Where They Wait

by Scott Carson

Yet, when the breakup finally happened, I couldn’t help the thought. I remembered the combination of scrutiny and concern in her eyes when she asked those questions, remembered her emphatic insistence that everyone dreams something sometime, and I wondered what she saw in my own eyes when I insisted that I did not.

I said, “Oh—guess who I saw today, Mom: Renee Holland. Do you remember her? From the camp across the cove?” She squeezed my hand but didn’t answer. “She has red hair,” I said. “You wouldn’t recognize her. It took me a minute. You remember Pat, though, don’t you? He hired me to write a story, and Renee is—” “Not at Rosewater,” she said. “What’s that?” She turned from the garden, looked directly at me, and said, “Should not be at Rosewater.” “Renee shouldn’t be at Rosewater? Or Pat?” “Nick,” she said. I felt an eerie prickle. It was like being in the deep fog and seeing something take shape, clear and undeniable and dead ahead. “I shouldn’t be at the camp?” For a long moment she stared directly at me, and then she turned away, and the smile crept back onto her face when she saw the bird.

Then the woman’s voice returned, in full-throated song this time. If they come for me If they take us away Do not fear, oh, do not fear For others have gone there before It was beautiful, though hardly soothing. If they come for me, if they take us away? There was menace beneath the beauty.

“You still talk to Cisco?” he asked. “No. What’s your point, though? What’re you getting at?” “You don’t trust people.” I set my beer down. “Hell of an accusation.” “No, it’s not. It’s a friend’s observation. You’ll glide with a crew, but not… invest in it the same way as others. You’re introverted, maybe, an observer, definitely, but it’s more than that. You don’t like to hand out trust.” “I don’t avoid offering it, either,” I protested, a little too adamantly. I think we always push back hardest when we’re called out on the truth.

The supposed paper-mill money that Pat had told me about was bullshit. So far as I could tell, they’d never been invested in any mill. Bryce Lermond’s father, Kevin Lermond, was indeed a West Point man, but his wife, Marilyn, was a doctor, with degrees from the University of New England and Northeastern. She’d once held a teaching fellowship at a research hospital in Boston. Her program there had been focused in vestibular and balance studies. Among the patients serviced by the program were epileptics and seizure sufferers. When Marilyn Lermond’s husband left the Army and she left her practice in Boston, they formed a joint venture and launched a company called VIST. The initials stood for Vestibular Innovations and Solutions, Tactical.

The only references I could find to the company were disturbing: articles describing the company as a leader in research with hypersonic weapons. The first was a Los Angeles Times piece from a few years after 9/11 that discussed the “new tech being deployed on old battlefields.” Among the weapons referenced was a “sonic bullet” that was in reality a narrow beam of targeted sound. The developer proudly raved about his weapon’s ability to produce “the equivalent of an intense migraine headache that is just totally disabling.”

The next time she appeared as an expert, it was in an academic paper about the story of an American embassy in Brazil where dozens had reported suffering from dizziness, insomnia, and difficulty concentrating after sustaining inner ear damage that they attributed to a high-pitched noise within the building. The affected included diplomats and CIA officers, some of whom later demonstrated the symptoms of traumatic brain injury. The story itself seemed to have died quietly. If anyone was ever officially blamed for the sickening of more than two dozen Americans at an international embassy, it remained classified. Marilyn Lermond’s take on the idea of sonic weapons in that case was concise and chilling. “Beyond plausible. It’s already in existence. The question is the mechanism of delivery, the frequency of the tones, and whether their goals were achieved or missed. All of the reported symptoms are in keeping with the technology we already understand, but there’s also the chance that those symptoms fell short of a more dangerous goal.”

She was asked if that goal would be a deadly one. “I don’t think that’s where the research in this area is focused—not in China, not in Russia, not here. Could you kill someone with low- or high-frequency audio weapons? Certainly. But I’ve seen little indication of anyone prioritizing that approach in research. It seems to be more a matter of control and manipulation. Physical, mental, what have you.”

“Renee, what in the hell did Pat listen to that made him do… that? And why doesn’t the same thing happen to me? Or will it in the end?” “I don’t know,” she said, and then held up a hand before I could object. “I honestly do not know. I can distill it, though: Pat listened to a weapon. That’s what it is. A cutting-edge weapon with an ancient twist.”

“Ashley seems real to you,” Renee said, watching my face. “Like a ghost, not a nightmare.” “I wouldn’t undersell her—she definitely feels like a nightmare—but, yes, it’s a ghost. It’s every ghost story you’ve ever heard or imagined. The difference is…” “What?” she prodded when I fell silent. “I don’t know what she wants,” I said. “To hurt me or to help me. Usually, that’s clear in a ghost story, right? But I think that might not be her choice to make.” I hadn’t articulated this before, but once the words were out there, I found myself nodding as if someone else had posited the idea.

“Fine, asshole: Why were you curious to see whether I’d walk off a roof?” “Because you don’t remember trauma,” he said calmly. “And you do not dream. Clarity involves trauma and dreams. Intimately. While I’d love to take credit for your unique condition, the credit belongs with your mother. She bulletproofed you.” “I don’t remember my dad’s accident,” I said. “But I don’t think that extends beyond—” “False,” Bryce Lermond said with a terrible, giddy delight. “You do not remember trauma, Nick. Pain, violence, agony—none of it sticks.” “You’re wrong. Crazy, but also fundamentally wrong. I’ve been all over the world recording traumatic events. War zones, hurricanes, homicides. I can send you the story I wrote about the family they found on the border, sealed into a shipping container and left in the desert heat. Tell you how that looked and smelled and sounded. My whole career has been—” “Reporting on other people’s trauma,” he said.

“Oh, shit,” I whispered, and Bryce’s smile widened. I wasn’t paying much attention to him anymore, though; my mind was back in that doctor’s office. The one the nurse had told me I’d visited years earlier after shredding the ligaments in my ankle. I didn’t remember that visit. Didn’t remember the injury. I remembered the game, remembered the open lane to the basket, and then…

“Your mother was a brilliant woman. So far ahead of the rest of her field. She set out to block a single traumatic memory. There are dozens of elite researchers working on the same thing. No one has come close. The only problem was that she overachieved. She didn’t just erase a single bad memory or remove a single recurring nightmare. She blocked them altogether.” He turned back to me. “If it holds up… well, I can hardly imagine the value.”

“I’m sorry, Bob,” I said. “And thank you. Truly. Thank you for telling me what you just did. It’s important.” “It’s in the past,” he said. I shook my head. “I wish it was, but it’s not.” “You feelin’ all right, son?” “I’m fine.” “Looking peaked.” “I’m fine.” I took a breath and stepped back. “Thanks again. And I’m sorry. For all of it.” He looked nonplussed now. “Nothing for you to apologize for. Wasn’t your idea, not any of it. Rosewater is not a good place for you. Wasn’t then, isn’t now.” “Excuse me?” He frowned with what seemed real concern. “If you’re hearing shit that’s not real, son? I’m no scientist, no one like your mother—and some people say she was a genius, the real deal, a no-doubt genius—but what she was doing felt risky to me. When a boy—or a man—gets to hearing things that aren’t real…” He shook his head. “The last thing you should tell him is that you hear it, too. That ain’t good.”

“Sounds very James Bond.” “It is. Read the recent complaints from our embassies in Cuba and China: strange sounds, memory loss, dizziness, headaches. Children waking up with nosebleeds.” I stopped there, remembering the sudden nosebleed I’d had after walking out of the Hefron Mill on my first visit. “They called it Havana syndrome,” I said slowly. “One of the diplomats described the same sound every night—like a marble dropped on the floor, he said. A single, sharp crack. Then he’d show up at work and not be able to remember the names of simple objects. The sound came at night, and in the day his mind wasn’t right. Wasn’t his own. That’s pretty close to what you were talking about with the language study, isn’t it? A repetitive tone that disrupted the formation of memories.”

“You have to listen now, Nick. You must. It’s the only way. Otherwise, you’ll have to stay. You must listen very carefully now. Hear only the right things.” Her mouth left my ear and her cold, wet hair trailed across my cheek and we were face-to-face again, her lifeless eyes fixed on mine. I screamed. Pulled back and away, scrambling, falling from the bed, the darkness rising as Ashley followed me down, lowering her lips to mine.

“I will have to swim,” I said, and this time Ashley answered me. “Don’t swim,” she said. “Follow the song. Do not go into the water. You have to follow the song.” “I can’t hear the song!” I screamed, and now I saw her moving in the mist, a figure floating through the fog, only a few steps ahead.

“I don’t hear the song!” I screamed, and Ashley Holland answered in a voice that was as calm as the sea was angry. “Listen,” she said. “Just listen.”

A woman’s voice, faint but pure and steady as a mountain stream: Do not fear, oh, do not fear For no man among us must die No man among us must die “It’s there,” I whispered. “I hear it now.” “Shhhhh,” Ashley answered, and a bracing breeze passed over me, as if her voice were trapped within the wind. “Listen. Liisssten.” I peered into the fog and strained to hear. No man among us must die No man among us must die If you want to see home I ask you to rise Tell you now to rise Now, now you must rise For no man among us must die

She knew that I was on the move, and outdoors. She pulled on my sweatshirt and ran in pursuit. The front door was standing open, a cool breeze coming through it, and when she burst through, she found me standing in the darkness, eyeing the treetops. “You seemed curious, nothing more. As if there was something up there that didn’t fit. But you didn’t look frightened, and you didn’t look as if you… intended to do anything.” “Climb, you mean.” She acknowledged that with a nod.

She had to stop and gather herself. “I saw that you had them in,” she said, lifting the case of the AirPods. “And I ran to you and tried to take them, but…” A single tear dripped from her left eye, ran down her cheek, traced her jawline, but didn’t fall. “But then you spoke in my sister’s voice,” she said, barely audible. “What?” “You opened your mouth and spoke but it was my sister’s voice,” she said, louder now, firm and undeniable. “You said ‘He’ll need to hear it now. Don’t try to stop him. It’s too late for that.’ ” “Don’t try to stop him,” I echoed.

I did what I was told. I let you listen. And the shaking stopped. You sat down. I sat with you. I sat with you and held you and waited for something to happen. For a long time, it was like you were comatose. There in body but not in mind. Then you were all there again. I can’t tell you exactly how I knew you were back. Something shifted—not physically, more like an energy change. A warmth. I don’t know how to explain it; I just knew you were there. I said your name.” She swallowed. “When you spoke, it was in your own voice again.”

“These are not nightmares,” I said. “It’s real.” “What is real?” “The place.” “The rock island?” “Yes.” “You’re serious.” “Yes,” I repeated. “I’m not saying I can sail off and find it, Renee, I’m just saying that it’s more real than a dream. It’s something in between, maybe. But I could stay there. Your sister is keeping me from doing it, I think, but I could stay there.”

“It’s a dream,” she said at last. “A vivid and wickedly powerful dream, evil, yes, but still a human product. At the end of the day, your experience is a human creation. Engineered.” There was a desperate insistence to her tone. I understood. There are some things it’s healthier not to believe in, maybe. Until the time comes when your experience forces your mind to expand, at least.

“It was his nickname for Clarity,” she said. “Back in the early days, we were debating names for it. Everything felt either too familiar or too desperately hip. He started calling it Purgatorium then. Made jokes about the ads, how we’d promise to take all of human stress and anxiety and put it on hold, a reprieve. It stood out because it’s an odd phrase, you know? Purgatory, fine. Purgatorium is Latin, though—it’s not the kind of word that just comes to the tip of the tongue.”

“The ship might have been real? Should be easy enough to find that out.” She took out her phone and began to enter in a search. I watched in silence. I’d meant the ship, yes, but it wasn’t the ship that lingered in my mind. My mind was on the rock island where the bloodied man had told me I was going to stay with him in the fog.

I’d finally paused to consider the alternative. What if I’d been alone? I was thinking about that while I got up and made yet another pot of coffee. Watching it brew, I found myself hearing Ashley Holland’s voice. Now, now you must rise The lyrics had been looping through my brain for hours now, but as day brightened around the camp, the idea of rising lingered. There had been two commands, I thought: the instruction of the song and the instruction of Ashley’s voice. They had seemed in sync at the time, but were they? What would have happened if I had listened only to the song? Now, now you must rise Ashley had told me to offer my hand. I’d done so, and then I was back in my own life, back at the camp, saved from that hellscape of rock ledge in the angry sea. If it had been only the song, though…

When I was reporting in combat zones, I’d trained myself to remember a single phrase by echoing it, usually unspoken but always moving my lips, the physical sensation designed to anchor it in the brain. I was doing it now, I realized. The book about shipwrecks. Four words, mouthed silently. Anchored. I looked back at the Beauchamp cabin. Watched the smoke rise.

“Purgatorium,” he said, drawing the word out. “Ayuh, that’s not one you hear of much anymore. Don’t know that anyone ever heard much about it, of course. But these days?” He shook his head. “Nah. Your buddy was the only one who gave a damn. But I was never comfortable talkin’ with him, to be honest with you.” “Why not?” “Always huntin’. Like he was hungry for something and wouldn’t say what.” “He was writing a book,” I said. “Maybe that’s why.” “Maybe,” Beauchamp allowed, but I could tell he didn’t believe it. “It was a ship, though? The Purgatorium?”

“The ship’s name was the Arabella. Till it wasn’t.”

“You don’t know Boon Island?” he said it with such incredulity you’d have thought we were talking about the Statue of Liberty. “Down off York Beach, near Kittery?”

“Ain’t much of an island, of course, just a rock ledge.” I felt a cold wave pass through me and was grateful to be sitting in the sagging couch instead of being on my feet.

“What’s it got to do with the Purgatorium, though?” His grin showed his yellowed teeth. “That makeshift raft the dead man rode in on? One that was found washed up with his frozen carcass still aboard? The folks who came across it never talked much about the way the corpse looked. Too shaken up by it all, I suppose. But a young boy was with them. Little kid. But old enough to remember what he saw. Years down the line, he told folks that there was a name painted on one of the planks of the raft. The name, he said, was Purgatorium.”

“So that was the story of Boon Island,” he went on. “The wreck happened in 1710, and the boy became a man, and the man became a soldier, way it always went in this country back in those times. Always fightin’ a war. He got himself into a good one, French and Indian. He moved up north, found himself in a French settlement. My people. Acadians. You know anything about the Acadians?” “They were deported. Taken from Maine and Novia Scotia and New Brunswick and relocated to Louisiana. The Cajuns in Louisiana are descendants of the Acadians in Maine.” “That’s maybe twenty percent of the story, but I’ll grant you still know more than most folks. The British deported them, as you called it. Others would call it genocide. There were more than twelve thousand people rounded up and loaded onto ships.

The ship was never seen again. The dory was, though. Washed up on a rock island miles away, not too far from what is Cutler, Maine, today. The rock had no name then, but today it’s Evangeline Ledge. You got any idea why that might be?”

Evangeline was Longfellow’s poem about the genocide of the Acadians. That one was popular when it came out, about a century after the crime was done. Evangeline Ledge is nothin’ but rock and weed and water.”

He smiled humorlessly. “When the dory from the Arabella was found,” he said, “there was a name painted on the stern. You tell me what it was.” “Purgatorium.” “That’s right,” Bob Beauchamp said, and his storyteller’s voice faded into a near whisper. “Purgatorium.” He breathed it like a prayer.

Dennison came around slowly. As the night went on, though, he began to tell strange, horrid tales. He spoke of an icy ledge of rock in a gale-thrashed sea. He said he had been on this rock and that he was not alone there. He claimed there were men from another ship on the rock, and that he’d sighted our own cabin boy, John. It chilled my heart to hear him speak of the boy. My fear grew to outright terror when he clutched me and pulled my face close to his own and insisted that the other men on the rock had come from a ship called the Nottingham Galley. Whether Dennison had heard of the fate of the Nottingham Galley, I’ll never know, but most of us had heard the grisly tale of the crew shipwrecked and left without a fire in a brutal winter. Of the unspeakable acts that occurred.

“They want me badly,” he said, and told me of grasping hands that reached for him in the fog, determined to pull him down and away. “When I arrive, one of them will be released,” he said. “One man comes aboard and one departs. That’s the special hell of it, Trenchard. I’ll be among them so long, waiting while others come and go. I see that clear. My wait on the island will be long.”

“They require a full crew on the Purgatorium,” he said. “No more and no less. Each man aboard releases another, but until then it is an endless stay. They all want me, don’t you see? They wait for me because when I arrive one of them can go into the sea and be quit of it. Just one, though. They wait for me, Trenchard, and they are not kind.”

When he spoke, I was so startled I nearly cried out. The words were in French and I spoke almost no French then, but I’ll forever remember the words. “Il navigue avec moi maintenant.” The translation records as: “He sails with me now.”

“Il navigue avec moi maintenant.” He sails with me now. It is when I hear those words again in full darkness that I know to the marrow of my bones that the island is real, a place of trapped evil.

“I don’t think it’s so weird,” he said confidently. “Someone wanted to lure them in, right?” “Excuse me?” I was uneasy, thinking that he knew Bryce Lermond, that Strawn’s Stereo and Music was a trap I’d wandered into. “The loons. Birds hear in a totally different way than we do, man. Not just frequencies and distances; they hear everything but with a totally different purpose. It’s how they mate, migrate, everything. If you were trying to attract a loon up by your cabin or dock or whatever—or scare one off maybe—you’d want to communicate with it. But that would probably piss off the neighbors, right? Or even if you didn’t have any neighbors, you’d be liable to drive yourself crazy, listening to that over and over.” He stopped the player and the distorted loon song died. “So that’s my guess. Whoever put this up is, like, seriously into birds. Studying them or whatever.” He tugged at his ear and peered at the screen. “Kind of smart, if the loons can actually pick it up at that frequency. I wonder if it worked.” “I think it did,” I said, but whether the birds had ever heard it, I had no idea. I knew that it was my cue, though. The sound my mother had chosen when she set out to stop my nightmares and erased my knowledge of reality instead.

“There’s one more, and it’s a wretched friggin’ noise.” He toggled between windows, pressed “play,” and winced at the sound that emanated from the speakers. It was a high, harsh squawk, nothing like the loon. It reminded me of failing brakes on an old car, or the protesting screech of an ancient screen door. “What is that one?” Renee said, grimacing. “An undesirable,” he said, turning it off. “Which makes me think maybe the point of the system is to scare birds away. People like to have loons around, but not grackles.” I stared at him, feeling an ice-water sensation slide down my spine. “Grackles,” I echoed.

“Are the loons good or bad for Nick?” I repeated. “Both,” she said, and I could have screamed. Renee was right: there was no point to this.

“Are the grackles good or bad for Nick?” I asked. “Both,” she said. The word left her thin lips forcefully, enunciated sharply. This time I didn’t feel the surge of helplessness. I’d dismissed her answer the first time. Now I just studied her face. “Both,” I echoed. “Does that mean I—Does that mean that Nick needs to hear them? Or should he stop listening? Which is better?”

Then she said, “Grackles.” Pause. Breath. “Up.” I watched her. She was looking right through me, but the force of effort from those two words was obvious. “Grackles go up,” I said. Her body seemed to loosen, unwind. “Up,” she said. “Yes.” “The loons…” I drifted off, thought about it, and then said, “Well, the loons descend. The loons dive down, don’t they?” “Down,” she said. “Up and down.” I studied her. Thought about the random, disassociated speech—what I had perceived as random and disassociated, at least. Wakefield and the Red Sox and the good day. Birds and sun. Traps under the porch. Grackles. The fluttering rise and fall of a knuckleball crossing the plate. I thought of the song. “I need both,” I said. “Nick needs both sounds, doesn’t he? One to dive, one to rise.” “Nick has both.”

I was the only one who could hear the birds at the frequency the emitter used. I had feared this initially, but now it occurred to me that I’d never seen the fog at Rosewater, either. The terrible dreams followed me from place to place, voices and visions and the rising wind of an angry storm out at sea, but at Rosewater the fog had cleared. Until I listened to the sleep song. Ten people had heard the song, Bryce Lermond had told me, and nine were dead. Then there was Nick Bishop.

Yes, I must confess that I misled you a tiny bit yesterday, although in my defense it wasn’t by much. I told you nine of the ten people to hear the song are dead. That’s only half-true.” “Half?” “Sixty percent? I don’t know, Nick, you tell me—how alive is your mother?” I pivoted back from the window. Stared at him. He smiled. Rapped his knuckles off the metal cover of the emitter. “She gave it a hell of a try. And this part of the story I actually do want you to know, because it’s fucking noble, man. All I ever wanted was you. You were going to be the test. I mean, you were the one who couldn’t dream and didn’t remember trauma, right? But she put you off-limits. Even promised to play the role herself, if that’s what it took, and considering how much she knew about the risks by then…” He made a little inclination with his head and seemed almost sincerely moved. “Very brave. She was a very brave woman.”

I started walking again, and the loon wailed once more. The sound my mother had chosen to calm me long ago was alive again, and the sound was deceptive. What the uninformed believed to be a peaceful birdsong was in fact a guardian’s war cry. The emitter that she’d used to play it sat on the table inside the camp, its power cord severed. So how was I hearing it? And I had never heard the grackles, not once. She said I needed both. Up and down, one to descend, one to rise. No. That wasn’t entirely right. She’d said “Nick has both.” Has. As if it had been hardwired, a permanent change, and all I needed to do was listen and understand. For the first time, I thought I did understand. The emitter had mattered once, had mattered greatly. But maybe its job was already done. Some circuits stay lit.