Suddenly, she turned and started running south along the wall.
“Where are you going?” Rawl called, already starting after her.
“To the harbor,” she called without slowing down.
“Why the harbor?” Paul asked. He sighed and followed them.
“Because,” Josie called over her shoulder. “He is going to try to bury himself. Just not under the earth.”
XIX
Drowning Man
Elias Wick had already considered all the options Josie and the twins had just been discussing. What he had to do had been obvious to him for some days now. What had remained to be thought out was how to do it. But he knew now. With the mallet, awl, and chisel in his bag, and the good rope around his shoulder, he tied the other, more cumbersome rope to the wall and used it to let himself down. As soon as his feet touched earth, they started for the harbor.
The harbor looked much the same as it had on the day they landed, although now it was night instead of late-morning. The three boats of the erstwhile Haven-ers still knocked idly against the dock. And there, turned over on the beach, looking rather like great sea turtles laboring up the scree, were the vessels which would convey him to the culmination of his priestly duties and his grave. The rowboats. He only needed one. He flipped it over, set the pair of oars in it, and pushed it down to the water. Its hull made a loud scraping sound against the gravel of the beach, jarring in the otherwise silent night. It would have seemed to him like a protest of his actions, but the boat slid easily over the grit despite the noise.
When the boat was just above the reach of the waves, he went in search of the final tool to wreak his demise and, hopefully, the salvation of his comrades. He found the perfect one near the tree line, just above where the boat had been. It was a large rectangular rock. He hefted it in his arms and struggled back to the boat. He set it gently beneath the rowing bench; careful not to damage the hull. Not yet.
He pushed the boat a little ways into the water and pulled himself in. He set the oars in the oarlocks and began to row. When he came to the middle of the harbor, he put the oars up and got out his mallet. He had brought both the awl and chisel because, not being accustomed to working with wood, he did not know which would serve his purpose better. Looking now at the boards that formed the hull of the boat, he decided on the chisel. He placed the blade against the hull between his feet and struck it with the mallet. He was encouraged by the bite it made in the wood. He struck again and again. Once he wiped his brow and in doing so unintentionally looked up. This glance made all the difference in the world. For when he looked up, he saw he had drifted quite close to shore. Knowing this would not do, he set the oars in place again.
This time he rowed nearly to the mouth of the harbor. Then, leaving the oars dangling in the water from the oarlocks, he began his work again. Soon his efforts were rewarded by the sight of the sea seeping into the small hole he had gouged in the bottom of the boat. He looked up. He had drifted further into the harbor. He rowed to the harbor’s center, believing this to be its deepest point. He tied one end of the rope about his waist and knotted it securely. He crisscrossed the other end around the rock as though he were wrapping a present with a bow. He laid the rock between his feet next to the hole. There was a small puddle in the boat now.
The purpose of the stone of course was to be an anchor for his body. This was the purpose of the hole: He could not simply drop himself and the rock off the side of the boat before he had done what he’d come to do. He had to wait until he had drawn as much of the darkness into himself as he could before burying himself beneath the waves. But he did not know what the darkness would do to him. Perhaps it would fill him with selfishness and cloud his mind from his original purpose and leave him with the desire only to save his own life – in which case the purpose of all his actions might be negated. The slow filling of the boat would give him time to invite the darkness in without giving him any recourse for responding to any trick of said darkness to try to change his mind.
He watched the water bubbling into the boat. It did not seem to be coming too fast. Then, rising slowly and cautiously to his feet so as not to upset the boat, he closed his eyes and held out his arms.
“Come,” he said. “Come.”
He did not know what else to say. He had never prayed such a prayer before (if a prayer it could be called), and the burden he had taken upon himself was so heavy upon him that very little energy remained to him to formulate any real sentences. But his despairing state of mind over the past few days had perhaps prepared him better than any thought-out oration.
At any rate, it worked.
“Come,” he said, and the darkness came.
It came with movements and sounds and sensations he felt more in the pit of his stomach than with his external senses. Things that fluttered like bats’ wings and scuttled like crabs.
“Come.”
It came.
My name is Hurt. My name is Shrink. My name is Gnaw.
“Come.”
They came to him like great black birds flapping home to roost in a ruined tree.
My name is Plague. My name is Lost. My name is None.
***
Josie, Rawl, and Paul did not slow their pace as they neared the beach. They ran all the faster. Twice Rawl tripped and fell. The second time, he struck his lip and tasted blood. He ran on. Josie stumbled in front of him and, catching up to her, he helped her to her feet. He could hear Paul crashing and snorting through the forest behind him. If he had not known who was making them, the noises would have frightened him.
The three broke out onto the beach almost at the same time.
“The boat,” Josie said.
Rawl understood many things from her two words. One was that there was only one boat left. The other was missing. He also knew she meant they had to get the remaining boat in the water as quickly as possible. Rawl scanned the beach. He did not see the other boat or Elias anywhere. There was no fog here and the moon was almost full (otherwise the whole venture might have been utterly hopeless) and the water in the moonlight was a mirror of dark silver. And in the center of that dark mirror, Rawl saw something which froze his blood.
Elias Wick was standing knee-deep in the water. But he was standing in the middle of the harbor. The priest’s boat had sunk now too low for Rawl to be able to see it or recognize it for what it was. The priest stood with his arms and face raised to the night sky.
“Rawl,” Josie called.
Rawl came to himself and helped right the boat and push it into the waves. They all scrambled aboard. Paul slammed the oars into the oarlocks as though he meant to snap them in half. Rawl pushed his brother forward to the prow and took the oars. Rowing meant he faced astern. He was facing Josie, who sat on the bench fixed against the stern, but she hovered more than sat, looking over his shoulder.
“To the right, back to the right,” Paul called from his place in the prow. “You’re too far over. No, now you’ve over-corrected.”
Rawl looked over his shoulder until he had the prow pointed at Elias once more. The priest had sunk to his waist. Rawl threw himself into the oars.
“Hurry up,” Paul said, “We’ll never get there in time.”
“He’s doing his best,” Josie said.
Rawl realized he’d only thought he’d been doing his best. He redoubled his efforts.
“You’re getting it all whopper-jawed,” Paul shouted. “Straighten it out.”
Rawl glanced over his shoulder. He worked exclusively with the left oar, using the right like a rudder, until he was lined up again.
“Hurry,” Josie said.
Rawl glanced over Josie’s shoulder for a point of reference but found none. The shore was a uniform line and the forest a blur of anonymous dark. “Josie,” he said, “Point at him.”
Josie, rising to a crouch, extended her arm and pointer finger towards Elias. Using her arm like the needle of a compass, Rawl set his course. He set to the oars again, moving his wh
ole body in the driving of them.
Glancing over his shoulder, he thought Elias had disappeared. On the second glance he spotted him. The priest had sunk to his chest.
“Josie, take the oars,” he said. They bumped past each other, trading seats. “Paul, get ready to dive.”
“Can you swim?” Paul asked Josie as he unlaced his boots.
“No,” Josie said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t try.”
“No,” Rawl said. “We need someone to stay with the boat.”
Rawl wasted no time with his boots. He pulled out his knife and cut the laces up the side. He ripped the boots off and stood up. He stripped down to his leggings. Removing his belt, he felt a strange prompting to bear his knife into the water with him. But he let it drop with everything else into the bottom of the boat. Standing in the wobbly craft, he spotted Elias. The priest had sunk to his shoulders. Only his head and upraised arms were above the water.
“Elias,” Rawl shouted.
The priest gave no indication he had heard him.
And then, as Rawl watched, Elias Wick disappeared beneath the water. Rawl knew then that was the worst moment in his life. By the time they reached the spot where he had gone under, the last ripple had died away.
Rawl and Paul coordinated their dives, Rawl jumping to the left and Paul to the right, so as not to flip the boat. Even so, Josie had to brace herself by spreading her feet and putting her hands on the gunwale. The boat rocked wildly before settling down but it had not stopped rocking before Josie was hanging over the side trying to see into the ink-dark water.
She waited. The ripples caused by the boys’ dives disappeared and were replaced by a terrible calm. Josie waited. “Please, please, please,” she said aloud.
Paul surfaced ten feet from the prow.
“Did you find him?”
“No.”
“He went down over there. Look there.”
Paul wiped the water from his face. “I just did. Nothing there.”
“Look again.”
Paul dove again and again the surface returned to its glass-like calm.
Rawl had spent many hours swimming in the ponds and streams around his home. Even as he dove from the boat, muscle memories formed from dozens of similar dives kicked in to make the movement as smooth as possible. As his hands pierced the water, warm memories of summer afternoons floated before him. He thought of Paul showing off by catching crawfish with his toes and of Fletcher’s pasty skin and the ridiculous, turtle-shaped birthmark on his chest. But the instant he cut through the black waters of the bay, he knew he was in an alien world.
He had been prepared to storm through the night-haunted forest to rescue Elias. But the mere thought of having to dive in the sea at night had started a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach which now erupted in a sensation like icy ants crawling over every inch of him and under his skin. He would have been alright if he could have stayed in the shallows with the gravel beneath his feet. But here in the open water, fear of the unknown gripped him as though his heart had been frozen in ice. He shuddered to think of what inhabited the waters in which he swam. He kept his eyes open although it did no good.
He flailed about beneath the water, striking with feet and hands. The placid surface did not betray his frantic movement below. Part of him feared he would find nothing and part of him feared he would. The water was so dark and featureless it gave him a crushing feeling of immense oblivion. Even as he groped for Elias, he feared he might kick for the surface only to find it had disappeared, that his whole world, his whole universe, was this black, breathless nothingness. He encountered nothing in the space he occupied and he knew that meant he had to search deeper. In a race where every second counted, he hesitated. He hesitated only a second but he hesitated nonetheless.
He realized now that, while he preferred the feel of the gravel bottom beneath his feet to floating freely if swimming by the beach in daylight, here, in the great, dark nothing, the nothing was far better than what lay beneath. He thought of monstrous devilfish, scenting his fear and sensing the tremors his small body created in the water, reaching up with their writhing snakelike arms to take him. He knew he was likely only to find the bottom of the harbor, but even that, with its waving weeds, many times his own height, and the quicksand-like muck below, seemed bad enough.
This was his second of hesitation. He wished he had brought his knife. Then, angling his body down, he made movements like a frog and strove for the bottom. It was farther than he thought. His ears felt like they were caught in a vise. The sensation spread over both sides of his head. His lungs burned; his limbs ached. Now at last he began to see something with his eyes. Spots of light like bursting stars danced in them.
Something touched him. He shuddered. Swatting it with his hand, he found it was only seaweed. But there was in the sensation something of a terror that had been part of his race since time primeval – the loathing of touching and being touched by that which one cannot see. He swam farther down into the entangling weeds.
Shooting his arms forward for another stroke, his hand struck something solid. He jerked it back, but even as he did, he knew what it was. Extending both hands, now with fingers splayed to explore greater area, he caught hold of the solid thing. It was a human hand.
Rawl felt his way down the arm until he found the body. Coming behind it, he hooked his arms under those of Elias. He kicked for the surface. Their bodies shot upwards and then jerked to a halt. Elias’s body was nearly torn from Rawl’s arms. Rawl thought of the mud-like ooze at the bottom. He kicked again but the result was the same. Then he remembered the rope.
Working his way around to Elias’s front, Rawl ran his hands over the priest’s torso until he found the knot. His efforts to untie it were wasted. His body was pleading for air and his fingers could not unravel it. For the second time he wished for his knife. He knew in the time it took him to retrieve it and return, Elias would be dead. If he was not already.
From the knot, Rawl felt his way down the length of rope. Here Elias’s design favored him. For the rock anchor lay inside the boat, which rested on a cradle of seaweed on the bottom, and had not, as he’d feared, ploughed into the muck below. This time Rawl wasted no time searching for the knot. He worked instead to slip the rope from around the rock without untying it. Tilting the rock on its side with one hand, he yanked on the binding with the other. At first nothing happened. Then, little by little, he began to work the rope up the sides of the rock. He dug his fingers under the rope, scraping and mashing them horribly against the stone. He yanked upwards. The loop pulled free. Tilting the rock on its smaller end, Rawl freed the rest of the rope in several tugs.
Using the rope as a guide once more, he worked his way back to Elias. Locking his arms under those of the priest, he kicked for the surface. This time there was no sudden resistance; only the cumbersomeness of Elias’s deadweight as Rawl kicked the yards and yards towards life. It seemed he’d never reach it. His kicks yielded little and with each one he felt his strength departing. Light danced across his entire field of vision now. But it was somehow different from the bursting stars. Then he realized it was not on his own eyes that the lights were dancing but above them. Close above them. The light he saw was the moonlight skating on the surface. He kicked once, twice more, and broke through. Nothing had every felt so good or so intense as those gulps of air. They were a burning agony-ecstasy to him. He leaned back, holding Elias’s head on his shoulder, his own lips scant inches above the water. He heard Josie shout and then Paul as well.
All Rawl could think about was air and breathing.
Rawl felt Elias’s body being pulled suddenly up and out of his arms. Paul had climbed back into the boat and was helping Josie to haul the priest into the boat. They tossed Rawl a rope which he clung to half-heartedly. Then they were pulling him out as well. His bare belly rubbed against the rough sides of the boat but he hardly noticed. He flopped over the side and lay leaning against the gunwale. Josie was there, la
ughing, crying, holding his face, running her hands through his hair. “Are you alright?”
His breathing was the only answer he could give her; but there was a kind of laughter in it. She kissed him on the forehead and turned back to Elias who lay in the center of the boat. Paul was doing something, pressing his mouth to Elias’s and pumping his chest. A great deal of water erupted suddenly from Elias’s mouth and he coughed. Paul sat back with a hand on his head. Josie laughed and cried harder. The two rolled Elias on his side and thumped him on the back as he spat out more water.
But something was wrong. Although he was breathing, Elias did not open his eyes. His breaths were not loud and greedy as Rawl’s had been, but soft, so that Rawl had at first thought he was not breathing at all. They could feel the beat of his heart at his throat and wrist but it was slow and slight. His skin was terribly cold.
“We need to get him to Leech,” Josie said.
Paul climbed over Elias to the rowing bench. Rawl, glancing over his shoulder over the prow of the boat, looked at the shore for the first time since giving the oars to Josie. He blinked. He sat up straighter and shifted his body to look more steadily at the shore. At first he thought he was seeing only the shadows of the trees that lined the rear of the beach, but the more he looked the more he knew this was not so. The things he was looking at stood out from the shadows and the trees behind them not because they were lighter but because they were darker. It was as if spaces had been cut out in the beach and against the backdrop of trees, or as if holes in the shapes of standing figures had been made that were like doors that opened on perfect pitch black. A door into night itself. A door into nothing.
“What are those?” Josie said, slipping up beside him. Her voice was only a whisper but even so it seemed too loud.
The dark things were standing all along the edge of the beach, very near, but not touching, the water. Rawl thought they looked like men standing with their hands at their sides, which is to say they looked like columns. But these figures seemed both thinner and taller than any men Rawl had ever seen. He did not doubt they were nothing human. He was sure they were watching them.
The Silent Isle Page 22