Frostmere Isle

(Highly Commended - Peter Cowan Short Story Competition)

A considerable amount of material had washed up from the night’s storm. The receding tide exposed a landscape of driftwood, ruined seaweed, and dead seabirds over the Archean basalts where the cliff line touched the ocean. At the first of the headlands below the brick lighthouse, a figure cloaked in oilskin and beaten sou’wester crawled across barnacled rocks with patient determination. A pre-dawn grey covered his world, with patches of phosphorescent seaweed lighting the water’s limit. He sought a path through the labyrinth to the waterline, where from the blackness came a knocking of timber against stone. Like a hall clock gradually losing seconds, he knew the irregular beat of a wooden chest compared to water-soaked lumber.

The storm had brought weeks of firewood to his mile of iced coastline, enough to feed the stove for winter, when then he would be forced to comb the northern side of Frostmere Isle. Yet the firewood could wait. Crates that survive such as last night’s tempest were built to preserve items of value. Items he might cherish or sell.

Their beaks directed towards the rolling abyssal plain, a band of seagulls stalked his path across the rocks. Two dozen blood ringed eyes followed the unsteady progress from upon a corroded boulder. As he passed, the man stabbed a knotty finger at them and swore a mariner’s curse against all the Earth’s carrion eaters.

When his boot touched the water’s edge, he stopped to listen. No knocking returned. A wave covered his feet, then receded with the slurp of a toothless jaw as it escaped via unseen crevasses. He beheld in quick succession a wooden bump off to his left and his ankle give way under a platform. Sheering pain tore along the entirety of his side as he slid the edge of a shell encrusted rock, each barnacle lip slicing through oiled hessian pants, past flesh, and across sinew. With a bellow, the seagulls leapt into the air. Only the man’s arms, outstretched and flat against the rock, had arrested his disappearance into the inky waters.

As he struggled in the rocky trap, a southerly breeze returned. His face savouring the cold bite, at odds to his burning within. The beacon from his lighthouse called out from the edge of sight, standing tall as a dark guardian from ancient times, blending into the landscape until hill and tower merged. Across the way, the seagulls resettled by a mound of rotting wrack.

His attempts to release the hold failed; it was unbreakable. The right leg was now unresponsive, the left unable to snatch anything but flail in infinite water. So compressed by the narrow rock fracture was he that only shallow breaths came.

The birds were nearer. Much, much nearer. Hopelessly, he struck out at them with a roar that issued as a croak. In the red haze he dreamed he caught sight of the box bobbing on open water, freed from the treacherous current that had bound it to the shore. Then a shadow blocked out the cliff line. A silhouetted, grotesque, long-nosed figure.

The gull tilted its head, a single unblinking white orb focused on the man’s eyes. What it saw looked like fresh cracked eggs.