by Bryan, JL
The walls were floor-to-ceiling clear window panels looking out on the sea islands and the ocean thousands of feet below. To make it worse, many areas of the floor were also completely transparent, like those underneath the built-in chairs and sofas clustered around a glass tabletop in the sunken central seating area. The floor beneath the glass table was clear, too, of course. It was like constantly walking on a web of narrow footbridges over a fatally high drop.
Wyatt had a private stateroom at the rear, which we weren’t invited to see. Renoir occupied a drop-down chair beside it, reading a gardening magazine, having traded his slate-black sunglasses for rimless reading glasses.
Wyatt himself stood by one of the curved window walls, giving Michael and Stacey a long-winded description of very specific technical details about the airship and how he’d improved it and had a team designing a more advanced version. Michael and Stacey soaked up the view, and Michael was probably genuinely interested in Wyatt’s chatter about the minutiae of the machinery.
Stacey sipped a green smoothie and snapped pictures of the view, taking selfies with Jacob and me and anyone else who would cooperate. Wyatt stole extra glances at Stacey, and occasionally scrutinizing ones at Jacob, like he was considering making some kind of mergers and acquisitions play.
“Holding up okay?” I asked Jacob at one point, away from the others. He’d once been in a plane crash.
“Well, I thought it would be like baby steps back toward getting on a plane someday,” Jacob said. He sat on one of the deeply piled sofas, doing his best not to look out through the windows or down through the floor. “And it sort of is. Because I’m realizing now that one nice thing about airplanes is that they hurry up and get you there as fast as possible. They don’t drag it out in a slow-motion torture session like this blimp does.”
“You mean hybrid airship,” I said.
“Whatever.”
“Here we are,” Wyatt announced, and I went to join them on the other side of the gondola. “Time to get some perspective on all of this.”
We hovered low over Satilla Island, where multiple crews were busy at work on the old buildings.
“We can’t do much about the main lodge until all those remains are settled and the government investigations are complete,” Wyatt said. “But my lawyers found a loophole that enables us to tear down some of the old, unrelated buildings as environmental hazards. We’re removing it all as fast as we can, giving the island back to nature.”
“What about the basement?” I asked.
“We will fill it in completely.” Darika stepped up on my other side, drinking cucumber juice in a martini glass.
“Including the weird old temple?” Stacey asked.
“We’re calling that the ‘sub-basement,’ but yes,” Darika replied. “It will be completely packed with rocks and dirt.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “You’ve taken all the other measures we’ve recommended?”
“That building’s been blessed and re-blessed by multiple overlapping denominations,” Wyatt said. “The old cemetery, too, where we’re plugging the door and windows to that little temple with concrete.”
“Any word on Gary?” I asked.
“He’s recovering,” Darika said. “The legal situation is fluid.”
“And Adrienne?” Stacey asked, looking at Wyatt.
He shook his head. “Her family walled me off after I refused to join their freaky murder cult. So I don’t know much.”
“Having different family religions can sometimes cause strain on a relationship,” Stacey said with a nod.
“From what I’ve heard, she’s spending time in a private psychiatric institute,” Wyatt said.
“Just like Marzena,” I said. “But she’ll probably get treated better.”
“The Canadian authorities are investigating the Grolman property on Wintertide Island,” Darika said. “But that’s sealed tight, no information available yet.”
“Where are we on Publius D. Tribune?” Wyatt asked her.
“The Wyatt Foundation has purchased his old house, the one he lost in foreclosure, and given him clear title to it,” Darika said. “That's the Wyatt Foundation, helping the homeless one step at a time. Though usually not this far east.”
“Aw, that’s generous,” Stacey said.
“A little too generous for someone who attacked us with fish hooks.” Brad sniffed.
“He deserved something for helping us,” Wyatt said. “He didn’t need to stick his neck out and reach out to me, but he did.”
“It’s ultimately just a tax deduction, regardless, and even more so after we added the solar shingles,” Darika said.
Wyatt turned to Stacey and me. “It looks like Darika made a smart move hiring the two of you. I’m scared to think how things might have gone if you hadn't been here to figure it all out.”
“I’m still not sure I'll ever have that place figured out.” I looked down at the huge bulk of the Gilded Age mansion at Satilla Island’s crest, surrounded by a high wall that was slowly cracking and crumbling into the ocean below. Someday the wall would be gone and all would be revealed. Nothing resists the wind, water, and salt forever. The tide always changes and the wheel always turns, just as Vanna White taught us. “Hey, Michael, how are you enjoying the ride?”
“Great present, Ellie. I’ve always wanted to ride in a bluh, I mean, an airship.” He clapped Wyatt on the shoulder, causing Brad to grimace slightly like he wanted to spritz Wyatt’s shoulder with sanitizer. “Thanks, man. This is really the best way to travel.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling people!” Wyatt said. “And with this model, it’s the landing system that makes the difference, because you can land anywhere in the world.”
“Why’s that?” Michael asked, and Wyatt told him. He told him a lot, for a while.
Stacey and I sat and watched the clouds drift by below our feet, and the meandering coastline far below that.
“It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” I said. “Being up here, I mean. It’s kind of surreal.”
“Just like our work,” Stacey said.
I thought about the ferryman’s warning, that our work could be damaging to the soul. He was probably right, but somebody had to stand in the breach between worlds when one opened. I wondered if it really was eating away at me on the inside somehow. I wondered if it was doing that to Stacey, too.
But on that afternoon, on a sky cruise through the heavens, through clouds that had once been considered the dwelling places of gods and angels, I put those thoughts aside.
Satilla Island was already behind us, growing smaller and less distinct, the host of evil spirits and their victims hopefully exorcised from the lodge, making way for a new generation of living things to move in and take over.
From the author
I hope you enjoyed this latest from Ellie and Stacey!
A few notes if you're interested:
Satilla Island is fictional, named after the Satilla River that empties near Jekyll and Cumberland Island, but its geography and history are inspired by those and other sea islands. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the plantation owners were replaced by the Gilded Age inhabitants—the famous Jekyll Island Club on Jekyll, the RJ Reynolds estate on Sapelo, the Carnegie estates on Cumberland Island, most notably the palatial Dungeness, whose burned-out ruins still stand, with wild horses grazing on its former lawns. Dungeness replaced a plantation house that had burned down, then itself burned down in the 1950, in a pattern similar to the story of Ellie's childhood home, though I didn't know about that when I first wrote about Ellie's childhood years ago. The Hole is a real place off Cumberland Island, filled with the Atlantic's largest sharks.
Hackelberend and Count von Ebernburg are each the mythical lead hunters in different local Wild Hunt stories in Germany. While I'd had “eccentric big-game hunter” in my Ellie story ideas file for a while, it was the combination of that with the old estates I've visited on Jekyll and the old, wide
spread Wild Hunt myths of Europe that made the idea click for me. My cover artist and I picked the house on the cover from stock images of various old country manor houses, and only by studying that building later out of curiosity did I learn about Bentheim stone, sourced from Lower Saxony, a place with very local Wild Hunt myths about the ghostly hunter Hackelberend.
The interesting connection there isn't just the Wild Hunt myth—there are different versions all over Europe, led by old gods or ghosts or the devil himself—but also that the Germany city of Braunschweig, or Brunswick, is also located in lower Saxony. The port town of Brunswick, Georgia, the closest town to Jekyll and Cumberland, which Ellie and Stacey visit in this book, is named for that city. To me, this was an amazing coincidence that would have increased the area's appeal to the Grolman family (as well as those members who were secretly Hackelberends and not Grolmans at all, like Garit and Adrienne). It never fit into the story in any specific way, though, so I'm mentioning it here instead, as a sort of curiosity item.
So those are my last notes on The Lodge. I'm currently at work on Ellie's next case, which involves a ghost who, according to childhood lore in one small town, emerges from doors and cabinets left carelessly open at night. You can pre-order Cabinet Jack on Amazon.
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