The rain eased and stopped as evening approached, but the sky remained discolored and wet.
“Mike?”
Angela was on the line. Cool, blonde, and blue, she was slim and an inch taller than me. The sound of her voice brought her close enough to touch.
The single word she spoke brought me to a different, safer time. The pines that towered over me in the gloom became insubstantial, and the cold depths surrounding the island were only staged for a bad dream. I followed the sound of her to my old brick house. Somehow I knew she was sitting in the kitchen, and if I listened closely enough, I would hear the front door slam open. Abby would joyfully announce her arrival, and I would lock the door behind her, and keep the three of us safe forever. I had only to follow Angela’s voice over the air and through time.
I closed my eyes.
“Mike? Is that you?”
“Just a second,” I answered. “I need to go where the reception’s better.”
I gathered myself as best I could.
“So how are you?” I asked. “It’s been a while.”
“I’m making do,” she said. “How’s the island? The reception’s not as bad as I would have thought.”
“It comes and goes. I think there are more towers than there used to be. I still pretty much have to go down to the very end of the dock to get anything, and if the weather’s bad you can forget it. I don’t make a lot of calls anyway.”
We made a few minutes of small talk, and then I came to the reason for my call.
“Do you stay in touch with your Aunt Louise?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said. “We phone at Christmas. She called after Abby... you talked to her, don’t you remember?”
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t think I made the connection if I did. Just a voice on the phone.”
“Not surprising, Mike. Getting involved is never your thing, is it? Why are you asking about her?”
“She left the island, right?” I asked. “Did you ever know exactly why?”
“She freaked out. Encountered things she had to run away from. It was drugs, or a nervous breakdown, depends on who you’re talking to. My parents never told me much.”
“I’ve seen some kind of strange things here myself... heard things,” I said. “I was wondering if something like that drove her off.”
“You’ve… seen things?” she asked. “Things like what?”
I didn’t want to tell her about the mother and daughter who shared the island with me, and I certainly didn’t want to get into the violent vision in the boathouse. I wanted to protect her, or maybe I just didn’t feel like exposing my vulnerability. I had shown Angela enough craziness.
“Nothing major, nothing serious,” I said. “I’m just feeling a bit spooked.”
“Yes, but what are you seeing?” she insisted. “You said you were seeing things.”
“Maybe that wasn’t a good choice of words,” I said. “It’s more a weird feeling from time to time, like I’m not alone.”
“My sister was like that... she hated the place. We could never leave her alone there, even for a minute. If everyone else went to town, she had to go, too.”
“I was thinking about calling your aunt,” I said. “If she’s around, and willing to talk to me.”
“Oh, she’s around. She was a university professor, remember... as smart as it gets. Maybe she can help you with whatever it is.”
“Mostly, I want to know why she left,” I said.
“Somehow I don’t think she’ll tell you, but you can try. Anyway, I can give you the number. Hang on.”
“Oh no, Angela. I’m stupid...I just realized I called you and didn’t bring a pen. I’m down by the water. If I go to the cabin and get one, I’ll lose you. Can I call you back?”
“Just get a stick and write it in the dirt,” she said, ever practical.
“Mud. It’s raining.”
“Even better,” she said. “Raining here too.”
I did exactly that when she read her aunt’s phone number to me. There was a pause, and she sounded more serious when she spoke again.
“I flew down to Atlanta to visit your dad last month. He isn’t doing well at all, Mike.”
I was surprised. “You visited my father? Why?”
“We’ve been in touch more since Abby died,” she said. “It devastated him. I doubt you ever thought about that. She loved him, like I think most little girls love their grandfathers. I always did. Abby was one thing he had, and he doesn’t have much. He’s lost weight and he’s drinking way too much. He called me, and I went for a few days.”
“He always did,” I said. “Drink too much.”
“I think you should call him at least, soon. He only has one child.”
“One more than I do,” I said, and instantly regretted it. The ensuing silence strung out.
“I shouldn’t keep you on,” Angela finally said. “Tell Louise I said hi if you talk to her, okay?”
“I will. Listen,” I said, “I may drive down your way in the next couple of weeks. If I do, can I drop by to see you? I have a feeling some of your common sense would do me good.”
Angela was quiet for long enough I began to doubt we were still connected. “It might do you some good, but it might not be good for me.” Her voice was soft. “You assume what’s good for you is always the right thing. Sorry, but I’m not ready for that.”
After she had disconnected, I sat and looked at nothing. I felt looser, somehow, as if more tethers had been cut. In the back of my mind, there had always been a temporary quality to my life on the lake. I had imagined someday I would leave and go back to where I had been. Angela had underlined the permanence of my situation, and the nature of the penance I did.
It was getting dark. I had to strain to decipher the numbers I had scratched in the earth at the water’s edge. I shook myself off and dialled. It rang three times on the other end and switched to an answering machine. The female voice on the tape didn’t jog my memory. I left a message, pointless since I was headed back to the cabin and a return call wouldn’t ring through. I had no sooner put my phone back in my pocket and turned to go in, when it vibrated. The woman on the other end sounded rushed.
“Sorry about that, Michael. I do screen my calls. In a few years I might be glad to have anyone at all on my telephone, but for now I still pick and choose. How are you? Your wife tells me you are living on Echo Island.”
“Angela and I have separated,” I said. “She’s not my wife any more.”
“Don’t speak down to me,” she snapped. “I keep up. How foolish to get married and put up with the nonsense it brings, and then abandon each other when times get hard? I never married. There’s so much about it doesn’t make sense to me.”
The woman on the other end had to be at least seventy, but she sounded remarkably vivacious. I tried to remember if I had ever seen a picture of her. There were photos in her old journal, but she wasn’t in them.
“I have a problem I hoped you could help me with,” I said. “There’s something bothering me. I don’t want to trouble you over it, though.”
“I’m seventy-three years old,” she said. “I didn’t shy away from things when I was young, and I certainly don’t now. Just tell me.”
The boathouse, the strange noises, the mother-and-daughter ghosts all came out, in a torrent. I edited nothing, and didn’t try to rationalize or explain. As my narrative went on, I searched less for an explanation of what had happened to me on the island, and more for an absolution of my own role in it. When I had slowed down and stopped, she fell silent for a moment.
“Let me think,” she said.
I waited, and realized I felt better just for the telling.
“If you walk on a lawn at dusk, and see green grass under your feet, do you understand you are seeing things?” she asked. “Your eyes can only see grays in low light. Your brain fills in the green part. But think about this: The grass is green. Even though you can’t see the color, it is green. So if you see gray, but your mind fills in green, are you really seeing things?”
“You think what I’m seeing is real?” I asked. “I’m not physically seeing it, but it’s real?”
“Don’t assume it isn’t real. Don’t close your eyes tight and ignore it. Instead, it might be time to open your eyes wider.”
“Is this what drove you off the island?” I asked. “Something like it? Were you seeing ghosts?”
“Ghosts wouldn’t have driven me off, Michael. I can promise you that.”
“Then what happened? What made you leave?”
“It was the island itself.” Her next words were careful, like beads picked out one by one and strung. “I haven’t set foot on that island in forty years. It stayed in the family as a summer place, but I never went back. I never expected to think about it again. I don’t know what the place really is. Haunted is far too simple, although I’m sure it is, many times over. There’s an underwater crater, an offshore pit, did you know that?”
“Yes,” I said. “They call it the ‘Hole’ now.”
“Oh, they always have. That isn’t anything new. The hole in the bottom of Hollow Lake. There’s a cave at the top of the island, did you know? A cave is a hole, too.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Elijah heard the voice of God from the mouth of a cave,” she said. “Caves can be very powerful places. The people who originally built the cabin were Spiritualists. I don’t know if they went to the island because of what it already was, or if they woke something up.”
“Someone told me about that. I thought it was weird.”
“There was nothing very sinister about it. The Spiritualist movement was mostly Methodists who believed in ghosts. It had millions of followers, popular through the 1800s until about 1920. Most of those were educated people, the middle and upper classes. The group of doctors that formed a little island social club and built the cabin had a connection to the movement.”
“It was accepted, then?” I asked. “A legitimate religion?”
“Absolutely. Just another Christian denomination, in a time boasted a church on every corner in America. The frauds killed it. People will always try to make money from religion if they can. People began to feel they had been duped, and eventually the whole thing lost credibility. It’s too bad… there were as many important women in the movement as there were men. I have a feeling I’d have been a member, a follower, if I lived then.”
“Do you think they caused the disturbance here?” I asked. “Something they did back then?”
“I don’t know, Michael. I uncovered some strange stuff from back then.”
I debated telling her I had her journal, and decided to wait.
“Maybe they didn’t find the island,” she said. “Maybe the island found them. If you think about it, the place was inaccessible as hell in 1900, when they came. They could only get in by a bad road, a logging track to the west end of the lake, and they had to haul in heavy wooden rowboats. Then ten miles over water, rowing past bigger islands to get to the smallest island in the whole damn lake? Why? For what? Going past miles and miles of trees and wilderness to have a holiday on Echo Island? Makes no sense. No, I think perhaps the island found them. It called them and they came.”
“Some of them were bootleggers, I heard. That could have been part of the reason,” I offered.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Michael. They were selling whiskey and gin in the cities, not in the woods. Although there is a case of booze buried there, and a hell of a good story goes with it. I have a pretty good idea where it is, but I’m not sure it should be dug up.”
She stopped for long enough that I wondered if we’d been disconnected.
“Not by you, anyway. Angela tells me you have a drinking problem.”
I burst out laughing. “I’m not going to drink it!” I said.
“Then what do you want with it?” she said.
I shook my head, at a loss for words.
“I’ll leave you with this, Michael. Here’s why I think the island is a risky place, maybe for you more than anyone else. You’ve lost a child. You’ve thrown your wife away, you have no job, and you drink. You’re vulnerable as can be. There are more than ghosts there, I believe. Much more. It’s the nature of the island and the water around it. It’s the place itself... it’s like an artesian well so deep that when you look into it, you see the essence of yourself reflected back. It’s you that makes the place so dangerous... your own self.”
When we said good night, I asked one more question. “Can I call you again?”
“I don’t think so, Michael. Whatever for? I’ve told you all I know. We aren’t family any more. I do wish you well, though.”
Aruba trailed me back to the cabin. I fell asleep quickly, and was awakened in the early hours by the sound of a boat engine. It didn’t approach, or pass by and disappear. As I lay listening, I realized it was circling the island. I got up and looked out the window. The night was still overcast, and the lake was a sea of darkness. I slipped on shoes and went outside, to a break in the trees. Even when the noise got close, I couldn’t spot a boat. The craft was being piloted without lights. Eventually, the sound turned to the west and faded away.
***