To be inside a miracle, to have it surround him from horizon to horizon, made him feel as if the floor of the world had opened under his feet. He couldn’t sleep more than a pinch. He was red-eyed and pale in the shaving mirror the next morning, and the razor trembled in his hand. He had to steady himself with a mixture of black coffee and flask whiskey before he lowered a launch from the davits, per Captain Davies’ orders, and steered a party of nervous seamen toward the pebbly beach of what had once been Great Island. A wind was rising, the water was choppy, and rain clouds came raggedly from the north. Chill, nasty weather.
Captain Davies wanted to know whether it might be practical to bring passengers ashore if the necessity arose. Buckley had doubted it to begin with; today he doubted it more than ever. He helped secure the launch above the tide, then walked a few paces up the margin of the island, his feet wet, his topcoat, hair, and moustache rimed with saltwater spray. Five grim bearded White Line sailors trudged up the gravel behind him, all speechless. This might be the place where the port of Queenstown had once stood; but Buckley felt uncomfortably like Columbus or Pizarro, alone on a new continent, the forest primeval looming before him with all its immensity and lure and threat. He called halt well before he reached the trees.
The sort-of trees. Buckley called them trees in the privacy of his mind. But it had been obvious even from the bridge of the Oregon that they were like no trees he had ever imagined, enormous blue or rust-red stalks from which needles arose in dense, bushy clusters. Some of the trees curled at the top like folded ferns, or opened into cup-shapes or bulbous, fungal domes, like the crowns of Turkish churches. The space between these growths was as close and dark as a badger hole and thick with mist. The air smelled like pine, Buckley thought, but with an odd note, bitter and strange, like menthol or camphor.
It was not what a forest ought to look like or smell like, and — perhaps worse — it was not what a forest should sound like. A forest, he thought, a decent winter forest on a windy day — the Maine forests of his childhood — ought to sound of creaking branches, the whisper of rain on leaves, or some other homely noise. But not here. These trees must be hollow, Buckley thought — the few fallen timbers at the shore had looked empty as straws — because the wind played long, low, melancholy tones on them. And the clustered needles rattled faintly. Like wooden chimes. Like bones.
The sound, more than anything, made him want to turn back. But he had orders. He steeled himself and led his expedition some yards farther up the shingle, to the verge of the alien forest, where he picked his way between yellow reeds growing knee-high from a hard black soil. He felt as if he should plant a flag… but whose? Not the Stars and Stripes, probably not even the Union Jack. Perhaps the star-and-circle of the White Star Line. We claim these lands in the name of God and J. Pierpont Morgan.
“ ’Ware your feet, sir,” the seaman behind him warned.
Buckley jerked his head down in time to see something scuttle away from his left boot. Something pale, many-legged, and nearly as long as a coal shovel. It disappeared into the reeds with a whistling screech, startling Buckley and making his heart thump.
“Jesus God!” he exclaimed. “This is far enough! It would be insane to land passengers here. I’ll tell Captain Davies—”
But the seaman was still staring.
Reluctantly, Buckley looked at the ground again.
Here was another of the creatures. Like a centipede, he thought, but fat as an anaconda, and the same sickly yellow as the weeds. That would be camouflage. Common in nature. It was interesting, in a horrible sort of way. He took a halfstep backward, expecting the thing to bolt.
It did, but not the way he expected. It moved toward him, insanely fast, and coiled up his right leg in a single sudden twining motion, like the explosive release of a spring. Buckley felt a prickle of heat and pressure as the creature pierced the cloth of his trousers and then the skin above his knee with the point of its daggerlike muzzle.
It had bit him!
He screamed and kicked. He wanted a tool to pry the monster off himself, a stick, a knife, but there was nothing to hand except these brittle, useless weeds.
Then the creature abruptly uncoiled — as if, Buckley thought, it had tasted something unpleasant — and writhed away into the undergrowth.
Buckley regained his composure and turned to face the horrified sailors. The pain in his leg was not great. He took a series of deep, lung-filling breaths. He meant to say something reassuring, to tell the men not to be frightened. But he fainted before he could muster the words.
The seamen dragged him back to the launch and sailed for the Oregon. They were careful not to touch his leg, which had already begun to swell.
That afternoon five Second-Class passengers stormed the bridge demanding to be allowed to leave the ship. They were Irishmen and they recognized Cork Harbor even in this altered guise; they had families inland and meant to go searching for survivors.
Captain Davies had taken the landing party’s report. He doubted these men would get more than a few yards inland before fear and superstition, if not the wildlife, turned them back. He stared them down and persuaded them to go belowdecks, but it was a near thing and it worried him. He distributed pistols to his chief officers and asked the wireless operator how soon they might expect to see another ship.
“Not long, sir. There’s a Canadian Pacific freighter less than an hour away.”
“Very well. You might tell them we’re waiting… and give them some warning what to expect.”
“Yes, sir. But—”
“But what?”
“I don’t know how to say it, sir. It’s all so strange.”
Davies put his hand on the radioman’s shoulder. “No one understands it. I’ll write a message myself.”
Rafe Buckley was running a fever, but by dinner the swelling in his leg had gone down, he was ambulatory, and he insisted on accepting Davies’ offer to join him at the captain’s table for dinner.
Buckley ate sparingly, sweated profusely, and to Davies’ disappointment, spoke little. Davies had wanted to hear about what the ship’s officers were already calling “the New World.” Buckley had not only set foot on that alien soil, he had been sampled by the wildlife.
But Buckley had not finished his roast beef before he stood uncertainly and made his way back to the infirmary, where, to the Captain’s astonishment, he died abruptly at half past midnight. Damage to the liver, the ship’s surgeon speculated. Perhaps a new toxin. Difficult to say, prior to the autopsy.
It was like a dream, Davies thought, a strange and terrible dream. He cabled the ships that had begun to arrive at Queenstown, Liverpool, the French ports, with news of the death and a warning not to go ashore without, at least, hip boots and a sidearm.
White Star dispatched colliers and supply ships from Halifax and New York as the sheer enormity of what had happened began to emerge from the welter of cables and alarms. It was not just Queenstown that had gone missing; there was no Ireland, no England, no France or Germany or Italy… nothing but wilderness north from Cairo and west at least as far as the Russian steppes, as if the planet had been sliced apart and some foreign organism grafted into the wound.
Davies wrote a cable to Rafe Buckley’s father in Maine. A terrible thing to have to do, he thought, but the mourning would be far from singular. Before long, he thought, the whole world would be mourning.