Haunted Island

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  Amelia called me to come to supper just as darkness began to settle over the land. The air was still, and although the night would again be cold, a strange, warm, sour smell seemed to come from the ground beneath my feet.

  Supper was eaten in silence. Of course, Joshua usually didn’t speak, but I missed Amelia’s usual cheerful chatter. Shadow, who usually lay on the floor near Joshua’s feet, prowled the room, whimpering at the door, walking in Amelia’s path as she carried our dirty plates from the table to the drainboard.

  “Shadow is acting strangely,” Amelia said.

  “There is nothing wrong with Shadow,” Joshua snapped.

  I piped up. “All the animals are nervous. I had a hard time catching and stabling the horse tonight. One of the chickens even flew in my face as though she were crazed.”

  Joshua shook his head. “There would be no reason for the animals to act in such a manner,” he said. “You are mistaken.”

  The man only believed what he wanted to believe. He could only see what he wanted to see. When Amelia invited me to bring a chair closer to the fire, I pulled on my coat instead and told her I was tired and wanted to go to bed early.

  My small room in the barn was cold, but I wrapped up well in blankets and soon my body warmth made me cozy and sleepy. The horse stomped and nickered now and then, and the chickens flew up and down from the rafters instead of settling down to sleep, but I was tired enough to push the sounds out of my head and fall asleep.

  I remember a dream of a horse running across wide, open fields, and I was on his back. It wasn’t Joshua’s horse under me. It was a large white animal who could run as fast as the wind blew. But then the horse began to roar with the horrible roaring of thunder, and he threw me from his back so violently that I sailed through the air and smashed against the ground.

  Suddenly I awoke. I found myself sprawled against the rough barn wall as though I’d been tossed there like a sack of dried corn. The ground was shaking and heaving, and I tried to hold on. But there was nothing to hold on to. I could actually hear the crunching of rocks deep, deep beneath where I lay, and the groaning of the earth as it shifted. It was the most awful, terrifying noise I had ever heard in my life. It was the noise that nightmares are made of.

  The shaking seemed to last forever. Later, someone told me the earthquake was measured in minutes and seconds, and he said that it happened around two in the morning. But during that quake I lost all sense of time.

  I acted automatically, without thinking. I untied the horse and opened the barn door so he could escape. It was after I had pushed open the heavy door that I saw the far end of the barn had collapsed, leaving it open to the sky. I ran outside, too, heading for Joshua Hanover’s house.

  The earth shuddered again, and I staggered, falling flat, staring up at stars and a bright moon that seemed to wobble in the sky. I still lay there after the movement stopped. I think I was waiting for it to begin again.

  But when I heard Shadow’s frantic barking I sat up, then scrambled to my feet. I was close to the front door of Joshua’s house. Most of the house was standing. It was low and solidly built and had moved with the flow of the earth, but a chunk of the roof and some of the bricks in the chimney had fallen and were lying on the ground.

  The door suddenly flew open, and Shadow raced outside as though he had gone crazy. Saliva was dripping from his jaws, his eyes were wide and red, and a high-pitched sound, like a scream, came from his open mouth. He tore off toward the woods.

  Joshua appeared in the doorway. He was clutching the canvas sack of money. “Shadow!” he yelled at his dog. “Shadow! Come back!”

  Shadow either didn’t hear him or, for the first time in his life, didn’t obey him. Shadow ran on. As he reached the edge of the woods another quake rolled under us. It was lighter than the first two, but strong enough to make me sit down hard on the ground and to topple an old pine that crashed in a shower of dust and needles.

  I heard Shadow give a yelp, and wondered if he’d been hit. But then I heard him howl again, and the howl was farther away. He was all right.

  Perhaps it was the first time that Joshua had ever been frightened for something or someone else. His face sagged as though it had been stretched down to his chest, and he cried mournfully, “Shadow! Wait! Come back to me!”

  He dropped that sack of money by the front door and ran after his dog. He stumbled and fell a couple of times, because the land had been twisted and pulled apart into hillocks and trenches. Between the house and the road the ground had dropped about ten feet, creating a deep trench. Joshua ran next to it, veered to his right, crossed the pasture, and disappeared into the woods.

  I immediately began to worry about Amelia. Was she still inside? I ran toward the house, calling her name.

  Amelia appeared in the doorway, clutching the doorframe as though she expected to be thrown off her feet at any minute. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she wore what ladies called a “wrapper.” The gold chain around her neck glimmered in the moonlight.

  “Amos!” she cried. “Are you all right?”

  “I guess so. Are you?”

  “Yes.” She nodded as I ran to join her. “Where’s Joshua?”

  “In the woods.” She looked puzzled, so I explained, “He ran after Shadow. Come on, Amelia. We have to get away from here!”

  “But where can we go?”

  I just shook my head. I didn’t know. I had no answer for her.

  She still clung to the doorframe. “I’m so frightened!” she whispered. “When will it end?”

  “Maybe it’s over now,” I said.

  But Amelia’s eyes suddenly widened as she looked over my, shoulder. She stiffened and screamed, “Look at the river!”

  I turned to see a wall of water veer off from the river, rushing into and filling the trench where the earth had split. The force of the water tore huge chunks of dirt from the sides of the trench. Roaring and churning through this new path, and growing wider by the minute, the river gobbled the land that it swept through.

  “We’ll drown!” Amelia cried.

  “No, we won’t!” I shouted. I picked up the sack of money that Joshua had dropped. I pulled Amelia away from the doorway and shoved the sack into her arms. “Run for high ground!” I yelled at her. “Run!”

  Amelia did as I said. She ran around the corner of the house and toward the wooded hill. I started after her, but tripped and sprawled on my face. Something cut a painful gash across my right cheek, and I tried to stop the bleeding with the sleeve of my coat and scramble to my feet at the same time. I fell again.

  By the time I managed to pull myself up Amelia was no longer in sight.

  “Amelia!” I called, but there was no answer. Amelia had disappeared.

  5

  “ANOTHER QUAKE ROLLED UNDER my feet,” Amos said. “There is nowhere to go when the earth moves violently. There is nothing anyone can do to escape. I lay on the ground, clutching the stump of an uprooted tree. I could hear the earth’s deep roar, and the rush of the river, and Joshua’s voice screaming through the darkness, ‘Shadow! Shadow, come!’ Terrified, I hung on to the tree stump until that quake had passed and the earth settled and was still.” Amy gave a long sigh. “Where was Amelia?” Amos shook his head. “Ah, that is what Joshua and I wanted to know—each for our own reasons. I’ll tell you what happened.”

  We had other quakes during the early-morning hours. Some of them were strong, others were like the gentle shudders that shake a child after a bout of tears. There were many moments, there in the darkness, when I thought that the earth was being destroyed and daylight would never come again, so it was a relief to see the sky turn pale and gray with the first morning light.

  The land looked as though giant fingers had dug through it, stirring and poking and slapping it into a new shape. The strangest sight, however, was the river, which had divided to pour around both sides of the farm and hill, turning what was left of Joshua’s property into an island. Across the still-
churning water I could faintly see some of the buildings of the town. The church had lost its steeple, and I was sure there must be great damage to the houses and stores as well. The river carried odd things past us, moving too fast to beach them. There were whole trees, some of them slamming into each other in midstream. Part of a chest of drawers, sailed downstream. Where it came from I couldn’t guess. A wooden chair bobbed in the current. It looked as sturdy as when it was new.

  I wanted to show these things to Amelia. I had to find her, so I headed toward the woods.

  But out of the woods came Joshua. He swayed like a young pine caught in a storm, and he shouted at me, “Where is Amelia?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to look for her.”

  Joshua’s eyes widened, as though he had suddenly thought of something important, and he ran past me as fast as he could go, heading out of the woods and toward the farmhouse. I turned and ran after him.

  He stopped when he came to the front of the house and stared at the ground.

  “Where is it?” he yelled. “Where is my money?”

  “I gave it to Amelia,” I said.

  He whirled to stare at me. “She took it? Amelia took my money?”

  “No,” I said. “I put the sack into her hands. I told her to run for high ground.”

  “She took it,” he muttered as though he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

  I tried to explain. “It was the river! It split! Half of it left its course and rushed through that trench with a terrible power. We couldn’t leave the money on the ground. It might have been swept away. We didn’t know how high the new branch of the river would come.”

  Joshua glared. “The river didn’t reach the house.”

  “We thought it might.”

  “She took my money!”

  “Will you look, Mr. Hanover?” I shouted at him., “Look at the river! It’s created an island! How did we know what it would do?”

  He slowly turned and looked to both sides? I think it was the first time that he realized what had happened to his property.

  I took a good look at the island, too, recognizing the fact that I was marooned here with the angry, crazed Joshua Hanover, and there was no chance to escape.

  He held one long arm out and pointed to a spot where the pier had been. There were only the tops of two pilings showing above the rough water. From one of them a single board dangled.

  “The boat is gone!” he said.

  “It must have been swept away,” I answered.

  “The boat, my money! Amelia betrayed me!” He paused. “She took my savings and left in the boat.”

  I gasped. That was the craziest idea I’d ever heard. “She couldn’t have done that! Not with the way the river was flowing. There was a high wall of water coming at us, and we ran.”

  His eyes drilled into mine. “Did you see where Amelia ran?”

  “Toward the woods.”

  “Did you see her go into the woods?”

  “No. I fell. Then I tried to get up and fell again. When I finally got to my feet she was nowhere in sight.”

  “Could she have gone back to the boat?”

  I took a deep breath. I was afraid of this man, but I was angry with him for suspecting Amelia. “Mr. Hanover, I know that your wife ran into the woods.”

  “Then come with me,” he said. “We’ll search for her.”

  As we crossed the pasture there were small cracks in the earth from which heat seemed to rise, steaming in the cold air. It was hard to walk at times, because the ground was uneven, but the woods were in worse condition.

  Trees had fallen, some of them resting on other trees, balancing precariously, ready to crash to the ground at any moment. There were spots that had sunk, drops of four to ten feet, and we had to be careful not to stumble into them.

  We called Amelia’s name, and we searched all through the woods. The morning had turned to noon. In spite of the horror of what had happened, my stomach began growling with hunger. Joshua Hanover glanced at me. “Now do you agree that she took my money and fled in my boat?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t agree to that.”

  “Then we will search again,” he said.

  Even though I was ready to drop, we began to cover the same area.

  It didn’t go well. Once again tremors shuddered through the earth. I fell, sliding face down into one of the holes. There was a loud crack as a tree, roots already dangling in the daylight, was heaved upward. It landed with an echoing thump across part of the hole I was in.

  When the earth stopped moving I dared to raise my head. If I hadn’t been lying in the hole the huge old pine might have killed me.

  I scrambled out of the hole, my hands slipping, my fingers tearing into open cavities in the porous limestone, using these cavities to pull myself to solid ground.

  “We’ll be killed if we stay in the woods,” I told Joshua, but he just shook his head.

  “We will cover all the area we can,” he said. “If Amelia took shelter here, we’ll find her.” So we searched again, while the land settled and resettled under us.

  As the earth growled and heaved, and I clung to a small tree, I managed to whisper, “It’s the end of the world.”

  “Not yet,” Joshua said. He seemed more furious than ever.

  The sun was low in the sky when he finally stopped and said, “We have gone over this ground twice. Are you ready to admit that Amelia has left us here?”

  I couldn’t do that. But I couldn’t keep searching, I was exhausted. I just ducked my head and said the first thing that came to my mind. “What happened to Shadow?”

  Joshua looked as though everything else had gone out of his mind. He groaned in pain and said, “Come with me.”

  He led me to what was left of the barn, where he picked up a shovel. Then I followed him on a track between the pasture and the woods. We went higher and higher until we came close to the top of the hill. Joshua stopped so suddenly I almost fell into him. He stooped and pulled aside some small tree limbs and brush.

  There lay Shadow.

  “We’ll dig a grave,” Joshua said. “At the edge of the woods, so he will have shade, near the pasture where he loved to run.”

  I couldn’t say a word. I felt sorry for Mr. Hanover, but at the same time I had been afraid of Shadow. I was glad I’d never have to be afraid of him again.

  Joshua dug the grave, while I stood aside. I could see down the meadow to the new branch of the river, and across it the faint lights that were being lit in the town. With all my heart I wished I were there and not on the island.

  Without a word Joshua went back into the woods and picked up Shadow’s body. He carried it to the grave and laid it down gently. He shoveled the dirt back into the grave and smoothed down the top.

  I don’t know what I expected. I thought maybe he’d say a few nice words about Shadow or tell me some good story he remembered about something Shadow had done. But instead, he didn’t seem to see me. He looked out over the rise, back to the house and to the spot where the pier and boat had been. His complexion grew darker, and his eyes glowed red in the dim evening light. His face seemed to swell, and it looked to me as though he’d grown even taller. He clenched his fists and raised them high in the air, shaking them furiously.

  “I loved her, and she betrayed me!” he shouted so suddenly that I stepped backward and stumbled, tripping over a log and falling on my back. “I will have vengeance!”

  He turned around and stomped back into the woods, leaving me alone with Shadow’s grave, the still-grumbling earth, and the rushing darkness.

  6

  AMY BOUNCED IN HER rocking chair, making it squeak against the floorboards of the porch. “Didn’t anyone rescue you?” she asked.

  “Don’t be dumb,” Chris said. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “Of course,” Amy said. “That was dumb. Sorry.”

  “My story’s not over,” Amos said. “Some of it has to do with what happened after the r
escue.”

  “Tell us.” Chris hugged his knees, eager to hear the rest. “We’re ready.”

  Mr. Corley rocked silently for a few moments. Then he began to speak.

  I didn’t like being cooped up on that island with Joshua Hanover, I can tell you that! I knew that no search parties could be sent until the river had quieted. The water still churned, and the currents were strong.

  I managed to repair part of the barn. The horse never showed up again. What happened to him, I’ll never know. So I had the barn to myself. I didn’t go near the house, except to get some food when Joshua wasn’t around. He prowled the island, striding down the beach with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes I’d see him loping across the pasture and into the woods. He never spoke to me. It was as though he didn’t see me or know I was there.

  But something saw me. I’d get the feeling at times that something was watching me, and I’d turn quickly, but no one was ever there. A couple of times at night, from the direction of the woods, I could hear a dog howling. I knew there was no dog on the island, so I’d scrunch down under the blanket, wadding it against my ears so I couldn’t hear.

  And sometimes late in the night, another sound would carry across the darkness like a cold breeze. From somewhere on the island Joshua would be angrily crying into the night, “Vengeance! I will have vengeance!”

  I thought about Amelia often. I even walked the island myself, searching for any trace of her. Maybe she had taken the boat and escaped. I hoped with all my heart that she had, even though I couldn’t imagine how such a small boat could stay afloat on that turbulent river.

  I hung a torn shirt on a tree near the new branch of the river, hoping people in town would see it and recognize it as a signal for help, but Joshua spied it and tugged it down, tossing it into the churning river.

  The quakes went on and on for days. Once they had started, they couldn’t seem to stop. Every few hours there was a new movement of the earth. Some were light enough to tolerate, and some were strong jolts. I wondered, during this time, if I would live to see the end of them.