Summer's End Read online

  So Jacob had heard Ichiro correctly. He shrugged his shoulders, gave the question a little thought, and then dived right in. “Do I have any magical or super powers?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I’m fighting ducks or horses that have swapped sizes. I’m assuming this battle isn’t taking place in the world as we know it.”

  Ichiro considered Jacob’s question. “No powers. It’s hand-to-hand combat. Or, well, hand-to-hoof-or-webbed-foot combat.”

  “Do I have to fight the one hundred horses at the same time, or one after the other?”

  “Why would they line up and wait their turn? The horses might be miniature, but they’re not idiots. They’re coming at you all at once.”

  “All right,” Jacob said with a nod. “I’ll fight the horses. What are they going to do, run over my toes until I give in? A giant duck, on the other hand, has a giant beak. One hundred duck-sized horses — that’s the correct answer.”

  “There’s no right or wrong answer,” Ichiro said. “But yeah, the horses are totally correct. Only a crazy person would pick the horse-sized duck. What about this? If you could be any of the X-Men, who would you be?”

  Jacob considered the new question for a moment, but Ichiro answered first, as if he’d asked it more to make a statement than to hear Jacob’s answer.

  “I’d be Wolverine so I could heal myself. And so I could make claws jut out of my hands.” He made a fist and ran a finger over his knuckles. “What about you?”

  “Healing and claws would be cool,” Jacob said, nodding and staring at the shore across the water. “But I’d be Professor X.”

  “Professor X? Why? Mind reading?”

  “No. Not for his powers. Because he starts a school to protect other mutants and makes new friends, like a family.”

  “You have friends. And family,” Ichiro said. “Your mother.”

  “I love my mom, but it’s just the two of us and she works a lot.”

  Ichiro nodded sympathetically. “Well, we can hang out all summer long.”

  “Thanks, man. I appreciate that. I just want to play baseball, ride our bikes around town and canoe.”

  “That sounds awesome.” Ichiro smiled with a faraway look in his eyes. “I want to make the most of this summer too, you know? I’m not exactly jumping for joy at the thought of moving. Just because my parents are from Japan doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for me. I’ve never been there. Everything looks completely different from Canada, and I mean everything. I don’t even speak much Japanese. What if I ask for some chocolate ice cream in a restaurant and accidentally order octopus ice cream?”

  “Octopus ice cream? You made that up.”

  “Did not! I saw it on YouTube! This guy did a video review and ate, like, half a tub of the stuff. I’m not even kidding.” Ichiro pretended to vomit and they laughed together.

  “Look, I get it,” Jacob said. “You’re worried next year is going to suck. I’m worried too. So let’s make sure this is an epic summer. One we’ll never forget. Deal?”

  “Yeah, man. Deal.” Ichiro turned his gaze and scanned the shores of the lake. There was a marsh, nearly hidden by the overgrowth of large trees and wild bushes, not too far from where they sat. “How about we check out what’s down that way and then head home?”

  “Sure,” Jacob said. “No time like the present to start our epic summer.”

  They began to paddle again and the canoe slowly picked up a little speed. Their wake was an ever-widening V, tiny ripples of water that rolled to shore. Small cottages — the type that have curtains for bedroom walls, creaky floorboards and sinks with hand pumps — surrounded this part of the lake, packed tightly together. But they petered out the closer the boys got to the marsh. There must have been more than fifty metres between the last cottage and the waterway’s opening, which was odd. There was plenty of room for another two or three small summer dwellings there.

  Somewhere across the lake an owl hooted, and the sound carried clean across the water as if the bird was right beside them.

  Hoot. Hoot. Hoot.

  Hoo—

  The bird’s call died abruptly as Jacob steered the canoe into the marsh, and there were no other sounds of life. Craggy trees and plants grew wild in tangled walls on both sides of the marsh, so thick and twisted that very little sunlight passed through. Everything was dark green, brown and black. The canoe’s colour was so bright in comparison to the overgrowth that it seemed unnaturally red.

  They passed a row of rotten wooden posts that jutted out of the murky water. It looked to Jacob like the submerged skeleton of a drowned sea monster left to decompose in this watery wasteland where time seemed to slow to a crawl.

  “Make me a promise, Jake,” Ichiro said. His voice echoed back.

  “Sure, what?”

  “If I get eaten by the Kalapik, tell my parents I love them. Then delete my computer’s browsing history.”

  Jacob laughed. “There’s no such thing as the Kalapik.”

  “Yeah, I know. But if he did exist, this is where he’d live.”

  In his mind, Jacob was suddenly a six-year-old boy again, being tucked in at night by his mother. She reached for the switch on his bedside lamp and hesitated. “You know what you did today was wrong, right, Jake?”

  Young Jacob pulled his bedsheet up to his chin and nodded.

  “I was so scared. I thought I’d lost you.” Tears welled in her eyes. She nearly stopped talking, and then continued. “I thought the Kalapik had gotten you.”

  A shiver spread through Jacob’s body. “What’s the Kalapik?”

  His mother sighed. “A monster with green skin, black eyes, long hair and claws for fingernails. It lives at the bottom of the lake and steals children who disobey their parents, and then keeps them forever. You must never, ever go swimming alone again. Do you hear me?”

  He burst out crying and clenched his mother’s arm and promised never to go in the lake without her again. He pleaded with her to leave the light on and stay all night in his room, in his bed, right beside him, so the Kalapik wouldn’t take him away.

  He soon discovered that other parents had also warned kids at his school not to go swimming or boating alone lest the Kalapik drag them down to the bottom of the lake. And a few years later, when Jacob was ten, a classmate named Colton disappeared. A search party combed the woods, and the police dragged the bottom of every lake within a thirty kilometre radius of Valeton, but the boy’s body was never discovered. Although most kids in Jacob’s class were too old to believe that there was a monster at the bottom of one of Valeton’s lakes, it didn’t take long for a rumour to spread through the school that Colton’s paddleboat was found adrift somewhere in the lake and he was the Kalapik’s latest victim.

  That was ridiculous, of course. As Jacob grew older he realized that the town’s adults used the legend of the Kalapik as a scare tactic, a way of keeping their young children out of the water unsupervised. A young kid swimming in the lake alone could drown. A young kid too scared of a monster to dip a single toe in the water could not.

  “Don’t you think, Jake?” Ichiro asked, a hint of annoyance creeping into his tone.

  The sound of his friend’s voice ripped Jacob out of the past and back to the present, back to the red canoe, back to the dark marsh. “Don’t I think what?”

  “That this looks like it could be where the Kalapik lives?”

  “Oh, um,” Jacob said, as he straightened his back and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I guess it does.” He didn’t want to talk about the Kalapik any longer. He’d managed to keep the creature, and Colton, out of his thoughts for a few years, and he’d rather keep it that way. Luckily, he spotted something that allowed him to change the subject.

  “Look up ahead,” Jacob said.

  The marsh opened up into a larger body of water, allowing sunlight to pass through once again. They paddled into the open water and took in their new surroundings. The water was clean and calm, ideal for swimming, and
the trees were tall and lush. There was even a rocky cliff, ten metres tall, on the far shore, both scenic and perfect for cliff jumping. And yet there wasn’t a single cottage or home anywhere to be seen. It was as if they’d paddled into a separate lake forgotten by time, an undiscovered body of water. Like early explorers, Jacob thought.

  “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Ichiro said. “This must be a different lake, right? This is even nicer than Passage Lake.”

  Jacob searched his memory, recalling a map of the area he’d studied before. “Yeah, I think it’s called … Seppu … Seppuk … oh, I remember. Sepequoi Lake.”

  The lake and surrounding woods were silent, and the splash of their paddles sounded muffled. Jacob rubbed his ears. They felt like they were under tremendous pressure.

  Ichiro rubbed his ears too. “You feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes. What’s causing it?”

  “Dunno.”

  As they rubbed their ears and talked about the odd sensation, it slowly dissipated. The water gently lapping against the side of the canoe suddenly sounded louder than usual. It seemed to play a quiet and soothing melody. Splish-splish splash. Splish-splish splash. Splish-splish splash splash, splash-splash-splash.

  Sitting in the dead centre of the water was a single solitary island. It was choked with dark trees that concealed what lay at its centre. Grey rock with streaks of red minerals ringed the island’s shore.

  They began to paddle again and travelled the rest of the distance to the island in silence. It didn’t look too far away, but perhaps by optical illusion, the island appeared to retreat as they neared it. Ash-grey clouds stretched across the sky like a veil.

  Then, as if time had skipped a beat, the island suddenly loomed before them, its tall pines towering overhead. Without wind to bend their branches, the trees stood still as statues.

  The canoe bumped gently against the rock and slowly twisted to sit parallel with the shore.

  “I have a strange feeling about this place,” Jacob said, trying to look through the trees but seeing only darkness.

  “Me too,” Ichiro said.

  “Do you want to head back home?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Ichiro smiled. “This island is weird and, yeah, I’ll admit it, a little creepy. There’s no way I’m going home before we check it out!”

  Jacob returned the smile. “Good. Me too.”

  He picked up the rope and looked for a low-hanging branch sturdy enough to secure the canoe.

  “Wait,” Ichiro said. He pointed over Jacob’s shoulder.

  There, not too far away, was a dock. It was old and beaten but solid enough to hold their craft in calm waters.

  How did we not see that before? Jacob asked himself. They paddled over and Jacob hopped out. He tied the rope to a cleat and helped Ichiro onto the dock. The wood shifted and groaned beneath their weight. The boys walked to land before the dock decided it didn’t want to hold them any longer.

  A thin path cut a dark hole through the woods. It looked like it had once been wide enough for a truck to pass through, but the bush had reclaimed it over time. Now it appeared to be used only by passing wildlife.

  Jacob felt something pulling him forward, daring him to look.

  For such a quiet, isolated island, there was a ton of energy in the air. It made it hard to focus, difficult to think. The small tendrils of an oncoming headache worked their way into the extremities of Jacob’s brain. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

  “Hey, look.” Ichiro, oblivious to Jacob’s discomfort, pointed above their heads. A piece of rusted metal peeked out from behind a few branches. It was curved and shaped into an intricate lacework. A single word could be seen through the leaves:

  END

  Jacob grabbed a branch and bent it so they could read the rest of the sign. The branch snapped immediately and he dropped it to the ground. It looked healthy on the outside but the centre of the branch was black and decaying. It looked like a broken bone with rotten marrow at its core. The tree was dying slowly from the inside out. Heart rot, Jacob knew. A fungal disease. But he thought it only affected old trees, not trees so small and young.

  He could now read the rest of the sign:

  SUMMER’S END

  “It’s a gate,” Ichiro said.

  “On an island. In the middle of nowhere. What is this place?”

  “No idea.”

  Jacob shrugged. “Let’s find out.”

  The air was hotter and heavier the farther inland they walked. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, and smelled of moss and summer berries. Jacob saw plenty of moss — it coated the floor like a spongy green carpet — but there were no berries.

  “You know what’s weird?” Ichiro asked, as they ducked under branches and twisted their bodies through the overgrowth.

  Plenty, Jacob thought. Plenty’s weird about this island. “What?”

  “I haven’t been bitten by a single mosquito. Haven’t even had to swat one away.”

  Bush this dense, that was weird.

  They carried on toward the centre of the island in silence.

  Another few steps and the path suddenly ended, widening to reveal a large clearing. A crushed stone walkway led to the front door of a large house.

  Jacob’s headache began to fade.

  The house sat at the far side of the clearing, surrounded by trees and tangled bushes. Against the backdrop of the grey sky, its red-brick chimney looked out of place — the only splash of colour on the black and grey house. The lack of colour made the house look like a dead thing, a pile of bones stripped clean of flesh by time and sun and rain. The sloped roof and a large bay window above the front door gave the old building a hunched look. A dormer window jutted out of the second floor. When Jacob looked away he thought he saw a flash of movement in the window out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked again there was nothing there. The house’s face was scarred by cracks in its rotting wooden boards, and most of the first-floor windows were dirty and shuttered. The porch was caked in mud, but the front door appeared to be in surprisingly good shape.

  On a rusty pole beside the house, in a flower bed overgrown by weeds, was a wrought-iron sign that was a twin to the one they’d seen near the dock:

  SUMMER’S END

  “So this is Summer’s End,” Ichiro said. “What do you think has better odds: That a serial killer lives here or a crazy old cat lady?”

  “For our sake, I hope neither,” Jacob responded. “Have you ever seen a place like this?”

  Ichiro shook his head.

  “It looks like it hasn’t been lived in for decades.”

  “No kidding,” Ichiro said. “The serial killer cat lady should spend a little time fixing the joint up.”

  Jacob’s laughter was genuine but contained a shred of nervousness. “Let me guess: you want to look inside.”

  “I want to look inside,” Ichiro said.

  “So do I.” He looked at his watch. It was a couple of minutes past six o’clock. His mother had picked up an extra shift at The Hot Plate and wouldn’t be home until late, but Jacob didn’t want to still be on the lake when it started getting dark. “Five minutes. Then we should head back.”

  “Sure.” As they crossed the clearing, Ichiro pointed to a crumbling stone well covered in moss and vines. “That’s where I’d dump the body parts. You know, if I was a serial killer — with twenty-nine cats.”

  The front steps sagged as they walked on them. After a brief moment of hesitation, he found the courage to knock on the front door. The sound echoed across the clearing. They listened for the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door, but heard nothing but the wind behind their backs. Jacob gripped the door handle but pulled his hand back immediately.

  “What is it?” Ichiro asked.

  “It’s cold.” He tentatively grabbed the handle once more. The thick door was fastened to its frame with large iron hinges. It was so heavy that Jacob had to push it open with his shoulder
, but it swung open without a sound.

  Shafts of light streamed into the front entrance through the open door.

  “He-hello?” Jacob called out. He hoped Ichiro wouldn’t give him a hard time later about his voice cracking. “Is anyone here?”

  No one answered.

  Dust painted every surface. Tangled strands of cobweb clung to the ceiling. A long, narrow hallway was dissected by four closed doors, concealing whatever lay in wait behind them.

  Jacob began to picture an assortment of horrors hiding behind each of the doors. He’d watched too many horror movies, read too many Stephen King books, and his imagination was making things worse than they were. This was just an old house that hadn’t been lived in for years. Nothing else.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ve seen enough for now. We can go.”

  Ichiro nodded distractedly. His gaze had fallen on a small table near the front door. A snow globe with a boy and a girl building a snowman caught his attention and he picked it up. It played a few chiming notes in his hand, a holdover from the time someone had turned the metal crank long ago. The unexpected music startled Ichiro and he nearly dropped the globe. Jacob flinched and looked around wildly, fearful that the music might awaken something. His imagination, once again getting the better of him. What had he expected to happen? Some madman to burst through one of the doors with an axe?

  Nothing happened. Ichiro placed the globe back down on its circular footprint in the dust.

  Beside it was a wooden photo frame with words carved into it:

  Family

  Where life begins

  and love never ends …

  There was a torn piece of glossy paper in the bottom of the frame, as if an old photograph had been quickly removed. Ichiro picked up the frame for a closer look.

  Something shiny caught Jacob’s eye. “What’s that? On the back?”

  Ichiro turned the frame over. It was a necklace, taped to the back of the frame. Ichiro peeled the necklace free. The yellowed tape practically disintegrated at his touch. The necklace was silver. Dangling from the thin chain was a pendant in the shape of a capital C. At the tip of the C was a small red gemstone that resembled the mineral that was embedded in the rocky shoreline of the island.