In the distance a chorus of unearthly voices roared in fury and an answering clang, and a shriek, less musical but more forceful, shivered the air, pushing on our bubble. The thin skin of mist and darkness around the boat held together, but quivered and melded to the arriving shock front, leaving us with only the thinnest barrier of Grey against Grey to hold back whatever had generated the opposing force.
I watched this odd phenomenon—like two soap bubbles kissing and then creating a flat section where they met, the surfaces shivering with reflections and the sliding play of storm light on the curved surfaces—and paid scant attention to my companions in the pilothouse until I heard Quinton whisper, “Is this . . . what it’s like . . . ?”
I shook myself and turned my head to him, barely noticing the twitching of the chronometer on the navigation console.
“What it’s like? I don’t know. What do you see?” I asked, my voice low and uncomfortably rough in my throat.
Quinton stared out at the curved walls of our bubble and the sphere of the next pressing against it. “Beautiful and cold . . . like ice in the Arctic, colors buried in deep chill, running from the sky in ribbons like the aurora. . . .”
I felt the fleeting warmth and soaring sensation of his wonder but had to say, “Not to me. That’s not what I see.” And a colder feeling, born of memory and mist-touched terrors, dulled his reflected excitement and left me a little sad.
“I hate it,” Zantree growled. “Give me the plain blue sea over this . . . pea-soup nightmare anytime.”
So . . . like other aspects of the Grey, this one also reflected the viewer’s own expectation and memory. Quinton saw cold beauty while Zantree experienced a mist filled with dangers.
I looked out at Solis and saw the interface of the two Grey spheres bow toward him. I threw myself out the door as the glassy surface between them shattered under a rush of water as white as a bridal dress and deadly cold.
Solis turned his shoulder to the falling wave, bending his body over the bell and crouching against the deck as the wave crashed into him. I shot down the steps with a sharp pang, oblivious to my lack of safety gear, and snatched at his lifeline.
“Solis!” I yelled as I yanked him toward the steps, only to feel my feet swept out from under me. I landed hard on my hip, dazed and breathless with pain.
Something hard and cold banged into my shoulder and I found myself scooped up and shoved back up the steps and into the pilothouse. Solis came through, dripping, behind me and slammed the door shut against the collapsing wall of water as both bubbles of Grey popped and dissolved.
Mambo Moon rocked violently and then bobbed back up, settling into the water again as the shadow of Vancouver and Spieden islands dropped away and let us back into the golden light of a summer’s evening. The noise of the bells cut off as suddenly as the wave had receded and we bobbed again on a gently rolling sea of deep blue, Jones Island dead ahead and as large as Rushmore.
Solis coughed a little and pulled off his safety gear, untying the bell from his vest and laying it on the floor, mouth down. “Fifteen minutes,” he said.
“What was fifteen minutes?” I gasped, trying to sit up without wincing.
“The elapsed time since I rang the bell. I thought it would be useful to know. . . .”
I blinked as I caught my breath and got myself upright. I hadn’t thought of it and I supposed no one else had either, but it was helpful since the chronometer on the nav indicated a passage of only five minutes. The bell’s Grey state lasted three times longer than the passage of normal time. Or was it the other way around?
“Whatever it was, we’ve drifted up close on Jones,” Zantree observed. “I’ll have to steer hard to port to make the turn around the point safely, so hold on.”
The boat swayed as Zantree turned it away from the island, heading north, and then corrected back down in a few minutes to position us just outside the mouth of the cove. There he reversed the engines and brought Mambo Moon to a halt.
“Well,” he asked, “do we go on as we are or do we ring the doorbell first?”
“I think we’ll have to ring,” I replied.
This time I made Solis stay inside and went out to strike the bell myself, the dark silver storm front of the Grey chime this time expanding outward and away from us to enclose most of the tiny bay instead of the boat. The bubble didn’t grow evenly but seemed to cleave to some invisible edge, climbing the cliff on the west and leaving a crescent of untouched, normal water near the eastern shore while a fugue of mist and thrashing wavelets filled the space within the visible half of the sphere. Dead white things flashed below the churned surface and broached to reveal glimpses of glazed eyes and restless tentacles that trailed seaweed.
I swallowed hard, feeling my stomach flip over at the sight of the unsettled Grey waters. We waited but nothing gave any indication that we should advance or turn back.
Zantree looked at me. “What do we do now, commander?”
“I’m not sure. Can you make it to that clear stretch without entering the bubble?” I asked, pointing to the calm stretch of eastern water.
He studied the cove a moment, then nodded. “Yup. I can get her in there. But why do you want me to avoid the bubble, exactly? It didn’t do us any harm the last time.”
“We were alone inside last time. I don’t really want to be inside with those things just yet,” I said.
He nodded, brought the burbling engines back up just a little, and then put the big boat in forward gear, easing it around the flickering mist edge of the Grey boundary, keeping us in the normal and the things inside undisturbed by our passage.
As we slipped between the two arms of land that enclosed the cove, he brought the boat around sharply to port once again, keeping as much safe distance between us and the bubble as possible. We slid without challenge into the tiny cove on the island’s north shore.
The cove was nearly a perfect circle of water, embraced in the two reaching arms of the north and east points that enclosed the short spit of the park service dock at the south extreme of the bowl, directly across from the entrance. In spite of the early-summer weather, the calm little anchorage was abandoned; no other boat stood anywhere within the bay. The island beyond rose to a spine of rocky ground covered in still-green grass and tall, slim firs and cedars. The gentle slope at the dock’s end rose into craggy, tumbled cliffs on the curving scarp of the encircling points that enfolded the cove. To the west lay the northernmost point of the island, tall, stark, and black in the shadow of the slowly creeping sunset. On the east the cliff fell into a scatter of massive stones that had rolled down from the treed, curving spine of the island. The sun struck the wet black rocks a burnished gold that writhed with creatures.
“Don’t know that I’ve ever seen it this . . . empty,” Zantree said, his voice hushed as if he feared something watching us with malevolent intent.
I pointed to the eastern cliffs and their strange movement. “What’s that?”
Zantree peered at it, then pulled a pair of binoculars from a box fixed to the side of the steering station and looked through them.
“Otters. It’s a colony of sea otters. Well, I’ll be blowed. . . .”
TWENTY-FOUR
I found myself turning to watch the expressions of Quinton and Solis. Quinton stared toward the cliff, his mouth slightly open with excitement and awe. Solis looked haunted.
“Do you see . . . Fielding?” I asked Zantree.
He scanned the cliff with the binoculars. “Not sure. There’s a dark shape in the water near the cliff base that might be him—it’s a lot larger than the others. . . .”
“Can you get us near them without cutting into the bubble? We’re probably safer near the otters than anywhere else,” I said.