As our school years continued, the
events of the third grade eventually faded from our conversations. In some ways, it was just so strange—what I
saw on Middle Island, what we all saw—that
it couldn’t say alive for long. People
want things to be normal.
Explainable. It’s how we get
through the strangeness of life, by focusing on the normal, the everyday, the
expected, the usual. So we force the
abnormal to retreat—to hide, not disappear.
For despite our fierce effort to ignore and conceal them, things do come
back. Especially the strange ones. And the dangerous ones.
The adults did not tell us much
about what had been going on there on Middle Island. Father told me only that Dr. Eastbrook had
been working there in a hidden laboratory, in the woods, underground. He came out only at night, when it was safer
because the island was “closed” to visitors after sundown. He would slip across the bridge back to St.
Mary’s, where he’d stored a car in a rented garage, and he’d drive over to
Marietta or some other small town to get the supplies he needed, trying not to
shop in the same places too often—not even get gas at the same station—so that
he would not arouse too much curiosity among the local residents. In St. Mary’s, it seems, virtually no one had
ever even seen him.
Father would not tell me what his
experiments involved. But I was starting
to figure some things out. He must have
been doing something illegal—otherwise, why all the secrecy? Also—and this was the disturbing part—his
experiments must have involved the bodies of animals, the remains of people.
When I got a little older, in fifth
grade, I read The Island of Doctor Moreau,
a novel by H. G. Wells, who also wrote The
Time Machine and The War of the
Worlds.[i] I turned pages eagerly, reading about a
shipwrecked man, Edward Prendick, who finds himself arriving at an island, an
island occupied by Dr. Moreau, the man who has rescued Edward at sea. When he lands, he’s surprised to see
odd-looking creatures. He hears strange
cries of unknown animals, at all times of day.
Later, in the woods one day, he sees a … man? But is it?
Wells describes it as a “grotesque, half-bestial creature.” Even later, Edward sees more of them.
Well, of course, he learns that
Moreau has been conducting experiments.
Fusing animals and people—the “beast folk,” they’re called. Horrified, he later manages to sail away in a
small boat—though his rescuers refuse to believe his story.
And while I was reading that book, how could I not think
about Middle Island? And Dr.
Eastbrook? And, of course, Blue Boyle.
No comments:
Post a Comment