Drifters Read online

  Dedication

  For all those hoping to be seen

  Map

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue: First Trial, January 1898

  Part I: A Hole in the World

  1. The Interview: Part I

  2. The Empty Seat

  3. The Principal’s Office

  4. The Warning

  5. The Emergency Room

  6. The Gift

  7. The New Student

  8. The Trail

  9. The Outbreak

  10. The Rooftop

  11. The Bluff

  12. The Woman in the Waves

  13. The Cycle

  14. The Order

  15. The Journey

  Interlude: Second Trial, January 1962

  Part II: A Light Beneath the Waves

  16. The Interview: Part II

  17. The Escape

  18. The Pattern

  19. The Entry

  20. Satellite Beach

  21. The Test

  22. The Photograph

  23. The Containment Room

  24. The Barricade

  Interlude: Third Trial, January 1994

  Part III: A Shadow on the Stars

  25. The Interview: Part III

  26. The Profile Page

  27. The Hidden Room

  28. The Confession

  29. The Voice

  30. The Quiet Coastline

  31. The Starless Night

  32. The Cavern

  33. The Conduit

  34. The Reunion

  Epilogue: January 2024

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Kevin Emerson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  First Trial, January 1898

  PROJECT BARRICADE

  REFERENCE CODE: 7

  ARTIFACT #06450-1

  SOURCE: U.S. NAVAL ARCHIVES

  CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET

  Concerning the Tragic and Unexplainable Circumstances of the Sinking of the Trading Vessel ENDURANCE, an account by reporter Stephen Peters

  28 January 1898

  Dearest Willa,

  I cannot imagine what wild rumors have reached you regarding my fate, and I hope this letter can bring you some comfort. How I long to deliver these words in person, to feel your loving embrace once more, but alas, I fear that my condition is unlikely to improve, and there is little hope of finding passage home in the short time I have left.

  Before I continue, darling, I must make a solemn request: given what has transpired, I suspect this correspondence will be the only account of the Endurance’s end. Therefore, I beg you, once you have read this, please deliver it to the naval authorities, and please stress to them that, though the events described herein may suggest fantasy or madness, I swear upon my father’s name that all of what follows is true.

  Now, for my grim tale: as you will recall from my previous letter, I joined the crew in San Diego on the tenth of December for the journey north to Skagway, in order to file a firsthand accounting of this Klondike gold rush that has of late gripped the imagination. The voyage began most amicably; I have always felt a certain ease among the swarthy clientele of such vessels, perhaps even more so than in the stuffy parlors of our fair city, and so I found the weeks at sea aboard the Endurance quite pleasant, until the fateful night of the twenty-third of January, when tragedy struck.

  The hour was nigh seven. I had, as usual, declined the invitations to join the nightly round of card games, and was tucked into my hammock, attempting to organize my notes from the journey so far, when I heard the warning bell ringing on deck: three sharp tones.

  Of course the bell did not always indicate danger. Sometimes, it was for a pod of humpback, which our navigator would want to chart for the whalers. Other times, for some sight of interest; there was no shortage of wild and breathtaking coastline along this journey, and the remains of spectacular shipwrecks to match.

  And yet as I rose, I felt a portentous chill, and saw a similar disquiet on the other men’s faces as we made our way up the narrow stairway to the main deck. For what, at this dark hour, could justify raising all hands, other than danger?

  “What is it, Barson?” the captain called to the first mate, who was perched in the crow’s nest.

  “It’s there, sir,” Barson replied, pointing two o’clock off starboard. “But what it may be, I cannot say.”

  We crowded to the railing. The sea was relatively calm, the moonless sky clear and twinkling with uncountable stars. I could just make out the features of the coastline: a wide beach and a high bluff, which ended sharply at what might have been the mouth of an inlet.

  “There!” a crewman shouted, pointing at the water between us and the beach.

  And here you must take my word, though you are sure to doubt: there was a ghostly light shimmering beneath the surface. It fluttered and danced and seemed to spiral in a vortex . . . and it was spreading quickly, causing a riot of waves above it.

  “Could be a bioluminescence,” said Mr. Partridge, our science officer. “Or some phosphorescence from thermal vents, though I’m not sure—”

  “It is none of those things,” said the captain gravely. He stared at the growing light with a calm, almost innocent visage, which at the time I found perplexing. As a disciple of our new scientific age, I spent those precious final moments engaged in fruitless theorizing: Was this a new manner of diving bell, or some technology known only to the mind of Edison himself? But somehow, the captain knew better. “Bring us hard to port, Mr. Wells,” he ordered. “All hands to the rigging!”

  Some of the crew took heel to their stations, but others remained at the railing with me, our eyes fixated on the light as if in a trance. And it grew ever more fascinating: blooming and pulsing, a brilliant golden-white. The water boiled, the waves becoming giant and chaotic, and the light shone bright enough to burn spots in my eyes and cause an unnatural heat on my face. At the same time, a storm was brewing overhead, dark clouds gathering in a spiral, as if this light were drawing foul weather to it.

  “Now, curse you!” the captain shouted. “Move!”

  Boots shotgunned on the boards, ropes groaned, pulleys whined. But we had barely begun our maneuvers when the first riotous wave reached us. The bow heaved, then fell steeply, sending us staggering for balance. The Endurance was thrown off its line, and so we came broadside to the next wave, which loomed high above the deck rails.

  “Hang on!” Barson shouted from above.

  For the briefest moment, I saw in that great wave a view that challenged the imagination: a disk of pure darkness had begun to grow within the center of the brilliant vortex, like the pupil of some otherworldly eye. And yet this pupil seemed more like a window: through it, I saw stars, same as the night sky above, but also green swirls of ethereal fire, and closer, a great, hulking darkness, like the blot of a cloud against a moonless night, as if some presence lurked on the other side—for I swear to you, Willa, that was what it seemed I was witnessing, a portal into another realm. I know not how else to describe it.

  Then that great wave curled overhead and broke upon us. I lost hold of the rail and was swept across the deck by the frigid, raging sea. It was sheer luck that I slammed into the mast with enough force to slow my pace; otherwise, I would have been carried overboard like so many of the crew. Instead, I was left prone against the far railing, choking and gasping for breath.

  I wiped the salt from my eyes and raised my head to see that the brilliant light had only grown. It was all around us now, not just beneath the water but everywhere, such that I could no longer see the
fore or aft of the ship, nor the sails—they may have already been ripped away by that point—nor even the sky above. There was only that blinding brightness.

  “Ahh!” A nearby crewman shrieked, and when I gazed at him, I witnessed a horrifying sight. His eyes had clouded over with a milky-white film, becoming pearlescent, unseeing, like something from one of Poe’s ghastly tales. He began to speak in wordless tones, his fingers clawing at his face, before he collapsed to the deck.

  The light had grown so bright it seemed to spear through the very fiber of every board, of the air itself, but that dark pupil had grown in kind, and from within it, a figure now appeared, walking forward as if out of nowhere. A human form in a heavy blue suit, similar to what a deep-sea diver might wear, and yet lined with flashing lights, as if it were somehow electrified. The figure stopped right in the middle of the deck, looking this way and that.

  I realized that I could no longer hear the waves, the wind, even the creaking of the ship. There was only a rhythmic whooshing, like breathing through a pipe, and a steady hum as if made by an enormous windmill. Then a series of urgent sounds: at first, I heard only strange clicks and chirps, but somehow, these unearthly noises began to form themselves into words in my mind, a voice, edged with fear, and sounding as if it were coming through some manner of megaphone.

  “Report! What do you see, Admiral?”

  “I’m not sure,” a woman’s voice replied from inside the suit. “I’m still taking readings—”

  “Be gone, Moon Man!”

  I turned to see our captain braced against the ladder to the aft deck, one arm held to shield his eyes, the other aiming his pistol at the otherworldly figure.

  “No, don’t—!” I shouted, not quite knowing why, yet feeling certain that no good could come from adding a bullet to this equation.

  How right I found myself to be, when the captain fired anyway.

  “Ah!” the woman in the suit cried, stumbling backward.

  A furious tone began to blare, like a siren.

  “Abort the trial!” the frightened man’s voice shouted. “Bring her back, now!”

  The woman staggered, a jet of steam shooting from her suit. “Close it!” she shouted. “Close it!”

  That humming sound intensified, concussing my ears. The siren wailed. The last thing I perceived was the blue-suited figure staggering into that pupil of darkness, the light shrinking around her.

  And then all at once, the light collapsed in on itself and vanished, and the humming ceased, leaving a hollow space in our ears, in the night itself—and also where half our ship had once been. Just beyond my feet, the entire center of the deck and the decks below had completely vaporized. There was the briefest moment of pause . . .

  Then, with a titanic roar, the sea consumed what was left of the Endurance. I heard the screams of crewmen, the splintering of wood, before I myself was plunged beneath the surface. I struggled to swim, not knowing which way was up, my limbs slamming into broken timbers. A fathomless cold and dark squeezed me in its grip. . . .

  Truth be told, I know not how I survived. Some pure instinct must have kept me swimming, held the air in my lungs just long enough for a forgiving wave to carry me to shore. There I awoke at dawn, flat on my back in the surf, unable to move due to a broken leg and a punctured abdomen. I shivered incessantly from the ocean cold, and yet I discovered that my arms, legs, and face were covered with red burns, as if I had been exposed to some intense heat. And while I could still see, a milky fog had accosted my vision.

  I feared I might not live out the day, lying there, soon to be food for the crabs and gulls, but a whaling party of Coast Salish people happened upon me, and brought me back to their camp. They have made room for me by their fire and at their table, but despite their best efforts, my wounds are too severe, and foretell my end.

  There are, to my knowledge, no other survivors.

  My dear, it has taken all my meager strength to write this. I know my tale skirts the boundary of imagination itself, and I would forgive you, of course, for suspecting that I have conjured it while in the grip of some mad fever. Yet I implore you to see this note to the authorities so that other ships may avoid this same fate. For I cannot shake a feeling that this will happen again. There is something about this place, this coastline: you can feel it in the mist. As if some essential border, some comforting gravity that we take for granted as part of our very existence, is missing here. It feels as though, were you to slip just a bit, you could drift away, to where, I do not know. . . .

  My rescuers seem to sense it as well. While the gulf between our languages is vast, I have learned that their village is to the north, and that while they visit this place to hunt, they would prefer not to linger. I might suggest that those seeking to settle this region follow their lead, and avoid this spot as well.

  Now, dearest Willa, I fear my hour grows late, and the time has come for me to say goodbye. And while I know this will land tragically in your heart, please know that I am ready, and that wherever I end up, I shall wait for you there.

  Be strong, my darling. And live well. . . .

  All My Love,

  Stephen

  Part I

  A Hole in the World

  1

  The Interview: Part I

  JANUARY 18, 2022

  Picture a spark of light, like a firework shooting skyward in the moment before it explodes. This spark is traveling through the pure darkness of starless space. The only other lights are a few other distant sparks, headed in roughly the same direction.

  As we move closer, we see that this single spark is actually a cluster of lights. And each of these lights is, in fact, an entire galaxy, a hundred billion fire diamonds of dazzling colors, from red to blue to white, spinning around a bright center.

  Now picture a single blue dot orbiting a single white star. The dot is moving at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour in its orbit, and the star is moving at nearly five hundred thousand miles per hour around its galactic center. This galaxy is racing at one point three million miles per hour toward a mysterious presence—we call it the great attractor—that draws us, for reasons we cannot know, across the dark sea of space.

  And yet.

  Despite all that, it is possible, on this little blue dot, inside its blanket of atmosphere, in a tiny town huddled at the edge of a great ocean, in a small, crowded living room—

  To feel like you are not moving at all. As if the universe itself has ground to a halt.

  This was how fourteen-year-old Sylvan Reynolds felt on a winter night in 2022, in the town of Far Haven, on the coast of Washington State, as Dr. Wells began to speak.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us again.”

  Sylvan sat on one of the couches. Dr. Wells sat directly across from him, in a chair from the dining table, her tablet balanced on her knees. Her assistant stood behind her, tapping his phone.

  “Sure.” Sylvan glanced at his parents over on the other couch. His mother, Beverly, smiled supportively, but her eyes darted with worry. His father, Greg, sat with his arms crossed, glowering at the visitors.

  “I’d like to revisit the events surrounding the disappearance of Jovie Williams,” Dr. Wells said. “Now, as I’m sure you know, what we’re discussing here is very sensitive. We do need to have your word that—”

  “We signed your papers,” Dad snapped. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Easy, Greg,” said Sheriff Marks, who leaned against the entryway to the living room. “We’re all here for the same reason.”

  Dad narrowed his eyes at her. “You sure about that?”

  “I understand your concerns, Mr. Reynolds,” said Dr. Wells. “But our goal is the same as it’s always been: the safety of the people of Far Haven.”

  Not all the people, Sylvan thought. He glanced at the logo on Dr. Wells’s tablet: a slanted capital B inside a parallelogram with rounded corners. It was the logo of Barsuda Solutions. Their vehicles and their workers in black jumpsuits and hard h
ats were as common a sight around Far Haven as trash trucks and Amazon vans, and had been for as long as Sylvan could remember. Technically, they’d arrived when he was two, in order to clean up the accident at the Baxter nuclear plant, and to monitor the health of the town’s water supply ever since.

  At least, that was the tale everyone had been told.

  Sylvan, however, knew the real story: one of wild lights in the water, thrashing helicopter blades over the beach, and, of course, that night, nearly four years ago now, when the ground had shaken, and his friend had vanished.

  A friend who, if Dr. Wells had her way, he would never see again.

  “If you really cared about us,” Dad was going on, “you would’ve moved everyone out of this town a decade ago.”

  “There was a relocation incentive program,” said Dr. Wells.

  “Which only helped if you could already afford it,” said Dad.

  Sylvan felt a wave of embarrassment hearing Dad talk like that, even if he understood. You rarely met anyone who said they wanted to live in Far Haven. Most everyone seemed to agree that life was better in the sparkling vacation towns elsewhere along the coast, or the gleaming cities of Seattle or Portland, each a few hours away, but no one from here could really afford to live in those places. Far Haven was somewhere you ended up, rather than somewhere you chose to be. A place you couldn’t escape from, even if you wanted to.

  Only Sylvan knew how close to the truth that really was.

  “I understand this has been difficult,” said Dr. Wells. She flashed what was maybe supposed to be a kind smile at Sylvan’s parents. Really, Sylvan thought she just looked bored. “Now . . .” She adjusted her glasses. “According to the case file, you weren’t with Jovie the night she went missing, which was . . .” She scrolled with her finger. “January 22, 2018. Is that correct?”

  “No,” Sylvan said immediately. “I mean, yes, correct. I wasn’t with her.”

  Relax! he thought. You sound nervous. But he could feel the sweat creeping down his arms, the adrenaline blooming in his gut. Back in elementary school, he’d never been one of those kids who got in trouble, disobeyed his parents, lied to people. How things had changed over the past four years. Now he knew all too well what it felt like to be that kid sitting in class, or at home, hoping you wouldn’t get busted. “Sorry,” he added, “it was a long time ago.”