North of Nowhere (17 page)

I quickly caught up with her. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Sal answered without looking at me. “Our rental apartment. It has a computer and a Wi-Fi connection. It was what made Dad choose that apartment — he’s addicted to the Internet. He thinks the sky will fall if he doesn’t go online at least twenty times a day.”

“Awesome!” An actual Internet signal! I could hardly believe it. I was going to reenter the twenty-first century for the first time in a week.

Sal suddenly stopped walking. “What if my parents are still there?” she asked.

I thought for a moment. “We ask if we can use the computer, but we don’t tell them what it’s for,” I said.

“So what
do
we say?”

“Just that you’ve come to pack up your things, and I’ve come to help you, and I want to look up a song on the Internet or something.”

“OK,” Sal agreed. “They’ve probably gotten their stuff together and gone back to the pub by now anyway.”

“Have you got a key?” I asked as we approached the apartment.

“Don’t need one. The door is number coded.”

As Sal punched in the numbers, part of me wondered what we were doing. What exactly were we going to look up online? And what was it going to tell us? It wasn’t as if Peter was likely to have disappeared without a trace, and then sent us an e-mail telling us where we could find him!

I fought the doubts away. At least we were doing
something.
It might not be much of a plan, but it was the only one we had.

I pulled up a chair next to Sal and listened to the computer slowly whir into action. Her parents had come and gone and the place was empty, apart from Sal’s room. Most of her stuff was in a small suitcase that was open on the bed, with a note lying on top.

Finally, the computer was up and running. It hummed quietly while we tried to figure out exactly what to type.

Sal’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. She looked at me.

“Why don’t you see if there’s a coastwatch station or something for this area?” I suggested. “Maybe they’ll have a list of people who have been rescued.”

She brought up a search engine and typed “Porthaven Coastwatch.”

After about five minutes of scrolling and reading through all sorts of technical jargon, we found it — a list of recent events that had taken place in this area. I held my breath as the page loaded.

“Nothing,” Sal said.

I read everything on the screen. The last entry was more than a week ago.

Sal stared at the computer. “Now what?”

“Look at the weather reports,” I suggested. “See if there’s anything about that freak storm.”

“Good idea.”

Sal hit a few keys and we tried a few weather pages. Again we couldn’t find anything useful. There were no reports of storms in more than a month.

“Why is there nothing about it?” Sal asked.

“I don’t know. Too recent, maybe?”

“Too recent? But isn’t that supposed to be the whole point of the Internet? You can read about things the second they’ve happened.”

“I know, I don’t get it,” I said. And then I realized what we should be looking for. It was obvious. So obvious that we’d looked right past it; or we’d simply been too scared of what we might see if we tried it. Either way, it was the only thing I could think of that might give us any answers.

“Sal.”

She turned to me.

I nodded at the keyboard. “Just put in ‘Luffsands.’”

A line of text at the top of the page said that there were 451,623 results for Luffsands. Below it, the screen was filled with links to tons of web pages.

“Where do we start?” Sal asked.

I shrugged. “The first one?”

She clicked on the top link. It led us to a page from the Wildlife Trust, full of statistics about birdlife found on the island.

Sal went back to the search engine and tried the next one. The page took forever to open. When it finally did, it was blank except for a line of small black text at the top: “Link Not Found. Error 5201.”

“This is stupid,” Sal said, flopping back in her chair. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

I leaned over and reached for the mouse. “Let’s try this one.” I scrolled to the bottom of the page and hit the last link.

“It’s a newspaper article,” I said as the page loaded.

“And look,” Sal added. “It’s got today’s date. We’re getting somewhere at last.” She hit a button to enlarge the window and we read the article together.

The article ended there. Underneath it was a photograph. It was small and quite blurry, but you could see clearly what it was — Luffsands, taken from the sea. The Luffsands we had seen this morning, the first time we went. The Luffsands where Dee’s house was still standing. Where about fifty houses were still standing.

Sal and I stared at the screen.

“I don’t get it,” Sal said. “The article’s from today. It says the storm was yesterday.”

“Which means that what we saw when we went across on our own was
real,
” I said.

“Exactly. So why does no one else seem to know anything about it? And how come it had all completely changed when we went back?”

I scrolled down the page. There was another line of text at the bottom of the newspaper article, but it was too small to read.

Sal enlarged it, and we both read what it said.

“That’s why,” I said. Then I looked at her and she looked at me. Neither of us had any words.

The article
was
today’s date: February 23. But there was one small difference.

It was February 23 — fifty years ago.

I don’t know how long I stared at that date. I don’t know why I kept on staring, either. Was I expecting it to change? Suddenly morph into something that made sense?

Sal broke into my thoughts. “Look,” she said. “There’s another article underneath it.”

This one was dated late March, the same year.

There was a photograph underneath the article. Sal clicked on it to enlarge the picture.

The first thing I noticed was that it was completely different from the photograph with the first article. That one had been the Luffsands we had seen this morning when we’d shouted across to Peter and Dee. This one was the Luffsands we had seen an hour later, with the lifeboat men. No houses standing. Dee’s house nothing more than a wall, perched on the tip of a promontory, resolutely sticking out over the sea.

Two photographs, a month apart — and yet we’d seen both of these scenes in the space of one morning.

But that wasn’t the most shocking thing about the picture. In fact, that was
nothing
compared to what I was about to see.

There were about twenty people in the shot. Most of them were in the background, bent over, examining the wreckage of their former homes. In the foreground, six people huddled together, looking toward the camera. The photographer clearly hadn’t suggested that anyone smile. Their faces were heavy and pained. At the end of the group, a woman on crutches leaned heavily on a boy standing next to her.

I stared at the boy. Then I checked the date on the top of the newspaper. It was
definitely
from fifty years ago. And it was
definitely
impossible.

“The boy . . .” I said, unable to finish.

There was no need. Sal was staring too. “I know,” she said. “It can’t be.”

But it was. The boy staring glumly into the camera — in a photograph that was taken fifty years ago — was Peter.

“Mia, I’ve got to get out of here,” Sal gasped. She looked as if she had literally seen a ghost. Maybe she had.

“Me too,” I said. “Grab your things and let’s go.”

I shut down the computer while Sal packed the last of her stuff. Then we let ourselves out of the apartment and made our way along the front, toward the pub.

We didn’t speak as we walked. There weren’t any words that could make sense of all the things that had happened today. And there was no way either of us could even think about anything else, not after what we’d seen, so the only option was silence.

“Mia, can we sit here for a bit?” Sal asked as we came to a bench looking out over the harbor. “I can’t face seeing anyone yet.”

We sat down and looked out at the sea, the calm water, the boats bobbing gently in the harbor. Was any of this real? Were we in some kind of a dream? I tried to figure out at which point I might have fallen asleep. It was the closest I’d come to an explanation — but then Sal brought me back to the present.

“I think we should tell our families,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“They’ll think we’re crazy,” she added.

“I know. Maybe we are. It’s certainly the best explanation I’ve managed to come up with so far.”

Sal tried to smile.

“But we should tell them, either way,” I went on. “Whatever’s going on here, whether we’re losing our minds, or something unbelievably weird is happening, I think we need help with it. We can’t do it on our own anymore.”

“I know,” Sal agreed. “We’ll tell them everything, then?”

I nodded. “Everything.”

“And if they don’t believe us?”

“If they don’t believe us, we haven’t lost anything. But at least we’ll get it off our chests. They’ve been around longer than we have. They might have some ideas about what’s going on.”

“I doubt it,” Sal said quietly. “I don’t think there’s
any
explanation for what’s going on.”

“No, probably not,” I agreed.

“But whatever it is, it’s too big for us,” she said.

“Exactly.”

We got up to leave and turned in the direction of the pub. As we did, I walked smack-dab into a man coming toward us.

“Sorry,” I said automatically.

He stopped and looked at me. His clothes looked dirty. His eyes were unfocused and wild. Drunk, probably. Then he looked at my coat. I was still wearing Peter’s yellow coat that we’d found inside the boat.

“I’ve got one of them,” he said, pointing at the coat. Great. A drunk man who found it interesting that he also possessed a coat. Exactly what we needed right then. “Not as nice as that one, though.”

“That’s lovely,” I said, giving him a
thanks-for-the-info-but-we-really-must-be-on-our-way-now
kind of smile.

“Left it on my boat,” he added.

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something about his words made me feel as if something unpleasant had just crept along the back of my neck.

The feeling multiplied by about a million with his
next
words.

“Lost the boat, though, didn’t I?” he said. “Along with my mind, it seems. Slept in a hut last night. No one’d take me home. Looked at me as if I were crazy when I told them where I lived. Laughed at me when I said my boat had disappeared into thin air. But it’s true. Strange, but darned well true as can be.”