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Page 19.

5. Island

Alex stood in the boat holding up the sail and aiming it so that he could tack along the sides of the wind. It was a good day for sailing. A moderately brisk wind pushed the boat along at a nice clip. The boat was slow to steer at the helm, but the rigging worked enough to make turns.

At first, Alex tacked back and forth in zigzags near the coast until he was past the cape and out in rougher seas. There he rode up and down on eight-foot swells, and the boat took it well. He was up to his ankles in water, but the boat was solid and kept pushing out to sea.

For a while Alex was a bit scared, scanning the horizon and not seeing any signs of land. He hoped to see a wisp of smoke or even a flash of flame, but there was nothing. If worst came to worst, like if the boat sank, he could swim the mile or two back to shore. It was not a prospect he liked, but he was determined to find out what lay at the end of this journey.

After he was about a mile beyond the cape and heading steeply out away from land, he saw a smudge on the horizon. He stood as best he could, rising up and down, and held his sail so that the wind threatened to push it from his grasp. He buried his face in his hands as he held the mast, and prayed it would not suddenly spring apart in his grip. Many of the reeds had already snapped and were loosely snapping in the wind, some making low whistling and twanging noises. The boat tended to ride too much to the left, to port, and he had to keep correcting by leaning far to one side, but the island grew larger. Still no signs of smoke.

Too late he noticed the breakers around the island, and the sharp teeth of black gleaming rocks over which washed foaming water. Garlands of kelp lay strewn among the boulders, and the ocean crashed rhythmically so that he could hear the shuddering under the water as all the boulders shifted with the rocking sea. The boat shot through a wall of breakers and became logy, slowly riding along, saturated with water. Alex lost his balance, went to his knees under water on the boat floor, then rose suddenly on a great curling head of foam. “Whoa!” he shouted, realizing that he was headed toward the tip of a groin whose bluish boulders rose like a crocodile’s mouth out of the sea. He dumped the sail over one side and jumped out the other, just as the boat was carried high and then dumped, smashing, onto a ledge six inches under water.

He didn’t have time to worry about it. For a moment he felt the silty, abrasive churning of an undertow. For a minute or so, he was thrown in cartwheels underwater. He heard the tuba-sounds of water channeling among the boulders as he spun helplessly. He felt the sand on the bottom and then found himself being carried away. A moment later, he surfed belly-down over a ledge and would have gone right back over the other side and out to sea, except he was able to wrap himself around a protruding stone and aikido himself into a crevice, where he stuck, during a moment when the sea paused for breath before plunging onward.

Gasping and pouring water from his mouth, nose, and ears, he pulled himself up out of the water. He could see his raft was finished, but he felt too battered to think about how he might get back to the mainland. He felt the weight of the water gliding off him, and the balmy wind drying his skin already as he hopped from stone to stone toward the sodden beach. There were few of the giant butterflies in view, most likely because the tree-trunk flowers that nurtured them were absent on this island. The sand smelled of rotting kelp, and swarms of insects buzzed over piled desiccation from various tides ago. There was a faint smoky something in the air, stale, not an active hearth fire, not a healthy wood smoke, but something puzzling and industrial, cold and unwelcoming. With a feeling of dread, he climbed up a slope of round rocks. The rocks lay packed tightly like a road. Again it was hard to guess if man or nature had laid them so perfectly in a carpet.

Then he saw the boat. Someone had pulled it up onto the rocks and into the shelter of an overhang. It was a squares boat with uplifted fore and aft, sturdy as a rowboat but lively as a little shell. In it, neatly furled, lay a mast with sail. Alex bent down to feel the sail. Surprisingly, it felt like wool. He rubbed forefinger and thumb together, feeling the oil there. He smelled it, a lanolin kind of sheep odor. He found the sheep minutes later, a herd of them, grazing unattended. He casually counted a dozen in plain view and a few more hidden shadows that promised to be more, standing in the rocky grassy ledges above where they’d gone to graze. They looked down on him, chewing comically, as if they were thinking something witty.

Alex climbed up a winding path and came to a small meadow about the size of his own sky-island. Several of the sheep followed him, and one or two ran ahead making their bad-a-a-a-h! noise. All they lacked was bells, he thought, and this could be some Irish or Alpine village a million years ago. He smelled the smoke, more strongly now, at the same time he saw the ruins. Down in a little valley nestled inside a ring of huge boulders (like teeth sitting on someone’s lower jaw, with thorn bushes and plum trees growing from the gums) were nestled some six houses, none with roofs.

As Alex stood overlooking the village, a light fog was creeping in. The sunlight, which he hadn’t particularly noticed before, illumined the growing milky haze from within like light inside a lantern. But it promised to be a fading light, for already down under the fog, on the cold and dripping walls of abandoned houses, black shadows were gathering. The stones dripped coldly with dark water.

Alex walked down into the ghost village, heart sinking as he noticed the absence of windows, doors, roofs. When he stepped into the houses one by one, and saw the worm-eaten gray timbers so fragile that they crumbled at the touch of a foot, and when he saw the deep soil that had gathered where floors had once been, and when he saw several wide tree trunks that had taken shelter here long ago, he got a picture that this place had been abandoned not yesterday, not last year, but generations ago.

He held his head and cried out with disappointment. “Hello!” he called. “Hello!” He walked over a mass of moss and ivy and brambles a yard deep in places covering what must once have been the village square. “Is anyone here?”

No answer—he heard only the wind, whispering in the leaves, and saw how the sun silently gilded the rocks, painting them with a kind of bright, tortured irony that made all the sadness in him well up, all the loneliness of his hopeless existence. Tiny butterflies fluttered over green and yellow lichen and nuzzled bright yellow flowers. Bees, probably descended from domestic ones, buzzed around an irregular dark comb in a tree. Birds twittered and hopped from branch to wall to boulder, unmindful of whatever tragedy had occurred here. Still, there was that cold aftertaste of smoke in the air, a faintly sour odor.

Alex clambered up the opposite side of the protective hillside and stood overlooking the seaward shore of the island.

Nothing.

The sea was becoming enshrouded in mist, and the light was losing its golden luster. The island was only about half a square mile in area and roughly oval. It reared up from the sea on stone pillars, a primordial lava up flow through a long gone mountain worn away by wind on some plain long since drowned in the ocean. Now, on the scrubby meadows high up, with their scraggly bushes and trees, fog was rolling in to soften and obscure the view.

Worried about becoming trapped for the night, Alex rushed down to the sandy beach on the seaward side.

Amid cawing sea birds and crawling crabs, he found a bundle of rags lying half in and half out of the water.

He smelled the foulness of death from a distance, and heard a loud buzzing of insects.

“No!” He hurried up close, while shreds of fog blew swiftly past, and his face dripped with condensation. Shivering, he stood and looked at the body on the beach. The stench was enough to knock a person back, but he forced himself to get near. Brushing aside scuttling crabs and swarming flies, he lifted the large wool cloak in which she was rolled up. He caught a brief glimpse of the ravaged face, the hollowed empty eyes, the lipless mouth, the clean young teeth. He glimpsed long black hair still with a trace of gloss in its healthy young fiber. Pulling the cloak open further to expose a torso laid open to whitish bone and purplish flesh swarming with the greenish golden carapaces of insects, he saw that she had her bony hands clutched together over her abdomen. The claw marks in her gut were still visible. That would explain the blood on the beach weeks earlier. She’d gone to land for some reason, to get something, to do something, and the rippers had attacked her. Somehow, she’d fought them off and managed to get to the boat. She’d managed, perhaps with the last of her strength, to sail away and make it this far. She’d beached the boat and staggered around the island, too weak to go over the top, and collapsed here. But where had she been headed? Surely not to those ghost houses.

Holding his nose, he groaned loudly with dismay and let the corner of the cloak fall back to hide her face. Backing away, holding his hands over his face, he recognized the delicate narrow foot sticking out from among a rumple of wool. As he backed away, a large sea bird landed and strutted up to the cloak, pecking at it imperiously.

Alex turned and started to run.