“You should be sleeping!” the doctor told Tom
as soon as Nathan had left. Tom failed to see why the doctor would care what he
did, and didn’t feel like humoring him.
“I’m not tired!” The statement came out
whinier and more high pitched than Tom would have liked.
The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Would you
like a sleeping draught? There’s not much else to do, and you could use the
rest.”
Tom really didn’t want to sleep, but he
couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he agreed. Once the doctor gave him
the drink and left, though, Tom drank half and almost gagged. He set the rest
down under the bed and hoped what he had ingested would be enough to make him
tired.
It wasn’t. In fact, he didn’t notice any
effect at all, and he grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, he decided he
couldn’t take lying down anymore and sat up, looking around the room. It was
cluttered with various objects that he had overlooked while his friends had
been in the room. Many of the higher shelves contained numerous sharp objects that
Tom probably didn’t want to know the purpose of, especially considering that
they were located in an infirmary. Not all of it looked menacing, however. On
one lower shelf, within Tom’s height range, lay what looked like measuring
instruments for weather. He remembered the navigator talking of thermometers
and barometers and other ometers…All the various names escaped him, but he knew
them by sight. What the doctor might have them down here for, where they did
not even function correctly, did not occur to him, but he decided he wanted to
investigate further.
He focused on getting out of bed, hoping
that his weakness would fade. He
recalled almost falling earlier, and stood slowly, testing his strength. He
felt slightly shaky, but strong enough to wander over to the shelves, and he
figured that as he moved more his strength would return. The doctor must be an
idiot if he thought that staying in bed would help.
He made it over and looked at the
instruments, trying to read them. The markings on the barometer were
indecipherable, but the thermometer was easy enough.
286
degrees. Wait, that didn’t make sense. Tom looked at it more closely, and saw
that it did in fact read 286. He figured it must be broken.
He rummaged through the shelf, and suddenly
his eyes caught something silvery on the other side of the room. It was a
small, open tank of water, with what looked like a comb in it. There was a
lantern above it, and a piece of paper underneath. Tom thought it was a very
odd assortment, and he shuffled over to look at it.
It didn’t seem to serve any purpose. The
glass tank just sat there with its comb, and there were no fish or anything
inside of the tank. It disappointed him. Bored already of the room he occupied,
Tom picked up the comb and ran it haphazardly through the water, and saw the
ripples it made.
Something about the ripples intrigued him with
their beauty. He faintly saw their shadows on the paper below the tank before
they faded. He ran the comb through again, and studied them more closely. Where
did they go when they disappeared? It almost hurt, to see them vanish. He
focused on prolonging their shadows with each stroke of the comb, and the
shadows and waves became noticeably more defined. Finally, he stopped using the
comb altogether, watching the waves and their shadows and focusing on making
them larger. He grew dizzy without knowing why.
The tank suddenly shattered, and the water
flowed out onto the floor, soaking into the boards of the ship. Tom snapped out
of his trance in horror, the comb still in his hand. He was in trouble; that
tank had been glass, and glass was expensive and rare.
As if on cue, the doctor burst in, and upon
seeing Tom out of bed with the broken tank and water pooling around the
shelves, his face turned purple with rage.
“What did you do!? It’s broken! That took
me years to get!” Tom backed up and
his weakness suddenly returned, landing him on the floor with a thud. The comb
was still clutched in his hand. “You!”
The doctor whirled on him, and Tom braced to get struck. Instead, the healer
hauled him up by the arm and shoved him back into bed, grabbing the comb out of
his hand. “Stay there!”
Tom didn’t even consider
disobeying. The doctor marched out, and quickly returned with a flask. “Drink
it.” Tom did, not wanting to upset the doctor any further, who looked like he
was going to cry. It tasted awful, but fear of what would happen if he didn’t
finish it made him drink without gagging.
“When you wake up, you get out of here. I don’t want destructive boys like you
around.” The drink hit him almost instantaneously, and Tom’s eyes grew heavy.
The last thing he heard was the doctor sweeping up the shards of glass, but he
could think only of the beauty of the shadows of the waves.
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