Isle of Man

by Ryan Winfield

  “Thought it through? What’s to think through?”

  “Well, how they’ll react might be one example, ” she says.

  “I’m sure they’ll be happy to be free.”

  She cocks an eyebrow at me.

  “Would you have been?”

  Her question catches me off guard, and I stop to consider it. I don’t know what I would have felt if we had suddenly been told that everything we thought was true was really lies and that the world had been up here all along. I mean, it was a huge shock for me, and I learned it the hard way—piece by piece, over an extended period of time.

  I’m still thinking about Hannah’s question when Jimmy says: “I vote for tomorrow mornin’.”

  “Tomorrow morning what?” I ask.

  “Headin’ over,” he says. “I vote we go at first light.”

  Hannah tosses a twig off the bluff.

  “Works for me.”

  “Tomorrow morning it is then,” I announce, glad to have finally decided on something. “Is that rabbit ready?”

  “Jus’ about.”

  Hannah scrunches up her face.

  “Hand me another bar.”

  By the time Hannah and I wake the next morning, Jimmy is already up, tending the fire. He hands us each a makeshift bowl of hot tea, fashioned from the plastic upturned ends of the first aid kit that we found on the boat.

  “Not bad,” Hannah says, sampling her steaming tea.

  I sip mine and taste the bite of pine.

  “Why pine needles?”

  “Vitamin C,” Jimmy says.

  Outside the shelter, the lake sits like a steely gray abyss opened in a world of white. Everything surrounding the lake is covered with snow. The trees, the shoreline, the mountain peaks. The foundation of the old lake house has disappeared so beneath a thick blanket of white, I doubt even a trained archeologist would notice it had ever been inhabited at all. The boat rests on the shore, its roofline coated with snow. I notice Jimmy’s tracks leading down and back and Junior’s tracks crisscrossing his and heading off in every direction.

  “Not a bad day to get out of here,” I say.

  “I used to love snow,” Hannah sighs. She says it in almost a whisper, the bowl of tea forgotten in her hand. “My mom and I would sit in the living room and watch it come down out the window. ‘Blowing like a banshee today,’ she’d always say when it was a blizzard. Then she’d spend all afternoon fussing over her exotic plants. Covering them against a freeze.”

  “What about your dad?” I ask. “Did he like the snow?”

  “He was always off working somewhere,” she says. “And when he wasn’t, he seemed to hardly notice what was going on around him. He’d rather read about the world than live in it.”

  Seeing the pain in her eyes, I lay my hand on her arm and say: “I’m sorry. I know how hard it is to lose your parents.”

  “I know you know,” she says. “But you know what else? My dad really did turn into a monster. I couldn’t believe he shot Gloria like that. Oh! It makes me sick.”

  “Well, we’ve got a chance to make it right.”

  “I hope so,” is all she says.

  We stack the unburned wood in a far corner of the shelter, just in case we need to return, cover the fire with dirt, load up our few possessions, and head down together to the boat. The only sound as we leave is our cold breath and the crunch of our feet in the snow.

  Jimmy scrambles onto the bow of the boat and clears the snow off the lid. Then he opens it and reaches down a hand for Hannah. I climb up next and sink into the pilot’s seat. Jimmy puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles, loud and clear in the cold, quiet morning. Twenty seconds later, Junior bounds onto the bow of the boat, leaps into the rear seat next to Hannah, and shakes the entire cabin wet before lying his head on Hannah’s lap. Jimmy and I laugh.

  “Why are you so friendly when you’re wet?” Hannah asks, wiping her face with one hand and scratching behind Junior’s wet ear with the other.

  Jimmy pulls down the lid and latches it. I back us gently from the shore and turn the boat so Hannah can get a last look out the window before we leave. She presses her hand against the glass, as if waving goodbye to her childhood home. I wait until she looks at me and nods, then I drop the throttle and steer us toward the dam.

  Once again I’m surprised by the size of the lake and how long it actually takes us to cross it. It’s a quiet trip, other than an occasional whimper from Junior, still hunkered down in the back with his head on Hannah’s lap. As we approach the locks, I ease off the throttle, half hoping the mitre gates won’t open. But the giant steel doors part, and a black hole appears in the dam. I take a deep breath and notch the throttle forward.

  “Wait!” Hannah says.

  I jerk the throttle back, reversing away from the entrance. We sit there, rocking gently on our own wake, feeling small and insignificant floating beneath the towering dam.

  “I just thought of something,” Hannah says. “What if the Foundation is still flooded, and the locks take us down? Won’t a wall of water bury us when the lower gates open?”

  I stop to consider this. I remember Dr. Radcliffe telling us about the step locks on the downside of the Foundation cavern that lead out to the Pacific Ocean. I’m guessing that’s how they drain away the water and lower the locks.

  “I don’t think so,” I say, not sounding very reassuring even to myself. “I doubt the locks will bring us any lower than the water level of the Foundation bay.”

  “But are you sure?”

  “No.”

  Hannah falls back into her seat.

  “Oh, sweet mother of Earth. Just go. If we die, we die.”

  I turn to Jimmy.

  “What do you say, Jimmy?”

  “Whatever,” he says. “I’m jus’ along for the ride.”

  The shadowed locks wait in front of us, the white snow-covered world waits behind. I guide the boat through the doors and bring it to rest in the center of the locks. The doors grind shut behind us, sealing out the light, and all is quiet and black. Junior whimpers. Hannah shushes him, calming his nerves by humming a quiet song. I remember her father singing the same tune while Jimmy and I were stowaways in his boat heading down to burn Eden. A minute later, the LED lights pop on, and the boat begins to lower as the water level drops.

  “So this is where we went?” Jimmy mumbles nervously from the shadows next to me.

  “That’s right,” I say, “you never saw this part, did you? We were hidden in the bow of Radcliffe’s boat.”

  “So it was you two who sabotaged Eden,” Hannah says.

  “We had to do something,” I shoot back.

  “I know it,” she replies. “I was just saying.”

  We continue our slow drop in the shadowy locks until the lower gates appear dimly on the inside wall. Then we stop. The gates are only exposed at half the height I remember them. I feel myself tense, bracing for a wall of water. The gates slowly part, exposing the flooded tunnel, the water level much closer to the LED ceiling lights, but definitely passable in our small boat. The three of us collectively sigh.

  I guide the boat into the tunnel, staying in the center to avoid hitting the ceiling where it slopes down at the edges. Small bits of floating debris litter the path and it feels like we’ve been shrunken down and are traveling through a subterranean sewer drain. When we reach the end of the tunnel, we idle into the pitch-black cavern bay. I guess the lights here went out with the flood. I stop the boat, and we float a few meters from the mouth of the tunnel in absolute blackness.

  “Are there any lights on this thing?” Hannah asks.

  I feel around blindly on the dash. “Shouldn’t you know?” I ask, frustrated because I can’t find anything.

  Jimmy lifts open the lid, and the cool cavern air swooshes in. Junior whimpers again. Then I hear a crack and am blinded by a bright phosphorous flash as Jimmy strikes one of the flares lit. My eyes adjust, and the flare fades to a constant burn, casting a glow around our b
oat that is eerily similar to the red light that used to pulse up from Eden. Jimmy stands and holds the flare high while I idle the boat farther into the cavern.

  All around us is the floating wreckage of the Foundation. Overturned crates marked from various levels of Holocene II. Metal canisters half-submerged. A white lab coat. No. A dead scientist wearing a white lab coat. He’s face down in the water, his bloated hands floating like two gray balloons at the ends of outstretched arms. I lean over and look back. Our wake lifts his left hand as if he were waving to us as we pass.

  When we approach where the docks should be, they’re either gone or underwater, and as we cruise onto what would have been the shore, the rooflines of the submerged buildings come into view. We pass the galvanized walls of the sintering plant and the munitions warehouse, then the scientists’ living quarters with some of the scaffolding still in place. There are objects resting on top of the buildings, making it clear that the water was much higher, probably as high as the cavern ceiling, and that it is just now draining away.

  I look back and see Hannah frozen in a wide-eyed trance and Junior sitting on the seat next to her, scanning the black water. The flare hisses in Jimmy’s hand beside me as if it were the sound itself chasing away just a halo’s worth of the darkness that swallows everything behind us as we pass.

  We come at last to Eden, its domed roof singed by the fire to a bluish black, but largely still intact. I circle the structure, marveling at how large it is. It’s hard to imagine the generations of Holocene II retirees that were slaughtered here: their brains enslaved, their bodies cast off like refuse. Somewhere in there still are my father and my mother, or at least the burnt remains of the chemicals that made up their brains—brains that met and loved one another enough to create me.

  I ease the boat alongside Eden’s sloping roofline. Jimmy jumps off and secures a line to a vertical vent protruding from the roof. It takes some coaxing to get Junior to leave the boat, but when we’re all safely on the roof, Jimmy leads us up the dome with his flare. Eden’s dome is the tallest structure in the Foundation cavern, and from its apex the flare casts a faint red glow onto the murky waters below, though the edges of the cavern are still hidden in shadow. We sit on the crest and take in the dim and dreary view.

  “What are we going to do?” Hannah asks. Her words echo back to us above the sound of the hissing torch.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You think it’s still draining?”

  “Maybe,” Hannah says. “I hope so.”

  “Do you hear that?” Jimmy asks.

  “Hear what?”

  “That banging,” he says. “There. Listen.”

  I strain to listen, but all I hear is the hissing of the torch.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say.

  “Shh,” Hannah says. “I think I hear it.”

  “Where?”

  Hannah points.

  “Out there.”

  As my eyes follow her finger, the sound comes into my head; it is a kind of metal clanging coming from beneath the water in intervals of three—clang, clang, clang.

  “What do you think it is?” I ask.

  “Definitely human,” Hannah says.

  “How do ya know that?” Jimmy asks.

  “Duh,” Hannah replies. “Only our brains can make sound patterns like that.”

  “Ever heard a bird sing?” he asks, sarcastically.

  “Stop it, you two. Let’s just go out there and see.”

  When we return to the boat, the tie-line is strained, and the hull is partially beached on a newly exposed portion of roof, answering our question about whether or not the water is still draining. We untie and shove free and motor by flare-light to investigate the source of the sound.

  “I can’t hear it anymore,” Hannah says, hanging her head overboard to listen.

  I kill the jets and let us coast in silence.

  “There,” she says, pointing. “To the left.”

  I restart the jets and idle to where she pointed, reversing us to a standstill and killing the jets again. The sound is definitely louder and coming from somewhere near us, but there’s nothing to see but black water.

  Jimmy hands me the flare and strips off his shirt.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “I’m goin’ down.”

  “What?” Hannah asks. “In the water? You have no idea what’s down there ...”

  “That’s why I’m goin’.”

  “But it’s black as hell. You won’t be able to see a thing.”

  “Thought ya didn’t believe in hell,” Jimmy says, smirking at Hannah as he steps out of his animal-skin kilt. “And besides, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with my ears or my hands, so I can listen and feel around. Seein’ ain’t all there is.”

  I hold the torch out to Jimmy.

  “Take this down.”

  “In the water?” he asks.

  “It’ll burn fine. They don’t need oxygen.”

  “Ya sure?”

  I nod, reaching over to grab a fresh flare from beneath the seat, just in case. Hannah holds the lit flare for Jimmy as he clamps his knife between his teeth and lowers himself into the water. He dunks his head to wet his hair, then comes back up and takes the flare from her. Junior joins Hannah at the edge of the boat and whines.

  “Ahh,” Jimmy says, through his clenched teeth. “How cute. You’s worried about me.”

  “So what?” Hannah says, lifting her chin. “At least I’m adult enough to admit it.”

  “I was talkin’ to Junior here,” Jimmy says, trying to control a giggle. “But I’m glad you’s worried too.”

  Hannah huffs, “Well, I knew that, and I was only ...” She stops short when she notices Jimmy is gone.

  As the flare descends underwater in Jimmy’s hand, a cold and silent darkness swallows the boat. We watch the ball of red light move away from us, diving deeper beneath the surface, abbreviated by the elongated shadows of Jimmy’s kicking legs. Then a larger shadow appears in the deep—something long and cylindrical. The boat tilts as the three of us lean over its side and watch. None of us dares to breathe, not even Junior, as if it might somehow help if we all hold our breath along with Jimmy. The light of Jimmy’s flare moves around to the far side of the shadow, and the backlit silhouette of a submarine fades into view. Then the flare goes out, and all is black.

  There is a moment of absolute silence, so still and quiet that I can hear the distant dripping of water somewhere in the faraway darkness. Then several things happen almost at once. The boat rocks, followed by a splash as something, or someone, falls into the water. I pull the cap and light the flare in my hand, the glare momentarily blinding me. And just as my vision returns, the submarine rockets from the water nose first, clearing the surface by several meters, and splashes down just five or so meters away. It sends a wall of spray into the boat, knocking me backwards onto the floor.

  When I clamber to my feet, waving the flare in front of me like a weapon, the first thing I do is look for Hannah. She’s picking herself up from the backseat, also stunned and soaking wet, but she looks unharmed. I rush to the edge and hold the flare up and look out, ready to dive in after Jimmy, but I see him treading water a few feet away with Junior paddling beside him. Behind them floats the surfaced submarine, its protruding sail emblazoned with the inverted valknut that makes up the Foundation crest. I reach out a hand and haul Jimmy up into the boat, and he turns back and heaves Junior aboard.

  “What the hell happened?” I ask.

  “It’s some kind of a boat,” Jimmy says.

  “I can see that. You all right, Hannah?”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Is Jimmy okay?”

  “I’m all right,” he says.

  “Well, what happened?”

  Jimmy fills us in excitedly: “This boat thing here was tied up to the docks down there and floatin’ hard against the lines. I heard the tappin’ from inside, thought there must be somebody in there. I was figurin’ how to free her
when my flare gave out. I already had a hand on the front line, so I jus’ cut it.”

  “You sure freed it all right.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t of done it neither if I’d seen that,” he says, pointing to the valknut.

  “The Foundation logo?” Hannah asks.

  Jimmy shakes his head.

  “I dunno what you all call it, but that’s the sign of the Park Service.”

  Hannah opens her mouth to respond, but I cut her off.

  “You did the right thing, Jimmy. We don’t know who’s in there, no matter what the symbol’s for.”

  The screech of grating metal turns all our heads to the submarine. The three of us stand together in the dark, watching, the flare held high in my hand, with Junior crouching at Jimmy’s feet. A small door opens in the sail. Several seconds pass as we stare at the black opening. Then a man steps out into the flare’s light. He’s wearing white coveralls streaked with grease. And he’s very old and very small. His long, white hair is frizzed out by humidity, giving him the appearance of someone being electrified. He’s holding an enormous wrench.

  I don’t know why, but I shout: “Freeze right there, Mister! Don’t you dare move.”

  He mumbles something unintelligible and then disappears inside the submarine again. We look at one another, confused and slightly panicked. I start the jets and bring us alongside the submarine. Jimmy jumps onto its deck and ties us off to a cleat still tied with the thick line that he cut. We scramble onto the submarine’s deck and head for its door, stopping as we realize there’s only room enough for one person to descend at a time.

  “I’ll go first,” I say.

  Jimmy pushes me aside.

  “No, I’ll go.”

  “These people worked for my father,” Hannah says. “If one of us has to go first, it should be me.”

  Just then Junior pushes past us and leans over the edge of the ladder, his bushy tail waving in the air for one moment before he disappears down into the black. Guess that answers that. I step onto the ladder next, but Hannah grabs my arm and takes the flare from my hand.

  “This can’t go down there.”

  “Well, you stay out here and hold it then.”

  “No way. I’m going down.” She hands the flare to Jimmy.