I mean, uh...Monkey! Thanks a lot!" He held out his hand to the man who palmed it happily, grinning a wide, slightly slack-jawed grin.
Gilligan gave him an awkward pat on the arm, then crouched down again to look at the little monkey. "Wait a minute – Igor, if you're here, then Balinkoff's here! What's he doing here? Why'd he do this to you? What does he want with us?"
Suddenly they heard a voice wail with all the despair of the mountain's ghosts. "Gilligan!"
Gilligan jumped before he realized whose voice it was. "Over here, Skipper!" he called, looking around.
The Skipper looked like his own ghost as he came looming up out of the mountain rain. "Little buddy, thank goodness! I heard you scream just now and thought you'd gone over! What – " Now the Skipper saw the tall man and recognized him. "What the – Get behind me, Gilligan!"
Gilligan yelped as the Skipper grabbed his arm and yanked him back so powerfully that the first mate belly-flopped into the ferns. The Skipper tensed, fists clenched, as he faced the man in the black sweater. "Igor! What're you doing back here? What've you done to my little buddy? Just try laying a hand on him again!"
In a flash the tall man scrambled around between the Skipper and the fallen Gilligan, shrieking and spitting. Snatching up leaves and chunks of mud, he flung them at the Skipper with a vengeance. "Hey, what's the big idea?" yelled the Skipper as he ducked. "Stand up and fight like a man, you big ape!"
Gilligan sputtered, spitting ferns. "That's just it, Skipper!" he called from the ground. "He's not a man – he is a big ape! He's a monkey!"
"What?" The Skipper flung up his arm as a flying clod knocked his hat askew. "Hey, cut it out, will ya?"
Gilligan scrambled to his feet and touched the crouching man gently on the shoulder. "Hey, little pal, it's okay! The Skipper wasn't trying to hurt me. He's my big buddy!"
The tall man looked curiously at him. "Ooh ooh?" he said.
"Yeah." Gilligan grinned. "His bark is worse than his bite."
"Gilligan, what in the name of the seven seas is going on?"
The tall man looked up at the Skipper and cocked his head. "Ooh?"
"What's the matter with this wiseguy? Why doesn't he talk?"
"He can't! Like I said, Skipper, he's a monkey! Look!" Gilligan plucked another grub off a leaf and handed it to the tall man, who munched it happily.
The Skipper grimaced and shook his head. "I don't believe it!"
"Believe it, Skipper! Dr. Balinkoff did it to him! Remember how he could switch minds?"
"Oh, yeah!" The Skipper pushed up his cap until the rain spattered in his eyes, then pulled it back down again. "That machine he had in his laboratory!"
Gilligan pointed to the little brown monkey. "And this monkey over here is Igor!"
The monkey nodded, keeping a wary eye on the Skipper. The Skipper fixed the monkey with a wary look of his own. "Well, just to be sure...if you're Igor, hold up three fingers."
The monkey sighed and held three skinny digits in the air.
The Skipper goggled. "It is Igor! So that's why he's got those clothes on!" The Skipper suddenly remembered something. "Hey, wait a minute: he's the one that bit you, isn't he?"
"Yeah. Hey, yeah!" The first mate scowled and favoured his hand. "What's the big idea, Igor? That hurt!"
The monkey shrugged and hung its head.
"Now hear this, Igor. You bite him or anybody else, and I'll forget that I don't clobber little guys!"
"Oh, forget it, Skipper," said Gilligan. "I wouldn't be in such a great mood either if somebody'd made a monkey out of me."
"Well...I guess not. And what about him?" The Skipper eyed the human form of their old enemy. "Seems pretty wild. Is he okay?"
"Okay? I wouldn't be standing here if it wasn't for him!" Gilligan pointed to the treacherous edge. "I did go over the cliff a minute ago, but he pulled me up! He saved my life!"
"You what? And he-" The Skipper saw the two red scars of torn up soil that vanished over the brink of the precipice. Swallowing hard, he blinked through the rain at his first mate, then reached slowly out to grasp the thin arm beneath the sodden red sleeve. "Oh, my gosh...you..."
The crouching man, now holding Gilligan's hand as a small child might hold his father's, peered up at the Skipper. He reached up a large hand and touched the Skipper gently on the arm. "Ooh ooh?"
The Skipper swallowed again before taking the limp hand and shaking it. "Th-thanks...thanks, pal," he said in an unsteady voice.
Smiling, Gilligan squeezed the tall man's other hand. "Yeah. Thanks!"
Forgotten on the sidelines, the little monkey blew a most unsentimental raspberry. Gilligan and the Skipper looked up. When he saw that he finally had their attention, the monkey jerked his thumb towards his chest.
Gilligan shrugged at the Skipper. "Guess he's sore 'cause we forgot about him." He turned back to the monkey. "So why'd Balinkoff do this to you anyway, Igor? Was he sore at you?"
The little monkey nodded and folded his arms in an angry pout.
"Gosh...all I get is a bop on the head. I'm sure glad you don't have any crazy cabinets, Skipper!"
"Wait a minute..." The danger to Gilligan had all but eclipsed the problem of the Professor; now the Skipper's eyes grew wide. "This is what we've been looking for, Gilligan! The clue to what happened to the Professor! Boris Balinkoff and his weird science!"
Gilligan's eyes flashed. "You're right, Skipper! It all makes sense now! He must have done something to make the Professor turn evil!" He paused, shaking his head. "But why would he want to do something like that?"
The monkey crossed his arms in front of himself and shook his own hands.
The Skipper gasped. "A handshake...you mean Balinkoff wants the Professor on his side? As in partners?"
Gilligan stared in horror. "Partners! The Professor and Balinkoff? That means that...the poison medicine..."
"The landmines...who knows what awful stuff they could come up with if they put their heads together! Gilligan, we've got to stop this! We've got to tell the others!" The Skipper was about to start down the mountain when the monkey caught his trouser leg and gestured urgently.
"What is it, Igor?" asked Gilligan.
Igor picked up a pebble and held it in the air for them to see. He placed it beneath a bush and chattered at it as the Skipper and Gilligan watched in confusion. Then Igor raced away a few steps, cupped his hand to his ear as though listening, and nodded. At last he scrambled back and picked up the pebble again, pointing to it.
"What's he mean, Skipper?" asked Gilligan, perplexed. "We talk into a pebble and somebody hears us?"
"Oh, that's impossible, Gilligan," the Skipper murmured, and then the light dawned. "Wait a minute – now I get it! Balinkoff's bugged our camp!"
"What? There's lots of bugs at camp!" Gilligan scowled. "I hate the green ones with big yellow wings."
"Gilligan, you numbskull, I'm not talking about insects! A bug is another name for a hidden microphone!"
"Oh!"
"Exactly! Who knows how long he's been listening in on us!" The Skipper fingered his rain-beaded chin in thought. "We'll have to be really careful! And we'll have to find some place that he can't overhear us!" He turned to Igor. "Now what if we-say..." he suddenly paused and fixed the monkey with a suspicious stare. "Why'd you tell us that, anyway? You work for that nut! How do we know we can trust you? How do we know this isn't some kind of a trap?"
The little monkey pointed to himself and the tall man and whined piteously. He threw his arms up in the air, as though he wished to somehow grow taller.
Gilligan crouched down in order to see eye-to-eye with the little simian. "Hey, I get it, Skipper. He wants his own body back! And you don't trust Balinkoff, do you, Igor?"
The monkey shook his head vehemently. The tall man, meanwhile, was stripping the leaves off a nearby bush and trying to gum them down.
The Skipper nodded. "So you'd be willing to double-cross him if we promised to turn you back into a man?"
"I just know the Professor could do it – when we get him back," added Gilligan.
The little monkey reached out to clasp the two sailors by the hands and give them both a hearty shake. "That's good enough for me!" said the Skipper. "Now - what about the lagoon? Any bugs there?"
"Are you kidding, Skipper?" Gilligan's eyebrows buckled. "There's moths and mosquitoes and dragonflies—"
"Gilligan!"
"Oh. Oh yeah. Sorry."
The Skipper turned back to the little monkey, who shook his head. "No, huh? Then that's where we'll make our plans." He took one last look up through the veils of rain to where the mountain's sinister stone guardians kept their vigil. "We've got what we came for, little buddy. Let's get out of this place, once and for all!"
