by J. S. Brent
But it wasn’t until his disappearance a few months ago that I had experienced my first taste of the outdoor life. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it. Granddad had grown up in the wilderness, and spent his life carving out a space of comfort after the disasters of his youth. I had grown up in relative comfort and yearned for adventure, but was finding that the adventurous life didn’t suit me as much as I had hoped.
Since I had journeyed across the world a month ago in search of my missing grandfather, I had been turned out of every inn, tavern and bar in town. I had slept in caves and ditches, had awoken to find the dew of the morning seeping through my shirts. Everyone talks about the glories of the natural world, but it felt like the natural world was trying to kill me. My hair was perpetually unkempt and unclean, filled with twigs and sticks and bits of tall grass, and the birds of the air came and nested in it. I had run out of razors my first week here and, unable to find new ones in any of the three stores located within walking distance of Kim’s, had learned to shave with a sharp fragment of clay, the reflection from a murky pond my only mirror. The rain soaked me, the sun baked me, the winds buffeted against my body. I would have sold my own home in exchange for a room where I could brush my teeth in peace.
Reflecting on all this, I was already miserable and cranky by the time I made my way to Maude’s. The door swung slowly open and everyone in the bar stopped talking to look at me. A young man playing an old saloon piano quit playing, picked up his stool with a loud scuffling sound and walked away.
Painfully aware that I looked like a homeless person fresh off the street (which, come to think of it, I was), I tried to ignore the reproaches of the bar’s other guests as I made my way to the counter.
“Hank, we’ve already been through this a hundred times,” said Dennis, the bartender, who knew I didn’t like being called Hank. “There are no rooms here. There will never be a room here. Not for you.”
“I just want a place I can go where I don’t have to pick bugs out of my hair in the morning,” I said.
“Well, you’re not going to find it here,” he said flatly.
“And can you tell me why not?”
“Because.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “You’ve got bugs in your hair.”
With an almighty groan I threw my hands in the air and turned away from the counter. Several of the patrons had been staring at me a split-second before I turned around. I wanted to sit down at their table and harass them, force them to talk to me and pretend not to be horrified, just to punish them for being so snobby. But deep down I knew it wouldn’t accomplish anything, except maybe getting me thrown out of the bar again.
“You know what? Maybe I like sleeping in caves,” I said aloud, to no one in particular. “Maybe I prefer it to a crummy place like this.”
“If that’s the case, then you can get the hell out of here,” said Dennis. I walked out of the bar and back towards Kim’s. In moments, the air was filled once again with the sounds of shouting and laughter. The piano began to play a jangly tune.
* * *
The road to the ferry was lined on either side by dense woods, with only the occasional street lamp set up as an outpost against the darkness. Here in these coastal regions humanity was just an afterthought, a bubble that had risen for a time and would soon vanish again, while the raccoons and bears and deer and boar scavenged among their ruins.
I passed Kim’s a final time—the din from the tavern was settling down and people were retiring to their rooms for the night—and stood out by the dock waiting for the ferry to arrive, pondering the inexorable tides that would one day overwhelm the island on which I was staying and submerge it forever in the sea. Human-made climate change was already working its destructive magic, having erased 50 percent of the island’s coastline within the last decade, but unscrupulous politicians and businessmen in America were conspiring to keep the world sick and the waters warm. Scientists and archeologists, aware of the danger, were sending their best men and women out here to unearth ancient pits before they were lost forever.
The last ferry of the night had already left the mainland for Oak Island by the time I arrived, but I knew it would be returning to dock for the night. When it finally showed up about half an hour later, I was able to bribe the captain with a carton of cigarettes, tobacco being scarce and precious in this part of the world. All the way back to the island, watching the water ripple outward from the prow of the boat, I consoled myself for the misery and loneliness of the last hours with thoughts of the woman I had seen in the diner, the tall, slender woman, the raven-haired woman, the glint-eyed goddess. Sometimes you find yourself yearning for someone with an inexplicable yearning. Sometimes you shrug it off, and other times, like now, you give in and let it carry you away like the tide.
* * *
I never made it all the way to land—not on the ferry, at least. It happened at a moment when the captain wasn’t even looking in my direction, he was so focused on the cigarette he was consuming with a suicidal relish. While his back was turned, I made my break, leaping from the stern into the warm water. A shiver ran through me; it was exhilarating to feel the pulse and surge of the waves over my body again, and the nipping of small fish.
There was a loud cry from the boat’s midsection, but it was too late; I was already gone, born along by the water towards shore. The captain shook his fist and I waved happily. I swam a few victory laps, snapping at fish with my powerful jaws, and by the time I made it to shore I had already caught enough to feed a small family. These I brought back to the cave where I had spent the last five nights, ever since the last inn on the mainland had decided that I wasn’t their idea of a customer. Apparently people like me are bad for business. Whatever. I’m sure Maude is a wonderful person, but she can’t fry a fish as good as mine. There are few who can.
I was ready to retire for the evening, but first I had to begin the laborious process of piling up rocks in front of the cave’s entrance to prevent unwelcome intruders during the night, be they bears or raccoons or inquisitive archeologists. Creating a door would render the cave all but invisible during the night hours. Then, with only a low-beam flashlight to illuminate the darkness, I used flint and steel to set ablaze a bundle of wood I had gathered the night before.
Unfortunately the wood was damp because of the recent rains, and within moments smoke was filling up the cramped space in the cave where I made my shelter. (I had not ventured any deeper than a few feet beyond this space, not wanting to encounter any other occupants who might be holed up here). Fearful of suffocating, I was forced to tear down the wall I had just spent the last 20 minutes painstakingly building and allow the smoke to stream out. I waited by the cave’s mouth, hacking and coughing, and reflecting sadly on the fact that though I had just given away a whole carton of cigarettes, my lungs were now likely in worse shape than before.
Once that was settled, I realized I lacked the strength to build the wall back up and resigned myself to perching on a ledge of the rock and cooking my fish while a cool wind blew in from outside, tousling my hair. The meal was delicious, if slightly bony, and once I had finished I knelt by the fire looking over my grandfather’s last journal.
I had read every one of his journals but this one prior to my arrival on the island. Like several of the others, it was filled with lavish drawings depicting the presumed locations of treasures on Oak Island: a queen’s ruby hidden in the hollow of a stalwart oak; a tiara owned by the queen of Ethiopia before being stolen by the Italians during the war and supposedly lost to history; three teaspoons of honey that had belonged to the Buddha; a statue of Judas Iscariot carved by the Gnostics; a map hand-drawn by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano; a rabbit’s carcass that made its possessor invincible in battle. Notes in his spindly handwriting explained that a massive quantity of gold and silver and precious stones was rumored to lay buried here, but that international disputes over the sovereignty of the island within the last 60 years had made research difficult. He had always wanted t
o travel here as part of an expedition, but those disputes and the adopted son he had never expected to have made that dream all but impossible for much of his life.
In the dim light I squinted hard at the drawings, struggling to visualize them with my mind’s eye. There was a massive pit called the Money Pit that resembled a large octagonal sandbox. I had actually seen this with my own eyes, but had been chased away by the leader of a dig that had already spread its wings over the site. More mysterious, and more tantalizing, was the illustration of what appeared to be an abandoned temple with sunken porches. No such temple existed on the island, or on the mainland, as far as anyone knew, nor had ever existed there. There were certain theories promoting the existence of such a site, most of them advanced online by the tinfoil hat crowd, but my grandfather had always been a smarter person than to take such ideas seriously. How they had ended up in his diary was a mystery to me.
But then again, so was much of what went on in his secret life. One night in late April he had cooked a lavish dinner of roast pork stuffed with garlic bulbs and onions with potatoes and buttery yams and steamed broccoli spears, with mint ice cream served over pecan pie for dessert and a glass of pink Moscato to wash it down. These meals had been a mainstay of my childhood, but now that he was getting older it was rare for him to go through the trouble. We stayed up reminiscing. All through the night he kept interrupting the flow of conversation as if to say something he had been brooding over; but the words never came, and he went to bed looking perturbed and unsatisfied. It was unlike him, and I wondered what foul ghost was troubling him that night.
And then the next morning he was gone. When I awoke there was no sign of him but an envelope on the kitchen table, containing a note that was short on explanations but long on apologies. “As you’re aware,” it read, “as I am increasingly aware, I am dying. The cancer is going to kill me before the end of the year. I want to spend that year doing the one thing I’ve always dreamed of doing. The only reason I never told you was because I knew once you found out, you would try to stop me. And I couldn’t bear to see us fighting now, not when things have been so good.”
For about a month after that the letters had continued, each one postmarked from an increasingly remote location. The last one had come from the mainland. By now I had grown so accustomed to his weekly report that when they suddenly stopped coming, I knew something was wrong. I immediately booked passage by train and boat to this rocky, storm-swept outpost. I tried not to think about the number of terrible things that might have befallen him on this, his last journey: the quick sands that might have consumed him, or the waters that might have swallowed him, or the bears that might have eaten him whole. That was life, though; one by one it took away everyone you lived.
Having finished eating, I put the book away and lay staring up at the ceiling, listening to the plinking of water droplets and the steady hum of a boat’s motor circling the narrow pier. Memories of the handful of beautiful women I had seen since coming to the island crowded out my despair over Granddad’s disappearance. But I was too tired even for lust, and slowly exhaustion crept over me. I could feel myself transforming into my true form, a Canadian brown bear, and then I was asleep.
Chapter 3—Olivia
I slept through my alarm the next morning, and was already late for work by the time I stumbled out of bed at a quarter past nine. Cursing loudly, I scrambled out of my pajamas (nearly tripping over myself as I ran to the bathroom) and into a beige uniform, brushing my teeth and hair on my way down the hall.
The breakfast bar was groaning under the weight of scrambled eggs, hardboiled eggs, bacon, sausage links, sausage patties, biscuits, white gravy, hash browns, mandarin oranges, cranberries, tea and coffee, but I grabbed a plain bagel and shoved it into my mouth as I ran through the door. By the time I realized I had forgotten cream cheese and butter, I was already standing by the dock, where I had to wait another 20 minutes for the ferry.
You know how when you’re trying not to think about something, it has a way of sneaking up and surprising you? I had spent much of the night in bed, tossing and turning and trying not to think about the handsome man who had apparently snubbed me on Dare2Bear. Bizarrely, the fact that I had never seen his face served to make him that much harder to resist: my mind filled in the blanks, carrying me down into dark gulfs of imagination. I felt embarrassed by it, the way I felt embarrassed by anything that I couldn’t drown out and placate through reason.
Breathe, Liv, I told myself as I stood on the ferry that morning. It’s just a biological reaction. You can control it. It doesn’t mean anything.
I was both worried about my job and having to contend with this inexplicable surge of feeling for a handsome stranger I had never seen. Both feelings strove for mastery, but as the ferry docked on the island, fear finally won out. I raced on foot the rest of the way to the money pit, and by the time I finally arrived, my hair clingy and coarse from the salt spray of the sea, Devin was gazing at his watch with a mocking expression.
“Girl, how much do I pay you?” he asked.
I just glared in reply. He finally had something to lord over me, and he was going to milk it for all it was worth.
Seeing the furious look on my face, he circled around me, crowing triumphantly.
“Hermione here thinks she’s too good for the rest of us,” he said, apparently addressing the five other members of our team (all guys). No one looked up. “She doesn’t have to show up on time. Being punctual is for idiots and losers.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, through gritted teeth.
“No, you’re not,” he said, laughing slightly. “I know you’re not, and you know you’re not. You’re just saying that because you have to, because it’s expected of you. Well, as your boss, I’m expected to discipline insubordinate co-workers, and I’m going to. I’m going to take this out of your next paycheck.”
I actually laughed at the pettiness of it. Forty-five minutes lost wages. The price of a cup of coffee.
But Devin was determined to make life miserable that morning. No sooner had I grabbed my trowel and dustpan and knelt down in the shade of our canvas tent to begin the day’s digging than he got up and moved the tent. No particular reason, just meanness. Four of the other guys still had shade, but not me and not Milo, who had the misfortune of digging next to me.
I tried not to notice the intense, burning sunlight beaming over my body, nor the fact that several of the guys had given up working and were just standing around in the tent cover sipping Gatorade and cracking jokes with Devin, who smiled and winked at me when he saw the indignant look on my face. I began dusting mechanically, almost mindlessly, trying not to think about the lavish breakfast I had missed out on or the beautiful man who seemed to be ignoring me, but only succeeded in making myself think harder about both of those things. However, it took my mind off of my current troubles, and I only emerged from my mind-cave an hour or so later when I first heard him yelling.
“I’ve already warned you once, this is a protected area,” he said. “If you come back again, I’m going to call the police.”
That’s unlikely, I thought. If there had been an actual police presence on this island, I might not have to put up with his constant harassment.
Looking up from my work, I was startled to see he was talking to the stranger, the man with whom I had briefly locked eyes the day before.
The stranger spoke in a low voice, so I couldn’t hear his response. It was obvious he was the sort of person who never got ruffled, even when others were losing their cool. He even seemed to be enjoying how agitated Devin was, as he realized his blustering and threats were having no effect.
“That’s it,” said Devin. “I’m calling the cops.”
The stranger crossed his arms, smirking slightly and remaining completely motionless. It was a tense game of chicken which Devin eventually lost, as he flung up his arms and began pacing in a circle, combing his fingers through his greasy black hair.
Meanwhile
, the stranger had pulled out a large, green, heart-shaped amulet and stood there casually looking at it, with the manner of a young businessman standing at a railway station inspecting a timepiece.
I gasped when I saw it, a low gasp of recognition. The color and shape were unique and I’d seen them before. My new friend must’ve heard me, for he turned and looked at me again. This time I averted my gaze and pretended to be consumed with my digging.
When Devin saw the amulet, he began raving.
“What are you trying to prove?” he said, cursing furiously. “We’re not interested in your trinkets.” Walking straight up to the stranger—a bold move, considering Devin was shorter than he by several inches—he wrestled the amulet out of his hand and threw it into the trees.
The stranger watched it fly away with an annoyed look, then went stomping after it.
