by Oisín Curran
On this side of the bridge there’s an opening in the rock face. I get up and head in, not waiting for the others. They come behind me anyway.
This new tunnel is very short. I’m barely in before I see pale light ahead. Then I’m on the other side. Gulls everywhere. They flap, they call, they shoot the air and land on a beach. A beach! We’re on the shore of an underground ocean.
There are waves all the way to a flat horizon. Even though stone walls on either side of us go up hundreds of feet before they bend into a ceiling high above, standing in that much open space after the oppressive tunnels feels miraculous. The strange light is brighter here because it bounces off water. At the bottom of the cliffs, the shore goes on and on out of sight.
None of us move. We stand or sit and stare and breathe. The air is wet and rusty. Yes, that’s the problem. We can’t stop for long or we’ll rust, the air will freeze us up like old bolts. I can see it happening. Everybody’s stalled—the sight of our own corpses, Nolan’s fall—it’s all coming on. We have to leave the caves behind.
We keep moving, I say to Chisolm.
Where? she asks.
I point to the far end of the sea. And then to the boats, because there are boats. Five of them. They’re in bad shape, but we have to fix them and set sail.
No, she says, No, we stop. We need to stop. You’ve led us into hell.
Obviously, the bodies in the caves have shaken her will. That’s bad—I’ve lost Chisolm and she was my fulcrum for prying everybody else loose. I fight with her. I shout, but she doesn’t answer. Nobody answers. They sit and stare at waves, which are full of jumping fish. Lutra looks hard at them, but Chisolm holds her tight to keep her from jumping in after them.
If I can’t use Chisolm, I must find another point to pivot on.
Quill and Rook give everybody cans of sardines. I eat half of mine and save the rest. The light fades and the crew lies down on sand and sleeps. Severn takes first watch. I pretend to sleep until I see his eyes close and yellow hair fall forward.
My Follower is close. I can feel it—feel the wind from its ragged feathers, feel my pictures slipping away, the little shreds of my forgotten past fading one by one. We have to go on. I walk to the boats and look them over. Rotten gunnels, cracked planks, dried caulking falling out. Where did the wood come from? Who built them? Why did they leave them here? Too heavy for me to drag to the water. And I don’t know how to sail. And even the best one would sink under me.
Lutra curls tight to sleeping Chisolm, but the otter wakes up as soon as I crouch in front of her. She growls, but I hang a sardine in front of her nose and she snaps it down. I hold another one out and she comes for it. I get her to the water’s edge and give it to her. Then I take the last one, show it to her, and throw it as far out in the water as I can. Lutra jumps into the water and swims out after it. Small silver fish jump in her path and she dives. It’s nearly pitch-dark when I think I see her head surface again far out. Then she dives again and disappears. She’s gone. I rake away my footprints on the sand but leave Lutra’s. I lie down and now all the light is gone so try to sleep.
I wake up to screams. Chisolm is at the water’s edge in thin dawn light, on her knees, crying, then screaming for Lutra, then crying again. Others stand and call to the otter. No sign.
You did this, says Rook in my ear. He looks at me, not smiling, and says he knows it was me, he should never have brought me aboard, I’ve led them into a nightmare.
I have to go on, I say.
Fix the boats! yells Chisolm. We must find her.
Some of the crew are carpenters and they brought a few tools, mostly hatchets and penknives. They get to work, pulling good wood off bad boats and fixing the two best ones. They work hard all day. Chisolm stands on the beach staring out at the water. Rook won’t talk to me. Everybody else seems to think Lutra left on her own.
Light’s nearly gone when we climb into the two repaired dories. At first we bail non-stop, but then the wood swells and the gaps slowly close. Somebody sewed old shirts and coats into sails, which now hang from oars that have become masts. A little tuft of breezes comes along and bellies them enough to blow us slowly out to sea.
The dark grey air electrifies and I turn just in time to see, or think I see, a flicker near the tunnel. My Follower. I’m barely ahead of it.
I sit in my seat at the prow of the lead boat and eat the can of sardines Quill hands out.
Captain Severn sits behind me. He looks as pale and drawn as his own corpse from the caves. That nightmare seems to have broken him. He doesn’t argue about where we should go but pulls out his compass and looks at me. I point over the waves and he sets a course.
We sail for three days. A light wind sends us over green water so clear we can see the mineral sea floor below us—crystal and iron, fool’s gold glinting, pink granite. Here and there islands of smoothly rounded pink rock pile up on top of each other like whipped egg whites. The ornate rock ceiling is so far above us that from time to time fluorescent orange clouds drift beneath it. In places elegantly long, solidified drips of purple stone hang from it like gargantuan icicles.
But the nights are so dark we stop. There are rusty anchors in the boats. Severn and Rook tie together old ropes and throw the anchors overboard. Nobody talks about what we saw in the caves. We don’t talk about much at all.
We’re scared at night. In daylight we see glowing animals slide under the water too fast to tell how big they are. They’re big enough. Fish too, schools of them. But at night every noise is huge. Waves slip and sigh, something boils the water nearby—fins? One night we hear a fight. Splashing water, roaring—two monsters? But the next day there’s nothing, except strange sky-blue gulls flying around us.
Chisolm sits in the bow of the other boat staring at the waves for Lutra. No Lutra. I stay where I am, looking at the horizon. My eyes are like Severn’s compass, they can bounce away but they always swing back. That’s why I’m the one who sees the island first...
...hurry, said Myles, jostling my elbow, I’m late.
We were down the hall, out the door, in the car, and leaving campus before I’d fully relocated. Then pushing the speed limit on Route 1A to Frothingham, which was the big town this side of Cove. There, at the corner of Main and Water, was the homeless shelter where Myles worked four overnights a week. Inside, the spotless halls smelled of floor soap and boiled potatoes. I trailed Myles, who rushed in, apologizing for his tardiness to Sister Mary Catherine, whose place he took at the office desk.
I would fire you, she said not unpleasantly, If I could find a replacement. As you well know.
Myles began to concoct an explanation, but she waved a hand to silence him. There’s an intake to do. I’m going home. Good night.
The intake was a young man from Nigeria who was waiting patiently in the hall.
For Myles, doing an intake was a natural extension of his propensity for story-harvesting. This was the best part of his job there. He arranged himself comfortably on top of several pillows on the office chair and listened carefully as Bayo told his tale. So did I.
They killed my father, he said, And said they would kill me next.
An internecine struggle, clan rivals, he had to flee the country. Then, he said, I was in Ghana for a while, selling jeans and T-shirts on the street.
I had money I’d brought from Nigeria, he said. I used it to pay a sailor on a merchant boat. He shut me in a metal box under his cabin. He was too afraid to let me out in Spain, so I froze when we went north and then I nearly died of heatstroke when we went south. I was in the box for three months. In New Orleans I walked off the boat because I’m black. Nobody noticed me. They thought I was a dockworker. I went to a shelter there and they said I should go to Canada. They put me on a bus here.
That makes sense, said Myles. We’re the closest shelter to the border. But that means you’re an illegal. I’m afraid you
can’t stay here.
Myles called Father Malenfant, who agreed to give Bayo sanctuary in St. Mike’s until arrangements could be made to smuggle him north. The evening had begun well, with a good story and some law-bending, and Myles was flush with energy when Iris arrived to pick me up. Her day of proofreading the newspaper had ended and she was ready for home.
Iris was quiet all the way back and over our dinner of leftover egg rolls.
You should go and visit Apollo and Artemis tomorrow, she said when she’d finished eating.
I guessed that she was worrying about Bill and Bernadette but didn’t feel she could go see them herself yet for fear of offending them with her sympathy. So she would send me as an emissary, or proxy. My friendship with the Krimgold-Gragnolati kids would, by association, refer to her friendship with their parents.
Bill’s blackjack and pistol lay quiescent on a bed of loose .45 calibre bullets. The bullets lined the bottom of a wicker basket on a side table in the Krimgold-Gragnolati kitchen. I stared at the blackjack, which I knew about from Tintin, who was always getting knocked out by one. It was made of polished black leather, seams stitched in red, and I wanted very much to hold it but didn’t dare.
Bill had the weaponry because he’d been an officer in the military police in Vietnam. Now he worked as a paramedic and volunteered with the police and fire departments, which explained the scanner that sat behind the basket of bullets, broadcasting anxiety at low volume.
Six foot five, flaming orange hair now balding, enormous blue eyes, lean and handsome, he loomed around by turns jittery and brooding, full of sudden erratic laughter, unexpected questions, and mid-conversation lapses.
Bernadette was slim and tall, dark-haired, quick-witted. Despite having defected to the counterculture with Bill, post-Vietnam, she retained a military decisiveness from her role as army wife stationed by turns in various outposts of Middle America. Normally, she was exuberant and tough. Today she was neither. She and Bill had gone practically mute. They were avoiding each other, smiling with painful awkwardness at me and the kids and focussing intently on household endeavours. Bill was installing baseboards and Bernadette was repairing Apollo’s three-speed. Athena serenely canned pickled beets, either unaware of her parents’ disquiet, or unwilling to care about it.
I couldn’t tell if Artemis and Apollo knew about the Gathering, but they knew something. Artemis was surlier and Apollo further out in his personal ether. He might also have been in shock. A bandage on his calf covered the hole made there by their rooster’s spur earlier that day. The rooster had long been troublesome and vicious, and as far as Bernadette was concerned, this attack on her son put things in a mortal light. Artemis, Apollo, and I were sent to the chicken yard with a hatchet and thick leather work gloves to dispense justice.
I helped the siblings corner the doomed bird, but nothing prepared me for the raw shock of the chopping block. I gripped the legs while Apollo did his best to hold the bird in a position horizontal to the stump. His hands were invisible among the feathers of the wings, which kept flapping free, but moments before Artemis raised the hatchet the rooster stilled, as though resigned to or stunned by the imminence of its death.
Then feathers and wings flew everywhere as the headless body thrashed among the wood chips, blood welling from its open neck. The head and an inch or two of the neck remained on the stump, unmoving, eyes open. Nauseated, I squatted to avoid fainting while Artemis and Apollo pranced gleefully around the twitching body of the rooster.
You look a little green around the gills, said Artemis, ruffling my hair. Don’t worry, it didn’t feel any pain. The body moves automatically after you cut off the head.
Where do you think food comes from? said Apollo scornfully.
I’m a vegetarian, I muttered.
Not us! declared Artemis, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. Time to dress this bird. No need for you to stay if you don’t want to.
Leave if you’re a candy-ass, added Apollo quietly. I knew very well that Apollo was soft, like me, but the rest of his family was hard and so this was how he callused his softness to belong.
I stayed anyway, to spite Apollo. I watched as he and
Artemis plunged the carcass into hot water, plucked the feathers, cut open the anus, and removed the liver and heart and stomach all shining and slippery. Artemis showed me the gravel in the gizzard and the contents of the oil sac.
The wind was cold in my hair as I rode my bike home. That night, as I tried to read myself to sleep, the faces of the Krimgold-Gragnolatis went by me, grim, distracted, mortified, oblivious. And I thought of the rooster whose coincidental violence had doomed it. But had the butchery lanced the pent misery in that household? It was hard to know yet. These thoughts conspired to keep me awake, and against my will my blood-soaked vision veered underground.
The island is lumpy, strange, but we’re happy to see it. Scared too. We need supplies, we fear a fight. But the closer we get, the quieter it looks. The little wind dies and the stronger crew members use old rotting oars to row us in.
Now we see it up close, small, flat, rocky. And the lump is astonishing—an enormous ship tilted halfway across the island. Blue gulls fly in and out of big holes in the steel hull and perch on the handrails of the deck, high above the rocky beach.
Big ships come from big cities. Which means I’m right. There is one down here.
We drag our dories up on the shale. Gulls the only sign of life.
Hello! shouts Captain Severn. But there’s no reply, nothing but a metallic echo.
Then there’s a faint noise in the ship, and a head with neat brown hair pokes out a window. Two bright, bright eyes look at us. We’re so surprised to see somebody, we don’t recognize him at first.
Nolan! says Quill.
It is. He disappears and we wait, stunned. Soon he hops down from a hole in the freighter and comes toward us slowly, limping, sideways. He’s dressed well and looks good for somebody we last saw on a rock floating on lava.
I have no memory of any of that, he says. I remember falling and that’s all until I woke up on board this ship here.
We’re happy to see him and he pretends to be happy to see us. But I can tell he’s not. He’s angry. Why? Can’t ask him that. Anyway, he’s telling us what happened.
The river of lava brought him to the sea, where the crew of a passing ship rescued him. The ship’s doctor tended his leg, which fractured when he fell. The crew took good care of him, and after a while he realized he could understand them, but they had a very strange accent. The ship went on, stopping at small ports along the coast to load and unload goods. As his leg got better, he began to help, taking inventory, swabbing the deck, cleaning berths.
But it’s been just a few days since we saw you last, says Rook. How could your leg have healed in that time?
A few days? says Nolan. I’ve been here for months and I was months aboard that ship before that.
Is he telling the truth? He doesn’t see how confused we are, or doesn’t care. He keeps talking.
There was a storm like I’d never seen before.
He was ordered to his cabin, where he stayed until he felt the boat drive aground and fall sideways. He left his cabin and he was alone. The crew abandoned ship in their lifeboats and forgot about their passenger in the rush.
Luckily, the boat was well stocked with supplies, he says. I’ve managed to survive.
He brings us on board and shows us how clean all the cabins are, all the halls, the walls. He’s very proud of it. We climb ladders until we come out on the top deck and look out to sea.
Did the crew talk about a city? I ask.
Yes, says Nolan. He waves at the flat horizon.
I look at Chisolm. I was right and she was right to trust me. But she doesn’t seem to care. She wants to know if Nolan has seen Lutra.
He hasn’t.
We have to go on to City, I say. I can practically hear the rustle of my Follower’s wings as it makes its way toward us.
But Nolan isn’t ready to leave. He wants time to pack. He says he’ll cook a hot meal for everybody if we stay the night. The crew is hungry and tired of bailing and rowing and floating. They vote to stay. I argue, but nobody listens and I can think of no new trick to get them going.
So we pull our boats up higher and follow Captain Severn’s instructions. The carpenters check the hulls and clean them. Others patch the tattered sails. Nolan won’t let anybody help him make his stew. He cooks in a giant pot from the ship’s galley over a driftwood fire.
He works so quietly it looks like he’s barely moving, but he must have because we can see and taste the stew. We sit around on rocks and eat, and everybody likes the food, except me, but that’s just because I don’t like stews. I pour it into the sand when nobody’s looking and eat some of the nuts I’ve been hoarding in my pockets. Maybe it’s my empty stomach that keeps me awake when everybody lies down on the beach to sleep in the warm night.
It feels like hours go by before I finally begin to doze a bit and see a lightning bug crawling across my mind, blinking as it goes, until it turns into a moving lamp. I blink and wake and see the lamp is Nolan’s. He’s walking from body to body and picking up an arm or a leg and letting it drop. I don’t move. Too scared. He comes closer and I can hear him sniffing the sleeping bodies. That sound creeps all over me with freezing little feet. He checks six of us and then starts tying hands and feet with rope.
