Chapter 14
That night Harper went to sleep with her head buzzing.
Her teammates had been insatiable but willing to wait until morning and what was going to be an inevitable lab day for details.
As she drifted off to sleep, Harper found herself in the bowels of the ship that reeked with the pungent odor of sickness and unwashed bodies.
She was huddled over a simple cot. Woolen blankets and rough bedding held a small boy whose cheeks were ruddy with fever and eyes twitched restlessly behind closed lids.
His dark hair was slicked with sweat and lay in limp clumps around his face.
Harper held a wet rag and watched as her hands that were not hers wet the rag in a ceramic basin, wrung out the excess water, and then pressed it to the boy’s forehead.
Harper heard her voice that was not hers singing softly to the child.
Baloo, balilli, baloo balilli
Baloo, balilli, baloo ba
Gae awa peerie fairies
Fae oor peerie bairn
Gae awa peerie fairies
Fae oor bairn noo
The child stirred at the sound and the touch of the cool cloth.
Harper smoothed his matted hair off his forehead, the heat emanating from his skin, casting a sort of aura of misery around his small form.
Harper heard the floor creak behind her and without looking she knew who it was, and the vision of a stern man with a rough beard and dark woolen clothes flashed across her dream eyes.
She knew the man had heard her sing, and that the song was not a psalm, not a prayer; she knew he had heard and she felt a chill in her bones that she hoped would pass onto the child to soothe his fever.
The presence behind her eased away and Harper knew the man would not speak his condemnation of her care in this moment as the boy lay dying.
Harper was bone weary, her skin tingled with exhaustion.
This would not be the last death on this vessel, Harper’s dream-self knew this with a morbid certainty.
All around her the faceless passengers of this journey sat in the shadows, watching the sick boy fearfully.
The frantic cries of a newborn pierced the dream stillness and Harper knew that death awaited them all, even her.
She could feel the dark presence in the stagnant, salt-tinged air, watching the child struggle with each breath.
In an instant, the dream girl whose body she inhabited and her own conscious form merged, and Harper was hit with a wave of grief that she’d not allowed herself to acknowledge for years.
It crashed over her, dragging her under.
Harper felt the sticky, fevered air around her, suffocating her, pulling her deep.
Her father’s voice, the touch of her mother’s fingertips.
Harper was no longer the girl sitting by this deathbed, she was entirely herself, and she was desperate to be free from this place.
She wanted to wake in her bed in the tiny house on Bell Island, where she could continue to forget everything that had come before.
Not this place where dreams and memories mixed.
She’d kept this pit at bay since she was thirteen, and she would do so until she was 103.
Nothing of use awaited her there; if she even peered over the edge, she would be lost forever.
She leaned forward, pulling the boy to her chest, holding his limp form tight against hers, feeling his heart fade with the pulsing of the blood in her veins.
She willed him to live, to survive this horror.
If he lived, then she would too, and so would the rest …
what was lost would be found. A wail escaped her lips and she clung to the boy as his ragged breath turned to a death rattle, his lungs drowning in their own fluid.
His tiny hand went limp as his soul fled his corporeal form.
Harper screamed at the monster that paced the deck overhead, cursing it for the boy, for the fate of the infant who screamed its pain, for her mother, for her father.
Harper demanded that the darkness give them back, return what had been stolen.
“Harper!” The voice was distant and insistent. “Harper!” it repeated.
Suddenly, light and air filled her senses. Shuri loomed over her.
“Harper, you alright? You were having a nightmare, you were shouting.” Shuri stood back.
Harper rubbed her eyes. Her joints ached, she could still feel the branches pulling her down into the earth, the weight of grief fresh in her gut. “Yeah, I’m sorry. Nightmare, yeah,” she muttered.
“Can’t wait to hear about your night!” Kyle called from the other side of the wall.
Harper rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.
She’d slept past her usual wake-up time of 6:00 a.m. No jog for her today, not that she could.
Harper could hear the wind outside the window.
She pulled herself out of bed and sat for a moment, letting the chill of the wood floor ground her and stabilize the storm in her head.
“Harper? Sorry to interrupt, we have a message from Boston.” Kyle’s voice from the other room was full of trepidation.
“On it,” Harper called back, and pulled her laptop from the side table.
Hello Islanders,
I’m sure it’s no surprise that the NOAA reports say you’ll be grounded for a few more days.
I’ve sent some additional data reports to your account courtesy of the geophysics team.
If possible, they want you to use the time to collect some water samples as close to the site as you can.
But, and I stress this, only do what is safe to do.
Samples off the Bell shore are useful too.
Keep an eye on the weather. We’ll be in touch.
There’s also an attachment from the Puffin Project people. They usually have a team out there come spring, but are hoping you’d do a little freelance bird-watching if you find yourself with a bit of time. Just photos and basic observation.
Best,
Akiel
Harper rubbed her eyes again. She hadn’t had more than two drinks last night, but she felt like she was in a fog. The wind raged against the windowpane. She texted Murphy:
Hey—The lab wants us to collect water samples as far out as we can, but I’m guessing that you are going to recommend that we don’t do that today—I think we’ll stick to whatever the Puffin Project is asking and stay off the water—tomorrow should be better?
Her reply was almost immediate. Murphy had likely received the same message from Boston.
Sounds good—I’ll be at the East Dock—check in later
Harper pulled on her clothes and shuffled across to the bathroom. Teeth brushed and face washed, she took a deep breath before facing her audience at the kitchen table. They were barely holding back their need to hear all the details of the night before.
“Alright, before you all get the goods, business.” Harper poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table where Shuri was pulling a piece of burnt toast apart.
“We’re obviously grounded today. But there’s evidently a side project from the Puffin Project, bird-watching essentially, but feels like the only safe option given the weather. ”
Kyle looked up from his phone. “If it’s all the same, I could use the time to prep the soil samples. No ferry this morning, but I can send them out tonight.”
“Fine. You up for the job?” Harper sipped her coffee, looking at Shuri.
“Absolutely. I did some work for them in Tokyo.” Shuri smiled. “Monitoring shorebirds and migration patterns. I love birds.”
Over breakfast, Harper filled them all in on her night at Bell Manor. She left out the crippling déjà vu and pretty much everything apart from cursory details. Harper could see the disappointment in their faces, but it felt like a betrayal to tell them more.
“You’re going back?” Kyle was buzzing with coffee and excitement.
“Probably so. She said as much,” Harper replied in a tone that did not invite more questions. She couldn’t place her feelings, but it felt like anything she told them about the manor or Lady Bell, Nigel, Anna … any admission felt like an incredible invasion of privacy.
As they walked to the lab, leaving Polly asleep on the sofa, Harper could feel her mind wandering.
Last night’s dream had left her shaken. Her memory was a moth-eaten sweater.
The form was solid, but the threads had come loose.
It had started unraveling at thirteen, the only things she was sure of were what had come to pass since she’d left Iceland for Boston.
It was the anchor on which she measured the veracity of all other memories.
Time was divided into Before and After, and she rarely engaged with the Before.
But here, in this place where her mother might well have walked this same path, where she saw this same view of the sea and sky, where her memory lived on with Hedy, with Lady Bell.
It seemed like the Before was very much present.
She remembered a therapist at the boarding school, right after she lost her parents.
He had said that she couldn’t bury her grief forever.
That it would demand to be dealt with eventually, like a splinter in the flesh, things have a way of working themselves out, nothing can be buried forever.
Harper begged to differ. She’d read an article about a man in the 1890s who had lived fifty years with an iron slug lodged in his brain, the result of an accident in a factory.
Harper’s grief was more iron than wood, and it was lodged forever behind her eyeline.
As they approached the lab, Harper saw movement in the shrubs on the side of the building.
She paused, the others passing her to get out of the cold.
Harper felt frozen in place, the scrubby plants moving chaotically as though something was hiding behind them.
She tried to shake off the ice that had suddenly formed in her gut.
It was likely a mouse or squirrel, a bird even, or nothing at all.
As she stared, five long and impossibly thin fingers with flesh like oak bark reached out through the shrubs.
Harper’s breath caught in her chest as she stared at the tips where nails should be that were sharpened bits of twig and leaf.
A single finger crooked and gestured to Harper, and before she could react, scream, or follow, the hand gracefully disappeared into the shrub, gone and perhaps never there to begin with.
Harper could feel her hands shaking. The creature, like so many things on this island, knew her, but the realization that shook her to her core was much more startling—she knew it.
Like the halls and tables at Bell Manor, like the roar of the Atlantic and the winter waves on the shore, she knew it.