I know I couldn’t take my eyes off them for a while, until I got the message that they knew they were being stared at and didn’t particularly like it. But they were generally ignored by the others.
There were strange accents, too. Not just the expected Maine twang and Canadian accents, or even just the French Canadian accents—those were normal. But there were some really odd ones, ones where I picked out only a few words, which sounded like English, French, Spanish, and Nordic languages all intermixed and often with weird results.
And men with pigtails and long, braided hair, and women with shaved heads or, occasionally, beards.
It was weird.
Frankly, it scared me a little, and I found the purser and introduced myself.
The officer, a good-looking young man named Gifford Hanley, a Canadian from his speech, seemed delighted that I’d seen all this and not the least bit disturbed.
“Well, well, well!” he almost beamed. “Maybe we’ve found our new man at last, eh? Not bloody soon enough, either! We’ve been working short-handed for too long and it’s getting to the others.”
He took me up to the bridge—one of the most modern I’d ever seen—and introduced me to the captain and helmsman. They all asked me what I thought of the Orcas and how I liked the sea, and none of them would answer my questions on the unusual passengers.
Well, there was a St. Clement’s Island. A big one, too, from the looks of it, and a fair amount of traffic getting off and wanting on. Some of the vehicles that got on were odd, too; many of the cars looked unfamiliar in design, the trucks also odd, and there were even several horse-drawn wagons!
The island had that same quality as some of the passengers, too. It never seemed to be quite in focus just beyond the ferry terminal, and lights seemed to shift, so that where I thought there were houses or a motel suddenly they were somewhere else, of a different intensity. I was willing to swear that the motel had two stories; later it seemed over on the left, and four stories high, then further back, still later, with a single story.
Even the lighthouse as we sped out of the harbor changed; one time it looked very tall with a house at its base; then, suddenly, it was short and tubby, then an automated light that seemed to be out in the water with no sign of an island.
This continued for most of the trip. St. Michael looked like a carbon copy of Southport, the passengers and vehicles as bizarre—and numerous—and there seemed to be a lot of customs men in different uniforms dashing about, totally ignoring some vehicles while processing others.
The trip back was equally strange. The newsstand contained some books and magazines that were odd to say the least, and papers with strange names and stranger headlines.
This time there were even Indians aboard, speaking odd tongues. Some looked straight out of The Last of the Mohicans, complete with wild haircut, others dressed from little to heavy, despite the fact that it was July and very warm and humid.
And, just before we were to make the red and green channel markers and turn into Southport, I saw the girl die for the first time.
She was dressed in red tee shirt, yellow shorts, and sandals; she had long brown hair, was rather short and stocky, and wore oversized granny glasses.
I wasn’t paying much attention, really, just watching her looking over the side at the wake, when, before I could even cry out, she suddenly climbed up on the rail and plunged in, very near the stern.
I screamed, and heard her body hit the water and then heard her howl of terror as she dropped close enough so that the propwash caught her, sucked her under, and cut her to pieces.
Several people on the afterdeck looked at me quizzically, but only one or two seemed to realize that a woman had just died.
There was little I could do, but I ran back to Hanley, breathless.
He just nodded sadly.
“Take it easy, man,” he said gently. “She’s dead, and there’s no use going back for the body. Believe me, we know. It won’t be there.”
I was shocked, badly upset. “How do you know that?” I snapped.
“Because we did it every time the last four times she killed herself and we never found the body then, either,” he replied sadly.
I had my mouth open, ready to retort, to say something, but he got up, put on his officer’s hat and coat, and said, “Excuse me. I have to supervise the unloading,” and walked out.
As soon as I got off the ship it was like some sort of dreamy fog had lifted from me. Everything looked suddenly bright and clear, and the people and vehicles looked normal. I made my way to the small ferry terminal building.
When they’d loaded and the ship was gone again, I waited for McNeil to return to his office. It looked much the same really, but a few things seemed different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something odd—like the paneling had been rosewood before, and was now walnut. Small things, but nagging ones.
McNeil came back after seeing the ship clear. It ran almost constantly, according to the schedule.
I glanced out the window as he approached and noticed uniformed customs men checking out the debarked vehicles. They seemed to have different uniforms than I’d remembered.
Then the ticket agent entered the office and I got another shock. He had a beard.
No, it was the same man, all right. No question about it. But the man I’d talked to less than nine hours before had been clean-shaven.
I turned to where the navigation atlas lay, just where I’d put it, still open to the Southport page.
It showed a ferry line from Southport to a rather substantial St. Clement’s Island now. But nothing to Nova Scotia.
I turned to the bearded McNeil, who was watching me with mild amusement in his eyes.
“What the hell is going on here?” I demanded.
He went over and sat down in his swivel chair. “Want the job?” he asked. “It’s yours if you do.”
I couldn’t believe his attitude. “I want an explanation, damn it!” I fumed.
He chuckled. “I told you I’d give you one if you wanted. Now, you’ll have to bear with me, since I’m only repeating what the Company tells me, and I’m not sure I have it all clear myself.”
I sat down in the other chair. “Go ahead,” I told him.
He sighed. “Well, let’s start off by saying that there’s been a Bluewater corporation ferry on this run since the mid-1800s—steam packet at first, of course. The Orcas is the eleventh ship in the service, put on a year and a half ago.”
He reached over, grabbed a cigarette, lit it, and continued.
“Well, anyway, it was a normal operation until about 1910 or so. That’s when they started noticing that their counts were off, that there seemed to be more passengers than the manifests called for, different freight, and all that. As it continued, the crews started noticing more and more of the kind of stuff you saw, and things got crazy for them, too. Southport was a big fishing and lobstering town then—nobody does that any more, the whole economy’s the ferry.
“Well, anyway, one time this crewman goes crazy, says the woman in his house isn’t his wife. A few days later another comes home to find that he has four kids—and he was only married a week before. And so on.”
I felt my skin starting to crawl slightly.
“So, they send some big shots up. The men are absolutely nuts, but they believe what they claim. Soon everybody who works the ship is spooked, and this can’t be dismissed. The experts go for a ride and can’t find anything wrong, but now two of the crewmen claim that it is their wife, or their kid, or somesuch. Got to be a pain, though, getting crewmen. We finally had to center on loners—people without family, friends, or close personal ties. It kept getting worse each trip. Had a hell of a time keeping men for a while, and that’s why it’s so hard to recruit new ones.”