Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“He’s probably dead now,” she said to herself, and looked sadly out at the water once more.

“Drowned,” she decided.

She wished she had a yellow rose to throw into the water.

Gail went on but had hardly trudged three paces when she heard a sound from across the lake, a long, mournful lowing, like a foghorn, but also not like one.

She stopped for another look.

The mist smelt of rotting smelt.

The foghorn did not sound again.

An enormous gray boulder rose out of the shallows here, rising right up onto the sand. Some net was snarled around it. After a moment of hesitation, Gail grabbed the net and climbed to the top.

It was a really large boulder, higher than her head. It was curious she had never noticed it before, but then, things looked different in the mist.

Gail stood on the boulder, which was high but also long, sloping away to her right, and curling in a crescent out into the water on her left. It was a low ridge of stone marking the line between land and water.

She peered out into the cool, blowing smoke, looking for the rescue ship that had to be out there somewhere, trolling for survivors of the wreck. Maybe it wasn’t too late for the little boy. She lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye, counting on its special powers to penetrate the mist and show her where the schooner had gone down.

“What are you doing?” said someone behind her.

Gail looked over her shoulder. It was Joel and Ben Quarrel, both of them barefoot. Ben Quarrel looked just like a little version of his older brother. Both of them were dark-haired and dark-eyed and had surly, almost petulant faces. She liked them both, though. Ben would sometimes spontaneously pretend he was on fire, and throw himself down and roll around screaming and someone would have to put him out. He needed to be put out about once an hour. Joel liked dares, but he would never dare anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He had dared Gail to let a spider crawl on her face, a daddy longlegs, and then when she wouldn’t, he did it. He stuck his tongue out and let the daddy longlegs crawl right over it. She was afraid he would eat it, but he didn’t. Joel didn’t say much and he didn’t boast, even when he had done something amazing, like get five skips on a stone.

She assumed they would be married someday. Gail had asked Joel if he thought he’d like that, and he had shrugged and said it suited him fine. That was in June, though, and they hadn’t talked about their engagement since. Sometimes she thought he had forgotten.

“What happened to your eye?” she asked.

Joel touched his left eye, which was surrounded by a painful looking red-and-brown mottling. “I was playing Daredevils of the Sky and fell out of my bunk bed.” He nodded toward the lake. “What’s out there?”

“There’s a ship sank. They’re looking for survivors now.”

Joel took off his shoes and put them up on the rock. Then he grabbed the netting tangled on the boulder, climbed to the top, and stood next to her, staring out into the mist.

“What was the name?” he asked.

“The name of what?”

“The ship that sank.”

“The Mary Celeste .”

“How far out?”

“A half a mile,” Gail said, and lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye for another look around.

Through the lens, the dim water was shattered, again and again, into a hundred scales of ruby and chrome.

“How do you know?” Joel asked after a bit.

She shrugged. “I found some things that washed up.”

“Can I see?” Ben Quarrel asked. He was having trouble climbing the net to the top of the boulder. He kept getting halfway, then jumping back down.

She turned to face him and took the soft green glass out of her pocket.

“This is an emerald,” she said. She took out the tin cowboy. “This is a tin cowboy. The boy this belonged to probably drowned.”

“That’s my tin cowboy,” Ben said. “I left it yesterday.”

“It isn’t. It just looks like yours.”

Joel glanced over at it. “No. That’s his. He’s always leaving them on the beach. He hardly has any left.”

Gail surrendered the point and tossed the tin cowboy down to Ben, who caught it, and lost interest in the sunk schooner. He turned his back to the great boulder and sat in the sand and got his cowboy into a fight with some pebbles. The pebbles kept hitting him and knocking him over. Gail didn’t think it was an even match.

“What else do you have?” Joel asked.

“This spoon,” Gail said. “It might be silver.”

Joel squinted at it, then looked back at the lake.

“Better let me have the telescope,” he said. “If there are people out there, we have as good a chance of spotting them as anyone searching for them on a boat.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” She gave him the kaleidoscope.

Joel turned it this way and that, scanning the murk for survivors, his face tense with concentration.

He lowered it at last and opened his mouth to say something. Before he could, the mournful foghorn sounded again. The water quivered. The foghorn sound went on for a long time before trailing sadly away.

“I wonder what that is,” Gail said.

“They fire cannons to bring dead bodies to the surface of the water,” Joel told her.

“That wasn’t a cannon.”

“It’s loud enough.”

He lifted the kaleidoscope to his eye again and looked for a while more. Then he lowered it and pointed at a floating board.

“Look. Part of the boat.”

“Maybe it has the name of the boat on it.”

Joel sat and rolled his jeans up to his knees. He dropped off the boulder into the water.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

“I’ll help,” Gail said, even though he didn’t need help. She took off her black shoes and put her socks inside them, then slid down the cold, rough stone into the water after him.

The water was up over her knees in two steps and she didn’t go any farther because she was soaking her dress. Joel had the board anyway. He was up to his waist, peering down at it.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“Like you thought. It’s the Mary Celeste ,” he said, and held up the board so she could see. There was nothing written on it.

She bit her lip and stared out over the water. “If anyone rescues them, it’s going to have to be us. We should make a fire on the beach, so they know which way to swim. What do you think?”

He didn’t answer.

“I said, ‘What do you think?’” she asked again, but then she saw the look on his face and knew he wasn’t going to answer, wasn’t even listening. “What’s wrong?”

She looked back over her shoulder to see what he was staring at, his face rigid and his eyes wide.

The boulder they had been standing on wasn’t a boulder. It was a dead animal. It was long, almost as long as two canoes lined end-to-end. The tail curled out into the water toward them, bobbing on the surface, thick as a fire hose. The head stretched out on the pebbly beach, even thicker, spade-shaped. Between the head and the tail, its body bulked up, thick around as a hippo. It wasn’t the mist that stank of rotting fish. It was the animal. Now that she was staring right at the thing, she didn’t know how she had ever stood on top of it, imagining it was a rock.

Her chest tingled and crawled, like she had ants under her dress. The ant feeling was in her hair, too. She could see where the animal was torn open, in the place where its throat widened into its torso. Its insides were red and white, like the insides of any fish. There wasn’t a lot of blood for such a big hole.

Joel gripped her hand. They stood up to their thighs in the water, staring at the dinosaur, which was as dead now as all the other dinosaurs that had ever walked the earth.