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clockworkeerie · 7 months

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September 23rd 2010

i) The tide was lower than Magritte had ever seen it.

Perhaps ‘seen’ was the wrong word to use. The inky darkness of night swallowed the barren, stoney features of Smelt Bay, as well as the ocean that lapped distantly at its shore. Rather, she heard it; the white noise of the waves breaking unusually far away. All the better, honestly. She wasn’t here to swim. In fact, Smelt Bay was a terrible beach for swimming. It wasn’t just that the frigid coastline lacked in soft, warm sand; the uneven and slippery rockbed that composed the entire stretch of bay was covered, acre by acre, in countless oyster shells. They adorned almost every rock they could cling to, and their razor sharp edges could slice easily through hand and foot like a warm knife through butter. Which is why Magritte plodded along, slowly and carefully, in her brand new hiking boots.

Raf had cautioned her against clambering around the beach so late at night and, usually, she heeded his anxieties about it. It wasn’t initially her intention to scramble down the bluff and onto the beach; she had only wanted to come out and watch the seafoam crash gently upon the stones. At night, under the moonlight, the contrast between white foam and inky water enchanted her with its otherworldly beauty. However, upon reaching the beach, the tide had been drawn out further than she could see. And so now, she was looking for it.

She had the good sense not to stumble forward in the dark, using her phone as a torch to illuminate the path in front of her. She loved scouring the beach at low tide. Countless crabs of all sizes scuttled and scurried beneath the unnatural light of her phone. Her eyes met with the occasional, chubby pink and purple starfish that had been abandoned by the retreating ocean. Both the crabs and the brightly coloured starfish were a common sight on these beaches and, while she appreciated their company, they failed to make her pause. What did capture her attention was a fat, orange blob of a creature.

What are you? Magritte stopped to crouch down for a better look, lifting her phone to shine upon it. Oh, just another starfish… Well, no. Not really. It had one, two, three, four…eight…thirteen legs! She stared at it for a moment of deliberation before extending a tentative forefinger to poke its roughly textured, glistening surface. Before her finger could get within an inch of it, a gentle blanketing wave of frothy ocean fanned out between her and the creature, covering both it and her hiking boots in several inches of freezing water.

With a startled yelp at the stabbing cold, Magritte bolted upright as she found herself soaked to the ankles.

“Aw, shit-!” She lifted one foot out, and then the other in an awkward hopping skip, trying in vain to keep her feet up, out of the rogue wave. Apparently, the tide had been a lot closer than she thought. She continued her silly, wet, hop-scotchy walk back towards the bluffs with a self-depreciative chuckle. She expected the wave to recede.

But it didn’t.

Instead, another wave layered itself on top, swallowing her calves, and then another that submerged her past the knee. The arresting shock of the cold was outcompeted by the jolt of fear that kicked her into a frantic scramble. As she abandoned caution, the forceful current of the tide rose past her waistline, shoving her forward and off her feet. The water’s piercing chill bit through her chest, squeezing a sharp gasp from her just as her head was pulled beneath the waves.

Primal terror possessed her to reach forward with her hands and find purchase on any surface she could grab. Her fingers closed around fists full of jagged oyster shells that held like cement to the stones they were anchored to. As the ripping current suddenly dragged Magritte back, the soft flesh of her grasping palms may as well have been wet tissue for how well they maintained their structure. What little air she held her lungs escaped with the muffled scream that boiled out from her throat. She tumbled like a rag doll as she was pulled backward by the powerful riptide. Her knees and elbows painfully scraped across the oyster-laiden ground in intervals that only served to further disorient her.

Panic crescendoed, blackening the edges of her vision just in time for her head to break through the surface of the waves. She treaded water with wild, unevenly flailing limbs, drawing in a sharp gasp that was quickly strangled by a fit of wet coughing. Chest, hands, arms, knees, everything burned. And what didn’t burn felt as though it were being needled by cold knives. She couldn’t stop coughing. She couldn’t draw a proper breath. Her head rushed with the sound of waves. Or blood. Her eyes were useless as strangled tears obscured her vision.

Until, at last, her coughing subsided, and she drew in one…two…three shaky, shallow breaths. She held it for a moment, the best she could.

And…it was quiet.

The sound of water lapping at her jawline and behind her ears outcompeted the volume of waves across the distant shore.

The very distant shore.

She released her breath, surrendering to over-exerted panting. But, even her starving lungs were too constricted by the freezing water to draw in proper gulps of air. Her breaths were short, sharp, and uneven as she attempted to scan the landscape for signs of the shore.

She could not see land; not even the light of distant houses. Beneath the starry sky, the world around her seemed unnaturally dark.

A nervous laugh broke out of her throat, accompanied with a teeth-clattering, quiet little chant. “F-fuck, fuck, f-fuck, fuck.”

The searing hot pain of her oyster-inflicted wounds had, at least, subsided rather quickly. She didn’t attempt to move her fingers, let alone ball her hands into fists. She didn’t even dare to look at them. She could barely feel them at all.

Experimentally, she drew in as deep a breath as she could, and stopped treading water. She felt herself begin to sink, and with more effort than it was worth, she shrugged off her jacket and kicked off her boots. Or rather, her boot, singular. Apparently, she had lost the other one already. Her feet were so numb that she couldn’t feel the difference. Shedding the remaining boot hardly made her more buoyant, but it felt like it helped.

She attempted to curl her lips into a smile. “O-okay, w…well…If I had to choose…between f-freezing to d-eath or drowning, I’d rather freeze. S-so let's focus on that, I g-uess.”

Bleak.

Was there any point in swimming when she couldn’t see the shore? How long could someone survive in water like this? Was she afraid of dying?

Not nearly as afraid as I was just a few moments ago.

She should have felt…more upset than this. It seemed strange. Maybe she was just too cold to think properly, but most likely, the reality of her situation hadn’t set in yet. After all, the situation was salvageable. A boat could come along and haul her out of the water. The tide could wash her up onto the shore. There were lots of different little islands around here, she was bound to wash up on the shore of one, right? What were the chances of that happening before she could freeze to death?

…How long would it take for the hopelessness to set in? If she could keep making light of the situation, it couldn’t be that bad, right?

“And, yan-n-no…it’s been a g-good run.”

…Hasn’t it?

Truth be told, things had only just started getting really good. Well, kinda. This year was a rough patch. Uncle Bill’s passing in late April had really…thrown things askew. But the island was a perfect escape from the fake sympathies, the incessant phone calls, the social obligations…all the stress… It was gonna give them the peace, quiet, and space to properly grieve. We were gonna start playing music again. They had only been on the island for a week. The cottage Bill had left to Raf was so nice. It had a piano. It was cute. Warm.

Of all things, it was the thought of the cottage’s little black wood stove that made Magritte’s eyes water with a sudden stab of helpless dismay.

No, why? That’s so stupid.

Why the stove? Why not the grief of her parents? Why not the fact that she’d never be able to play music again? Why not–

“Raf.” It came out as a croak that she barely even recognized as her own voice. “S-shit. I’m sorry, Raf. M-man. This was my s-stupid idea. It was my id-dea to come here, it was s-s-supposed to be so good. B-but…th-this is r-really…gonna…wreck you, isn’t it.”

There was a long pause as Magritte bobbed uselessly with the waves, trying to will her numb, sluggish limbs to move in a manner that allowed her to survey her surroundings once again for any sign of land. Maybe she should just start swimming in a direction, would that have been better? Would it make her feel warmer? Or…would it just exhaust her faster?

She was already so tired.

I don’t want to be anyone’s traumatic loss, I just want to be warm.

How the hell did this even happen? What caused the ocean to hit her so suddenly, like a river?

It doesn’t make sense. What if this is just a really bad dream? I could wake up in bed, soft and warm, and held…coffee...and…eggs. Over easy in front of the wood stove. Pyjamas…slippers, but like…not the linoleum kind, it needs to have enough structural integrity for breakfast…to support the…workload and drive me to the–

-PIFFF-

Magritte hadn’t realised that her eyelids were closed, but the sudden explosive hissing that erupted right beside her caused them to snap wide open. For a second, she thought that something had fallen off the top shelf of her closet. But almost as quickly as she imagined that, the biting cold water encroaching on the corners of her nose and eyes reminded her of where she was.

-FIFFFFF-

The same sound again, slightly further away. Panic rejuvenated her for a brief moment until she saw the source of the noise. A jet of pale mist erupted from the surface of the water, and in its wake, a dark, triangular silhouette glided smoothly downward. The wet, rubbery flesh glistened in the moonlight before sinking beneath the rolling waves.

Whales.

Magritte attempted to lift her head enough to see if she could spot them again. Sure enough, three or four more of the creatures surfaced silently. The ghostly silhouettes of their dorsal fins were all that gave away their position. These must have been the orcas the neighbours had mentioned. Even Raf once managed to catch a glimpse of them from the shore, but Magritte hadn’t been with him to see it. She had wanted so badly to look at them…

“Oh…well, thanks for showing up, guys.” Her teeth weren’t clattering anymore, but she could hardly bring her voice above a whisper. For some reason, her throat felt so tight. “Please don’t toss me around like a seal… I’ve seen what you do to them…on t.v.”

The whales responded with a series of loud, spouting breaths; some nearby, others further away. As she recalled the image of a half flayed seal rag-dolling through the air, anxiety blossomed in the pit of her stomach, Magritte turned her gaze upward and hung it on the three bright stars of Orion’s belt.

If making noise is encouraged as a way of deterring bears from harassing hikers, maybe the same was true for whales and swimmers. I can be weird and loud, can’t I?

She attempted to sing a song. Her strangled voice rasped, fruitlessly struggling to be heard above the sounds around her.

“What are you hunting up there in the stars?

Is it beasts, or demons, or old battle scars?

Do you remember the warmth of my palm in yours

Is it buried in rubble from all of those wars?

You’ve lost yourself so far, far away

Searching for ghosts and impossible prey.

You’ve flown too far from the earth and the sea,

Please come back…come back…

…Come back to…”

As her words drifted, so too did she; down, down, into the cold, quiet void.

And it embraced her, lovingly.

ii)

Raf’s eyes opened to the sound of ocean waves and a dull ache in his neck. Light poured out from the cottage windows, pooling warmly across the sprucewood deck and the white, woven hammock that cradled him. An earbud filled his left ear, but no music played. Either his iphone had come to the end of his playlist, or it had run out its battery life while he slept.

With a tired groan, he sat up and stretched, gingerly tilting his head to loosen the painful knot in his neck. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but he should have expected it after a relaxing joint and some quality tunes. He wasn’t sure what had woken him up. Perhaps it was the chill. It wasn’t cold enough for his breath to hang in the air, but it was chilly enough for him to wish for a sweater–rather than a t-shirt–beneath his jacket.

Or maybe it was the concussive sound of the waves.

The ocean wasn’t visible from his cottage. There was a strip of dense forest that lined the property and separated it from the bluffs. Still, the white noise of the ocean could always be heard through the trees. The salt could be smelled on the breeze, and it could be felt collecting in his hair. It must have been exceptionally turbulent out there tonight, for he could hear the waves crashing with an unusually loud clarity.

Raf lifted his phone and turned on the LED screen to check the time. Its battery life was still good, but as he had suspected, his playlist had played through to the last track.

1:34 a.m.

The corners of Raf’s mouth twitched.

Magritte hadn’t woken him up to herd him into bed when she came home. Was she pissed off at him for declining to walk with her?

In fairness, he had been…difficult to manage the past half year. And it became increasingly obvious that Magritte’s bountiful patience had been running thin over the past month or two. She had begun to adopt his defensive snippiness–not at him, but at the things she knew infringed upon him. Phone calls, text messages, the gestures of concerned friends and colleagues reaching out to see if he was okay. The cold, prying interrogations–thinly veiled by hollow sympathies–querying for available pieces of his uncle’s estate.

The man’s body hardly had time to grow cold before Ephrem representatives began hounding Raf about the company shares he had inherited. His family in Monaco had gone so far as to request the retrieval of Uncle Bill’s body. “He should be put to rest on home soil”–but his will had detailed what was to be done. By his request, Uncle Bill’s body was kept here, in British Columbia. Raf had to take care of it all; the estate, the funeral, and the vultures.

All he wanted to do was hide.

And, in a way, that’s mostly what he did. He managed as much as he could, but once the funeral had been concluded, his energy and willingness to keep on top of things dissolved. He just couldn’t…deal…with the people. Any of them. At some point, they had all stopped resembling human beings, and felt more like a pack of feral dogs with no purpose greater than to sate their gluttony. Every interaction bloodied him with clawing, hungry teeth.

Magritte picked up the slack for him. It was…beyond her ability, honestly. But she did her best, at the expense of indulging her passions. While he isolated and avoided the torrent of his unwanted responsibilities, Magritte had lived those months constantly on the backfoot, attempting to hold things together and never quite managing to see any of it through properly. It was simply too many balls for her poor little arms to carry, and as she tried to pick up the ones she had dropped, more always spilled out.

Last month, it had finally driven her to tears.

Raf had been woefully inadequate at showing his appreciation for her efforts and, even as he watched her sob in frustration, he found it difficult to provide any meaningful comfort. Nothing broke his heart quite like seeing her cry, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to promise any fun distractions. He couldn’t tell her, in earnest, that things were fine. He couldn’t give her the reward of knowing that she had been able to make everything right and good for him. He could only tell her that he knew she was doing her best, that he was glad to have her with him, and that he loved her.

More than anything, he loved her.

Talk was cheap. He knew that better than anyone. But living in ‘survival mode’ left very little in the way of emotional resources, and he had become very cold, irritable, and distant. Still, Magritte sought out his company. She wished to share good experiences with him and did her best to take care of him despite his diminishing reciprocation over the past few months.

Retreating to Cortes Island had been her idea. She had never visited the place before, but when Raf described it as a tiny, isolated little community with no supermarkets nor chain restaurants, no hospitals nor police stations, and with the population of a small school, her eyes lit up.

“It’s perfect! We could just disappear there and take a year–or five–to just…recover from everything!” Her tone had taken on a conspiratorial tone when she added, “We don’t have to tell anyone.”

She had underestimated the scope of work that accompanied ‘disappearing to a small island for a year’. In contrast, the workload was all his mind could fixate on. But– a body of water separating him from the relentless chaos of the mainland was appealing enough for him to commit to the move. And so, they made their hasty preparations, packed up, and left without a word.

A week had passed since they moved into the small cottage, and Raf had to admit that the quiet calm of the island was…a relief.

He had asked Magritte for a month. A month of nothing; no outings, no plans, no obligations–just rest. It was the closest thing to hibernation he was ever going to experience, and she had agreed to it. It didn’t stop her, though, from inviting him out for walks, and to see the ocean with her. It was the bare minimum, and he should have obliged her more often than he did. But truly, all he wanted to do was stay home, smoke weed, listen to music, and sleep.

And that’s what he had chosen to do when she invited him to watch the waves with her, some time after 10pm. She didn’t seem bothered when he lazily declined to accompany her, but perhaps she had grown cranky about it during her time out. Seeing him passed out in the hammock, she probably left him to endure the natural consequences of his poor choices, and went to bed without him.

Honestly, catching a chill and a sore neck was negligible punishment compared to the guilt of disappointing Margie. On the other hand, he had asked her for a month–just one month–to be as lazy and absent as he wanted to be, and she had agreed to it. So if she was pissed off at him–

Her shoes were not at the front door.

Usually, Magritte kicked her boots off before entering the house, and rarely brought them inside. Raf opened the door, expecting to see them on the shoe rack, but they weren’t there either. Nor was her jacket strewn over the back of the couch as it should have been.

He stepped inside, closing the door behind him, and marched quietly up the steep, narrow little staircase to the second floor. Down the short corridor, his bedroom door was still open and he could see through to his window and the night sky that overlooked the foot of his bed. Peeking his head in, the blankets laid smooth and undisturbed across the mattress, folded over to expose the neatly arranged pillows.

Raf pulled himself back into the tiny corridor with a bewildered frown. “Margie?” It wasn’t a yell, but his voice projected loudly enough to be heard throughout the small cottage.

There was no answer, only the gentle hum of the fridge downstairs, accompanied by the rustling of leaves in the breeze outside. And the crashing of waves upon the unseen shore.

With an agitated groan Raf dropped back down the stairs, towards the front door, and hastily put on his sneakers. Something at the beach must have captivated her. Maybe some weird sealife, maybe partying campers. Either way, she had lost track of time, and now he had to go find her. At least she couldn’t be disappointed with him if she had chosen to stay out at a worryingly late hour.

The beach wasn’t more than a fifteen minute walk away, and all he had to do was follow the gravel road down the slope, onto Potlatch Road, and then down to Smelt Bay. There were no lamps lining the street, and so Raf found himself relying on his phone flashlight to light the path ahead of him. Despite the darkness, it wasn’t an eerie nor dangerous walk by any means. Accompanied by the singing of crickets, he was comfortably familiar enough with these streets, trusting them even with a lone, wandering Margie.

As he made his way briskly down the long, paved length of Potlatch road, his curiosity was tickled by just how close the sound of lapping ocean waves seemed to be. Perhaps it was the way it echoed off the treeline, but it sounded as though it were almost right in front of him.

Raf rounded the broad corner towards Smelt Bay–and stopped.

The pavement directly beneath his feet had become gradually more wet, as though a heavy rain had passed through recently. That would have been strange enough on its own. He’d have definitely noticed if it had been raining, and there wouldn’t have been such a clear, sudden border between dry ground and waterlogged asphalt. He lifted his phone light to shine it further down the road, and frowned.

Ahead of him, the street was covered in a thin layer of water, seafoam lapping over concrete and into the grassy ditch. As he continued a tentative pace forward, the water wasn’t quite high enough to spill over the rubber soles of his shoes. He walked until Potlatch met with Smelt Bay Road, where he was granted an unobscured view of the beach. The ocean’s waves broke over the bluffs, flooding the street and the grassy plots of land that faced the open bay.

“...The hell?” He muttered, barely above a whisper.

The ocean had to have risen a fair few feet in order for it to breach the bluffs. Was it possible for the tide to get this high? He watched as an empty bottle, tangled within a plastic bag, washed across the street alongside a random toque and a mess of uprooted reeds. Debris, both natural and unnatural, lined the waterlogged road. An enormous, sea weathered piece of driftwood that had spent years as a reliable landmark on the stony beach–now sat wedged askew in the ditch. A flash flood?

Tsunami.

Wait–

Anxiety closed its claws around his gut, and twisted.

“Margie?!” He barked out her name in the direction of the beach.

He took a few automatic strides towards the submerged bluff before halting, and he turned his phone over in his hand. Opening his contact list, he hit Magritte’s number and pressed the phone to his ear. Cell coverage on the island was spotty at best, but to his relief, the call connected. As it rang, he paced, his feet kicking up cold water into his shoes.

“Come on, answer your phone. I’m not gonna be mad at you, just answer your damn phone.”

He let it ring until the robotic voice of the phone operator made him hang up.

And then he tried again, to the same result.

What the hell could he do?

What was he supposed to do?

Don’t catastrophize, it’s not the worst case scenario, it never is.

Immediately, his brain had filled him with thoughts of Margie getting bowled over by enormous waves and dragged to sea. But, based on the fact that no one else was out inspecting damages or lamenting their losses, things probably hadn’t happened as suddenly nor as violently as his imagination pictured it. Realistically, she likely saw the tide start to come in and watched it from a distance, perhaps with some other folks who were hanging around the area. Plausibly, she was at a campsite somewhere, talking about it over smores and cheap booze. Or something like that.

But then, why didn’t she answer her phone?

Raf had already turned around and began walking in the direction of the camping lots. All he had to do was find one that still had a fire going at this time of night. But, as his feet left solid pavement and marched onto the dirt road of the Smelt Bay campsites, he found that the tide had flooded this area as well. The inch of water blanketing the ground turned it into a muddy mess. There were no tents pitched in any of the lots. No campfires, either. Two or three of the lots housed a parked RV, elevated off the ground. Dry, and oblivious to the seawater beneath their tires. None of them showed any signs of waking life. Magritte wasn’t here.

Coming upon one of the empty lots, Raf found a sturdy tree stump that had clearly been fashioned for seating, and dropped himself down on it. He buried his face into his hands with a fraught sigh. There had been tents here, he knew that much. The inhabitants likely packed up and abandoned the lots in favour of finding a dry place to spend the night. If the RVs and trailers were still here, clearly there couldn’t have been much of a panic. The waterline hadn’t risen catastrophically.

Still, Magritte was missing.

He tried to call her one more time, and was greeted unhelpfully by the operating system once again.

What if she had gotten home after he had left to find her?

The thought pulled Raf back onto his feet, and what started as a swift walk home hastened into an anxious jog.

The tide, he noted, was slowly receding. A length of road that had been submerged when he first arrived was exposed once again to dry off in the chilly night air. For some reason, the sight of it relieved his anxiety somewhat. There was nothing inherently dangerous about the strange tide; it wasn’t any kind of disaster. Likely, Margie was at home, worried and waiting for him. Her phone battery must have depleted. It would explain why she wasn’t calling him back.

It wasn’t long before he was walking down the long, rough, unpaved driveway; under the boughs of spruce and cedar trees and into the clearing of the cottage's wild, grassy property.

Approaching the house, he called out her name across the yard to no answer. The lights were still on in the living room and kitchen. He climbed the two steps of the porch up to the front door and, calling her name once more, he opened it.

No response.

Before stepping inside, he kicked off his muddy shoes and then closed the door behind him.

“Margie.” His volume was conversational as he scaled the narrow flight of stairs to the second floor and diligently checked each of the bedrooms.

No. She wasn’t here.

Then…where was she?

Not the ocean. Not the ocean. Not in the ocean.

Sitting down on the foot of the bed, Raf stared at the floor and tried to fight off a wave of despair.

There was no way.

There was no fucking way. It would have been beyond cruelty to leave him like this. He wasn’t gonna be able to…it wasn’t something he could handle.

Steadying himself with a deep breath, he scooted over to his side of the bed, took his laptop up off his night table, and unfolded it on his lap. A phone jack tethered it to the wall behind the nightstand and provided a serviceable internet connection. He opened a browser and typed into the search bar; “How long to wait before making a missing person report?”

Apparently the answer was “not at all”.

Raf looked up the appropriate number to call, picked up the phone, and dialled.

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