by J. G. Kemp
The Journals of Evergreen Isle
Book 1
Mary Andromeda
and the
AMAZING EYE
J.G. Kemp
Stories in Science
For L, C, and D, with love,
– J.G. Kemp
Copyright © 2016 by J.G. Kemp
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
For contact information, visit:
storiesinscience.com
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help
him to find it within himself.” – Galileo Galilei
and also, of course…
…you can only help her to find it within herself.
Prologue
The Discovery of Evergreen Isle
From the Journal of Captain Ralph W.
… the sky was ablaze with lightning, and the constant roar of thunder, and wind, and the crashing waves, and the creaking and groaning of the ship filled our ears, without pause. Great collapsing walls of water pounded the deck, and the Fellowship Explorer trembled and quaked with the heaving swell, over mountains of ocean and through canyons of liquid sea.
Yet on the night of the third day, the storm weakened, the winds and waves settled, and in the early morning hours, shortly before dawn, the clouds lifted and clear stars shone overhead.
As we gathered on deck and gazed up at the heavens, a faint green and blue glow appeared on the northern horizon—and then pinks and reds and oranges. It was the Northern Lights! The Aurora Borealis! The ribbons of light grew brighter and danced overhead and then a sudden flash pierced the sky—and then another, and another, and another—hundreds upon hundreds of shooting stars! We stood, speechless, transfixed at the scene above, until the wonderful lights faded away, into the blue sky of dawn.
And what a dawn it was! On the distant horizon was the storm through which we had passed. By the mighty winds of those terrible clouds our ship had been tossed and tattered, like a child’s toy, but we had survived—for days we had survived—and there, there was the rising sun, shining over all.
O sun! Glorious, golden, wonderful light! Our strength was renewed, our spirits refreshed. There was hope! And as we rejoiced in rays of that magnificent orb, a voice rang out—as clear and pure as a bell—and carved deep into my very soul.
“Land Ho!”
My eyes looked to the herald and followed his pointed finger to the west, and there, rising from the sea and cloaked in brilliant green, was the great mountain…
The Island!
Chapter 1
The Forbidden Room
Mary Andromeda crept, silently, towards the top of the stairs. She peered between the narrow spindles of the railing, her eyes fixed on the room below, like a lioness stalking her captors from behind the bars of a cage. Her little sister, Cassiopeia Andromeda, followed behind.
“Mary, we shouldn’t do this,” the younger girl whispered nervously.
Mary’s eyes scanned the room—the open entry hall of her uncle’s mansion. “Don’t worry, it’ll just be a minute.” She took another silent step forward… and another.
“But… what if we get caught? Uncle Edwin would—”
“He won’t be back until after the meeting. We have time.” Mary crawled onto the top stair. She listened… she heard the thumping of her heartbeat, and her sister’s breathing, and the sound of an airplane outside, and the ticking of the large clock in the room below.
“Mary, I don’t—”
“Come on!” Mary pounced down the stairs. Her slender legs blurred under her flapping yellow summer dress, and her curly blond hair bounced with each step. Her sister followed behind.
After reaching the bottom stair, Mary rushed across the entry hall and slipped into a corridor, like a mouse, hunted, running for its life along the cracks of the stone floor. She glanced over her shoulder—no one had seen them—and scurried along, hovering close to the wall, until she reached the end of the passage and stopped in front of a door. An unusually large door. A rose-red door with a strange, spiral letter ‘A’ carved into the wood. The forbidden door, that she had been told never to open. Ever.
… or so said Uncle Edwin.
Mary withdrew a large metal key, with a similar spiral ‘A’ design, from her dress pocket.
“Mary, I still don’t think—”
“Of course you don’t, Cassie,” Mary said sharply. “Don’t be so afraid.” Mary eased the key into the keyhole—metal scraped against metal—the sound echoed down the hallway and throughout the house.
“Shhhh,” whispered Cassie.
Mary listened… the house was silent. She turned the key—the lock clicked. “Come on, let’s go, hurry.” She twisted the knob, flung the door open, brushed her little sister inside, took one last glance down the hallway, and stepped forward, into the Forbidden Room.
Then quietly closing the door behind her, she placed one ear against it, and listened… they were alone. She took a deep breath… and smelled books—musty old books. She turned from the door and gazed at the scene within.
The room was circular, and large, at least two stories high, and there was paper everywhere—piles upon piles of paper—books, journals, and loose pages. Stacks of paper towered above them like the columns of a Greek ruin, and collapsed rows of paper, waist-high, lined the floor like the walls of a maze. Mary imagined huge paper sea-monsters, writhing and thrashing in a rolling paper sea, flinging and hurling paper everywhere, in a violent fury, destroying some ancient and forgotten paper temple.
“What happened here?” said Mary, astonished. She stepped towards a collapsed pile of journals which lay near her feet.
“Wow, look at that,” whispered Cassie, pointing up at the ceiling. It was a sky-blue dome, painted with billowing white clouds, and in the middle was a large circular window, like the pupil of an eye, through which sunlight poured in.
“Why would this room be forbidden?” asked Mary, puzzled. “It’s beautiful.”
Cassie shrugged. “Maybe Uncle Edwin doesn’t want us to see how messy it is?”
“It’s just books and journals and paper, what’s the big deal?” said Mary. She pushed her glasses farther up her nose.
“What’s the big deal?… it looks like a library exploded, and then it rained books for a day, and then it all exploded again,” said Cassie.
“There has to be something here,” said Mary, “something more important than messy piles of paper.” She picked a journal off the floor in front of her. It was covered in dust. She wiped it off and read the title out loud, “The Flora and Fauna of Evergreen Isle.” She thumbed through the pages and stopped at a drawing of a tree and read the caption, “the Evergreen Isle Cedar is the largest tree species on the island, towering upwards of 30 meters, with a diameter that typically exceeds 2 meters but not more than 3 meters.”
Mary paused and looked up at Cassie. “Well… that certainly seems like a top-secret, hide-in-a-locked-room, never-let-anyone-read-it sort of thing.” She set the journal down and picked up another. “A Study of Evergreen Isle Tide-pools,” she read and rolled her eyes. “I better not even open that, sounds dangerous.”
Cassie giggled.
Mary liked the sound; she liked making her sister laugh. She picked up another journal, pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose, stuck her chin up in the air, and read the title in a dignified voice
, “The Mathematics of Evergreen Isle Pinecones.”
Cassie laughed out loud and then quickly covered her mouth.
“Really? The Mathematics of Pinecones?” Mary said. She picked up another journal, opened it with a flourish, cleared her throat with an aristocratic cough, and read again, “this unusual pattern of rotation defies the accepted laws of gravity…”
Cassie laughed harder while trying to muffle the sound with her hands.
“… and is but one of the mysterious,” Mary began to gesture with her finger for emphasis, “… and wonderful …,”
Cassie was laughing out loud.
“… qualities of the Andromeda—”
The laughing stopped. Cassie looked serious. “Andromeda?” she asked, “Who’s that one by?”
Mary closed the journal—the cover was blank. She opened it to the first page and read the inscription aloud,
The Journal of Vera Andromeda
“Mom’s?” Cassie asked.
“Yeah… I think so,” said Mary.
Mary flipped through the journal, scanning the words on one page before turning to another. “Looks like it’s about stars and galaxies and gravity, with lots of numbers and charts.” She turned back to the first page and stared at her mother’s name.
“I like her handwriting,” said Cassie.
Mary traced the letters slowly with her finger. “Yeah, me too. Why would Uncle Edwin have Mom’s journal in here, and why would it be forbidden?” she asked, puzzled.
“I don’t know, but maybe there’s more,” Cassie said excitedly. She quickly dropped to her knees, pulled a journal from the pile, and glanced inside it… and then set it down and picked up another. Mary joined her.
As the minutes passed, the sunlight pierced through the window overhead, landing on the floor like the beam of a spotlight, and crawled, slowly, over the sea of paper, as the earth turned, and the angle of light changed, and the sisters searched.
“Mary look!” Cassie called out. “Mom’s sisters—the ones from the accident.” She read, “The Classification and Composition of Stars by Annie and Cecilia Andromeda.” She flipped through the pages and then frowned and set the journal down. “More stuff about space… nothing about Mom.”
Mary picked out an old-looking, tattered journal at the bottom of the pile and opened it. The title was written in flowing cursive script. “Hey! Listen to this!” She read, “The Founding Documents of the Royal Fellowship Society, compiled by Caroline Andromeda.”
“Grandma?” asked Cassie.
“What’s the Royal Fellowship Society?” wondered Mary. She flipped through the yellow and brittle pages.
creak…
A sound came from inside the house. Cassie gasped. Mary cocked her ear towards the door. They waited…
BANG—the silence was broken. It was the slam of the front door. They had lingered too long. Uncle Edwin was home.
“Oh no!” said Cassie. She looked at Mary, eyes wide, waiting for instructions.
Mary thought for a moment. “We can’t leave now. If he doesn’t see us leaving the room, he’ll see us leaving the hallway. We have to wait. Maybe he’ll go upstairs, or into his office, and we can sneak out then.”
A faint sound of footsteps came from the entry hall. Uncle Edwin was pacing, back and forth, at the base of the staircase.
“Oh no, he’s pacing again,” whispered Cassie, “we could be here for hours.”
As they waited, Mary imagined a mouse, trapped in a hole, patiently waiting for the slim chance to slip out, unnoticed, past the dangling claws of a hungry cat. But soon, the sound of the pacing stopped and was followed by the creaking of the staircase and footsteps on the second floor, which gradually moved off into a different part of the mansion.
“Thank goodness,” said Cassie, relieved.
Mary listened… the house was silent again. She stood and handed her grandmother’s journal to Cassie and smoothed her dress over her legs. “Bring the one from Mom and Mom’s sisters. We’ll go through the parlor and out the kitchen door to the treehouse. He’ll think we were there the whole time. He’ll never know.”
“What about the key,” asked Cassie, “what if he finds it’s missing?”
“We’ll worry about that later, come on.” Mary opened the door as quietly as she could, and Cassie slipped out. Mary followed and then carefully locked the door, dropped the key into her dress pocket, and led the way back down the corridor. Please don’t catch us, please don’t catch us, she thought.
Before crossing the open entry-hall, Mary peered around the corner, up the stairs to the second floor. Uncle Edwin was nowhere in sight. Mary took a deep breath, grabbed her sisters hand, and without saying a word, ran towards the parlor—past the staircase, under the chandelier, and past the front door. Almost there, she thought.
She ran through the parlor—past the couches and coffee tables. The kitchen hallway was just around the corner. Please don’t catch us, please don’t catch us, she thought again. As she rounded the corner her foot caught the rug on the parlor floor—she tripped—she tumbled forward. Cassie tumbled into her—the journals fell—the heavy metal key flew out of Mary’s pocket. She crashed into an end-table. The key landed, clanking, on the stone floor. The vase on the end-table wobbled, back and forth, before it fell over and shattered next to the tangled sisters…
When the clangor had faded away, the house was silent. Uncle Edwin loomed over them, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed, his black eyes fixed and empty—as usual—like he was staring at something far away. “What’s this?” he asked, in his calm, cold, heartless voice, as he slowly reached for the fallen journals and his key to the Forbidden Room.
Chapter 2
Sent Away
The sun was setting, and Mary lay on her bed, staring blankly at a shaft of light which was falling through a crack in the curtains. Specks of dust were dancing, weightless, in the sunbeam, slowly twisting… and spinning… and rolling through the air. Mary imagined she was dust herself, carried up on gentle eddies and floating freely around the room. She heard the chirping of crickets and the hum of an airplane in the world outside. She was hungry; since she had opened the forbidden door, she had been locked in her bedroom, allowed only bread and water, for five days.
The sky grew darker, and the shaft of light slowly faded, and Mary heard footsteps in the hall. She sat upright and straightened her yellow summer dress, and pushed her glasses farther up her nose. The footsteps approached, and a key scraped in the lock. The door opened, and her Uncle Edwin entered.
He stood tall and was wearing his usual gray suit and silver tie. His straight black hair was combed to the side. He was frowning, and he fixed his empty, staring eyes upon Mary. Mary stared back.
“Your mother left you, little girl, with me,” he said scornfully. “I decide what you may do, and I decide where you will go.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stood even taller. “Tomorrow, you will leave this house, and you will go to the Institute. You will stay there… indefinitely. Pack a suitcase, the car will arrive at nine o’ clock, do not be late.” And he quickly glanced down at his watch and abruptly turned to leave.
Mary was stunned. Leaving? “What… what about my sister? What about Cassie?” she said hurriedly.
Her uncle did not stop; he strode out of the room and walked briskly down the hall. “Your sister will remain here,” he called over his shoulder.
“What!? No! I won’t leave her!” Mary shouted, “You can’t—” She scrambled off the bed and began to run after him but Cassie stopped her.
“Mary don’t,” Cassie whispered, “it’ll only make it worse.” Cassie had been listening from the hall, just outside the door.
“But—” Mary froze; she couldn’t think straight. Cassie’s eyes were red and her cheeks were flushed and wet. “But—”
“Please Mary, don’t argue with him.” Cassie grabbed Mary’s hands. “Please.”
“But—”
Cassie looked into Mary’s eyes, one and then the other, back and forth.
“He can’t… I… but…” Mary’s words stumbled out. She knew Cassie was right. She knew that arguing with her uncle would only make it worse. She listened to his footsteps fade away in the house and the sound of his office door closing before she retreated, powerlessly, back into her bedroom, back into her burrow. Cassie followed her.
“Mary, what’s happening?” Cassie asked fearfully. “What’s the Institute?”
Mary pushed the door closed and shuffled to her bed. “It’s that school, the one in Port Oceanside.”
