into the waters below

I still feel the bite of the wind on my bare skin, even in this windowless prison. Every waking moment, every waking hour, my thoughts return to the horror in your gaze, your pleading eyes burned into my retinas.

Has it really been five years? These meds they make me take seem to have obviated my need for time. So much sameness. Eat, shit, take meds, stare into the darkness atop my bare mattress, then do it all again. I see no one, talk to no one, and only have your sad weary gaze for companionship.

On the rare moments when your wraith wearies of haunting me, I feel the bitter wind buffeting frail flesh and hear the thudding beat of my heart like I did when the thick arterial blood slipped through my fingers into Aipaloovik’s thirsty waters below. But the god hiding in its depths does not appear in my waking thoughts. He only visits like a phantom of the night during those rare moments when exhaustion lures me into cruel sleep.

Sometimes he draws hideously near, hissing through sharp white fangs - Ssssstupid white devil, and in his harsh gaze I see my bloodless corpse swinging to and fro in the freezing arctic wind.

My days pass in meaningless cycles of pain and loss. Why am I here? I whisper. Why am I here? I howl. But no one listens. No one knows. No one cares. What is left save to unwilling recall what I cannot forget?

It was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime. The World’s End travel company, fifteen thousand dollars per ticket. An uninhabited island in the arctic. Our minds boggled at the pure terrifying scope of such a thing.

After we helicoptered to our destination, we stood beneath the downwash as it hovered briefly above us, our jaws dropping at our surroundings natural beauty. To the west glaciers loomed like monsters out of myth, great ice sheets shearing off and sliding into the water with a watery roar. To the east, white capped mountains nestled in the mists.

Tell all of the story, your ghost seductively whispers. Not just the pretty bits. Tell it all, set us free, my love. I grow weary of this world and this dreadful place. Weave me a tale to set afire my aching bones and release the anguish we both still carry.

Ahhh, my tender dove, if only you would smile at me rather than stare, this confinement might be bearable, I murmur back.

Tell our tale and I will smile as I once did. Do you not remember how fiercely I held your hand when we were together on that cursed shore in those last few moments?

I swallow as the memory arises within only to thrust it down again.

Start at the beginning, baby. Do you remember the birds?

I remember, I whisper, as if hypnotized by the mere thought of their numbers. Puffins abounded. Nesting in the rocks, fishing in the bay, chasing one another on the beach. Eagles soared overhead and in the evenings, we heard the haunting cry of the loon.

But most of the rocky island looked more like a lunar landscape than any place on earth ought to appear. We camped in the lowlands where the arctic vegetation proliferated that the rest of the island lacked, mostly short densely woven shrubs that were flowering in what passed for summer in that god-forsaken place.

Some nights the temps dropped below freezing, you and I clinging to one another in our double sleeping bag while the wind miserably howled outside of our tent.

Eight of us made the journey including you and me, three good college buddies with girlfriends: Michael and Stacie, Logan and Missy, and Murph and Sheila.

We were up late the first night making our camp using metal stakes rather than wooden ones to fix our tents to the rocky ground. But even with that precaution, the high winds fiercely pulled at them in the night. Each morning, we pounded the stakes that had loosened in the gale and added still more for fear that our tents would blow away and us with them.

On the second night, our guide Ahnah shared some of the Inuit mythology associated with the surrounding islands to include many gods, some good, some evil. But only one that connected me to the surrounding savage beauty was Aipaloovik, the sea god of death and destruction.

But when her tales moved from myth to history, I felt the forbidding darkness of the place ache in my bones. The Inuit in northern Quebec experienced their own trail of tears when the Canadian government forcibly moved them to the arctic islands now surrounding us where no one could easily survive without the haunting specter of starvation their constant, hateful companion.

That's when the evening grew awkward. Ahnah told us the legend of the Ahkiyyini, saying - the skeleton spirits are the ghosts of our ancestors stranded and condemned by starvation and homesickness to endlessly wander in search of their true homes. Her voice filled with emotion; her eyes glistened with tears as she spoke.

Murph killed the moment by muttering Bullshit under his breath.

You mock our ancestors?

I mock anyone who believes in ghosts and goblins, he replied defensively.

We do not believe, she softly answered. We fear. You will see, even while you yet scoff. You will fear at the end. I felt the unspoken threat in her words and yet also the shame that Murphy had not.

The vibe killed, we morosely returned to our tents for the night. I could hear Sheila and Murph arguing as we bedded down and hoped he would apologize the next day. But he never got the chance.

In the morning, our guide was gone and with her roughly half of our food. We did not have cell phone service to call to complain or for help and still had two and half weeks prior to the helicopter’s return to fly us out. None of us spoke to Murph the next couple of days.

From that point forward we were forced to eat half rations on the days we did not catch fish and most days the fishing was lousy.

A few days later when we ventured from our tents for a meager breakfast, Murph had disappeared too. We spent the morning looking for him. But we had not counted on the island’s size. After several hours of fruitless wandering, we returned to find Sheila in a trembling state of terror.

We rested and ate as best we could and returned to our search while the women tried to buck up her spirits. The sun doesn’t truly set in the arctic summer and the three of us completely lost track of time. When we returned foot sore and crippled by exhaustion, the sun was beginning anew its slow arc into the morning skies.

By then, Shiela had disappeared, too.

You took my hands, my dear Angie, and beckoned me to rest. I fairly collapsed to the ground.

I heard Missy ask Logan where Murph and Sheila had gone and he shrugged his shoulders and sat down with a thump and a curse.

Then Michael, who still stood with his hands on his hips, narrowed his eyes and said what I was already thinking. We’re not alone.

What do you mean, we’re not alone? Stacy angrily replied. If you’re trying to scare us, you’re doing a great job.

I’m wondering if our guide is nearby and having a bit of fun at our expense.

The guide is long gone, Logan grunted hoarsely, she left us in the gawd damn lurch. If someone out there is playing, it’s a whole lot worse than a bit of fun.

None of us left camp the remainder of the day. I had never realized till then how quiet persistent fear could be. No one else ventured the possibility of innocent misadventure or foul play. We stewed on both, trusting in the strength of our pitiful numbers. We heard no screams or thumps in the prior nights. We would stay together and hope for the best.

That night we heard howls carried by the wind, but I would swear on my father's grave they were not wolves. I could easily imagine we heard the cries of babes and infants who had gone hungry for too long, their diminutive ghosts still wandering the island in search of their lost home.

The next day it got a whole lot worse when Ahnah’s corpse washed ashore, her throat cut from ear to ear. We three men approached her pale and bloated body and waived the women away. I knew as I looked down at her that our fellowship was lost forever, even before Missy uttered the obvious.

Which one of you fuckers was responsible for this?

Logan turned toward her with horror in his gaze and said Now baby, don’t go jumping to conclusions.

Don’t you baby me, mister. When he reached out to take her hand, she slapped his arm away. Don’t touch me!

Michael acted like he wasn’t paying attention to what was happening to our once close circle. We can’t leave her body like this, he complained, it‘ll poison the waters.

What are you suggesting? I angrily replied. We can’t bury her, the ground is as hard as stone. We don’t have shovels anyway.

We dragged her onto the beach and covered her with a tarp that we kept from blowing away by holding the edges down with large, round stones we pulled from the water.

The howls returned the following night and in the morning Missy was gone too. By then Logan finally believed her accusations and started packing his ruck.

Wait for us Logan, Michael told him, we'll help you look.

For what? He grunted back. Her body will wash up soon enough. But when we began walking toward Logan to reason with him he picked up a hatchet and pointed the business end at the two of us. You two fuckers stay away from me. If either of you follow, I swear to god I'll plant this in your faces.

That night it was only you and me, and Michael and Stacy. The howls were closer this time and I made the mistake of leaving of our tent and saw a cloud of mist moving slowly across the shore and within it strange glowing lights like will-o-the-wisps.

As it crept into our encampment, I could feel a sense of profound darkness, the desire to follow it after it swept by me almost overcoming my senses. That's when I spotted Stacy in its wake and I cried out to her to stop. But she continued to walk as though asleep, neither answering nor turning to face me.

That's when you poked your head out of our tent and asked me what the hell I was doing. Stacy's walking into the night, I replied, and turning to point at her she was no where to be seen.

We went to their tent to wake Michael and did not find either of them. What are we going to do, Bobbie, you whispered before beginning to weep softly. I held you close and you sobbed into my chest for a long time. We need to get to the bottom of this, you finally whispered. Together, you and I.

In the morning I packed the ruck with the remaining food and we set off together to search the island. Do you remember?

You know I do.

And strangely, you led and walked with purpose and direction till we reached a little hidden cove. The tripod that the guide used to hold the food packs aloft straddled a large stone with a deep swale cut in its center by ten thousand years of waves and wind and in that swale the tide was slipping back into the sea and with it most of the water trapped there.

You gingerly step into the swale and squint at its wet surface for sometime. This is where they all died, you whisper.

Do you remember when Ahnah told us what the Inuit believe about the afterlife?

Each of us possess two souls, I answer, one who is always with us and a second that can wander free of our bodies.

Your soul has left you Bobbie, it has abandoned you and me. Without its guidance you are unmoored, a lost child. A ghost.

I don't understand.

Then join me and see the blood floating here in the water and staining the cracks in the stone. Ahnah's blood. Murph's and Sheila's, Michael's and Stacy's, Logan's and Missie's. All that remains is for yours and mine to stain these waters and this stone and then it is finished.

Honey, you're scaring me.

I'm scaring you? You're the one who killed our friends and Ahnah. Did you hang them from this to drain their blood?

Your eyes are hard now and I'm slow to realize that these are not the surroundings of memory, but somehow the two of us are impossibly having a conversation that ended on these same shores five years before.

You don't understand, I whisper, a cold wind blowing within me like a warning. I can't do this a second time, it was too much to bear the first.

You followed Ahnah when she left the camp, didn't you? I nod slowly. And what did you see when you stood here that night?

I saw Aipaloovik emerging from the waters of the bay to feed.

And did you feed him?

We have no business in this savage, beautiful place. No one does. We're taboo, no better than our ancestors, defiling everything we touch, poisoning clear waters with our plastic, petroleum and filth. Killing wild things for sport rather than food. The stench of our tribe's crimes overcame my nostrils as I beheld the sea god in all his terrifying glory.

I knew then I could purify the island and the surrounding waters by sacrificing all of us to the harsh god of the sea.

If I had cut myself as deeply as I had each of you, I would have died and no one, Inuit or white would have been the wiser. Feeling something tugging on my ankles, I see that I have stepped unwittingly into the snare I had used on all the others.

Then, as if on cue, Angie grunts while turning the hand winch on the tripod and I fall on my ass and bang my head hard on the stone. When consciousness returns my mouth is heavily taped, I cannot speak, and my hands are tied behind my back.

Since we both know you can't do this, how about I cut your throat first rather than the other way round. I love you, Bobbie, but I think you love yourself a little too much to finish what you started.

Hanging upside down from the tripod, the water in the bay has become my sky, my head swimming in terror as Angie grips my face and pushes my head back and presses the blade to my throat. Goodbye, baby. I'll join you soon on the other side. Drawing the knife across my throat, I begin to convulse, the icy wind buffeting my exposed belly once my shirt slides down my torso, the thudding beat of my heart sounding in my ears and the thick arterial blood cascading down my face into the waters below.

….