Where They Wait

by Scott Carson

“What’s the joke, Bryce?” I whispered. “You want me to climb in?” “No joke. You’re about to do something very special. Change the world, in fact. I believe you can do that.” He walked to the head of the coffin and let his fingertips trace its smooth surface. “The song, I’ve solved. I can capture it, conceal it, replicate it, alter it, aim it. I can do most anything with the song. The problem is the singer. I haven’t solved that one just yet. I think there’s a more significant process there. Human touch seems to matter.” I got it then. A horrible sense of clarity crept over me, and I remembered the journal of John Trenchard, his description of how the Arabella had been abandoned with no one left aboard save for the dead and dying. I remembered this and then I heard the words of the song: If you want to see home I ask you to rise Tell you to rise Now, now, you must rise For no man among us must die “No, Bryce,” I said. Whispered.

“Bring her back?” she whispered. “Yes,” I said. “The song has been sung to the living. He wants to know what happens when it’s offered to the dead. Am I right, Bryce? You’ve got the same big idea your ancestor had on the Arabella all those centuries ago.” Bryce looked to Renee. “I loved her,” he said. “I love her still. And you? You have the arrogance to look at me with blame. To see her now”—he waved at the casket—“and say this is my fault. When you were the one who coerced her into removing every protection, every caution, every protocol. Together, she and I were going to change the world. Together, we were going to…” His voice trailed off. He wiped his mouth. Shook his head. “You hid the truth from her,” Renee said. “She didn’t know a fraction of what you knew.”

I was about to tell him that if he wanted to see such horror so badly, he could try it himself, but then I stopped myself. Why couldn’t he try? He knew the words; as he’d said, he had the song. Why had he needed me at all? And then, finally, I understood. If the simple act of listening could do damage to the living, then the act of singing it to the dead? That was damnation. It was written plainly in the journal of John Trenchard, quoted from the dying Dennison. There was a price to listening to the death song, and a higher cost still for those who shared it. Once it had been a gift, a peaceful passage, but out there on the winter sea where Lermond’s whip had gone slick and red with blood and flesh, flaying innocence in pursuit of power, it had become something else. “Yes,” Ashley Holland’s ghost whispered into my ear, that soft icy gust that had once repelled me and now felt like a comfort. “You know what to do. Sing the right song, in the right way. Please.”

Then came a sound just a pitch below the howl of the storm. Soft but clear and decidedly out of place on this forsaken rock. It was a bird’s song. Not a beautiful one, not the mournful cry of a loon nor the harsh cawing of a seagull, but something higher, shrill, rising, rising, rising. I kept my eyes closed and let my mind chase the sound.

Each day I work with her on the memory exercises that her doctors and therapists recommend. They caution me not to expect much. For a long time, I thought about recorded cues and guidance offered up to the unconscious mind during sleep. The research is undeniably promising. I had my reservations, of course, but the thought of being able to reach someone who is lost and guide them back toward you—to restore them to how they once were and how you wish them to be again—is a powerful one.

A dreaming man now, I have developed a fresh gratitude for dawn. At dawn, the memory of the island recedes, and as the daylight rises, I’m convinced that when my time comes, the ones on the island will let me pass. I’ve spoken for them, after all, have told their story, sang their song. I owe them no more. They will let me pass. I am sure of it. Then comes the night, and the fog reaches out with the wind blowing hard behind it, and I am no longer so sure. This is the rhythm of my life. The island comes and goes, night becomes day, dreams and memories change hands. Familiar faces become foreign, dire moments become distant, and the only thing I can be sure of is that I’m sure of nothing at all, which leaves a great capacity for hope.

I hope that maybe the worst of this world is imagined, and the best of it assured. It is so easy to become fearful when you are alone in the dark. When the sun emerges in the east and the last of the blackness recedes, it is possible to believe that too much weight was granted to fear, and too little allocated to hope. This is, of course, the gift of dreams.