She didn’t have a single second to catch her breath. The moment she stepped foot on solid ground, she was hurried into a waiting Jeep, which took off bumping and jolting over the uneven ground. When it finally came to a stop, she half-fell out of it, immediately dropping to her hands and knees before she proceeded to throw up.
“You okay?” John asked her, sympathy in his voice.
“Not even a little bit,” she said, clutching her stomach and worrying that another bout might come on any moment.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got something you can take for the motion sickness before we head back.”
“That would be good. Thank you. So, what did you drag me all the way out here to show me?” she asked.
“It’s just about thirty yards down from here. Are you okay to walk?”
She figured she could walk ninety feet, even if her legs were wobbly. Besides, at the moment, that sounded a whole lot more appealing than the thought of having to get right back onto a moving vehicle. At least out here she could breathe fresh air.
They moved a few feet through what looked like brush and trees which had been recently cleared away.
“The workmen who were clearing this area found something very unusual and called us,” John said.
“You’re being very vague. What exactly is it that they found?” she asked, growing even more frustrated with his evasiveness.
He stopped in front of a fat, squat palm and then turned and looked at her. “This,” he said, pulling the fronds of the palm tree back so she could see past it.
There, in the middle of the bushes, was an old, weathered boat. She took a hesitant step forward, her heart quickening as she recognized it. Without a shadow of a doubt she knew it was her husband’s boat, The Guardians--only there was an ancient tree growing right up through the middle of it.
15
“Mark!” Sally shouted and lunged forward, nearly tripping over some roots on the ground. She made it to the boat. The letters were faded, but she could still brush her fingers over the name The Guardians on the ship.
“Mark! Dave!” she screamed frantically, hoping beyond hope they would hear her.
There was no answer.
The boat was in terrible shape. She struggled to understand exactly what it was she was staring at. The whole thing was filthy. Half the windows were broken out. There were layers of dirt and sand and grime caked all over it. Trees were growing all around it, and besides the large tree in the middle, there were two others also growing through it. Cobwebs hung thick over the whole thing.
She didn’t care if what she was seeing was impossible. She had to get on board and look around. She needed to find her husband and his best friend.
“Help me!” she shouted to John, who had hung back when she’d run toward the boat.
He came forward slowly, a look of awe on his face. “They told me,” he said. “But seeing it this way is something else entirely.”
“Help me up,” she said, gripping the side of the boat.
He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s safe to go onboard, Sally. The boards are rotting through. You could hurt yourself.”
“You can’t stop me!” she snapped. “So either help me get up there or get out of the way.”
He laced his fingers together and gave her a boost up. She managed to swing her body over the side of the boat and roll to a standing position. Cobwebs caught in her hair as she hurried toward the stairs leading below deck. She brushed them away but didn’t slow her pace until she put her foot on the top step and it creaked.
“Careful!” John called, coming up behind her. “That wood looks like it’s rotted out. One wrong step and your foot will go right through.”
She clung tightly to the handrail as she descended, carefully testing each step before putting her weight on it. The last step cracked and shattered, but held long enough for her to get past it.
She had been in that hallway a hundred times in the past, yet it felt completely alien now. The stench of decay filled the air and there was a thick layer of dirt covering everything. None of this made sense.
Her heart pounded as she turned and headed for the master bedroom where Mark stayed when he was out on his fishing trips. She had no idea what had happened here or the how or why of it, but she was terrified of what she was going to find.
“Mark?” she called even though she knew in her heart he wasn’t there.
The second she stepped foot in the room, she knew it was indeed her husband’s boat, despite its ancient appearance. Everything was exactly as she remembered it except for the many years of decay which had set in. She could even make out a faint tropical floral pattern on the sheets, something Mark had objected to but she had insisted on.
She wanted to sit on the edge of the bed as she had so many times, to connect in some way to her husband, but the grime covering it repulsed her. She glanced at the chair in the room and stiffened. With a cry of agony, she rushed over and snatched up the hat that was sitting upon it. Just like everything else in the room, it was old and weathered, but she still would have known it anywhere.
Her pulse raced. Why was it here and Mark was not? He wore it constantly when on his fishing trips. His lucky hat, he’d called it.
She turned to show John the hat.
“This is Mark’s favorite hat! I gave it to him as a gift for his birthday one year and he always wore it fishing. Where is my husband and what happened to this boat?” she demanded.
He shook his head and ran a hand across his jaw. “I wish I knew. I can’t explain what happened to the boat. I just know scientifically it’s been here at least one-hundred-and-fifty years. That’s roughly how old the tree growing through the center of it looks. It had to have been beached here. There’s a gash in the hull, so there was no way the boat would be seaworthy after that. Then the trees grew up around it. It defies reason, but this seems to be the same boat that went missing only a few weeks ago.”
“It is the same boat,” she said through clenched teeth.
“I agree with you. The surveying party was shocked to find the technology on board the ship was so modern. That’s why they called us in.”
“Where are Mark and Dave?”
He held out his hands in a helpless gesture. “They haven’t found any signs of graves or skeletons here on the island. Assuming they were stranded here at the same time the boat was, it’s possible they found a way off the island.”
“A hundred and fifty years ago?” she asked, struggling to wrap her head around it.
“I know it sounds crazy, but, look around you. Crazy is pretty much all we’ve got at the moment.”
All the weeks of uncertainty, of not knowing anything, and now they had found the ship. But instead of getting answers, all she had were more mysteries.
It was too much. Her legs suddenly gave out and she landed hard on the edge of the grimy, ancient bed. Tears of pain and frustration erupted. Since they had called off searching for the ship, she hadn’t allowed herself to really and truly cry. Somehow, deep inside, she felt that if she cried, she’d be admitting he was gone and she’d never see him again.
She wasn’t ready to do that.
That’s why she wouldn’t hold a funeral. A funeral implied finality, and there was nothing final about any of this.
Now, however, she didn’t know what to think anymore. All of this was so far beyond her realm of imagination. None of it made any sense, and she could no longer hold back the waves of fear and doubt assuaging her. She was vaguely aware of John’s presence hovering nearby. He stood silently with her for a few moments before heading down the corridor toward the second bedroom, the one Dave would have been using.
She didn’t know how long it was before he came back.
He stood in the doorway for a moment before finally speaking. “I’m sorry, but we should go now.”
She looked up at him, finding it hard to focus on his face through the tears. “Go where? What can w
e possibly do now?” she asked. “We can’t just leave. We haven’t found Mark and Dave.”
“I wish I had the answers, but I promise, this is not over. I will help you figure out what happened here if it’s within my power to do so.”
Within my power to do so.
Slowly, she looked around at their surroundings. What had the power to do this? And how could they possibly hope to understand it?
“Where do you think they went?” she asked miserably. “And please don’t say you wish you knew.”
He scowled. “Okay. If they made it to this island with the boat, I think they left it shortly afterward. Maybe someone found them and took them to the mainland.”
“What makes you think they weren’t here for very long?”
“All the cabinet doors have been removed. That suggests to me they needed wood for a fire. If they were really here before the trees grew up, that was probably their best source of wood. But they didn’t take out the drawers or start tearing apart the ship. They would have known there was no way they could patch the hull and make the ship seaworthy again. I think if they had been on the island for a longer period of time, they would have scavenged more of the boat for firewood or to build better lodgings or something.”
“You mean like Robinson Crusoe?”
“Yes, something of that nature.”
She glanced at the nightstand next to the bed. John was right. The drawer was still in it. The wood was warped, but she managed to open the drawer. Inside, she found some paper with writing on it. She carefully pulled it out and unfolded the pages. The writing was faint because of age and the paper was brittle. There wasn’t enough light coming into the cabin for her to make out any of the words, but her heart skipped a beat as she recognized her husband’s handwriting.
“Mark wrote this,” she said, her voice trembling.
“He did? Maybe he explained what happened.” John asked eagerly.
“I can’t read it in here.”
“It’s past time for us to go, anyway.”
She got up, clutching the papers, even as she worried about damaging them. Mark had written whatever was on them and she needed to read it, no matter what it was. Intuitively, she felt there was nothing left for her to find on the boat anyway, which made leaving it a little easier for her.
“What’s going to happen to the ship?” she asked.
“We need to figure that out,” John admitted. “We’re going to have a team go over it in detail to try to find out everything they can about it and what happened to it. Then we can discuss what to do with it.”
“You said it will never be seaworthy again.”
“That’s true,” he confirmed.
“So, what are the options?” she asked.
“I don’t know just yet. I’m just taking this one step at a time for now.”
“Nobody is going to believe me,” she murmured as they made their way to the stairs.
He glanced at her with a grimace. “About that. At least for now, you might not want to share this finding with anyone.”
“Why not?”
“As you pointed out, it’s a pretty fantastic tale. Just give me a little time to try and understand what happened scientifically before you share this with anyone.”
She shook her head. “The last thing I need is people thinking I’ve gone crazy, but you want me to keep all this a secret? I mean, if I can’t talk about this to someone, I am actually going to go crazy. I can’t just let this spin around and around in my head. I need someone I can talk it out with.”
“I might know someone you can talk to. A friend.”
“If you’re about to say that they’re a therapist or something like that, I’m going to shut you down right now.”
“No, no. She’s a writer. She specializes in these kinds of things.”
“What kinds of things?” she asked as she carefully began to ascend the rotted stairway.
“Things which appear to have no natural explanation.”
“Such as?”
She could hear him sigh as she made it up the last stair.
Suddenly, she heard a large cracking sound. She turned around just in time to see the stairs collapse underneath John and send him falling backward.
She shouted as he hit the deck beneath. “John, are you okay?”
He didn’t answer.
Panic raced through her.
She turned and screamed at the top of her lungs. “Help! Please help! John’s been hurt!”
A minute later, three men raced over, climbed up on top of the boat and she directed them to the collapsed stairs. Just as they got there, she heard John groan and she breathed in relief.
“You okay?” one of the guys yelled down to him.
“Nothing’s broken, I don’t think. If someone could throw me down a rope, that would be great,” John said.
Sally stepped back out of the way, letting the others take charge. She stood thinking as they worked out the best way to get John back up onto the deck. They managed the feat in short order. In just a couple of minutes, they were settled into the jeep, rattling and bouncing back to the helicopter.
~
She and John were silent for the entire return trip, each busy with their own thoughts. It wasn’t until they’d made it back to the station and were in his office with the door closed that he finally turned to her.
“Promise me you won’t tell other people about what we saw today, at least until we can figure out what’s really going on.”
It was a tall order. Then again, who could she really tell? It wasn’t as if anyone would believe her. She thought about Meredith and some of her other friends. In general, they weren’t the most open-minded people.
“Who would I tell? I don’t want people to think I’m crazy,” she admitted.
“I’d prefer not to be called that, either,” John said.
“But people will believe you. The guys you work with have seen it, too.”
“Yeah. Still, we don’t like to advertise these kinds of things.”
“Unnatural things.”
“Things that appear unnatural,” he corrected her.
“And this author friend of yours--”
“Janis. She’s been doing research for years.”
“On what, exactly?”
“The Devil’s Triangle.”
16
Sally stared open-mouthed at John for a long moment.
“You mean the Bermuda Triangle?” she finally asked.
He nodded.
“But that’s just superstition.”
“That’s what I used to think.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I joined the Coast Guard.”
She just stared at him in silence, waiting for him to say something more—something that made sense.
He fidgeted for a moment and then said, “I’ve seen a lot of things that have no rational explanation, no matter how hard people try to come up with one. Your husband’s boat, for example. There is no reasonable explanation for how it ended up beached on that island a century-and-a-half ago.”
He was right. , and if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she would have called him crazy or a liar.
“Is there any hope Mark and Dave will make it back?” she asked, her throat constricting.
“I’ve given up on speculating on things I don’t understand. That’s one of the reasons I think we should talk to my friend Janis.”
“Okay. Set up the meeting.”
~
“Land! I see land!” Mark exclaimed excitedly.
“That is the best news I’ve ever heard,” Dave said fervently. “Anything specific?”
“No, I can’t make out any structures yet. We must be further up the coast than where we left.”
“Maybe,” he heard Dave mutter through gritted teeth. Mark ignored the hesitation in Dave’s tone.
Fifteen minutes later, Mark was helping
the fisherman drag the boat up onto the shore. A short distance away was a town. He could see the steeple of a church towering above everything else, drawing the eye heavenward. He breathed a sigh of relief. Wherever they were, they would soon be home. He couldn’t wait to step onto a plane and get back to his wife.
He turned and helped Dave out of the boat as gently as he could. The other man was weak, but at least he was moving, and they’d be able to get him help soon now that they’d reached civilization. The fisherman indicated they should follow him, which they slowly did, given Dave’s injuries. As they walked, Mark surveyed their surroundings, trying to figure out where they might be. It was the oddest feeling--it looked like the town that time forgot. He didn’t see a single car anywhere on the streets. In fact, everything about it had a bit of an alien feel to him.
The fisherman finally led them into a modest house. A young woman with raven hair, who Mark suspected was the fisherman’s daughter, came running when he called. She was beautiful and her eyes immediately gravitated toward Dave. She reached out to him, helping him down into a chair in the front room of the house.
She and her father began conversing rapidly in Spanish. Mark took his phone out of his pocket and turned it on. They hadn’t been able to get signal on the island, so he’d left it off to conserve his battery. Now, he’d at last be able to call Sally and let her know he was safe. She must be out of her mind with worry. Tears stung his eyes as he waited for his phone to turn on.
When his home screen came up, he stared in consternation.
How could this be?
He still had no signal. He turned slowly in a circle, holding up his phone, hoping against hope to see at least two or three bars.
Nothing.
“No signal?” Dave asked, but unlike Mark, he didn’t sound the least bit surprised.
“No. I’ll try outside.”
“It won’t help.”
“Why?”
The Triangle Page 11