“Like Back to the Future.”
“Like what?”
“The movie.”
Beatrice shrugged.
“I know it’s old, but c’mon. It’s a classic.”
“I’ve never seen any movies. Just heard about them.”
“What have you been doing all these years?”
Beatrice looked at him with immense sadness. There were things she’d seen that he hadn’t, things she should never have seen.
Then she gave him the answer she could say out loud. “I’ve done a lot of reading.”
“Time travel stories?” he joked.
“A few. Not many. My dad let me have books. I think he doesn’t realize how dangerous books are. He doesn’t read, which is why. But I think he also thought letting me read would keep me there, with him. But they only made me want to leave. Do you read stories like that, the ones that make you want adventure?”
“I don’t read that much.”
“But I bet you used to.”
“Yeah, when I was younger.”
“I think my favorite story is a retelling of an ancient story,” Beatrice said. “It starts with a servant girl telling another servant girl a story, late at night, to pass the time and get to sleep. She tells the story of a prince who might be the son of a god, except his mother was a mortal. The other mortals are jealous of him and hate him—so much so that they begin to despise the god that he claims is his father. So they try to kill him. It goes on from there, that the god decides to kill him too—”
“His son?”
“Yeah. But he claims he won’t kill him if the son can convince his fellow mortals to revere the god again. So the son goes on a series of quests—people in the old stories are always going on quests for the gods—and he has to complete a set of assignments that please his fellow mortals. And then the whole thing gets mixed up, because you can’t tell if the servant girl is talking about something that truly happened or if she’s making it all up. The other servant girl starts accusing her of inventing the story rather than passing it on.”
“Weird,” Jason said.
“You have to read it. It makes more sense. I can’t retell it. It’s like retelling a retelling. It loses something. But at one point, the son must go across the ocean and bring back some plant they’ve never seen before. And, of course, it’s a magical plant that feeds and heals everybody, and they begin to like him again, which makes them like the god again.”
“It sounds made up.”
“It is made up.”
“No, I mean, it sounds like you are making it up right now.”
“I’m not!”
“It sounds confusing.”
“It’s actually very lovely.”
Beatrice looked out of the cave to the ocean. She brushed strands of hair out of her face, tucking them behind her ear. “It’s weird that there’s waves without any wind.”
Jason followed her gaze. Was the whole world really gone? There had to be something out there.
“Thank you for showing me the cave,” she said.
“Of course. Around the bend up that way, there’s a cool cove, as well, where we used to go paddling around. It’s a pretty spot too. Archer and I went up that way to check out the view from the lighthouse.”
“Should we have another look? We could see if the mainland is actually missing, like your friend Bradley claims.”
“True. Then we should probably start looking for Archer again.”
They climbed back up the steep trail to the top of the cliff and trekked along the elevated coastline toward the Echo Island lighthouse. The walk was long, made longer by the silence, but the day persisted, the sun apparently suspended in a Joshuaic state. When they finally reached the base of the tower, Jason’s feet ached, and his side cramped.
“It’s gonna be dark in there until we reach the lookout,” he said. “But the staircase is pretty easy. Just hold on to the rails.”
“I know how to climb stairs,” she said.
“Yeah, okay.” He opened the door for her and followed her into the narrow chute. They’d made one turn in the ascending spiral when the entry door shut them into the darkness. He tried to keep his distance on the climb, not wanting to bump into her, but she was moving very quickly. Jason sped up when he thought she might be too far ahead, but realized he was getting too close when he felt the brush of her dress against his knees, so he relaxed his pace.
Beatrice reached the landing at the top of the stairs, and she’d begun opening the door when he said, “Wait.”
They could see each other’s faces in the light through the crack. She was looking down on him on the steps beneath her.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“What if it’s really not there?”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to know?”
She was right. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see what’s out there.”
He squeezed in next to her on the landing, and they walked through the door together.
Jason rounded the catwalk, tracing his hand along the glass of the lantern room. He almost didn’t want to open his eyes, but facing west, he did, and stared hard.
“Are you sure you can usually see it from here?” she said.
“Yes. But.”
“It’s not there,” she said.
“It’s not there.”
“So, your friend isn’t crazy.”
“Well, Bradley is crazy. But he wasn’t wrong about this.”
He gripped the railing in his fists and squeezed.
She opened the door a little wider. “I’m tired.”
“You don’t look it.” He was looking at her differently now.
“Okay,” she said, uncomfortably.
“I’m sorry. Should I not have said that? I just meant what I said. You don’t look tired.”
But that’s not all he meant, and she knew it.
“No, it’s fine. I’m not used to talking to other people, much less having someone comment on how I look. I mean . . . hey, there’s no wind up here either.”
Jason paused. “You’re right. There should definitely be wind this high.”
“I’ve never been up this high.”
“Oh, my bad. Are you gonna faint?”
She looked offended. “No.”
Was there any figuring her out? She was as inscrutable as the island itself. None of his instincts were helping him with it, or with her.
He shifted his weight against the glass and looked back over the island. The woods stretched interminably out from their vantage point. And then again, his eye caught that thin stream of smoke rising from the northern forest.
“Should we go to the library now?” she said.
“No, there’s another place Archer and I went before that he might have gone back to.”
Then he told her about the cabin in the woods and the green notebooks.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “That’s just like in my story!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The name of the book about the servant girl who retells the ancient story. It’s called The Green Notebook.”
11
THE CABIN
Archer held the brown clothbound book in his trembling palms. He rubbed the cover. He squeezed the book, as if it might turn to smoke in his hands.
When he was sure it was real, he opened to the frontispiece, which was blank. He turned the page to find a black-and-white sketch of two girls sitting by a fire. They were in the peasant dress of antiquity, probably Greco-Roman, and they looked to be early adolescents. One girl sat on a rock by the fire, her knees hitched up to her chest, the bottom of her dress pulled taut to mid-calf. The other girl reclined on a rock opposite her, legs straight out in front of her and beside the fire, feet crossed. In her lap, she
held an open book, and she gripped a quill in her right hand. There was no caption or identifying marks.
Archer turned to the title page, which consisted solely of the words The Green Notebook in simple block print. No author name. No publisher information. No date.
He flipped to the back cover and looked inside for the library card pocket. There was none. It was as if the book had been planted there. Just for him.
Was he going crazy?
He carried The Green Notebook and the green notebook from the cabin back to the table and opened the former to the first page of text, thinking, Please be in English.
It was. But it was not at all what he expected.
He began reading the tale of Hippodamia, who is telling a story to Ilione by their bedtime fire after a long day of slave labor. Archer was skimming quickly, trying to get the gist. Hippodamia’s tale was about a demigod named Meleager. His mother was a slave, and his father was rumored to be a god. Apparently, Meleager was quite proud of this rumor, and he boasted of it constantly, to the point of turning even his friends into enemies.
On and on he read, but Archer felt like he was missing something. The book wasn’t telling him anything he wanted to know.
He stopped a few pages in, and he opened up the green notebook, once again staring at its cryptic text. Was this the same book in a different language?
Perhaps the notebooks held a translation of the book. Maybe the author was experimenting in code. Or maybe the book was an English translation of what had originally been handwritten in the notebooks.
Archer thought back to that bookcase in the cabin. There were way too many notebooks to translate to this relatively short tome on the table in front of him.
Or maybe it was just a coincidence. The odds of the green notebook landing next to a book called The Green Notebook had to be astronomical. And yet it had happened. Just like the disappearance of the whole town and the complete shutdown of anything electronic; it had happened.
This means something, he thought. But he had the overwhelming feeling that the strangeness was outrunning him. The deeper he went, the more disorienting it became. He had never experienced this before. The mystery was getting bigger, not smaller.
He read a few more pages. Meleager was about to be burned in a fire by a town mob, when an unseen hand swooped down and saved him. It was his father, the unnamed. He told Meleager that he had not enjoyed the town’s devotion and offerings since having his good name soiled by the scandalous rumor mill turning on and on about gods consorting with mortal women. He claimed he was going to kill Meleager himself, but he decided he wouldn’t, so long as Meleager could turn the hearts of the citizens back to him.
Every ten pages or so, the story would pause as the scene returned to the teller, Hippodamia, and to the hearer, Ilione. Hippodamia would ask Ilione if she was understanding the story, if she was liking it, or if she wanted Hippodamia to stop. “No, no,” Ilione kept saying. “I want to hear more.” Hippodamia then resumed, plunging the narrative back into the hero’s tale.
Archer flipped through the rest of the pages. This pattern repeated throughout the book, punctuating the heroic exploits of Meleager at land and sea to reclaim the goodwill of his countrymen and the cosmic pardon from his father. The story didn’t interest him much, and the conceit of the girl telling it seemed strained. And none of it seemed to explain anything about what was going on with him and his friends on Echo Island.
In any event, Archer’s problem was that he could not test this text against the mystery text of the handwritten notebook. He’d pulled the notebook he’d been studying at random off the shelf. If he had the first notebook or even the last, he could compare it to the opening and closing of the story. If the notebooks were indeed translations or even proto-versions of the story, he might be able to identify that in the comparative paragraph lengths or sentence word counts. Of course, no translation is word-to-word in its correlation, but it was better than nothing.
Archer knew what he had to do: get back to the cabin and the rest of the notebooks.
Surprised by the enduring daylight, he plodded north to the coastal cliffs, cutting across streets, parking lots, and yards. The journey seemed to take no time at all. When he reached the edge of the forest, he could barely remember passing landmarks he had most assuredly passed.
Deeper and deeper Archer pressed into the wooded expanse, wading through brush and traversing fallen trees and risen roots.
He’d no sooner stepped his long legs over a mud puddle when he thought he heard a footfall behind him. He froze. Listened. Nothing stirred, not even leaves in the breeze.
Satisfied he’d only imagined the steps, Archer took his own step forward when suddenly that low, moaning roar came through the trees. It was the same sound he’d heard in the same woods when he’d come before with Jason. It sounded like it had come from the oceanside, from outside the woods, in fact. What was it? A bear? Something larger?
He didn’t stop to find out but kept walking until he came once again upon the stone cabin. Like The Green Notebook, it didn’t seem to belong, not where he found it nor on the island at all.
The chimney was still issuing smoke, a thicker plume now than before. Somebody was there. Or had been.
Archer knocked twice. Then three times, louder. Satisfied that once again no one was home, he opened the door a crack and peered in. Seeing nothing, he opened it all the way and stepped inside.
The space looked as he and Jason had left it. The furnishings had not moved an inch.
There was no open work on the desk, and the butts in the ashtray did not warm his hovering hand.
Embers still glowed in the fireplace, however, which meant that whoever lived here was still on the island, still feeding the fire from time to time. The idea that the fire had been smoldering since the disappearance was ludicrous. It was his first definitive discovery in the pursuit of the mystery. They weren’t, in fact, alone.
And that is when he heard footsteps on the narrow porch outside, and the door, which he’d left cracked, creak softly behind him. He turned in fright.
“I thought you’d be here.”
It was Jason. And a girl.
“What?” Archer said, dumbfounded. “Who?” He gestured at her.
Jason stepped into the dim light. He gave Archer an enthusiastic hug, though Archer’s arms hung limply at his side.
“I’m glad you’re okay, man,” Jason said. “This is Beatrice. She lives on the island. We sort of found each other.”
Archer craned his neck to the ceiling, as if his confusion might be vanquished from on high. Finally, he looked at Beatrice again. “Do you live here?”
“No.”
“What happened to everyone?” he asked.
“She doesn’t know,” Jason said. “She’s as clueless as we are. Did you find anything?”
There was a deep well of sadness behind Archer’s eyes. “I—I don’t know. I really don’t know. I thought I did. I tried and tried to decipher one of the green notebooks, and then I found another book literally called The Green Notebook. I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything, or if I’m just going crazy.”
“I know that story,” Beatrice said. “It’s my favorite.”
“Yeah?” Archer said. “Well, it’s driving me insane. I came back here to look into more of the notebooks. Maybe there’s something here, but I’m beginning to think whatever is happening is beyond figuring out.”
Jason took two steps forward. “Don’t say that, man. We’ve got to figure out something.”
Beatrice said, “We need to figure out how to get off the island.”
“You haven’t told her?” Archer said. “Our idiot friend says there’s nothing out there anymore.”
Jason looked at Beatrice knowingly, then said, “Archer, it’s true. We went up to the lighthouse and looked out. The mainland’s gon
e.”
“It can’t be.”
“But it is.”
“There’s no logical explanation,” Archer said. “What if this isn’t even what we think it is? What if we’re not even on Echo Island?”
“Where else would we be?”
“I don’t know!”
Beatrice jumped.
“Sorry. I mean,” he said gently, “I don’t know. But there are some theoretical physicists who suggest the whole world we live in might be a simulation.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it’s possible that everything we experience as life is really just a supremely advanced computer simulation orchestrated by some exterior force.”
“What kind of force?” Beatrice asked.
“I don’t know,” said Archer. “Extraterrestrials or something. It doesn’t matter. But what if this is all a weird Matrix-type thing? Or a dream even?”
Beatrice said, “What’s the Matrix?”
Archer stared at her pitifully.
“It doesn’t feel like a dream or a simulation,” Jason said. “It feels real.”
All three of them jumped when a deep voice from the doorway said, “Because it is real.”
Bradley rounded the corner near the Bee Market and stopped to catch his breath. If Tim were still wandering, he’d probably be in there, but Bradley opened the door cautiously, not remembering if there was a bell above the door.
There wasn’t. The grocery store was dark. Bradley listened intently for any sound. If Tim were in there, he might be transfixed in the cereal aisle. Tim had always had a thing for colorful food packaging.
Bradley crept lightly around the aisles, looking around the endcap displays carefully and down each row. No sign of Tim.
Bradley inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. He’d already decided his next plan of action: cross Minuai Fields where Beatrice said she lived with her dad.
He walked through the woods around the circumference of the open field. If Tereus was as dangerous as Beatrice had said, and if he was armed to the teeth, approaching in the wide open was probably not a great idea.
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