2000
There are hundreds of stories about Fowler Island, and I’ve read them all. Even written a few. Anecdotes, reimaginings, fact and myth, bullshit and horrible truths. It’s funny how even when faced with an outlandish life—say a job scrubbing the fact of suicidal women off the surface of a monstrous island—one’s brain attempts to filter out the possible from the impossible. I suppose it is a means of survival. To envision a world, no matter how wild, with rules.
But here we are, and the Quarry Hollow has tipped right over the edge of the cliff. “Ass over teakettle,” as Ms. Millie used to say. An impossible feat, yet it did so easily with a heavy heave and a single, long groan that tore concrete from Fowler soil, as if the structure itself had always been just another sad soul waiting to jump off into the quarry. In a terrible moment in the swirl of it all I knew that the attic—the point of the turret to be more specific—would smash into the island. Limestone would shatter glass and the bowed attic ceiling would splinter inward to flatten us. So I pictured the quarry floor sinking faster, moving down to make room for the poke of the turret, and I focused on it so hard that my mind made it true and we found a softer landing. A bounce as lake water caught us, buoying us into a new world, and for a second, maybe ten, I felt the house’s new purpose. A great ship of a building that would carry us to safety. Then the water rushed in.
We were under before I could take a full gulp of air, spinning like clothes in a washing machine. My lungs already burning, I reached for Wally as it all went out of control. It was instinct, and it told me something about my heart. Maybe there is something in the world for me that isn’t totally about the island. We found each other’s hands, and I warned her—as if there was any kind of warning that would have helped—but the danger came anyway and her head hit something. Our grasp on each other broke. Her red hair floating away from me in the fading light.
I reach out, desperate to grab hold of something in the dimly lit, cold water, and I find the slippery brass bed that has been up here for the life of the house. Screwed into the floor some time ago by Elizabeth Volt. I realize that the bolted windows, the furniture nailed to the floor, were part of a larger plan. A purpose for the house that I had been trained to ignore. All those stories about the crazy sister had taken over. What purpose did a woman serve? None, surely. A madwoman? Even less. Even I had swallowed the lore of a useless Elizabeth, banging around the attic, making no sense. I brushed off all these things as the actions of a hysterical woman. I am no better than the rest.
We are close enough to the surface of the lake that light is still finding its way to us, and I can see now that a good ten inches of space is between what was once floor and the water line.
Joshua and Wilderness find the air pocket at the same time I do. Wilderness takes a deep, quick breath—he has Wally under one arm and tries, failing, to get her to take a gulp of air as well—before he swims for the upside-down stairs. He will get Wally to the surface. Joshua points down and behind me, and I hold my breath, go under again and see that Carrie is at the darkroom door, breath held as she pulls on the doorknob. I go back for air and tell Joshua that I will be in charge of Carrie.
Wilderness, I tell myself, will know how to get the water out of Wally’s lungs and get her breathing again. I go under, panic growing in my chest. I urgently pull at Carrie’s ankle when I am close enough, but she kicks me off. I try again, but she is insistent, tugging at the door, as if she knows something more than I do. My lungs feel weak. I need air and so does Carrie. I make her go first, joining her. Neither of us has much of a choice, and we gulp together, goldfish women, desperate.
We drink the air down in seconds, but it helps, and we get our noses, mouths, and ears above the water long enough for Carrie to say, “We have to get to those cameras.”
“What? Why? We don’t have time.” But I am thinking, thinking, thinking.
As time freezes in that little sliver of air, Carrie grabs my left wrist under the water. There is still warmth in her hand, and it brings back a memory, as if she is sending it to me. A file cabinet at the back of the museum. Long flat drawers that she once helped me sort through. Sketches dating back to Elizabeth. Plans she had commissioned for finishing the attic, a renovation that most islanders thought proved her insanity and Seth’s right to keep her close. Along with those are some more artistic sketches, possibly done by Elizabeth herself, although there is no name on them to prove that she drew them. In them the house, this house, floats on the lake. It is upside down. The big boat-shaped attic pointing its great turret of a finger into the deep dark. The three windows of the turret glow like a lighthouse—beams of glittery dust shine out into the lake water. Its foundation floats above the water, poking up in jagged pieces, a bottom row of broken teeth yawning up at the sky. In the sketches, the house is filled with people. Women and children and men standing together, poking their heads up over the floor joists and looking toward the mainland.
“We have to let the ghosts out,” Carrie gasps.
She inhales deeply and then is gone, back under, her fingers no longer clasped shut around my pulse. Fear beats in my chest. The girls are out there somewhere, and I am here, losing perspective, balance gone. There is something I should remember. I shut my eyes, tread water, sip air. Calm myself. Think.
Ms. Millie told me many times that Eileen Fowler communicated with her sister every evening—Eileen on the Watch Tower and Elizabeth in her turret. Eileen, who could read minds, had spent every moment she was separated from Elizabeth learning how to send her thoughts into her sister’s brain and extract her sister’s thoughts. It was Eileen’s force of will that kept them close.
So, thanks to Eileen, they could be one body, one set of eyes, when they needed to be. They could watch together from their separate island spaces, as Seth took his new form—the one the devil gave him. Seth galloping on all fours to the Killing Pond to greet the dead body of a once-lonely woman. The devil was there too, but Elizabeth and Eileen could not see him from their separate vantage points. They could only ever see Seth on his exit and his return. When he climbed back out of the quarry, his body was wet, blood on his mouth, still part-monster, his middle swollen, like a snake with his prey still squirming inside him.
Once when Elizabeth had dared to leave the attic—Seth had forgotten to bolt the door—she followed the sounds of him retching. He was in the downstairs hallway, his body convulsing, and Elizabeth could see the thing in his belly push out, punch at his insides until it found a path out of his mouth. What came out wasn’t a body. Not a thing that could punch or kick. It was a wave of glittery dust. Wisps on the air like dandelion seeds that gravitated toward the wall and stuck briefly before the house drank them in. Eileen saw it too, pulling the thoughts from her sister as they occurred.
It was written that Seth Volt turned to face Elizabeth. His body still half-creature. He looked a bit broken, and Elizabeth knew then that this was a mess of his making but not one he could control. He knew that now too. He had not defeated the devil, but rather become one himself.
“Elizabeth,” he pleaded as his body became human again. He was naked and dirty, blood on his face and neck. He could not get up off the floor. “The island has to be fed or we will drown.”
Elizabeth ran from him. Back up to her attic, blocking the door with a chair. She could see the future playing out. Her baby was still in her belly then, and she could see that the horrors would take longer than a generation to stop.
Forehead pressed to glass, calling to her sister for ideas while Seth banged on the door, screaming, “Please. You have to stop me!”
As the sun rose, Eileen and Elizabeth realized the only thing that could be done: “Let the island sink.” Whether it happened now or in a decade. The devil, both devils, would have to be starved, and that meant the island the sisters loved would go under.
I swim to Carrie, who is still trying to pull open the door. I put my hands on hers and we pull together, and the water must finally equalize, because the door comes open. The tiny room is filled with water now. The window seat has dumped its contents. Henrie’s photographs catch at my limbs, press to my cheeks. Carrie is already holding one of Henrie’s homemade cameras in her hands. She is tearing at tape to get the lid free. My lungs are burning again, wanting to be filled so much that I have to remind my brain not to mistake water for air. White spots dance in my peripheral vision.
Carrie has worked lose the lid, and when she begins to crack it open, light pours out. Instant and blinding before it scatters around us like stardust. The water around us fills with stars, and a pocket of air forms around us, growing bigger as we open each container until we are standing in a big bubble of oxygen, our feet on the ceiling of the turret. I keep going, reach forward, pull another camera from the pile, and labor to open it. Again stars. Again light. The turret has become our little ship, a safe space filling with light.
Although it might be my imagination, the house feels lighter, as if it is climbing higher in the water, floating atop the surface of things, steady as a river barge and moving forward. Carrie is pressed to the glass now, no more cameras to pry open, her palms on the window, focused so hard that I am certain she is directing this ship. Her eyes forward, the turret leading us toward the girls.
I place myself next to Carrie. My left hand over her right hand, my other pressed to the glass. If I tilt my eyes up, I can see the surface of the water now. It is daytime above us. The sun is out. Ahead of us are the quarry cliffs, the Killing Pond now indistinguishable from the rest of the watery world, but the flashlight beam we’ve created reveals the girls inside their old cliffside cave. Both of them. Carrie sees them too and her body jumps a bit. Her excitement and relief something I share. We steer toward them with our hearts and minds and hands. We feel so strong, so powerful, and present, and then we see it. A big dark thing swimming up from the deep. A monster of scales and rot and teeth and open bloody wounds that leave trails in the water. The huge dark body of it—both somehow troll and serpent—is injured. Chunks of it gone. It rises slowly at first, then quickly until it is pointed right at them, and we are screaming, screaming, screaming, pounding at the glass.
The cracks stem from where our fists are pounding, and then little hairs like tree roots shoot up to the sill and down to the top of the frame. The dark shape of a thing reaches the mouth of the cave, nibbling and sucking at B.B. for just a moment before she slips out of the cave and into the monster. Gone.
The horror is too big. It moves between us, pounding, pounding, pounding. The ghosts push at the windows with us. The glass weakens, and the house moves forward with us in our bubble, propelled now by our panic, our power.