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Page 20.

Then he smelled that oddly cold smoke again, and followed the smell several hundred feet around to the northern end of the island, which he realized he might have seen from his aerie atop the cliff several miles away.

There he found the likely cause of his fire. Someone had stored wood here in a kind of wall-shape fifty feet long, and anywhere from five to ten feet high. The logs had been broken from young, small timber and left to dry for firewood over a period of years. Recently, for some reason, someone had set the whole thing on fire. There were still a few spots faintly smoldering, though the dampness was rapidly quenching the last hot spots.

Beyond this wall of wood, nestled in a fold in the central hill on the island, was a cottage. A strong smoke house smell surrounded it, as if it were a place for preserving fish and meat, aside from the burned wood outside.

Alex was torn between running for the boat and getting off the island, and staying to learn more. Certainly, he couldn’t just make off with someone’s boat.

The air was filled with fresh drizzle now, and the rocks gleamed as though dripping with rain. Water ran down his hair and splashed coldly on his damp shoulders, making him shiver. The air was growing darker, and he knew there would be no more sunlight that day.

The cottage door was tightly closed. He approached carefully, noting its dark and lifeless aspect. The cottage was built of good-sized gray and brown blocks tightly fitted with a crumbling mortar made of straw and mud. The cottage was more of a lean-to, built hive-like against the stone surface of a cleft in the hill. Its thick roof consisted of rough beams overlaid with layers of tightly bundled straw and clay. A stone chimney protruded, dead, leaking not a shred of smoke from under its clay rain-cover.

The cottage had no windows, and the door was tightly woven from interlaced saplings.

“Anyone in there?” Alex called out. No answer.

The door was held in place somehow on the inside, and Alex had to kick and pull for several minutes before he got it loose. A crossbeam finally fell down, and he staggered back holding the door in his hands.

The same smell of rot and death greeted him as he stepped inside. In the twilight, it took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust. In the meantime, he spied a table with objects on it, including striking stones and tinder. He worked feverishly, with trembling hands, striking the stones together until he had straw and tinder going. From this, he lit a handful of straw torn from the roof.

The single room lit up, revealing a garish scene. The floor was stone, polished from much walking, and strewn with clean sand. To the right was a rough wooden bench against the wall that seemed to be loaded with objects and serving more as a table than a place to sit. More toward the center was a fireplace built of many small flat beach stones like bricks. To the left was a bed—a wooden enclosure filled with straw and covered with a thick wool blanket. On this blanket, propped up with her back to the wall, was the corpse of an old woman.

In the dry, smoky air, her leathery features seemed to be in the first stages of mummification. Her cheeks were sunken, her toothless mouth open, her eyes big hollows with whitish eyeballs glimmering from tiny shriveled eyelids sunk way in. Her hair was white and sparse, but wild and long. Her body was clothed in thick woolen garments, and only her thin neck and bony hands were exposed. Her gnarly hands were crossed over her knees, which were slightly drawn up as if she’d died sitting up. In her lap and strewn over the bed were scraps of white material.

Looking more closely, Alex saw lines of ants crawling up the bed on both sides and entering separate holes—one in her left cheek, the other in the middle of her neck, a third directly into her mouth, and he stopped looking to see how many more holes the ants had made. As he looked, a beetle crawled out from her mouth, and he quickly jerked back.

The fireplace was overflowing with ashes, and when he looked more closely, sitting on his knees and twisting around to look up, he saw that the chimney had been tightly plugged with straw.

Alex formulated a good guess as he stepped from the cottage. For some reason, the woman had committed suicide. The chimney had been purposely plugged up. Fire had burned long and hard in the fireplace, maybe for days, filling the cottage with carbon monoxide and smoke, and soon killing the woman. She’d sat in bed awaiting death. Why?

Perhaps the other woman, the younger one, had left. Or perhaps the younger woman had died. This older one had been overwhelmed by grief. Alex could certainly understand. Much as he wanted to flee from this place, Alex realized he was stuck for the night. Fog roiled in so thickly now that he could hardly see his hands before his face. He could hear the sea, but couldn’t see it. The birds and insects had fallen still. The last rays of daylight moved through the fog. The light grew still, copper-colored, fading, as though Alex were at the bottom of a well.

Alex went back into the cottage. He lit a wax candle set in a clay cup, and placed it by the door on the bench. In a strange way, even though there was only death here, it was at least a testimony to life that had been. Could there be more? Or was he making of himself the greatest fool in history? He rolled the woman’s body up in one of her blankets and carried her outside. It was like carrying a husk. She weighed hardly anything. He realized that the insects had most likely carried away what was edible inside, leaving mostly bones and tendons. He took the body down to the water. Blindly, he walked into the surf. He felt the icy water crawl up his legs, up around his groin, up to his waist. There, he released her, pushing her away with one foot. He heard a splash, as from a fish, and knew she’d be well taken care of. Dragging the sodden blanket with him through the water, he sloshed back on shore.

In the cottage, which still smelled of smoke and death, he pulled as much of the straw down out of the chimney as he could. She’d been weak, and had not plugged the chimney up badly. Alex held his candle up until a blaze started in the chimney. In minutes, it had burned through. He waited outside, watching sodden yellowish smoke pour up from the chimney, over the top and out from the clay rain-cover, and then down along the roof as if the smoke itself were wet. By now, a light steady rain was falling in long quiet strands, like a tightly woven tapestry, at a slight angle.

Everything was wet, the whole world, Alex thought as he picked up the broken door and leaned it against its doorway. By now, occasional wind gusts blew up the beach, and the rocks in the hills made low moaning and keening sounds as thick damp wind pushed through.

Alex found a modest woodpile under the bench and soon had a roaring fire going. The cottage warmed up and dried out. Fresh cold air sucked in through the door opening, swirled around the room taking away the stench of death and decay, and entered the fireplace, where wind and stench ignited in a healing and cleansing fire that pushed up through the chimney and away into the stormy night. Alex fed all the straw from her bed into the fire, burning away more of the death that had taken over the cottage. The floor was littered with flakes of white material, and he kicked them heedlessly about.

Alex made one more trip outside, reluctantly. He carried her blankets out, five of them, and swirled them around in a puddle of rainwater to cleanse them. As he did so, he rinsed soot and dirt from his own body, no matter how cold it felt. It was good to be clean. Then he brought the blankets inside, wrung them out, and laid them around the fire to dry out. It was good and warm inside by now, and slowly the floor and the walls themselves became warm, warmed through by the good clean reddish bluish whitish fire.

He repaired the door, putting the stout cross-timber in place to hold it from inside. It would keep any rippers, ghosts, sea monsters, or other unwanted guests out long enough for him to awaken and use the old woman’s good supply of stone utensils to fight them off. The smell of death grew faint, though it was still present. He stopped smelling it, and it seemed to fade away. From a storage nook high up, and he pulled out more straw and filled the wooden bed-square. He found dried fish and dried fruit wrapped in leaves, and had himself a meal. He filled a clean cup several times with pure rainwater, to wash down the dry food. Feeling contented, he fluffed out the blankets and waved them one by one for a long time before the fire until they were dry enough to wrap himself in. It was hot in the place, and he was content to just lay the blankets into the bed.

Then he wrapped himself up and quickly surrendered to exhausted sleep.