Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Now, Barry Bleecker was certainly no stranger to storms. He was on the sort of intimate terms with them unique to young men born in America’s middle. He had come to know them very well in the rush of oak-knocking wind that always announced a tornado’s arrival. The tone of the Emergency Broadcast System was never far behind, but Barry’s nose, finely calibrated over the course of a boyhood of such storms, could smell them coming from a mile away. In fact, they haunted his dreams still. His one and only recurring nightmare was of being back on his family’s farm in Macoupin County, Illinois, exposed and vulnerable in a cornfield and watching the dragon claws of a twister descend from the clouds. True, Barry had never actually seen a tornado firsthand—they always seemed to strike just a suburb away or one town over. But he had spent his childhood in their barometric shadow, and the storms that spawned them cut through his thin Presbyterian veneer and shook him down to his Baptist soul.

  Which was why Barry knew something was seriously amiss long before there was any obvious sign. His nose had been twitching all morning. The disquieting stillness, the conspiracy of pressures, an electrical tang in the very molecules of the air—it was all too familiar. When the ragged edges of the sky took on an almost phosphorescent glow, it only made him that much more sure of it. Had he been in Illinois, his grandparents might have taken him to the root cellar. Had the feeling presented itself in Ohio, there was always the security of the cinder-block basement. But there was nothing beneath them on the island but sand, and precious little shelter from the whims of the sea.

  “Why do you keep doing that?” Sophie finally asked in annoyance.

  “Doing what?”

  “Raising your head and sniffing, like some kind of dog.”

  Barry didn’t answer for a moment. He set down the banana peel he’d been scraping out with a clamshell and took a squinting survey of the horizon. “I’m not sure. But I think something’s not right.”

  “We’ve been on this shitty island for almost a year now and you just figured that out?”

  “No, seriously, I mean it.” He stood up just in time to catch an unusually cool breeze, sending a familiar wave of goose bumps rippling across his bare skin.

  Sophie set aside her banana peels as well and conducted her own scan of the horizon.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It looks normal to me. A little overcast, but it’s like this all the time during the rainy season.”

  “The rainy season should be almost over. This feels different.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes theatrically in Barry’s direction. “So we’re going off feelings now? Is that it?”

  “Just turn on the radio. Maybe we can get something from Tahiti.”

  “Turn it on yourself, imbécile.”

  Normally, Barry would have responded with an insult, possibly even a cruel mimicry of her French accent, but on this day, he did not. Instead, he fetched the radio from the bag of survival gear in their shelter, gave it a minute’s worth of cranks, and spent another finding the station. There was considerable interference, which was unusual. Some of it almost sounded like conversation, a low burble of background noise clotting up the airwaves. But the signal from Tahiti at last came warbling through the static, in French, of course, and Barry asked Sophie to listen. She did so, reluctantly.

  “It’s just some bulletin about the mayor of Papeete going fishing with a church group. And something about a quilting contest.”

  “Keep listening.”

  “Pfff.” She expressed her aggravation in the usual fashion but did keep her ear cocked toward the shortwave. Slowly, her eyes began to narrow.

  “Anything?”

  “Shhhh!” Evidently, there was.

  The broadcast ended shortly thereafter, at which point Sophie clicked off the radio.

  “Well?”

  “Comment dit-on ‘cyclone’ en anglais?”

  “Cyclone. It’s the same word. Or hurricane.”

  “Alors, the man said a big one is moving to the north and west of Tahiti, but it is not supposed to hit any islands, and should not be a threat. You see? No big deal.”

  “Not a big deal to anyone on Tahiti, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re not on Tahiti.”

  “Putain de merde, Barry, what do you want me to do, become a météorologue? The man said it was fine, and you’re probably worried about nothing.”

  “Nothing, huh?” He sat back down and returned to his old banana peels, from which they had been hoping to scrape enough starch to make up for a lost meal. “You’re probably right.”

  And the two of them went back to work, Barry’s nose twitching and skin prickling all the while, his entire body on high alert. He did his best to ignore it. The last thing he was in the mood for was another pointless fight.

  As for Sophie, she may not have had much experience with storms, but she did know a thing or two about animals. Her grandparents had used the summers that she and her brother spent in the Pyrenees to pass on as much as they could of the region’s ample inheritance of folk wisdom. When a chamois goat came crashing down from the tree line and ran frantic circles in their village, her grandfather explained that it was suffering from a blinding sickness, a sign of general misfortune and a great danger to sheep. When a chorus of wolf howls rang out from the Spanish side of the Cirque de Gavarnie, her grandmother assured her that a June snow was coming, with the first miraculous flakes falling that same day. And when a dozen lammergeier vultures appeared circling over the church one Sunday after mass, both of her grandparents shuddered at the omen—and sure enough, an avalanche devoured two of the town’s shepherds just before sunset.

  Which was precisely why, when, several minutes later, the island’s entire colony of sooty terns alighted from their rocks to circle the sky, Barry’s concerns took on for Sophie a fresh sense of relevancy. Urgency, too. Maybe he wasn’t entirely full of merde after all. The two of them climbed to their feet simultaneously, dropped their clamshells and banana peels, and gaped at the spectacle of a thousand birds blotting out the sun. The swarm did three counterclockwise revolutions high over their heads before elongating into a snake that climbed into the clouds.

  And then they were gone. An island’s worth of seabirds vanished in less than a minute.

  “Bordel. Have you ever seen them do that before?”

  Barry shook his head, slack-jawed and confounded by the thing he had witnessed. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  Sophie grimaced and reconsidered her position. “You were right. Something is happening—this isn’t normal.”

  The same unusually chill wind from before picked up again, this time with a troubling insistency—the palm fronds reacted with a collective hiss, their silvery undersides exposed by the gust. Sophie shuddered visibly and hugged her arms across her chest. Barry rubbed at the haggardness of his beard, pondering the possibilities. Something was coming, and the sudden exodus of the birds was simply an augur of that fact.

  “Let me see that radio. I’ll be back in a bit. Try to stay by the shelter, and if anything happens, shoot the flare gun—I left it right next to the survival kit.”

  Sophie nodded, unusually cooperative. “Be careful.”

  “I will.” And he kissed her on the cheek.

  21

  Barry’s reason for grabbing the radio and heading to the rocks was twofold: first, to gain a better vantage point and determine if indeed anything was heading their way; and second, to locate a better source of shelter in case there was. He jogged through the underbrush—by this point bending rather violently to the wind—and began scrambling up the boulders at the base of the island’s central peak, ever mindful of the shortwave under his arm. Generally, his climb would have been met by the screeches of the terns that inhabited its crannies, and he found their absence eerie and disarming; there was nothing but the whistling of the wind and the eighth notes of his heart.

  Two-thirds of the way up, he found something. Not much of a c
ave per se, it was far too small and shallow to really dub it as such. But a crevice, a fissure in the rock face just big enough to harbor two crouching refugees from wind and rain. He made a mental note of its location and continued his climb, arriving at the summit just a few minutes later. He caught his breath and took an appraisal of the sea.

  Barry noticed it immediately. Almost like glitter, a bleary scintillation in an unusually dark corner of the horizon. He used his index finger to adjust his contacts, thinking it might be some problem with the lenses, and squinted more closely.

  No, it wasn’t a problem with his contacts. It was lightning. It couldn’t be anything else. Dozens upon dozens of flickering bolts. Hundreds, possibly. Granted, it was miles away, but still—even the very worst electrical storms he’d seen on the Illinois prairie paled in comparison. This was more like the grand finale of a distant fireworks show, but far from being the end, it felt like just the beginning.

  He gave the radio’s little generator handle a few cranks, until the Tahitian station it was tuned to jump-started back to life. But again, there was something else there as well. Background voices, traces of multiple far-off conversations, even more numerous from the top of the mountain. He fiddled with the dial until the voices faded, and the broadcast came through loud and clear. The Monkees’ eponymous hit, “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees,” was playing, something that would have been good for a chuckle under different circumstances. But Barry didn’t even crack a smile. He elongated the telescopic antenna and began moving it in a slow circle, taking careful note of where the signal was strongest. It reached a crescendo just at “People say we monkey around,” the words shedding the static and becoming instantly sharp. Barry stopped there, the antenna poised like a weather vane to the southeast. That was surely the direction of the Tahitian station. It had to be. And if the cyclone was headed “harmlessly” to the north and west of the islands … well, he didn’t need a trained meteorologist to tell him that was bad news. It meant it was coming right at them.

  And as if to put an emphatic accent aigu over his realization, a lash of stinging rain came from out of nowhere, or rather somewhere way up in the churning clouds above. It arrived in three sharp blasts and then steadied itself to a gusty drizzle.

  Even quicker than he had come up, Barry scurried back down, hopscotching over the boulders and dodging through the palm grove. When he reached Sophie, she was standing in front of their thatched hut, pointing out across the ocean.

  “Barry, regarde. The waves.”

  The coral reef that circled the island (and sheltered it, for that matter) a hundred meters out had become a ring of seething white foam. Acting like a seawall, it was catching the big waves before they reached the shore; their bases cut out, they were breaking over the top of it.

  “Fuckin’ birds were right.” He grinned at Sophie, who did not appear to share his amusement. “I think the cyclone is coming this way.”

  “But what do we do? This could be a very dangerous situation, non?”

  “If things get bad, there’s a little cave up on the side of the rocks we can hide out in. We should be okay there. In the meantime, we can stay here in the shelter and wait.”

  Barry ducked inside the palm hut to get out of the wind and the rain, which by then had taken a turn for the vicious. He tucked the radio back into the waterproof duffel bag, beside their other essentials, and zipped it securely shut. Sophie followed him in, her brown eyes wide with mounting concern.

  “And how do we know if things get bad?”

  “Trust me, we’ll—”

  And just like that, they did. The first of the big waves came without warning—it breached the reef as a soundless swell that Barry and Sophie only half noticed out of the corners of their eyes. When it struck the beachhead, however, its sneak attack was revealed with the force of a bomb blast, causing the very ground beneath their feet to shudder. The two castaways instinctively crouched, just as one does when startled by a close clap of thunder. The wave’s humpback exploded into a white swirl of foam that came careening all the way to the edge of the shelter.

  “Merde!” Sophie poked her head out to examine the wet line the wave had left only feet from the entrance. “Should we go, Barry?”

  “I don’t think we need to just yet.”

  At which point, a shredding gust of what was already very strong wind ripped back most of the roof above, sending palm fronds cartwheeling across the sand and making a wild dance of the blue tarp beneath.

  “Barry!” Sophie shouted his name into the wind as the structure and all hell both broke loose around them.

  “Come here, I’ve got you.” Barry threw his arms around her and shielded her from the whipping cords and thrashing leaves; the wind was suddenly nettled with rain, and their skin stung from the storm-whipped sand. Several grains lodged themselves painfully in his contact lenses; he was in the middle of repositioning one when he noticed a second monster cresting the reef. This wave was even larger than the first, and he had already grabbed Sophie’s hand and spun in the direction of the island’s interior when it erupted across the shoreline behind them.

  “Run!” was all Barry had time to shout, yanking Sophie out of the hut and toward what he hoped would be safety. A surge of seawater caught them knee-deep as they cleared the sand and entered into the palms, all of which were bowed and thrashing in the storm. For once, Sophie didn’t argue, and Barry didn’t question—they both simply ran, legitimately terrified by what was happening around them. One by one, trunks began snapping, each resounding like a twelve-gauge shotgun blast. Several trees collapsed right in front of them, blocking the trail and causing Barry to change his zigzag course. They did not see but rather felt a third wave blindside their island, its entire stone core quaking from the force. And more were coming.

  Barry didn’t even break stride when they reached the first rain-slicked boulders of the mountain; he leapt upon them nimble as a cat and turned to help Sophie pull herself up.

  “The little cave is close to the top. We’ll be safe there.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  As he had noted, it really was more of a half-sheltered outcropping than an actual cave, but it would have to do. Together, they scrambled up the steep rock face, ever mindful of the slippery moss and pockets of bird guano, the latter of which turned to a slick paste when mixed with the rain. At several points in the climb, Sophie became stuck, but Barry was always right there at her side, ducking back down to lend her a helpful tug or a strategic boost, in a way that, although she would not have admitted it then, reminded her of her grandfather during her childhood hikes in the Pyrenees. Barry and Sophie barked their elbows and skinned their knees but were otherwise safe and sound when they got to the mouth of the crevice and tumbled soaked and panting onto its cold stone floor.

  At last perched safe from the roaring winds and the smashing waves, they dared to look out at the storm that surrounded them. Barry was dumbfounded, amazed by the violent turn it had taken since his first glimpse from the summit. It was genuinely terrific. Not in the word’s more pedestrian sense, but in its original Latinate meaning: full of terror. The sky and sea were welded at the seams into a single image of hell, with kohl-black mists, gouts of red steam, and monster waves reaping their way across it. It was like something out of a Bosch painting, but at least they were safe up there, sheltered by the rocks and out of harm’s …

  Crap.

  Barry’s stomach sank. It suddenly occurred to him.

  “I’ve got to go back down.”

  “What? Are you out of your mind?”

  “We left everything in the shelter. All of it.”

  The matches, the freshwater, the solar still, the flare gun, the fishing gear, the utility knife, the radio, the energy bars, the first-aid kit—not to mention the inflatable life raft—everything they needed to ensure their survival was in a waterproof duffel bag in what remained of their shelter. If the waves hadn’t already washed it awa
y, they surely would soon.

  “Barry, it’s okay, just stay here, please.”

  But he knew it wasn’t okay. Far from it, in fact. That survival kit was their only hope.

  “I’ll be back. I promise.” And with that he planted a smooch on her cheek and bounded down over the edge, leaving a desperate Sophie screaming his name just as a beast of a wave, several orders of magnitude larger than the giants that had preceded it, emerged from the depths off toward the horizon.

  22

  The term lost everything is one bandied about loosely in this day and age. More often than not, it’s attached to an acrimonious divorce settlement or a declaration of bankruptcy. Oh, they lost everything, the misfortune is detailed in a scandalous whisper. But how often is it actually true? How many people out there—living people, for the dead are surely exempt in such matters—have ever truly lost everything? Certainly a treasured automobile or a cherished home or even a beloved spouse is painful to part with. But everything?

  When Sophie first tumbled from the deflating raft in the immediate aftermath of the plane crash, she had lost a great deal. The people she loved, the life she had enjoyed, the simple pleasures of normal existence … all those things had been severed from her being by the sharp shank of that ill-timed bolt. But she had not truly lost everything. She still possessed a modicum of hope and at least one other human being, as imperfect as he was, to share it with. And it was only that small remainder of a normal life that discouraged her from doing what she had almost done alone on the water. It wasn’t much of a reason to keep on living, but it was something.