Submission for The_Bookshop's "Ghost Stories: A 2k Writing-Workshop Contest"

Prompt ... Photo 5: The Spirits of Winter

(Word Count: 1998)

Grandad called me over to the window of the Widow's Peak in my parent's century old Captain's House. The peak overlooked Parson's Bay. He pointed to a young man standing on the rocks at the point, which jutted out into the bitterly cold January waters. Grandad's face was pensive as he squinted his old watery eyes to get a better look.

"We'd better get down there kiddo," he said solemnly.

He was given to premonitions, and I knew not to ignore him. Pressing my face closer to the cold glass, I looked down at the lone figure on the rock shelf and watched him intently for another moment.

Out of nowhere an enormous wave hit him and drug him under the salty water. I let out a terrified gasp. There had always been a mystery about those rocks. People had gone missing off them every winter since before my granddad was born. I'd just never witnessed it for myself. Not waiting for Grandad to say another word, I sprinted down the stairs.

I yelled for my dad on the way down. It was a Saturday, so he was around the house somewhere. I just didn't know where. When he didn't answer back I ran out into the back porch and grabbed Grandad's old orange and white Kisbee Ring. It use to hang on his lobster boat until we retired The Splendour to the boat graveyard five years ago - the summer I nearly drowned.

I kept shouting for Dad as I raced out the back door. He emerged from the garage wiping oil or grease from his hands and grumbled back with unveiled irritation, "What?"

Not in the least offended by his sour mood, which I was plenty use to, I yelled back, over the frigid north-east wind, "A wave swept someone off the point. You gotta call 911."

He cursed, but nodded his balding head in understanding as he fumbled in his back pocket for his cell phone. Knowing he was going to make the call, I didn't wait for him and took off at a run again. The pressure was on because time wasn't on the stranger's side in these cold temps.

Grandad was running right along beside me the whole way, which was a huge relief. Lord knew I didn't want to be out on the rocks alone. I was afraid of the rocks. There had been eighty some deaths recorded there in the last eighty plus years. The place gave me the willies despite all the deaths being ruled accidental.

We reached the rocks in quick time and I had the preserver ready to throw out to the guy if we saw him bobbing in and out of the water. Chances were good that the undertow, which was notoriously strong here at the point, had already pulled him out into the bay and drowned him. But, I couldn't think about that as I scanned the white capped waves for signs of life.

"Do you see him Grandad?" I asked anxiously.

"No kiddo," came his quick reply.

Grandad and I stood, for what seemed an eternity, scanning the water. I was freezing to death and had to keep jumping on the spot and rubbing my arms to keep warm because, in my haste, I'd run out of the house without my winter jacket on. If we had to wait much longer in these frigid temps, the ambulance would have two half frozen bodies to deal with.

My thoughts on the subject of freezing to death were interrupted by the sound of sirens wailing off in the distance. A measure of relief ran through me. Dad had gotten through to the 911 dispatcher. Still, hope was dwindling fast. The water in the bay was roughly 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, which meant the guy would likely die from hypothermia if he was lucky enough not to have already drown.

Granddad caught my attention by pointing his bony index finger toward the farthest exposed rocks on the point, and I shivered from head to toe. The shiver had nothing to do with the sub-zero temperatures though. There stood a Mi'kmaq woman in a beautifully ornate, but soaking wet, elk skin dress. Her long damp black hair was blowing wildly around her face and shoulders.

I was frightened beyond words at the sight of her. I had seen that woman before. Though this was the twenty first century and there hadn't been a Mi'kmaq woman on the island since Saint Bernadette's Orphanage at West Head was closed eighty years ago, I knew the face that stared blankly at Grandad and I.

I'd seen her the day I fell over the side of my grandad's fishing boat and nearly drowned. Gawd, I would never forget that blank face, that stringy wet hair, and those rough hands reaching down through the water to choke me. It had been five years since the incident and I had made a full recovery, but the sight of her all these years later brought the whole terrifying experience right back to me. My knees went weak and my heart pound painfully in my chest as I sank to my knees on the icy granite beneath me.

"Granddad?" I half choked out.

He calmly knelt beside me and said in a voice void of fear, "That's Tepkunset."

The name made be break out in a chilly sweat and set all my muscles trembling. She was an old island legend. I'd heard stories about her drowning children off this very spot all my life, but had never once seen her roaming the rocks. I'd only seen her that one time, when she tried to drown me in the bay. No one believed me though. Whenever I retold the tale, they said I was a little touched from the trauma of my near death experience.

"She's got something there," Grandad said quietly into my ear.

Horrified and yet morbidly curious, I gathered up all my courage to look more closely at her. As the sirens got louder behind us, I realized she was holding the collar of a man sitting slumped forward on the rock. Was it the stranger who had been swept out to sea fifteen minutes ago?

The sound of an outboard motor caught my attention and I turned to look up the cove. Warren Brown and his brother Jack were coming from Codder's Wharf in their turquoise skiff, which they called Dolly. She stood out brilliantly on the grey windswept sea.

The brothers were volunteer firefighters and often took to the water in their fishing boat, or the skiff, whenever a call came through about a potential drowning. Taking their fishing boat out would have been safer on this choppy water, but it was easier to pull a dead (or half dead) body into a skiff than to haul it up the side of a lobster boat. I could still remember the difficulty the McCormick's (a father and son) had hauling my half-drowned body up the side of their bright yellow lobster boat the summer I fell off of Grandad's Splendour.

I was jerked back to the present with a frightened yelp when Dad suddenly appeared beside me and threw my winter jacket over my shoulders. My mind was so preoccupied with Tepkunset, the stranger, and memories of my own near drowning that I never heard him come up behind me.

He ignored my jumpy behaviour, which was my new normal since the McCormick's fished me out of the bay five summers ago, and asked, "Do you see anything?"

He would never believe me If I told him I saw Tepkunset out on the rocks. He was the no-nonsense type, who didn't give any credence to things he couldn't comprehend with his five senses. Any time I brought up the strange things I saw and felt since I'd been brought back from the brink of death, he would curse at me and tell me to keep it to myself. He didn't want to hear that kind of foolish talk.

Pausing briefly before I replied, I gave Grandad a sideways glance. He just shrugged a bony shoulder. As always, he was leaving it up to me to decide what to tell Dad and what to leave out.

"Yes, " I said solemnly as I pointed to the last rock jutting out from the rough water.

Shrugging into my coat, I zipped it up as quickly as my half frozen fingers would let me. Dad's eyes lit up the minute he saw the slumped figure, and he got out his cell to call Warren, whose skiff was just minutes away from us.

"He's on the point," Dad yelled into the phone to be heard over the wind. "Yes, that's him."

The two paramedics arrived behind us with their kit bags and a stretcher just after Dad ended the call with Warren. By this time the Brown brothers had reached the end of the point and were pulling the man into the skiff. The moment Warren had a secure hold of the man Tepkunset, whose eyes never left Grandad and I this whole time, simply vanished.

From that moment on, we all watched and waited anxiously to see whether Warren would give us a thumb's up indicating the man was alive. No other signal was necessary. Jack jumped to the rear of the skiff to start the motor just as Warren gave us the only gesture we wanted to see. Then they swung Dolly around and drove her right up onto the beach where the paramedics rushed to meet them.

Dad grabbed me as I started to head for the beach. I looked up at his pinched face with surprise. He shook his head at me and swallowed hard before saying, "Don't go down there. He's not out of the woods yet. I don't want you to see that." He looked at me meaningfully and I understood. He was thinking of another time, another place, and another drowning victim, that culminated in a deep loss to our family.

I looked over at Grandad and he gave me a sad smile. He knew it too. So, I didn't push it. I just nodded my head. Grandad and I stayed up on the rocks for a few minutes while we watched Dad scramble down to the beach. The medics had the guy wrapped in a thermal blanket and strapped to the board. It didn't take them long before they were headed back to the ambulance.

When they reached it, I saw a third man standing there by the ambulance's back doors. He didn't look familiar and was too far away to get a good look at. A chill ran down my spine all the same though, and I shivered with unease as I watched him pace back and forth in an agitated manor.

"Whose that there, Grandad?" I asked as I lifted a finger and pointed at the new arrival. Was he a friend of the man who'd been swept into the sea? If so, where had he been all this time?

Grandad watched him for a long moment. Their eyes met and then the stranger looked directly at me. I recognized the puzzled expression on his face. I'd seen if before. It was the same look Grandad had given me when he stood beside his own prostrate, waterlogged and dead body the day the McCormick's fished us both out of the bay. I felt sick for the man.

That feeling was quickly forgotten the moment a cold, wet strand of black hair whipped me in the face unexpectedly. My stomach dropped like a ship's anchor in the next moment when an oddly familiar wet hand came to rest on my shoulder. I stopped breathing as Tepkunset's name swept through my petrified mind. Grandad had risked his life to save me from her - from drowning - the summer I turned sixteen, but could his ghost save me now?