Echo Island

by Jared C. Wilson

  Tim cocked his head.

  “Did you see any guns?” Bradley said.

  “I don’t know,” Tim said. “Maybe in there?” He was pointing to a door at the end of the living room.

  The sound of footsteps quickly ascended the porch.

  Bradley made a break for the bedroom. Tim ducked down behind the small counter that separated the open kitchen from the living room.

  Tereus kicked the door open just as Bradley darted inside the bedroom. If the man hadn’t heard the bedroom door just as it shut, he might have turned to his right and easily discovered Tim slumped behind the kitchen counter armed only with a lamp.

  Tereus lumbered toward the bedroom, rifle ready. But he stopped at the door.

  Bradley was on pure adrenaline now. He didn’t even stop to marvel at the fact that he’d just jumped into the most stocked armory he’d seen in his life. The floor, the bed, the dresser—every space was covered in firearms of every kind. He didn’t hesitate but grabbed the first thing he saw, a pistol.

  Bradley pressed his back against the wall just to the right inside the door.

  They listened to the sound of each other’s heavy breathing on either side of the wall.

  “Listen, kid,” Tereus finally said. “Come out and show me your hands. I’ll let you and your friend go.”

  Bradley said nothing.

  “You don’t want the alternative; I promise you that. You don’t want to know what I will do if you don’t come out.”

  Bradley’s hand was sweating on the gun handle. He wondered if it was even loaded.

  “All right,” Tereus said. “Have it your way.”

  He stepped back and with an easy kick, popped the door open.

  Bradley instantly turned with the gun and pulled the trigger. Click, click, click. It wasn’t loaded.

  Tereus burst through the door, rifle barrel first. Bradley quickly ducked under it and, springing himself forward, knocked the man onto his heels and against the fallen door. As he stumbled back, Bradley angled through the bedroom door and made a break for the front door again, yelling as he went, “Tim, if you can hear me, run!”

  A shot rang out as he burst through the door to the outside, chips of siding spraying against his face. He leapt from the steps and tore off for the woods.

  Another shot rang out, and a bullet whizzed by his head as he sprinted.

  But then, he heard something else. An abrupt yelp. Something. Against all instincts, he stopped and whirled around.

  Far away on the small porch landing to the trailer home, something was happening. It took him a second to register what he was seeing.

  Tim.

  He was still in the trailer.

  And there was a blaze of fire emanating from the doorway. The door was somehow on fire. But not just the door. The man. He had turned toward the opening, and his entire back was ablaze. He was screaming and walking back into the house.

  No, no, no. Bradley started running again, this time toward the house. Tim, what did you do?

  He’d almost reached the wooden steps up to the door when the door, windows, and siding burst open with an enormous rush of hot air licked by flames. Bradley was blown back onto the ground.

  The fire was rapidly catching, the flames rushing all along the structure, when out from the blazing doorway staggered a blackened figure.

  “Tim,” Bradley said.

  But by the sheer size, Bradley could tell it wasn’t Tim.

  Jason felt sick to his stomach. His head was dizzy. He reached over beside him on the hearth and placed a shaky hand on Beatrice’s arm.

  Archer sighed loudly. “This is impossible.”

  Beatrice said to him, “Just think about it.”

  “That’s all I’ve been doing!”

  Jason looked up at his friend. Softly, he said, “Archer, just calm down.”

  “If you guys want to believe this craziness, I can’t stop you. But there are theories, and there are facts. There are things we can see and hear and touch and taste. There is, you know, reality. And I don’t know what’s happening, but this guy’s taking you on a trip away from reality. It’s not possible.”

  “Archer,” Beatrice said, “stop.”

  “No. You stop, strange girl who showed up like this strange guy to make everything confusing.”

  Beatrice shrank back, hurt.

  Archer cried out, “Too many variables!” before he began grabbing notebooks off the shelf. He removed the first three and tucked them under his arm, keeping a wary eye on Jack, who remained seated at the desk, watching him, apparently unbothered.

  Then Archer bolted for the door.

  Jason called after him. But his friend was gone.

  “Some things are meant to be calculated,” Jack said. “Mystery isn’t among them.”

  “Are you just going to let him take those?” Jason said.

  “He has already taken one notebook from the shelf before. Once he’d done that, it was inevitable he’d want more. In any event, I cannot stop him.”

  “Is it true?” said Beatrice.

  “What, dear?”

  “Are we actually . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Are we dead?”

  “Oh,” Jack said, “it’s not as simple as all that.”

  12

  REVELATIONS

  The day had felt interminably long, but night fell suddenly. The moon was like an ivory comma over quiet woods and empty streets, as if the whole island had more to say.

  Archer did not seem to notice. He rushed back to the library, three green notebooks clutched to his chest. He was not afraid of any threat still looming on the island. He was not concerned about the whereabouts of Bradley and Tim. He had barely thought of his mother. He only wanted to know what the notebooks said.

  Now, while the truth seemed to be slipping from his grasp, he had to redouble his mental efforts in possessing it. This man Jack was a discombobulating presence. His theory didn’t fit with anything Archer knew about the known world. Already, Archer knew he was having to account for more and more strangeness in his figuring—making the likelihood of a logical explanation for everything more and more unlikely—but the sudden appearance of a riddle-telling Englishman in a mysterious cabin in the woods was a bridge too far. The oddities were accumulating too quickly.

  He returned to the table in the library, lit a lamp, and cracked open the very first notebook from the bookcase, straining over the strange text. Next to it, he opened The Green Notebook, comparing the first sentence of each. In terms of word count—if the arrangement of symbols in the green notebook were words at all—the sentences did not even come close to matching. The first sentence of the novel was exactly eleven words long:

  Two servant girls by firelight each night told each other stories.

  The opening sentence of the green notebook appeared to constitute the length of a short paragraph.

  Archer scanned each word, each line, skimming every sentence as naturally as possible, not stopping on each word or thinking too much about how the symbols might translate to the English alphabet. He kept this up for three or four pages when something remarkable began to happen. It was as if the words were shifting before his very eyes. The effect was similar to those optical illusion paintings that, on the surface, simply look like a chaotic swirl of color—that is, until the looker both focuses and relaxes. Then in that strange, undefined, visual sweet spot—the presence beneath or beyond the chaos—some definable object is revealed.

  The text was transforming before his eyes, becoming intelligible.

  He could read it.

  She said, “What did you mean it’s not as simple as all that? Are we dead?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. The four boys died in that car accident.”

  “No,” Jason said. />
  “And you—” Jack said, still looking from his seat at Beatrice.

  “I think I know now,” Beatrice said. “My father . . . killed me.”

  Jason stood up from the fireplace. “What? No. None of this can be true.”

  “It is, young man,” Jack reiterated. “But your deaths are only one part of the story. There are more important things for you to understand.”

  Jason erupted. “What on earth are you talking about? You’ve just told us we’re all dead—that Beatrice has been murdered even—and we’ve been floating around on this island like ghosts? Is that right? It’s not that everybody else is gone. We are! We’re the ones who are gone. And what does that make this place? Hell? What?”

  “It is not hell.”

  “Well, it’s not heaven either, is it?”

  “No, it most certainly isn’t heaven.”

  “Help us, man! Tell us what’s going on. If this isn’t heaven or hell—and it sure isn’t Echo Island—where are we?”

  “But it is Echo Island. That is, Echo Island as it was meant to be. When you crossed over the river Styx, in a sense, the island did as well. And it is just as real as you are. In a way, it is more real than it was before, just as you are.”

  “How can we be more real? Aren’t we ghosts?”

  “Do you feel like a ghost?”

  “Well. No, not exactly.”

  “You aren’t a ghost.”

  Beatrice was watching the entire exchange from her seated position at the hearth, looking plaintively up at them as they spoke. She was about to speak when they heard a loud banging on the door.

  “Archer?” Jason called out.

  “No!” the voice replied, and the door opened. It was Bradley.

  He was covered in sweat and dirt and was clearly out of breath.

  “And next, I caught a glimpse of powerful Heracles,” Jack said.

  Jason met him halfway across the floor. “What happened?”

  “Tim,” Bradley sputtered. “Tim’s . . .”

  Beatrice finally rose. “Oh no.”

  “He’s dead. The man in the house. There was a fire. And Tim’s gone.”

  Jason grabbed him by the shoulders, “Bradley, what happened?”

  “It was awful, man.”

  Jason saw fear in Bradley’s eyes. It was not a common sight.

  “He tried to kill me.”

  “Tim?”

  “No, no. The guy. Her. Her dad.”

  Jack calmly said, “Tereus.”

  “Yeah,” Bradley said. And then it struck him that there was a bald man he’d never seen before sitting coolly beside him. “Who are you?” Then to his friends, “Who is this?”

  “You can call me Jack.”

  Bradley shook his head as if he could reset the whole timeline, jostle everything out of his brain.

  Jason recaptured his gaze. “Bradley, what happened to Tim?”

  “That guy, Tereus, he had Tim tied up in his house. I managed to get Tim out, but Tereus just started shooting. And Tim, Tim didn’t make it.” Then, he said angrily, “That idiot. I told him to crawl under and run away. And he never listens. I have to do everything for him!”

  Beatrice spoke up again. “Did my father . . .”

  Bradley stopped. He looked at her, anger gone and fear returning. “Yeah. I don’t know. I was outside. I thought Tim was already in the woods maybe. I don’t know—it happened so quickly. And when I turned around, the whole thing was on fire. And your dad, he came walking out of there.” He swallowed. “Like a demon or something.”

  He was breathing slower now and wiped his hand across his wet brow.

  “I just started running,” he said. “Trying to get away. Ran into the woods. I didn’t know if he was following or not. But I just kept running. And somehow, I ran into this place.”

  “Somehow,” Jack said.

  Jason grabbed hold of Bradley’s arm. “Tim?” he said.

  Bradley looked him in the eyes. Jason had never seen him sad, not since they were little kids. “Yeah,” Bradley said. One small tear dropped from his eye.

  Jason swallowed, lowering his head toward the ground.

  “I am sorry,” Jack interjected.

  Bradley wiped his cheek. He looked over at the man, stared at him for several seconds, and then said, “Who are you again?”

  Jason replied for him, wiping a tear from his own face. “This is Jack. He says he’s our guide.”

  “Our guide to what?”

  “That’s what I’m beginning to wonder,” Jason said. “Guide to what? Because you just said we’re all dead, and our friend Tim just died. How do dead people die?”

  “All in good time,” Jack said.

  “Wait,” said Bradley. “We’re dead?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “but as I said to your friends, this is not the most important thing to know.”

  “It seems pretty dang important.” Bradley stared at the floor. “Man. This actually makes sense. The jeep, right? When we crashed.”

  “Yeah,” Jason said.

  “Good grief, it makes sense. That’s why everyone’s gone. We thought everybody disappeared, but really it was us.”

  The room fell silent.

  “But wait, if we’re dead,” said Bradley, “then where are we?”

  Jack replied, “I was just getting to that when you arrived. That you have died is what has happened. But that is simply the premise for where you find yourself at the moment. It is not the story.”

  Bradley looked at him. “Is this how you always talk?”

  “There’s only so much I can say,” said Jack. “Whenever possible, it is better to show than to tell.”

  “But at least tell us if we’re in purgatory,” Beatrice said.

  “No,” said Jack. “Purgatory, properly speaking, does not exist.”

  “But you said it’s not heaven or hell either. Is there a heaven and a hell?” Jason asked.

  “Most certainly.”

  “Then where are we?” all three of them asked.

  Jack sighed. He looked up to the ceiling for a moment, as if receiving a word. Then he looked at each one in turn—Bradley first, then Beatrice, and finally Jason. Uncrossing his leg, he folded his hands in his lap and said, “You are in a construct. You might say, a supposal.”

  “What does that mean?’

  “It means, my dear, that you are in someone else’s imagination.”

  Archer was afraid to stop, afraid that if he did, the words would go away. He could read them. And what he read was startling, striking him to the heart. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but he dared not blink.

  He could read the words in the notebook plain as day. He read:

  Like clockwork, like the tipping of that scale, the island slowly rose from the sea, taking its jagged shape of rocky beach and angular forest. Eventually, the beach ran as far east and west as he could see, and the ferry’s bumpered hull gently rubbed against the concrete dock. The ferryman descended the cabin without a word, locked the vessel to the broad boat ramp, and lowered the gate, which usually withstood the passage of cars, but that morning only upheld the unloading of the foursome.

  It was a description of the route between the mainland and Echo Island. But it seemed even more specific than that. It seemed personal. Yes, it was their route.

  Archer kept reading, undeterred by the shock that slowly overtook him as he quickly discovered the notebooks were chronicling everything that they’d been doing from the end of their camping trip forward. All of them were in there—Jason, Bradley, Tim, himself.

  He flipped forward several pages and read:

  “Power goes out all the time.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Bradley mock agreed. Then he said sternly, “Where did everybody go, man?”

  “Stop saying e
verybody,” said Jason.

  “What?”

  “Stop saying everybody. You walked from the dock to here. It’s a big island.”

  “So where is everybody, Jason?”

  “It’s a big island!”

  Archer said, “Let’s calm down. Let’s think about this.”

  Archer repeated to himself, Calm down. Let’s think about this.

  He couldn’t get around it. The green notebooks were cataloguing nearly everything he and his friends had said and done, filled in with narration. Like somebody was watching them. Like somebody was spying. Someone was in the house. Someone was on the ferry. Someone who somehow could track their every movement and record their every word.

  But they hadn’t seen anybody.

  Then Archer had an idea: What if this was some kind of elaborate prank? What if one of the others was manipulating this entire thing? No, that couldn’t be it. Bradley was too dumb. Tim was too distracted. Only Jason could have done this, he thought, before dismissing the idea. Jason would never think of this.

  Or maybe it was something else. Perhaps they were trapped in some kind of elaborate virtual reality simulation. It seemed far-fetched, but Archer was running out of theories. And when you run out of theories, the only one that explains everything—no matter how ludicrous—had to be the answer, or closest to it.

  He flipped back to the start of the notebook and read the words that just moments before he could not decipher:

  The four boys went camping in the state park on the mainland the weekend after their high school graduation, eating fire-cooked meals and playing cards and goofing off, assuming the entire time that the town of Echo Island would still be there when they returned.

  No way, he thought.

  He closed that notebook and grabbed the third, opening it to the last page. The last paragraph read:

  Something occurred to him while on this trek, albeit briefly. If a sudden, say, rapture-like event had vanished everyone, why didn’t anything on the island seem interrupted? Sure, traffic would be sparse on a Sunday morning, but the sudden and surprise interruption of life might have left a crashed car here and there. There’d be litter in the streets, food left out on tables uneaten. Even if the event had caused no structural or environmental damage, it would have at least left signs of life interrupted. The island looked the same as it always had, but the actual signs of life, of activity, were gone with the inhabitants. It was like a stage set for a play that hadn’t begun.