There was enough moonlight to illuminate my way, but just barely. The doors to every room were open. I peered in one and found it empty. The covers on the bed were thrown back and there were books on the floor. It looked like the occupant had gotten up to use the bathroom and would be back any second. In each room I passed, I noticed a similar scene. Empty, in disarray, looking as if someone had been awakened from sleep and fled.
I stopped and stood in the center of the hallway and justlistened. I began to realize slowly, and with some horror, that something terrible had happened here. When I passed a bathroom, I stepped inside and flipped on the lights. With a low hum, fluorescent light flooded the area. Pale green tile lined the walls. Against one wall stood a row of cubbies, each filled with bathroom caddies, toothbrushes and shampoo poking out of them like flowers in an artistic arrangement. On one sink sat a single toothbrush. On the floor in front of it, a tube of toothpaste lay abandoned.
“What the hell?” I whispered to myself.
Turning out the light, I headed back into the hall, moving as quickly as I could until I stopped suddenly outside one of the offices. There was something familiar about it. Poking my head inside, I noticed a painting of a toad on the wall. When I stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by a familiar scent—oaky and calming.
Stunned, I stood there and closed my eyes, transported. I knew this scent. Charles Danforth. The room smelled exactly like him. I was gripped by a wave of sadness. He was the last person I wanted to think about. I got out of there before I devolved into a blubbering mess. Continuing on down the hall, I reached a room at the end that appeared to be a conference room.
The space was lined with dry-erase boards, and a microwave and a coffeemaker were over in the corner next to an army-green filing cabinet. AResident Evilposter hung at the far end of the windowless space. On instinct, I tried the filing cabinet and found that the top drawer was locked. The bottom two, though, were filled with maps of what looked like the campus and surrounding area. I thumbed through them but didn’t find much of interest. At the center of the room stood a large circular table with blueprints strewn around it. Examining them more closely,I saw they seemed to be plans for repairs or an expansion of some kind. As best as I could make out, it might be for an irrigation system. The strange thing about it, though, was that the plans seemed to correspond to the island. Was this why they were keeping me away from it? They were doing some kind of agricultural project out there? I went back into the central hallway and headed out a large metal door off to the side. As I’d hoped, it led into the woods on the other side of the building.
Around me the warm night winds tore through the trees, creating a sound like a distant train. It felt like a storm might be on the way. As calmly as I could, I headed back toward my cabana, lost in thought as my mind spiraled with possibilities. It wasn’t until I was almost to my cabana that the truth of the situation occurred to me. The island was off-limits, and yet they were building some complicated irrigation system for it. Suddenly it all came into view. They must be growing weed out there. Was that what all the secrecy was about? A cannabis operation? Wasn’t pot legal in Colorado? I felt a wave of relief wash over me. No wonder Isabelle was hanging bottles in her basement and making nonsensical treasure hunts all over the campus. She wasn’t under psychic attack or being hunted by the Illuminati. Perhaps the good scientist, like many before her, was simply getting too high on her own supply.
As I headed into the cabana, the night felt particularly alive around me, as if the animals themselves were excited by my discovery, and for the first time since coming to Hildegard, I felt curiously at one with the environment. I almost felt like I could disappear into the ecosystem and no one would be the wiser.
Yawning, I opened the door to my cabana, and when I saw the divination tools on my bed, I absently picked them up. If I was honest with myself, I wanted nothing to do with the cards.They might be interesting anthropologically, but they also gave me a bad feeling. It wasn’t just the excessively violent imagery; there was also something uncanny about them, like they were snapshots from a dream I wanted to forget. The widows’ keys, though, fascinated me. Taking the velvet bag over to the coffee table, I spilled them out on top. Although they were vaguely familiar, I still couldn’t make sense of them. It was impossible to decipher them without a key text, but that didn’t stop me from admiring them. They seemed to throb with an indiscernible kind of meaning. I picked up the bright crescent moon, and holding it in my palm, I stared at it like a woman scrying into a mirror. Still, it gave no secrets away. Sighing, I left the widows’ keys on the coffee table and got ready for bed. When I climbed back under the covers, the tension eased from my body and I relaxed into the pillow.
It happened almost instantly, that sickening sense that something was wrong. Around me, the room grew a distant kind of gray, as if I were a denizen of another plane, a reality laid directly on top of our own. I tried to move, but my muscles only tensed with panicked futility. Acid rose up in my throat as I realized that once again, I was trapped in my own body. I tried to scream, and although my vocal cords burned with effort, no sound issued from them, and my lips remained still.
As I lay there in that gray, unreal world, it took every ounce of my control not to let the fear overtake me. My mind drifted to the figure I’d seen standing over my bed the night of the sirens. I imagined it now crouching by my feet. I imagined it leaning over me with a slavering maw, opening an expansive jaw to reveal a set of dagger-like teeth. The powerlessness was overwhelming. I told myself that it had to pass eventually, but in the moment, that didn’t seem possible. It felt like I would be trapped in thatstate forever. So I breathed slowly and deeply. I told myself that I would be okay because I had no other choice.
I don’t know when reality shifted, but at some point, I realized I must have fallen asleep.
I dream of the gardens, vast and twinkling in the mists of twilight. Clusters of fireflies constellate the horizon, and I can see someone up ahead—a flitting of white fabric, wind-rippled as it floats around scurrying feet, pale and bare. Soon she comes into view, jet-black hair, a moon-white dress.
“Isabelle,” I whisper.
I try to follow, but the night grows darker, and I know I’ll never catch her in time. All around me—a buzzing sound.
“Are you sure it’s Isabelle?” asks a voice to my left. It’s Aspen, bathed in moonlight and stretched out on an elegant chaise longue. She wears an evening gown made entirely of peacock feathers. “Or is it Sabine? They let her die. We all let her die. So that she might be reborn.”
“It’s Isabelle,” I say. “She has my relic.”
“Better catch her quick, then. Before Les Terribles get her. They’re all around, you know.” Aspen plucks a feather from her dress and holds it up to her face, its jade eye obscuring her own. “Just out of sight.”
I’m at the lake now, the sand between my toes. Water laps against the shore and through the fog I can see them—thirteen figures all in a circle. A living relic. At the center stands a woman in white, black hair hanging down in wet waves. Now I’m in the circle, too, part of the coven as it begins to snow.
Isabelle stands perfectly still, her back to me. Her hair is stringy and tangled now, the hair of a madwoman. Her dress is in tatters, more gray than white, and her arms, hanging limp at her side, are covered with scratches. Some of the wounds are slowly oozing blood, crimson rivulets dripping into the snow that now blankets the ground.
I reach out to touch her, but she’s no longer there.
The snow falls on my outstretched arm. Not snow—ash.
I’m on the pier now, perched at the edge, and I can see something in the lake, circling in the depths. Slowly it begins to rise, silvery and white, up through the water. A sea creature, gelatinous and massive. Up it comes, a mass of pulsating tentacles. Only when it nears the surface do I see that its tentacles are no more than diaphanous sleeves. Isabelle. Around her, hair swirls out and away like obsidian snakes. One slips up and around my ankle. A tug and I crash through the water. She pulls me down into the deep. All the while, I can see her smiling beside me, her mouth split into a cruel grin—rotten teeth and tangled lake moss—as she drags me down to the subterranean depths, down to the Terrible Ones.
Suddenly I was no longer dreaming. Water slipped between my toes and rain cascaded down my shoulders, the sensations all too real. With horror I realized I wasn’t in bed, but standing outside at the edge of the pier, rain thrashing down around me.
With a jolt, I seized, my body wrenched out of that half-dreaming state and back into the sharpness of reality. I stumbled from the edge and looked around, searching for some explanation. It had happened again. I had no memory of how I’d gotten here.
Staring out at the shadowy water, I tried to make sense of what was happening to me. I hadn’t… I hadn’t actually been in the lake, had I? Lightning slashed through the sky, imparting a sudden vivid clarity. Once again, the world was just the world. Coming to my senses, I turned and raced through the rain back to my cabana.
Once I was safely inside, I dried myself off and changed, and then got into bed, staring out the window at the storm outside.
2.4NEGATIVE IONS: THE LINK BETWEEN UFOS AND BODIES OF WATER
A spokesman for a special and little known Royal Canadian Air Force department in Ottawa for the investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects said last night a series of bright lights which glided into the ocean off Shag Harbor, Shelburne County, Wednesday night may be one of the extremely rare cases where “something concrete” may be found. The spokesman, who identified himself as Squadron Leader Bain, said his department was “very interested” in the matter.
—HALIFAXCHRONICLEHERALD,OCTOBER 7, 1967
