Wild Fell (2 page)

“What about her face?” Brenda asked in a small voice.

“She had no
eyes
, Brenda,” Sean said. He shivered. “There were no eyes. Just black holes where eyes should be. Her face was all shrivelled like a mummy. And her mouth was wide open, like she was screaming. I even saw her teeth. They looked like rotted black toadstools. Then the car turned again and we crashed into the ditch. She was gone.” Sean splayed the fingers of his right hand in a flicking motion. “
Pffft
. Into thin air. After a bit, Uncle Vic still hadn’t come back, and I was pretty shaken up. So I unlocked the passenger-side door and got out. I could barely make him out through the fog, but he was on the other side of the road coming from somewhere farther back. He saw me and shouted at me to stay where I was and not come any closer, to get back in the car. His voice didn’t even sound like his voice. I’ve never seen him like that. He was white as a sheet.”

“Why? Had he found her body or something?”

Sean said, “No. There was no body.”

“What, then? What was over there? What did he find?”

“An old graveyard,” Sean said. “There was nothing over there but an old graveyard surrounded by a tall iron fence. The gate was locked. Uncle Vic said it didn’t look like anyone had been there for a hundred years.”

Brenda took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She gazed intently at Sean’s face.

“Sean?” she said.

Sean kept his eyes on the road, staring straight ahead. “Yeah?”

“Sean, you are so full of baloney. But I have to admit, that was a pretty good story. You had me going there for a minute. Maybe two.”

“It’s a true story, Bren.” Sean sounded wounded. “It really happened.”

She laughed. “Sure it did.”

After ten minutes, Sean pulled over to the side of the dirt road and cut the motor and the headlights. Through the open window, Brenda heard the sound of lake water lapping against rock and shore. The full moon was very bright, and through the trees she saw the undulating shimmer of orange light where it struck the water of Devil’s Lake.

He reached for her hand. “Do you love me, Bren? Tell me. I really need to know if you love me.”

“Yes, I love you. Of course I love you.”

“Do you trust me?”

Brenda was silent. Out in the darkness, a loon screamed.

Sean said again, more insistently this time, “Do you
trust
me?”

“Sean—”

He let go of her hand. “I guess you don’t. I guess all this talk all summer has been bull. You don’t love me, do you? Not really.”

“Sean, what’s wrong with you?” Her voice jumped an octave. She hated the sound of it—plaintive and whiny even to her own ears. “I
said
I love you. I’m here with
you
, not out with some other guy. I love
you
. But why are you asking me if I trust you? What do I have to trust you with? Where
are
we?” She reached down and patted the tote bag she’d placed at her feet. “I brought food, in case we get hungry. I even stole a bottle of wine from my parents. You know—for after . . . whatever.” She squinted in the darkness of the cab to see his face, but saw only outlines and shadows. She sighed. “Okay, I give up. Yes, I trust you. Fine.”

He sighed. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now, where are we?”

“We’re at the lake, of course.” He pointed. “There’s the beach.”

“For Pete’s sake, Sean . . .” She peered through the windshield and frowned. “That’s not the beach. I know what the beach looks like.”

Sean laughed. “Come on, Brenda.” He opened his door. The gust of air that blew in from outside was more October than August. “I have something to show you. A special place you’ve probably never been before.”

Brenda reached for the handle of the passenger side and turned it. The door swung open and she stepped out of the truck. “I hope you brought a flashlight,” she said with a bravado she didn’t feel. “I don’t know where we are. And I hope you brought a blanket, because it’s darn cold out here. Did you bring your lighter? We could make a fire.”

Sean put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to his body. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll keep you warm. I’ll protect you from ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties.” In his other hand, he carried the canvas tote bag with Brenda’s purloined wine.

She leaned into his chest, tentatively at first, then yielding against his bulk. “And things that go bump in the night? And old ladies with no eyes?”

“Them, too.” Sean kissed her neck. She smiled in the dark. That warmth again, that heat that rose up in her from everywhere and nowhere. The answering heat from his body. The sound of the lake on the shore somewhere beyond the line of trees along the path ahead. The moonlight everywhere, so bright and yellow, so deep she felt she could swim in it, felt she could let it lift her up and carry them both away on the crest of a dark umber breaker.

Beyond the tree line, the loon screamed again, the sound ricocheting across the black water like a skipped stone. There was a violent splash, then silence.

In the end, Sean had indeed taken Brenda to a place she’d never been.

They stood on a promontory above a rise of flat ground overgrown with weeds and ferns and littered with storm-dead driftwood. A patch of rocky beach planed off to the left from where they were standing, and Brenda saw the remnants of someone’s bonfire on the beach, ash and burned logs. She was oddly comforted by the idea that they weren’t the first to have discovered this place, that others had been there before—others no different than her, probably teenagers from Alvina or one of the surrounding towns. The normalcy of that thought comforted her, though she wondered why in the world she thought she needed comforting. She was with Sean, his arm still around her shoulders.

She stared at the dark mass of island that rose out of the water like a fortress, ninety feet in the distance—no, not rose, it
soared
out of the water, taller than any island she’d seen in her life. She wondered if it might be a trick of the moonlight. While she could generally orient herself by her location relative to the lake, Brenda had to admit she didn’t know where she was. This thought, in and of itself, was more than a bit exciting, but she’d rather die than confess that to Sean, who was still a
jerk
, even though she was starting to enjoy herself more than she thought she would.

There was something a bit magical about seeing Alvina, a town she’d never left, and feared she never would—if indeed they were still within the Alvina town lines at all—as a foreign place, a
different
place. It was like travelling to another country without ever leaving home.

“Look,” Sean said, pointing. “It’s Blackmore. I bet you’ve never seen it from this angle before. Where we’re standing is where the Blackmore family used to have their private dock and marina in the 1800s. The servants used to row it. Can you believe that? That they had
servants
to
row
them? Just like . . . 
slaves
!” Sean laughed. “Isn’t that the craziest goddamn thing you ever heard in your whole life?”

“Is that really Blackmore Island I’m looking at?”

“Why would I lie? I told you,” he said. “The house is there, too.” He indicated the highest point of the tree-rise. “It’s up there, behind those trees near the top.”

“Is there really a house there, Sean? For real?”

“Yes, it’s there. There’s a bit of a hill on the island, and rocks below it. The house is at the top of the hill brow.”

Brenda had heard rumours of the existence of the ruin before tonight, of course, the local “haunted house” that everyone had heard of but no one had seen. Being a practical girl, in the absence of evidence, she had discounted the stories as just that, rumours. It had precious little to do with any lack of imagination. Quite to the contrary: like any girl growing up in a small town like Alvina—a town whose roots stretched back beyond its established history of impeccable 19
th-
century rectitude—she was the heiress to a store of legend so vast and rich that to separate fact from fiction would have been not only pointless but counterintuitive.

According to local lore, some rich family with political connections in the 1800s had supposedly built a house on one of the many islands that lay scattered across the blue sweep of Devil’s Lake. The family had prospered, and then fallen out of prosperity. One legend had it that the house had burned down. Another had it that it was a pile of rubble and overrun with dangerous animals that were drawn to the island for some reason having to do with Indian demons, or devils dating back to the days of the French missionaries and settlers. Still another told of a brother and sister who lived together as husband and wife. When she had been a small girl, she and her friends had frightened each other under the sheets at sleepovers with ghost stories about the haunted islands of Devil’s Lake and the creatures that dwelled there.

Her father had once said that Devil’s Lake got its name because the Devil himself had stolen a handful of the islands that had been created when the Indian god Kitchewana, painfully in love with a woman named Wanakita, who was promised to another, threw his wedding decorations into the Great Lakes in a rage when she rebuffed him, thereby creating 30,000 islands.

According to Tom Egan, the islands rising out of Devil’s Lake were Satan’s work, the fruits of a diabolical theft. She’d asked her father how many islands the Devil had stolen to make the ones on Devil’s Lake. He told her he didn’t know how many, but there sure were a lot of them.
Too many to count
, he’d said.

“The Devil is always a thief, Brenda,” he’d told her. “If he’d steal from a god, you can imagine what he’d take from a little girl like you. So you’d better always be good.”

And now, here she was, gazing at part of that very theft, with the full moon shining down on it through the trees.

It was beginning to dawn on Brenda that Sean might be less ordinary than she’d been led to believe, less ordinary than she herself had believed. This alone, the fact that he’d taken her somewhere she’d never been, was showing her things she’d never seen, lifted him out of the realm of the ordinary.

In the part of her mind that dealt in abstract images and desires—the most honest part of herself, the part where her deepest desires and fears were more or less inchoate—Brenda wondered if tonight would be the night that she would lose her virginity to Sean. If there was a way for her to lose that guarded treasure without taking a conscious course of action to cause its loss by deliberate actions of her own—not
rape
, of course, which wasn’t even part of her intellectual or emotional lexicon—but rather through gently
surrendering
to the inevitable
, which was how she imagined lovemaking to be, she would choose that way. She was almost sure she loved him, and he’d already said he loved her.

She heard her father’s voice in her head:
You’d better always be good.

She reached for Sean’s hand. “Have you ever been out there? I mean, to the island?”

“I rowed out there once,” Sean said. “I didn’t get right onto the land itself, but I saw the roof of the house through the treetops. I had binoculars with me. It was more like a tower on a castle than a roof. There was a sort of stone archway leading up to stone steps built into the hill. There was some sort of writing carved over the archway.”

“What did it say?”

“
Wild Fall
. Or
Fell
. Something like that. It was pretty worn out, or at least that’s how it looked to me from a distance. It didn’t make sense. At first I wasn’t even sure it was English. I thought maybe there was a word missing or something.”

“Why didn’t you explore it? How could you get so close and not land?”

“I was alone. I wanted to do it with someone. Maybe even someone special.” He smiled. “I left the boat over there, behind that driftwood. Do you want to row out there with me? Right now? It’s a full moon. It’s bright. It wouldn’t take long. I have a flashlight in the truck, and you brought the wine. Come on, Brenda. Let’s have an adventure—let’s do something we’ve never done before. Something you’d never dream of doing alone.”

She looked across the water at Blackmore Island set like a dark jewel in the moonlight. Then she looked up at Sean, who smiled expectantly, cajolingly. She felt the desire rise up again in her and knew he was feeling it as well. She suddenly felt thrillingly wicked. She was surprised by how much she enjoyed it, this feeling of being someone unlike herself.

“All right,” Brenda said. “But just for a few minutes. And we have to get back in time to get me home for my curfew, or my dad is going to kill us both.”

Sean reached out to touch her face, lightly running his finger down her cheek. Then he retrieved the rowboat from under the branches, where he’d hidden it that morning in anticipation of his date with Brenda tonight and pushed it across the pebbled shore into the water.

The wind was colder on the water as Sean rowed, cutting sharper than the cooling late-August breeze of earlier in the evening on the mainland. Brenda looked back to the place from which he’d launched his boat, the place beyond which the Chevy was parked. For a moment, it seemed very far away. Brenda was suddenly conscious of the cold, the sound of the oars churning the water, the grinding of the wooden oars in the iron oarlocks, of Sean’s occasional grunt as he bent his body to the task of rowing.

Ahead, the island loomed, getting closer with every pull of the oars. Brenda wished she felt like she’d felt fifteen minutes before, thrillingly wicked. But she didn’t. Instead, she just felt very far from shore. Above her, the orange moon vanished behind a caul of purple and black clouds, drawing darkness like a curtain across the water, obscuring Blackmore Island completely. In her mind she pictured Kitchewana’s rage, the smashed, hurled granite becoming islands for the Devil to steal. In the sudden darkness, the universe around her—the enormous sky, the vast body of water under the tiny rowboat—felt like a chessboard for gods and demons, a place that could hide any sort of malignant entity.