Our Last Echoes

by Kate Alice Marshall

  “Probably not very accurate, then,” Kenny said with a laugh. “We’re usually bedraggled, muddy, exhausted, or all three at once. You can identify a LARC employee by the dark circles under our eyes and the stray feathers tucked in odd places.” He leaned back in his chair and waved at us to take our seats. The chair creaked alarmingly under me, but held up. “This is great, you know. I don’t have to be the new guy anymore. You get all the abuse.”

  “Nah, she’s just a kid,” Lily said. “I’ll be nice to her.” Kenny groaned good-naturedly.

  “How long have you been at the LARC?” I asked him.

  “Two summers, but I got here a week after Lily. I’ve been ‘new guy’ ever since,” he said. “It’ll be great having some extra company, at least. Especially since Liam’s leaving.”

  “What?” I asked, startled and, I had to admit, a bit disappointed.

  Liam gave a too-casual shrug, slouching in that boneless, expansive way that only tall, skinny guys can manage. “My mum—my other mum—didn’t precisely check with Dr. Kapoor before she put me on a flight to Anchorage. The only reason I’ve been here this long is that Mum took off for a research trip to Morocco for a book, and my grandparents are visiting my cousins in Delhi and can’t get a flight back until next week. I think Mum was trying to force us into some quality time together, but Dr. Kapoor’s busy with her feathered children. And I know better than to compete with them for her affection.”

  Mrs. Popova whisked the cocoa and pursed her lips, shaking her head as if in regret.

  “I’m sure your mom loves you more than birds,” Kenny said awkwardly.

  “More than any one of them, to be sure,” Liam said. “But in the aggregate, sometimes I wonder.” He smiled that easy smile to take the edge off his comment.

  The silence threatened to get truly excruciating, and I cleared my throat. “You mentioned a ghost story?”

  “A ghost story?” Kenny asked, perking up.

  “I said it was like a ghost story,” Liam hedged.

  Mrs. Popova clicked her tongue. “All stories turn into ghost stories if you wait long enough,” she said. She paused in the midst of stirring the cocoa, looking out the kitchen window at the gray of the mist. “No, she wasn’t a ghost. She was just a child.”

  “The girl in the boat?” Kenny guessed.

  Mrs. Popova sighed. “It’s not a story I care to tell or hear without a bit of whiskey in me, and I haven’t got any. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get myself to bed. Enjoy your cocoa. Lock the doors. And—”

  “Don’t go outside,” Kenny and Lily chorused. They laughed, but my skin prickled.

  Once Mrs. Popova was in her room, I turned my gaze on Liam. “So. The girl in the boat,” I said, ready to shake him by the shoulders until he explained what the hell he was talking about.

  “You’re not saying it right,” he informed me.

  “How am I supposed to say it?” I asked.

  “Like this: the Girl in the Boat,” he intoned. Like a title. Like a figure from myth. Like, I thought, a ghost story.

  “It’s kind of LARC legend,” Kenny said. “Passed down to the new grad students and post-docs.”

  Liam nodded. “I heard it from one of my mom’s students at the University of Alaska when I was a kid. It’s been around awhile. There are a few different versions.”

  “And what version would you tell me?” I asked.

  “The spooky version, of course,” Liam said, and grinned. He sat up, leaning forward a bit and holding up his hands as if framing the scene. “A fisherman is out on the ocean. No one for miles around, as far as he knows, and fog all around him, so thick he can’t see. And he starts to hear this bird. Like a loon, maybe. Mournful, sad. This broken cry calling out again and again. He tries to ignore it. It’s just a bird, and he has a catch to haul in. The cry starts to fade. Like it’s getting weak. And he doesn’t quite know why, but he starts heading toward it.”

  I shivered. The cadence of Liam’s voice had changed. It was low and haunting, his eyes fixed on mine as he spoke. Kenny and Lily seemed just as spellbound, leaning forward in their seats, even though they knew the story.

  “Then he can’t hear it anymore. And he can’t see anything through the fog. So he cuts the engine. All he can hear is the water against the hull of his boat, and his own heavy breath.” He let the silence hang, leaving us to imagine that eerie stillness. When he spoke again, it was softly. “And then . . . he sees it. Emerging from the fog. A low shape on the water. A boat. Just a rowboat, but it hasn’t got any oars. He draws up alongside it and looks inside. And he sees a little girl, curled in the bottom of the boat. So cold and so tired and so hungry that she’s lost even the strength to cry. He takes her back to shore, and bundles her up, and gets her help. If he hadn’t come upon her then, she would have died.”

  “But she didn’t,” I said. My mouth was dry. I struggled to keep my voice even, the normal level of curious. “So it isn’t a ghost story after all.”

  “I don’t know,” Liam said. His head tilted. “Maybe you don’t have to die to be a ghost.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking. And I didn’t know what my answer might be if he wasn’t. Was that what I was? A ghost? “Did it really happen?” I asked.

  “Maybe?” Kenny said, but Liam looked thoughtful.

  “There was this thing,” he said. “When I was little, Dr. Kapoor was a postdoc, and she was spending the summer here. When she got back, she was really . . . withdrawn, I guess? I was too little to know why, but I heard her talking with Mum once. I remember something about a girl, and I remember having the impression something bad had happened to her. That would have been . . . 2003?”

  “That’s the year that storm happened,” Lily said.

  “What storm?” I asked. As if I didn’t know.

  “It was this awful accident,” Lily said. “Some idiots went out on the water during the mist, and the weather turned. The boat sank, or something? Three people died. They never even found the bodies. But I don’t remember there being a kid involved.”

  “No one really talks about it,” Kenny pointed out. “Could be we don’t have all the details. The only people around from back then are Hardcastle and Kapoor, and good luck getting anything out of them about it.”

  “Ah,” I said, as if that satisfied my curiosity, as if it didn’t really matter to me at all. A storm. Three people dead. Just a number, some faceless figures. But I knew their names. Joy Novak. Martin Carreau. Carolyn Baker. The coverage was obscure, the records thin, but I knew they’d been here. And then . . . they weren’t.

  “Are you all right?” Liam asked.

  “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t ask me that,” I replied. I wasn’t all right. My nerves jangled, and a familiar vertigo swept over me, the prelude to the crash that always came after I pulled my little trick with unwanted emotions. I was out of time. “I’m just tired. I think I should get some rest,” I said. Was my voice too loud, too frantic? Liam frowned slightly, but the others looked unconcerned.

  “You’re the third door on the left,” Lily informed me. “Bathroom’s at the end of the hall.”

  “Thanks.” I stumbled as I stood, but I hoped they’d just pass it off as weariness from a long trip. I offered an anemic wave and hurried down the carpeted hallway, hearing my breath too loudly in my ears.

  I barely got the door closed behind me before my knees went out. I sagged and slid, letting my bag fall to the ground beside me, as the fear I’d pushed away less than an hour ago slammed back into me.

  I screwed my eyes shut. I shoved one hand into my pocket and wrapped it tight around my mother’s wooden bird, letting the sharp points of the wings bite into my palm. I sucked in breath after breath through my nose, and told myself I was safe, that there was no reason for this surge of adrenaline, this racing pulse, this wild, untamed fear.

  I counted brea
ths. Fifteen. Thirty.

  By forty-five, I was something approaching calm. I relaxed my hands, opened my eyes, and let my head loll against the door. That hadn’t been so bad. I hadn’t felt like I was dying. I hadn’t thrown up. And no one had seen.

  I stood up shakily. The window threw my reflection back at me—hollow eyes, hair like a mass of briars around my face. I looked away quickly. I hated seeing my reflection. Especially after one of my crashes—that emotional collapse that inevitably followed after I’d shoved away fear or sorrow into that empty void-space. Though sometimes the blinding fear or anger or rending sadness rushed over me like a wave with no reason at all. I was lucky this time. I’d had warning and somewhere private to ride it out.

  I dropped my bag on the bed and sat next to it. I pulled out my clothes, stacking them side by side on the bed to store later, and reached to the bottom of the bag, to the most important object I carried with me: a printout of a scanned photograph.

  The phone call had come late at night, when I was leaving my shift at the burger place near my school, walking back to my foster home. It was short-term placement—three months left and I’d be out on my own, eighteen and done with high school. I never answered unknown numbers, but for some reason I picked up.

  What do you know about Bitter Rock?

  I was sure Abby had the wrong person. Or that it was some kind of prank. And then she texted the scan to me: a photo, front and back.

  The photo showed my mother and me. I was maybe three. Small, but I always have been. I was pressed against her side, grinning up at her. I’d had brown hair as a kid; it had only lightened to blonde as a teenager. The same as hers, which was pulled back in a braid, the same way I wore mine now. A close-mouthed smile made her look like she had a secret and wanted you to know it. Her hands were in the pockets of a puffy vest; her gaze was fixed squarely on the camera. Behind her was the sky, and scrub grass, and a rocky cliffside. And in the corner of the photo was the edge of a sign. LANDON AVIAN RES—

  That’s all you could read. There was a date scrawled on the back of the photo, next to our names. August 10, 2003. Days before she died. She looked happy. She looked well. She looked a world away from dying in a Montana hospital.

  I lay down on the bed, holding the small wooden bird between my thumb and forefinger. Now that I’d seen one in person, there was no mistaking that it was a red-throated tern. A bird that only came from one island.

  I knew a Sophie once, Mrs. Popova had said. Who else could she mean? I didn’t remember her. Did I? I shut my eyes and summoned up an image of Mrs. Popova’s face, and something kicked hard at my gut, the same not-quite-memory that I’d gotten looking at Mikhail.

  Abby, the girl who called me, had told me about 2003, the summer when my mother, Martin Carreau, and Carolyn Baker went missing. Their deaths—or disappearances—were strange enough on their own, she said, but it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  She didn’t tell me more than that, so I found it on my own. The disappearances weren’t tied to Bitter Rock directly, not overtly, but you could make the connection if you knew what you were looking for. A small island. People missing. Investigations that petered out far too soon.

  The Krachka first—a fishing boat. The crew missing and an entire village with it. An airbase in World War II abandoned without explanation. A back-to-the-land commune wiped off the map.

  And three vanished ornithologists in 2003.

  Abby wasn’t the first to put the pieces together and see the pattern. I’d found other theories—internet forums teemed with posts suggesting the missing were the victims of aliens, government experiments, the Rapture in miniature. And then the voices of reason always chimed in: coincidence. It was a dangerous part of the ocean. Lots of storms and lots of rocks. It was too remote for emergency services or search crews to get out there, increasing the chances of bodies going unrecovered. And, of course, some of it could be made up or exaggerated. It was the obvious explanation. The one that didn’t require you to believe in the impossible.

  But I already believed in impossible things.

  Because I was one of them.

  EXHIBIT C

  Video recording posted to Facebook by Angela Esau

  POSTED OCTOBER 18, 2013, 9:43 AM

  Caption reads: what a FREAK

  The video is from a high angle, a phone lifted above the heads of a crowd of middle school students. They’re shouting, some of them laughing, most of it unintelligible or profane. They’ve formed a tight ring in a hallway lined with blue-gray lockers, and in the center of the ring, a girl is on her knees. She hunches, screaming and tearing at her wheat-colored hair, pulling it free of the braid that hangs to the middle of her back.

  STUDENT 1: What’s wrong with her?

  STUDENT 2: Someone get help!

  STUDENT 3: Holy shit! She’s going crazy!

  The girl turns her face toward the camera. It is Sophia Novak, age thirteen. Her face is raked with red lines where her nails have dug into her cheeks. Her lips are skinned back in a rictus of fear and rage, and the whites of her eyes show as her gaze roves blindly over the students. And then she lunges. Not at the students, though they lurch back in a wave to get away, but straight into the bank of lockers.

  She rams her head against them, and then her fists, pounding the metal.

  TEACHER: Move! Get out of the way!

  The male teacher pulls her away from the lockers. The locker doors are dented, smeared with blood. She wrenches away from him and then stops.

  She freezes, the rage falling from her face like a mask cast to the floor. She blinks, looking dazed. She spreads her hands and looks down at them.

  TEACHER: Sophia?

  She turns and walks calmly away from him. The crowd of students parts hastily to give her room.

  The video ends.

  3

  I MUST HAVE dozed off, because then I was dreaming. The dreams were always the same, a tangled knot of memory and nightmare—the sea, the cold, the shore. A sky empty of stars. And lastly, always, the dark angel.

  The dark angel was a hole in the world in the shape of a man. Six wings grew from its shoulders, and it hung above me, its outline surrounded by streaks of light like fractured glass. It pointed at me—

  And I woke. I sat panting in bed, sweat sticking my shirt to my skin. The light in the hall was off, and I glanced at the alarm clock beside the bed. Just after two a.m. It was dim outside, though not quite night. There was no true night in the summer here.

  Something clicked softly against the window.

  My head whipped up. For a moment all I could see was my startled reflection. Outside there was only the sound of waves and wind, of rock tumbled against rock, scrape and hush, and of the terns calling.

  Or was it more? The scrape of rocks became a footstep; the tern’s scream became the wail of someone crying. Then back again. I crept from the bed and turned off the light. When I turned to the window, my twinned self in the reflection had vanished. In its place was the mist.

  And in the mist, a shadow. Someone was outside.

  I bolted to the window, but the shadow had receded into the gloom.

  I bit my lip, my mouth dry and sour with adrenaline. Everyone I’d met so far had told me this place was dangerous. Mr. Nguyen, refusing to set foot on the shore. Mikhail, with his parting warning. Mrs. Popova, locking the doors against an empty island. I should stay put. Any sensible person would stay put.

  But I wouldn’t find out anything by staying safely indoors. And it wasn’t like I had anything to lose, except my life. And it wasn’t a life worth fretting over.

  I grabbed my phone for its flashlight and hurried for the back door, doing my best to move quietly. The house was old and creaked with every step, but no one stirred. I twisted the deadbolt on the back door and yanked it open. Frigid air blasted me immediately, but at least there was
only fog. The storm had stayed out east after all.

  Mrs. Popova’s house backed up to the water. I walked slowly toward it—between the darkness of the cloud cover and the mist, I could barely see my own feet. It would be easy to fall, crack my skull on the rocks, and be carried away by the hungry tide. Just another one of the vanished.

  I’d reached the edge of the water. The surf slapped at the pebbles just ahead of me, foamy, flecked with grit and bits of seaweed. It sloshed, shushed—dripped. But no, that last sound was behind me, and with it the scrape of rocks. A footstep.

  Fear jolted through me, rooting me in place. I should have turned, but the terror held me still. Another footstep came, and with it a soft exhalation of breath.

  Angrily, I shoved my fear into the emptiness of the void. For an instant, it vanished—and then it rushed back, like a wave retreating only to crash against the shore once more. I sucked in a startled breath, and bit down against a low moan of animal panic.

  “Who’s there?” I whispered. My voice was too weak to overcome the ocean.

  Fingertips brushed the back of my neck. I held myself perfectly still as they trailed lightly down my back to a point between my shoulder blades, then fell away. The person behind me sighed, and their footsteps fell back. I forced myself to turn slowly, my heart hammering.

  The mist was thick. Thicker than any fog I’d ever seen. The figure in front of me stood no more than four feet away, but all I could see was a gray shadow through the mist. A person, but featureless, nearly formless. Silent, except for the persistent drip of water. A damp, earthy smell seemed to emanate from them.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” the figure repeated. Voice a croak like a raven’s.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “What do you want?” Less of a croak now. Almost human.

  The figure faded. It took me a moment to realize they had stepped back—and back again, the mist swallowing them until all that was before me was a featureless expanse of gray.