The Fog Comes In

Nobody argued about whose idea it was to take the boat out that morning. Later, when everything had happened and they were sitting wrapped in blankets on the beach, all three of them would say it was someone else's idea. But the truth was that it had been all of their ideas at once, which was usually how things went with Priya, Sam, and Otto.

They had been coming to Crabber's Cove every summer for four years. Their families rented the same three cottages side by side on the hill above the harbour, and for two weeks every August the three of them had the beach, the rock pools, and the small wooden rowing boat that belonged to the cottage owner, Mr. Hendricks, almost entirely to themselves.

Mr. Hendricks had one rule about the boat. You could take it out in the cove as long as you stayed inside the two orange buoys he had placed at either end of the bay. Beyond the buoys the current got tricky and the water got deep and on some days a sea mist rolled in from the north that could drop visibility down to almost nothing in twenty minutes.

The morning they broke the rule, the sky was perfectly clear.

Sam had spotted something the evening before. He had been sitting on the flat rock at the north end of the cove with his binoculars, which he carried everywhere because he was serious about birdwatching in a way that Priya and Otto found both admirable and slightly odd. He had been watching a group of gannets diving when he swung the binoculars further out to sea and saw it.

An island.

Not a big island. More of a large rocky shape with some trees on top, sitting low on the horizon. He had looked at it for a long time to make sure it was not just a cloud or a trick of the evening light. It was not. It was solid and dark and it sat in the same place for the whole hour he watched it.

He had gone straight to Priya and Otto.

Priya was the sensible one of the three, usually. She was twelve and the oldest by four months, and she had a habit of thinking things through before agreeing to them. She had looked at Sam's binoculars and stared out at the shape on the horizon for a long time.

Then she had said: "It is not on Mr. Hendricks' map."

Otto had already been looking up the local charts on his phone. He was the one who always had information ready. "Nothing marked out there," he said. "Not on any of the maps I can find."

The three of them had looked at each other.

"We should go look at it," Sam said.

Priya had opened her mouth to say something sensible. Then she had closed it again. Then she had said: "We go out, we look at it from the water, we come straight back. And we tell someone where we are going first."

They had left a note on the kitchen table of Priya's cottage. It said: Gone to look at something out past the north buoy. Back by lunch. They had taken water bottles, a packet of biscuits, Priya's waterproof phone, and Sam's binoculars. Otto had brought a small notebook and a pen because he always brought a small notebook and a pen.

The rowing took about forty minutes. Sam and Otto took turns with the oars while Priya sat at the back and kept the island in sight. It was bigger up close than it had looked from shore, maybe two hundred metres end to end, with a high rocky spine running down the middle and trees growing thick on the sheltered eastern side. The western face was bare grey rock dropping straight into the water.

They were about fifty metres from the island when the fog came in.

It did not come slowly. One minute the sky was clear and the next minute a white wall was moving across the water from the north, swallowing everything behind it. Priya turned around and their own shore had already disappeared.

"Row," she said.

"Which way?" Sam said.

Priya looked at the island. She looked at where their shore had been. She looked at the fog which was now all around them on three sides.

"The island," she said. "We can not row home in this. We wait it out on the island and then go back when it clears."

Nobody argued.

They found a small gravel beach on the eastern side sheltered from the current, pulled the boat up above the waterline, and turned around to face the island.

That was when Otto pointed at the trees and said, very quietly: "There is smoke coming from up there."

He was right. A thin thread of grey smoke was rising slowly from somewhere in the middle of the trees, curling up and disappearing into the fog above.

The three of them stood very still and looked at it for a long time without saying anything at all.