Palisade Island

The island looked different up close, the way most things do. From the water it had seemed empty, a brown hump with a few stands of eucalyptus leaning inland against the wind. From the jetty it was a compound: white buildings on a terrace above the beach, a water tower, a fuel shed, and a fence. The fence was the first thing I noticed, because it was the tallest thing on the island. It ran inland from the head of the jetty, a wall of steel mesh ten feet high with razor wire coiled along the top, and it did not enclose the buildings. It enclosed everything behind them, all the green interior of the island, and whatever lived behind it was the reason the fence was there.

Rhodes stayed aboard the Meridian with the cargo. Corbett walked me up the gangway and along a path of crushed shell to a low administration building where a woman in coveralls took my name, my ID number, and my left thumbprint before she would let me sit down. She did not ask if I wanted to be there. The whole place had the feel of a facility that had forgotten there were other kinds of places: the light was the color of a well-kept laboratory, the air smelled of bleach and salt, and nobody walked anywhere without a clipboard or a purpose.

We waited in a room with a long table and a whiteboard that had been wiped clean except for a phrase written in the corner, in small neat capitals: STAY OFF ALL FOURS. I read it twice and thought it was a joke about posture. Corbett saw me looking and said nothing, which was how I learned that Corbett said nothing whenever the truth would have cost him something.

Dr. Roland Voss came in without ceremony, in a white coat over a blue shirt, carrying a tablet and a cup of coffee he did not drink. He was fifty-eight years old, compact, with the kind of unremarkable face you forget while you are looking at it, and eyes that did not stay anywhere long. He shook my hand and told me my misfortune was the island's fortune, because he had been needing an outside opinion for months.

"A marine ecologist," he said, tasting the words. "You study kelp. You know what a keystone is."

"I know what it means in biology."

"Good," he said. "Then you will understand what I do here. I build keystones." He set the tablet on the table and turned it toward me, and the screen showed a photograph of a beach I did not recognize, and on the beach a heap of pale flesh I did not want to recognize either. Voss watched my face while I looked at it. "That was taken six years ago. I made that. Do you want to see what I have made since?"

I said I would rather get back to the mainland.

"Of course," he said, as if I had declined dessert. "There is a supply run in nine days. You are welcome to ride it back. In the meantime, Dean will show you a cottage, and I will be grateful if you treat the Station as a research station, which is all it is." He smiled a small, careful smile. "The island has very little crime, Mr. Marsh. I should know. I have the only record of it."

Corbett walked me to the cottage, a white box on stilts with a view of the jetty and the fence, and left me a key and a schedule of meals. The cottage had a bed, a desk, a lamp, and a stack of paperbacks that had been read so often their spines had gone soft. It also had a window facing the interior of the island, and behind the fence, at the edge of the eucalyptus, I saw a shape watching the cottage. It stood like a man and was not one, and when it saw me see it, it went back into the trees with a motion that was almost, but not quite, a walk.

I told myself it was a trick of the light, a stump, a shadow. I had been through a storm and a rescue and a man who showed me photographs of things I did not want to name; my nerves were allowed to invent a watcher. But the shape had moved with a purpose, and the purpose had been to be unseen, and that is not something light does.

That first night on Palisade Island I lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind in the fence wires, and I heard, very faintly, from somewhere beyond the eucalyptus, a sound like many voices repeating something together. I could not make out the words. I did not want to make out the words. I turned the lamp off and the sound went on, patient and regular, the way a tide goes on, and I understood, without being able to say why, that the island was not a research station, or was one, and the two things were the same in a way I had not yet been taught.

In the morning the voices were gone, and the shape was gone, and there was coffee and eggs in the mess hall and a man named Voss who asked me, over his untouched cup, what I thought the fence was for.

"I don't know," I said.

"Good," he said. "Keep that. The people who guess early guess wrong."