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by James Treadwell


  Jennifer slumped down onto the seat in the bow, covering her face with her hands.

  “At least you get to see me swim for it.” Goose didn’t much like the idea, but by this stage she hardly cared. Get her hands on the keys, get back to the boat, get back to Hardy. Whatever was going on there, at least she’d be able to dry out, warm up, and eat. She stripped off jacket, boots, pants, and sweatshirt, trying to ignore the cold. Having some dry clothes afterward would be the main thing. She could mop herself off with the sweatshirt when she got back and then wrap herself in the rest. She couldn’t bring herself to strip off undershirt, panties, or bra. Maybe they’d keep her a fraction warmer for a few seconds, who knew, but the thought of going into that grey sea naked was intolerable.

  She denied herself hesitation. She told her legs to jump and they jumped. Salt and cold hit her together, the base elements of a brutally alien world. She closed her eyes and put her head down. Six frantic strokes later she took her first breath, a shocked gasp. She shoved hair out of her eyes and looked for the bobbing float.

  A wild screech broke behind her. She flinched, imagining an eagle plunging, but it was Jennifer. The girl had sprung to her feet and was shouting, twisting in panic. Goose couldn’t see what had frightened her, if anything. Her eyes stung with the salt. Small waves slapped over her mouth. Straightening herself to look, she kicked against limpet-crusted rock. Her feet were too cold to feel pain. She saw the keys a few strokes farther off, took a deep breath, and kicked out again. The shoal rose abruptly under her. She felt for handholds among fissured stones, distracted by the girl’s screaming. The current had pushed the keys over the reef. It was too shallow to swim here so she hauled herself up onto a shin-deep platform of stone. Coming out into the wind made the freezing wet almost unbearable. She turned to shout at Jennifer, patience snapping: “Will you shut the f—”

  Another body had risen from the water.

  On the far side of the boat, on a small promontory of shingle reaching out from the last of the islands, a drenched black figure was unfurling itself from the sea, water oozing from moldering clothes and gorgon hair. The wind gusted sharply, and Goose felt her palpitating heart seized by a grip of ice. Jennifer stretched her arms out toward the monstrosity, yelling. It drew itself upright on the shore. It had arms too, and hands, withered white hands, salt-scoured and leached of warmth. Goose wiped at her eyes to see what those hands held as they lifted skyward. Something small, looped on a silvery thread. The chain caught a gleam of tarnished daylight.

  Jennifer went suddenly silent. The gust redoubled at Goose’s back, but the chill in her spine had come from inside.

  The twice-drowned thing shuffled slowly around and raised its head.

  There was just a moment, the interval of a breath, when Goose had time to think to herself, The bandage is gone, before she saw what it had for eyes.

  She lost her footing. Caught by the reef, a wave crashed over her, into her nose and mouth. She choked but couldn’t turn away. The spots of lurid fire held her blurred gaze like twin beacons. Everything else was grey and salt and cold: only the drowned revenant’s eyes burned with ghastly unlife. It braced its hands over its head in triumph, the silver necklace chain strung between them, and snapped it. The ring quivered for an instant in empty air, a speck against the clouds behind. A skeletal hand caught it and slipped it on.

  An anguished wind howled. The keys, Goose thought to herself, for want of anything better to think; don’t let them blow away. Otherwise, otherwise . . . She was shivering with cold compounded by dumb dread. She saw the float and dived again. Whipped to anger, the sea smacked against her flailing arms. She swam in a frenzy, feeling herself going numb in soul as well as body, horror as overwhelming as cold. A white-capped crest picked up the keys and flipped them near her hand; she kicked and clutched and grabbed them, and couldn’t remember why she wanted them, what she was doing in the water, shivering and tiny, an atom in the deadly vastness of the ocean. Her arms and legs were turning sluggish, heavy, dead wood. She was struggling to stay afloat. A single desperate urge overtook her at the expense of everything else, the atavistic compulsion to get her feet on solid ground: she drove herself back to the reef, scratching ankles and arms as she beached herself on it, clutching an outcrop of rock, hugging it, sobbing, gasping at the inhuman cold. The shoal behind her lifted the swell into breakers and threw them over her head. She spat phlegm and water. Ah non, she was thinking, ah non, pas moi, pas moi. She remembered the boat, salvation. The keys were still in her fist though she couldn’t feel her fingers. She remembered the thing, the demon, the undead, its whispering voice in the dark: everyone’s story ends in death. With a dreadful effort she pulled herself higher and made herself look over the rising sea. Everything froze; everything turned to an arctic blank. The wind had driven the boat away twice as far as it had been before. “Jennifer!” she screamed, and threw herself toward it, forgetting to take a breath. Waves lifted her and sucked her under. She surfaced, coughing, blinded by spray and salt and terror. What if it was swimming beneath her? She kicked out again, not knowing what she was doing. When the sea let her force her head up for a moment she saw the boat, no closer. It was only a moment. Her legs were losing strength. The dark beneath her was wrapping feelers around her ankles and beginning to pull. She tried to call out again and a mouthful of ocean slapped itself down her open throat. In a terrible instant she saw herself as if from the eagle’s view, swimming weakly until she sank; the horror of it was too much to bear. She poured her desperation into her limbs and made them fight toward the only solid thing she could see, the bleak hard angle of the reef, until her feet scraped rock again. Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait? She looked at her fists, close to her eyes. Empty. The key chain had slipped out of her fingers. Empty. She stared at them again as if the mistake would correct itself. Pas moi. No keys, and the boat drifting farther and farther away. Her arms wouldn’t let go of the rock, as if they’d made their own decision that all that mattered was that she was alive, now, anchored in place, not about to drown. She hugged herself tight to it and tried to look for the float. Waves were curling higher than her head; they pushed her weakening torso as if she were limp kelp, scraping her over the rock. A single explicit thought loomed up like the black-clad corpse from the sea: la mort. The end. She would die, freeze and drown, unless she, unless she, unless . . .

  Dry land wasn’t far. She could see it. When the vicious spray let her, she could see individual trees shaking their tops in the sudden wind. Out of the water. Her story contracted to that single point: she wanted to be beyond the sea’s reach, otherwise it would have her, and then no more Goose, no more story. She tried to steady herself and time a few deep breaths to match troughs between the breakers. She became aware of her existence balanced on the point of a pin. Struggle in the water for the keys, struggle to reach the boat, or force herself across the fifty meters of tossing grey to the nearest of the solid islands? It didn’t feel like a choice. Only one end was in sight. She gritted her teeth, gulped air, and let go. The first wave rolled her over, capsizing her, blotting out all sound for a second beyond the weird hushed wallowing of underwater currents. She kicked up against rock, found air, glimpsed for a moment the crown of trees marking safety ahead, and began windmilling her arms.

  It was a contest of effort against pain. She knew all about those. She’d won hundreds of them. She won again, eventually. There was even a strangely sweet moment when she knew she was going to win, when she came into the lee of the scattered landmasses and felt the sea calming, and looked ahead as she took another painful breath and saw the evergreens filling most of her view. She emerged out of the wind, dragging herself on scraped and bloody hands and knees until the numb hooks of her fists were tearing at leaves and bark. She collapsed in a hollow among driftwood above the top of the tide, and lay there, alive, not finished, listening to herself breathing: alive, cold to the bone, hungry, all but naked, and utterly marooned.


  29

  It rained a tantrum: violent and short. She cramped herself beneath a contorted overhang of ancient deadwood. Everything afterward smelled of pine.

  • • •

  After the storm the sky seemed brighter and farther away. Later on it flaked apart and the sun came out.

  Her undershirt had been scratched to shreds. She peeled it off and discarded it, a heap of artificial seaweed. She could hear the wind still but not feel it. Her little hollow was sheltered, and faced south, into the strong light. The stripped and barren wood warmed fast. She pressed her back against it. She couldn’t remember the last sunshine she’d seen. It turned the world as bright as a postcard and fell on her skin like an eager lover.

  • • •

  A while later she found she could sit up. Her hands could flex. Her heartbeat was thin and rapid, but it no longer felt manacled by chains of ice. The sun had risen higher. One long flat stone near her hand was actually warm to the touch. She clasped it between her feet until they stung.

  Across ten kilometers of glittering water the low top of Vancouver Island was a finger’s width of fresh green. There were roads there, and people, and phones, connections: Highway 1, stringing the whole of Canada together. A little later still, when the yellow warmth had gone deep enough that she could stand and walk, she made a circuit of the island where she’d landed. She had the mysterious feeling that somewhere on it she’d find those things, Canadian things. A secretly hidden, well-stocked marina, perhaps, or a solar-powered emergency phone with a connection to the coast guard. It seemed necessary, somehow. The idea that she was cast away on a tiny speck of untouched and uninhabitable rock in the middle of the Inside Passage was peculiarly unthinkable. It could only be a bad joke. There were places where she had to climb up through narrow defiles in cliffs and skirt the prickly undergrowth of the trees, but she went all the way around the island until she reached her little sun-washed haven among the fallen trees again, having found nothing, of course, but what was actually there.

  She found herself hoping for things. A spring of fresh water. (She pecked rain from tiny crevices like a bird.) A passing boat. No, a passing helicopter. No, Jonas arriving in his boat, with a big smile, a thick blanket as big as a comforter, and a bag of warm almond croissants from Au Pain Doré. It was the kind of hope that hurt, physically, the kind that makes you short of breath and sick to your innards.

  That finished, eventually. Afterward she had other thoughts, involving things like bird’s eggs, or actual birds killed by well-judged stones, or rubbing sticks together, or piling up stones to make a cairn visible across the Passage, or lashing logs together with seaweed.

  Other kinds of things too: what-ifs. These were also exquisitely painful. If she hadn’t thrown the stupid paddle out of the stupid boat so she wouldn’t have had to swim to get the stupid keys. If she’d made herself swim after the boat instead of to dry land. If they’d asked someone else to come and replace Fitzgerald instead of her. If she’d never listened to the thing from hell, if she’d stayed at her post. If she’d just ignored Kalmykov. How many times had she, a fit young blond woman in the police force, ignored or shrugged off that sort of crap? A hundred? So why not a hundred and one?

  All that finished too, so then she thought about dying.

  For some reason she’d never expected the thought of it to be so frightening. It had always just seemed like one of those things that happened (to other people, that is). It was going on all over the place. She’d assumed that when her turn came it would feel ordinary, unexceptional. Instead it turned out to be like the worst fear she’d ever had magnified by a factor of a thousand. She’d do anything not to die. If God came out of the sea and told her she could live but a hundred happy children would starve in her place, she’d have wept with gratitude and said yes, thank you, let them starve, save me.

  She remembered the way her grandmother’s old TV used to turn off. No remote or anything: you pushed in the knob, snick, and then the screen shrank suddenly in on itself to a point of light, and then, wink, nothing. When Goose thought of that she gibbered in terror. She pulled herself into a ball and fell on her side in the sunlight and her mouth went ahh non, ahh non, non non non.

  Some inward voice told her that she ought to be ashamed of such cowardice. (Her mother?) The accusation felt weak. Shame needed witnesses. Shame was public. She was alone. The island didn’t care about courage or cravenness. It didn’t care about her at all. It had no interest in providing her with food or means of shelter or escape. It didn’t want to listen to her memories or her complaints about unfinished business or the things she wanted to say to the people who’d miss her.

  There must be something I can do. Dying was ridiculous, impossible; it couldn’t happen. So, something else. It was just a question of figuring out what it was.

  The problem was that she was so weak with hunger she could barely think.

  • • •

  She narrowed it down to three things: food, warmth, escape.

  Like a juggler’s batons, they refused to stay in her grip together. She had to toss one away to grab another. She could maybe try to find two small logs to lash together with the remains of her shirt, and float out on the raft when the tide began to rise to fill the Passage, letting the current carry her south and east, maybe lying flat on her stomach and paddling with her hands; but she’d have to start right away, while there was daylight left, because soon she’d run out of energy, and then it would be night and she’d be naked at sea in the dark. Or she could look for something better than seaweed to chew on, maybe gather enough to get her through the day, but then she’d still be stuck. Or she could stay here in her suntrap where it was pleasant to soak up warmth, and be comfortable, and starve while she hoped for something else to happen. Or make herself some kind of shelter so she’d be warm through the night, which would give more time for the miracle to come along. It was the age of miracles, after all. She’d seen a demon on the neighboring island; why not an angel on this one? N’ayez pas peur, Séverine. Choral music and harps.

  She noticed the sharp-edged shadow of a branch above angling differently across the shoreline. Lengthening, just a fraction. Pointing, cruelly, toward the water. The sun had started its descent.

  Her hands began to shake.

  • • •

  She remembered Jennifer saying something about the larger island, people living there, a house, a hearth. She thought she remembered catching a faint whiff of smoke. (Jennifer. Why couldn’t she have left the girl alone? Why couldn’t she have done what Cope had made it so clear he wanted her to do: colluded with her boss’s neglect, pretended the whole damn thing hadn’t happened? She was a junior officer; she was trained to do what her superiors told her to do. Why? Why?)

  She scrambled around to the side of her island that faced into the bay where she’d come with the boat. It was in the shade. As soon as she wasn’t feeling the sun on her skin she was assaulted by clutching, withering cold. She looked across the small expanse of calm water, wondering whether it was shallow and still enough that the suddenly glorious day had warmed it a degree or two. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. Thirty seconds, max, then out again on the shingle where Jennifer had pulled up her kayak, and she could race around to the south-facing shore and get herself warmed up again. If only she wasn’t so hungry. Her limbs felt like sticks.

  Am I making a good decision? she thought, as she shuffled down to the edge of the tide. Mustn’t make bad decisions. Hungry and panicky and tired. Think. But don’t think too long, because the sun’s going down.

  She clenched her hands into fists and ran in. As soon as the ice of the water hit her she had her answer: This is stupid. You can’t get cold again. Too late. She’d told herself not to stop so she didn’t stop. She hopped from submerged rock to rock until she could plunge in. The cold hit her breasts and belly and crotch. She swore breathlessly and swam hard, keeping her head
up because she couldn’t bear the idea of submerging it. She swam badly, horribly, like a novice, like the kids she’d laughed at in school swim lessons. (They were all somewhere now with food in their stomachs and roofs over their heads, and she was going to be dead by the morning. Ha ha ha.) She staggered out onto the hard beach, still swearing. Her body temperature had plunged. She found she couldn’t swear properly even through clenched teeth. Her jaw was shaking too violently. The sun, she thought, the sun. She turned left. This island was wooded closer to the shore but the tide was still low enough to leave eaves of rock above the water. She limped around until she was out of the shadow of the trees and spread-eagled herself over sun-warmed stone. She felt small breaths of air over her back, hints of the sea breeze: each one was like being doused with ice shavings. She remembered thinking, just an hour or two ago, that whatever she did she mustn’t let herself get cold again. How had that just happened? How had she voluntarily immersed herself in North Pacific water, knowing she had nothing to dry herself on and no clothes at all beyond her soaked underwear, nothing to cover even a patch of her body? She huddled herself close, waiting for the sun to work its magic, imploring it.

  A shiver attacked her. It wasn’t like the shiver of fear or the tremble of a draft. It was a different beast entirely, a thing with an iron fist and a will of its own. It rattled through her as if it had determined to shake her loose from herself. That’s enough of you. It took over her muscles and turned them against herself. She whimpered in helpless pain until it let her go. Clothes, she thought. Blankets. Quick. But there were no clothes or blankets. She got to her hands and knees to crawl somewhere where the mild caress of wind couldn’t touch her. It hit her again, dropped her and doubled her up. It was like retching, an irresistible exhausting grip. In the middle of it she thought, very clearly—perfectly clearly: C’est ça. This is it.

 

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