Did you know that Google has answers for everything? I’ve been relying on it for years, and especially now that my family is so isolated, and I have to care for my daughter.
“High fever threshold in babies”
“sleep regression”
“how to teach baby to be gentle with dogs”
“homemade cough syrup”
“baby milestone chart months”
But now, “how to care for amputee dog,”
“antlered forest monster”
which led to,
“how to recognize a wendigo”
“Ojibwe folklore”
“History of [redacted] island.” I won’t say the name of where we all are, we do make our money from people on vacation. Hate to keep you away. Nothing bad has ever happened here in the summer, and we’re not so far north that we’re hard to visit. Sure, we’re subarctic, but that’s mainly from being surrounded by the freezing lake. It’s so huge that it has its own ecosystem. A Russian visited once, before the war, and remarked that this island, this tiny place, reminded him of Lake Baikal.
I asked every one of us, all fifty-four, to come to the Christmas party in three days, since I had a community matter to address, something important. They would come. In such a small town, everyone pulls together.
But there were still two more nights to get through. The growls and screams from the woods were gone, replaced with something even stranger. Several of us heard it.
A woman outside was moaning, crying. “I did not eat Charlie. I did not eat Charlie.” Over and over. But it wasn’t one of us. Anyone who stayed out all night would freeze, and everyone had counted their household. We were all here.
“I did not eat Charlie.” Right outside my door this time. I jumped and looked around, but saw nothing. Everything was locked. Rattled, I decided to call the oldest person living here. He was almost eighty.
“Did you ever know of a guy named Charlie, in the island history?” I probed. “Or did anything dark or strange happen on the island before?”
“I don’t…wait, no, that’s just sad. I don’t remember his name. Could be Charlie though.”
“And?” I pressed the phone closer to my ear. My daughter was fussing with a teething ring.
“The lighthouse, you know it’s automated now.”
“Right.”
“It used to be manned, before the machines and the timers. There was a couple who lived there over winters. They were so happy. Way back then, we loved each other. But, the keeper…he died on winter’s darkest day. Just an accident. Fell from the tower, maybe, got hit by a wave, or just had a heart attack or a stroke. His wife had to take over.”
“She was just stuck with the body until the spring thaw?” I get nauseous just from smelling leftovers that are just a day over the edible mark. The thought of staying with a slowly decaying corpse made me gag.
“Right in one. But it wasn’t so bad- he froze like a pork shoulder, she kept him outside. He didn’t rot. The keeper was also the only one who really knew a lot about hunting and fishing, he caught rabbits and ice fished. When he died…maybe she couldn’t get enough to eat. But whatever happened, she didn’t eat him. She barely survived, but his body was intact when they finally buried him. She lived just long enough for that to happen, then she…wasted away, I think. Anyway, she lay down next to him in the end.”
“Where are they buried?”
“I don’t know. Not the island. Hold on, I have a book here somewhere.” Several minutes of shuffling and hunting down page numbers later. “Ah. They, er, weren’t buried.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Calm down. It says here they returned…yes, Charlie and Angelique…to the lake they loved so much. They’re frozen down there. It’s what they wanted.”
“She must have been so hungry, that winter. Do you think that bad energy can stay around? Maybe it’s a ghost? But then…my dogs…I don’t think ghosts can physically hurt people or animals. Have you ever heard of something like that?” And I blurted out the story of what had happened to Nova. What I had seen. What no one believed me about. But with that unearthly voice, I hoped they would now.
“Holy shit,” the old-timer said slowly. “My grandfather was Native. He would mention that famine could make monsters. As in, the spirit of famine could turn into something that could actually hurt you. He never said the name of the thing. Had a few sacred silver-tipped arrows…dunno what happened to them…he said they were for it.”
“Silver? Does that actually work?” I had seen, in researching folklore, that this was a method for a lot of monsters.
“So he said.”
“I thought that was just for werewolves in those dumb B-movie horror DVDs I used to watch on the projector as a kid.”
“Nope, apparently silver is the broad spectrum antibiotic of the monster world. I have a feeling there was something else to do after you defeated it, but he never told me. I was too little, then. It was too gruesome.”
“How do we get silver stuck out here?” We pondered this, and then I thanked him for his time while we both got to thinking. I tried to remember any time I might have seen silver in any context at all, if my family had ever had any, as I cleaned the house the next day. Even polished the…wait…
This chore wasn’t called “polishing silver” for nothing. I also searched through the family jewelry. I knew my mother had never liked gold. And there it was!
I put out a message on the island’s Nextdoor board and phone tree. Needed to get the items, but also not panic people. Silver was one of the only ways to defeat it.
I posted the following: “Please bring your family China and silverware for the Christmas party. What good are beautiful table settings for if you never use them? And please wear your jewelry if you have it, especially silver, to go with the color scheme!”
This was a lie, but I knew I could only convince people face-to-face. We have to defeat it together. No one is coming.