1
It was because of the fog that Luca Wolf and Emma Reich were the first to see the ship in the tulip field. The fog and the fact that they were riding their bikes to school. Later, Luca would wonder how many cars had already passed it by, their drivers blissfully unaware how close they had come to meeting their doom on their morning commute. ‘The lucky ones’, Luca would call them during his questioning. There would be a strong bitterness in his voice, because at thirteen and inspired by the Netflix shows he watched, Luca had quite a penchant for drama. Then he would burst into tears and wish that he and Emma had been as lucky.
Had it been up to Luca, they wouldn’t even have taken their bikes that day. Looking out his bedroom window that morning, still drowsy with sleep, the world outside was only shapes and suggestions of shapes. A halo of thick mist enveloped the lamp at the far end of the backyard and frost covered the gutter and roof tiles.
He sprawled back onto his bed, opened Snapchat, took a selfie that reflected his ultimate weltschmerz, and texted, Take the bus?, adding a kiss emoji.
Drama queen, Emma texted back. Her own selfie was dressed and ready to go, looking stunning with her radiant red hair. Got hockey practice, she added, meaning she had to take her bike. Two pink hearts to make up for it, but Luca knew they were only friendship hearts.
Granted, in Luca Wolf’s humble opinion, Emma Reich always looked stunning. They had known each other since kindergarten, and even though there had been a brief (and rather childish) fling between them in third grade, Luca had got friend-zoned a long time ago. He wasn’t boyfriend material anyway. Once they started going to junior high, girls only had eyes for upperclassmen. It was the cruel fate of every thirteen-year-old boy, but Luca had accepted it … until recently, when he realized she had started living in his head rent-free.
Drama queen, Emma certainly would have said.
His mom insisted that he put on his parka and mittens, which made him look ridiculous—‘Dead ringer for the Michelin Man,’ she said, laughing—but as soon as Luca jumped on his Cannondale and raced down Park Lane, he was thankful he had them. The cold bit into his cheeks, instantly numbing them. Sure, it was your typical Dutch December, only a couple degrees sub-zero, but autumn had been unusually mild, and Luca wasn’t acclimatized to the change. He tightened his hood and pedaled more vigorously to stop the shivering.
It was still dark at dawn, and in the fog everything looked strange. Trees and parked cars were unidentifiable shapes until you got really close, and the dull streetlights hovered uncannily among them. The way things emerged from the mist was eerie, Luca thought.
Emma was waiting at the square in front of the summer gelato bar on an oversized Gazelle bike. When she saw him, she put away her phone. ‘Hey, Luca!’
‘Seriously, screw hockey. I’m freezing to death.’
‘Let’s go then, you’ll warm up soon enough. Nice parka, by the way.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘No, I mean it.’
Luca could see that she did. Her big, almond-shaped eyes radiated only kindness, and he instantly felt his face flush. In her long, beige coat, woolen scarf, leather gloves and knitted cap, Emma looked anything but ridiculous. Her bike was a hand-me-down from her older sister and completed the picture: she looked grown up. Luca felt embarrassed, first about his own lack of sophistication, then about the effect she was having on him. Around Emma’s innate confidence, his brain turned to soup. Every damn time.
The bike ride from their hometown of Katwijk to Northgo High in Noordwijk took thirty minutes, and when the weather was good, they would ride along the boulevard and straight through the dunes. This morning, the lighthouse loomed out of the mist like a ghost, and the invisible, cold presence of the sea seemed somewhat threatening, so they instinctively opted for the inland route. This took them through the town center, across the canal, then along the lee of the dunes. Once there, a sense of elation came over Luca that he couldn’t quite put into words. They were alone, but it wasn’t just that. The mist locked them into this cold, gray-white morning, along with the impassive silence of the reserve. Its invisible boundary muffled their voices and created an intimate isolation, as if they were sharing a secret.
They discussed the shows they were watching—he The Witcher, she Sex Education, season two—each trying to convince the other that their choice was superior.
‘I don’t know,’ Emma said. ‘I only watched the beginning of The Witcher, but—’
‘Epic! That mega-spider’s face, ha ha!’
‘But it doesn’t make sense. The swamp is totally quiet. The deer’s just grazing on the bank. And then suddenly, this spider leaps out of the water with the Witcher hanging onto its leg, in the middle of some big fight? Where’s the credibility?’
‘Who cares? That battle slapped!’
‘Yeah, but the beginning was just a cheap jump scare. I don’t know. I’ll finish the books first and maybe then give it a try. But I don’t think I’ll like it.’
Luca, who hadn’t read the Witcher books at all and watched the show mainly for the monsters (okay, and the women in medieval combats), had to admit she had a point. Was he superficial for not having noticed it too? But then, watching a chick-flick like Sex Education would be over-compensating (although the title had secretly piqued his curiosity).
‘Yeah, well, I dunno,’ he said, his face deadpan. ‘I read the Sex Education books, but I think the show lacks their depth. It’s just not credible, y’know?’
Emma’s face burst into a smile as she tried to shove him. Luca swerved and pedaled ahead of her (allowing him to wipe his runny nose unseen), but inside, he was aglow.
Past the Space Expo, the mist covering the dunes to their left created the impression of a hidden wilderness where you could get lost for days. Maybe forever. His mom called this place Every Man’s End, a name that always fired Luca’s imagination. There were ample places around here with good names—Thunder Dune, Siren’s Hill—and even though the reserve was relatively small and crisscrossed with trails, these names gave the dunes a sense of power.
Finally, they turned away from the dunes and reached the road through the tulip fields to Noordwijk. Emma started discussing their grammar assignment, which was why Luca’s attention strayed. A thin layer of ice covered the ditch to the left of the road. Tall, dead grass hung motionlessly over the bank. Usually, you could hear the sound of farming machinery carried from afar. Today, there was absolutely nothing. The silence increased his sense of isolation, but Luca didn’t feel elated anymore. Instead, he felt goosebumps all over his back.
He saw something in the mist.
‘Whoa,’ he said, slowing down.
‘What?’
Luca didn’t reply but gazed off to the left, and Emma followed his eyes. Day had almost entirely broken and the mist assumed the pale gray hue of a dead fish belly. And in that pale light, a shape loomed.
Dark.
Enormous.
2
‘Let’s talk about the boy,’ Diana said. That’s how she had introduced herself. No last name. No employer. No recognizable uniform. Just an expensive, tailored suit that looked as anonymous as the blacked-out nine-seater which had brought them to The Hague, or the bland interrogation room where they were served mugs of coffee—no print on those either. ‘Luca Wolf. When did you first see him?’
‘When I got to Every Man’s End this morning,’ Wim Hopman said, as if he were explaining something glaringly obvious to a toddler. ‘The bulbs are in the ground, so there isn’t much work to do on the land. Must have been quarter to nine or thereabouts when I passed by, because I had an appointment with my bean counter in Noordwijk. Give or take ten minutes, but ask Ineke if you want to be sure.’
‘It was quarter to nine,’ Ineke confirmed. ‘And I should know. I’ve been running the place for twenty-seven years.’
‘Praise the Lord for a good marriage,’ said Van Driel. That’s how he had introduced himself. No first name. Broad-shouldered, goatee, smooth skull. Standing behind the interview table with his shirtsleeves rolled up, it was abundantly clear he wanted you to see his muscled, ink-clad forearms before you looked up into his humorless eyes. If Diana looked like the CEO of an investment company, Van Driel looked like an ex-marine. Or maybe a hitman.
Ineke might run the house, the kids, and the calendar, but Wim ran the tulip nursery and owned the land that—according to his son Yuri’s texts—was now entirely cordoned off with black tarpaulin fences, and was being featured on all the online news feeds. He hadn’t had the chance to check the footage for himself, because before he knew it, their driver had held out a container where they were told to deposit their phones—SOP at secured locations, apparently. They had complied without giving it a second thought. That had been a mistake.
‘So that’s why you drove past the field?’ Diana asked.
‘Yep. Except you couldn’t see a horse’s ass with all the fog. Halfway up the road there’s a dam crossing the ditch, and that’s where I saw the car. Tail lights first, engine still running. It’s so damn narrow that it blocked the entire road. Probably an accident, I said to myself, because there were four bikes on the shoulder, all on their sides. That would have been a bad one; if he’d hit four of ’em, I mean. It’s mostly kids biking to school in the morning. But there was no one there. Not a single soul. And that’s when I thought, what the hell is going on?’
‘And? What the hell was going on?’ Van Driel asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
‘Biggest pile of shit on God’s green earth, that’s what. I didn’t ask to be here. Or for you to seize my goddam land.’
Diana ignored this. ‘When did you see the boy?’
‘I heard him before I saw him,’ Wim said. ‘The second I got out of the car, I heard moaning. I ran toward it, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from in the mist. Sounds are funny when it’s foggy. Li’l scary too, not afraid to admit that. And I heard something else.’
‘What?’
Wim glanced at his wife, suddenly uncomfortable. Ineke, clearly unsettled, squeezed his hand and turned to their questioners. ‘Do you know how that area got its name? Wim’s father used to have a copper ship’s bell at the front door, which he’d ring to call in the farmhands. He inherited it from his father, who’d got it from his father. Many generations ago, some Hopman sailed on a merchant ship. Right, Wim?’
‘Right. Mother always rang the bell for us when dinner was ready. She’d swing this thick braided rope on the clapper, with fringes and a tassel and the lot. The old sailors used to call it an “every man’s end”. It would chime so fiercely that you could hear it across the dunes. The name stuck in these parts. But here’s the thing: the bell’s been gone for forty years, but that’s the sound I heard in the mist this morning.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Stood and listened, of course.’ This time Wim Hopman didn’t want to admit he had gotten more than a little scared. Because what Wim had heard didn’t just sound like his childhood bell, it was that bell. There was no doubt in his mind. Hearing it ring so eerily half a lifetime later had not been a pleasant sensation, not at all. His parents were long gone, the bell with them. How could a sound that had ceased forty years ago suddenly echo again on a cold winter morning … and feel so wrong?
He cleared his throat. ‘Only later did I realize what must have made that sound.’
Van Driel looked at him impassively.
‘And then you saw Luca Wolf,’ Diana stated.
‘That’s right. The kid stumbled into me as if the mist just spat him out. Shook the hell out of me.’
‘Was he alone?’
‘Yep.’
Van Driel put his hands on the table and leaned in, the veins and tendons in his forearms tightening. ‘You positive?’
‘If Wim says he didn’t see anyone else, he didn’t see anyone else,’ Ineke said. ‘Don’t treat us like we’ve done something wrong.’ The fear was back in her voice. Wim wasn’t sure whether they could hear it, but he certainly did.
‘Of course,’ Diana said. ‘We just want to get a clear picture.’
But Wim noticed that Van Driel’s eyes were no longer just humorless. They now held a merciless appraisal that was much more menacing.
‘Later, other people came,’ Wim continued, searching for Ineke’s hand under the table. She was fidgeting. ‘Just a bunch, as I told you before. But when I got there, he was the only one on the scene.’
Van Driel relaxed a bit, and Wim Hopman suddenly understood what this was all about: they needed to know if there were other witnesses. They intended to sweep this whole fucking mess under the carpet.
‘How would you describe the state the boy was in?’
‘Oh, he was hysterical. What did you expect?’
Copyright © 2024 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Translation copyright © 2024 by Moshe Gilula
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