“Oh my God,” I said, turning away and trying to remain calm. “What the? How? Why would there be a foot. Did someone cut off someone’s foot?”
“I don’t know. It might have fallen off.”
“Jesus, Dex,” I exclaimed. I looked at him with disgust. He gave me a barely perceptible shrug, his complexion still ashen.
“Leprosy,” he said matter–of–factly.
“OK, for one thing their feet didn’t just fall off like that. They lost feeling in their feet and hands and whatever, but that was totally different. And for another, that foot couldn’t possibly be a hundred years old!”
“Did you see the foot?” he asked, looking at me wryly.
I did not want to see the foot. Sure, there was a part of me that wanted to look, the same part of me that slows down at car accidents in some sick hope that I’d see a dead body, but I also knew that if the sight caused Dex to nearly puke, it would do something much worse to me. In fact, I felt like spewing right here on the rocks just from the thought of it.
“I hate to say this, but I really think we should get going,” I said, eyeing the moving fog that seemed to creep in closer. I wanted to be as far away from the foot as possible, even if the only other option was to continue on our pointless trek around the island.
Dex agreed and, after he scooped up the knife from its deadly resting place, we were back on our way, scrambling over the rest of the rocky coast in silence, mulling over the damn foot in the shoe. I didn’t know what Dex was thinking but at least he was the one to have seen it, to have seen something for once. The shoe could have been a hundred years old, it could have been a few years old – the sea and climate ravaged things out here like nothing else. It could have been a leper’s foot, it could have be the foot of someone murdered, or it could have just been the only remains of a drowned kayaker, washed up to shore. Apparently finding feet on the coast was a common occurrence in B.C. I didn’t want to think about it anymore than I had to.
We had other things to contend with, including making our way through the forest again, choosing the cover of dark pine and twisting arbutus trees with their scaling red bark that reminded me of dead, sunburned skin. We rounded the head of the island and started down the other coast with the wild waves now crashing turbulently on our right side. After a while of exhaustive bushwhacking, my fingers cold, numbed and scratched to bits from pushing back scathing branches, we came back to the a familiar area where a trail opened up and the Mary Contrary could be seen rollicking off the coast.
She was a sight for sore eyes, all right. There was nothing I wanted more than to just toss everything aside and make a swim for it. We paused near the beach and watched her ride the waves. Dex could tell what I was thinking.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “if the weather is better, I’ll try and make a go for her.”
I didn’t like that idea but knew we might not have the choice. If we were even given the choice. The good news, though, was that if someone had actually sabotaged the Zodiac and meant to strand us here, they would have just taken the boat. With the sailboat still here, that seemed more unlikely.
We continued down the path until we reached the turnoff for the dead heart and the campsite. Instead of turning left, we kept going down the coast. This was all new to me. The path was almost wider at points and took on the appearance of a well–worn stroll through a city park.
“Did you come down here earlier?” I asked Dex. He said he hadn’t.
It wasn’t long at all before the trees around us began to clear. If there was a view to be had through the encumbering fog, it would have been quite the sight. With the sea falling below the low cliffs to our right, you could have probably seen for miles.
The first surprise came in the form of what was supposed to be the old caretaker’s woodshop. There was nothing left of the building except low cement fixtures that would have held together the foundation and a single cement staircase that led to nowhere. The building was now home to spindly trees that twisted sideways from the wind.
The area around the cottage was strange, with a weird, thick feeling in the air, like the fog from offshore was choking us with an invisible hand. All I could think about was the history behind the ruins, how the coldness that was constantly seeping through my supposedly waterproof jacket and throttling my bones and joints was just a daily fact of life for the poor people who were left here.
Dex surveyed the area with one glance. Either he didn’t care or it spooked him out as much as it did me. We walked for a bit longer until we came across another ruin.
It was half a house, still standing. There were no floors or rooms, but two walls of vertical cement that met together in a tangled mess of vines and overgrown weeds that declared residency on the skeleton.
An arbutus tree shot up from the middle of the building, nature’s triumph over mankind. Flanking the remains of the ruins were large toppled stones and boulders that were covered in a thick layer of dark green moss. Civilization still had its grasp on the place with the numerous tags of graffiti that sprawled against the walls. Some lovebird’s initials, some racist slang, some innocuous cheers for Grad 2000.
Standing there with Dex, looking the eerie relic over, I think we were both glad to see something so trivial and modern as moronic graffiti. In any other situation I probably would have made some remark about punk kids ruining a historical artifact but all I could think about was how soothing the vandalism was. There was another world out there, another world of modern people who were going on about their lives. A world that occasionally brought over teenage kids to this godforsaken island so they could have sex away from prying eyes, get drunk and tag decrepit old structures that no one cared about.
“What do you think?” Dex asked. We had paused in front of the crippled cottage, both of us looking it over in silence.
“It’s creepy and comforting. At the same time.”
He looked out to where the lack of trees gave us a clear view of the briny waves and the vanilla cotton candy mist. “Would have been a hell of a view for the caretaker. You can’t buy this location back at home.”
True. But it would still be a hard sell. Sure you get a view, you just have to share an island with a bunch of lepers.
“Wish I had brought the Super 8,” he lamented to himself and walked along one side of the ruins. I stayed put, not wanting to explore it any further. Like the previous ruin, there was something unsettling here. Then again after a day of almost drowning, finding our Zodiac slashed and discovering a foot on the beach, it didn’t seem all that strange to find every single thing we came across just a tad creepy.
He went around the corner to the upright slabs and vanished out of my sight. I knew he was there, just a couple of yards away, but a wash of prickly cold came over me, almost as if I had an icy breeze inside of my body.
“Hee hee hee.”
The girl’s giggle.
I spun around and looked behind me at the forest.
The sound of leaves being crushed, branches cracking, light footsteps. But there was nothing there. Nothing I could see.
I listened hard. I couldn’t hear anything else. Not even Dex. I was about to open my mouth to call from him when I heard a SNAP.
I looked around me again and saw a glimpse of a white shirt disappearing behind the concrete where Dex had gone.
“Dex!” I yelled and ran over. I went around the corner and saw nothing. Where was he?
I kept running and was about to round the next one, the area where the dying vines overwhelmed the cracked and pebbly walls, when Dex appeared. I put on the brakes, almost running right into him. He reached out and steadied me with his hand.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Did you hear that?” I asked breathlessly.
“Hear what?”
“The laugh. The girl laughed and then I saw her, I saw her, she would have run right into you.”
I could see the hesitation in his face, followed by a tinge of concern across his brow. He kept his hand on me, tightening his grip.
“I didn’t see or hear anything, Perry.”
Of course he didn’t. I gave him a wary smile.
“Guess I’m going nuts then!” I felt small and simple. Maybe I was going nuts. Though if I wasn’t, I was a bit relieved to know that the girl, whether she was dead or alive, was still alive…if that made any sense.
I knew Dex was looking me over like some clinical scientist so I just brushed it off. “Well anyway, maybe you aren’t very observant. Can we finish this stakeout up? I’m getting colder by the minute.”
We took off down the path, leaving the ruins behind. The only problem now was the path deteriorated back into bush territory and we were back to slogging through mud and crisscrossed roots for the rest of the way. Sometimes we would come across a pretty curve of beach or a scenic outlook but with that constant armor of fog at our doorstep, nothing was as pretty as it could have been. Yesterday would have been the better day to go exploring. But then again, yesterday felt like a whole different life all together. Even the hockey game we went to – the strip club, God damn it – felt like something that happened years ago and to other people other than us. It had only been 30 hours or something but it felt like my whole life was rain, cold and fog, with the occasional foot thrown in there.
The south end of the island came up and we were soon making our way up the bottom, tripping up the east coast. Aside from the little girl, we hadn’t come across anyone else. Dex pointed out that just because the perimeter was clean it didn’t mean people weren’t hiding out in the middle.
I started to doubt it though. We hadn’t seen signs of anyone. The boat was still there the last we looked, and as we struggled through the brush until we saw our own tent again, shining in its blue plastic glory like a beacon, it only solidified the fact that if there was someone else here wanting to make trouble for us, they would have done something else, right? The boat would have been gone, our campsite would have been destroyed. It would have been more.
Unfortunately, this didn’t mean the end of our journey. Dex was so determined to still find those “pontoon–slashing motherfuckers” that he made us keep going and hit up the one place we had missed… the dead heart of the island.
It really was starting to get dark. From the way the clouds grew blacker near their tops, it must have been at least 3:30 or 4 p.m. We maybe had an hour before the sun would set in a place unseen.
But Dex was insistent and as much as my feet hurt in my boots, as much as my bones and hands throbbed subtly from the fall, I still wasn’t brave enough to wait it out alone at the campsite. So we kept going, heading deep inside to where the ferns grew to prehistoric heights and the only light seemed choked out by grasping limbs.
Though it was his idea, I could see Dex was apprehensive about heading into the middle. At one point in the path he stopped and quickly handed me back the knife for “safe keeping.”
We reached the end of the path and started back again. There was nothing there. No raccoons, no saboteurs, no giggling girls. Just the hanging moss, rotted stumps, a floor of grey, wet leaves and the stench of dying vegetation.
As we walked along, our pace quickening with the relief that we were leaving, Dex looked at me and smiled. “At least this has taken your mind off of all the blog comments.”
He was right about that. I wasn’t quite in the place to smile about it yet but it all seemed very frivolous when compared to a real–life dangerous situation.
He looked up at the marker on the tree as we passed it and frowned.
“I don’t remember seeing that tree before.”
We stopped and I looked behind me. The tree looked like any other tree in this area. Slimy, scaly bark flanked with beaded moss and the drip of rainwater. There was a tiny nick in the side of it though, where the inner bark was clean and white. Almost like someone took a few whacks of an axe to it and then gave up. He was right. I hadn’t seen that before. But I wasn’t sure that meant anything.
I looked at him unsure of what to say. “I don’t know.”
He sucked in his lips and reached into his pocket. He brought out the pack of cigarettes. It was empty. He crumpled up the package in frustration and threw it on the ground.
“Really, Dex? Littering?” I bent over to pick it up but he grabbed my arm.
“Just leave it for now, trust me.”
He brought out a pack of Nicorette gum and popped a few pieces in his mouth instead. Then he shrugged. “Almost there.”