The island is windy and perpetually damp. Nothing but stone and tree and ocean, everywhere you look. Harrowing. You wouldn't know it's right off the coast of Shikotan, a bigger island broken off the northern tip of the country. It's so completely isolated, it feels like the end of the world.
We arrived only yesterday and already the cold sea air has seeped into my bones and softened the pages on which I now write. You shouldn't have come, the locals tell me. You shouldn't have brought your wife and child. It isn't safe.
Yuriko and Meiko have not complained, though this place could hardly be considered a vacation destination. They know the importance of this sabbatical from the Central Meteorological Observatory to further my study of the jet stream. This is my last chance, my superiors said when they approved this research trip. They are not convinced that the winds I have discovered are of any importance. Other scientists have ignored my work. The world has not taken notice of my papers. It is not too late to take up some other research topic. “You are still a young man,” my supervisor told me before I was to leave. “You can find something else with which to make your mark.” They want me to stop making my measurements so they can use the money to pay for other work. I know that my discovery will prove to be important one day. My work on the jet stream will be my greatest contribution to mankind, I feel the truth of this in my heart. Shikotan Island is my last chance to prove that there is something to “Wasaburo’s Winds.” We have discovered that Shikotan also houses a colony for undesirables, the mad and the deformed, the people that society does not wish to see. They are sent here to this lonely outpost—to be studied and cared for, in theory. In reality, there is no other place for them to go. This is the place they are sent to die. Because I am a scientist, I was expected to pay a visit to the hospital. But beyond such obligations, I was curious, hoping to understand what afflicts these patients, and how it may connect to the terrible lore of this place. I wanted to see them for myself. All the patients I encountered were distracted or deranged. Many violen. The sounds of their wailing and the rattling of their doors carried on the wind. The man in charge said that everyone seems to get worse very quickly after arriving. He speculated that it had to do with the isolation. Even the attendants themselves tend to descend into a kind of madness here. For that reason, few leave the hospital alive. But this year, he told me, things have gotten inexplicably worse. New arrivals have plunged rapidly into madness. He has no idea what is causing it. He advised me to send my family back to the mainland immediately and to stay as briefly as possible myself. The island, the locals say, is cursed.
“Well gosh darnit, wouldn’t you just.”
Archie Mitchell gripped the gearshift of his 1941 Nash 600 sedan, but he could feel the loose spin of his tires over mud.
The late autumn rains had softened Dairy Creek Road into little more than a dark rivulet woven through the dense ponderosas and junipers blanketing the mountainside. Uncertainty spun in his gut. They should have known better than to take these logging roads this time of year.
“The kids, Arch,” Elsie warned from the passenger seat. Her blond waves, her pink lips. Hazel eyes darted to the rearview mirror.