That Heavy Light

The snow twisted through the thick mists that rose off the water, creating a thick veil that obscured the distant island. The deep black of the sea quickly faded into the blinding neon grey of the sky, the light diffuse and scattering all shadow. The island itself flickered from view like a mirage, its hazy outline faint and indistinct.

The boat struggled forward through the churning water, and slowly the jagged silhouette stabilized. The skinny, twisted trees blocked any view of the small settlement we’d come to find, but a long and crooked dock extended out into the hostile ocean. The unlikely storm stopped as soon as it had begun, white snowflakes replaced by raindrops for a brief moment before ceasing entirely. I didn’t know it could snow this early up here, and I shivered in my thin jacket. Glenn steered the boat in, and my mother hopped over as soon as we were close enough, tying our boat to a post.

I followed, shouldering my backpack and adjusting the straps, but looked over at her sudden indrawn breath. There was already a rope tied to the post we’d used, and she’d stepped closer to see what it was connected to. I followed her to the edge and looked down. The bow of a wooden boat was sticking up, a sharply curved beam that descended down into the murky dark water. I looked down the dock, and saw ropes tied off around most of the posts, at least a dozen. I walked to the next one and peered down, seeing another curved prow sticking upward through the black.

“Why…” As soon as I started speaking I stopped, startling myself with the crack that appeared in the silence.

Mother came to stand next to me, and I heard the click of her camera.

“We’ll have to move the boat later, so I can get some shots from the shore,” she said, and began to move slowly down the dock, sighting through her lens.

Glenn came over to stand next to me, rubbing his sparse beard. “Heckuva thing. You’d think they’d float.”

I had thought that, until he said it, but now it seemed like a stupid thing to say. Boats sunk all the time.

But all of them? All tied to the dock? Why…

Again, I let my question die, this time unspoken, and followed Mother down the dock, careful to keep out of her viewfinder. A small area of packed dirt was clear ahead of us, with a path worn through leading up the hill and into the trees. I listened to the hollow thud of our footsteps, the soft shushing of the waves, and the faint click of my mother’s camera. The sounds made barely a dent in the pressing silence.

Where were the people? Mother had mentioned about 60 people lived in this settlement. I checked my phone, wondering if I had entirely lost track of time in the light that seemed to have barely faded before glimmering again across the perpetual cloud. It was barely 4pm, surely there should be activity. Especially considering all the boats were in.

Had the people been stranded here? How long could they last alone? But the person my mother had spoken to had been here only a few days ago. Even if they had been stranded, that wasn’t long enough for anything to go so wrong.

And where was the snow? We’d been going through that storm for nearly half an hour. There was nothing. I turned in a circle. Nothing.

Mother and Glenn were walking ahead now, sloping up the path, and I turned to follow them. My legs felt heavy as I walked, my steps dragging. With effort I caught up, but remained behind them so as not to obscure a potential shot. There was no one, no sound other than our steps, but the place still felt… inhabited. I craned my head to look through the surrounding trees, but there was only the cool quiet.

It wasn’t too long before we reached a wider clearing, where the land levelled out.

“This must be the wrong place,” I said. I sighed and regretted it instantly, the rotten seaweed scent of the ocean still thick in the air.

Glenn shook his head. “This is where he said to go, the crooked dock. The only other dock on the island is the short one on the other side. We couldn’t have circled the entire island by accident.”

“Right,” I said, gesturing to the open meadow we stood in.

He shook his head stubbornly. “The other dock only has space for three boats, that’s what he said. We’d know.”

“Then it’s the wrong island!”

Mother interrupted our bickering. “It’s the right place. I recognize it from the photos Johnny sent.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, but it couldn’t be true. I got out my phone and pulled up the pictures she’d forwarded me from Johnny, her contact at the nearby bird sanctuary. There’d been at least one including a view of part of the village, with its sturdy wooden houses on high stilts to keep them accessible when the winter snows came. I held up my phone, walked a bit further in, and lined up the view. A crooked tree bent near a grey rock that jutted out of the dirt, just like in the photo. Though in the photo, a house partially obscured the tree.

“How…” Again the question died before it could be formed. I didn’t even know what to ask. How, what, who? It was hard to know where to start when questioning the impossible. Just a waste of words.

“Let’s look around,” Mother said, and started deeper into the clearing.

I watched her for a bit before looking back at the trees. What was there to see?

I walked around the perimeter of the clearing, and not finding anything, went further into the trees. The smell of the ocean remained thick and heavy in the air, completely overwhelming any scent of pine or earth. After a bit, I sat down on a fallen tree, and brought up the photos Mother had sent before we left.

They weren’t great, blurry and taken with an old phone, I guessed. Johnny had stopped by the island when he’d heard something about a strange catch they’d brought up. He’d sent a photo of a grinning man, one of the fishermen maybe, with the edge of a house and the weird tree off to the side. All of the photos had a strange effect to them that made me think not only was the photographer unskilled, and the camera old, but also the lens must be covered in some kind of oil. The photo of the creature was even worse than the others, showing a shimmery blur around a huge bent thing. It almost seemed like a fissure in the ground rather than a material being, the way it splayed across the dirt, its soft body at rigid angles. The darkness of it was near absolute, though likely that was due to the blur erasing any detail.

A sound cut through my study, and I jerked my head upright. I couldn’t see either Mother or Glenn, but it didn’t sound like someone walking. It was more like a creaking, low and throaty. As I looked slowly around, I felt the fine hairs on my body rise. The forest had a strange, hazy radiance to it in the bright, diffuse light. I felt almost like I was on a movie set, the way the shadows didn’t seem quite right, the directionless brilliance.

The sound came again, a low and deep noise that shuddered through the air. I started to look up, toward the direction it came from, when a loud crash had me scrambling backward. A giant branch lay across the ground in front of me, a large peeling gash where it would’ve connected to the tree. My heart thudded as I stared at the long wound along the side of the tree. Now that I was paying attention, looking up instead of down, it seemed to me the tree limbs bent down strangely, almost as if straining against a heavy weight. Another crash cut through the quiet, though much further away. Silence fell again, but it felt more fragile now, knowing how easy it was to shatter.

I headed back to the clearing, and noted how many fallen branches I passed. The earth below was nearly invisible beneath the cover of pine needles, bits of scrub, and broken tree limbs.

I didn’t feel well.

When I got back to the open area that had once housed a village, Glenn stood there, still and staring upward at the sky. He didn’t stir at my presence, and only finally looked over when I called his name.

“What are you doing?” I asked, though the answer seemed self-evident.

“There’s no birds,” he replied, and looked back to the sky.

“So?” I shrugged, feeling the weight of my backpack pulling my shoulders down. “We’re pretty far from mainland.”

Glenn finally met my eyes, though only to be sure I saw him roll his. “Yeah, Birgit, but we’re not that far from the bird sanctuary. There’s almost half a million birds around there, so you’d think we’d see one or two.”

I shrugged again, and barely managed to stop myself from jumping when I heard another, distant crash.

Before I could start to worry, I saw Mother striding through the trees. 

“Birgit, you need to go back and tell Kendall something is going on here. Stay with Marie and have him come back”

She was speaking before she even cleared the edge of the forest, not looking at me, but instead flicking through photos on her viewfinder.

“Can’t we just radio them?” Kendall had told us cell coverage was rare this far out, and had given us a radio when we had gotten the boat from him.

“It isn’t working,” she replied, pulling the little handset from her bag and pressing the button. A rough, staticky noise blared forth, woven with some sort of warbling, high pitched whine. “Take the radio too, tell him to bring another.”

“Send Glenn!”

“I need his help to set up the equipment,” she said, leaning down to unzip one of the duffle bags she’d brought with her. I could see this wasn’t a discussion; it was an order. But what was she even going to photograph? An empty field? Maybe it would be some kind of proof of what happened here. But what did happen here?

I looked back as I walked down the path, and saw instead of setting her gear up on the field, she seemed to be setting it up to point at the trees. She was gesturing to the ground, while Glenn unzipped the other bag.

When I got to the packed dirt clearing by the dock, I dropped my backpack to the ground and instantly felt much better. I must have overpacked it again, and I rubbed at my sore shoulders. I wouldn’t need it, and the idea of carrying it another inch was exhausting. 

I wouldn’t have noticed, but the dock was so close to the water that I could see the water level had risen slightly in the hour or so we’d been on the island. The tide must be coming in, and a few small puddles had formed on the old wood.

I jumped back into the boat, and held the key until the motor caught. I was careful as I steered the boat away, making sure not to run into the graves of the boats that lingered beneath the water. It wasn’t until I was speeding away that I checked the compass bearing. It spun uselessly, and I banged it against my leg before checking it again. I locked the wheel, and opened the side compartment, looking to see if we had a spare. Right now I could orient on the island, but it was vanishing quickly behind me. The mist lay thick across the water, the boat cutting through fog almost as dense at the sea below, and already the island was being reduced back into a wobbling mirage.

Though I hadn’t throttled up, the boat seemed to move faster through the waves, and I checked the compass in my hand again. The needle pointed straight and true, and I relaxed. I did not want to have to tell Mother I’d failed at such a simple task.

It was nearly three hours later when I returned to the island, and I was grateful for the nearly unending daylight of late summer this far north. I’d told Marie and Kendall what I could, though neither of them seemed to believe me. Kendall made it clear he thought we were in the wrong place, and Marie insisted I eat as if that would put my head on straight. I should’ve taken my own photos. If it was so hard for me to believe, when I saw things with my own eyes, why would they?

I neglected to tell Kendall Mother had asked for him to replace me. I wasn’t going to sit at the cabin doing nothing, even if it was a reprieve from Glenn’s company. And I needed Mother to know I wasn’t useless. 

The air whipped past as the island materialized from the grey mists. The sky still cloaked everything with liquid brilliance, the sunlight scattered by the infinite water droplets in the clouds and air. I felt blinded by the milky light, and relieved to have contrast to fix my gaze upon. I slowed a good distance away, trying to line up with the dock I knew would be cutting into the sea. I heard the caw of birds, and remembering Glenn’s words, I looked up to see a dark line of them flying northwest past the island. But as they neared, they parted, sliding through the air like a current diverted, splitting into two arcs that curved past the island before meeting again on the other side.

I looked back to the dirt clearing barely visible ahead. The dock was lower now, so low I could only notice it from the posts still jutting up from the sea. I wasn’t sure why the villagers built their dock so close to the water, as they must know the tide would make it difficult to access.

I decided to avoid the dock and the sunken boats entirely, and I putted up to the edge of the water. When I felt the boat nudge against mud, I jumped out and tied the rope to a tree that was growing along the tideline.

My backpack wasn’t where I left it, Glenn or my mother probably having taken it. Maybe not the best way to show Mother how responsible I am. I double-checked I had both the radios Kendall had furnished me with, and began trudging back up the road. The long day, filled with hours following the river from Inuvik to the cabin, and then hours more on the ocean, was really catching up with me. The slope that had felt gentle before seemed steep as I dragged myself up to the clearing.

They weren’t there. Mother was not a patient woman, not the sort of person to wait. I looked about to see if there was any indication of where they might be, but only the silence kept me company. That brittle silence.

I waited, alternating between exploring the nearby forest and sitting in the clearing for nearly an hour before giving up. Glenn had said there was another dock, that was the only other place to go. They’d probably cut through the trees, but I could just take the boat.

I circled the island twice, and had still not found the other dock. It had occurred to me that this dock may also be below the tidewater, and so I looked for anywhere that might indicate some sort of opening. Finally, I saw a wider gap in the forest. I slowly motored in, and tied off to a nearby tree.

My feet squelched uncomfortably in my supposedly waterproof boots as I walked up the thin path that wove through the pines. I tried calling out, but my voice was as thin as the distant sound of the waves.

Again, I stood in front of a clearing, no houses or people to greet me. Mother and Glenn were nowhere to be seen, nor the bags of equipment. But this clearing wasn’t as empty as the other. A small pile of what seemed to be dirt and possibly branches lay in the middle, with no evidence as to why, or what function it might have. A long, low sound echoed, reminding me of the tree that had sundered earlier. But this sound seemed lower, deeper. The ground beneath my feet was not quite right, not stable. I moved closer to the pile of dirt, and coughed at the sudden stink of the sea. The pile was bigger than I had thought, casting a harsh shadow behind it.

And then the shadow moved.

I tried to stumble back, but my feet were stuck. I looked down uncomprehending at the dirt that covered me, that rose nearly to my shins. The shadow twitched again, and the light pressed me down, that murky sunlight a weight enough to crush me.

A sound, again, but this time higher, keening. It was me, but how could it be? My body responded with animal whimpers, while my brain struggled to comprehend.

The rain began, each drop a hurled stone, pummelling my body. I heard a rumbling, barely audible, so deep it seemed to vibrate my bones, my vision, the thunder of a storm emanating from the dark thing. A rainbow shimmered across the edge of my vision, as water, light, and air bent around me. As the world bent around me, then broke.