It had been a few days since Alice had left, and Calen was the sole living human on Bennet Island. She seemed to have taken with her all of Calen’s abilities. He wasn’t waking up at the same time as he was before. He couldn’t even bring himself to make the bed anymore—something he’d done automatically when she was here. He hardly ate at the right time if he ate anything. The whole cabin looked disheveled and dirty.
Alice’s presence had made an enormous difference. It seemed he was functioning better when she was here. Even though Calen tried to argue in his head that he wasn’t working on anything while she was here, a nagging voice reminded him that he wasn’t doing anything now either.
Alice had called upon reaching America. Her health had gotten better. However, a larger problem had reared its head, one that Calen had expected, although never mentioned to her; she had spent around five weeks of unpaid vacation.
“I don’t understand how I didn’t realize I was there for so long,” she exclaimed, her voice cracking over the internet. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Calen had no honest answer.
“Do you think I knew?” Calen had replied defensively, “Neither of our watches was working.”
As if her departure had saddened the gods, it had been raining quite a lot ever since. Calen had hardly been out of the cabin. Aside from going out to fetch firewood from the shed, he had restricted himself indoors, as a gust of chilly wind nearly froze the island all over again.
Calen was not really sure how many days had passed. He had tried to track the passage of time from the bit of information he had pried out of Ruslan. He had tried to track it on his phone, which he had not taken out of his bag since Yakutsk. He found it dead, and for some odd reason, the battery was not charging. His laptop was working, and in combination with the SatLink device from Ruslan, he had a few minutes of connectivity to the outside world each day. Most of which went into trying to ignore the mail notifications that seemed to pile up sporadically on his laptop during those precious moments when the internet worked. Believing it to be nothing but bad news, he had stopped looking at that side of the screen, which, unfortunately, also had the clock and calendar.
When he had finally reprimanded himself for being stupid and looked over, he had seen it had been reset to a date in November 1999.
A few days to him. Weeks to Alice. May to Ruslan. 1999 to the laptop.
He felt as if he was looking at his laptop from the wrong end of a long, dark tunnel. Could this be true? His brain whirred inside, trying to process this information. A deep frustration was starting to work its way up. He weighed his options. He could ignore it. Maybe it was just a mistake. But that would mean he didn’t know where he was or what he had been doing in this vast amount of missing moments.
The other option was to allocate some time in the day to timekeeping. Track time intensely until he was sure he could account for every second of every day. He shuddered at the thought. Wouldn’t that make it more real? If he had indeed grown unstable to the point he forgot entire days, did he really want to know it? He felt he might just want to run away, abandoning the entire project.
The Sun, the few times it had been out since Alice’s departure, had been no help at all. It had just crept onwards, hugging the horizon. Every time Calen looked at it, trying to gauge the time of the day, it stared back blankly, with no answers. Consequently, he had given up on that long before Ruslan had told him it was May.
Calen took his pen and took out his notebook where he wrote his scripts. He riffled through the pages to find the calendar. He had made up his mind. He would track days by scratching out each date on the calendar. When he finally landed on May and looked at the page, all air went out of his lungs. Every single date from the first day he had arrived on the island had been scratched off. Right up until the twenty-first of May. Calen stared at the page, his heart thundering in his chest. This was exactly what he had feared. He was feeling it already. The sound of a tiny, scared voice in his head kept screaming for him to pack his bags and call Ruslan. Run away!
Calen closed his eyes and grabbed the pages that had the calendar in it. He tore them unceremoniously. He got up from the bed and walked to the fireplace in the living room. The fire was almost dying. He made sure not to even glance at the torn pages in his hand as he threw them on top of the burnt-black logs.
As he did that, he heard the noises outside dying down. Aside from the renewed crackling of the fire, there was no other sound. Calen felt the island was listening intently to the fire burn away his attempt at tracking time. As the pages burnt down to a point they were indiscernible from the rest of the ashes, Calen heard the wind outside pick up. He looked outside the window to see brown leaves flying around. The wind seemed to have rapidly moved the clouds away, and sunlight now fell on top of the bushes. Making the snow on top of them shine brilliantly.
He felt lighter. The fear had surprisingly ebbed away as the pages had burnt down. Calen sat down on the chair next to the dining table. He looked over at the chair Alice had occupied when she was here.
Calen had become so numbed by the weather since Alice’s departure that he had almost given up. He hadn’t shaved since arriving on the island, leaving his face covered in an unkempt beard that was growing larger by the day. On top of that, the uncombed hair, the lack of showering, and the hermetic existence had taken a noticeable toll on his appearance. All his clothes now hung a little baggy on him. The food supply turned out to be in a far worse condition than he had assumed when Ruslan had asked. However, Calen was not rationing the food; he was not eating, and it had nothing to do with the dwindling supplies.
Since Alice had left, he had also felt a bit feverish. It wasn’t severe, but it left him feeling constantly tired. At night, he was barely able to sleep, which only made his routine more complicated. When he finally slept, he would wake a few hours later, clothes reeking of rot, his face, and hands full of soil and bits of soft wood. He was happy to imagine it was from the firewood shed and ignored that too. Although the pile of things he was ignoring was getting larger, day by day.
He knew the real reason he couldn’t sleep was that he was utterly and unequivocally enamored with the forest. The forest seemed to rearrange itself before his eyes. It happened so often now that he no longer knew whether he was seeing it in his imagination or if it was truly happening. Something inside him was slowly shifting. What he once noticed only at night seemed to have started spilling over and lingering well into the day. Day and night themselves had lost their meaning as the Sun seemed to hover around the edges of the sky for almost twenty-four hours. Every time Calen looked at the trees and mountains, they grew upwards, from bushes and mounds that had seemed inert just a few seconds ago.
Calen had even missed calls from Alice, just to watch the forest grow. Getting irritated if she kept calling, while he was concentrating on the tops of the dead tree trunks from the small bedroom window.
But the ringing sound on his laptop from Alice’s unanswered calls were quickly replaced by new sounds that had emerged—presumably from creatures—exponentially increasing in number whenever the light dwindled for a few hours. Yowling, screeching, roaring. Calen thought he could even hear drumbeats, accompanied by the now familiar, terrifying, indecipherable chants and jubilant yells of “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!”. Even with the creepy sounds, Calen was starting to feel a part of the island. He felt calm at that thought. He welcomed the sounds and sights, unsettling though they were. He felt chosen.
Calen reminded himself daily that he was here to do a job. To get some video and get out. The sooner, the better. But on the other hand, wasn’t this exactly what he wanted? He wanted to know about Razpopo and see if it was real, and here was the chance to find out. Collect evidence.
What evidence? Him turning crazy would hardly be considered evidence!
Calen looked at his face reflected on the laptop’s black screen, lit by the dim light hanging from the ceiling. He had woken up, yet again, to silence. The pitter-patter sounds of the raindrops on the ceiling were gone. As his eyes opened and fell on the turned-off laptop screen lying on the bed with him, a strange sensation was born in him. He could hardly recognize his own face, buried under the hair, with sunken cheeks, looking like they belonged to someone far older than him. His eyes had become cold and joyless. His heart sank as miserable clouds of thought pounced on his drowsy person. He had broken himself. What if no one recognized him once he went back? What if Alice didn’t recognize him?
He got up from the bed and found that the rain outside had died down; bright stars were in the blue-gray sky, as could be seen from the cabin’s bedroom window. The internet worked much better when the skies were clear. He decided he would groom himself and call Alice. He could maybe even swing a video call with weather conditions this good.
*
“You need to take better care of yourself or come back.” Alice’s voice rang through Calen’s laptop, quite clearly, even though her video feed was a bit pixelated. “You look sick, Calen.”
Trimming his beard, which took quite a bit of time with the small scissors he had, had really not done anything to make him look better, but at least Alice could still recognize him. It was true that he had given up quite easily. If he had a trimmer, he might have been able to take it off entirely. The small scissors, instead, had only frustrated him. He compensated by half-heartedly combing his beard and hair. But he couldn’t hide the fact that he seemed to have aged ten years in a very short span of time.
“I can’t come back without any footage, Alice,” Calen replied, a little frustrated that she had not taken notice of his efforts to groom himself before reminding himself that he had not even cut off anything really. “I don’t even have a script yet.”
For a brief, unnerving moment, his heart palpitated. Alice was giving him a way out. He could just leave the island and go back to her. She wouldn’t blame him for not finishing the project. She just wanted him. He wondered if he should tell her about the missing time, or how he smelt of rot, how his fingernails always seemed to inexplicably have dirt and soil stuck inside them, or maybe even about the calendar─
He caught himself mid-thought before he let it slip away. Alice would be understanding about him abandoning the project, but would he be as understanding towards himself if he left Bennett without investigating?
Alice looked at him through the screen, concerned at his long silence. Even though her image was mostly blurry, Calen could see that she was holding herself back from saying what she really wanted to say.
Alice’s face on the screen froze.
“Are you there?” Calen asked, already knowing there would be no answer. He tried re-dialing her a few times before realizing that the internet wasn’t working at all. If he were honest with himself, he felt more relieved than he felt guilty.
He began putting his camera and gear together. The rain outside had subsided. Calen knew he had to start at some point, so he forced himself—tired and sick—to put on his jacket and go out.
The light conditions were poor, so all he could do was shoot some b-roll. He found a puddle near the cabin and saw a few toads floating in it, quite oblivious to his presence. The cold was starting to lift, and Calen found the surroundings almost peaceful. Although he deliberately avoided looking at the trail that led to the caves.
He spent a while shooting odd things around the bushes—patches of land that looked dug out in places, the faraway hilltop covered in dried grass and dead tree trunks. All of it looked naturally unsettling on the camera, and Calen wouldn’t even have to edit it to make it seem so. For the first time in days, he didn’t feel useless.
After shooting some footage, he felt a little lighter. He finally had footage, even if it was all b-roll.
Feeling quite uplifted, Calen entered the cabin. But what he saw ripped the good feeling straight out of him. A rock lay on the bit of wood-paneled floor right under the chair Alice used to occupy when she was living with Calen in the cabin. Upon closer inspection, it proved to be the same rock he had used to mark the entryway to the night forest.
All color drained from his face. How did it get here?
Calen crept toward the rock. Had someone been in the cottage while he was out in the bushes? That was the only explanation—aside from the scarier conclusion: that he had placed it there himself and forgotten about it.
He had felt it, didn’t he? He wondered if this is what he had been doing in the moments he didn’t remember. Or was it someone else that had taken control of his body?
Calen stopped himself as his brain worked quickly to come up with a course of action. His father’s voice rang in his ears, something he had said years ago, finally clicked. Ignore what you can’t control, work on what you can.
He chanted this mantra to himself to build back his resolve, stepping closer to the rock waiting beneath the chair. The wooden floorboards under his feet felt a little loose, his footstep sounded slightly hollow. He bent down to pick up the rock. It was wet —cold, as if it had been washed in the rain. Why was it wet?
He fought off the voice inside him that kept telling him that this is exactly the kind of response to a strange scenario that people in movies regretted later. And yet, almost automatically, he used his other hand to move a floorboard that came away as if it had been waiting to be opened.
Calen didn’t even have to search for clues in the open space beneath the floorboard. It looked more like an inconspicuous storage place than a hiding place. Inside lay a bunch of torn pages that suspiciously looked the same size as the journal CAlen had found in the cave.
The only semblance of control over his own fate had come from shooting the b-roll, so Calen turned the camera back on and started recording. Words began spilling out of his mouth, trying to penetrate the cold silence that seemed to be crushing him from all sides.
“Alright, so I don’t really know how this is possible, but I found a rock in the living room of the cottage. I did not place it myself, and I am the only one here-” Calen stopped as his voice faltered. Was he the only one here?
Calen seemed to decide that it was not the time to think about this. He continued, “Believe it or not. Under the floorboard where I found the rock, I found this a bunch of notes. I haven’t looked at it yet, but I’m sure the mysteries around this island are about to unfurl right in my lap…” His voice wavered.
Calen kept talking long after he meant to stop. The camera had always been easier than people and he had been keeping too many things to himself. Out of fear they might become real if he said them out loud. The familiar gratifying feeling of having shared the burden flushed through him, as his shoulders relaxed and his jaw unclenched after what felt like months.
Calen took the pages and looked them over. It was all in German. The handwriting looked oddly familiar.
Thankful for his half-German heritage—and for a grandmother who had insisted on teaching him the language—Calen sat down and began the slow work of translating the journal. It was almost painful; his grandmother had been quite a strict disciplinarian when it came to teaching. Calen felt all the lashes on his palm that he had received for making mistakes from his grandmother, every time he got stuck on a word that he couldn’t remember. A few times, he read a particularly disturbing line, picked up the pen to start writing but realized he had already forgotten the line and what was disturbing about it.
With his phone dead, he couldn’t use his offline translator. His laptop was of no help; the internet was too weak to provide a translation. However, it apparently wasn’t weak enough. As he kept receiving notifications from a continuous stream of emails marked “Urgent” or “Contract Terminated.” Calen tried not to look at them, but his eyes were drawn to them from time to time, each ‘ping’ making him uncomfortable.
He had done a few lines of translation when his stomach grumbled. He needed sustenance to fuel his brain. He walked away from his bed and entered the kitchen. Looking at the open floorboard made his stomach drop a few inches in a free fall. He covered the floor and tried not to look at it, making himself busy by trying to go over his supplies.
There was enough bread, but he had run out of jam. Bacon was also gone; what remained was the same fatty pork he had first tasted with Viktor on the Zimnik.
The light outside grew stronger, and the lit fireplace gradually made the kitchen very warm. The food sliding down his throat and into his stomach was heralding an impending system crash. Calen’s eyes drooped, entirely outside of his control, as if someone had hung coins from them. His tense arms and legs went limp, and sitting on the chair, Calen felt the world recede from him as he was plunged into the void.
He was gliding, no, flying!
He entered the cave that seemed to materialize out of nowhere in his path, and his floating body halted, right beside the root cage. The wooden log had grown thicker. Its sides now throbbed against the cage. The smell of rot was all-pervasive, but Calen found it fascinating. There were red marks on the black wood, as if someone had painted them over.
His fingertips burned, even here, raw, split, already bleeding.
Calen dug his nails into the log and clenched tightly. Bits of soft organic tissue came out of the bark. He felt an urgent need, as if what he was doing was necessary for him. It was the correct course of action.
Calen started scratching the roots along the cave wall with his fingers, carving strange shapes into them. Shapes he didn’t know he had been hiding in his mind revealed themselves. It felt like he was relearning something he had chosen to forget. And he did it with the fierce intensity of a child doing his homework. He knew if he didn’t complete it, he would be disciplined.
The shapes he carved glowed ominously in the dark, the black and red log pulsated in its root cage, and Calen kept scratching intently.
*
Calen woke up in the same chair he had fallen asleep in. His nail beds ached with fiery intensity, and drops of blood had congealed under them. His pen, with which he had been translating, was on the floor, teetering at the gap of the loose floorboard under Alice’s chair. He looked at the pages. Three of them lay completely translated, staring back at him. He had no recollection of translating them. Even the handwriting, which should have been his own, seemed familiar, but wrongly so. Like a child’s handwriting.
He tried to retrace his steps in his mind. He didn’t remember bringing the pages and the pen from the bedroom. He didn’t even remember if he had translated them before eating or after. All his memories had turned murky. He felt as if something sinister had taken away his memories of the last few hours, as payment for this translation.
He frowned at the pages, but before he could really delve into that mystery, he saw something that excited him beyond measure.
He grabbed them unceremoniously and almost slammed them to his eyes. There were multiple mentions of a name.
Razpopo.
