Chapter 3
Harper fought the ache in her head and folded her clothes carefully, setting them in her duffel bag.
She wasn’t taking much, minimal clothes—she knew enough to know she’d be wearing thermal suits on the boat and spending the rest of her time in the lab.
She packed hiking boots and a fleece-lined sweater, waiting on the few toiletry items she kept in the bathroom until departure time tomorrow morning.
There wasn’t much; her dark auburn hair was boy short, and she rarely wore makeup.
Her vanity kit consisted primarily of different levels of sunscreen.
She coiled the charging cables for her laptop, and carefully fit her backpack with her travel hot spot and all the electronics she relied on for every day.
Okeanos had promised the lab on Bell Island would have Wi-Fi and all the necessary equipment, and anything missing would be sent via ferry.
It was easy to forget that she was not going to be so remote that she had to plan for oblivion.
It wasn’t like Vestmannaeyjar, where the ferry from the tiny island took you to an equally tiny town on the mainland.
A ninety-minute ferry on a clear day to Boston Harbor, twice a day, she could easily visit regular society and buy things like cellphone chargers if need be.
But the idea of Bell Island had wound its way into her brain; all she could see were the old images of Avalon from her childhood bedtime stories wound with the scant memories she carried from her mother and the faded photographs of her mother as a child on the Bell dock, playing at the edge of the icy Atlantic, stacking smooth stones on a rocky beach, her face, so like Harper’s, fixed in serious concentration at her task.
But throughout Harper’s own childhood, Bell had taken on a mythic quality, an island shrouded in mist, invisible to all who would cause it harm.
Carli’s ghost stories had done their job; she shook the image off and continued to sort her belongings.
One octopus plush from her small collection made its way into the bag.
The rest, along with a few odds and ends, and all her books in a packing crate were to be stored in a locker at the BSI bio department.
“What happens if I never come back?” she had asked when the office administrator had made the offer.
The admin had shrugged. “I expect it will stay there in perpetuity until someone notices, which will likely not be until the bicentennial, wherein they will assume it’s a time capsule.
” With that, she had given Harper a curt nod and gone back to her work.
So Harper would deliver her stored items to the storage closet and head to the harbor.
Her bed and desk were staying in her sparse room, allowing Carli to rent it as “furnished.”
Later that night, as Harper lay restlessly in bed, she stared at the ceiling, still feeling the alien points of pressure on her hand from where the jellyfish had made its stay.
“It’s time to go,” she had whispered to the creature.
The words had come from deep within her; it was time she left this place, past time.
She’d felt it for a while now, even before Dr. Kallen had begun reminding her of the ticking clock on her research grant.
She’d known deep in her bones that it was time to leave the space she had occupied for so long.
There were things that sat on the edge of her memory that were starting to stir.
Harper spent a good amount of energy not remembering things.
Instead of her childhood, she had filled her memories with data tables, diagnostic charts for microbial activity, the periodic chart, the composition of soil, maps of the stars, the number of common octopuses that had been documented in the North Atlantic in the past ten years.
It was a game she played whenever the other memories threatened to surface.
How could she drown them? Shout them out with undeniable truths?
But she inevitably lost the fight in her sleep.
Dreams were not tempted by charts and numbers.
Harper had nearly the same dream most every night; there were variations, it wandered from pedestrian banalities to a hopeless sort of terror, but it was the same sleep dimension.
The world she inhabited when she closed her eyes was always consistent, even in her earliest memories.
In fact, the dreams were the only thing she remembered.
Her childhood, the details of her life growing up lived in an impenetrable fog, one Harper did not care to venture into.
But the dreams were clear. She could remember dreams from her earliest years; they were a sort of half-life, an alter version that existed alongside her waking self.
There were dream figures that she recognized from night to night, some loved her other self, some she avoided, others still were dark and shadowy patches with not entirely formed faces, their features blurred like a finger through paint.
She could see the ocean in her dreams, but it was different from the Atlantic she knew—it was angrier, colder.
The water crashed against wood, and the surface beneath her feet rocked and swayed with the waves, threatening to throw her off balance.
The wind whipped ice through the air. She was dressed in a simple brown shift dress with an apron and a wrap around her head.
A handmade woolen cloak was wrapped around her but did little to stop the chill.
Her boots were simple cloth and leather, handmade and sturdy.
She had never seen her own face, but her arms underneath the cloak were pale and thin, her hands calloused.
The others in her dream were dressed similarly, and had stern, pale faces.
The women’s heads were wrapped in kerchiefs, and men wore hats designed to keep the sun and salt from their skin.
Everything had a surreal quality, as though Harper were looking at the scene through a milk bottle.
In some dreams, she was working, walking through a field the color of her plain dress, collecting bundles of what might be wheat in a large basket that balanced on her shoulder.
Sometimes she was on a great ship, surrounded by water, the smell of fish in the air.
In others she was in a lower, darker part of the same ship.
The constant rocking made her stomach turn and the air mixed the pungent odor of meat cooking with that of unwashed bodies and sick.
In still other dreams she walked with other girls, and she knew these to be a memory to her dream-self, a younger version than the figure on the ship.
They were young, teenagers, their eyes tired, their actions guarded.
Heads covered, they lowered their eyes when older men and women passed.
And on some magical nights, she heard the sound of a child laughing, felt a small, soft hand in hers. These were the good dreams.
The ship dreams were more immediate, urgent.
In these, Harper had a resting tension, a certainty that death was inches away at any moment.
In the worst of them, her woolen dress was ripped and filthy.
She was freezing cold and curled into a tight ball in the corner of a dark and locked room that stank of sick and urine.
No light infiltrated the windowless space except for the light from passing lanterns that dared to creep under the wooden door.
Sometimes she heard footsteps and curled tighter into herself, trying to disappear.
Sometimes she stared at the flickers of light on the other side of the door, overcome with a sense of hopelessness.
Everything hurt, every bone in her body ached, cuts and slashes across her skin.
In these dreams, she knew she would die, and soon.
She knew it would be best to die where she was even if it meant she would never see the light of the sun or moon again.
What awaited her was far worse than freezing to death in a forgotten place. These were the bad dreams.
Last night had been a good night. She was young, the ship did not yet exist. She kneaded bread next to a rustic oven built into the wall of stone and brick, waves of heat rolled out and Harper felt a trickle of sweat creep its way down the back of her neck.
She rolled it into balls, and then slammed down on a stone surface.
A child’s tinkling laughter filled the space, and Harper knew he sat in a corner of the space, watching her every move.
Her blood, her little boy. Her dream-self felt a fierce protectiveness toward the child, the depth of which shook her very core.
As Harper awoke, peachy dawn streaks marked the early morning sky.
Her hands were sore from their night labors and she was left with a feeling of contentment.
She was headed right where she needed to be.