Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural mystery novel, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Ten of Season Two. Start Here.
Previously, Caroline and Reyville confronted and confessed, and the underground tunnels revealed their unsettling secret…
In this episode, a rescue is mounted, motives are explained, and a relationship shifts…
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
When Caroline opened her eyes, it was in a room she hadn’t seen, before. The walls were the same stone brick as the rest of the facility, so she assumed she was still underground. But the air was cooler, here, and clammy. And the sound of running water filled the air like static.
She was leaning up against the wall, shoulders and neck aching from the injection she had been given. As her vision cleared and her mind returned to itself she moved slowly, looked around. The lighting overhead was fluorescent, but half of the bulbs were either turned off or dead, giving the room a grim mortuary feel. There were crates of various sizes and shapes piled and stacked around the room, all stenciled with the black lion head.
The sound of rushing water was coming from the wall off to the left, where a manmade canal ran through the room to accommodate a slim underground river, maybe five feet across, kicking up a rush of cold air as it passed from one arched, mouthlike opening through to the other on the opposite wall. The current was surprisingly strong in the narrow channel, water muttering frantically as it passed on its way. To where, Caroline didn’t know.
Aside from a single unoccupied folding chair sitting directly in front of her, the room was empty of other people. And yet she felt watched. By the unhidden camera in an upper corner, certainly, but also…by something else. Something she could feel more than see.
She had a strange feeling that if she had Scully with her, this room—this whole underground facility—would reveal itself to be very crowded.
Caroline lifted her hand to touch her face, and her movements felt dull, like she was underwater. Her head throbbed. And when she tried to adjust her legs, she found that they did not move on her command. Not even a twitch.
A shiver of ice ran through her.
Flora. It had been Flora, all along. The disembodied voice on the phone, forcing her to give Scully to the masked men in the boat all those months ago. The Dark Lion, using RUMOR as a front for her own ends. Reyville, even Andy had been right not to trust her. It was Caroline alone who had held out hope. And now, that was gone.
The shocking strike of a door-bolt being drawn back echoed through the room and the steel door opened, revealing Flora in her white lab coat, ever the professional. Behind her, Caroline could see other people working at desks, walking back and forth across the room beyond. She recognized one or two faces from the night they captured Longshank. Flora’s Project Sea Lion team were clearly loyal to her in more ways than one.
Flora crossed the gloom-filled room on clicking heels and sat down in the chair, folding her hands in her lap. On her face was something like genuine concern. It made Caroline want to crawl across the floor and let her fists do the talking.
“How are you feeling?” Flora asked.
Caroline scoffed, but her head was still swimming and she couldn’t quite form sentences fast enough to retort anything clever, so instead she said, “You drugged me.”
Flora nodded. “Nellarin. It’s a neurotoxin I developed, extracted from common birdmint. In the dosage I gave you it’s a temporary paralytic, but it wears off in stages. You won’t be much use from the waist down for a few hours, yet. But that gives us plenty of time to come to an understanding.”
“An understanding?” Caroline repeated the word, letting it register. “I don’t…I don’t think there’s much hope of that, now. Do you?”
Flora sighed, studied her hands in her lap. “I know how this looks—”
“Really?” Caroline allowed every ounce of the betrayal she felt to rise in her tone of voice. She was angry. She was angry at herself, but mostly angry at the nerve of Flora to be sitting there looking sad, looking sorry, when all of this—and so much more; how much more?—was her fault.
“Yes. Sincerely. I know how this looks.” Flora’s eyes flashed, then, and Caroline was reminded that this woman was deeply unpredictable. “I never lied to you. I was clear from the start about what I wanted. And the friendship was real.”
Caroline chose to ignore that, because it pained her. Some part of her still wanted to believe it. But what was almost worse was that she believed that Flora believed it. She peered around the room again, looking for a weapon, for anything. But it was just crates upon crates, and that rushing water.
“Does Hoodman’s know about all this, going on in their building?” she asked.
“It’s my building,” Flora said. “Barton Hill is a family heirloom. But I was only able to finally purchase it back a handful of months ago, when the old owner of Hoodman’s passed away. Now the store is my tenant, and a handy one to have. It would have been more ideal for Dark Lion to remain where we were, at RUMOR, but…well…you and the Captain made sure that wasn’t going to work out.”
Caroline felt the revelation but was not surprised by anything, anymore. That Flora was a descendent of the Bartons felt like something she should have understood long ago. Everything on Ferris Island seemed to run deep. Deeper still. Always deeper.
Her head pounded. All she felt was loss.
“You were the voice on the phone,” Caroline said, quietly. She didn’t like how small and quavering her own words sounded, competing with the rush of the underground river going by. “You stole Scully.”
Flora sighed. “I didn’t have a choice. You were so close, thinking you were uncovering some grand conspiracy…you wouldn’t have understood, then. We didn’t know each other yet. I couldn’t explain. So I needed the camera, just to erase the evidence of Dark Lion. I returned it, didn’t I? Safe and sound? I never meant to keep it for long.”
Caroline wanted so desperately to readjust the way she was sitting, but she couldn’t get her weight to shift. She used her arms to slightly move the dead weight underneath her, but it still wasn’t fully comfortable.
“Dark Lion,” she said, but she also asked.
Flora nodded. “It’s just a code name for the project.”
“You call this a project?”
“It is a project. And a very, very important one.” Flora wove her fingers together. “Project Dark Lion has always been about finding the key to what makes Ferris Island different. The core, the essence. Like I said, Caroline: it’s what you and I have always had in common.”
“But you don’t care who you hurt,” Caroline said. “That’s the difference.”
“Science isn’t tidy.” Flora leaned back, as if trying to put distance between herself and Caroline’s distaste. “I never took anything as a specimen that would be missed.”
Caroline felt a sharp pang at those words. Before the project in its form at RUMOR had been rumbled by herself and Reyville, Dark Lion had poached animals, birds, fishmaids. They had even kidnapped and brainwashed actual human beings. Brackers. The girl with the dirty shirt. The man, that truck driver…
And then Caroline remembered the room of cages and a wave of nausea passed through her.
Nothing that would be missed.
“You have people in that room.” Caroline said it through gritted teeth. “Human beings. What are you doing to them?”
Flora frowned. “Don’t ask me that like you care. The questions don’t matter, Caroline. Only the answers matter. I thought you felt the same way. Isn’t that what your little enterprise with the Captain is all about? Answers?”
“No. No, it’s about helping people.”
Flora chuckled, shook her head. “And working with Reyville…that has purely altruistic motives, right? Knowing who and what he is? It didn’t cross your mind at all that he’s the only person who can give you everything?”
The way Flora said it sent a shiver of warning through Caroline. She had injected the words with meaning that felt foreign. Like she was implying something Caroline didn’t know.
Caroline tried to speak carefully. “What does his…repetition…have to do with anything?”
The words hovered in the air between them, unanswered. Flora blinked, and something like shock spread across her face. “Wait. You don’t know, do you?”
Caroline waited, holding her breath, but Flora just stood from the chair, looking a little lightheaded.
“I would have thought,” the researcher said. “You of all people he would tell.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The good news is that he genuinely cares about you,” Flora said, allowing herself a smile. “That’s for sure. I saw that, the night we captured Longshank. That, at least, is true. And that will make the rest of this so much easier.”
Flora reached into the pocket of her lab coat and pulled something out.
It was Caroline’s phone.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t worry, Caroline. This is almost over.”
She left the room, the heavy door swinging shut, and the bolt slid across.
*******
Time stretched. In the gloom, Caroline’s head continued to ache, dozing in and out of feverish sleep. She didn’t know how long she had waited.
The fluorescent bulbs flickered dully overhead, and Caroline fancied that she could see shapes, flitting between the crates. The shapes of people, of animals. Phantom splashes in the underground river. And she wondered how many had died, down here. How many of Flora’s specimens had not survived whatever testing she had done to them in pursuit of answers to an unanswerable question. How many of the ghosts of Barton Hill were lingering in these tunnels, trying to find connection and finding the lost souls of Flora’s project.
The river, came a whisper, but Caroline couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just her own mind playing tricks. Though faded to near-nothing, the welts on her arm tingled.
The river leads away, the voice said, and it was as though someone was bending down beside her ear to murmur to her.
The river leads out, came a voice on the other side of her, and a soft spectral hand on her face, and the crowded feeling of the room became nearly suffocating. And Caroline looked up, bleary-eyed, to see the room rippling with the ghosts of the unnamed dead.
Footsteps in the corridor outside and the sound of the bolt being slid back made the ripples vanish as if they had never been, and when the door opened, Caroline was alone again…yet not alone at all.
Flora was in the doorway, slipping the phone back into her pocket. She entered the room and left the door wide open behind her.
“All done,” she said, businesslike. “Sorry for the delay. I need to go closer to the surface to text. Service down here is awful.”
Caroline said nothing.
“Reyville is on his way,” Flora said. “Should be here any minute.”
Caroline swallowed. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t. You did. You insisted that he meet you here. It doesn’t take much to get him to show up. Not when it’s you.”
Caroline felt the frustration like a tightening in her throat. “Please don’t hurt him.”
Flora sat down in the chair. “Caroline, I wish you would understand this. I’m not going to hurt him, or you, or anyone. This is about what’s beneficial for all of us.”
“Beneficial? You’re using me as bait.”
“Only because Reyville doesn’t trust me. Neither of you do. And that’s fine, I understand. But I wish you would. I only want the best for all of us.”
A silence filled the air, then. Caroline felt a question poke at her tongue, so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but she wanted to know.
“Why ‘Songbird’?”
Flora smiled, then. Shy. “Oh. Well, that one kind of slipped out. You know the song? By Fleetwood Mac?”
Caroline nodded vaguely. She was more familiar with the same title of a different song, by Oasis; it was the final track on the mix CD Reyville had given her, ages ago. A whole lifetime ago.
Flora continued, “My grandma loved Fleetwood Mac. There was always an old album playing on her stereo, or in her car. I think I always associated those songs with the stories she would tell me, about Ferris Island. The two were intertwined in my head. And after the little stunt you pulled, rescuing that little Bracker girl—”
Caroline remembered. Lyla.
“—after that, we kept hearing whispers about the singing woman and the sailor. The two of you enjoyed a bit of legendary status among the Brackers, for a while. Songbird seemed to fit, so that became the code name for you, in the project. I didn’t mean to say it aloud on the phone, but…well…”
Somewhere in the corridor outside, a slamming door. Footsteps, sturdy and certain.
Caroline’s heart began to pound. It was Reyville. She knew it was Reyville.
“Flora. Please.”
But Flora stood from the chair, crossed to the door, and calmly called into the corridor, “Captain? We’re in here.”
The footsteps paused. Cautious. Caroline hoped beyond all hope that it wasn’t him. That it was someone else. Anyone else.
The footsteps started up again, drawing closer. And then, there he was. Captain Reyville, hand on the mariner’s knife sheathed on his belt, blue eyes watchful.
When he glanced into the room and saw Caroline, his surprise traveled across his face in a series of unvoiced questions.
“Come in,” Flora said.
“Reyville—”
But he walked into the room, and Flora calmly closed the door behind him. An unseen hand slid the bolt shut from the outside.
They were locked in.
Without another word or a glance at Flora, Reyville hurried across the room and knelt beside Caroline. “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay, I…Reyville, I’m so sorry.”
He briefly touched her shoulder before he stood and turned, and the thunder of island authority rumbled in his voice as he pinned Flora with his gaze and asked, “What is this?”
Flora replied, patiently, “You’re here. That’s the important thing.”
“What did you do to her?” Reyville glanced down at Caroline.
“She’s been drugged, but I promise you it’s temporary. She’s going to rest there, while we talk. It won’t take long.”
Reyville wanted to argue, it was clear in the storm-like fury of his eyes and the scowl of his scarred lip. But instead, he said, “What is it you want to talk about?”
Flora returned to her seat, folding her hands in her lap. “First, I would like you to tell Caroline who you really are. I feel like that’s long overdue, don’t you?”
Even inches away, Caroline could feel Reyville’s entire body tense.
“Why?” Reyville asked.
“Because you love her,” Flora said simply. “Don’t you.”
Reyville’s gaze flicked to Caroline, his face softening.
“Yes, I do.”
“Then tell her.” Flora was so calm, the slight play of a smile on her lips. Crisp and professional as always, as though she were giving a lecture to a group of students.
Caroline’s heart pounded. But Reyville didn’t speak.
“Who are you, Captain?” Flora said. “I think you’ll agree that you should have admitted to this a long, long time ago. Especially to someone you care about.”
But Reyville shook his head. “I know what you want me to say. But you’re already wrong. I am not that man. I’m just Captain Reyville. Liam Lucas. That’s who I am.”
“You know what I’m talking about, though,” Flora said. Her cool was slipping, ever so slightly. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes. And it’s why you’ll never find what you’re looking for.” Reyville’s voice was quiet, but Caroline could feel the power under control, the strength held in tension. “You think there’s something at the core of it all, something you can quantify and measure, something you can distill. But it isn’t like that. This island doesn’t have a single beating heart that you can control. You can study every Bracker, every fishmaid, every ghost, every plant…you can study me…but you’ll never find the soul of it. It’s always going to be beyond you.”
Flora’s eyes were wide, but calculating. “If there’s even the slimmest chance I can make this end. This repetition, these circles…wouldn’t you want that? For your sake, and for Caroline’s? For this to be the last time, the best time?”
But Reyville shook his head. “What I want is something you can’t give me.”
Reyville knelt and drew Caroline up into his arms, lifting her up. She leaned into him, into the warmth of him. He smelled of the sea, of stale cigarettes from hanging around the Fishmaid’s Wake, of coffee, of something unnameable.
He smelled like Reyville, nothing more. Familiar. Comfortable.
She felt his voice rumble beside her ear. “I think it’s time that you let us go.”
But Flora sat prim in her chair, unmoved. “The only reason you’re both here is because I let you in. Behind that door is the rest of my team, working away, ready for any command from me. The only way out of this room is cooperation. There’s no other way out.”
Caroline reached up to loop her arms around Reyville’s neck. Her bare hand brushed his skin, but there were no visions. The welts tingled, but had faded. The gift was gone.
She tilted her lips up to his ear and whispered, “The river leads out.”
He trusted her without question. Gripped her tightly. And without another word to Flora, he swiveled left, his legs swallowing the room in strides, and he plunged them both into the underground river.
The current caught them, and they were swept away.
Away, and out.
*******
Without the use of her legs to swim, Caroline began to panic, but Reyville held firmly to her arm as they were rushed through the dark and the cold. He raised her up to the surface whenever a pocket of air appeared above them, taking deep gasps before being plunged under, again.
It occurred to her that this could be the end for them both. A watery grave, their bodies never found, floating out to sea and lost.
But thanks to the speed of the current, it didn’t take long before the black tunnel gave way to a dim, green light and the freshwater turned to salt, and Caroline could feel Reyville dragging her up, up, up to burst spluttering into the dusk. At first she couldn’t see, couldn’t tell where they were, until she realized that the lights of Port Salish were glittering in the gathering dark, but so far away. Too far to swim without legs to kick.
She tried to stay upright with her arms, but the dead weight of her legs made it impossible, and she could tell that Reyville was starting to tire from attempting to hold her up.
“Don’t,” she said, trying to be heard over the coughing. “Don’t let me drag you under.”
And he laughed, then, a fierce sound, and said, “You can drag me under any time, Phelan.”
And against the wild waves she laughed, too, because it was madness. It was all madness. All of it.
The welts on her arm tingled. She ducked under the water, unable to pull herself up.
Please, she said, to anyone who would listen. Please, don’t let this be the end.
She pushed up, caught breath, then went under again.
Please don’t let me fail him. Not again. I love him.
And whether it was fate, or chance, or whether the fading welts had only a shiver of power left in them, Caroline did not know. But she felt her desperate prayer answered in the sensation of something buoying up underneath her, raising her to the surface where she panted for a moment, looking for Reyville. He was feet away, being held similarly upright, coughing.
A purring chitter, a chorus of fluttering, and a half-dozen inquisitive faces with wide, dark eyes.
Fishmaids.
One darted near, and above its eyes was a fading white “V”.
“Oh, sweet Vee,” Caroline said, nearly weeping with relief. “Hello, sweet girl.”
The young fishmaid chirruped, wide mouth full of teeth glinting in the low light, and the small crowd of fishmaids began to swim, taking turns holding Caroline and Reyville above water as they led them back toward the shore, closing the gap between open sea and the safety of land.
The strange procession passed unseen into the breakwater of the Port Salish Harbor as the dusk drew in, and Reyville climbed up the rescue ladder to the dock then pulled Caroline up after him.
They lay on the weathered boards for a long time, dripping, shivering, as the fishmaids slipped away into the dark water, purring lightly, their job done.
*******
Caroline woke to warmth, to light, to the song of the seagulls, the old trawler creaking gently beneath the bed. She was wearing dry clothes from Reyville’s closet, soft with use. And he was lying beside her, asleep.
The night before was like a dream. She could remember Reyville lifting her from the dock and carrying her to the Princess of the Weathers. He had put the kettle on—of course—and set about to getting the both of them dried off, warmed up, changed into clean clothes. She could still feel the gentleness of his hands, the soft care in his eyes, the worry as he put her to bed. Strength under control. Love in the little things, the unglamorous things.
He was warm beside her now, breathing softly. She tucked her knees up, grateful to feel that the nellarin drug had worn off overnight. Her legs still felt a bit sore, like she had gotten a tetanus shot, but at least they moved upon her command.
Reyville shifted in his sleep, and his eyes opened, and for a minute or two they just gazed at each other, sleepy, smiling softly.
“Hi,” she said, finally.
“Hi,” he returned, and yawned.
There was so much to say. Too much. Plans to make. No time to waste. Dark Lion couldn't be allowed to continue.
But that all felt too big, lying in the warm bed beside this man who loved her. Caroline felt her breath hitch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For…everything.”
He reached out and touched her cheek. “You’re not indestructible. I wish you would remember that.”
“Neither are you. Reincarnation or not.”
Something happened behind his eyes, and he pulled himself up onto his elbow, gazing down at her. “I hate to admit it, but Flora was right about one thing. I should have told you, before. Who I am. Or who I was, I guess.”
“You don’t have to,” Caroline said, and she meant it.
But he shook his head. “I want to. It’s long past time.”
He paused, drew a deep breath, then said, “I first came to this island in 1792, on the HMS Discovery. Sailing under George Vancouver, mapping this region for the first time. I was twenty-two.”
Caroline felt something shift, like pieces falling into place.
Reyville continued, “That August the weather was unpredictable. A storm kicked up, and I was washed overboard. I thought for sure I was done for, but…something carried me to shore. To this island. It was not inhabited. The native people living on the mainland had an understanding with the place. They would fish off-shore, occasionally harvest wild fruit on a seasonal basis from around the edges of the beach, but the island was completely untouched. Until I landed here.”
Caroline had worked for the local newspaper. She knew the island’s history. But for some reason, she found it difficult to say what she knew aloud.
“So that means, you’re…”
“William Ferris,” Reyville said. “Yes.”
Caroline shivered, though she wasn’t cold. The welts had faded and the gift was all but gone, but the vision still remained, as if she had lived it herself: drowning, alone. Swimming against the storm, desperate to reach a rocky shore with a dark treeline, empty, a land that had never hosted humans until one young sailor found his way there by accident.
William Ferris. Ferris Island.
“Why does it keep bringing you back?” Caroline asked. “The island, I mean.”
Reyville dropped his gaze and said, “It’s justice. Or whatever the island’s version of justice is. The native people knew better, but I didn’t. I couldn’t know. After I landed here and Vancouver named the island for me, thinking it was my where I died, that’s when people started to arrive to settle here. The island thinks I brought others with me on purpose, to steal the resources and destroy the woods. It resents me. It…blames me.”
He looked at Caroline, then, and his eyes were filled with grief. “So my curse is to relive my mistake. To come back from the dead and be plagued with desire to reach Ferris Island, no matter the cost. Like a fever. Most of my lifetimes never made it back here. Captain Nestor did. He was my first repeat. But Thomas and Randall, they died in both World Wars. And Todd…he drank himself to death in Lancaster in 1978, haunted by nightmares and memories, unable to shake the pain of lives he never lived.”
The ginger ale. That’s why Reyville never drank.
“Liam Lucas—me—I’m the only one who has reached the island in nearly two hundred years. I thought that meant something. That it was up to me to give back, to break this curse by serving the island as best I could. That’s why, when I found you—your insatiable desire to know things, to solve things—I thought I had found my answer. I thought what we were doing would solve everything. But I don’t know anymore, Caroline.”
He shook his head, looking lost. “I don’t think there are any guarantees with a place like this.”
Caroline let that sit. Her mind was swirling with thoughts, feelings, but mostly she was deeply surprised at herself. Here, Reyville had finally given her the answer she had been looking for: who he was, why he contacted her in the first place, where all of this had come from.
No more secrets.
But instead of feeling that it changed everything, she realized that it changed nothing. Because he wasn’t William Ferris, or Captain Nestor, or Thomas or Randall or Todd. He wasn’t even Liam Lucas, anymore. Not really.
He was Reyville. Just Reyville. Her Reyville. And that was more than enough, despite everything. That was all she wanted.
There was so much to do. They were going to set this right. To do what only they could do, the singing woman and the sailor, local legends, ready to serve. But this moment was for them, alone.
So she lifted up to sit, and his eyes followed her, hopeful.
“No guarantees here,” Caroline said, “except one.”
She asked with her eyes, and he invited her in with a flick of a smile—there he is—so she leaned in and sank into his lips, his arms. And there they stayed as the summer morning filled the spaces around them, the old trawler murmuring in the gentle waves. Held aloft by the soft grip of the endless sea.
With every touch of skin to skin, with every tender brush of lip and hand and cheek and neck, Caroline was relieved to see no visions, no past lives, no ghosts, no mysteries.
It was just Reyville. Her Reyville.
As he had always been.
Thank you for reading! 📸
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I did not expect that was who he'd be, but it makes perfect sense, it really does, it all slots together, and oh *MAN* this... I'm just...wow. This was so well done. I haven't seen this done so well since... I don't know, the season finale of Andor, maybe? Wow.
Also, obligatory: THE SHIP. THE SHIP. THE SHIP HAS SAILED.
Yay!! LOVE
This was such a delightful and satisfying episode, and such a good resolution to last week’s installment. I can’t wait to see what happens next!