Anyone who wasn’t already completely corrupted, that was.
But what was she supposed to do? She was only a girl. A skinny, weak girl.
It was much faster getting back; within a few minutes, she was picking her way through the parked cars, heading for the noise below. Russ’s truck was rocking gently and the windows were fogged up. Krystle frowned.
That was bad too.
So much to do! So much to solve. How could she carry this burden?
Her fingers went to her pocket, where the tiny razor blade rested behind the bindle. It was small, but it was sharp…
The bindle sang to her, though. The sweet, sweet call of speed. Such strength.
Krystle straightened her shoulders and walked towards the laughter.
“There you are,” Trent said, slipping an arm around her and planting a beery kiss on the side of her face. “What happened to you?”
She stood trembling in his embrace, staring up at him even as he turned to talk to Trish. Exposing his neck, his jugular. Everyone was so fragile; she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed this. Her fingers twitched on her pocket, rubbing, caressing. Trent’s hand slipped casually to cup her ass.
It felt good. Right. Sexy, and solid. Safe.
Too bad it was all a lie.
“Nothing,” she said, dropping her hand, then leaning up to return his kiss. “Nothing.”
She shrunk away from him after a minute. Coming down was hard. She’d never hallucinated on speed before, but apparently there was a first time for everything. Krystle yearned for the comfortable familiarity of her own stuff. She didn’t like Trent’s. It tasted too much like magazine paper. And it was way too rushy. Clayton must have mixed the batch wrong.
That stuff was crazy.
It would all be okay later, after she got her head back together. It would. And then they’d fuck in the bushes, or on the front seat of his truck, like Russ and Lisa were doing. Because this was the biggest-ass party of a summer of big-ass parties, and it had to be done up right.
“I need a beer,” she said, slipping out from under her boyfriend’s arm and heading for the keg.
But she hadn’t even gotten halfway to the river before she saw the glowing green, shimmering across the water. Almost like it was winking up at her.
“No,” she whispered again, as she sank to her knees. “No, oh please no, don’t make me…”
The glimmer of green caught the light of a distant star and echoed in Krystle’s head as though that had been its purpose from the very start. From the beginning of it all, a million billion light years away across the universe.
And she whispered, “No.”
Bone Island
Shannon Page and Jay Lake
Despite all the yoga I do, my back often hurts. Figuring it was the human condition (getting older and all), I didn’t worry much about it, till finally one day my chiropractor suggested I get some x-rays. Turns out I have a couple of congenitally fused vertebrae at the bottom of my spine ... and something called a “bone island” in my left hip. Which of course I mentioned to Jay, whereupon he said, “That’s a great story title!” Thus, “Bone Island.” It was published in Interzone in 2009.
_______________
It’s not what you think. The chalk-white hills give our place its name, rising cleanly from the cold blue water of the bight. Not anything more nefarious or other-worldly. That’s what we tell the tourists, anyway. Hiding in plain sight.
Although, if you think about it, what is chalk? Or limestone, or what have you—nothing more than the bones of billions of long-dead sea creatures.
So maybe it’s not such a bad name after all. Bone Island. My terrible home.
~o0o~
Sara Maarinen set her mind against me from the moment she arrived on the island. I could say that I don’t know why, and there is truth in that, although of course everything is always more complicated than it seems.
I can explain.
First I have to tell you about the cottage in the tall weeds that grow like Circe’s loom-weavings amid the rocks and heather of the lower meadows. The cottage that is said to contain the long-dead spirits of Bone Island, along with some of the bones of our ancestors.
There, see, I have misled you already. The bones, they are there. They jut up from the earth of the cottage’s garden, pushing rotted boards from broken coffins before them. They are restless in their repose.
A woman used to live there. She could have been my grandmother. Hell, she could have been Eve’s grandmother, she was so old. Those weeds were her herbs once. That cottage was her home, a single wisp of blue smoke spiraling ever upward like a lost soul seeking heaven. She delivered babies and physicked sick milch-cows and knew where to dig for the best water, and so people called her a witch.
The Bone Island Witch, of course, though that sounds mostly like something you’d see in a tourist brochure.
But what is a witch? You might ask the same question about a doctor or a preacher. Someone with a little special knowledge and the good of the world lodged in some corner of their heart will always seem like a threat to many. (At least, that’s what we tell the tourists.)
But the witch died, as even the oldest women do. There is no ultimate reward for outliving your contemporaries. She was buried not amid the restless bones of her own yard (for she truly was a witch) but just outside the rusted iron fence around the Moravian Church Cemetery at the edge of the Commons. The cemetery for respect, outside the fence Just In Case.
It was the Bone Island Witch whose empty, pointed shoes Sara Maarinen came to fill.
It was she who set in motion everything that went wrong afterwards, when the restless bones danced and the white beaches ran with red.
~o0o~
Sara came from the mainland. She showed up one fine morning with a lawyer and a real estate agent and a briefcase full of official papers demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt that she owned the cottage. It had been left to her by an elderly maiden aunt—not our witch, no, although those fancy papers traced a lineage back to her in some complicated and ultimately inarguable way. They were French papers, festooned with bright golden seals and official stamps and pale blue ribbons. French bureaucracy is the most serious kind.
Even so, she brought the lawyer for additional seriousness. And she brought the real estate agent because she planned to sell the cottage at once.
That was, of course, before she saw it.
I know all this because I’d made it my business to keep an eye on the unquiet place these past few years.
I also know all this because Bone Island is small and everyone understands everyone else’s least privacies, in the way of good inbred communities the world over.
But mostly I know all this because when the bones walked anew and the blackest crows came to haunt the cottage walls, Sara herself took me in her arms and set in motion the end of the story. The story I will now set down in these pages. The story that may save you, if you heed it true. Because although your details surely differ from ours, the magic underneath holds from Bone Island to Cape Town to the tip of Greenland, and everywhere in between.
~o0o~
“Don’t you be listening to her,” Grant Archerson said. He stood before me, tiny beads of sweat forming along his jaw, just below the scar.
I looked away, gave a wink to Janey Iverson instead, out without her little one this fine evening, then took a long drink of my ale, swallowing and wiping my mouth with the back of a hand before answering Grant. “Why not?”
Grant eyed the frosty glass on the bar, measuring the size of my appetite, my greed. My thirst. If he only knew. “She’s not right, that’s all.” He shrugged, as if to say, Isn’t it obvious?
But what is obvious? That a raven-haired woman from across the sea should bring trouble? Of course she would, and she wouldn’t be the first. Trouble we knew, trouble we had aplenty on Bone Island. You might almost say we looked for it.
I opened my mouth to say so, but Grant’s eyes f
licked to the door behind me even as I felt the cool night air on my back. It would be her, of course. Grant shook his head and turned away.
I wiped the smile from my face before I turned around. The words died in my throat as I gazed upon Christina.
“I thought so,” she said. Without moving her head, she somehow took in the entire room and dismissed it. I saw the shiver of a stranger tucked at a corner table. “Come on now—home with you.”
I wanted to apologize, to explain. Not to Christina. To the rest of them.
~o0o~
There are many creation stories, and all of them are wrong. Who could know the mind of Goddess, after all? Her dreams encompass more than the sum of human thought. The merest blink of Her eye is aeons in the passing. Her thoughts are slow tsunamis which ripple through the world invisible and destructive as a plague.
In some of those stories, a god or the son of a god is slain. His bones become mountains, his skin becomes the land, his blood becomes the rivers and oceans. This is true enough in its way, as anyone who has ever known the lore of a Corn King can attest. Blood on the plow is the oldest sacrament of civilization, once bounds were first measured and the land settled in harness. The queen picked her husband, lay with him before her cheering subjects, then split his skull with a mattock or a hoe or an obsidian knife that his newly-royal blood might bless the land.
So it is with the world. Those many creation stories are wrong, but they all carry truth like the germ waiting in an old pauper’s grave. There are bones in the world, greater and deeper than even the thunder lizards of times long before. Bone Island is almost the last such outcropping, a place where once angels feasted on the corpse of a god.
Imagine if you will a place where every speck of soil, the walls of every well, the foundation of every home, is infused with a magic older than the line of monkeys from which we are descended. Time is nothing to Goddess, and everything. She is ancient of days and new as a baby’s blue eye all at once. How can her power be less, which we drink and breathe and eat every day?
Still, from time to time some leave the island, or a local brings back a husband from a farther-away place. We thought Sara Maarinen was the grandchild of such a marriage, an outcross. Her grandmother had taken something from the heart of Bone Island which in the end drew Sara home.
~o0o~
The boat put in at the barnacle-encrusted dock on an eerily calm Tuesday in the month of July. A trim figure with stridently raven hair stood in the bow, leaning forward and putting a hand to her forehead, as if posing. She needn’t have bothered. We’d all be watching, oh yes we would.
She wore serious city clothes, all in black except for a vivid fuchsia scarf, and foolish high-heeled shoes. She carried a bag made from the skins of exotic rodents, filled with new-world magic: a telephone that needed no wires, a calendar made without paper.
We were not impressed. Bone Island keeps its secret ways, but not from ignorance. From choice. Besides, the tricksy little batteries in those things have a way of failing here between the limitless ocean and the ancient land.
The press of Christina’s fingers was still strong upon my left shoulder. There would be bruises there later, like the tattoos of scattered grapes. She’d done a reading, and drawn from me in the process. Not magic, this, not in the new-world sense of wizards and sparkles and spells from Under the Hill.
Just a way of listening to the world, more carefully than most would credit. It can be done anywhere—our limestone and talc hills are no more a requirement than the black dresses or the mouse blood. In other days, corpse-tallow candles were used to open the reading sight, but one can do it with a Bic lighter.
Someone to draw on, to draw down on, was part of it as well.
“She comes, Cary,” Christina had said. Her touch was warm to the edge of painful. The bones in my shoulder ached. “The cottage cries, the soil churns.”
The soil always churns, I thought. By ant or plow or restless spirit, it never stops. All I said was, “Yes,” in the voiceless whisper which usually pleased her most.
“Scatter salt beneath her feet.” Christina’s free hand darted like a bluebottle wasp, pressed a soft bag into my grip. Because it couldn’t be just any salt. She’d released me then, and I’d slumped forward as I always do at those moments.
At the dock I spread my burden. Salt by the sea would seem as pointless as taking blood to the butcher’s, but everything has a purpose. Old Kennewick sailing the boat on its twice daily trip across the bight would know better than to step out before this woman in urban black.
Even if he hadn’t seen the grainy sparkle drifting from my hand, he’d understand what my presence meant. As for the salt itself, let her track the stuff far and wide. Some magics are so simple as to be nothing but good sense.
I stepped forward and extended a hand to help her out of the boat.
“Welcome to Bone Island, Mistress...?”
Sara Maarinen—for I already knew her name full well—stared at my fingers as if they were scabbed over. She set her mouth and accepted my help, coming up onto the dock. “I am Ms. Maarinen,” she told me, as if announcing foreign royalty.
I flashed her my pub grin, the one that usually got me a kiss at least, if not free beer and undivided female attention. “And I suppose I’m not. Cary Palka, at your service.”
“I don’t believe I know any Palkas,” she said with a tone that could have frosted pumpkins. She turned back to Kennewick. “Have this boy take my bags to the White Rock Inn.”
Old Kennewick tugged on his hat brim like an idiot parody of some pastoral peasant. As she turned away I saw venom on his face. Not for me, but for Sara Maarinen. I nodded, rolling my eyes in a way which everyone around here knew meant “Christina”.
He began to laugh, an emphysemal wheezing fit to compete with the crying of the circling gulls. And then he pushed off from the dock almost before I could grab the blessed suitcases.
~o0o~
She took the best room in the White Rock, of course, even though it meant shoving aside Dorothy Iverson’s cousin Sheila, here for her annual month-long visit. I know she would have taken it anyway, even if it hadn’t had a direct view of the cottage; she was just that sort of person. And she organized Gertrude to bring her room service breakfast—coffee, biscuits, and blood sausage on a tidy little tray. So maybe she knew her own island power already. Certainly she was accustomed to getting her way, without question.
Her lawyer and real estate agent, newly arrived on the biweekly mail plane, had to make do with lesser rooms.
They got started right quick the next day, at the crack of noon, when a freshly bathed Sara descended the creaking staircase of the White Rock with a black leather briefcase under her arm and a swath of papers in her hand. Look at Her Highness, I thought, seeing her. Hot water brought to her room too! I smiled at Gertrude, who aimed a slap at my sore shoulder I had to dance to avoid.
“Don’t you be grinning at things you don’t understand, boy,” she hissed.
“Oh, I think I understand this just fine, Gertie,” I said, then darted for the back door. It was time to feed the ducks. And even if it wasn’t, I was going to do it anyway.
Outside, the howling fog-wind hit me in the face like a drunk’s well-aimed fist. I growled back into the teeth of it, pushing forward even as it threatened to slam me against the building. Ah, summer on Bone Island. The yews flung fat droplets on my head as I passed by them, squinting. I couldn’t even see the pond, though it was scarcely twenty steps from the inn’s back door. But I could hear the ducks chortling to their peeping young as they paddled about in the wind-whipped cress. They finally saw me and converged at the muddy bank.
I reached into the pocket of my greatcoat and pulled out the bag of salt. “Well, now, what is this?” I asked aloud. The ducks looked back at me. “For certain this was all scattered yesterday, and yet here it is anew?”
The ducks made no answer. It was not cracked corn and yardberry seeds, and that was all they knew.
~o0o~
There’s magic and there’s magic. Any fool can dream of spells wrestled from ancient, smoking grimoires, but the truth of that is near enough to nothing but dreams and legends. Things people want to believe, because the details seem so right. Plenty of stagecraft to support their opinions, until some folk confuse those opinions with facts. Noisy magic is rare, but not impossible.
The magic of salt and stone, of seeing and saying, of water and wind—that’s the magic which can be found in the world by an observant child. Watch a cat at a sun-drenched winter window for a long, quiet while. Eventually you may catch Tabby with frost on her paws, save without ever first hearing the creak of the door.
That second, the quiet magic, is what was held tight-clutched by the Bone Island Witch, may the pennies never leave her eyes. Others of us too, Christina most of all, have the knowing. It’s a magic which will never show a purple sparkle, wouldn’t be caught dead in a silver moon hanging chainwise around a pretty little neck. Quiet magic is everywhere but improbable.
That magic made the salt which I spread by the dock. Noisy magic returned it to my pocket, rude as a fart at a funeral and twice as distressing.
We already knew Sara Maarinen was trouble. We just hadn’t known what kind of trouble. Leaving the ducks to their querulous displeasures, I headed through the fog for Christina’s home, above the boarded windows of the old Leister Mercantile.
~o0o~
Pressing through the familiar weather, it came to me that maybe this fog-wind wasn’t quite so ordinary as I’d thought. This was summer, which was ever a cold, cold season on Bone Island, but the sun wasn’t even a pale glower above. If not for the clocks in the sitting room of the White Rock, I’d have had no notion whether the world was in dusk, dawn or in between.
Had Sara Maarinen called the weather to her? She had the law on her side, a shield of papers and agentry as impenetrable as any stopping web. Even the oldest gammer with her leather clogs and milky eye-of-wisdom couldn’t do better than a city lawyer.
Eastlick and Other Stories Page 16