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35.
It was a good sailing day, with moderately brisk wind that pushed the boat along at a nice clip. The boat didn’t steer well, but the sail worked well. Alex stood in the boat holding up the sail and aiming it so that he could tack along the sides of the wind. At first he tacked back and forth in zigzags near the coast until he was past the cape and out in rougher seas. There he rode up and down on eight-foot swells, and the boat took it well. He was up to his ankles in water, and when he sat down it was like sitting in a low bathtub of water, but the boat was solid and kept pushing out to sea.
For a while Alex was a bit scared, scanning the horizon and not seeing any signs of land. He hoped to see a wisp of smoke or even a flash of flame, but there was nothing.
After he was about a mile beyond the cape and heading steeply out away from land, he saw a smudge on the horizon. He stood as best he could, rising up and down, and held his sail so that the wind threatened to push it from his grasp. He buried his face in his hands as he held the mast, and prayed it would not suddenly spring apart in his grip. Many of the reeds had already snapped and were loosely snapping in the wind, some making low whistling and twanging noises. The boat tended to ride too much to the left, to port, and he had to keep correcting by leaning far to one side, but the island grew larger. Still no signs of smoke.
Too late he noticed the breakers around the island, and the sharp teeth of black gleaming rocks over which washed foaming water. Garlands of kelp lay strewn among the boulders, and the ocean crashed rhythmically so that he could hear the shuddering under the water as all the boulders shifted with the rocking sea. The boat shot through a wall of breakers and became logy, slowly riding along, saturated with water. Alex lost his balance, went to his knees under water on the boat floor, then rose suddenly on a great curling head of foam. “Whoa!” he shouted, realizing that he was headed toward the tip of a groin whose bluish boulders rose like a crocodile’s mouth out of the sea. He dumped the sail over one side and jumped out the other, just as the boat was carried high and then dumped, smashing, onto a ledge six inches under water.
He didn’t have time to worry about it. For a moment he felt the silty, abrasive churning of an undertow. For a minute or so, he was thrown in cartwheels underwater. He heard the tuba-sounds of water channeling among the boulders as he spun helplessly. He felt the sand on the bottom and then found himself being carried away. A moment later, he surfed belly-down over a ledge and would have gone right back over the other side and out to sea, except he was able to wrap himself around a protruding stone and aikido himself into a crevice, where he stuck, during a moment when the sea paused for breath before plunging onward.
Gasping and pouring water from his mouth, nose, and ears, he pulled himself up out of the water. He could see his raft was finished, but he felt too battered to think about how he might get back to the mainland. He felt the weight of the water gliding off him, and the balmy wind drying his skin already as he hopped from stone to stone toward the sodden beach. There were few of the giant butterflies in view, most likely because the tree-trunk flowers that nurtured them were absent on this island. The sand smelled of rotting kelp, and swarms of insects buzzed over piled dessication from various tides ago. There was a faint smoky something in the air, stale, not an active hearthfire, not a healthy woodsmoke, but something puzzling and industrial, cold and unwelcoming. With a feeling of dread, he climbed up a slope of round rocks. The rocks lay packed tightly like a road. Again it was hard to guess if man or nature had laid them so perfectly in a carpet.
Then he saw the boat. Someone had pulled it up onto the rocks and into the shelter of an overhang. It was a squarish boat with uplifted fore and aft, sturdy as a rowboat but lively as a little shell. In it, neatly furled, lay a mast with sail. Alex bent down to feel the sail. Surprisingly, it felt like wool. He rubbed forefinger and thumb together, feeling the oil there. He smelled it, a lanolin kind of sheep odor. He found the sheep minutes later, a herd of them, grazing unattended. He casually counted a dozen in plain view and a few more hidden shadows that promised to be more, standing in the rocky grassy ledges above where they’d gone to graze. They looked down on him, chewing comically, as if they were thinking something witty.
Alex climbed up a winding path and came to a small meadow about the size of his own sky-island. Several of the sheep followed him, and one or two ran ahead making their ba-a-a-a-h! noise. All they lacked was bells, he thought, and this could be some Irish or Alpine village a million years ago. He smelled the smoke, more strongly now, at the same time he saw the ruins. Down in a little valley nestled inside a ring of huge boulders (like teeth sitting on someone’s lower jaw, with thorn bushes and plum trees growing from the gums) were nestled some six houses, none with roofs.
As Alex stood overlooking the village, a light fog was creeping in. The sunlight, which he hadn’t particularly noticed before, illumined the growing milky haze from within like light inside a lantern. But it promised to be a fading light, for already down under the fog, on the cold and dripping walls of abandoned houses, black shadows were gathering. The stones dripped coldly with dark water.
Alex walked down into the ghost village, heart sinking as he noticed the absence of windows, doors, roofs. When he stepped into the houses one by one, and saw the worm-eaten gray timbers so fragile that they crumbled at the touch of a foot, and when he saw the deep soil that had gathered where floors had once been, and when he saw several wide tree trunks that had taken shelter here long ago, he got a picture that this place had been abandoned not yesterday, not last year, but generations ago.
He held his head and cried out with disappointment. “Hello!” he called. “Hello!” He walked over a mass of moss and ivy and brambles a yard deep in places covering what must once have been the village square. “Is anyone here?”
No answer—he heard only the wind, whispering in the leaves, and saw how the sun silently gilded the rocks, painting them with a kind of bright, tortured irony that made all the sadness in him well up, all the loneliness of his hopeless existence. Tiny butterflies fluttered over green and yellow lichen and nuzzled bright yellow flowers. Bees, probably descended from domestic ones, buzzed around an irregular dark comb in a tree. Birds twittered and hopped from branch to wall to boulder, unmindful of whatever tragedy had occurred here. Still, there was that cold aftertaste of smoke in the air, a faintly sour odor.
Alex clambered up the opposite side of the protective hillside and stood overlooking the seaward shore of the island.
Nothing.
The sea was becoming enshrouded in mist, and the light was losing its golden luster. The island was only about half a square mile in area and roughly oval. It reared up from the sea on stone pillars, a primordial lava upflow through a long gone mountain worn away by wind on some plain long since drowned in the ocean. Now, on the scrubby meadows high up, with their scraggly bushes and trees, fog was rolling in to soften and obscure the view.
Worried about becoming trapped for the night, Alex rushed down to the sandy beach on the seaward side.
Amid cawing sea birds and crawling crabs, he found a bundle of rags lying half in and half out of the water.
He smelled the foulness of death from a distance, and heard a loud buzzing of insects.
“No!” He hurried up close, while shreds of fog blew swiftly past, and his face dripped with condensation. Shivering, he stood and looked at the body on the beach. The stench was enough to knock a person back, but he forced himself to get near. Brushing aside scuttling crabs and swarming flies, he lifted the large wool cloak in which she was rolled up. He caught a brief glimpse of the ravaged face, the hollowed empty eyes, the lipless mouth, the clean young teeth. He glimpsed long black hair still with a trace of gloss in its healthy young fiber. Pulling the cloak open further to expose a torso laid open to whitish bone and purplish flesh swarming with the greenish golden carapaces of insects, he saw that she had her bony hands clutched together over her abdomen. The claw marks in her gut were still visible. That would explain the blood on the beach weeks earlier. She’d gone to land for some reason, to get something, to do something, and the rippers had attacked her. Somehow, she’d fought them off and managed to get to the boat. She’d managed, perhaps with the last of her strength, to sail away and make it this far. She’d beached the boat and staggered around the island, too weak to go over the top, and collapsed here. But where had she been headed? Surely not to those ghost houses.
Holding his nose, he groaned loudly with dismay and let the corner of the cloak fall back to hide her face. Backing away, holding his hands over his face, he recognized the delicate narrow foot sticking out from among a rumple of wool. As he backed away, a large sea bird landed and strutted up to the cloak, pecking at it imperiously.
Alex turned and started to run.
Then he smelled that oddly cold smoke again, and followed the smell several hundred feet around to the northern end of the island, which he realized he might have seen from his aerie atop the cliff several miles away.
There he found the likely cause of his fire. Someone had stored wood here in a kind of wall-shape fifty feet long, and anywhere from five to ten feet high. The logs had been broken from young, small timber and left to dry for firewood over a period of years. Recently, for some reason, someone had set the whole thing on fire. There were still a few spots faintly smoldering, though the dampness was rapidly quenching the last hot spots.
Beyond this wall of wood, nestled in a fold in the central hill on the island, was a cottage. A strong smoke house smell surrounded it, as if it were a place for preserving fish and meat, aside from the burned wood outside.
Alex was torn between running for the boat and getting off the island, and staying to learn more. Certainly, he couldn’t just make off with someone’s boat.
The air was filled with fresh drizzle now, and the rocks gleamed as though dripping with rain. Water ran down his hair and splashed coldly on his damp shoulders, making him shiver. The air was growing darker, and he knew there would be no more sunlight that day.
The cottage door was tightly closed. He approached carefully, noting its dark and lifeless aspect. The cottage was built of good-sized gray and brown blocks tightly fitted with a crumbling mortar made of straw and mud. The cottage was more of a lean-to, built hive-like against the stone surface of a cleft in the hill. Its thick roof consisted of rough beams overlaid with layers of tightly bundled straw and clay. A stone chimney protruded, dead, leaking not a shred of smoke from under its clay rain-cover.
The cottage had no windows, and the door was tightly woven from interlaced saplings.
“Anyone in there?” Alex called out. No answer.
The door was held in place somehow on the inside, and Alex had to kick and pull for several minutes before he got it loose. A crossbeam finally fell down, and he staggered back holding the door in his hands.
The same smell of rot and death greeted him as he stepped inside. In the twilight, it took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust. In the meantime, he spied a table with objects on it, including striking stones and tinder. He worked feverishly, with trembling hands, striking the stones together until he had straw and tinder going. From this, he lit a handful of straw torn from the roof.
The single room lit up, revealing a garish scene. The floor was stone, polished from much walking, and strewn with clean sand. To the right was a rough wooden bench against the wall that seemed to be loaded with objects and serving more as a table than a place to sit. More toward the center was a fireplace built of many small flat beach stones like bricks. To the left was a bed—a wooden enclosure filled with straw and covered with a thick wool blanket. On this blanket, propped up with her back to the wall, was the corpse of an old woman.
In the dry, smoky air, her leathery features seemed to be in the first stages of mummification. Her cheeks were sunken, her toothless mouth open, her eyes big hollows with whitish eyeballs glimmering from tiny shriveled eyelids sunk way in. Her hair was white and sparse, but wild and long. Her body was clothed in thick woolen garments, and only her thin neck and bony hands were exposed. Her gnarly hands were crossed over her knees, which were slightly drawn up as if she’d died sitting up. In her lap and strewn over the bed were scraps of white material.
Looking more closely, Alex saw lines of ants crawling up the bed on both sides and entering separate holes—one in her left cheek, the other in the middle of her neck, a third directly into her mouth, and he stopped looking to see how many more holes the ants had made. As he looked, a beetle crawled out from her mouth, and he quickly jerked back.
The fireplace was overflowing with ashes, and when he looked more closely, sitting on his knees and twisting around to look up, he saw that the chimney had been tightly plugged with straw.
Alex formulated a good guess as he stepped from the cottage. For some reason, the woman had committed suicide. The chimney had been purposely plugged up. Fire had burned long and hard in the fireplace, maybe for days, filling the cottage with carbon monoxide and smoke, and soon killing the woman. She’d sat in bed awaiting death. Why?
Perhaps the other woman, the younger one, had left. Or perhaps the younger woman had died. This older one had been overwhelmed by grief. Alex could certainly understand. Much as he wanted to flee from this place, Alex realized he was stuck for the night. Fog roiled in so thickly now that he could hardly see his hands before his face. He could hear the sea, but couldn’t see it. The birds and insects had fallen still. The last rays of daylight moved through the fog. The light grew still, copper-colored, fading, as though Alex were at the bottom of a well.
Alex went back into the cottage. He lit a wax candle set in a clay cup, and placed it by the door on the bench. In a strange way, even though there was only death here, it was at least a testimony to life that had been. Could there be more? Or was he making of himself the greatest fool in history? He rolled the woman’s body up in one of her blankets and carried her outside. It was like carrying a husk. She weighed hardly anything. He realized that the insects had most likely carried away what was edible inside, leaving mostly bones and tendons. He took the body down to the water. Blindly, he walked into the surf. He felt the icy water crawl up his legs, up around his groin, up to his waist. There, he released her, pushing her away with one foot. He heard a splash, as from a fish, and knew she’d be well taken care of. Dragging the sodden blanket with him through the water, he sloshed back on shore.
In the cottage, which still smelled of smoke and death, he pulled as much of the straw down out of the chimney as he could. She’d been weak, and had not plugged the chimney up badly. Alex held his candle up until a blaze started in the chimney. In minutes, it had burned through. He waited outside, watching sodden yellowish smoke pour up from the chimney, over the top and out from the clay rain-cover, and then down along the roof as if the smoke itself were wet. By now, a light steady rain was falling in long quiet strands, like a tightly woven tapestry, at a slight angle.
Everything was wet, the whole world, Alex thought as he picked up the broken door and leaned it against its doorway. By now, occasional wind gusts blew up the beach, and the rocks in the hills made low moaning and keening sounds as thick damp wind pushed through.
Alex found a modest woodpile under the bench and soon had a roaring fire going. The cottage warmed up and dried out. Fresh cold air sucked in through the door opening, swirled around the room taking away the stench of death and decay, and entered the fireplace, where wind and stench ignited in a healing and cleansing fire that pushed up through the chimney and away into the stormy night. Alex fed all the straw from her bed into the fire, burning away more of the death that had taken over the cottage. The floor was littered with flakes of white material, and he kicked them heedlessly about.
Alex made one more trip outside, reluctantly. He carried her blankets out, five of them, and swirled them around in a puddle of rainwater to cleanse them. As he did so, he rinsed soot and dirt from his own body, no matter how cold it felt. It was good to be clean. Then he brought the blankets inside, wrung them out, and laid them around the fire to dry out. It was good and warm inside by now, and slowly the floor and the walls themselves became warm, warmed through by the good clean reddish bluish whitish fire.
He repaired the door, putting the stout cross-timber in place to hold it from inside. It would keep any rippers, ghosts, sea monsters, or other unwanted guests out long enough for him to awaken and use the old woman’s good supply of stone utensils to fight them off. The smell of death grew faint, though it was still present. He stopped smelling it, and it seemed to fade away. From a storage nook high up, and he pulled out more straw and filled the wooden bed-square. He found dried fish and dried fruit wrapped in leaves, and had himself a meal. He filled a clean cup several times with pure rainwater, to wash down the dry food. Feeling contented, he fluffed out the blankets and waved them one by one for a long time before the fire until they were dry enough to wrap himself in. It was hot in the place, and he was content to just lay the blankets into the bed.
Then he wrapped himself up and quickly surrendered to exhausted sleep.
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