Zeuglodon by James P. Blaylock

He took the lead case out of his canvas bag and held it up to show he had them. “Have the Doctor send Lala out. She can return to the boat right now with my three. I need a word with him, and then I’ll be on my way lickety split, and we can all go about our business. If he’s not satisfied, then he’s still got a hostage.”
    Reginald stood there regarding us through his faceplate. His eyes were weirdly enlarged by the glass, like the eyes of a deepwater fish. I could hear water swishing through the tubing and wheezing through the oxygenator at his belt. “The Doctor won’t send her out,” Reginald said. “You’ve got to come aboard.”
    “If it’s the maps he’s worried about, you can believe that I’ve got them right here in the box. I’m not fool enough to have come all this way without them. The bargain was clear. We trade Lala for the maps. I’ve got the maps. You tell him to send Lala out.”
    “He’ll do things his way, not mine and not yours. You know that’s how it is with him.”
    I could see that there was no chance of Uncle Hedge striking a bargain with Reginald Peach. Peach was too frightened of Dr. Frosticos. You could see it in his face. He looked like a man holding a burning stick of dynamite and wondering what to do with it. I looked at the submarine now, and I could see a face behind the glass of one of the big fisheye windows in the front. It was just a shadow, but I knew who it was.
    “Head back to the boat,” Uncle Hedge said to us, but none of us moved. “ Now ,” he said. “Take the inflatable back across. Return for me or Lala when you see either of us on the beach.”
    We did as we were told, turning around and heading back up the path along the lake. Uncle Hedge went ahead with Reginald Peach. When we were near the place where the path entered the ice valley, I looked back. The two of them were just then stepping up onto the pier. I had a very bad feeling about things. Uncle Hedge had sent us away because he knew something was wrong, and something was wrong, and wronger every moment. There was a tiny vibration beneath my feet, as if the ice island was humming, and when I looked down at where the ocean lapped against the icy shore of the lake, I saw something that was very strange. Ocean water was flowing up over the shore now, as if the tide were coming in and the path would soon be submerged. But if the island were floating, it would rise with the tide. The tide wouldn’t “come in.” I had the oddest feeling of movement, a very definite feeling.
    Perry and Brendan felt it too, because they stopped and looked down at the water, and then we all looked at each other. We were moving. The whole ice island was moving, although how fast it was moving and in what direction was impossible to say, because the ice cliffs and the pier and the submarine were all moving together. Tentacles of fog swirled in around the most distant of the ice cliffs now.
    “Hurry!” Perry shouted, and we set out running, all of us knowing that if we were going to help Uncle Hedge and Lala we had to save ourselves, which meant getting back to the Clematis before we lost sight of it in the fog. When we ducked into the shadow of the little valley I glanced back again just in time to see Uncle Hedge and Reginald Peach disappearing into the door of the submarine. Uncle Hedge looked up just then, and I saw him move quickly back toward the pier, as if he saw that there was treachery. He raised the lead box as if to throw it into the ocean, but what happened next I can’t say, because we were in the ice valley itself now, and we ducked around the first little turn and the lake was lost from view.
    We had to slow up when we got to the chunk ice, but we scrambled and slid our way over it and through it, jamming our cleats against the big chunks and against the cliffs on either side, and kind of running up and over ice boulders that would have stopped us cold if we hadn’t had the cleats. I banged my knee