Timothy stumbled again upon rising, specks of sand in his curls, muttering a tame curse to the loose ground. I scooped up a plain milky shell, examined it, then skipped it off the bay’s soft break, watching as it took an awkward bounce toward the reddened, swollen sun. Timothy sat himself on a jetty and rubbed the grains from his face while Marco’s laughter called from behind. The curlyhaired boy whined, why don’t you just hurry up then, but Marco persisted in his sauntering.

I jumped up onto the jetty and followed its narrow track, arms spread, feet in file, out past where the continent gave way to the deluge. Teetering over water even the docile breezes threatened the dehydrated state of my clothing so I sat down, facing the bay’s mouth, bare feet bouncing off the logs three feet above the green tide.

Marco was caught up in a brief survey of the native fauna, paying no mind to the curly boy’s grousing. Dead horseshoe crab. You saw them every so often on those shores. I had never seen a live one, though, just the tracks they left. Made it look like someone had dragged something of bulk across the sand, like a treasure chest.

At last the agitated boy felt he had waited too long and cried that it was enough already, so Marco hoisted up the raft and trudged over to the jetty. I scooted back to where the water faded into seaweed-strewn sand, still a good way off the ground on account of the tide being out, and dropped down, sinking further into the muck than I would have liked. Running to the others, I picked up the paddle I had rested against the wood. Then we all turned at once, as though the action required the strength of three, and looked to our evening’s entertainment.

A way out in the water, maybe fifty yards and down past the next jetty, a quahogging skiff bobbed under the purpling sky. Its curved bow swept out of the water like an uppercut and the slit window of its little brown pilothouse looked out sternly, nodding to-and-fro. It was the only vessel on the sighing bay.

Timothy gave a low whistle and started forward.

“There she is,” he said.

“Not moved in ages,” I replied.

“Hope she doesn’t mean to tonight.”

To the others and me, the quahog boat was permanence, paralysis. It had materialized with our world; it hung like wall art in our earliest memories. Those of Grandma Connolly taking us down the strand in her summer frock, pointing out the verdant Potowomut horizon and the different marinas, recounting to our incredulous faces that our mothers had once swum clean across the bay. The quahog boat had been there then, not at the center of the narratives, but present nonetheless, a squat and pleasant idiosyncrasy with an aura more primordial than those of the sailboats moored nearby. There it had stayed through a decade of quiet boredom, fixing itself into the respites we found from parental overbearance in our walks along the beach. We would pass its regard, sometimes even give it a wave, as we ventured on to ask the windsock at the point which way the wind was blowing. Even as we entered recent memory, it budged not a yard from its spot, and we realized with our newfound world-awareness that it must have been abandoned some time ago, or else fallen out of use by the owner.

We slogged down the next stretch of sand, a rank of stately reeds to our right keeping watch over the growing dusk. Behind them rose those odd houses typical of the seaside, made of weathered and hull-colored shingle siding, sporting circular windows and square cupolas like miniature lantern rooms. The warm, heavy air seemed to clutch me in a fist and the rank lowtide odor invigorated my senses. The only sound save the waves was the skrrrt of Marco’s raft as he dragged it along.

At the next jetty we paused again to consider the scene. In the distance a train inaudibly rumbled past the Cowesett marina. Behind us the stately reeds tittered in the wind. The quahog boat remained as it always had been and always would be.

The boat was haunted, it had been decided. There could be no other explanation for the quiet power it held over us. In a prehistoric time the owner, perhaps a Mr. Abel Gorton, had putted around in it daily, digging with his feet for quahogs in the now sickly shoals and vending them in markets where they would go fresh to fashionable South County restaurants. Increasingly arthritic and aching with age, he’d eventually ascended into one of the weathered ocean houses and fallen ill there, his wife long departed and his daughter abroad. He had died overlooking his vessel. Then his spirit, wracked with dissatisfaction and choosing to remain in our mortal plane, had become bound not to the home of his child’s conception and rearing but to that stolid implement of his livelihood.

Inventive though it was, the ghost fable yet lacked the requisite substantiation — we considered ourselves, its inventors, the perfect trio of human sacrifices to flesh it out. Down past the jetty we laid the raft in the water. An inflatable dinghy with dirt caked all over its tubular frame, it had come from Marco’s garage and seen little use since his birth. I tossed my paddle inside.

“Haunted or not, you know it probably belongs to someone,” I said.

Timothy clambered in and sat crosslegged on the rubber floor. “Get in. Marco can push us off.”

“Probably watching now.” I squinted at the nearest ocean house but the windows were dark. Timothy squirmed anxiously. The sun had nearly set, spreading its redness through the western sky like butter melting in a skillet. I supposed that I would be made to go along with the scheme now or catch hell for it, and decided it best to carry on while there was still daylight. So with me thrusting the oar into the sand, Marco gave us a strong shove and vaulted in himself.

We were rather somber on the paddle out, reverent toward our deed. Marco, who had always been timorous in nature, clasped his hands, saying he didn’t hope to stay aboard too long.

“Long as we have to,” said Timothy.

The small swells sloshed at our side. Each stroke of the oar I effected with the utmost delicacy, taking care not to disturb what might lay in the darkened waters. Somewhere beneath the surface horseshoe crabs stalked about their ancient and mysterious business. Grandma Connolly had told us a wreck lay out just beyond the jetties, and I imagined us snagging on it, deflating, tumbling into its maw. Even a short distance from the shore, the air cooled and the wind quickened. At the mouth of the bay, silhouetted now, I could make out Prudence and Patience islands, their nicely consonant names calling to my mind Phobos and Deimos.

At a bump I started. We had reached our target quickly, without my noticing. I suppose we all sat there wondering what to do with ourselves for a moment. We had, I perceived, expected some radical change to come over the quahog boat upon our landing, but it only sat there slightly larger and fuller in detail than discernable from the beach. The wood of the hull had decayed to some extent, bleached and peeling. The russet pilothouse, its expression impassive despite the arrival of the interlopers, had an uneven surface, like an especially coarse sandpaper, whose ridges gave form especially well to the last rays of sunlight.

Without a word Timothy rose, mounted the gunwale, and slipped over. I followed, limbs shaking more than anticipated in the precarious transfer between vessels, and Marco came last, with Timothy reaching back to hold close the raft. Aboard we all stood, and though surely something had changed, we could not perceive it. The deck made a low creaking sound as our masses shifted about. Now facing the open side of the pilothouse, I could see the helm and throttle, the window gazing into Apponaug Cove. Marco was on his knees, keeping the raft from drifting. He looked up at Timothy.

“Wait for the magic now, I guess,” he said.

Timothy nodded faintly and proceeded to stalk around like a noir gumshoe, inspecting the rudimentary controls and slipping around the pilothouse to stand at the bow. 

“So this is trespassing,” I said to Marco, who gave a bemused look. 

“Only if we’re caught.”

I paused, listening to the groaning wood. “Not looking forward to next week.”

“Who is? Least you aren’t in remedial.”

“Still. It’s only one more year then moving on again. You ever think of it like that? Like you kind of hate it but you’ll never get it back?”

Marco, with a nettled look, said, “That is one way to think about it.” He turned away to splash at the water, evading my conversation.

“Least you’ll be seeing Allie K. daily again,” I said in a bid to salvage the mood.

Marco didn’t turn. “From afar.”

It was then that our Verrazzano returned from rounding the pilothouse. “See anything, birthday boy?” I asked. 

“Better watch it,” said Timothy, “I’ll have a sleepover for us if we survive.” 

“In the first schoolweek. Perfect,” I lamented.

“Better than sitting around crying. Like you’d have us do,” said Marco. 

Overhead a gull flew low and called gravely. The breezes grew nippier with each gust, and I became aware, as seemed to be happening with increasing frequency lately, that I was improperly dressed for the occasion. 

“We should head in,” I said. “Obviously nothing’s happening. It’s getting cold.”

“That’s the presence,” said Marco in a hushed voice. “It’s coming.”

He and Timothy sat on the gunwale in a dutiful sort of silence. There was a gravity in their eyes, a subtle fervor which I hadn’t noticed earlier. To me, the thrill had been in the mischief — in the invasion of another’s chattel, the willful subjection to chance of tort liability, the mix of guilt and elation to follow. Yet that gravity was of another plane, lacking the artifice of my constructed exploit and focused from within the psyche by something mystic and unreachable. 

It irked me, to an extent. Each passing moment heightened our risk of punishment, brought my goosebumps from the chill into fuller definition, and here they sat, the gunwale like a pew, waiting without a hint of irony for our made-up specter to present himself. I don’t know why it irked me so. I was in on the charade, had felt the rush as real as anyone would have as I tumbled onto the rotting deck. They were both dressed as I was, and beginning to shiver. Still they made no intimation of moving from their posts. Their pupils were black wells, silhouetted as they were against the last light of day. I stood up and began to pace about. In the pilothouse, I twisted the wheel a bit, causing the prow to begin swiveling a bit more towards the west. I turned back towards the others. “What do you think she’d do? Thirty-five? Forty?” No response came. Marco scraped at the deck with his shoe and Timothy whispered something in his ear. 

The service for Grandma Connolly was to be that weekend. It worked out, my mother had said, so that it would be done with before school picked up again. She didn’t want me to be troubled, and for my part I remained untroubled. Grandma Connolly had been in obvious decline for a number of years, so the natural conclusion could not have been more heralded. I believed she was in a better place, and I cherished the memories of the walks she’d taken us on down to Cedar Tree Point, though there was still something cruel in the finality of it. I mainly lamented my mother’s position, and in that moment wished to be with her more than anything. Behind me, Timothy and Marco looked on still, awaiting their impending validation.

Outside my attention, my hand had been resting on the helm, tilting it ever so slightly, so that the boat had continued turning, turning, turning slowly. Through the window, the mouth of the bay came into view. When I had last glimpsed it, the western sky had worn a low skirt of mauve. Now, pitch black had spread across the heavens at a seemingly preternatural pace. A sudden dizziness swept over me. Though the night had not been clouded in the slightest, there were somehow no stars. The chilly air turned bitter cold. The lights that had been twinkling around the shore fizzled out, leaving ashen echoes in their places. I looked to where my friends had stood, only I could no longer make them out in the murk. All was silent but the water lapping at the hull.

I screamed, I believe, not because I could not see, but because I could not make myself see, because there was a certain gravity that I forced to take hold of my consciousness, impeding all sobriety. I screamed and flailed about, desperate to make contact with a tangible world, and my scream carried out over the black water and disoriented me further, and I heard the cry of the gull in the scream and the roar of the outboard engine that wasn’t there, and then I was tumbling, tumbling, flipping onto my back, striking a pliant surface, then flipping again and coming to rest upon a shifting bottom where I slithered alongside skeletal saucerplate figures whose eyes saw in all directions at once and whose tails sagged behind like they were flowing off the bodies and drifting into history, and then I was up, up and gasping, wet and crying as I’d been twice before, and now other screams joined mine, and we thrashed and kicked and put one arm over the other until we were on our knees sloshing through foul swells for ever and ever until we came to land facedown on a mat of devil’s tongue and dead man’s fingers. 

I’d but caught my breath and they were upon me.

“What happened?” cried Timothy. 

“What did you see, what did you see?” said Marco.

We were all panting and blubbering, crawling farther up the beach away from the wretched seaweed only to find our wet skin and clothing caked in the drier sand. I could faintly make out their masses, for I could see the stars now. I could not speak to explain my behavior. I could not offer an adequate rationalization for their sopping state even to myself. I only lay trembling, mouth in the sand, grateful for its gritty taste. Above us, lit windows along the waterfront road betrayed the existence of people who likely knew nothing of our crisis. 

“Did you see anything?”

“I saw the ghost.”

“Where? What did it look like? Oh, Jesus! I knew it, I knew it…” 

I rolled over and sat up facing the water. At first, I kept my eyes on the pleasant foam surging up the sand and retreating back toward the waves. The other two survivors squealed with fear and delight, too animated to hear the rest of whatever fable I’d tell them. My teeth chattered and my clothes and hair were dripping with sand and slime and sea. I clutched at my shoulders and rocked back and forth, eventually lifting my gaze. 

The quahog boat still floated in its place with the same dignified air. I supposed there was nothing could be done to change that, and I should be getting to bed. I thought of what to say to my parents, and what to say to Timothy and Marco, but my thoughts ran blankly back and forth between two distant points. I wasn’t frightened.

Just then, an agitated cry came from my side. Marco said something and gestured to the water. Somewhere out in the darkness, forgotten in the commotion, his raft was drifting away.

☉