Filed to story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
He barrels into me and I hold him against me. His long white hair gets in my face and I absentmindedly start plaiting it for him.
“What did you and Rowan do in the base yesterday?” I ask him.
“Looked for a chemical.”
“What chemical?”
“Can’t remember.”
The kid can remember the entire encyclopedia of botanical scientific names but can’t recall the name of one chemical.
“Did she say what it was for?”
“She said biologists use it to detect copper and iron.”
I have no idea what this could mean but it leaves me uneasy.
We climb the hill to walk along the headland. I am extremely aware of the minutes passing. We keep our eyes glued to the water, to the horizon, to the coastline. Raff knows not to do this. It doesn’t make sense that they’d go exploring, not without telling me. If he goes out to record the whales, he has to be back within an hour or two. This is the only way we’ve been able to make a home here-by checking in with each other constantly, by never worrying each other.
“They’re okay,” Orly says. “They’re coming home.”
“How do you know?” Fen asks him.
“I would know if something had happened. They would have told me by now.”
When at last we see Raff and Rowan appear in the distance my knees almost buckle. The little black Zodiac zooms up from the south, and I can see as they draw closer that Raff is at the helm and he looks fine. Rowan sits beside him. There is surprising relief in me at the sight of her.
They stop, though, before they get to the beach. It takes me only a moment to see why, another moment to watch what happens, and then my heart fails.
Rowan
We don’t speak on the way home. A mantra ticks over in my head, a thought that drifted in early on, with no basis except a gut feeling, some terrible instinct rising to the surface.
They have killed him, goes the mantra.
They have killed him.
What follows that? Logically, what follows?
They’re going to kill me too.
No. Don’t be ridiculous.
Even the idea of them killing Hank is ridiculous. I can’t wrap my head around a single reason why.
But then I suppose that’s the way of all murders, isn’t it, to seem a complete mystery until the motive is uncovered.
So let me lay it out for myself. Desperate emails, calling for help.
I am in danger, they declared. Hank’s possessions hoarded secretly under a floor. And now blood in the hut where he lived, a lot of blood.
What do I do?
I spot the research base in the distance, nestled between the two lumps of island. I am very cold, despite the layers. All I can think about is a hot shower, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes long. We speed around the isthmus to the northern side of the beach, to our beach, but something makes Raff slow to a stop.
“Look,” he says.
It is another whale.
“A humpback,” he says, and I can hear in his voice that this is the one he wanted above all others, and I want to snap at him that it doesn’t matter, just get us to land, for god’s sake, but I glance at his face and it stops me. He’s just a kid, it’s easy to forget he’s still a kid, and he loves these whales, truly he loves them, and I don’t think he sees them very often.
The creature crests the water, waving its pectoral fin at us, and we both wave back. We see a second, much smaller, fin do the same, and I don’t think, I rocket to my feet because it’s a baby, it’s a mother and calf, and they are so lovely that both Raff and I are laughing, and I don’t want to go back to shore anymore, I want to stay here with them.
I cannot, in this moment, fathom the men who came here on their boats to kill these creatures. I can’t comprehend what could allow you to do that, what could drive you to it. They do not seem like they could belong to the same species, but maybe it is the animal in me that feels the love, the human that can detach from it.
I pull myself back to the moment and try to be within it. This will be over soon and I’ll regret not savoring every second.
The whales disappear briefly and then we see the baby do a kind of awkward leap out of the water, barely lifting its body. We cheer for it. It is adorable. We can’t see the mother anywhere, but we search for her.
“She might have dived?” I say after a while.
“Not without the calf,” Raff says.
I look behind us to the three waiting smudges on the headland. What will I say to him? How will he explain the blood? Is there anything he could say that would satisfy me? Make this pain in my chest go away? How do we move forward from here? I don’t know if I can climb that hill again, sleep in that lighthouse. I feel sickened by my thoughts about him, by the rising heat of my desire for him, by my lack of vigilance, by my distractions and my pleasure when I should have been pursuing Hank and nothing else.
That is the last coherent thought I have.
Because the mother whale, this mighty humpback, breaches the water right beside us, her body surging high into the air. Her arc is clear. She is so close I can see all the scratches on her skin, all the barnacles clinging on, every tiny detail. She blots out the sky. I know what will happen. We both do. I reach for Raff’s hand and squeeze it tight, and I look into his knowing eyes with time only to say, “It’s alright,” before she comes down on top of us.
Raff
He thinks of his mother. Just her name. He doesn’t have time to conjure anything else. And then, as the enormous body of this creature he loves falls toward him, he thinks it’s not a bad way to go. That actually, it is quite perfect.
Dominic
It isn’t until afterward that I am able to make sense of it. I must be mad for thinking any of this, must be imagining things. But it looks like she twists at the last moment. It looks like she leaps, is falling, sees them beneath her, and then pulls herself to the side, angling that massive body away from them. It looks like she tries to save them.
Rowan