Isle of Shadows...
...the first few pages...
...by MontiLee Stormer and Rob Callahan
The two little corpses weighed him down more literally than he knew. Soaked through to the bone and listless from their ceaseless struggles, they rested behind him. The desire to escape their father was as insatiable as it was unfulfilled, perhaps eternally, and the exhaustion inherent in their plight held them in a hopeless, motionless funk from which they'd become too tired to stir any more than rarely, briefly. Their lifeless eyes stared at the wide-open sky as they rested with their backs on the ground with chains kinking slightly beneath their heads. Eventually the man would move again. Eventually they would be dragged across the well-kept lawn toward the next hedge or bush or patch of flowers. Eventually their awareness of the grounds-keeper to whom they were attached would congeal and come upon them as he carried them through his world of breath and blood.
Such was their notion of the living, the notion they had only when one the living affected them. They knew the grounds keeper was near because the chains were not long, but the rest of the corporeal world mostly eluded their notice. The flowers and trees, the birds overhead and the bugs in the ground were phantasms or mirages to them at best. In the world in which the ghostly children dwelt there was only them, their father, and the girl watching quietly, fidgeting anxiously as she did, from nearby. Of her they were only aware, as are wild animals of an oncoming storm. She was about to descend on them and, while she was little more to them than a looming idea, a breeze carrying impending inclemency, she existed. They could feel her stirring and inching ever closer. The eyes of the storm were fixed unfailingly upon them.
The storm - its name was Catherine - stared from some distance across the meticulously manicured lawn. Between the girl and the dead children stretched a thick, soft carpet of healthy grass. Mist and moisture from the sea rolled over it all and, along with the sun through clouds cloaking most days, kept the vegetation healthy and strong. Of what little the elements failed, the man who kept the grounds provided. Sustenance was offered amply and with ease by nature, and with great toil and sweat by man, but offered regardless of expense was it. All things involved did their necessary share to keep the system thriving. For the air, the sea and the land, it was a matter of providing the essential parts that were needed. For the man, it was an obsession with keeping things alive. Desire for life or obsession with its inverse not withstanding, he played his part, dutifully and unflinching, though there were days, more frequently as the days grew shorter, when it was absolutely the last thing he wanted to do.
The house glowered on its foundation and was unlike the sculptured land surrounding it. Perhaps once clean and majestic, it had declined in the time since Catherine's birth. The vines that crept upward along its outer walls juxtaposed the foliage of the lawn and garden. They sprawled randomly across the gray stone surfaces and seemed often as if they were reaching out from the house, grasping hopelessly for some other nearby surface to which they could cling. Old cobwebs hung in corners where walls met ceilings and collected only dust. The makers and marks of those sticky, silken nets had fled the house ages ago. Wood and plaster parts of the structure, where age and environment might normally have nourished numerous molds and mildews, were sterile despite dampness and darkness. There were shadows everywhere, in places shadows had no right to be, but there was only the Jardin family to notice them, and more pressing concerns occupied their minds. All other living things had fled the house when the quiet little girl first came into it. As she came from the womb of flesh, revenants and spirits were born around her. A womb of darkness veiled itself over her and grew as she did. No plant, bacteria or beast with a sense of the supernatural would have stayed in her presence of its own accord, and that left only her family and the living, breathing humans whose belief in such things fell somewhere between faint and none at all.
As such humans were rare on the Island, Catherine's childhood was a lonely one, and her loneliness was as a beacon beckoning into the darkness. She was a lighthouse standing sentinel where the ocean of the dead pounded against the land of the living and she warded off not so much as one weary traveler as they floated in. She grew older and stronger, and so too did the otherworldly oddities drawn to her. As she drifted further from the solid and coherent world into which she was born, other things inched closer to it. The cradle and crib, cages to contain the woes she wrought, were long behind her. No construct could continue to constrain the innocent infant that had grown into an enlightened little girl. Caring for her had become less prevention than reaction. Control of the damage increasingly left in her wake was the primary responsibility of her caretakers and, just as she watched the grounds keeper from a notable distance, so too did her mother from a distance judged safe. At that distance Mrs. Jardin stayed until she could no longer, until by necessity she had to step in and take on the increasingly difficult task of soothing her daughter's destructive dander.
From a second floor window the waning, wasting woman watched and wrung her hands, for the little girl's tensing and rapt concentration focused toward the man with sheers in his hands advertised her intent. Her anticipation was clear as that of some wild predator prowling the pastures wherein its prey grazed. Catherine would move in soon. The best her mother could hope for was that the girl's attack would be benign, that the child would simply annoy the man with odd questions and queer observations, but she had learned the hard way over the years never to hope for the best.
Catherine would make her way across the grass to engage him soon, but for the moment she sat unobserved and watched the twitching and stirring of his dead children's specters. That they had drowned was obvious enough as evidenced by their being soaked and tattered, as if high waves had smashed them against stone worn smooth by so many other waves before, thrown them hard against the cold, wet surfaces and waited for the limp bodies to slide back into the water, so as to take them a short distance away and toss them yet again. Catherine imagined their appearances when they were finally fished from the sea: Their bones pulverized, their insides like jelly, their skin soft and yellowing with the bruises forming beneath its top layer. The phantoms on the ground were made before their corresponding corpses took the worst of their beatings. The physical remnants of the bodies had long since been reduced to flesh sacks of pureed human remains, but the other remnants, the ethereal, were simply waterlogged and frightened. They were just as they had been in the moment they were pulled from their respective bodies and chained to their mourning father's skull.
While the children were barely aware of her, Catherine was acutely so of them. Their sad, haunting presence on the grass behind their father demanded her approach. They pulled her like falling apples to the ground and she fell upon them finally, succumbing to their lure and clipping across the lawn to her own spot behind the man, next to them. Her little feet seemed to sink deeper into the earth with every step, as if each stride close brought her further into a soggy mire. By the time she reached them, her steps were as upon a vast, soggy sponge, or so she imagined. To the grounds keeper, the ground was solid and dry. Only to Catherine and the children did the footing seem submerged. She glared at them as she neared. They stirred and tried to pull away but their chains held fast. The grounds keeper felt an itch on the back of his skull where the chains tugged, unknown to him, and he scratched absentmindedly there. Catherine looked from the children, her eyes moving quickly along the length of the chains, to the man. She watched his fingers pass through the links embedded in his skull as if they weren't there.
But she could see them, they had to be there! She didn't understand, but she knew they were there. He must be playing some trick on her. That had to be it. He was playing some cruel prank grown-ups played on little girls. This was no different, she judged, than when they pretended not to see the lights dancing through the woods in the distance or when they played deaf to the mournful cries of those shimmering silhouettes who roamed the hillsides. He was toying with her and she was not in a mood for it, so she confronted him.
Fists on her hips, her face duly contorted in a disapproving scowl, the sole stock and trade of indignant six-year-olds' scorn, she demanded, "What are you doing?"
The grounds keeper, both having failed to notice her approach and previously believing he was completely alone, spun around at the sound of her voice. The initial surprise caused a lurch in his gut and an intake of air, but the gasp subsided as consciousness caught up with reflex and he realized just who his visitor was. Away he cast his compulsory thoughts of the dearly departed as he forced his stubble-rimmed lips to curl into a smile. The daughter of his employer, no matter how creepy, was both adorable and harmless as far as he cared to tell. He would consider her company a welcome distraction from some incessant, tragic memory.
"Hello, Katie." His voice boomed to her small ears like underground thunder, buried as it was beneath his thick accent. The sound was as gritty as the sand in his children's lungs and as worn as the bone that scraped along the rocks. "What are you doing?"
"I asked you first," she told him as she kicked her glower up a notch. The grounds keeper laughed heartily with only the faintest subconscious hint of nervousness. His Katie was an odd one, but he was learning.
"I guess you did, girl," he boomed as he set his hedge sheers down. A blue tin toolbox sat at his side, and he fished around inside until his hand retracted, grasping another device of his trade. Catherine looked not at his emerging hand, but into the depths of the box. She wondered what else was within, and asked as much while he went back to work on the hedge.
"I've got everything in there," he explained, raising his long reach pruners and going to work on the higher parts of the hedge. "Pruners, shears, snips, saws, and loppers. Everything a body needs to keep the hedge healthy."
"You have knives." Catherine focused keenly on the shiny blades laying lengthwise within the box. From her distance, she could barely see over its rim, but she could see enough to warrant more inspection.
"Plenty," he replied.
"What do you do with these?" As she stepped closer to the box for a better look, her feet passed through the chains that had beckoned her. A shiver, numbness and the feeling of pins passed through her legs where the chains touched them. Each sensation in succession took its turn before fading. Each served to remind her of the reason she had approached. The chains rattled silently as her solid flesh passed through their haze. They didn't do that when the grounds keeper put his hand through them, but they clung slightly to the disturbance of her flesh, adhering to her living essence, before falling back into intangibility. This she took as further evidence that the man was playing some game with her. It was up to her to decipher the rules and win, and she hoped that when she did this time the grown-ups would finally show some sense and congratulate her. She was sick of winning and earning only punishment as her reward.
"The knives? I've got a couple for grafting, some for pruning and budding. That funny-looking bent one is for veggies, but I don't get much use of it here." He turned, taking his attention away from the hedge, and looked at his newfound pupil. She was holding the vegetable knife awkwardly and thrusting through the air behind him. He couldn't see the invisible chains she endeavored to cut, but he felt the itch return to his scalp as her hand passed through and rattled them again. He scratched his skin again with one hand while the other dropped its tool and reached toward the knife Catherine was slicing through thin air.
"They're not toys, dear," he said as he placed the knife back within the box. "If a little girl wasn't careful with one of these, she might hurt someone."
"By cutting them?"
"Cutting," he said, "stabbing, skewering." He stopped himself. It hadn't been so long since he was raising children of his own, and he still understood that there were certain words one didn't introduce to a child, especially a wee nutter like Katie. It was safer to bleed a carcass out over circling sharks than to give the girl ideas like that. "There are plenty of ways to hurt someone with a knife. We don't want to hurt people. Do we, Katie?" Satisfied that he'd dissuaded her, the man retrieved his tool from the ground and went back to work on the hedge.
"Like you're cutting the plants," she said as she resumed inventorying the toolbox. "Why are you hurting them?"
"Plants don't feel pain, Katie." He punctuated his sentence with an angled snip of a withering twig.
"Yes they do." Catherine knew they did. Surely he must know, too. His nonsensical statement concerning the feelings of foliage must have been another part of the game. "They're alive so they do." Her eyes fell on something else in the toolbox, something long and sharp and heavy, and she fixated on it while she carried on playing his game.
...by MontiLee Stormer and Rob Callahan
The two little corpses weighed him down more literally than he knew. Soaked through to the bone and listless from their ceaseless struggles, they rested behind him. The desire to escape their father was as insatiable as it was unfulfilled, perhaps eternally, and the exhaustion inherent in their plight held them in a hopeless, motionless funk from which they'd become too tired to stir any more than rarely, briefly. Their lifeless eyes stared at the wide-open sky as they rested with their backs on the ground with chains kinking slightly beneath their heads. Eventually the man would move again. Eventually they would be dragged across the well-kept lawn toward the next hedge or bush or patch of flowers. Eventually their awareness of the grounds-keeper to whom they were attached would congeal and come upon them as he carried them through his world of breath and blood.
Such was their notion of the living, the notion they had only when one the living affected them. They knew the grounds keeper was near because the chains were not long, but the rest of the corporeal world mostly eluded their notice. The flowers and trees, the birds overhead and the bugs in the ground were phantasms or mirages to them at best. In the world in which the ghostly children dwelt there was only them, their father, and the girl watching quietly, fidgeting anxiously as she did, from nearby. Of her they were only aware, as are wild animals of an oncoming storm. She was about to descend on them and, while she was little more to them than a looming idea, a breeze carrying impending inclemency, she existed. They could feel her stirring and inching ever closer. The eyes of the storm were fixed unfailingly upon them.
The storm - its name was Catherine - stared from some distance across the meticulously manicured lawn. Between the girl and the dead children stretched a thick, soft carpet of healthy grass. Mist and moisture from the sea rolled over it all and, along with the sun through clouds cloaking most days, kept the vegetation healthy and strong. Of what little the elements failed, the man who kept the grounds provided. Sustenance was offered amply and with ease by nature, and with great toil and sweat by man, but offered regardless of expense was it. All things involved did their necessary share to keep the system thriving. For the air, the sea and the land, it was a matter of providing the essential parts that were needed. For the man, it was an obsession with keeping things alive. Desire for life or obsession with its inverse not withstanding, he played his part, dutifully and unflinching, though there were days, more frequently as the days grew shorter, when it was absolutely the last thing he wanted to do.
The house glowered on its foundation and was unlike the sculptured land surrounding it. Perhaps once clean and majestic, it had declined in the time since Catherine's birth. The vines that crept upward along its outer walls juxtaposed the foliage of the lawn and garden. They sprawled randomly across the gray stone surfaces and seemed often as if they were reaching out from the house, grasping hopelessly for some other nearby surface to which they could cling. Old cobwebs hung in corners where walls met ceilings and collected only dust. The makers and marks of those sticky, silken nets had fled the house ages ago. Wood and plaster parts of the structure, where age and environment might normally have nourished numerous molds and mildews, were sterile despite dampness and darkness. There were shadows everywhere, in places shadows had no right to be, but there was only the Jardin family to notice them, and more pressing concerns occupied their minds. All other living things had fled the house when the quiet little girl first came into it. As she came from the womb of flesh, revenants and spirits were born around her. A womb of darkness veiled itself over her and grew as she did. No plant, bacteria or beast with a sense of the supernatural would have stayed in her presence of its own accord, and that left only her family and the living, breathing humans whose belief in such things fell somewhere between faint and none at all.
As such humans were rare on the Island, Catherine's childhood was a lonely one, and her loneliness was as a beacon beckoning into the darkness. She was a lighthouse standing sentinel where the ocean of the dead pounded against the land of the living and she warded off not so much as one weary traveler as they floated in. She grew older and stronger, and so too did the otherworldly oddities drawn to her. As she drifted further from the solid and coherent world into which she was born, other things inched closer to it. The cradle and crib, cages to contain the woes she wrought, were long behind her. No construct could continue to constrain the innocent infant that had grown into an enlightened little girl. Caring for her had become less prevention than reaction. Control of the damage increasingly left in her wake was the primary responsibility of her caretakers and, just as she watched the grounds keeper from a notable distance, so too did her mother from a distance judged safe. At that distance Mrs. Jardin stayed until she could no longer, until by necessity she had to step in and take on the increasingly difficult task of soothing her daughter's destructive dander.
From a second floor window the waning, wasting woman watched and wrung her hands, for the little girl's tensing and rapt concentration focused toward the man with sheers in his hands advertised her intent. Her anticipation was clear as that of some wild predator prowling the pastures wherein its prey grazed. Catherine would move in soon. The best her mother could hope for was that the girl's attack would be benign, that the child would simply annoy the man with odd questions and queer observations, but she had learned the hard way over the years never to hope for the best.
Catherine would make her way across the grass to engage him soon, but for the moment she sat unobserved and watched the twitching and stirring of his dead children's specters. That they had drowned was obvious enough as evidenced by their being soaked and tattered, as if high waves had smashed them against stone worn smooth by so many other waves before, thrown them hard against the cold, wet surfaces and waited for the limp bodies to slide back into the water, so as to take them a short distance away and toss them yet again. Catherine imagined their appearances when they were finally fished from the sea: Their bones pulverized, their insides like jelly, their skin soft and yellowing with the bruises forming beneath its top layer. The phantoms on the ground were made before their corresponding corpses took the worst of their beatings. The physical remnants of the bodies had long since been reduced to flesh sacks of pureed human remains, but the other remnants, the ethereal, were simply waterlogged and frightened. They were just as they had been in the moment they were pulled from their respective bodies and chained to their mourning father's skull.
While the children were barely aware of her, Catherine was acutely so of them. Their sad, haunting presence on the grass behind their father demanded her approach. They pulled her like falling apples to the ground and she fell upon them finally, succumbing to their lure and clipping across the lawn to her own spot behind the man, next to them. Her little feet seemed to sink deeper into the earth with every step, as if each stride close brought her further into a soggy mire. By the time she reached them, her steps were as upon a vast, soggy sponge, or so she imagined. To the grounds keeper, the ground was solid and dry. Only to Catherine and the children did the footing seem submerged. She glared at them as she neared. They stirred and tried to pull away but their chains held fast. The grounds keeper felt an itch on the back of his skull where the chains tugged, unknown to him, and he scratched absentmindedly there. Catherine looked from the children, her eyes moving quickly along the length of the chains, to the man. She watched his fingers pass through the links embedded in his skull as if they weren't there.
But she could see them, they had to be there! She didn't understand, but she knew they were there. He must be playing some trick on her. That had to be it. He was playing some cruel prank grown-ups played on little girls. This was no different, she judged, than when they pretended not to see the lights dancing through the woods in the distance or when they played deaf to the mournful cries of those shimmering silhouettes who roamed the hillsides. He was toying with her and she was not in a mood for it, so she confronted him.
Fists on her hips, her face duly contorted in a disapproving scowl, the sole stock and trade of indignant six-year-olds' scorn, she demanded, "What are you doing?"
The grounds keeper, both having failed to notice her approach and previously believing he was completely alone, spun around at the sound of her voice. The initial surprise caused a lurch in his gut and an intake of air, but the gasp subsided as consciousness caught up with reflex and he realized just who his visitor was. Away he cast his compulsory thoughts of the dearly departed as he forced his stubble-rimmed lips to curl into a smile. The daughter of his employer, no matter how creepy, was both adorable and harmless as far as he cared to tell. He would consider her company a welcome distraction from some incessant, tragic memory.
"Hello, Katie." His voice boomed to her small ears like underground thunder, buried as it was beneath his thick accent. The sound was as gritty as the sand in his children's lungs and as worn as the bone that scraped along the rocks. "What are you doing?"
"I asked you first," she told him as she kicked her glower up a notch. The grounds keeper laughed heartily with only the faintest subconscious hint of nervousness. His Katie was an odd one, but he was learning.
"I guess you did, girl," he boomed as he set his hedge sheers down. A blue tin toolbox sat at his side, and he fished around inside until his hand retracted, grasping another device of his trade. Catherine looked not at his emerging hand, but into the depths of the box. She wondered what else was within, and asked as much while he went back to work on the hedge.
"I've got everything in there," he explained, raising his long reach pruners and going to work on the higher parts of the hedge. "Pruners, shears, snips, saws, and loppers. Everything a body needs to keep the hedge healthy."
"You have knives." Catherine focused keenly on the shiny blades laying lengthwise within the box. From her distance, she could barely see over its rim, but she could see enough to warrant more inspection.
"Plenty," he replied.
"What do you do with these?" As she stepped closer to the box for a better look, her feet passed through the chains that had beckoned her. A shiver, numbness and the feeling of pins passed through her legs where the chains touched them. Each sensation in succession took its turn before fading. Each served to remind her of the reason she had approached. The chains rattled silently as her solid flesh passed through their haze. They didn't do that when the grounds keeper put his hand through them, but they clung slightly to the disturbance of her flesh, adhering to her living essence, before falling back into intangibility. This she took as further evidence that the man was playing some game with her. It was up to her to decipher the rules and win, and she hoped that when she did this time the grown-ups would finally show some sense and congratulate her. She was sick of winning and earning only punishment as her reward.
"The knives? I've got a couple for grafting, some for pruning and budding. That funny-looking bent one is for veggies, but I don't get much use of it here." He turned, taking his attention away from the hedge, and looked at his newfound pupil. She was holding the vegetable knife awkwardly and thrusting through the air behind him. He couldn't see the invisible chains she endeavored to cut, but he felt the itch return to his scalp as her hand passed through and rattled them again. He scratched his skin again with one hand while the other dropped its tool and reached toward the knife Catherine was slicing through thin air.
"They're not toys, dear," he said as he placed the knife back within the box. "If a little girl wasn't careful with one of these, she might hurt someone."
"By cutting them?"
"Cutting," he said, "stabbing, skewering." He stopped himself. It hadn't been so long since he was raising children of his own, and he still understood that there were certain words one didn't introduce to a child, especially a wee nutter like Katie. It was safer to bleed a carcass out over circling sharks than to give the girl ideas like that. "There are plenty of ways to hurt someone with a knife. We don't want to hurt people. Do we, Katie?" Satisfied that he'd dissuaded her, the man retrieved his tool from the ground and went back to work on the hedge.
"Like you're cutting the plants," she said as she resumed inventorying the toolbox. "Why are you hurting them?"
"Plants don't feel pain, Katie." He punctuated his sentence with an angled snip of a withering twig.
"Yes they do." Catherine knew they did. Surely he must know, too. His nonsensical statement concerning the feelings of foliage must have been another part of the game. "They're alive so they do." Her eyes fell on something else in the toolbox, something long and sharp and heavy, and she fixated on it while she carried on playing his game.