It took only a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the space and as soon as they did, he noticed it. There on the ground in the center of the studio lay a wooden disc onto which had been carved an intricate and strange design.
It was the talisman.
22
JEFF PICKED UP THE disc from the ground and turned it over and over in his fingers. The last time he had seen it was back in the cave, when Savannah retrieved it after Jeff had flung it to the floor. And now it was back.
And Savannah was back, too.
He felt her before he saw her. Turning slowly, both eager and fearful, Jeff looked to his left to find Savannah seated on the ground, cross-legged. It was exactly the way she used to sit when…
A chill went up Jeff’s spine. When she was alive.
Jeff began to tremble. The first time he tried to speak, his voice sounded only in a hoarse squeak. He held the talisman out to her and tried again. “You brought this?” he said.
Savannah smiled a natural, friendly smile. “I returned it,” she said in the same strange language Jeff had first heard at the cave.
“Why?” Jeff said.
“It’s yours.”
Jeff stepped toward her. He said, “May I sit down?”
“Of course,” Savannah said. “But you mustn’t try to touch me. It isn’t possible.”
Jeff sat down before her and crossed his legs like her. He stared at her in wonder for a long time. She said nothing but simply smiled patiently. She looked solid, real…living.
Finally, Jeff said, “Are you a ghost?”
Savannah looked as if she were thinking of just the right words to say. “I am…myself.”
Jeff tried again. “Is this a dream?”
“Life is but a dream,” Savannah said. Then she laughed and added, “Row, row, row your boat.”
“Well,” Jeff said, feeling somehow more comfortable, “I’ve never been mocked from the Other Side.”
Savannah laughed. “Not that you know of!” she said.
“Why are you here?” Jeff asked.
Savannah again looked thoughtful. She reminded Jeff of someone from a foreign country trying to translate her thoughts into an unfamiliar language. “I am here so…” she thought again. “I am here so that you will know.”
“Know what?”
“What do you want to know?” Savannah asked.
Jeff threw his hands in the air and nearly shouted, “I want to know everything!”
“Typical Jeff,” she said. “Wanting more than you can get.”
Jeff shook his head. “All right, then,” he said. “I want to know whatever you can tell me.”
Savannah once more knitted her brow in thought. “This will not be easy to explain to you,” she said at length. “I cannot really tell you anything. But I can make you know.”
She stood up. “I can stay no longer.”
Jeff sprang to his feet, his arms outstretched. “No…please…”
Savannah stepped back. “Remember—you cannot touch me.”
Jeff dropped his arms and they hung dejectedly at his sides. “Don’t go. I’ve missed you so much.”
“I know,” she said.
“It was the stupidest thing I ever did…” he said. Tears began to course down his cheeks.
“I know,” she said.
Jeff said, weeping harder, “Do you hate me?”
Savannah smiled more brightly than ever. “I love you, Jeff. I will love you forever. I came to you, didn’t I? Beyond death. Beyond time. No one makes that journey through hate.”
“I love you,” Jeff said. “You’re the only woman I ever loved.”
Savannah said, “I know that, too. Everything is all right.” She began to fade from sight.
“No!” Jeff shouted. “Not yet! Tell me!” He gestured around the studio to all of his grotesque artworks. “What are these?”
Her voice was faint and her face looked as if it were behind a cloud of steam. “Those are directions,” she said. “From me to you. From you to me.”
And then she was gone.
Jeff collapsed to the ground, his body wracked with sobs. He clutched the talisman tightly in his hands and wept for what seemed like hours. And then, just as suddenly, he stopped weeping and sat upright, a look of wonder on his face. He couldn’t explain how or why, but now he knew. What Savannah had just said was true. She couldn’t explain anything to him, but she could make it so that he would know. And he did.
“Those are directions,” she had said. “From me to you. From you to me.” Savannah had drawn the designs in her sketchbook without knowing why, and once he was on the island, Jeff began to draw them himself. He had thought they were simply abstracts, interesting yet meaningless; and after they started coming to him almost every day, he began to think that his artwork held some sort of sinister motive. He was compelled to carve the talisman after seeing Savannah in his dream showing it to him, and mistakenly thought that it was there to ward off the evil that he met that day at the cave.
But the talisman and the other designs were simply, as Savannah explained, directions—signposts that would allow him to find her and she him, even when they were living in different dimensions. Jeff had once told her that the designs looked like hieroglyphics from a civilization that never existed and Savannah had answered, “Don’t be so sure.” And now he knew that the language did exist, and had always existed. But it was a language understood only by two people, that would bring them together in their hour of greatest need.
And Jeff also realized that he knew, with a degree of relief, that Savannah had not committed suicide. When she appeared in his dream with slashed wrists, he had made the natural assumption and blamed himself for her despair. But now he could recall the awful sequence of events of her final day almost as if he had seen them himself.
Three days after Jeff had left her weeping hysterically among her half-packed luggage, Savannah woke up feeling ill. She rushed into the bathroom and vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach but bile. After three days in a row of similar bouts of nausea, she noticed that her period was late. After still three more days of weeping and worrying, she went to see her gynecologist, who examined her thoroughly and then congratulated her on the impending arrival of her first child.
Jeff had already left for Australia and Savannah didn’t know what to do. He had made it clear enough that he wanted nothing more to do with her. If she came to him with the news that she was pregnant with his child, certainly he would think that she was trying to entrap him, tie him to her through a lifelong obligation. She couldn’t face the possibility that he would react to the news with disgust, horror, or anger. But she also knew that it was wrong to bear his child without his knowledge.
Savannah expected Jeff to return to Lochheath in the early summer, just after her graduation. She determined that she would meet with him then. She would be very pregnant indeed by that point and she would try to explain as calmly and as rationally as possible that she expected nothing from him and that if he wanted to have a relationship with his child, Savannah would try to remain as unobtrusive as possible.
But it was then that Savannah heard someone at school saying that Jeff wasn’t coming back. He was traveling straight from Sydney to Los Angeles. He might not come back to Scotland for a year or more. Maybe he would never come back. She went home to her apartment, unsure about what to do.
When she walked into her flat, she noticed her sketchbook lying open on the kitchen table. Savannah was puzzled—as a bitter memory of her time with Jeff, the sketchbook had been kept on a closet shelf for weeks. But now it was open to the pages that held some of the odd and unexplainable designs that she had drawn. One in particular caught her eye. When she drew it, it had seemed nothing more than a meaningless, if slightly unsettling, jumble of lines and curves. Now, the picture clearly contained the drawing of an airplane with the number 815 written on it.
Savannah was flabbergasted. She knew that she had drawn no su
ch thing.
Several other faculty members and students had corresponded with Jeff while he was in Sydney, so it was little trouble to find out the name of his hotel. And when she called there to find that he had already checked out, she asked the name of the airline. The clerk had arranged for the cab and told her Jeff was flying on Oceanic.
Savannah rushed to her computer, logged on, and began searching for information about the flights leaving that day from Sydney to Los Angeles. There was only one.
Flight 815.
Panicking, Savannah rushed from her apartment, jumped into her car, and began speeding toward the local airport. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do once she got there, but she had the vague idea of flying to Los Angeles. To protect Jeff.
The traffic was infuriatingly slow on the road to the airport and Savannah kept her hand pressed to the car horn, all the while knowing that it would do nothing to speed things along. When she found herself trapped behind a slow-moving garbage lorry, Savannah impulsively veered her car onto the shoulder of the road to pass on the left side. The shoulder was narrower than she expected and her car plunged off the road into a gully. Instinctively, Savannah let go of the steering wheel and held her hands in front of her to shield herself from the impact. Both of her arms crashed through the windshield; the shattered glass cut wide gashes across the veins in her wrists.
Savannah gingerly drew her arms back inside, recognizing with ultimate irony that she probably would have remained uninjured if she had kept both hands on the wheel. She stared in shocked bemusement as her blood pulsed out in thick, dark geysers. Looking to the side, she saw a cow in a pasture, watching her curiously. She was gazing into the cow’s large eyes when everything went dark.
Savannah had known that Jeff had to be protected from something and she had died trying to come to his aid. And now Jeff knew, as tears stung at his eyes, that even after death, she had recognized from wherever she was that at least one of the island’s mysteries was going to bring him greater danger than ever. And so she came again, and rescued him at last.
The speckles of light from the sun began to disappear and the interior of the studio was almost totally dark before Jeff stirred. He felt like he had been asleep but knew that he hadn’t been. And once again, he felt as if he had been dreaming. But he hadn’t been—he knew that he had only been listening to what Savannah had been telling him.
23
BRILLIANT SHAFTS OF BLUE and gold streaked across the sky as the sun prepared to make its final plunge below the horizon. At one point in his life Jeff would have likened the gorgeous sight to a Maxfield Parrish painting. But now he took the beauty of the sunset on its own terms. As he emerged from the studio, his arms filled with island artwork, he paused for a few seconds to bask in the vibrant colors of sunset, and then moved on to the pile. All of the statues, sculptures, carvings, drawings—everything he had made since he arrived on the island—were now unceremoniously stacked down on the beach near the huge piece of fuselage, that somber monument to Flight 815.
Or perhaps “unceremoniously” was the wrong word. Jeff had gathered up the pieces, carried them across the sand, and readied them for something that felt very much like a ritual. This would be his farewell to the darkness of the past, his embrace of a new and, he hoped, better life, a celebration of his conviction that the rest of that life would be spent right here on this island, with these people.
Jeff was comfortable, almost happy, with the idea. Returning to Scotland now had no appeal to him. Without Savannah it would seem only like a cold, hard place filled with bittersweet memories of all that he had lost through his own pride and stupidity. There was much here on the island that was mysterious, much that was frightening, and much that was dangerous. But, Jeff felt, couldn’t that be said for nearly anywhere in the world? On this remote tropical isle, there was also beauty and at least the potential for tranquility. He would take the good with the bad and he would make the best of it.
Jeff saw Kate sitting and chatting with Sun. He called out to her and both women waved at him. Kate arose, said a few words to Sun, and then trotted over to Jeff.
“Hey there,” she said. “Housecleaning?”
Jeff nodded. “Now that it’s getting dark, I thought all this would make a lovely bonfire,” he said. “Want to join me?”
Kate smiled. “It is getting a little chilly,” she said. “Light ’er up!”
Jeff took the piece of paper on which he had drawn the disturbing portrait of the shadow creatures and crumpled it loosely into a ball. He pulled out the cigarette lighter he had borrowed from Sawyer, flicked it once, and then held the tiny flame to the paper. When it was lit, Jeff carefully placed the burning drawing into a hollow place he had prepared near the bottom of the pile. Soon, the dry wood, paper, and leaves were blazing brightly.
Now they’re beautiful, Jeff thought. All those terrible things…
“Nice,” Kate said.
Jeff nodded. “Yes. It’s rather like a funeral pyre, isn’t it?”
Kate laughed. “Well, pleased to meet you, Mr. Morbid.”
Jeff laughed, too. “No, I meant it in a far more positive way. This is a funeral for a lot of bad stuff. Good riddance.”
They watched the yellow and orange flames dance brightly for a few moments and then Kate said, “You’ve never told me the real story, you know.”
“About the cave?” Jeff said. “Of course I did.”
“Hey, don’t lie to a liar,” Kate said. “There was something else that happened that day. Something you wouldn’t tell anybody about.”
Jeff’s face and eyes reflected the fire as he considered whether to tell Kate the whole story about Savannah. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he said after a moment.
Kate grinned and said, “No.”
Jeff laughed again, harder this time. “Neither do I,” he said. “But I believe in angels.”
The next morning Jeff awoke in the studio once more. Now that all of his artwork was nothing more than a pile of ashes, the place seemed positively cheery again. Sure the caves might be safer, but Jeff decided that he liked it here and here he was going to stay.
But I know one thing that will spruce the place up, he thought.
He pulled a piece of paper from the suitcase where he had kept it for the past weeks. Unfolding it, he carefully smoothed out the creases. Then he placed the sheet of paper on the ground, propped up against the trunk of a thick bamboo tree. It was the superhero drawing that Walt gave him the day after the incident at the cave.
I won’t be able to get any glass, but I can carve a nice frame. That would be a good project, Jeff thought.
Jeff sat for a moment looking at the drawing, smiling. Then he realized that for the first time in over a month, he had awakened inspired to create something. He fished in his suitcase for another piece of paper. There wasn’t much left; he’d have to be very careful from here on out.
He propped the suitcase on his knees so that he could use it as a desk and then he took out one of his two surviving pens and began to draw.
This picture was not filled with the strange, unsettling shapes and imagery of his previous island work. It was a portrait of Savannah. Now there was no surrealistic setting, no homage to other artists or styles. This was a representation of her face drawn with as much detail as love could muster, an image of optimism, beauty, and tranquility. It was a portrait that Jeff hoped might help to free them both from the ugly mistakes of the past.
The last time Jeff saw Savannah alive she had been weeping in agony at the pain he had caused her. The last words she said to him then were, “You will never live a day of your life without thinking of me.”
Jeff Hadley smiled and continued sketching. Savannah’s prediction was true so far, and Jeff knew that it would be true for the rest of his life.
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