Inventing and telling stories is one of life’s pleasures -- but some storytellers need extraordinary encouragement. For more than a decade John Gellard and Peter Johnson, two inspired English teachers at Kitsilano and Prince of Wales high schools in Vancouver, Canada, provided just such encouragement. Each fall, the teachers spirited their Writing 12 senior students out of the city to Gambier Island off British Columbia’s coast. On the first afternoon of each two-day writing retreat, rain or shine, all students, teachers and occasional guests were sent alone into Gambier’s woodlands and coastlines to find a spot to write. Four hours later, bearing some sort of tale, everyone straggled back to the the island’s rented community centre.
The writers, numbering as many as 55, cooked and wolfed down a pasta feast before transforming themselves by donning formal evening wear. With the women in evening gowns and the men in tuxedos, everyone settled before a blazing fireplace in the centre’s Great Hall. Then, long into the dark Autumn night, each and every person took a turn reading the words inspired by their four hours of solitude.
The subjects ranged from political commentary to fairy tales to personal essays. Most remarkable, though, was the respectful attentiveness to each reader, and the unstinting applause at the end of each presentation. Later, the works in all their raw authenticity were published in a school annual, “Tales of Gambier.”
I was lucky enough in October, 2003, to be invited along on the Gambier retreat. The following ghost story -- inspired perhaps by the nearness of Halloween, by the spookiness of wandering alone in the Island’s woods and the zaniness of joining dozens of teenagers on a retreat -- was my offering. It certainly ain’t literature, but it was a lot of fun to write, and when it comes to play, I think fun is what counts most.
-- Deborah Jones
The Island
The announcer on the short wave radio called it the 500-year-storm. His voice broke through the static every few minutes to impart rainfall totals, wind velocity, lightning strikes. Phyllis MacIntyre cared not a whit. She already had the measure of this storm. She knew it intimately from the smashing of the outhouse door, the quaking of the clapboard walls, the moaning of the old rafters that had seemed oh-so-quaint when, on a crazy whim, she and Jack bought this second retirement home on the Island. Now, she thought at one point as she listened to the din of the storm, even the wind was cackling at their foolishness.
It was high noon in mid-fall, but leaning on her crutch at the picture window, peering through dense sheets of rainwater, Phyllis thought the bay below their cabin looked as dark and grim as during a February dusk. What were she and Jack doing here, she wondered yet again. They enjoyed being landlubber city dwellers in their retirement. They appreciated their helpful urban neighbours. They liked the convenience stores. They were reassured by the city’s emergency services, like the paramedics who came the other day when she sprained her ankle. “Emergency services!” she muttered with a rueful snort, shifting the leg in a cast and realizing they were utterly alone on the Island this fall weekend.
Heedless of the fact she was biting her fingernails to the quick, Phyllis stood before the pane of glass and stared and chewed, chewed and stared. She flinched every time a bolt of lightning revealed the wrath of the ocean, and remembered how they’d been smitten by the calm blue waters the first time they visited this place. “Picturesque retreat on charming Gambier Island bay,” the realtor had cooed into the phone.
“Ha!” Phyllis snorted again, watching the maelstrom of the “charming” bay hurl sailboats high onto the shore. Phyllis thought she’d be sick just watching the heaving water -- except that her stomach had been clenched in fear since early that morning when Jack, calling out that he’d be “just a moment,” had dashed out into the storm to drag their canoe further onto the beach.
Phyllis wondered for the umpteenth time: ‘Where, in hell, was Jack?’
~~~
When the lightning struck the highest point at the centre of Gambier Island, the giant fir ceased to be a tree, became instead a radiant conduit of pure energy. Crackling, dancing, swirling, the lightning bolt raced from tip to roots, where it should have reached ground and a peaceful end. Instead, serendipitously hitting an impossible vein of gold, it blazed on deep within the earth, under the Island ball field and alongside the septic tank, before striking a thousand-year-old carved coffin built, improbably, from a petrified Scandinavian oak tree. Thwarted in its journey, the lightning gathered itself for a last almighty blast and, as the ancient wood construct heaved and cracked, ended.
Endings, always, are also beginnings. And as the lightning bolt expired, life began anew for the skraeling. In the 1,000 years since the mutiny and violent imprisonment of the skraeling’s last Viking captain, the immortal troll had been entombed, rendered breathless, sightless, bereft of consciousness. Oh, the odd earthquake had stirred its gaol and shivered its soul, sent hope flickering through the dim depths of its skraeling brain. But for seemingly endless time, the creature had been essentially dormant.
Now, its dark sleep ended in a blaze.
Pain.
Light.
Heat.
Life.
The skraeling stirred, long-dormant muscles flexing in agony. Blindly, it reached three-fingered hands through the earth and up to the air, then hauled its serpentine body through a crack in the debris. For the first time in a millennium it laid its wasted form on the surface of the world. The creature’s desiccated skin sponged up the rain, returning to its green-hued reptilian iridescence. Water seeped under its closed eyelids, and its eyes stung as the translucent lids opened slowly to reveal yellow orbs. Its first gasp of air seared lungs long shrivelled, and it writhed in pain as oxygen raced through veins long parched.
Hesitantly at first, then faster and faster, the skraeling began to move. It wriggled and slithered across a community centre field, darted to the other side of the road, somersaulted into a ditch. There, beneath bramble thickets, it found a stream born of the storm. As the pain eased and its muscles reached capacity, the skraeling slipped into the water, revelling in its infinite ability to heal and adapt.
Cackling loudly as it passed a clapboard cottage, the creature belly-surfed the stream’s surface as the water coursed down a hill, joined forces with a rivulet, merged with a culvert’s outpour and grew to become a river. The torrent had become a flood by the time it reached a second culvert, and the skraeling abandoned itself to the flow. It was excited. It smelled the ocean now, the salt-tang sharp in its nostrils. Its hearts quickened as it imagined the sight of its long-lost Viking ship. It anticipated its reunion with the vessel which, so long ago, had brought it to this alien land, and from which it had been so rudely expelled with its host, the ship’s captain, who even the skraeling’s supernatural powers could not save from a rebellious crew. Now, the skraeling quivered as it rushed, after so many centuries of being denied, to resume its rightful place in whomever was now Captain.
Suddenly the flood entered an outflow pipe, and gushed out into thin air. The skraeling was falling, falling, falling. Smash. Head first, it hit the rocky beach, where it lay bleeding and stunned.
The skraeling jerked and twitched for the few moments its wounds needed to heal, rolled clear of the battering torrent of water, and raised its head to survey the bay. The Viking ship was not among the flimsy boats roiling in the stormy waters -- but the scent of human was strong. Pressed to the beach by the driving rain and the spray of breaking waves, the skraeling crawled along the rocks -- and came nose to nose with the wrinkled face of a very old man.
The man’s skin was papery with age and his grey hair thin. His body looked wiry and strong -- except that something was horribly wrong. He sprawled on his belly on the rocks, washed over by wave after crashing wave of seawater. His back was twisted like a corkscrew and one leg was crushed under a rock. The man’s blue eyes, dulled with pain and fading in the cold, met the skraeling’s yellow gleam. The two examined one another, faces inches apart. For a fleeting instant the blue eyes widened in terror. Then the skraeling locked its gaze with the man, willed itself entry, and vanished corporeally.
Rain spattered onto the beach rocks where the creature had been.
Jack’s body shuddered. He lifted his head, sighed, straightened himself out, and then leapt up. He shook the water out of his black, thick hair and stretched his muscular limbs. Impervious to the raging storm, only momentarily curious at the unaccustomed spring in his step and the lack of arthritic pain in his joints, he then set off homeward with a brisk stride. He must hurry, thought Jack. Phyllis would be worried.
Published: Tales of Gambier, Fall 2003, by Deborah Jones
Copyright Deborah Jones 2003
