by Trisha Telep
Nothing.
“Listen. You get your ass up those stairs right this instant, or I will call your mother.”
There was a pause and then I heard a small giggle. I swallowed and swore all kinds of curses in my head. My mobile was in my duffle bag, and my duffle bag had been stolen. I eyed the antique phone. If ever there was an emergency, this was it. I didn’t care if Ethan thought I was nuts. Maybe I was nuts. But I wasn’t alone on Tern Island and someone was playing tricks. I picked up the house phone. There was static interference on the line, and then I heard a child sing slyly,“Beaaaa-uh.”
“Who is this? Hello?”
The static increased and I had to move the phone away from my ear. The cellar door swung wildly and then slammed shut, making me jump. The latch fell into place.
Ethan, get me off this island now.
I brought the receiver back to my ear. The static was fainter now, and I could hear the ghost of other transmissions. I was straining to make sense of the words when I heard as clear as anything,“Bea, the lighthouse has the answers.”
Static shrieked in my ear and I jumped back, dropping the phone to dangle by its twisted cord.
This was absurd. Someone was playing a sick joke and I had fallen for it. I looked at the closed cellar door. If there was a child down there – a preternaturally strong and clever child – I should still go down to find him or her. A child should be protected, after all. An uncomfortable memory came to me, of being locked in a dark, cramped place, and I shied away from it. Was it a memory or a nightmare?
I jiggled the latch of the cellar door and it creaked open. I felt for the string of the old-fashioned light unit, but when I tugged on it, nothing happened. The kitchen light barely illuminated the wooden stairs that disappeared into the gloom. The shelves that held my grandfather’s wine and spirits were tucked beneath the stairs. There wasn’t much space for anything else; just a small landing and some room to duck under the staircase and pull out a bottle of some fine ’07 vintage. I couldn’t see my duffle bag at all, so that’s where my unseen adversary had probably hidden it.
Mrs Dawes had kept a flashlight and basic tools in the cupboard next to the sink. I checked it and sure enough there was a handheld torch of the simple wind-up kind that had amused me so much as a child. I wound it and a bluish light gleamed from the torch. I glanced back at the cellar door, uncomfortable at the thought of it slamming closed with me downstairs. Rummaging through the cupboard, I found the power screwdriver I was looking for. It didn’t take long to take the cellar door off of its hinges and set it down on the floor of the kitchen.
“Little children who slam doors don’t deserve to have them,” I announced to the house. The only response was the wind.
The doorway yawned in front of me, and I shone the flashlight at it. The light had grown weaker and I quickly wound it up again.
Six steps into the ground. I walked down quickly, the air growing colder as soon as I left the kitchen. The thrumming of the Stirling was muffled; the heat exchanger lived on the other side of the house.
My duffle bag was not at the bottom of the stairs. Winding the light, I looked around and under the stairs. No duffle bag. No bottles either. Whoever had taken the duffle hadn’t gone down the stairs. I went to go back up when something hit the back of my head and I pitched forward in a blinding flash of pain. The last thing I remembered was the flashlight rolling crazily, the smell of the ocean, and the fierce pain in the back of my head.
I woke up cold and stiff, with a pounding headache, thinking I was still on the Bifrost. But the rough wooden floor and the bitterly cold wind helped me remember that I had left Jupiter eighteen months ago. I was on Tern Island. I tried to get up but my legs didn’t work. It was like when I first made planetfall. I gave up the attempt and lay there, trying to make sense of what was happening.
I blinked and opened my eyes hazily, seeing double. I was looking up at the night sky. The rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. The stars flickered through the atmosphere, the spiral arm of the Milky Way a faint smudge against the void. I could see the massive armature of the station that orbited the Earth, its lights flashing rhythmically. I looked for Jupiter and saw her, a steady, reassuring point of light.
I turned my head, oh so carefully, almost overwhelmed by the pounding headache and the nausea. There was enough starlight for me to see the broken stone walls of the tower. Someone – no child, of course – had carried me to the top of the lighthouse. An enemy, I imagined. I struggled to come to terms with that. I had no enemies. Things like this simply didn’t happen in space. People were – people were chosen for space, carefully vetted and analyzed and tested. They didn’t hit pilots over the head with heavy objects and carry them to the top of dangerous towers. I would have felt more outrage if I hadn’t been so sick and feeble.
I managed to push into a sitting position.
“Where are you?” I tried to shout, but my voice came out as a whisper. I was shivering from the cold and shock. I needed to get back to the house, despite the presence of my enemy. I wouldn’t last the night up here.
A light caught my eye, the flickering of candlelight, a tiny reminder of danger. A candle doesn’t light itself. I got to my hands and knees and then to my feet, swaying dangerously. The light waited, the little flame blowing sideways. I was drawn to it – I imagined I could even feel the tiny bit of heat it emitted. I tottered toward it, one step, then two.
A mighty gust of wind roared up out of the sky and battered me backwards. I couldn’t even hear my own scream in the whirlwind that sent me to my rear on the wet, rough floor. My head pounded as if it were about to explode.
The wind abated as quickly as it had come up, taking the candlelight with it. I got my breath back and decided staying off my feet was best. I scooted over to the center of the tower, thinking I could find the stairs and the ladder down. The stars gave me enough light that my plan was rewarded. My boots found the trapdoor, and slow step by slow step I made it down the ladder.
This part of the tower was familiar to me. My grandfather had used it for storage of all kinds of junk. I didn’t know who was playing with fire, but I knew where they had gotten the candles. I made my way to the cabinet with the emergency supplies and fumbled for a stub of my own. There were matches too, and after a few hasty tries I managed to light my candle. It flared and sputtered and the heat was uncomfortable, but it gave me light. I found a small lantern and fixed the candle inside it, holding it by the handle high above my head.
As I expected, no one was in sight. My headache had faded somewhat. I grabbed a wool blanket from the stack and wrapped it around myself. It smelled of urine and rat droppings but at least I stopped shivering. I could even, if I wanted, stay here for the night.
The lighthouse has the answers? I wasn’t sure I wanted answers anymore. Someone had tried – was trying – to kill me. I wanted off Tern Island as much now as I had when I had been a teenager, when my grandfather had succumbed to his madness, calling me “Angelique”, my mother’s name, and cursing me for my bad blood, my defective genes, and for killing his son, my father. He had beaten me so badly that I still bore the scars on one side of my face. I had fled in the night, piloting a small fishing boat across the sound, setting a rough course by keeping the flickering light from the lighthouse at my back. I imagined I could still hear my grandfather screaming my name across the water. The Cardenas had sheltered me from his retribution, and then I had fled as far as I could.
I had gone all the way to the moons of Jupiter to escape his insanity, and here I was, back again, with no way to escape this time. Moving stiffly, I barricaded the door to the tower, constructing a deadfall of junk to warn me if anyone tried to get in. I cleared a lumpy old sofa and laid my aching body down, wrapped in the stinky blanket, and blew out the candle.
From where I lay, I could see a patch of starlight through the trapdoor in the ceiling. Jupiter burned bright, and I was comforted by her presence. I closed my eyes and slept.
/>
I woke, plagued with a cold and stuffy nose, to birdsong and the wind in the pine trees. I sat up stiffly, waited for my headache to subside, and began the process of clearing out the deadfall at the door.
The sun was up but emitted no warmth. My breath misted as I made my way across the overgrown frost-rimed lawn to the house. I would call Mrs Cardenas and she would send Ethan, and once away from this place I would instruct my lawyers to sell the house and the island. I would begin the process of getting back into space. I never should have come.
The ocean was gray with whitecaps, the long stone jetty submerged by the tide. Despite my determination to leave and never come back, I paused to take in the island’s harsh beauty. It was a stark place, unhealthy for a child to grow up in, but it was the only home I knew. And there was the cemetery, with its impossible image of a child who never existed. I knew I should walk away, and I knew I couldn’t. It was an essential part of me, as much my DNA as the bad blood my grandfather had accused me of.
The rusty gate squealed as I pushed it open and entered the little graveyard. I looked around at the graves of my ancestors. There was my grandfather’s – the massive, polished oblong thrusting into the sky. But it was not his grave I meant to see. Nestled in between the roots of the largest pine tree was a small, unassuming gravestone, its engraved name barely readable after eighty years of weather and time.
Bianca Fermes
29 April 2150 – 8 September 2161
I didn’t believe in bad blood or bad genes, but I was beginning to believe in ghosts. Before me, at Tern Island, there had been another child, one whose grave was tucked furthermost under the pine trees in the cemetery. I was a lonely child, and before Ethan had come along, I had pretended she could play with me. I had only stopped when things became too real and the stories I made up about her became frightening, as if I hadn’t been playing make-believe so much as narrating history.
“What happened to the little girl in the cemetery, the one who fell from the tower?” I remembered asking Mrs Dawes. And her only response had been to stutter and scold, telling me I was a bad girl for making up stories.
I stopped playing with Bianca and I never went back to the cemetery, but she was never far from my mind, especially at night when my grandfather hammered on my locked bedroom door and screamed at me.
I knelt awkwardly at the grave and put my hand on the rough stone. “I’m sorry I abandoned you,” I said. “You must have been very lonely.”
The pine trees stilled, and the cemetery grew silent.
“I went away to Jupiter,” I went on, past the lump in my throat. “I tried to forget you and everything else that happened. But that wasn’t fair, was it? It wasn’t your fault.”
When we go off-world, we leave our ghosts behind. They are too weighty to carry, these memories made of gravity. They won’t fit in our small duffle bags and lean lives. But the ghosts remember us, and somehow that’s worse.
“Dammit,” a voice came from behind me. “You are hard to kill, Beatriz Sabatini.”
I stood unsteadily. The man behind me had long brown hair and an untidy beard. His eyes were pale blue and red-rimmed. He wore an old worn coat and dirty jeans and pointed a gun at me. He did not look healthy, but he was stronger than I was. I had to remember that. I tried to will away my concussion. My life depended upon quick thought and action.
“You were supposed to fall off the tower,” he went on. He gestured with the gun. “Practice until you get it right, I suppose. Move it.”
I didn’t move it. “And you are?” I inquired politely, retreating into icy, spacer calm. He sputtered.
“The rightful owner of this island,” he said, advancing a step and waving the gun at me. I tried not to flinch. “And don’t you forget it. You spacers with your attitude and your technology and your money and your fancy lives, you think you can just come back to Earth and take what belongs to others. I took care of this place when you took off. I took care of the old man all the time he was crazy, raving about you and some other whore and God knows what. Tern Island is mine, Spacer. You should have stayed in space where you belong.”
Tell me about it, I thought.
“Where’s my duffle bag?” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He gestured again with the gun. “Let’s go.”
I couldn’t stall any longer. He fell in behind me and we made our way back to the tower. The sun was up and the ocean was blue and green, dazzling bright. Overhead the ghost armature of the space station was painted on the sky. The lighthouse with its broken stonework loomed above us.
The danger had cleared some of the fuzz from my mind. He couldn’t just shoot me. He had to know that someone would come back to look for me. If it seemed like an accident, then no one would look for my killer. I wondered how he had managed to hide on the island in the eighteen months since my grandfather’s death.
The lighthouse storage room gave me my answer. What I had not noticed last night in my concussed state was that the junk had been organized. There was a camp stove and pallets of canned foods. I felt sickened by the fact that I had spent the night in his lair.
“Where did you sleep last night?” I asked.
“The old man’s room,” he said smugly, and then caught himself. He jabbed me with the gun. “Shut up and climb.”
Had he been in the house when I had bathed? I was repulsed by the thought. I climbed carefully, only partly taking my time to slow down the inevitable. I fumbled my way up the ladder, my boots slipping on the rungs. He was pressed up behind me, and I knew it was awkward for him too. I had to time my next move carefully. As my head cleared the trapdoor, I grabbed hold of the top of the ladder, engaged the magnets in my boots and kicked out. He grunted and his grip loosened. I felt the clunk as the magnets pulled the gun from his hand.
I flung myself up and out of the trapdoor, disengaged the magnetic soles and grabbed the gun as it dropped to the stone, aiming it at the attacker as he came barreling out of the trapdoor after me. He went stock still as he took in our reversal of fortune. My hand was shaking but I made myself calm.
“Back off,” I ordered.
He swayed slightly, his head moving from side to side, his eyes darting in confusion. My sense of danger heightened.
He mumbled something and began to cry. “You can’t do this to me!” he screamed. He stumbled forward and I backed up, turning along the curve of the broken tower wall. “I took care of that old bastard for three years while he went insane. He owes me!”
I didn’t want to have to shoot him. “Stay where you are!” I said, my voice rising in panic. He took in my fear and in an instant he became sly.
“Oh, you don’t want me to do this?” He took a step forward. I backed up instinctively, and he grinned, cruel. He did it again, and I backed up again, stumbling against the wall.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to shoot. I will if I have to, though. So just stay where you are.”
The gun was old and stiff, an antique. I wondered if he had found it in the storage room. I wondered if it even worked. I squeezed the trigger ever so slightly, and he saw the movement and stopped. I wondered how long I could hold it like that before I would shoot him. He began screaming and cursing at me, and despite myself I flinched. Perhaps it was because of my childhood, but I never could stand uncontrolled anger and rage. I licked my lips and held my ground, wishing for the peace and calm of space.
There was no warning when he charged me. I squeezed the trigger reflexively and the report of the gun was loud and shocking. My outcry and his howl intermingled. I missed of course; the bullet ricocheted and sent a puff of concrete dust and stone into the air. He bowled into me, knocking me off my feet, and the gun flew from my hand to land a few feet away on the floor.
He grinned, his teeth dirty and unkempt. I started to speak but my eyes widened as I looked past him and made a sound. He snorted with disdain. “Really? That old tri—”
Ethan Cardenas bolted
up through the trapdoor with one quick movement and brought a sizable chunk of old stonework down on my tormentor’s head.
We sat in the sunlight and the cold air, enjoying the bright breeze, the dazzle on the sea, and the blue sky and scudding clouds. The space station wheeled silently overhead, creating spoke-wheeled shadows on the ocean. Ethan wrapped me in his warm wool pea coat and I leaned against him. My attacker groaned every now and then. From our vantage point we could see the three speedboats with police flags coming our way, sending up a vee of white water from their bows.
“Why did you come back?” I asked. I felt warm and tired and safe.
His arm tightened around me. “You called. Or – someone did. The phone in the office rang. And when I answered it I couldn’t hear anything except static and voices. The storm had come up pretty bad by then, so I couldn’t get back before now. Sorry.”
“Not your fault,” I said, and leaned in closer. Ethan didn’t seem to mind. He kissed the top of my head. It was like the kiss he had given me the day before, but somehow it held more promise.
“Maybe,” he said, and there was guilt in his voice. I shifted to look up at him. “I never thought he’d still be on the island. After your grandfather died, it never occurred to me that Mike Dawes would have stayed.”
“Mike Dawes,” I repeated. “You mean—”
“The Dawes’s grandson. After you left he came out to the island to help them take care of the place. They retired, and he stayed to look after your grandfather. As far as I knew he was a nice guy, but after a few years – well. He got more and more squirrelly. But I never thought he’d gone feral.”
I didn’t say that my grandfather had that effect on people. My gaze wandered over to the small candle that was still wedged firmly in the ruined tower wall. There was a sizable gap leading out into the air beside it. If I had continued walking toward the candle last night I would have gone right over the edge, just another spacer fallen victim to gravity. With me in my concussed state, had it not been for that wild gust of wind that had knocked me flat, it would have worked.
