Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  I can’t tell you how many times I walked around the clearing after that. I must’ve circled it a hundred times, until there wasn’t a piece of it I hadn’t walked over. And every time it was the same. The trail went one way and then stopped. There was nothing past it, nothing leading out of the clearing. I couldn’t find nothing. I went back to the mineshaft and stood at its edge. I stared down at it and it just kept staring back at me. You couldn’t see nothing down there.

  ‘George,’ I shouted.

  Nothing.

  I picked up a rock and threw it. I heard it clatter against the sides and fall into water. It was a long way down. The sides were steep and sheer.

  ‘George,’ I shouted.

  I sat down and kept staring into the eye of the shaft, but it never blinked. When I looked up I saw everywhere else had gone dark too.

  It was night.

  The road seemed to last forever. I was running and running but every time I stopped for breath it was like I’d not gotten anywhere. The branches crowded over my head and reached out to touch my arms and legs. There was no moon or stars and sometimes I’d lose the track and find myself in the woods and spin around crazily till eventually I wound up on it again. But then I must’ve lost the track one last time and couldn’t find my way back onto it. I spun around and around and then just started running as fast as I could through the woods.

  The blowdown and the rocks kept tripping me up and the branches scraped my face and arms all over. There was a wet feeling on my skin and I couldn’t tell whether it was just sweat or if it was blood from the scrapes – it was too dark to see a thing. And the woods were loud. It was okay when I was running – I couldn’t hear nothing but the twigs snapping under my feet and the branches whooshing past my ears and slapping into my face – but the moment I stopped, even for a second, I could hear it: the howling and the hooting and the screeching; the lumbering, crashing noises of invisible animals moving through the bush; and worst of all, the low whispering sounds that seemed to come from all around me – sounds of things I couldn’t see and didn’t know. I kept running and running to stop myself hearing them, but then my legs wouldn’t run no more, so I lay down in a bed of damp moss and curled myself up in a ball and put my hands on my ears to keep them out.

  But it wasn’t no use.

  I couldn’t tell where I was or what was around me. There were things beside me, but it was so dark I could only sense they were there – trees and boulders whose shapes I couldn’t see but only feel, somehow. It didn’t matter whether I closed my eyes. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if they were closed or not. And all the time, coming through my fingers into my ears were the whispering sounds.

  Sometimes the shapes felt like people and the whispering became their voices. At one point I thought I heard Mr. McKenzie and he was saying, ‘See. See. This is the end of the world. Didn’t you notice, Eli? Didn’t you believe me?’ And then he was gone and the Earl was there instead. ‘This is my Bermuda Triangle,’ he was saying. ‘This is it. This is it. This is it.’ Then he was gone too and George was there.

  ‘Where are you, Eli?’ he asked. ‘Why aren’t you coming with me?’

  ‘George,’ I croaked, and my own voice had become as small and weak as a no-see-um. ‘I waited, George. I tried following but I lost your trail. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Where’d you go?’

  ‘I’m heading north, Eli, to where the icebergs and stuff are. There’s a lot to explore there. But I can’t see it yet. I’ve not reached there yet.’

  ‘Where are you, George? I can’t see you.’

  ‘I don’t know where I am, Eli. It’s too dark to see here. I can’t see anything here.’

  ‘We’ve got to get back,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to find the Crooked River and get back.’

  But he didn’t say nothing then. And then the voices got all mixed up into one voice.

  ‘Eli,’ it kept whispering. ‘Eli. Eli.’

  ‘Eli, Eli,’ said the voice, and this time it was just like Virgil’s and it was coming from close above me. There were orange and red blotches in the dark in front of me, dancing and jumping about, then a thin sliver of bright light growing wider and brighter. It grew right into daylight. The trees and boulders were there beside me and Virgil’s face was peering down at me.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ he said. ‘It’s okay, Eli. It’s okay. We found you. We found you, thank Christ.’

  The kitchen was full of the smell of porridge. There was a big pot of it bubbling on the stove and Nana kept going back and forth, filling up my bowl. Then she would wait behind me while I ate, resting her hand on my shoulder like she was making sure I was really there. It was the warmest, most delicious porridge I’d ever tasted. Nana had put raisins in it and they were hot and sweet. I ate three bowls.

  Virgil was sitting at one end of the table and Dad was sitting at the other. They watched me eat – saying nothing at first – looking closely at each spoonful I put in my mouth like they’d never seen anyone eat porridge before. After the second bowl they began telling me what’d happened.

  It was Billy who told on me. He must’ve run right back home after I hit him with the oar and blabbed everything to Buddy. Then Buddy had come over and told Virgil. ‘I’m not bothered about the boat,’ he’d said. ‘I just figured you’d want to know. I wouldn’t want my kid messing about on that river on his own.’ Virgil and Dad set off to find me straight away. They took a canoe and paddled downriver, searching the banks for the rowboat, until at last they found it – right where I’d left it in the reeds and bulrushes. They’d picked up my trail in the mud of the bank and followed it over an outcrop of rock and into the woods. It was there things started getting a little odd, they said.

  There were traces of my footprints in the moss and pine needles – they were already pretty faint, only just enough to follow – but overtop of them were a set of bigger, fresher ones. They couldn’t figure it out. They didn’t know of anyone who came out to this part of the bush – no prospectors or hunters or fishermen – and they couldn’t think of anybody who’d have gone out to look for me apart from themselves. And while they were scratching their heads about that, they’d come across what looked like the remains of a clearing. It was real strange, they said. They found an old bear trap under some blueberry bushes and a big mound of earth hidden beneath a pile of blowdown. And then it’d got a whole bunch stranger.

  It was Virgil who found the door. He spotted it beside a rock – a set of bare boards in the dirt. When he opened it all he could see to begin with was the top of some steps leading down into a big dark hole. And then, as his eyes adjusted, he made out a face staring up at him and a smaller darker hole.

  ‘You better watch where you’re pointing that rifle, Joe,’ Virgil said.

  ‘Where’ve you taken him?’ Mr. McKenzie hissed.

  ‘I’m not having any conversation with a gun in my face,’ Virgil said. ‘You put that down and we can talk.’

  ‘Where’ve you taken him?’

  ‘Taken who?’

  ‘You know damn well who.’

  ‘You better settle yourself down some, Joe. Why don’t you come out of there? We’re here to find Eli and we’d sure be obliged if you could help us out.’

  ‘Eli?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  As Mr. McKenzie was coming up the steps, Dad circled behind the door and hit him on the head with a log. He didn’t come to till they were back in the boat, they said. And when he did he wasn’t any help at all. He just kept babbling on about how they’d stolen George and how they’d all be sorry soon, every damn one of them. He was still saying it when they dropped him off at the police station and headed back down the river.

  But the strangest thing of all, Virgil said, was when he took a peek in that hole. He only looked for a second, and there wasn’t much light to see by, but he swore there w
as enough stuff cached down there to live on for years.

  I was lucky I’d stayed put so close to the river, Dad and Virgil told me. By the time they’d got to searching for me again the light was getting bad and they couldn’t pick up my trail. They’d asked Mr. McKenzie where I was about a hundred times, and none too gently neither, but he’d said nothing except how they’d stolen George and how they’d all be sorry before too long. And so they’d combed the bush around the clearing and where they’d found the rowboat until it was dark and then camped out there for the night, meaning to start again at first light. They were expecting help then too, because the police suspected Mr. McKenzie had kidnapped George and they were going to send search parties to look in the area around the clearing and off to the north and west of it – up towards Bad Vermilion. But in the end they didn’t need any extra help – almost as soon as they’d set off the next morning they’d found me, no more than five hundred yards or so from the boat. They couldn’t believe they’d not found me the afternoon before, they said. They both could’ve sworn they’d covered that very piece of ground.

  ‘Now there’s one thing we’ve got to ask you, Eli,’ Virgil said. Dad was nodding his head at the other end of the table. Nana was standing behind me waiting for me to finish my next bowl. Suddenly the porridge didn’t feel so good in my stomach.

  ‘We’ve got to ask you why you took Mr. Bryce’s boat, Eli. And why you took it all that way down the river.’

  ‘I was looking for George,’ I said.

  ‘We kind of guessed that. Nobody’s mad with you for trying to find him, Eli, but you know you shouldn’t have gone looking for him on your own like that, don’t you? Not without telling anyone.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. And that’s all I said. There was so much else I should have told them – about George and Bad Vermilion and the mineshaft – but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Even thinking about it all was too much: it was too big a thought for my head, and the words were too big for my tongue.

  ‘Oh … and one other thing, Eli. Why did you decide to go in that direction? What made you pick it?’

  I said nothing. I couldn’t say nothing.

  ‘He must’ve seen Joe,’ Dad said. ‘That’s it. You saw Joe go that way and you followed him, didn’t you, Eli?’

  ‘But the footprints … ’ Virgil started to say.

  I left him there. That’s all I could think. I left George there alone.

  ‘I think that’s enough for now,’ Nana said. ‘Come with me, Eli. Why don’t you have a lie-down in the living room?’

  ‘I couldn’t find him,’ I said. My face had gone all wet and I was blubbering. ‘I couldn’t find him.’

  ‘That’s okay, Eli,’ Nana said, putting her arm around me. ‘You tried. There was nothing more you could do.’

  ‘I waited for him but he didn’t come back.’

  Nana put me to bed on the couch in the living room, where she could keep an eye on me, and for a long time I just stared at the wall. ‘It’s okay, Eli,’ she kept saying. ‘You’re home now.’

  I stared at the Helsinki picture and the sky was just as blue and full of light as it ever was. And if I looked hard enough it was like I could see George, walking and walking towards the north, towards that same sky – that sky that would never darken and never change, not ever.

  Minnow Fishing

  The light from the moon didn’t last too long. Pretty soon it’d danced and glistened its way off into the night and I was sitting there in the dark, beneath the boughs of the big red pine. I figured it wasn’t any use me looking for Bobby if I couldn’t see nothing, so I decided to stop and wait till I could see the X Virgil had made on the rock across the river before setting off again.

  Virgil never stopped looking for Clarence. Whenever we were out together, fishing or hunting or anything, there was always a piece of him I could tell was keeping one eye out for some sign he’d missed, some clue, some X he’d not thought to mark. And I wondered why that was – why people never stop looking. And do they look back at us, the people who are lost? Are they sad we’re gone? Are they looking for us too? Are they waiting to be found? Or do they just want to be left alone?

  As soon as the X was visible I got up on my feet. I wasn’t really sure what direction to take next but there was this feeling I had that maybe I’d missed something, that there was something I hadn’t thought of, so I decided to follow the river down to where it joined the lake and go back along the shoreline. And as I walked I got to thinking about minnow fishing.

  If I was a minnow and I was worried about slubes then what would I do? Of course. It was exactly the same as I’d told Bobby: I’d look for cover. So what would seem like the best cover in these parts? There was the woods. That was the obvious choice. Plenty of trees and rocks and stuff to hide behind. But when you really put your mind to it, it’s not that easy to hide properly in the woods. Any half-decent slube knows to hunt in the weeds – they’re cover for him as much as for the minnows. He just stays still and quiet, and nine times out of ten what he’s hunting for comes to him. And the woods would seem just the same. You wouldn’t be able to see what was coming for you, and one snapped twig or noisy branch would give you away if it was close. No, what you’d want was a place with a bit of open water around it, to keep an eye on – a reef or something like that. And what looked most like a reef about here? By the time I’d thought it all through I’d gone a ways down the shoreline and the answer was pretty much staring me in the face: Clarence’s castle.

  The water around it had dropped to the ground almost – there was only a foot or so left – and it looked almost the same as it did in the photo Jim had taken, except for the trickles of water coming out the windows and the weeds hanging from the sills. With a clear view I reckoned it looked a bit like a big barn with a grain tower, but it didn’t look exactly like that – it didn’t look like any building I’d ever seen before. And it was green too, from the slime on the wood.

  It was easy enough to walk out to it now, across the exposed mud and shrivelling weeds, and I hadn’t gone more than a few feet when I picked up Bobby’s tracks. They went down about ten inches into the mud and I couldn’t believe I’d missed them the night before. They got shallower and fainter closer to the castle and I figured that must’ve been because there’d still been water there when Bobby walked out to it. He must’ve had to swim the last bit because they disappeared altogether before reaching the door.

  Bobby must’ve been a real brave kid. Or a real scared kid. That’s what I thought when I stood in front of the door. I didn’t want to go in there. It was the last place in the world I wanted to go. I was remembering when the phantom shad had dragged me here before and Clarence and George had beckoned me in. I was remembering dreaming about it, with Dad up above me in the window of the tower, speaking in bubbles. For a long time my feet wouldn’t move. This is where all the lost things are, I was thinking. This is where they all live and if I go inside I’ll have to live with them for ever.

  ‘Eli?’

  It was Bobby’s voice. It was coming from up above me, from the tower.

  ‘Eli? Is that you, Eli?’ It was hardly more than a whisper.

  ‘Yes. It’s me,’ I said.

  I went inside.

  Bobby was curled up in the top room of the tower. He was covered from head to toe in mud and slime and was shivering so much he could hardly talk. There were bites all over his face and neck.

  ‘Those bugs sure got you good,’ I said.

  ‘Mom says I’ve got delicate skin.’

  ‘I reckon all those bites should toughen it up.’

  ‘I was hiding.’

  ‘I know you were.’

  ‘Am I in trouble?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not in any trouble. Your mom’s worried about you, is all.’

  ‘How’d you find me
?’

  ‘It was like minnow fishing,’ I told him.

  The room was almost empty, like the other rooms below. There was only the silt and slime covering the floor. It was almost empty – except for one chair in the corner opposite where Bobby was. It was turned to face the window that looked out onto where the lake had been and where the river was flowing again now, between its old banks. I hadn’t paid much notice to it when I first came in, but as Bobby was getting to his feet I went over there. I’m not sure why I did that, but it was like I had to, somehow – like something was leading me in that direction whether I wanted to go there or not. From behind I could see the remains of what seemed like an old blanket or something, torn and full of holes, hanging off the edge of the seat. It was a faded grey colour. There were a couple of rocks on the floor below it. I went around to the front of the chair to get a better look.

  ‘Eli?’ Bobby said from the other side of the room.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been staring at Clarence when Bobby called – whether it was for seconds or minutes; it was as if, while I stared, seconds and minutes didn’t matter anymore.

  I turned my attention back to Bobby. ‘I think we better make tracks now, Bobby,’ I said. ‘Your mom’s real worried about you.’ I bundled him down the stairs pretty quick.

  As we came out the door Bobby asked, ‘Is this where your grandfather lived?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really. Only for a bit. He lived at number one O’Callaghan Street. That’s where he lived.’