“There’s nothing on an island around here that can kill a sheep, other than an islander. Or so they thought then. One summer they started to find mutilated sheep bodies out in the pastures.
“It only made sense to the school’s bosses to blame the boys since they were Savage urchins who, at best, were born to pull oars for the Quaker captains. And the boys probably should have, too. They never saw a cent of the profit from the wool at the school and they lived on food as meager as a sailor’s half-rations. The killings spread to the rest of the island’s livestock and the Bismuthians responded by blockading the reform school, setting watches on the cavern doors of the school that had been chiseled from the granite mountain.
“The islanders told stories of loups-garous. The boys themselves were stripped and searched for signs of shape-shifting. The island’s pastures were emptied and children were kept indoors. By summer’s end, Bismuth accepted the obvious; wolves had swum to the island and were quickly depopulating it.
“Even a few rabbits can destroy an island, but predators like these were worse than a hurricane. The islands can’t sustain them so there are no native populations. Actually, there are no wolves at all anymore, anywhere. And this is why—humans are much worse. The Bismuthians gathered on a fall day just before the foul weather started. They armed themselves like villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Even the Indian boys were conscripted to burn out the wolves.
“They knew the wolves denned on the mountain and one morning they encircled the base of it, and with as much alarum as they could scare up, the islanders forced the mountain’s animals to the summit. Then they lit a ring of fire around the peak and stood guard below to kill any wolf that tried to flee the conflagration. Then they ran for their own lives, since lighting their own island on fire was a much worse idea than they had anticipated.
“There are accounts from ships at sea that they could see the fire from all up and down the coast, and by morning the island itself was ringed by gawkers by the boatful. The Bismuthians were lucky, so to speak. The fire never really made it to the harbor, where most people lived. Rather, it spent itself burning the island’s pastures and woods, which had already been overgrazed and overtimbered anyway. Still, the smoking stump of their island was a sore sight. The fire must have descended into the mineshafts of the mountain, since the smoke never abated.”
“There was a reform school on that mountain, right?” reminded Ronco.
“Well that’s what I’m trying to tell you about. Keep up. Like I said, it was the Civil War; the mainland was pooling with blood. That winter after the wolf-burnings, nobody on the continent had the slightest thought about islanders. Not even the school’s Quaker masters. Once the wool tribute stopped, the school was conveniently forgotten. Their teachers had taken to sea to dodge the draft. The Bismuthians were too concerned with their own subsistence and besides, they kept their backs to the smoking mountain. The Indian boys had the dubious freedom to fend for themselves.
“During the course of that frigid winter, the boys took to roaming the island and terrifying the village. Islanders did what they always do in hard times—shun the outsiders and refuse to share. The boys’ raids lessened as winter deepened. They must have holed up in the shafts and caves below the school. Maybe they tried to hibernate—people say the Indians knew how. But the mountain never stopped smoking.
“Come spring, as the islanders were first shaking out their quilts, the continent remembered the island. The Army sent engineers to Bismuth to survey the still-smoking mountain for sites to fortify against the Confederate Navy. They were told the reform school had been closed—and maybe it had, but nobody had told the starvelings the engineers found at the mountain. Hardly a word could be cadged from the wretches that remained. Bodies were found in bunks as if they were shelved for cold storage. Graves had been dug out and long bones were found by the cast-iron kettles.
“The revenants who’d survived had surrendered their senses and could make no account of the winter. And it’s easy to imagine the Islanders, the Quakers, the Army—everyone—weren’t too eager to hear it anyway.”
Lettie hadn’t checked her cell phone for life signs in a few minutes, so I figured it a story well told. My friend, Franklin Mint, didn’t seem satisfied though. I could sense he was hoping I’d leave off somewhere good for him to pick up.
“Many of the boys were still missing,” he said, in a tone that insinuated ancestral knowledge of the unspeakable. “Not eaten, not dead. Disappeared into the fetid blackness of the shafts, hauling all record of their existence along with them. Legends say the boys found the shamans—or the creatures the shamans had become—and joined them in their lightless sanctuary below.
“The years that followed the American Civil War also saw the end of whaling as Bismuth knew it. And without whales and sheep, the people saw less reason to live on the island. The villagers whispered sinister stories about the mountain and chose to ignore stinking tendrils of vapor and the luteous glows that sometimes escaped from the crevasses. Rumors spread of cacophonous flutings and groanings from the unwholesome chasms and of lightning that lingered too long on the summit’s rocky knuckle.
“Islanders were careful not to speak of a curious phenomenon that occurred each summer near where the mountain sloped sheer into the sea without so much of a strip of sand to skirt it. Still, a professor from an important mainland university who had summered here for years became curious about the annual turbulence. Curious because it occurred on the solstice and curious because he had read weird accounts written by mad scholars and suspect fantasists of other such unseemly disturbances of the natural congresses of fishes and men.”
Franklin’s language had purpled dramatically, like the sea before a disastrous gale. His story was creepy enough, but the transformation that was coming upon the Korean skald was really starting to give me the willies.
“It was said that when the sun finally set after its longest shine of the year, that any islander who trod the mountain would not return. That foolhardy fishermen found abominations in their nets. That children were snatched and replaced with changelings who developed gill-like deformities. The ancient Indians who let slip dark hints told the professor that shrill piping and rumbling hooms throbbed through curséd Mount Bis on that evil night each year, making its very pebbles dance primeval steps of inhuman choreography. The natives insinuated that the shamans of yore still lurked the mountain’s roots, though they had long ago shed their humanity. They warned that ever since the forsaken boys of the reformatory disappeared into the ramifying mine shafts, the solstice had become a dire day marked by tragedies and accidents. ‘Do not linger here upon the solstice,’ they admonished. ‘Sublet your cottage to tourists that week.’
“On that shortest night of the summer, as the aurora borealis shimmered, the old professor took his walking stick and equally-old-but-equally-curious dog and slipped from his cottage, telling his sleepy wife that he was going to make astronomical observations. She warned him to stay away from the mountain and the moiling pool that formed annually below it. But he was a true Nineteenth Century scholar and was certain that, along with his dog and stick, reason and skepticism would ward him from supernatural bunkum.”
Ronco pitched in: “It must have been a difficult walk for both, since none of their six knees bent well any longer. They were driven by a curiosity, by the gravity of the sublime, an impish perversion that has always driven mankind to consider beyond what simple reason would allow.”
Franklin nodded sagely. “What drives men into the depths of lurking madness? What is worse; to traipse blindly into a horror that should not exist, or to court it, whether through necromancy or imagination? The professor chose his fate, of course, but how is it his highly-praised organ of reason allowed such a choice? Here is what we do know: When his wife awoke in the morning and found the professor had not returned from his observations, she sent searchers. He was discovered, alone, that afternoon, shuffling along the mountain road. He collapsed
into the arms of his rescuers and did not utter a word for more than a week as he convalesced. When he did speak again, he had lost most of his talent for rhetoric and reasoning. He could only blurt warnings and bizarre gabblings that did not suit the once proper and staid man at all.
“His wife would never say a word about the man; she simply kept caring for him and telling those concerned that he had fallen ill and deserved their prayers, while keeping the key to his sickroom on a ribbon around her neck. One of my ancestors was a servant in their cottage, and it is from her that my family has preserved his story. She gathered from his ravings that he had hiked the mountain to a flat cliff that hung over the ocean. He sat there to listen to what he supposed was the wind whooshing through the boulders and cracks and marvel at the spectral light folding luminously across the sky. The aurora seemed to have an anti-shadow in the waves, which fizzed with phosphorescence as they convolved upon themselves, forming a surging whirlpool below the beetling crag.
“His thoughts had wandered among the stars and waves so it seemed a surprise to him when he noticed the wind’s roar had taken on distinctive trills, like the undertones of a thousand bull rushes. A deep counterpoint worried its way to his earbones through his bottom. He noticed his dog had gone rigid with attention and soon he could not even hear the waves, only the piping and wooming that was devouring his mind.
“He saw a swirling in the inky water just beyond the undulating black bladderwort and felt compelled to clamber downward to it, despite the fragility of his age. His dog began to growl but would not join him.
“Any man who knows the sea knows to expect grotesqueries. The professor may not have been an islander, but he was of coastal stock and a free thinker, besides. Maybe it was his education and sophistication that prevented him from dying of shock at that moment. Perhaps it was the utter inconceivability of what he saw that allowed him to stagger away. But his sanity did not return from the mountain with him, nor did his dog.
“For men of reason and intellect know better than to see those same qualities reflected in an animal’s eyes. Moiling beneath the spume were pale creatures with griseous brows that surely contained thought. Slatches in the waves showed them to be the size of dolphins yet without their sleek and resilient skin. The professor thought more of insect larvae than piscine hunters. Their bodies suggested bulging tubes of tallow; the tailfins were strangely articulated, and their lateral fins were more like hands with attenuated, webbed fingers.
“Several creatures rose to the surface as if they were standing on pedestals. What shocked the professor most was not their repugnant bodies. It was their wall-eyed stare, both unhuman and disturbingly familiar. It was the wide, chinless jaw with the curiously rubbery lips and the corpse-like pallor of the creature’s face, and the uncanny attention they fixed upon him. What shattered the mind of the poor professor most entirely was their request: ‘Give dog.’
“He said later that at the time he could not even begin to question why he was throwing his beloved dog into the seething water—he said that he had still been in their thrall even after he’d been found. His dog yelped and snapped at him, pulled into the depths before it could even drown. The last thing the professor could recall seeing was his loyal friend moaning with fear and betrayal, trying to bat at the sickly smooth heads of the creatures with his forepaws as something tugged from below.”
I had stopped breathing a minute or so prior. I was afraid to look at Franklin. Ronco was smiling with pride. I renewed my vow to never swim again.
Lettie looked aggrieved. “He killed his dog?!” When none of us defended the conclusion, she asked if we didn’t know any shorter stories about houses with lights that went on and off and creaking floorboards in the attic. I did, but they were all true and not worth mentioning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
BBQ Squid
Turns out, we blew it with the story. As the only real native around, I felt I was qualified to judge, and I deemed it magnificently eerie. Lettie, on the other hand, grumbled it was nasty and old fashioned. She couldn’t get over the dead dog. Her lack of appreciation cast a pall on us and transformed us from salty raconteurs to three creepy guys she was trapped on a boat with. Ronco had promised a “water picnic” earlier, but she was having none of it. A boyfriend awaited her at the inn. A cell phone potent with runes of busy-ness and personal significance was waved before us. An insufficiency of bars was declared. The danger of interfering with Lettie’s immediate destiny were made plain: the likeliness of our televised celebrity was diminishing with every second we failed to promptly deliver her back to the island.
I think it was when Ill John shucked his Patriots jacket that he also doffed his Ronco persona. Franklin slipped back into Chosen by simply turning silent. I suppose his feelings were hurt. His story had deserved a better audience. As Lettie grew more anxious, the Koreans grew more distant, and I realized I was witnessing an important evolutionary moment—Ill John and Chosen had taken an important step in adapting to the island; they had assimilated the fluidic, unexplainable concept of “island time.” Island time is endemic but meaningless among islanders; it only becomes apparent when strangers wield their own sense of time and significance. Island time then begins to calcify around them, suspending the irritant in a way that makes them continue to feel glossy and valuable, while rendering them inconsequential. Lettie’s attempt to summon the persuasive power of the Manhattan Minute must have catalyzed the Koreans and revealed to them the complex nuances of inaction and delay that make up island time. Needless to say, the no-wake rule of the harbor was well-anticipated and applied with a sense of stately conservation as we gurgled dockward.
Lettie took to the foredeck to recuse herself from our company and do something in her lap with her thumbs and an electronic device that wasn’t as interesting to watch as it might have seemed. I had hoped to impress my salty, rogue sexuality upon her by coiling a line on the deck and offering observations about the quality of the weather, but Ill John and I wound up with our lips in each other’s ears, trying to whisper over the engine noise.
We were looking at Lettie’s back as she sat on the deck and leaned against the cabin’s front window. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped jersey and a black bra or maybe bikini. Lots of tourists wear bathing suits under their clothes. Presumably because this island is so paradisiacal that one never knows when one will feel so joyful that one must fling off one’s clothes and swim. When I was a kid I wore trunks under my pants for an entire summer, waiting for that very feeling to overcome me. I got a rash and new underwear for school that year, but that was all.
Since the dock and Lettie’s slouching boyfriend had been in view for some time—and would continue to be so for some time due to our negligible pace—our guest seemed a little more pacific. Her boyfriend, she said, wasn’t partial to the water and hadn’t really recovered from the ferry ride. But he did own his own apartment in Manhattan. She said that even though Manhattan was on the water, there wasn’t much aquatic about it, except in some restaurants. She praised the plaintalking authenticity of us islanders but didn’t think we were telegenic, especially the geezers.
After we tied up to let her off, I watched her climb the low-tide ladder and thought she was still kind of good looking even if she was from New York and had a seasick boyfriend. I liked the way she carried her sneakers instead of putting them back on. I told myself it was her way of telling me that the key was under the mat, for later.
My mind was getting so watery that my only lingering thought as we pulled out again was of Lettie’s soles. I forgot to follow her up the ladder and back to my life, whatever had become of it. Ill John must have noticed. He told me not to be forlorn and that good supper and a pleasant evening was before us. But my needs extended beyond good supper.
I watched the two of them converse in Korean; Ill John seemed to be coaxing Chosen out of his sulk. It was soothing to see them rally, and I settled a bit. Their fondness for Bismuth life was disconcerting, but it
gave off a nice little contact high. I shouldn’t complain, I thought. Here I am on my own island in my own harbor, where I knew at least two names and a nickname for every rock in sight. These people actually want my company and are fully aware I have nothing profitable to offer them. We roamed the harbor, presumably in search of a good place to lay out our metaphorical blanket and begin our picnic, and I tried to re-assemble what had been my plan, since I was somewhat convinced that I had once felt a strong sense of purpose and was currently experiencing mission drift. Men need plans because their lives are what happen when their plans go south.
There was the still enigmatic sampo gift. At one point it had seemed life-threatening and desperately serious. My anticipation of supper had tidily replaced my dread of the sampo. There was Angie, whose ire was going to dog me forever. I felt lousy about running our potential relationship aground before it had got much farther than Mini’s Island. I should have known better than to get between a mother and her cub. Snorri’s worries about his whale and antenna were much too perplexing to become my own worry. Waldena was well worth thinking about, but my mind seized up between fight and flight whenever she made it to my forebrain and gummed up all my mental machinery. I tried to concentrate and project my will into the future. I should expect things of the world and anticipate them and integrate these things into what was expected of me and my own personal aspirations. But I kept leaping to what seemed like an inevitable conclusion—if I were lying on my own couch, in my own home, right this very minute, there would be no need for a plan. But plans are plans, especially other people’s plans.
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