Journey's End

by Rachel Hawkins

  “I figured that,” Nolie said, fidgeting with her sleeves. “But it’s got to be kind of cool to have a job, right? Even during the summer? I’ve never had a summer job.”

  Bel started walking again and gave a little shrug. “Not really a job,” she said. “Just . . . helping out.”

  “Still,” Nolie said, leaping over a bigger rock in the path, her arms held out at the side to keep her balance. “Better than how I spend my summers. My mom makes me go to, like, these day camps?” Now that she’d gotten the hang of jumping over the smaller rocks, she kept doing it, enjoying the way the salty wind lifted her jacket like wings.

  “Oooh, camp,” Bel said, and started jumping over the rocks, too. “I’ve always wanted to go to camp. Singing, fires, those treats with the marshmallows and chocolate.”

  “S’mores,” Nolie offered. “And trust me, the camp I go to doesn’t have those things. It’s just making weird crafts in the community center.”

  Bel paused again, her head tilted to one side. “Well, in that case,” she said, grinning at last, “no wonder you’d rather spend a summer ghost hunting.”

  Smiling back, Nolie nodded. “Exactly.”

  The path leveled out onto a rocky shore, and overhead, the sky was clearer.

  “The rain stopped,” she said, and the blond girl glanced over at her.

  “That? That wasn’t rain. It was mizzle.”

  When Nolie just started at her, Bel said, “Mist. Drizzle. Mix them together—”

  “Mizzle,” Nolie finished, nodding. “Got it. That’s actually kind of a great word!”

  Bel smiled again, and Nolie was suddenly really glad her dad had brought her into the village.

  “My dad said there are caves here?” Nolie asked as they kept going down the path.

  “Aye,” Bel replied, kicking at a few stray pebbles. “Hundreds of ’em. No one even knows how many. My brother Simon used to tell me all sorts of scary stories about monsters living back there, or people who wandered in and never came back out.”

  “Is people disappearing even a scary thing when you live in Journey’s End?” Nolie asked. She’d meant for it to be a joke, but Bel turned to her with a frown.

  “’Course it is,” she said, struggling to keep the wind from blowing her hair in her face. Nolie was glad she’d pulled her own hair back into a ponytail today. “Just because we’re used to people goin’ missing doesn’t mean we like it.”

  Nolie wanted to offer an apology, but Bel was already turning and walking farther down the beach.

  Nolie followed, careful of where she put her feet. The beaches she was used to were covered in sand, but this one was made up mostly of rocks. Some tiny, like the pebbles Bel was still kicking, and some huge boulders, covered with slippery orange algae.

  Even through the rubber of her boots, Nolie could feel how cold the water was as it washed over her feet, and she curled her toes. Her dad had told her there were boats that took people out to the Boundary, but Nolie couldn’t imagine wanting to sail out in this choppy gray water that looked like liquid rock.

  “Here?” Bel called out, stopping at the base of a cliff. There was a cave to her back, a small one. Glancing up, Nolie could just make out the gabled roof of a house, and while she was pretty sure it was her dad’s, all the houses on that cliff looked the same. “I think so,” she hollered back.

  Bel turned in a little half circle, looking around. “I don’t see anyone.”

  Nolie joined her, on a flat slab of rock that reached out into the water, pointing at the Boundary like a finger. It was true that the beach was deserted, and Nolie suddenly felt kind of stupid. Maybe she had just imagined the boy, and now she’d dragged Bel out here for nothing, and the one person she’d met so far—a person she actually liked—would think she was a total weirdo.

  But Bel didn’t seem to mind. “See that?” She pointed out at a white boat in the distance. “That’s our boat. My dad and my brother are on it.”

  Nolie squinted, watching the vessel as it bobbed out toward the Boundary. “Are they fishermen?” she asked, and Bel laughed.

  “Oh, no. Hardly anyone in Journey’s End fishes anymore. It’s a tour boat. You know, go out, look at the Boundary, take some pictures. That kind of thing.”

  Nolie looked more closely at the boat. “I get wanting to have a closer look, but I think I’d want a bigger boat?”

  As soon as she’d said them, she wished she could call the words back, afraid she’d hurt Bel’s feelings again.

  But Bel only gave an easy shrug and said, “I don’t get why any of the tourists want to do the stuff they do.”

  Nolie shoved her hands deeper in her pockets. “My dad is, like, obsessed with the Boundary. He always wanted to come here and work for the Institute and study it or whatever. If it were me, I’d be more interested in the people who disappeared, but he’s studying . . . I don’t know, its viscosity or some other science word. I’d want to know the stories, you know?” She looked at Bel. “There are stories, right?”

  Bel dug into the pebbles with the tip of her boot. Her shoes, Nolie saw, were scuffed up and nearly the same dull greenish brown as the rocks under their feet. Nolie made a note to talk to her dad about getting her some less . . . colorful galoshes.

  “Sure,” Bel said, shoulders up by her ears against the wind. “About the people who went missing. And times when it seemed like the Boundary was moving closer . . . but they’re just stories.”

  “But what happens in them?”

  Another shrug. “Oh, you know. Village witch or someone like that says the fog is coming closer. Then a kid decides to be a hero and finds a spell or a talisman to save the day. There’s a plaque in the city center about one of the legends. I’ll show you when we get back.”

  “Okay, now we’re talking,” Nolie said. “Village witches, excellent. What else?”

  “People say there’s a lighthouse out there, too,” Bel added, nodding out toward the ocean. “On a big rock you can barely call an island.”

  Haunted lighthouses? Even better, Nolie thought. “Is it lit?” she asked. The fog around where Bel was pointing was too thick to see anything.

  Bel gave another shrug, the wind blowing her sandy hair in her eyes. “Don’t see how. No one can go out there, and there’s no way to keep a lighthouse lamp going for so many years without any tending.”

  Smiling, Nolie looked back out at the fog. “Magic,” she suggested, and Bel wrinkled her nose.

  “Maybe,” she said, but Nolie got the idea that she wasn’t exactly a fan of the magical. Still, it had been nice of her to bring Nolie down here, even if ghosts and haunted lighthouses weren’t really her thing.

  Looking up the path they’d come from, Bel winced slightly. “I need to get to the shop. Mum’s probably back from lunch by now.”

  “Sorry I dragged you out here for nothing,” Nolie said, her face warm despite the biting wind. “I guess I was just imagining things. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Bel waved that off. “You probably saw one of the lads from the village.”

  Nolie nodded, and turned to follow Bel back up the beach, but as she did, something caught her eye. At first, she thought it was the edge of another rock, but as she got closer, she could see that it was actually a little rowboat.

  Nolie walked up to it, Bel trailing behind her. A few drops of rain had started to fall—real rain this time, not mizzle—and while Nolie grimaced and pulled the hood of her jacket up, Bel just stood there. Of course, Nolie thought, if you grew up in a place where it rained more often than not, a little rain probably wouldn’t bother you.

  “Someone lose a boat?” Nolie asked, and Bel shrugged.

  “I’ve never seen that one before. And you’d have to be right out of your head to take something that old out on these waters.” She nodded toward the sea, and Nolie crouched down closer to the boat
.

  It did look old. Really old, and the smell coming off it made her step back a little. There was a name painted on the side, a chipped black that still stood out against the faded gray of the boat.

  “The Selkie,” Nolie read out loud, and Bel squatted down beside her.

  “Good name for a boat,” Bel observed, and Nolie reached out to run a finger over the letter S.

  She was just about to tell Bel they should head back up to the village when Bel nodded toward the base of the cliff. There, in the tiny strip of sand that ran alongside the rock, were a few footprints, clearly made by bare feet.

  There were five prints that Nolie could see, the hollows already filling with water. The boy she’d seen had his pants rolled up, hadn’t he? The more she thought about it, the more she was sure he’d been barefooted.

  “So there was someone out here,” Bel mused.

  Nolie felt her heart leap. Settle down, she reminded herself. You don’t want this girl thinking you’re a complete weirdo.

  “I guess,” she replied, trying to sound casual. “But probably one of the kids from your village. Like you said.”

  Bel squinted at the tracks, her blond hair blowing all around her heart-shaped face. And then she nodded at where the prints disappeared, just inside the mouth of one of the caves.

  “Let’s find out.”

  CHAPTER 5

  NOLIE STOOD ON THE BEACH, WATCHING BEL DISAPPEAR into the mouth of the cave.

  “We’re just going right in?” she asked. “Wow, y’all are really tough in Scotland.”

  Bel’s head popped back out of the cave. Screwing up her face, she asked, “Did you just say ‘y’all’? I didn’t know that was a thing people actually said.”

  “I didn’t think Scottish people actually said ‘aye’ or ‘wee,’ but you do,” Nolie reminded her, and Bel laughed.

  “Fair enough. So are you coming? I have a torch.”

  Once again, Nolie just blinked at her. “Like . . . a stick on fire?”

  Grinning, Bel reached into her jacket and pulled out a key ring, clicking the button on a little flashlight attached to it. It didn’t give much light, but it was better than nothing, Nolie guessed.

  “It’s not a ghost,” Bel told her. “Ghosts don’t have footprints.”

  “No, but serial killers do,” Nolie replied. “Which is why this seems like the real kind of scary.”

  Bel tilted her head to one side, looking at Nolie with that whole wrinkled-nose thing she’d done before. “Ghosts aren’t the real kind of scary?”

  Shaking her head, Nolie dug her hands deeper into her pockets and said, “No, ghosts are the fun kind of scary. The fun kind of scary is . . . I don’t know, like when you’re inside your house on a stormy day. Nothing can actually hurt you, you know? The real kind of scary is the sort of thing where you end up on the news or CSI: Whatever.”

  “CSI?” Bel asked, and Nolie sighed, waving her off.

  “It’s a cop show. But . . . okay, we’ll go check it out, I guess.”

  She followed Bel into the cave. There was a hole somewhere high up in the rock that let thin, watery light through, enough so they didn’t really need Bel’s flashlight. There wasn’t much to the cave, and it didn’t go back very far. It was more like a big, round room with a little shelf of rock jutting out from one wall.

  “It’s not that scary, really,” Nolie offered, and Bel turned off her “torch,” putting the key ring back in her pocket.

  “Not really,” she agreed. “Except I think this was the cave Bluidy George was said to live in.”

  When Nolie just looked at her, Bel tucked her hair behind her ears. “He was a murderer in the fourteen hundreds. Hid in caves and murdered people.”

  Nolie screwed up her face, thinking. “That’s in a weird place between fun scary and real scary.”

  “Then he ate them.”

  “That doesn’t really help,” Nolie said, and Bel’s teeth flashed white in the gloom.

  “Sorry.”

  “But no ghost, at least,” Nolie said. “And no serial killer, either. Unless Bloody George is still around.”

  “Bluidy,” Bel corrected, and Nolie tried again. The word felt weird in her mouth, the same way Caillte had, and embarrassed, she shoved her hands into her pockets.

  “The accent is going to take a while, I guess.”

  Bel turned to face Nolie, her hands in her own pockets. “Y’all,” she said, and it didn’t sound like the way Nolie said it at all. It was all stretched out, and Bel kind of rolled her Ls at the end, making Nolie grin.

  With a dramatic sigh, Bel lifted her shoulders. “We’ll both have to practice.”

  Nolie turned to look around. The walls of the cave were damp, and the sand under her boots squelched as she walked forward, looking up at the opening in the rock. It struck her that Journey’s End was a pretty gray place. Gray rocks, gray buildings, gray water, even gray sky.

  And the gray fog.

  Thinking about it, Nolie decided that she wanted to keep her purple galoshes after all. It seemed like Journey’s End needed more purple.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” Nolie said, looking back over at Bel. “Even if you don’t believe in ghosts.”

  Bel gave a little shrug and her face went pink. “Seemed like a good way to welcome you to Journey’s End.”

  Nolie nodded. “Definitely. Ghost hunting on my first day? What was that word you used about the book? Ace.”

  That made Bel smile, too, and Nolie was going to ask if they could hang out more the next day when a strange noise came from behind her.

  It sounded almost like the patter of footsteps on stone, faint but echoing in the cave.

  Next to her, Bel tensed up, too, looking around.

  “There’s no one in here but us,” she said, but Nolie didn’t think Bel sounded convinced.

  Almost at the same time, they saw the opening in the wall. Thanks to the dim light inside the cave, it was nearly invisible, and unless you were staring right at it, the passage just looked like a discoloration in the rock. But it was an opening, stretching who knew how far back, and as Nolie stared at it, the sound of footsteps still echoing, the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

  “Bel?” she asked, and the other girl lifted her chin, squaring her shoulders.

  “I know that’s you, Donal McLeod,” she called, her voice wavering only a little bit. “Or one of your stupid friends, and you can’t scare us.”

  There was no answer, but Nolie swore she could hear the faintest sawing of breath.

  Moving a little closer to Bel, she whispered, “Would it be okay if we just ran away now?”

  Bel nodded vigorously. “Yes, let’s.”

  They ran out of the cave with shrieking laughs, their hands clutching at each other’s arms, and Nolie’s heart was hammering as they skidded to a stop there at the surf, but she was giggling, her fingers still tight on Bel’s jacket.

  “Sorry I almost got you murdered on your first day,” Bel panted, and Nolie laughed even though she was a little breathless herself.

  “It’s cool. The heart attack definitely took my mind off my jet lag.”

  Bel giggled again before letting go of Nolie’s arm and hopping up on a nearby rock. But as soon as she did, she skidded back a little, her smile fading, and Nolie hopped up next to her to see what was wrong.

  Just a little bit down the beach, she could make out four people. There were three girls—two with dark hair, one with hair almost as red as Nolie’s—and a boy.

  A boy with nearly black hair, just like the boy she’d seen on the beach.

  “That’s Donal,” Bel said, her voice oddly flat now. “I bet that’s who you saw.”

  “Probably,” Nolie agreed, even if she didn’t really think it was. This Donal guy was wearing a jersey with some kind of mascot emblazoned o
n it, and jeans, not the old-fashioned clothes the boy she’d seen had been wearing.

  Bel was watching the girls more than the boy, though, and she seemed to almost shrink into herself as they looked over at her and Nolie.

  “Are those girls your friends?” Nolie asked, and Bel shook her head.

  “No. I mean . . . kind of? One of them used to be.”

  Nolie knew that feeling. There had been a girl in fourth grade, Caroline, who’d been her best friend—until suddenly, one day, she wasn’t.

  The girls were talking together, too far away to overhear, but their laughter carried over, high-pitched and grating.

  Nolie found herself scowling at all of them, but they were already turning to walk back down the beach, and Bel was looking out to the ocean.

  She shaded her eyes even though the sun still hadn’t broken through the clouds, looking out toward the Boundary. That white boat she’d said was her family’s was barely more than a speck now. “Dad’ll be out another hour at least,” she said with a sigh.

  Then she toed at the damp sand and rocks. “So how long has your dad worked at the Institute?” Bel asked, her eyes still on the boat in the distance.

  “About six months,” Nolie answered, and it was on the tip of her tongue to tell Bel that her parents were divorced, and one of the big reasons for that was that her dad wanted to live here in Scotland and her mom hadn’t wanted to. But she’d just met this girl, and good taste in books or not, she wasn’t sure that was the kind of thing you just told people.

  Instead, she turned her back to the water, facing Bel, and said, “I’m actually supposed to go to the Institute with him tomorrow. Do you wanna . . . I mean, if you’re not busy, you could come, too.”

  “Up to the Institute?”

  The word “to” sounded more like “ta” to Nolie, and it made her smile. “Yeah.”

  Bel chewed her lower lip, still staring out at the sea. “Never been to the Institute,” she said at last. “No one in the village has, far as I know.”