Children of the Storm

windows.
        The room grew darker.
        Bess got up and turned on another light.
        “Will we go into the storm celler?” Alex said.
        “That's fun! “Tina said.
        “We'll see,” Bess told them. “But we're not the types to run from any little blow, you know.” She spoke in imitation of some salty old sea dog.
        “I thought there weren't any cellars in Sea-watch,” Sonya said, slightly confused. She didn't much like the idea of hiding in the cellar like a rat in flight from its own fear. “I thought a cellar would flood with sea water.”
        “It's not a genuine cellar,” Bess explained. She pointed to a white door at the far end of the room, a door which was recessed into the wall beside the large refrigerator. “The storm cellar's attached to the house instead of lying under it. The ground slopes up at that side of Seawatch, and the storm cellar is built partly into the hillside. Concrete, all reinforced. It's not a perfect shelter, mind you, but it's a sight better than the house when the wind really gets bad and the rain comes as hard as a waterfall.”
        “How long will we have to stay in there?” Sonya asked.
        Bess shrugged. “Depends. If the storm passes us at a decent distance, we might not have to use it at all. If it passes right over us, as it looks as if it might, then we'll be in there a day-maybe two.”
        “I'll be glad when this is over,” Sonya said.
        “That makes a bunch of us,” Bess said.
        Sonya could not help but remember Lynda Spaulding's melodramatic warnings about hurricanes. Right now, as the rain pattered hard against the windows and they waited to find out how bad it was going to get, those warnings did not seem silly and melodramatic at all. They seemed frighteningly real and valid.
        Indeed, almost everything that Lynda Spaulding, in her moments of jealousy, had predicted was now coming true. Everything except for the stories about Voodoo, of course. Thus far in her Caribbean adventures, Sonya had not encountered anyone working a Voodoo spell on anyone else. No mumbo-jumbo, no chants or curses. She supposed that was something to be thankful for, at least.
        At that moment, Bill Peterson opened the door, had it ripped from his hand by the fierce wind. It banged back against the wall with a terrific crash that sent Sonya halfway out of her chair and brought every eye in the room immediately to the young man.
        Bill came in, followed by the wind and rain like a giant claw that was trying to snatch him back, and he struggled to shove the door shut against that claw's insistence.
        He turned, that chore completed, and smiled at them, drenched clear through, his clothes pasted to him by the rain, his hair hanging in thick, wet clumps, made darker by the water. “I think we're in for a spell of bad weather,” he told them, grinning.
        “You'll catch your death of cold,” Bess said.
        Helga was on her feet. “I'll make coffee for you.”
        “Be back in a jiffy, then,” Bill said. He went upstairs to change his clothes.
        When he came back, a couple of minutes later, Helga proved true to her word and gave him a cup of steaming coffee, which he took at the work table, sitting on a stool. He folded his hands about the cup, warming himself, and he drank it like a man fresh from the desert and willing to swallow anything liquid.
        “How's the boat?” Saine asked.
        Bill glanced at him.
        “Bad,” he said.
        “In what way?” Saine asked.
        “I'm getting nowhere with her.”
        “Why?”
        “I was making a little progress, mostly because of the bicycle rig I'd hooked up to the hand pump. I'd gotten the water level in the lower decks down to, oh maybe two thirds of what it had been when I found her last night. It wasn't going smoothly or quickly, you understand. But steadily. Then this damn rain came up.” He scowled into what was left of his coffee, like a gypsy into a teacup.
        “So?”
        “You could stand out in this stuff and drown,” Bill said. “It's that damn heavy. Of course, when I was working the pump, I had to leave the deck door open in order to run the pump hose over the side. As a result, the rain was catching on the upper deck like water in a swimming pool. It followed the deck slant to the hatch door, poured through the door and down the steps and into the hold-almost as fast as I was pumping it out.