Echo Island

by Jared C. Wilson

  He stopped to listen, halfway hoping she’d feel guilty for ignoring him and return, sorry for freaking him out. His eyes searched the mist, darting back and forth over every shadowy crease and swirl. He threw some more words out: “I won’t hurt you.”

  For some reason, although he wasn’t being quiet anymore, he didn’t want to yell.

  Maybe this girl was the one who lived in the cabin. Maybe she knew how to make sense of the gibberish notebooks. Maybe she witnessed what happened to everybody.

  Jason listened for another few seconds, staggering around in a furtive three-sixty, and finally began walking forward. He had no sense of his bearings. He wasn’t even sure if he was going in the direction she’d passed, but he kept pressing forward into the cloudy murk in front of him. A face suddenly appeared, and he nearly jumped out of his skin until he realized it was his own pale reflection in the glass of the church window. He had almost walked into the side of the white clapboard building.

  And just like that, when the mist seemed the most hopelessly thick, the fog began to dissipate. He wondered if it had rolled in with the girl, a strange ethereal procession summoned by her presence, and it had rolled off now to follow her wherever she had gone.

  He turned away from the church toward the cemetery behind him and watched the mist slither away with time-lapse effect, the smoky white tendrils sliding against the narrow tombstones.

  The girl had not gone in the direction of town, he was sure of it. So he abandoned his plan to reach the Bee Market and retraced his steps back to the parking lot. He looked at the looming tree line of the woods. The fog was still settled in there, probably churning off the warming water of Cutter Pond in the middle.

  He plodded forward.

  In the Echo Island Historical Center, Archer found a box of matches in the receptionist desk and began lighting every candle and oil lantern he could find. He glanced at the row of desktop computers lining the wall just inside the front door and pursed his lips. It would be so much easier if he could google this predicament.

  Instead, he took one of the lanterns in his hand and began making his methodical rounds, doing his “Archway thing,” as Bradley might have put it. The center maintained a small library, nothing extensive, just five long oak bookcases holding books mostly related to coastal and island history, reference books about seafaring, forestry, and gardening, and, of course, plenty of town records full of boring lists of meetings, minutes, and deliberations. He thought about adding to the last Echo Island record book, “Town vanishes. Game over. The end.”

  It was the artwork on the wall that triggered his attention. One framed print, in particular, caught his eye. It was not an especially old work. Under unreflective glass and bordered by a simple cherrywood frame, the scene was a ship in the middle of a storm, a big foamy wave about to push against a scattering of rocks rising out of the dark green sea. It was a night scene, the ship dark brown with streaks of gray, the sky brown and orange. The entire image looked as if it had been covered in a grayish filter. A silver plaque affixed to the frame was engraved in a simple font: creusa, the ghost ship 1889.

  Something about that name—Creusa—rattled Archer’s memory, some artifact prying free in the back of his mind. He couldn’t place it. It wouldn’t come out to identify itself. But he knew what to do next.

  Among the selection of books chronicling the Pacific Northwest’s coastal history, he found a volume titled Spooky Tales of the Salty Seas. It was a book written for children, really, something like the Time-Life books on Bigfoot and UFOs that were designed to spark kids’ interest in local history. The short book cataloged its entries alphabetically, and Archer didn’t even need to scan an index. There on page twelve was the entry titled “Creusa.”

  During a great storm in October 1889, the storied ship called the Creusa, named after a figure in Greek mythology, was caught in great throes of danger off the western coast of Washington, just north of its destination, the tiny outpost called Echo Island. The ship left port in Anchorage, Alaska, not many days prior; the journey was intended to be a short and, no doubt, safe one. In the cold morning light, fishermen spotted the ship stuck in the rocks of Echo Island’s northern harbor, listing helplessly, its torn sail flapping in the breeze. The storm was gone. And so were the Creusa’s twenty-four boarders. From the captain down to the lowliest shipmate, not a soul was found.

  Did they abandon ship? Were they swept overboard? Were they kidnapped by pirates?

  Or was it something more sinister?

  To add more strangeness to the mystery, the captain’s logbook contained just one entry, which ended abruptly, midsentence, as if he had been crudely—and permanently—interrupted.

  The remains of the Creusa were dismantled and repurposed or destroyed. Her passengers were never accounted for, and what fell upon them remains a mystery. But to this day, fishermen far into the sea off the safe shores of Echo Island say they can sometimes hear the low moans of their ghosts rolling along with the steady waves. They are looking for their ship. They are looking for home.

  Archer stared at the dramatic illustration of the Creusa that accompanied the entry. It looked somewhat like the painting hanging on the wall, but the book’s artist had thought to include a small skeletal hand holding up a lantern in the boat’s wave-crashed stern.

  It was a children’s book. He should have expected it would not provide any key insights into either the Creusa’s real fate, or their own. But something inside him seemed to warm, as if he had actually gotten closer to the solution to the mystery.

  He closed the book and rose to reexamine the painting. What bothered him most about the entire scene was how wild it was. Archer was most comfortable indoors, looking at books, crunching numbers, tracing lines, making predictions, and charting trajectories based on available data and experience. A ship in a storm was the very opposite of all predictability. You can chart your course by map or stars, as he was sure the Creusa’s captain had done. But the sea is chaos, the skies unmasterable. They are each too vast, too full of possibilities.

  Archer thought for a second what it might be like to be on that ship, to feel that you may at any second be wrecked, submerged, overthrown. Archer always thought drowning might be the worst way to die. But he didn’t know what he would have done if he felt a shipwreck was imminent.

  How did all twenty-four passengers just . . . vanish? No trace. How could they have all been swept overboard and none of their bodies ever been found washed up on the shores of the island?

  For Archer, the idea of some ghostly solution was out of the question. There had to be a rational explanation for their disappearance. And for the whole town’s disappearance, in his situation. But at the moment, he felt like that ship in the picture, without control and totally at the mercy of the overwhelming vastness of the world.

  He needed to sit down.

  Returning to the table, he retrieved the green notebook once again. The rolling, lolling swirls of the scribbles on those pages now before his eyes were like the waves of that stormy sea—unknowable, not navigable, overwhelming in their continuous onslaught. Word after word—if they were even words at all—streaming along, line after line, page after page, holding in their hammering grasp, as far as he knew, the keys to everything. Archer stared at them, into them, through them. He hoped to walk on these waves, to tame them.

  Bradley and Tim returned to Jason’s house. Tim was disappointed to find that neither of their friends had returned, and especially so after Bradley immediately began pouring himself drinks.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tim asked.

  “Tim,” said Bradley. “My main man. I’m not sure of anything right now.”

  Tim had never seen Bradley scared. Angry, yes. Frustrated, definitely. He’d seen him tired and even confused. But he didn’t think he’d ever seen him scared.

  “Here,” Bradley said. He pushed a glass of brow
n liquor across the table. “Sit a spell, junior.”

  Tim looked down at the glass. He had been drinking with Bradley before. He never liked it. He didn’t like the illegality of it. But he also didn’t like the taste. And he especially didn’t like what happened to Bradley when he drank. As far as Tim was concerned, Bradley was the last person on earth who needed to lower his inhibitions.

  And while he hated saying no to him, Tim said it anyway. “No, I’m good.”

  “Well, I guess you are,” Bradley said. “You. Jason. Archway. You’re all so good. It makes me sick.”

  It sounded like drunk talk, but he hadn’t yet taken a sip.

  Tim walked away. He went to look out the large picture window in the living room. The fog was gone, but the expanse above the houses was milky white, as if one thick monstrous cloud had settled over the island. It made the sky look like a big blank page.

  “Is there anything good in the pantry?” he called out.

  Bradley didn’t answer.

  Tim hung his head. He didn’t feel hungry, but that had never before stopped him from eating. He thought of all those beautiful cereal boxes back at the grocery.

  “Since they’re not here, I’m going for a walk,” he called over his shoulder.

  Bradley muttered from the kitchen, “Whatever.”

  Tim was scared to go outside alone, scared that whoever was in the Bee Market might surface again. But he walked out the door anyway. In that moment, anywhere felt safer than the house with a drunken, scared Bradley.

  Without a goodbye, he headed in the direction of the Bee Market.

  The fog eerily hovered just inside the woods around Cutter Pond. Jason was reluctant to reenter it, but he was sure the girl had gone in there. That is, if he hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing.

  Slowly he stepped, the softest crunch of grass and leaves beneath his feet sounding so much louder in his ears than they actually were. The mist indeed seemed draped along the trees, large swaths of thick vapor. It looked like it could even be felt, and he pushed his hand through, half expecting some material resistance.

  Once inside the tree line, he could not see but three or four feet in any direction. Still he pressed on, slowly, gingerly. Tree after tree came into view. The air was still, silent. There was no rattling of squirrels on fallen leaves, no fluttering of birds in the branches, not so much as a frog’s croak from the direction of the pond.

  He put one foot in front of the other and made his way cautiously to the interior woods, knowing he couldn’t be very far from the pond.

  As he neared the shore, the ground began to slope, becoming grassier. His feet were practically in mud when he stopped. There was no wind, no ripple on the pond. It was smooth as glass and the fog hovered over it like a low storm over a sea.

  Then he heard it.

  In the normal din of the forest, he might not have heard the sound. But in the eerie quiet of the moment, it was unmistakable. A foot striking the ground, perhaps into a protruding root. A hollow thump.

  He whirled around and saw nothing, of course, but the white veil around him. Still he called in the direction of the noise. “Who’s there? Hello?”

  Nothing.

  “I know you’re there. I saw you before. Please.”

  He tried to sound unthreatening.

  He listened intently. The quiet was unnerving.

  Again, less loudly. “Please.”

  Jason thought he could hear something now. What was it? A shuffling, like small feet through grass. Was it moving away? Or nearer?

  It seemed to get quieter. Definitely moving away.

  And right as he was about to run in the direction of the noise, thrusting himself into the obstacle course of a rush of unseen trees, a face pushed through the fog before him, and with it a long mane of brown hair. It was a girl in a white dress.

  8

  INTERSECTIONS

  It finally occurred to Tim just how unnaturally quiet the island was. The complete hush of anything mechanical or electronic was spooky enough, but he listened for birds, for the rustling of a breeze, for something. There was nothing. After the whole world sounded like it was crashing into their town during the thunderstorm, it was like they’d all been shut into some sensory deprivation chamber. The place looked the same, but it didn’t sound, smell, even feel the same.

  And maybe it wasn’t the same. Maybe they hadn’t reached the island at all but some cruel facsimile, some holographic hoax set as a trap by . . . what?

  He tried to think about what Archer might say. What if it wasn’t that everyone vanished, but that they weren’t on Echo Island at all? Archer had gone on and on once before about alternate dimensions, otherworlds created at some supposed cataclysmic cosmic moment, a parallel universe with higher elements and greater natural laws than our own. Archer never got far into that kind of thing before Tim got bored and tuned him out, or Bradley got bored and started making fun.

  Tim now wished Bradley had come with him. He did not like being alone with his thoughts. And as the edifices of the town center came closer and closer, he did not like being alone with whomever—or whatever—might be out there.

  Still, he walked down the sidewalk toward the Bee Market alone, creeping slowly with his left shoulder against the brick walls of the storefronts, pausing before every window and door to listen and peer in from a parallel angle, and then rushing past only to slow again when he reached the security of the exterior brick.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, Tim proceeded this way until he at last reached the grocery store again. Only then did it dawn on him that the dark interior of the store would be immensely more frightening than the daylight outside. And yet, he felt inexorably drawn in. The familiarity, the predictability, the orderliness of the place all offered a comfort he couldn’t explain. He opened the door and entered.

  At the historical society building, Archer felt like he was on a roll. Green notebook pressed flat on the table before him, he made his own scribbles on a sheet of paper next to it. He had convinced himself the writing was real. Not gibberish. A cypher. Some kind of code. Once his mind got going, it was difficult to turn off, and his points of inquiry and postulations began to divide into multiple streams of thought, branching off each other, intersecting and radiating out in bursting arrays of limbic impressions.

  For one thing, he realized why the situation felt so familiar to him. The historical anecdote of the Creusa became a referent pointing him back further. The lost colony of Roanoke! Yes. This had happened before. An entire town had disappeared. When old compatriots had returned to the town, they found it completely abandoned with only a cryptic note left behind. The mystery of the Roanoke colony persisted to this day, inspiring multiple theories.

  Archer had written roanoke at the top of his scratch paper and had set about testing basic keys to translating a section of the notebook. He took each apparent word in one line and divided it into its apparent “letters.” A few resembled the cursive form of letters in the Latin alphabet. Others looked more like Greek or Cyrillic characters. If the whole thing was a code, the characters might correspond to characters making up English words. One common means of deciphering was noting repetitious characters and testing them against common repetitions in the English language—ee, ll, tt, for examples.

  Two of the most common words in the English language are and and the. Archer looked for any instance of what might be a three-character word. With these two keys, it might prove possible to fill in other letters and determine other words, like solving a crossword puzzle. Archer had learned this from reading a book about the Zodiac Killer. The killer had sent coded letters to the newspaper and police, and two schoolteachers used that process to decipher one of them.

  He plugged away at his key for over an hour. Nothing was clicking. None of the repetitive characters seemed to correspond to commonly repeated letters, because none
of them resembled whole words in English with repetitive letters. And the few three-character words did not appear often enough or in the right places to be and or the. Most of them appeared at the end of sentences. This meant they could be other three-letter words, to be sure, but that would not help him crack the code.

  It’s not a code, he finally decided. All the evidence pointed the other way: it wasn’t a cypher; it was another language. And while Archer was fluent in both Spanish and French, as well as passable in German, Dutch, and Portuguese, this did not resemble any language he’d ever encountered. The biggest problem, of course, was the strange characters. This language was not using the Latin alphabet, not entirely anyway. Maybe it was a linguistic hybrid of some kind, using multiple alphabets. But that’s not another language. That’s a code.

  Unless, he thought, it’s a strange kind of dialect that combines alphabets the way some dialects combine languages.

  He looked at the word roanoke at the top of his musings. Certainly, it was a proper name, not a common word used for common things, but it began to grow strange in his mind. It struck his internal ear as foreign, nonsensical, like when one stares at any word too long, no matter how common, and it suddenly looks and sounds odd, even feels made up.

  The word hung in his thoughts, and he tested it against other memories. And then, there it was. Another word, just as strange, just as uncommon.

  Voynich.

  He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it already. There was something about the enduring mystery of the Roanoke colony that was connected to a book he’d read once about the Voynich manuscript, an old document discovered in the early 1900s that dates back to the 1400s. The unique thing about the Voynich manuscript is that it’s written in an unknown language.

  The pages are vellum, Archer remembered, and it was purchased from a rare-book dealer who did not recall how he came to acquire the manuscript. It’s full of illustrations, too, some of which seem to correspond to known flora and fauna, but others don’t seem to correspond to anything in the known world at all. Lots of people have tried to translate the manuscript. Some have deemed it an elaborate hoax. Other linguistic experts say it is too extensive and too variegated to be gibberish. It has all the markings of an actual language, albeit an otherwise undiscovered one.