Page 26 of After Life
Oscar stared at me wide-eyed for a long moment before bursting into a cackle. “Pull the other one, there’s bells on!”
“I know, it’s ridiculous but the fact remains, this is what it’s for. Here, the passage beneath the first one. Loosely, it says to call on the ocean’s lost, mark out this sigil where the sand pinks at dawn. Mark with the blood of your heart and burn with salted flame.” I turned to the second sigil. “And this one is sort of a reversal, from what I can tell. Send them back to the sea lest their desire for the shore root them in place.”
“Why would anyone want to summon the dead from the ocean?” Oscar asked, wrinkling his nose. “Unless,” he continued, tone thoughtful, “they were specific dead. People they’d lost to an accident in the water. A shipwreck, maybe?”
I shook my head, paging ahead, past lists of ingredients for protection charms and imprecations about the correct times and days to perform this particular bit of work. “In chapter two, the author describes Broken Palm Island before people settled here full time. It wasn’t considered habitable due to the lack of resources and what the author claims were rank spirits and dark movements among the night-shadows, the ocean too bitter and hungry for those not prepared to draw on her secrets.” I glanced up at him. “Rank spirits could be something like rotting vegetation, or maybe just the smell of the shore and cove at low tide. Dead fish, seaweed, who knows.”
“You said folklore. It’s folklore? This sounds more like someone fancied themselves to be a witch of sorts.”
Scooting closer, I opened to a page about midway through the book. “Here. The author describes creatures who live on the island. Now, there are the standard things like crabs, sand fleas, birds. But, they go on to describe something like... like...” I trailed off, shaking my head. “I can’t think of something to compare it to. While cryptids are not uncommon in American folklore, they tend to fall into regional lines. At least before the internet became a thing. Now you have people from California claiming they saw the Flatwoods Monster and New Yorkers crying Chupacabra.”
“I’m starting to think I should’ve paid more attention to that folklore podcast Ezra found,” Oscar murmured. “What did the author claim lived here?”
I shrugged, starting to pace the narrow confines of the room as I spoke, falling into professor mode almost without thinking. “This is the weirdest part. They call them wreckers, which at first I assumed meant they were wreckers, like actual people but living rough or maybe the author was being denigrating over perceived social class disparity. But wreckers weren’t active here like they were in Florida, at least from what I recall.”
He wrinkled his nose in thought. “Wreckers? Is that what it sounds like?”
“The stories go that wreckers would lure ships to run aground, then loot them. Piracy without the overhead of having to outfit and maintain a ship.”
“Piracy on a budget.”
I smirked. “Something like that. Actual wreckers would originally help salvage shipwrecks in exchange for a portion of the cargo, but as the stories go, some people figured why wait for a disaster to occur. Make it happen. There’re tales of fires set on beaches to draw ships to the shallows, that sort of thing. The veracity of the more salacious tales is debated—everyone loves a good story and making up something daring and a little scary to tell visitors may have given rise to the legends of wreckers especially along the Florida coast. Original wreckers were legitimate and didn’t create the shipwrecks themselves.”
“Well,” Oscar sighed. “Pirates have always been a thing, eh? People love the idea...”
I hummed in agreement. “There’s an area off the coast here known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic due to how many ships wrecked there over the years. Secondly, this island, at least according to the maps and the geological and oceanographic surveys I was able to pull up online, lacks reefs or any sort of submerged dangers that would lead to wrecking. Third—”
“Love, how many points do you have?” Oscar asked, a small smile tugging his lips. “Is it more than five? If so, I think I’d like some tea first.”
I mock-huffed, unable to stop the warm little bubble of amusement at his teasing. Damn it, I love him, I thought, and nearly distracted myself from the matter at hand with my goofy grinning up at him. “This is the last one on this topic,” I promised. “But if you’re gonna make a pot, I’ll take some.” He stuck his tongue out, startling a laugh out of me. “Well, third thing is: the book refers to Wreckers, but it’s a very nonstandard description. They’re capitalized, for one. Like a title rather than a job description. And for two—”
“That’s technically point number five, Julian.”
“No, it’s sub-point two to major point three.”
“Splitting hairs.”
“Being exact,” I countered, and he grinned, elbowing me gently in the ribs on my uninjured side.
“So, the Wreckers-with-a-capital are what? Pirates? Ghosts? Oh!” He sat up and bounced a little, patting my arm in excitement. “Pirate ghosts? I’ve only spoken with one pirate ghost, a rather snarky fellow in Newton Ferrers. he claimed to be Henry Avery but was much too late to have been him.” Oscar clicked his tongue in remembered disapproval. “Ezra thinks the man was a tour guide who topped it while giving one of the West Country pirate tours and either didn’t know he was dead or was very committed to remaining in character.”
The idea tickled me, and I wondered what that said about me now, when the year before I’d have rolled my eyes and pretended I didn’t hear that.
I prefer this version of me, I realized, not for the first time. It’s much less of an asshole. “What happened to him?”
“Hm? Oh, well, he was dead so not much, I suppose. He was banging around in an older home, scaring the absolute daylight out of the owner, who was a friend of a friend of Grandmere’s. He was one of my first clients.”
“The ghost or the homeowner?”
Oscar tipped his head thoughtfully. “Both, I suppose, in a sense. The ghost—Henry, since that’s the only name he’d give me—refused to leave, would never say why. I must admit, my adventurous heart hoped there was buried treasure or something like that, but I strongly suspect he was just afraid of what comes next.”
“Aren’t we all?” I muttered, flipping the page in the book to a line drawing of something tall, sharp-angled, and spidery.
Oscar fell quiet at my off-hand remark, folding his hands in his lap and staring at the page I had open.
“Are you?” I murmured. Oscar darted me a glance and, very gingerly, shrugged one shoulder.
“Not so much fear,” he said after a brief hesitation. “Perhaps more akin to uncertainty. I know there is something next. But what it is? Haven’t the foggiest. Is it the same for everyone? Will I see my loved ones? Or will I be in some void waiting for what’s after that stop?” He shifted uneasily, staring at the open book on my knee. “What if what comes next, if you’re not a ghost, is just gray nothing? An eternal holding pattern? I’m not sure I’d do well with that.”
