Chapter Five #4
Still, I lower my voice. “People do strange things,” I say. “Maybe he was drunk, ran his ship aground the night I encountered it. And after that, he decided it was a bad idea. Went home, tore the ship apart, and never sailed it again.”
“Until now,” Helen points out, glancing at me with pale green eyes.
She’s right. Would he suddenly set out again, cross the Atlantic to the Faroes, and begin his hoax all over again? Maybe. But he would have aged as well; he’d be too old by now. Maybe he has a son who’s taken over the family hoax?
Doubtful.
None of it really adds up.
We fall silent, both of us turning over the possibilities, and the farther we drive, through long, dark tunnels and over bridges, the more certain I am that we’ll find nothing.
The island is likely nothing more than an abandoned boat or debris from a cargo ship…
could be anything. The mind has a way of aligning objects with things we already know.
Familiar things, stories, legends. We want to believe in something larger than ourselves, so we make the ordinary moments into something bigger.
More memorable. It’s part of our human drive to find meaning.
Helen Ashcroft is a textbook example of someone searching for more beneath the mundane.
She wants to believe in a floating island trapped in time.
And she’ll chase this story as far as it will go.
I spin the diamond ring around my finger, searching for comfort in it.
For solid ground. James. He will anchor me to the real world once I’m back in Seattle.
He will kiss me and pull me against his chest, and I will breathe in his familiar scent—of the café and the constant rain—and I will let all of this go.
At last, we reach the small community, hemmed in on two sides by rocky, treeless hills.
The entire terrain is barren—no shrubs, no evergreens.
Odd-shaped farmlands intersect one another, and the single-lane road leads us toward the sea, where all the homes are painted a stark, Dutch white.
Helen parks beside a tiny church with a red door and a small graveyard overlooking the Atlantic below.
I step out of the car, breathing in the salt air.
A narrow, meandering creek passes beside the church before spilling into the sea below.
The ocean is choppy here, heaving inland like foamy bathwater, with a series of bluffs rising up to the left.
It feels like a storybook. A town written about but never seen up close.
There are no tourists here. No coffee shops or bus stops.
Helen grabs the black satchel from the back seat and slings it over her shoulder.
After fiddling with a few things inside the bag, she unravels a microphone, then holds it straight out in front of her, capturing the sound of the wind and the thrashing sea.
Ambient noise for her podcast—to play during moments of pause, to build suspense when revealing clues about the island.
Her face is serious, short nose twitching slightly, the wind brushing her flat dark hair back from her forehead.
“Pollamj?rki hasn’t lifted yet.” A voice, raspy and thick, cuts through the air behind us.
A woman is walking up the road, moving toward us, canvas overalls rolled up at the ankles, boots muddied, and a brown flannel shirt flapping in the breeze.
She doesn’t smile so much as pull her lips up into a confounded grimace, trying to figure out just what in the hell Helen is doing with a microphone pointed at the sea.
Her face shows the years worn into it, skin bowing along her jowls, but pulled tight at the forehead.
She might only be in her fifties, but her face is just as weathered as the paint on the nearby church, making her appear much older.
The harsh sea air and gusting winds have not been kind to her.
Helen steps forward, a hand outstretched to greet the woman. “I’m Helen Ashcroft,” she says. “We spoke on the phone. And this is Ellie.” She nods to me, and I appreciate that she doesn’t say my last name, particularly because her recorder is still on.
“Pleasure,” the woman says, her accent an odd blend of Faroese and British.
Maybe she was born in the UK, came across the cold Atlantic at some point in her life.
“I’m Erol.” She slants her eyes to the ocean, a hundred stories carved into her features.
“Can’t see out past the rocks. Too much pollamj?rki,” she repeats, then amends, “Sea mist.”
I wonder if this is a term she uses often, or if she’s only uttered it now for our benefit. Giving us a sense of the local dialect.
“How was the weather when you saw the island?” Helen asks, getting right to the point of our two-hour drive.
“Clear as Lake S?rvágsvatn on a spring day.”
I don’t know what this means exactly, but I assume it means you could see for miles. And that there was no disputing what she saw.
“It was out beyond the point, just sitting there like a ship deciding whether it was safe to come into the bay. I could see the waves breaking against its shore, and for a time I think it was stuck on the rocks. Sat there for a good fifteen minutes.”
Helen steps closer to the woman, holding the microphone out in front of her, the wind surely louder than our voices. “Did you see anyone on the island?” she asks, her expression widening, hopeful.
Erol tilts her gaze to the ocean again, toward the far cliffs where she must have seen the thing she is so sure was an island. “Nah, no sign of anyone. But it was a good distance out there, could only make out a house and a few smaller structures.”
“You saw the house?” Helen’s tone rises in pitch. “Did it have a chimney and gray-blue shutters?”
The woman’s jaw shifts back, and she takes a moment to answer, pulling the gusting air into her lungs.
“Couldn’t make out anything like that. I only know it sat there for a time before the winds picked up, and it finally broke loose, swept out into that god-awful Atlantic.
” Her face turns wistful, many seasons of brutal storms flashing across her eyes, winters when the rain was surely so harsh you might have felt drier if you’d waded out into the sea.
Months when the sun barely scraped above the horizon, the dark leaching into every crevice, inescapable.
“Did anyone else see it?” Helen presses, cheeks pink now from the cold, eyes unblinking.
But Erol shakes her head. “Nah. I was the only one out on the shoreline that morning. Couldn’t sleep, the sun was only just risen.”
Helen makes a sound at the back of her throat, and I can almost sense the questions leaping around in her skull like Ping-Pong balls, too many to get out all at once.
“Is it possible you were dreaming?” she asks.
Her voice is curious but not condescending, and I can tell she’s done this many times before.
She’s mastered the art of coaxing answers out of people.
“Not that you imagined it… but you know, that feeling when you’re sort of half-asleep, and the waking world has that dreamy, not-quite-right quality?
Maybe you were in that place—felt awake but you weren’t, if that makes sense. ”
I respect that Helen asks this question, that she isn’t willing to believe this woman just on her word. She’s after the truth, whether it makes for a better story or not.
“I know what you’re saying,” the woman answers.
“The Flanders’ boy used to sleepwalk up and down the shore at night when he was young.
We all feared he’d walk straight out into the ocean one of those nights.
But when he was around fourteen, just grew out of it.
” She clears her throat and sets her gaze back on Helen, her sagging jawline meeting in a hard resolve.
“But I can tell you clearly, what I saw that morning wasn’t a dream.
It was solid and real as the ground beneath our feet.
There was an island out there. Can’t say for sure if it was a piece of Scottish land, like the old stories say, but it was an island.
Sure as anything. And one I hope to never see again. ”
Helen’s eyes flash to me, like she’s looking to see my reaction, before turning back to Erol. “Why’s that? Why do you never want to see it again?”
A seagull veers through the clear sky a few yards away, landing on the rocky bluff and letting out a screech. “It’s a ghost island,” Erol answers. “Only the dead can live on a place like that, and we don’t need ill omens on our seas, cursing our fishermen.”
Helen falls quiet, and I wait for her to ask another question, but she lowers her microphone and switches off the recorder.
Again, her eyes skip to me like she’s expecting me to speak, to reveal to this woman that I too once saw the island and spent both a whole week and only a couple hours on it.
But I turn away from her and walk toward the bluff, looking out at the choppy sea.
Behind me, I hear Helen and the woman speaking low, maybe discussing if there’s anything else that should be included in the podcast, and finally Helen appears beside me. “Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
I lift a shoulder. “Hard to say.”
“Did it sound like your island?”
Air gusts from my nostrils. My island. “How do you know I was telling the truth?” I ask in return. “I was only a kid when I saw it, maybe I was only dreaming, like you said.”
“Were you?”
I look away from her. I wish it was a dream.
“I don’t think you’d come all the way here,” Helen says, “if you didn’t think what you saw was real. You wouldn’t have come hoping to find it again.”
“But there’s nothing to find,” I counter, glancing at her. “Only rumors and near misses. I should have gone home today.”