The Mystery of Ireland's Eye Read online

  I was at the edge of the woods when we locked eyes. Now I stood there like a pillar of salt, frozen in time. But soon I heard Mom and Dad coming up the path towards me. They led me back down to the tent, fed me hot chocolate, and calmed me.

  I never told them about what I’d seen.

  10

  Villains

  True to their word, my parents aimed for a crack-of-dawn launching. After my night’s adventure they didn’t need any more convincing that the time had come to leave Ireland’s Eye. We started dismantling the tent and packing before the sun rose and had the kayaks full and ready to go within an hour. Out at the entrance to the harbour, the water, for the first time since we had been here, looked calm and friendly.

  But before we climbed aboard, Dad made a suggestion.

  “Dylan, why don’t you and I take one more quick look inside the mayor’s house? And we’ll check out that burning cigarette of yours. I’m sure it’ll be easily explained when we look into it thoroughly. Then we can all leave here without any demons. That would be a start anyway.”

  The fact that we were about to go had raised my spirits considerably and I had no objection to a farewell investigation. Actually, I had been turning yesterday’s events over in my mind and was starting to think that maybe there were answers to many of these so-called mysteries.

  Up we went to the mayor’s house, Mom waiting near the kayaks down below. As we neared, I looked over at the cemetery woods. Everything looked normal.

  But something seemed amiss at the house. First of all, the door was open. I knew we hadn’t left it like that; in fact, we had made a point of pulling it tightly shut. We both knew that winds couldn’t have blown that thick wooden door open. And when we entered, there were traces of mud on the floor.

  Believe it or not, that didn’t surprise me. The more I reflected on the burning cigarette, the carved desk in the schoolhouse, the phantom faces in the windows, the more I was putting two and two together.

  Dad had smiled at the open door, trying to look calm for me though obviously a little spooked, but when he saw the mud he grew very serious and silent. Entering the house just behind him, I was thinking about the fresh dirt on the floor in the boy’s bedroom. It made sense now.

  Dad walked carefully to the foot of the stairs as though treading on thin ice. I thought of the muddy boots I had seen on the wharf at Argentia, of a voice asking too many questions and another saying, “Do not go to Ireland’s Eye.”

  Suddenly the front door slammed behind us.

  A big man reached out and threw my father to the floor. Two others helped to pin him down, while a fourth shot forward and made a grab for me.

  “Why didn’t yu leave like yu were supposed to?” shouted one of them. I instantly recognized the voice, gruff and with a slight accent. It belonged to the old Newfoundlander, and his face was red with anger.

  “Run, Dylan!” yelled Dad, as he wriggled free for an instant and tripped the man who reached for me.

  Up the stairs I went at full throttle, the man in close pursuit.

  “Tie him to the stove!” I heard the old Newfoundlander bellow below me. “I’ll go down and get the woman. The boy goes beside his nosy father!”

  But the boy wasn’t having any of that. Going through the door of the kid’s room I turned suddenly and slammed it in the thug’s face, knocking him back into the hall and drawing a few swears out of him. I remembered an old hockey stick the kid had in the corner of the room. It was vintage 1950s, straight as a brick and twice as heavy. When the man rose and charged through the doorway I stepped back and gave him the best two-hander I’d ever dished out. It hit him right between the shoulder blades and felt like chopping wood. My coach would call that a good penalty.

  As the man reeled again, I saw his face: the same friendly one that had spoken to me at Argentia. I sprang back into the hall, down the stairs right past the men tying up Dad, and straight out the front door. Then I hightailed it to the woods.

  As I ran as hard as I could, never pausing to look back, my mind was racing. Soon the events of the past few days became even clearer to me. The old Newfoundlander and his pals had been trying to keep us away from Ireland’s Eye from the minute they discovered we were coming here. They found out about us on the wharf and must have booted it out by motorboat and set up shop before we arrived. Then they started trying to scare us off the island. I was the kid, the one they could really terrorize, so they had worked on me.

  In a way, it was a relief—I wasn’t losing my mind and I hadn’t been seeing things. These people sure weren’t here on their summer vacation; they were up to no good and didn’t want anyone anywhere near Ireland’s Eye.

  But now, they had my mom and dad.

  * * *

  I must have run for half an hour, or at least it seemed that long. A few minutes into the woods the land began to slope upward and then became very steep. I felt like I was running up a mountain, but I kept going, my legs leaden. I didn’t stop until I was absolutely exhausted and well down the other side of the mountainous hill. At first I heard shouts behind me but gradually the voices got fainter, and when I stopped, bending over and heaving deep breaths, I heard nothing behind me at all.

  I spotted a bunch of trees that had fallen over and climbed under them. They almost formed a little tunnel, so I lay flat on my back looking up through a couple of tiny openings at the sky. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would jump right out of my chest. When people in the movies are in a bar or a cafe or something, and expecting danger, they always keep their backs to the wall, their eyes on the entrance. That’s what I had in mind.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later I heard a rustling in the leaves in the distance. Then I heard voices. Before long they seemed farther away but then one of them must have turned. I could hear him thumping along in the woods, coming straight towards me!

  In minutes he was so close I could hear him breathing. He came right up to my hiding spot. I saw his muddy boots through an opening, just centimetres from my face! He stood there for about a minute, huffing and puffing. I glanced up and saw his eyes shifting around. Please don’t look down. But then he did! In fact, he was peering straight at me! He started bending over, his face coming down like a giant’s regarding a tiny object. But when he got close he just plucked something with his hand and rose again. It was a bakeapple berry, a small orange-yellow fruit that grows wild in Newfoundland. He popped it into his mouth and turned to walk away.

  Then I felt a sneeze coming on. I prayed he would be well out of earshot when I had to let it loose, but he’d only gone about thirty metres when it just exploded out of me, my hands pinned to my nose to cover the noise. I could hear him stop, turn, and then come back. His boots stopped within centimetres of me again. We both listened for what seemed like an eternity. Finally he moved. Then I heard his boots in the woods, sounding fainter and fainter as he walked away.

  I must have stayed there for hours after that, listening to the wind blowing through the trees, hearing the ocean in the distance. Every now and then I thought I heard more footsteps and froze.

  But no one came.

  It seemed to me that they had decided to wait me out. They knew I had no food, that I was easily scared, and that I’d have to spend the night in the woods. So they called off the search and began giving me the silent treatment. I guess they figured that before long I would come to them. As I lay there, eyes darting around, no sound seemed to be coming from the area near the now-distant village.

  I thought about getting up and retracing my steps, sneaking out to a vantage point near the church and doing a little spying so I could figure out how in the world I might get out of this. But it seemed too risky, way too risky. And anyway, I was too frightened even to move.

  But after lying there like a corpse for a few hours, I started to calm down. I had to do something, even if it was just seeing if the enemy was nearby. Cautiou
sly, expecting an arrow to come straight at my nose or something, I poked my head out from my hiding place. Nothing. Quietly I got to my knees, pulled myself out from the fallen trees and stood up.

  There was a rustling in the woods and something was coming towards me! I turned and saw a dark shape scurry through the leaves. Now I was really done for. I looked straight at my enemy, facing the end.

  It was a chipmunk. A big, bad chipmunk.

  I spent much of the daylight on the far side of the island near the water, my brain barely in gear. I was full of fear and couldn’t think straight. I stayed away from the other ghost town at Black Duck Cove. Even though there were hardly any buildings there, I couldn’t face it now—I walked along the shore some distance away. My head shot around every time a bird flew from a tree or anything moved in the bush behind me.

  For the longest time I just walked along the water’s edge, skipping stones into the ocean and trying to hold back tears. I felt like I was about to just completely collapse, and I desperately wished my mom and dad were with me. For a while I even thought about giving up. But deep within me that didn’t seem right. It wasn’t what Teeder Kennedy would have done, down a few goals and out of breath. Finally, I decided to try to last the night in the woods and headed back into the bush to find my hiding spot again. It was the best place to sleep. Maybe in the morning I’d think of some way out of this.

  Back in hiding, with the sun going down, everything was eerily silent. I even sneaked about a hundred metres up the hill towards the village but stopped when I thought I heard voices in the distance. I ran back to my tree bed, lay down, and covered the open spots with leaves.

  Waves of regret began to wash over me as my shaking hands put my camouflage in place. Why hadn’t I listened to Rhett and the Bomb? We could be at the movies now, or skateboarding home, happy and without much to care about. My mind drifted back to Moore Park and the things I liked to do in Toronto. But those sorts of thoughts never lasted long because every now and then I would hear a noise or something I thought was a footstep. And there were other sounds, of things moving on more than two feet and strange rustlings in the woods. What if those thugs were the least of my worries? Were there wolves or bears or something worse on Ireland’s Eye? But what scared me the most, more than those sounds, was when everything went silent. It was a mind-numbing, pitch-black silence.

  I started to believe that I was completely alone on this island in the Atlantic. The old Newfoundlander and his men had killed my parents and left me here to expire slowly and painfully. I stared up at the black starlit sky, mesmerized and terrified by everything, occasionally remembering that I hadn’t eaten at all, though I felt too weak to get up to do anything about it. Finally I became drowsy and my eyes closed. But not for long.

  I was awakened by an enormous explosion. It was still the middle of the night. A thunderstorm was rocking Ireland’s Eye. When I looked up I felt like the world was coming to an end. I could see the flashes of lightning crackling above the trees and hear the thunder rolling across the ocean like the blasts of massive cannons. The whole island seemed to shake. I had never heard or seen anything like this in Toronto. Here in the woods of Ireland’s Eye I was experiencing what nature was really made of. It had taken until this night, my third on the island, to feel the famous wrath of the elements, the wrath that had drowned so many good and forgotten fishermen and sailors in the oceans of this part of the world. It was as if the weather we had had since we got here was an illusion made for us folks “from away” and reality had returned with the flick of a switch.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get up and run, retreat to my bedroom, to the comfort of my parents, or reach out and turn everything off. It felt like being buried alive, helplessly pinned inside a coffin with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this earth-shattering storm was an omen of something horrible. What was going to happen to me? And what had happened to my mom and dad?

  But then I remembered the way the brief storm had suddenly seized us on the ocean and what the man at the gas station had said about Newfoundland’s weather: that it was always changing and that life was meant to be that way. For some reason that made me feel a little better. I clenched my fists and watched the storm. Slowly the thunder and lightning faded and a gentle rain fell through the trees and down onto my face. When it touched me it seemed to cool me. I drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  In the morning I awoke hungry and alone, my clothes soaking wet and the leaves sticking to me. But the weather had turned to brilliant sunshine and my mind appeared to have cleared a little. Almost immediately I found myself talking to my grandfather. It wasn’t a dream this time and I couldn’t see him, but I spoke to him like I would have to any living being. He was kind and comforting, and seemed like the grandfather I had known just before he died. He didn’t ask me not to forget him because he seemed to know now that I never would.

  “You’re in a bit of a spot here, Teeder, aren’t you?” That was his pet name for me when I was feeling down, after the immortal Kennedy of course, centre and captain extraordinaire.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s see: you’re all alone on Ireland’s Eye, your mom and dad are being held by a quartet of morons bent on who knows what, and to top it all off, you’re only thirteen years old.”

  Then we laughed. I don’t know why, but we laughed. “What do you think you should do, Teeder?”

  “Stay calm?”

  “Right.”

  “Think?”

  “Right. God gave you enormous power, my boy, especially if you use it to do right.”

  I didn’t snicker inwardly at that this time like I had in the past. His advice about God and doing what was right seemed just fine on this lonely morning. In fact, it gave me energy.

  It was funny—I wasn’t actually seeing him any more, even in my dreams, but in a way I was seeing him better than I ever had. He was alive again.

  “Stay calm, think, do what is right, that’s all you need to know.”

  Then he disappeared, or at least he stopped talking to me. I got up, aware that his spirit was with me, and went to work. I even put my hunger out of my mind. I had to concoct a plan.

  The first thing that needed to be done was to scout out my situation, regardless of the danger involved. As I made my way back towards the village side of the island I started listing my advantages. I was smaller and faster than the thugs: they were all ageing overweight men. That meant I could get away from them whenever I wanted to and that they would never be able to keep up with me in the woods. Obviously, I could take some calculated risks. Secondly, they wanted me, not the other way around, so I could draw them towards me if I needed to. Thirdly, I knew that Dad had some flares and some provisions in a secret compartment in his kayak. There was no way they could know that. And finally, I knew a great deal about Ireland’s Eye. Dad had made sure of that. I knew it up and down, across and back; I knew all about its rocks and its trees, the details of its ghost towns and its history. I was betting these thugs didn’t. They were here to use it for their own gain, that was all. There must be something here, perhaps something in the island’s past, that would help me outsmart them. I turned this over in my mind as I came to the edge of the woods.

  The church was just a few hundred metres away. I crept over to it and satisfied myself that no one was inside. I entered and quietly climbed the stairs to the bell tower. I didn’t look out through the main window, but remembering a crack in the wood beneath it, peered out from there.

  Below me I saw the whole sweep of that beautiful harbour again. But what I saw at the landing wasn’t beautiful. Mom and Dad were each tied to a post on the wharf, and a man stood beside them, gun in hand. The old Newfoundlander was pacing on the shore, from time to time looking up the hill towards the mayor’s house and the woods. I glanced at the house. There, another of the henchmen was sitting on the r
oof, Dad’s binoculars in his hands, scanning the horizon. At the edge of the woods behind the swamp I could see a fourth man looking down at the ground as if examining footprints. He was just a few metres from where I had entered the woods at full throttle.

  I turned my back to the wall and sighed. What do I know about Ireland’s Eye that these thugs don’t?

  “I KNOW YER UP THERE, YU YOUNG PUNK!”

  I whirled around and looked through the crack again. It was hard to tell but from this distance he seemed to be looking right at me. Then he turned and addressed the other side of the cove.

  “IF YU DON’T SHOW YERSELF NOW, IT’LL BE LIGHTS OUT FOR MA AND PA…DO YU UNDERSTAND?” His voice echoed around the harbour.

  I didn’t believe him. And it wasn’t just that he was the sort of man who couldn’t be believed. It would be lights out for my parents and me if he ever caught me. But his trump card was having them alive so he could draw me to him. Then he could do us all in.

  I was pretty sure he didn’t know exactly where I was. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been calling in various directions all morning. I bet that no matter where I had been hiding he would have seemed to have been looking right at me at least once this morning.

  This was a good place to think. I could keep an eye on all of them and plot what had to be done. From here I was looking down on a map of the battlefield.

  First things first: I had to get down there and get the food and the flare gun out of the kayak. I started thinking, checking on my enemies’ locations from time to time. In minutes I had everything worked out.