by Tanya Huff
"Okay, everyone, listen up!" A fortyish man wearing Ministry khaki, climbed up on a wooden crate and waved a clipboard. "Some of you already know me, but for the rest, I'm Gary Straum, and I'll be your guide this trip. The young man driving the boat is Jamie Wierster. He knows almost as much as I do about the island, so if I'm not available, he'll do his best to tell you anything you need to know."
A ruddy-cheeked, young giant leaned out of the tiny cabin and waved.
"I just want to remind you of a few things before we get started," Gary continued as the two girls giggled. "Main Duck Island is part of the St. Lawrence Islands National Parks system and is a nature sanctuary. You may not take samples of the plant life away with you – this means no picking, no digging, no collecting seeds. The wildlife is to be left strictly alone. If there's a disagreement of any kind between you and any creature living on that island, I will rule in favour of the creature. Anything you carry in must be carried out. If you can't live with that, I suggest you leave now." Gary smiled as an older man grabbed the back of the teenage boy's skater shirt and hauled him back by his side. "All right, then. When I read your name, come and pick up your life jacket..." He gestured at the open steel locker beside him. "...put it on, and board. The sooner we get going, the more time we'll have to spend on the island."
Diana's name was the last on the list. She hadn't put it there, and she felt a little sorry for the actual twenty-fifth person, who'd been bumped to make room for her, but there was a hole in the fabric of reality out on Main Duck Island and it was her job as a Keeper to close it.
Feeling awkward and faintly ridiculous in the life jacket, Diana sat down on a wooden bench and set her backpack carefully at her feet.
"I saw the cat. When we passed you in the lane."
She answered the teenage boy's smile with one of her own as he dropped onto the bench beside her. According to the boarding list, his name was Ryan. Ryan, like everyone else on the boat, was a Bystander, and given the relative numbers, Keepers were used to working around them. "Of course you did, Ryan. Please forget about it."
It really was a magic word.
He frowned. Looked around like he was wondering why he'd sat beside her, and after mumbling something inarticulate, moved across the boat to sit back down in his original seat. The girls, Mackenzie and Erin, sitting on the bench in front of him, giggled.
"I get the impression you're not the giggling type."
It was one of the older women, her husband busy taking pictures of Gary casting off and jumping aboard.
"Not really, no."
"Carol Diamond. That's my husband Richard. We're here as part of an Elder Hostel program." Her wave took in the rest of the hats-and-hiking-boots crowd. "All of us."
"Great."
"Are you travelling on your own, dear?"
"Yes, I am."
Carol smiled the even, white smile of the fully-dentured and nodded toward the teenagers. "Well, how nice you have some people of your own age to spend time with."
Diana blinked. Two months shy of twenty, she did not appreciate being lumped in with the children. Fortunately, between the motor and the wind it was difficult to carry on a casual conversation, and Carol didn't try, content to sit quietly while her husband took pictures of Waupoos Island, Prince Edward Point, waves, sky, gulls, the other people in the boat, and once, while he was fiddling with the focus, his lap.
The three pictures with Diana in them would be mysteriously over-exposed.
So would one of the shots he'd taken of the southern view across Lake Ontario, but Diana had nothing to do with that.
"Hey!" Ryan managed to make himself heard over the ambient noise. "What's that?"
Everyone squinted in the direction he was pointing. A series of small, dark dots rose above a sharp-edged horizon.
"That's our first sight of the island; we're about five miles out." Gary moved closer to the teenager. "Well done."
Ryan turned just far enough to scowl at him. "Not that. Closer to us."
About twenty metres from the boat, another series of small dark dots rose and fell with the slight chop. Then, suddenly, they were gone. The last dot rose up into a triangular point just before it disappeared.
"That looked like a tail!"
"Might be a loon," Gary offered.
"Fucking big loon!"
"Ryan!"
Ryan rolled his eyes at his father, but muttered an apology.
"It's probably just some floating junk." A half-turn included the rest of the group in the discussion. "You'd be amazed at the stuff we find out here." His list had almost everyone laughing.
Lake monster wasn't on it, Diana noted.
* * * *
As Main Duck Island coalesced into a low, solid line of trees with a light house rising off the westernmost point, Gary explained that it had been acquired by the park service in 1998, having been previously owned by John Foster Dulles, a prominent lawyer who'd been American Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. The island was 209 hectares in size, and except for the ruins of some old fishing cabins that had been posted no trespassing, none of it was off limits.
"The lighthouse?" one of the lime-green t-shirt group asked.
"Is unmanned and closed to the public, but you can go right up to it and poke around."
Mention of the lighthouse started the shipwreck stories. There were a lot of them; the area around the island was known as the graveyard of Lake Ontario and contained the wrecks of two- and three-masted schooners, brigantines, barges, and steamers, dating back to a small French warship en route to Fort Niagara with supplies and a pay chest of gold for the troops that went down in late fall around 1750.
Diana had begun to get a bad feeling about the location of the hole she had to close.
As Jamie steered the trawler into School House Bay, Gary told the story of the John Randall. She'd anchored in the bay for shelter back in 1920, only to have the wind shift to the north and drive her ashore. Her stern hit a rock, her engine lifted, and she broke in two.
"The crew of four scrambled up onto the bow and remained there for ten hours, washed by heavy seas and lashed by a November northeaster. They finally made it ashore on a hatch cover and stayed with the lighthouse keeper nine days before they were picked up. You can still see the wooden ribs and planks of the ship in the bay."
"So no one died?" Ryan asked.
"Not that time." With the dock only metres away, Gary moved over to the port side of the boat and picked up the rear mooring line. "But a year and eight days later, the Captain of the Randall went down while in command of the City of New York. His wife and his ten-month-old daughter went to the bottom with him."
"So sad," Carol sighed as Gary leapt out onto the dock. "But at least they were together." She twisted on the bench to look back the way they'd come. "I bet those waves hide a hundred stories."
"I bet they hide a hundred and one," Diana muttered, hoisting her backpack. She was not going to enjoy explaining this to Sam.
* * * *
"In the water?"
"Essentially."
Sam's ears saddled. "How essentially?" The echoed word dripped with feline sarcasm.
"Under the water."
"Have a nice time."
Down on one knee beside him, Diana stroked along his back and out his tail. "There's a lake monster out there, too. Looked like a sea serpent. Probably came through the hole."
"And that's supposed to make me change my mind?" the cat snorted. He peered off the end of the dock into the weedy bay. "Frogs pee in that water, you know."
"That's not..." She probed at the Summons, trying to narrow it down a little. "...exactly the water we're going into."
He sat back and looked up at her, amber eyes narrowed. "What water are we going into, exactly? If we were going, that is?"
"Southwest." She straightened. "Toward the lighthouse."
"I'll wait here."
"Come on. The nature hike went through the woods. We'll take the beach a
nd avoid an audience." About to lift the backpack, she paused. "You want to walk or ride?"
Tail tip twitching, he shoved past her, muttering, "What part of I'll wait here did you not understand?"
The beach consisted of two to three metres of smooth gravel, trimmed with a ridge of polished zebra mussel shells at the edge of the water. As Diana and Sam rounded a clump of sumac, they saw Ryan, a garter snake wrapped around one hand, moving quietly toward the two girls crouched at the ridge of shells.
"You think we should get involved?" Sam wondered.
Before Diana could answer, Ryan placed his foot wrong, the gravel rattled, and both girls turned. Although he no longer had surprise on his side, he waved the snake in their general direction.
"Look what I have!"
Braced for shrieking and running, Diana was surprised to see both girls advance toward Ryan.
"How dare you!" Mackenzie snapped, fists on her hips. "How would you like it if someone picked you up by the throat and flailed you at people?"
"The poor snake!" Erin added.
"I'm not hurting it," Ryan began, but Mackenzie ran right over his protest with her opinion of the kind of people who abused animals for fun, while Erin gently took the snake from him and released it.
"In answer to your question," Diana snickered as they started walking again, "I don't think we're needed."
A little further down the beach, two even larger snakes lay tangled together in the sun on a huge slab of flat rock. The female hissed as they went by. Sam hissed back.
"Don't be rude, Sam, it's their beach."
"She started it," Sam muttered.
About half way to the lighthouse, with the teenagers out of sight behind them, Diana headed for the water.
"Is it here?"
"No, it's farther west, but these shoals go out over half a mile in places, and I'd rather not be visible from shore for that long. I don't want to have to maintain a misdirection when we're wading waist deep."
"When we're wading?" Sam sniffed disdainfully at the mussel shells. "Lift me over this, would you."
"Actually," she bent and picked him up, settling his weight against her chest, "why don't I just carry you until we're in the water."
"Yeah, yeah." He sighed and adjusted his position slightly. "It's going to be cold."
"It's Lake Ontario, I don't think it ever gets warm. But don't worry, you won't feel it." As the water lapped against the beach gravel a centimetre from the toes of her shoes, Diana reached into the Possibilities and wrapped power around them. Then she stepped forward. "There's a nice, wide channel here," she said, moving carefully over the flat rock. Sam would be completely unbearable if she missed her footing and a wave knocked them down. "We can follow the rift out to deep water and..."
The bottom dropped out from under her feet.
She stopped their descent before the channel grew uncomfortably narrow. The last thing she wanted was to get her foot stuck between two rocks while under three metres of Lake Ontario with a cranky cat. Well, maybe not the last thing she wanted – being forced to sit through a marathon viewing of Question Period ranked higher on the list, but not by much.
Thanks to the zebra mussels, the water was remarkably clear – the one benefit of an invasive species that blocked intake pipes up and down the Great Lakes. Enough light made it down from the surface that they could easily see their way.
"Of course, I could see anyway," Sam reminded her as she let him go. He swam slowly around her, hair puffing out from his body. "Cats see much better than humans in low light levels." A little experimentation proved he could use his tail as a rudder. "You know, when you don't have to get wet, swimming is kind of fun. Hey! Is that a fish?"
Since the fish was moving in the right direction, and Sam didn't have a hope of catching it, Diana merely followed along behind, half her attention on the Summons, and the other half on the cat.
"Sam, come on! This way! We've got to go deeper."
"How deep?" he demanded, scattering a small school of herring.
"Right to the bottom." She slipped one arm out of her backpack and swung it around so she could pull out her flashlight. "Come on, and stop bothering the fish."
"Something has them freaked."
"They probably don't get a lot of cats down here."
"I don't think it's me. Mostly, I seem to be confusing them."
"Welcome to the club."
"What?"
"Never mind." The water was definitely getting darker. Jade green now and, finally, a little murky. "If it's not you, then what?"
"Something big."
"The sea serpent?"
He was back at her side so quickly that the impact sent her spinning slowly counter-clockwise. "Maybe."
Diana stopped the spin before her third revolution. A Keeper spinning three times counter-clockwise near an open accident site could have unpleasant – or, at the very least unlikely – consequences.
"How can you have a sea serpent in a lake?" Sam snorted in a tone that said very clearly, I wasn't scared, so don't think for a moment I was.
Diana shrugged. "I don't know. I guess because lake serpent sounds dumb."
"What's that?"
She turned the beam of the flashlight. A small piece of metal glinted on a narrow shelf of rock. "We should check it out."
"Is it part of the Summons?"
"Yes... No..." She started to swim. "Maybe." Feeling the faint tug of a current nearer the rocks, she half turned. "Stay close. I don't want you swept away."
He paddled a little faster and tucked up against her side. "Good. I don't want to be swept away."
"We're lucky it's so calm today. On a rough day with high waves, there's probably a powerful undertow through here."
"Don't want to be eaten by an under-toad," Sam muttered.
"Not under-toad. Undertow."
"You sure of that?"
Glancing down into the dark depths of the lake, Diana wasn't, so, to be on the safe side, she stopped thinking about it. The older Keepers got unnecessarily shirty about the accidental creation of creatures from folklore. As a general rule, the creatures weren't too happy about it either.
"It's the clasp off a change purse." The leather purse itself had long rotted away. "Hang on..." Slipping two fingers down into a crack in the rock, she pulled out a copper coin, too corroded to be identified further.
"You should put that back."
A second coin. She tucked them both into the front pocket of her jeans.
"Okay, fine. Don't listen to the cat."
"I need them."
"What for?"
Good question. "I don't know yet. Come on."
"Come on?" Sam repeated, paddling with all four feet to keep up. "You say that like I was the one who paused to do a little grave robbing."
"First of all, that wasn't a grave, and second," she continued before Sam could argue, "I haven't actually robbed anything since the coins are still here. In the water."
"In your pocket."
"That only counts if I take them away with me."
"So you've borrowed them?"
"More or less."
"Less," the cat snorted.
Diana let him have the last word. It was pretty much the only way to shut him up.
By the time they reached the bottom, the only illumination came from the flashlight. The water was a greenish-yellow, small particulates drifting through the path of the beam.
"Are we there yet?"
"A little further west."
The bottom was still mostly rock, but there were patches of dirt supporting a few small weeds in spite of the depth. They followed a low ridge for close to half a kilometre, stopping when it rose suddenly to within a few metres of the surface.
"This is the place," Diana said, sweeping the light over the rock. "Somewhere close and... Sam, what are you doing?"
He was floating motionless, nose-to-nose with a good-sized herring. "Staring contest."
"You can't win."
&nbs
p; "Cats always win."
"I don't think fish have eyelids."
Sam's tail started to lash, propelling him forward. "You cheater!"
Diana couldn't be sure, but she thought the fish looked slightly sheepish as it turned and darted away. "Never mind that!" she yelled, as Sam took off in pursuit. "We're right on top of the Summons, so I'm thinking – given where we are – that we've got to find a wreck."
"In a minute!" Sam disappeared around the edge of the shoal. "I'm just gonna teach that cheating fish a..."
"Sam?"
"Found it."
"Found what?" Diana demanded as she swam after the cat. "Oh."
Much like Main Duck Island itself, the shoal rose to become a nearly-vertical underwater cliff on the north side, but fell off in layers to the south. On one layer, about a meter and a half up from the bottom, the skeletal prow of an old, wooden ship jutted out from the ridge, huge timbers held in place in the narrow angle between two slabs of canted rock and preserved by the cold of the water.
"Well, this is..."
"Obvious," snorted Sam. "Big hunk of rock rising toward the surface. Exposed wreck. Probably been a hundred divers down here every summer."
"Probably," Diana agreed, swimming closer. "But this is where the hole is, I'm sure of it. Somebody did something sometime recently."
"Oh, that's definitive," Sam sighed, following her in.
The hole she'd been Summoned to close was not part of the wreck, but in the rock beside it, where a narrow crevice cut down into the lake bed.
"Isn't the word hole usually more of a metaphorical description," Sam wondered as Diana floated head down and feet up, peering into the crevice.
"Usually. Still is, mostly." The actual opening between this world and the nastier end of the Possibilities stretched out on both sides of the crevice, but it was centred over the dark, triangular crack in the rock. "There's something down here."
