Ike Hamill - Migrators

In a few months, Alan thought, this place might not seem so secluded.

The snowmobile trail looked like it was going to be a major thoroughfare once the snow hit. Another team of eager trail riders had been through with chainsaws and widened the trail even more. Alan and Bob walked down the hill, smelling the scent of freshly trimmed pines. Alan rolled his left foot around the edge with each step to minimize the pressure on his toe. Even with care, the stitches throbbed. He’d skipped his painkillers that morning—he didn’t like the idea of driving while doped up.

“I want to see how the beaver pond looks since the storm,” Alan said.

Bob nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets as they walked.

“So how much of that book did you read?” Alan asked.

“All of it,” Bob said. “I was waiting around in the hospital to find out how your surgery went, and then when I got home I couldn’t get to sleep. I read it twice, actually.”

“Did you make sense of it?”

“Sophia’s entries were tough to decipher. Marie made a little more sense. I didn’t have any problems at all reading Violet’s entries, except for those little hearts she put over each J.”

Alan laughed.

They reached the bottom of the hill. As they turned left, Alan saw the devastation from the flooding and destruction of the beaver dam. What used to be a pond was now a muddy mess. The water was only a thin stream between two wide banks of spongy dirt. The beaver lodge was in ruins as well. Alan wondered if the beavers had drowned in the rain.

“What did you think of it?” Bob asked.

“I’d rather hear your perspective first,” Alan said. “I think my judgement might be a little clouded.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Want to sit?”

He motioned at a couple of big rocks that sat near what used to be the pond’s shoreline. Alan followed him over there.

“I think Sophia started the diary because her mother couldn’t write. I don’t know if the father could. Buster said his father used to read books all the time, so if he wasn’t lying about that, then I guess the father could. Anyway, it looked to me like Sophia was given the task of documenting the processes, so they could move them from an oral tradition to something a little more rigorous.”

“Rigorous,” Alan said with a smirk.

“But Sophia used the diary for more than just documentation. She wrote down quite a bit about her life—she talked about getting married so young, healing people, and then eventually about having a daughter and when her daughter was taken away from her,” Bob said.

“What else did you notice about Sophia?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mental illness?” Alan asked. “Her rants about suicide, and how she talked about amputating her own fingers?”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “But those things happened after they took Marie away from her. It was pretty clear that she was devastated by losing her daughter. I really wasn’t surprised by the change in her mental state. They never told her it was coming and then one day they just took her daughter away to be raised by someone else. I think that would unbalance most mothers.”

“What about her healing?”

“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what to think about the healing. It’s difficult—she didn’t really know what was wrong with the people they brought to her, except in the couple of cases she wrote about where they were physically deformed. I liked the description one of them had. Was it Marie or Violet who suggested that tumors have their own souls?”

“Marie,” Alan said, nodding.

“She said that one of her patients who had a brain tumor was having conversations with it.”

“Perkins,” Alan said. “Dudley Perkins.”

“Yes,” Bob said. “When Marie called the migrators to come take away Dudley’s brain tumor, he sang a song to bid farewell to his friend. That’s an interesting idea—the soul of a tumor. I wonder if anyone’s done a movie about something like that.”

“Cancer’s not a very sympathetic character,” Alan said.

“Despicable characters sometimes lead to good cinema,” Bob said.

“So do you believe any of that stuff from the book?” Alan asked.

“Well…” Bob said. He looked off across the ruins of the pond and thought for a minute before speaking again. “When I was reading it for the second time, I kept thinking how well it all fit. Buster described them as phantoms that fed on the remnants of human spirit. The book said that they would normally stay underground, but a woman with the right training could bring them to the surface to remove demons from human hosts. If you assume that by demons they mean cancer or illness, then it’s like using leeches to suck impurities from a person’s blood, right? One woman of each generation is trained to coax those creatures to the surface to cure people.”

“So you believe that whatever those things were, they perform some kind of psychic surgery?” Alan asked.

“No, not psychic. Maybe they excrete some acid or flesh-eating bacteria or something. Whatever it is, it can be used as a weapon, like on your foot. Or it can be used more precisely. The woman tames those things and makes them behave.”

“Welcome to Kingston Lakes, where logic and reason don’t apply,” Alan said.

“And then one day a giant squid washes up on the beach and science has to revise its thinking. It happens all the time—just less often than it did a thousand years ago,” Bob said. “Maybe they built this whole mythology around a little nugget of a perfectly natural phenomenon. Once you strip away all that other window dressing, maybe the phenomenon isn’t that hard to believe. I’m curious to know what happened in that cabin.”

“I suppose it was the passing down ceremony,” Alan said. “It seemed like the same ceremony described in the book. The one that transferred the knowledge from Sophia to Marie, and Marie to Violet. When they passed the knowledge they had a wedding at the same time. They were there to transfer from Violet to Pauline, but I interrupted the process.”

“So they didn’t finish?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know. I guess not. You read the part about the bones?” Alan asked.

“Yes. It said that the bones of a practitioner must be kept safe from the migrators. I assume that’s why we found Sophia’s bones in that ceramic case.”

“Exactly,” Alan said. “It was like the ceramic acted as an insulator that they couldn’t get past.”

“But it didn’t say why it was important,” Bob said.

“Well, it was implied,” Alan said. “In the Mother’s Verse it said something like, ‘Keep safe the bones, away from migration. Keep safe the soul to aid the temptation.’ I don’t remember exactly. But, if I was reading it right, there was a part that suggested that if those phantoms fed on the soul of a practitioner, that the bones would lose their potency to bring the migrators to the surface again. That means that somewhere around here Buster’s mom must be in one of those porcelain boxes.”

“And Marie,” Bob said. “Don’t forget her. So your instincts were right—those things wanted to get at Sophia’s skeleton. You think that giving her remains to the migrators broke the cycle.”

“It’s a thought,” Alan said. “It certainly seemed to disrupt whatever they were doing. But it’s impossible to separate superstition from fact without more information.”

“Tell me what you saw in there,” Bob said.

Alan took a deep breath. He put his left foot up on his right knee. Even that small change in elevation helped the throbbing.

He told Bob the whole story, beginning with when he walked through the door and ending with his blind escape.

“I wonder if anyone else made it out alive,” Bob said when Alan was finished. “That whole cabin exploded in flame right after you stumbled out.”