Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“And what’s that then, lying around?”
“I dunno, maybe. Why can’t I just lie around? I don’t owe anyone suffering or working. So much fucking
working.”
“I have no idea what you’re on about,” he says flatly, a man who has clearly never not worked a day in his life.
I spread my hands. “Look, I get it. I was the same. I dropped out of school when I was fifteen so I could get a job to support my sisters. My dad had bailed and my mum was?… She couldn’t work. So I did. It’s all I did. Backbreaking labor for years and years. I had this insane drive to build a house that would keep my sisters safe. But it was stupid, and I’m sick of trying to make things that will survive this world because nothing can, anymore.”
At first I think he’s done with the conversation, that he will let that be the end. But then he says, “Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.”
He walks a couple of steps ahead and I take the moment to watch him, watch a droplet of water run off the tip of his nose, watch another
slide down into his beard. I imagine the taste of it, of his skin on my tongue. It startles me, and my foot glances off the edge of a rock and I stumble.
“You okay?”
I nod but I’m not. I know the curl of desire when I feel it.
There are two field huts: the closest has a blue door, the farther a red. Hank spent a lot of time living in the blue so that’s where we go; his room is small and empty. There are no pictures, no personal items. He has cleared it out completely, so that when I sit on this bed where he slept, I feel no part of him, and when I climb between his sheets there is no smell to bring him back, nothing at all, I am alone. I think of how I have felt this way in our bed too, the bed we shared before it was ash.
In the kitchen there is a small gas camp stove. Dom and Orly are already boiling frozen vegetables in pots and searing fillets of fish in a pan when I return from the bedroom. I closed my eyes for seconds and slept without meaning to. In my dream a child was running from me, hiding in the gaps between floorboards where I couldn’t reach him. I have had this dream before, but not for many years. It disturbs me that it should return now.
It stinks of bleach in this cabin. The smell seems incongruent to the feel of the place, and I try to work out why. Is it odd that it’s been cleaned so recently, given nobody has lived here in weeks? Maybe Dom and his kids stay here regularly when they visit the bank, and like to keep it spotless.
The snow has turned to rain and it batters the windows. I look out at the ocean. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing to the water. There is a kind of shadow beneath the surface. A shape. The waves crash over and around it.
They come to either side of me.
“There was a third field hut,” Dom tells me. “Green.”
“The sea used to be farther out,” Orly says. “But it came in.”
“It happened in the night,” Dom says. “A storm took out the support posts. Ate the outcrops. The hut sank into the waves.”
The hairs on my arms stand on end. “Was anyone hurt?”
“No,” Dom says, but I catch the glance between father and son.
Later, in the candlelight. In the little living room, on the couches. We have finished our dinner-too delicious to be called a camp meal-of bream on a bed of garlic greens.
“The time is upon us,” Orly says dramatically, grabbing a torch and flicking it on and off beneath his face. “Tonight you will learn about the Shearwater Carver.”
“Don’t waste the battery,” his dad says, so Orly switches off the torch with a huff. But his excitement can’t be dampened.
“Get ready to be scared, Rowan.”
“I’m ready, Orly.”
“Many years ago, on this very island, madness reigned.”
My eyebrows arch and I glance at his dad. Dom holds his hands up, like
don’t blame me for this.
“It was not long after the animal massacres had ended and the island had been named a wildlife sanctuary, so the feel of all that spilled blood lingered on. The scientists who came to work here were haunted by it, and by all the animal souls that remained.”
I don’t know who taught him this story, but he’s obviously learned the intonation and the pacing as well as he’s learned the words, and I suddenly find myself a bit creeped out.
“That haunting worked its way inside a young man called Carver. It whispered to him every night. The souls told him they needed to be avenged, and that any human life would do, but the more blood spilled the better. One night, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he took a carving knife from the kitchen and he went to each of the sleeping quarters, to each of the researchers asleep in their beds, and”-and here he shouts the last words-“stabbed them all dead!
“
I stare at him in horror. “Oh my god, you little ghoul.”
Orly giggles. “I didn’t make it up.”
“He heard his brother and sister telling it a few years ago.” Dom sighs. “Had nightmares about it for a month and then became obsessed with it.”
“Well you’ve done a good job, kid, I feel very uncomfortable.” I look at Dom. “Is that true?”
He shrugs.
“Nah,” Orly pipes in. “Can’t be. The voices are gentle. They don’t want anyone to die.”
Later, when Orly has fallen asleep in his father’s lap, I can’t help asking Dom about it.
“Who does he talk to?”
“He says the animals live in the wind. The ones that were killed.” Dom shakes his head slowly. “It scares me sometimes but it’s not just Orly. We all feel it here. The blood spilled. Don’t you think there should be a price to pay?”
I have felt it too. A stain on the island. But I shake my head, for this is not unusual. “We have a debt to pay to this whole world,” I say. “We’ve slaughtered creatures everywhere.”
“Only here it sends some of us mad.”