“That is the plan,” I confirmed. Then I bent down and kissed her forehead and her mouth, gently, and leaned my forehead against hers. “Love you, too,” I whispered.
Her voice tightened. “You jerk. Good luck.”
“You, too,” I said. “Keys are in the ignition.”
Then I straightened, hitched up the heavy bags, and stalked toward the docks. I didn’t look at her as I walked away, and I didn’t look back.
That way, we could both pretend that I hadn’t seen her crying.
My brother owned an ancient battered commercial fishing boat. He told me it was a trawler. Or maybe he said troller. Or schooner. It was one of those—unless it wasn’t. Apparently, nautical types get real specific and fussy about the fine distinctions that categorize the various vessels—but since I’m not nautical, I don’t lose much sleep over the misuse of the proper term.
The boat is forty-two feet long and could have been a stunt double for Quint’s fishing boat in Jaws. It desperately needed a paint job, as the white of its hull had long since faded to grey and smoke-smudged black. The only fresh paint on it was a row of letters on the bow that read Water Beetle.
Getting Morgan on board was a pain—literally, in his case. We got him settled onto the bed in the little cabin and brought all the gear aboard. After that, I climbed up onto the bridge, started the engines with my copy of the Water Beetle’s key, and immediately realized I hadn’t cast off the lines. I had to go back down to the deck to untie us from the dock.
Look, I just told you—I’m not nautical.
Leaving the marina wasn’t hard. Thomas had a spot that was very near the open waters of the lake. I almost forgot to flick on the lights, but got them clicked on before we got out of the marina and onto the open water. Then I checked the compass next to the boat’s wheel, turned us a degree or two south of due east, and opened up the engine.
We started out over the blackness of the lake, the boat’s engines making a rather subdued, throaty lub lub dub lub sound. The boat had originally been built for charter use in the open sea, and it had some muscle. The water was calm tonight, and the ride remained smooth as we rapidly built up speed.
I felt a little nervous about the trip. Over the past year, Thomas and I had gone out to the island several times so that I could explore the place. He’d been teaching me how to handle the boat, but this was my first solo voyage.
After a few minutes, Molly came partway up the short ladder to the bridge and stopped. “Do I need to ask permission to come up there or something?”
“Why would you?” I asked.
She considered. “It’s what they do on
Star Trek ?”
“Good point,” I said. “Permission granted, Ensign.”
“Aye aye,” she said, and came up to stand next to me. She frowned at the darkness to the east, and cast a wary glance back at the rapidly fading lights of the city. “So. We’re going out to the weird island, the one with that big ley line running through it?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Where my dad got . . .”
I tried not to remember how badly Michael Carpenter had suffered when he had gone there with me. “Crippled,” I said. “Yeah.”
She frowned quietly. “I heard him talking to my mom about the island. But when I tried to go look it up, I couldn’t find it on any of the maps. Not even in the libraries.”
“Yeah,” I said. “From what I hear, bad things happened to everyone who went out there. There used to be some kind of port facility for fishing and merchant traffic, big as a small town, but it was abandoned. Sometime in the nineteenth century, the city completely expunged the place from its records.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t want anyone to go out there,” I said. “If they merely passed a law, they knew that sooner or later some moron would go there out of sheer contrariness. So they pretty much unmade the place, at least officially.”
“And in more than a century, no one’s ever seen it?”
“That dark ley line puts off a big field of energy,” I said. “It makes people nervous. Not insane or anything, but it’s enough to make them subconsciously avoid the place, if they aren’t making a specific effort to get there. Plus, there are stone reefs around a big portion of the island, and people tend to swing wide around it.”
She frowned. “Couldn’t that be a problem for us?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where to get through them.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Maybe she looked a little paler. “Oh,” she said. “Good. And we’re going there why?”
“The sanctum invocation,” I said. “The island has a kind of spirit to it, an awareness.”
“A genius loci,” she said.
I nodded approval. “Exactly that. And fed by that ley line, it’s a big, strong one. It doesn’t much care for visitors, either. It’s arranged to kill a bunch of them.”
Molly blinked. “And you want to do a sanctum invocation? There?”
“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I don’t want to. But I’ve got to find some way to give myself an edge tomorrow, or it’s all over but the crying.”
She shook her head slowly. Then she fell silent until we actually reached the island a little while later. It was dark, but I had enough moonlight and starlight to find the buoy Thomas and I had placed at the entry through the reef. I swung the Water Beetle through it, and began following the coastline of the island until I passed a second buoy and guided the boat into the small floating dock we’d constructed. I managed to get the vessel next to the dock without breaking anything, and hopped off with lines in hand to tie it off.
I looked up to find Molly holding my ritual box. She passed it to me and I nodded to her. “If this works, it should take me an hour or so,” I told her. “Stay with Morgan. If I’m not back by dawn, untie the boat, start the engine, and drive it back to the marina. It’s not too different from a car, for what you’ll be doing.”
She bit her lip and nodded. “What then?” she asked.
“Get to your dad. Tell him I said that you need to disappear. He’ll know what to do.”
“What about you?” she asked. “What will you be doing?”
I slipped the strap to the ritual box over one shoulder, took up my staff, and started toward the interior of the island.
“Not much,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ll be dead.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Grimm’s fairy tales, a compilation of the most widely known scary stories of Western Europe, darn near always feature a forest as the setting. Monstrous and terrifying things live there. When the hero of a given story sets out, the forest is a place of danger, a stronghold of darkness—and there’s a good reason for it.
It can be freaking frightening to be walking a forest in the dark. And if that isn’t enough, it’s dangerous, to boot.
You can’t see much. There are sounds around you, from the sigh of wind in the trees to the rustle of brush caused by a moving animal. Invisible things touch you suddenly and without warning—tree branches, spiderwebs, leaves, brush. The ground shifts and changes constantly, forcing you to compensate with every step as the earth below you rises or dips suddenly. Stones trip up your feet. So do ground-hugging vines, thorns, branches, and roots. The dark conceals sinkholes, embankments, and the edges of rock shelves that might drop you six inches or six feet.
In stories, you read about characters running through a forest at night. It’s a load of crap. Oh, maybe it’s feasible in really ancient pine forests, where the ground is mostly clear, or in those vast oak forests where they love to shoot Robin Hood movies and adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. But if you get into the thick native brush in the U.S., you’re better off finding a big stick and breaking your own ankle than you are trying to sprint through it blind.