Sal came up beside me. “How do we get to the house?” she asked.
The wall, the only remaining piece of Dee’s house, was on the other side of the chasm — and there was absolutely no way of getting across it.
“We don’t.”
“But —”
“Sal, what difference does it make? They’re not there. The house is hardly there, and we can see all the way through it from here — through those great big gaping holes in the side. It’s empty! It’s dead and deserted, like this whole place.”
I could feel my voice rising. I took a breath and added more gently, “Sal, there’s no one here. And, more to the point, there’s been no one here for years.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Sal insisted.
“I know it doesn’t. But it’s true. Look around. It’s a completely abandoned, destroyed, deserted place.”
I turned around in a full circle to survey my surroundings and try to convince myself they were real. That was when I noticed something that made me catch my breath, right over at the edge of the spit of land, just in front of where we stood. I walked across to take a closer look.
It was a crumbling low wall, like others all around the place, but with one difference: it was pink. A very faded pink, but you could clearly see the color, which stood out among the gray. The wall came up about as high as my knees and was probably once the back corner of a house.
I remembered Dee telling me about the family who had owned this house. I couldn’t recall their names, but I remembered what she’d said. The couple who lived here had just painted the place pink because their young daughter had insisted on it.
This pink had been painted a long time ago.
Where was the family now? What had happened to them? What had happened to all of it? How was any of this possible?
My heart felt heavy, and I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take.
“Sal, let’s go back,” I said.
She just nodded without saying anything. That was when I realized how much harder this must be for her than for me. An hour ago, we were filled with hope that we were about to bring her brother home; now he seemed more lost than ever.
“We’ll find him,” I said, touching her arm as we walked. “We’ll bring him home.”
Sal just nodded and swallowed. We didn’t say anything else till we got back to the lifeboat.
The men were waiting for us. “So, you want to tell us the truth about your friends?” Dave asked. “They weren’t here at all, really, were they?”
We didn’t reply. How could we? There was nothing we could say that would make sense — or that the men would believe.
“You know we’re an emergency service, don’t you?” Stan said as we clambered aboard and Dave started the engine.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, it’s probably best if you don’t waste our time again.”
I looked at his face to see if he was angry, but he’d turned away to pull a fender over the side of the boat.
“We’re not going to report you this time,” he went on as we started chugging away from the island. “But next time you’re craving a boat trip, it’s best if you ask one of the fishermen to give you a ride. What if we’d had a real emergency come in while we were taking you girls out on a joyride?”
“A joyride?” I gasped. “You think this was a joyride?”
Stan shrugged. “OK, to be fair, I can’t say either of you looks exactly filled with joy. Well, what was it about, then?”
I opened my mouth to reply and caught Sal’s eye before I began. She quickly shook her head: don’t tell them.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t a joyride, and we weren’t tricking you. But we were wrong. We thought our friends were over there, but we hadn’t already been there like we said.”
“We thought if we said we’d been there and seen them, you’d be more likely to come,” Sal added.
Stan looked at us, studying each of our faces — probably to see if we were lying. I don’t know what he saw there, but whatever it was, he spoke more gently. “All right,” he said. “Like I said, you’re not in trouble.”
No, but Peter and Dee still are.
“Just be honest next time, OK?”
“OK. Sorry,” I said again.
“Go and check where your friends are staying. You’ll probably find they’re at home safe and sound,” Stan finished.
“Probably,” I said woodenly.
The rest of the journey back was calm and uneventful. Soon, Dave was pulling the boat back into the harbor and Stan stood up to get ready with the ropes.
“Now, go and find your friends and have a nice day,” he said. “No more silly stories, OK?”
“No more silly stories,” I repeated.
“We’re sorry,” Sal added.
“All right. Good girls.” Stan slung the rope over a cleat and reached out to help us off the boat. “Off you go, now. And try to cheer up a bit, eh? Porthaven’s not the worst place in the world to spend your vacation, you know.”
We got off the boat and left Dave and Stan sorting out ropes and engines. We didn’t start talking till we were sure we were out of earshot. Then Sal stopped and turned to me.
“Now what do we do?” she asked.
“I was about to ask you the same thing. Do you think we should go back to the pub?”
She shook her head. “I can’t face it. What would we say? Hey, we saw Peter. He was hanging off the roof of a flooded house in the middle of a terrible storm. So we got the rescue boat out to get him, and guess what! He wasn’t there anymore! And neither was the house. Or the village. That’d go over well, don’t you think?”
“Exactly. We can’t tell your parents. We can’t tell anyone. They’ll think we’re bonkers.”
“Or that we made it up, like the lifeboat men did.”
“Right. And to be fair, who could blame them?” I added. “If I heard someone say that, I’d think they’d either made it up or lost their mind, for sure.”
“So what do we do?” Sal asked.
I thought for a moment. “We need to find out what’s going on,” I said. Possibly stating the obvious, but what else could we do?
“I agree. But how?”
I shrugged. “Normally I’d say let’s look up a bunch of stuff on the Internet — but we can’t.”
“Why not?”
I opened my arms to take in all of Porthaven. “This place,” I said. “I don’t know anywhere around here that gets a signal.”
Sal stared at me. “I do,” she said. “Come on.” And then she hurried off.
I quickly caught up with her. “Where are we going?” I asked.
Sal answered without looking at me. “Our rental apartment. It has a computer and a Wi-Fi connection. It was what made Dad choose that apartment — he’s addicted to the Internet. He thinks the sky will fall if he doesn’t go online at least twenty times a day.”
“Awesome!” An actual Internet signal! I could hardly believe it. I was going to reenter the twenty-first century for the first time in a week.
Sal suddenly stopped walking. “What if my parents are still there?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. “We ask if we can use the computer, but we don’t tell them what it’s for,” I said.
“So what do we say?”
“Just that you’ve come to pack up your things, and I’ve come to help you, and I want to look up a song on the Internet or something.”
“OK,” Sal agreed. “They’ve probably gotten their stuff together and gone back to the pub by now anyway.”
“Have you got a key?” I asked as we approached the apartment.
“Don’t need one. The door is number coded.”
As Sal punched in the numbers, part of me wondered what we were doing. What exactly were we going to look up online? And what was it going to tell us? It wasn’t as if Peter was likely to have disappeared without a trace, and then sent us an e-mail telling us w
here we could find him!
I fought the doubts away. At least we were doing something. It might not be much of a plan, but it was the only one we had.
I pulled up a chair next to Sal and listened to the computer slowly whir into action. Her parents had come and gone and the place was empty, apart from Sal’s room. Most of her stuff was in a small suitcase that was open on the bed, with a note lying on top.
We’ve packed most of your things for you. Come over to the pub as soon as you’re ready.
Love you, Mom & Dad
Finally, the computer was up and running. It hummed quietly while we tried to figure out exactly what to type.
Sal’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. She looked at me.
“Why don’t you see if there’s a coastwatch station or something for this area?” I suggested. “Maybe they’ll have a list of people who have been rescued.”
She brought up a search engine and typed “Porthaven Coastwatch.”
After about five minutes of scrolling and reading through all sorts of technical jargon, we found it — a list of recent events that had taken place in this area. I held my breath as the page loaded.
“Nothing,” Sal said.
I read everything on the screen. The last entry was more than a week ago.
Sal stared at the computer. “Now what?”
“Look at the weather reports,” I suggested. “See if there’s anything about that freak storm.”
“Good idea.”
Sal hit a few keys and we tried a few weather pages. Again we couldn’t find anything useful. There were no reports of storms in more than a month.
“Why is there nothing about it?” Sal asked.
“I don’t know. Too recent, maybe?”
“Too recent? But isn’t that supposed to be the whole point of the Internet? You can read about things the second they’ve happened.”
“I know, I don’t get it,” I said. And then I realized what we should be looking for. It was obvious. So obvious that we’d looked right past it; or we’d simply been too scared of what we might see if we tried it. Either way, it was the only thing I could think of that might give us any answers.
“Sal.”
She turned to me.
I nodded at the keyboard. “Just put in ‘Luffsands.’”
A line of text at the top of the page said that there were 451,623 results for Luffsands. Below it, the screen was filled with links to tons of web pages.
“Where do we start?” Sal asked.
I shrugged. “The first one?”
She clicked on the top link. It led us to a page from the Wildlife Trust, full of statistics about birdlife found on the island.
Sal went back to the search engine and tried the next one. The page took forever to open. When it finally did, it was blank except for a line of small black text at the top: “Link Not Found. Error 5201.”
“This is stupid,” Sal said, flopping back in her chair. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
I leaned over and reached for the mouse. “Let’s try this one.” I scrolled to the bottom of the page and hit the last link.
“It’s a newspaper article,” I said as the page loaded.
“And look,” Sal added. “It’s got today’s date. We’re getting somewhere at last.” She hit a button to enlarge the window and we read the article together.
Luffsands was hit yesterday by one of the worst storms in living history.
The village, home to sixty-seven families, was left in ruins by a combination of the fiercest northeasterly winds on record and the highest tide of the year.
Seven houses were completely destroyed. Many others were left without roofs, windows, or floors. Forecasters are predicting even worse gales over the coming days. If their timing combines with the tide as disastrously as yesterday’s storm, the destruction could be even more devastating.
Nigel Cannister, from the Eastern Coastwatch Station, said, “We’ve conducted three search and rescue missions so far, and we believe we’ve gotten all the residents out. The conditions our men have been working in have been exceptionally difficult, and yesterday’s rescue mission had to be halted when an entire piece of land collapsed into the sea. We will be returning to make absolutely sure no one has been left behind, once it is safe to do so.”
Mr. Cannister went on. “We are advising that no one attempts to return to the island until we have officially given the all clear. Unfortunately, we do not expect to be able to do this anytime soon. If the forecasters are correct, we anticipate that the entire village could go the same way as the front houses. In other words, by the end of this week, there may be no village to return to.
The article ended there. Underneath it was a photograph. It was small and quite blurry, but you could see clearly what it was — Luffsands, taken from the sea. The Luffsands we had seen this morning, the first time we went. The Luffsands where Dee’s house was still standing. Where about fifty houses were still standing.
Sal and I stared at the screen.
“I don’t get it,” Sal said. “The article’s from today. It says the storm was yesterday.”
“Which means that what we saw when we went across on our own was real,” I said.
“Exactly. So why does no one else seem to know anything about it? And how come it had all completely changed when we went back?”
I scrolled down the page. There was another line of text at the bottom of the newspaper article, but it was too small to read.
Sal enlarged it, and we both read what it said.
“That’s why,” I said. Then I looked at her and she looked at me. Neither of us had any words.
The article was today’s date: February 23. But there was one small difference.
It was February 23 — fifty years ago.
I don’t know how long I stared at that date. I don’t know why I kept on staring, either. Was I expecting it to change? Suddenly morph into something that made sense?
Sal broke into my thoughts. “Look,” she said. “There’s another article underneath it.”
This one was dated late March, the same year.
Former residents of Luffsands yesterday visited the remains of their village, in an attempt to salvage anything that remained of their former homes.
The village’s seventy-nine houses were all destroyed in severe storms just over four weeks ago. Miraculously, there were no fatalities, although the lives that were left in tatters will take many years to rebuild.
The visit was the first time residents had been able to return, and it took place after the local coastwatch finally gave the all clear. After weeks of landslides and collapses, Luffsands has now been declared safe to visit — but only under strict supervision from the coastwatch.
Residents took the opportunity to return to their former homes and search through wreckage in an attempt to rescue any personal belongings that had not been washed away by the tides following last month’s storms.
Anyone wishing to contribute to the Luffsands Residents’ Fund should get in touch with the newspaper.
There was a photograph underneath the article. Sal clicked on it to enlarge the picture.
The first thing I noticed was that it was completely different from the photograph with the first article. That one had been the Luffsands we had seen this morning when we’d shouted across to Peter and Dee. This one was the Luffsands we had seen an hour later, with the lifeboat men. No houses standing. Dee’s house nothing more than a wall, perched on the tip of a promontory, resolutely sticking out over the sea.
Two photographs, a month apart — and yet we’d seen both of these scenes in the space of one morning.
But that wasn’t the most shocking thing about the picture. In fact, that was nothing compared to what I was about to see.
There were about twenty people in the shot. Most of them were in the background, bent over, examining the wreckage of their former homes. In the foreground, six people huddled together, looking toward the camera. The photographer cle
arly hadn’t suggested that anyone smile. Their faces were heavy and pained. At the end of the group, a woman on crutches leaned heavily on a boy standing next to her.
I stared at the boy. Then I checked the date on the top of the newspaper. It was definitely from fifty years ago. And it was definitely impossible.
“The boy . . .” I said, unable to finish.
There was no need. Sal was staring too. “I know,” she said. “It can’t be.”
But it was. The boy staring glumly into the camera — in a photograph that was taken fifty years ago — was Peter.
“Mia, I’ve got to get out of here,” Sal gasped. She looked as if she had literally seen a ghost. Maybe she had.
“Me too,” I said. “Grab your things and let’s go.”
I shut down the computer while Sal packed the last of her stuff. Then we let ourselves out of the apartment and made our way along the front, toward the pub.
We didn’t speak as we walked. There weren’t any words that could make sense of all the things that had happened today. And there was no way either of us could even think about anything else, not after what we’d seen, so the only option was silence.
“Mia, can we sit here for a bit?” Sal asked as we came to a bench looking out over the harbor. “I can’t face seeing anyone yet.”
We sat down and looked out at the sea, the calm water, the boats bobbing gently in the harbor. Was any of this real? Were we in some kind of a dream? I tried to figure out at which point I might have fallen asleep. It was the closest I’d come to an explanation — but then Sal brought me back to the present.
“I think we should tell our families,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“They’ll think we’re crazy,” she added.
“I know. Maybe we are. It’s certainly the best explanation I’ve managed to come up with so far.”
Sal tried to smile.
“But we should tell them, either way,” I went on. “Whatever’s going on here, whether we’re losing our minds, or something unbelievably weird is happening, I think we need help with it. We can’t do it on our own anymore.”