Isle of Man

CHAPTER 19

The Champion and the Truth



I’m not sure who’s more nervous, Jimmy or me.

He’s shadowboxing with Bree to warm up for his first match of the day, against a real monster they call “Ralph the Mouth,” apparently because he gets in his opponents’ faces and yells every time he scores a point. Ralph might be a few years older than us, but he’s twice as big—although a cold look from Finn shuts his mouth in a hurry as he descends the ladder into the court. Jimmy scrambles down after him.

Finn tosses the ball in, and Jimmy jumps and snatches it before it even bounces. So he’s up to serve. Jimmy winds up, bounces the ball, and aces a hook right past Ralph.

“Go, Jimmy!” I shout. The crowd cheers, too.

“They like him,” Bree says, squeezing in beside me.

“He’s easy to like,” I reply. “Sorry about the other day.”

“No worries. I’m glad you’re here for Jimmy.”

Jimmy runs Ralph all over the court. He’s so exhausted from chasing Jimmy’s balls, he doesn’t even mouth off when he finally scores a point. But Jimmy quickly wins back the serve and finishes him off, to wild cheers from the audience. Finn reaches Jimmy a hand and helps him up the ladder. Papers fly as people line up to place bets on the next match.

I turn to ask Bree how many matches there are before the final, but she’s gone. When I look back, she’s scaling down the ladder and dropping into the court for her first matchup.

Jimmy joins me in the bleachers, unable to contain a huge smile, his bare chest still heaving from the match. I notice that his palm is bleeding.

“You all right?”

“Never felt better,” he says.

We watch as Bree battles a red-headed boy, finally winning fifteen to twelve. Both of them are so spent when the game is over that they have to be hauled up the ladder by the crowd.

“Let’s go eat,” Bree says when we go to congratulate her.

“Shouldn’t we stay and watch?” Jimmy asks. “Get an idea how the winner plays in case we end up goin’ against ‘em.”

“Nah,” Bree says. “You know Quinn’s gonna win, and if you play him this afternoon, just push to his left. He’s weak there. I’m beat and so are you. We need energy.”

Jimmy agrees, and we gather in Bree’s tent and sit down for a meal of cold meat and cheese, a hunk of dry bread, and some warm tea. She doesn’t say anything about what a jerk I was to her yesterday, and I even catch her smiling at me a few times. She actually seems kind of cool.

“Make me a promise,” Bree says, looking at Jimmy with a very serious expression. “Aubrey, you’re a witness. If we play each other in the final, you have to do your best to beat me.”

“But Bree,” he protests, “this means more—”

“I said promise me, Jimmy. I don’t want to win it that way. I want to earn it. Winning isn’t winning when you cheat.”

After hesitating, he nods.

“Okay, I promise.”

We sit quietly eating, the sound of our chewing interrupted only by the distant cracking of the ball. After a while, Bree asks:

“So where’d you two come from again? It’s hard to believe you know so little about the games, since it’s all most people on the island can even talk about.”

“We come from a long ways away,” Jimmy says.

“It can’t be that far,” she says. “The island isn’t that big.”

“We’re not from—”

“We’re from Ayre, in the north.” I cut Jimmy off.

“Figures,” Bree says, biting off a hunk of bread.

The handball players compete all morning into afternoon, eliminating competitors match by match until Bree advances to the championship by winning her semi-final round against a small but fierce girl named Cordelia. The crowd cheers Bree as she climbs from the court, but boos Cordelia when she refuses Bree’s offered hand. Nobody likes a poor sport, I guess.

Jimmy’s up next against Quinn. If he wins, it will be him and Bree fighting it out for the title. There’s a brief pause in the excitement, and I watch as Bree hugs Jimmy and wishes him luck, holding up her left hand to remind him of Quinn’s weak spot. Then she works her way through the crowd toward me as Jimmy climbs down into the court. Quinn follows him. He’s an odd kid. He’s a year or so younger than we are, and he looks completely harmless, his thin shoulders slumped, his pale face void of any expression. But once the ball’s in play, he turns into a madman, scoring four quick points against Jimmy.

Bree sits beside me and drains her canteen.

“Looks like it’ll be Jimmy ’n me after all,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“He has to beat this Quinn kid first.”

“He will,” she says. “He will.”

I know she’s right. Quinn has a massive serve, but Jimmy plays it smart, letting the ball slow down and bounce off the back wall, then returning it to Quinn’s left. They battle it out for nearly forty minutes, with long, exhausting volleys, until Jimmy hits a short pop low and scores the winning point. Quinn’s face shows its first expression as he sadly shakes Jimmy’s hand. They climb up and head for their canteens.

Finn stands and thanks all the competitors, announcing a brief break before the championship match. Then he gathers Jimmy and Bree and walks them toward the castle, presumably to have a talk. The crowd disperses as people run to outhouses or jog to their tents to freshen up. I hang back and watch as workers descend into the court and scour the ground for scraps of paper or bits of trash that might have fallen in.

Before long, the crowd is packed back into the bleachers and buzzing with excitement as they wait impatiently for the athletes to return. They cheer when Finn leads Jimmy and Bree back into the courtyard, each of them now wearing a red sash tied at their waist. Finn sees them to the ladder, shakes their hands, bows, and returns to his seat as they climb down into the court. Jimmy looks up and scans the bleachers and locks eyes with me and smiles. I give him thumbs up.

Finn removes the ball from his pocket and holds it up, as if truing its shape against the high winter sun; then he lobs it into the court. Bree nabs it, but Jimmy hardly seems to move. I see Bree glare at him, as if reminding him of his promise. She lines up and serves a rocket to his right and scores. The crowd goes wild. Jimmy backs up for the second serve and returns it, starting a long volley that he ultimately wins. Back and forth, they trade serves for a long time, but hardly scoring at all. I notice Jimmy is favoring his right leg, probably from his old wound that I stitched shut in the cove. But true to her word, Bree shows him no slack and works the ball hard toward his right side. Her hand is a pistol, firing serves with blinding speed and returning them with deafening cracks. Jimmy has a difficult time winning the serve, and when he does the score is 11 to 6. But Jimmy isn’t licked yet. He switches things up and serves with his left hand. Bree scrambles to modify her game, but not before Jimmy’s evened the score.

As Bree lines up to serve, Finn calls down: “Eleven all.”

Jimmy sends back a hook, and Bree dives for it but misses, falling and scraping her knee. Jimmy helps her up and pauses to make sure she’s okay before serving. Three aces and it’s game point, 14 to 11. The crowd falls quiet, anticipating Jimmy’s win. But Jimmy serves a soft one, and Bree easily streaks it past him to the corner wall. She eyes him suspiciously as she sets up her serve. She scores. I get the feeling Jimmy’s letting her win. I think she does too, because her next serve blasts straight at Jimmy’s head, forcing him to duck and giving her the point.

“Thirteen serving fourteen,” Finn calls.

But this time Jimmy manages to send back her serve and they volley for several minutes before Bree collapses trying to rush to the forward wall for a short ball. Jimmy lines up the serve from his left again.

“Game point serving thirteen.”

Jimmy sends a clean serve hard against the wall, and Bree easily returns it. Jimmy slaps the ball back, soft and short, and I’m certain it won’t even make the front wall. But it does. It hits the corner where the wall intersects the ground and rolls out across the court, coming to rest at Bree’s feet.

The crowd goes wild, leaping to their feet screaming: “Roller! Roller! Roller!”

I don’t even think Jimmy realizes that it was a legal shot, because he looks confused when Bree walks up and shakes his hand. Then she hurriedly climbs the ladder and exits the court. The crowd descends on Jimmy, dropping from the bleachers and rushing to congratulate him. Slapping his back, crowding him, touching him. The court fills with rowdy fans, and they hoist Jimmy in the air on a hundred hands and pass him across the court and lift him up like a prize to Finn, who pulls him onto the bleachers and hugs him. Jimmy is suddenly a star.

I try to make my way over to congratulate him, but there’s no chance. The crowd is just too thick. Bree appears at my shoulder.

“We’ll be lucky to even get a chance to say goodbye,” she says, looking sad. “They’ll be celebrating him all night.”

“You played really well,” I say, realizing too late that it’s probably little consolation to hear.

“Thanks,” she says, graciously. “But Jimmy was the better player. Maybe next year it will finally be me.”

While the crowd sweeps Jimmy away to the castle, Bree and I wander around the quiet camp, alone except for a few mothers nursing crying babies. We sit on the back of an empty wagon and swing our legs, watching the late afternoon dissolve into evening. I can tell she’s down about losing, and I figure we both could use some company.

“So tell me about this book you read on your birthday.”

“Half a book,” she says.

“Only half?”

“Yeah, the last part is missing, so I just make up my own endings every time.”

“At least it’s always different then.”

She smiles. We kick our legs. I try to whistle a tune. After a while I turn to Bree.

“Hey, do you know how old Finn is?”

“Finn? I don’t know for sure. Nobody really knows. He’s old, though. Some people say he’s immortal. That he’s older than the island, even. But I don’t think so. A couple years ago, Brent and me—he won that year—we were snooping around some, and we found a room from the original castle, before they rebuilt. It’s kind of a basement. Anyway, there were lots of kid’s drawings down there on the walls that made it look like beings came from the sky. Brent said Finn was an alien.”

I can’t help but laugh.

“An alien?”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” she says, “but who knows?”

I’m a little worried with Jimmy being so lavishly celebrated that he’ll forget his deal to help me get the David’s hand back. I’m even more worried that he’ll really want to stay on now that he’s the island hero.

“Hey, Bree. Do you think you could show me that room?”

“The basement?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure,” she says, hopping of the wagon.

She fetches a lantern from her tent and leads me to the deserted north side of the castle, down a flight of stone stairs winding around a circular tower. The ancient wooden door at the base of the stairs appears to be locked, but Bree wiggles the rusted iron latch and shimmies it open.

“Not very good security,” I say.

Bree shrugs. I hold the lantern while she lifts the glass and strikes it lit. Then I hand it back and follow her inside.

The room is dank and musty. The lamp casts a dim glow on stacks of old barrels and piles of antlered deer skulls tangled like bleached branches in the corners. I eye them, wondering if one of them belonged to the stag we killed.

Bree walks me to the back of the room and opens another door onto a narrow passageway.

“You can see that this was the wall of the original castle,” she says, pointing out the worn, hand-laid stones. Then she stops at yet another door, this one half-rotted. She puts her shoulder to it and forces the door open on creaking leather hinges, dried and brittle with age.

Inside is a small room that was once partitioned into two, except the wall between them has largely crumbled. Bree steps over the tumbled stones and leads me to the far wall.

She holds up the lantern—

Faded but detectable, black charcoal drawings adorn the wall like ancient cave paintings from a people long gone. I can see right away why Bree joked about aliens, because the most prominent image is a drone lifting off into the sky while a mother and son stand below and wave goodbye.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“What?” Bree asks.

I take the lamp from Bree and hold it closer, inspecting the drawing. Sure enough, a Park Service crest is clearly visible on the side of the drone. I move the lamp around and see that the valknut symbol is reproduced in other places on the walls, too. Then my eye spots something on a lower stone, beneath the waving figures. I set the lamp down and drop to my knees. It’s a signature, scrawled by a child’s uncertain hand—DAVID.

“Who’s David?” I ask, pointing.

“Why, that’s Finn,” Bree says, seemingly surprised that I don’t know. “His name’s David Robert MacFinn. But since he’s the head of Clan MacFinn, everyone just calls him Finn.”

An image of Finn’s face pops into my head—his sharp nose, his crystal blue eyes. I’ve seen those eyes before. I try to recall Finn’s song the other night: “Inside the woman a child grew, _something, something_, an immortal son ...”

Bree finishes it for me. “Half god, half man, a deadly duo. A gift of love by a woman’s courage won.”

The truth springs into my consciousness with the clarity of a cold, clear morning. The drawing. The drone. The signature.

“Finn is Dr. Radcliffe’s illegitimate son.”

“Whose son?” Bree asks.

It’s the only explanation. It explains the island being off limits to the drones. It explains the secrecy. The myth. Didn’t the professor tell us Radcliffe spent a lot of time here in the early years? I’d bet my head Radcliffe had an affair with Finn’s mother. And I’d bet he injected his son with the serum, too, before he left him to spawn a clan of descendants, most of whose skulls now hang on the wall. But most importantly, it means that the encryption key I’ve been looking for isn’t in the statue’s hand at all. It’s in his hand, David MacFinn’s.

“‘Where man rises from the sea, in the right hand of David you shall find your key.’”

“I don’t know that one,” Bree says.

I turn and hug her.

“You’re amazing, Bree. You have no idea what you’ve done for me.”

She pats my back uncomfortably.

“Okay, easy there, tiger.”

All night the castle rings with the sounds of celebration. The wine flows, the music plays, the guests dance. A royal feast is prepared, even bigger than the last. There are so many dinner guests they won’t all fit in the great hall, and the statue room is opened so people can eat amongst the marble figures, including the David with its still missing hand. But I pass it by with little interest now, because I know we were looking for the key in the wrong David. All I can think is that Dr. Radcliffe must have inserted a chip in his son’s hand. Or perhaps the code is some algorithm from his fingerprint, if fingerprints don’t change as we age. Anyway, I don’t know how it’s hidden in his hand, and I have even less ideas about how to get at it.

I try to corner Jimmy to tell him what I’ve learned, but he’s overwhelmed with attention, and I can’t even get close. He sits next to Finn at the head of the big table, receiving a long line of people presenting him with gifts. Precious stones and feathers and even a gray rabbit-fur coat that Jimmy slips on, making him look ridiculous. But Jimmy’s loving it. And who wouldn’t? He’s suddenly the island’s favorite son. And he’s not even from here.

The guests raise their glasses to toast.

“Today for Jimmy,” someone calls. “Tomorrow for us!”

I refuse to wait in line to talk with my friend, so I grab Junior from the study, where I find him asleep in front of the fire, and carry him upstairs to my room and shut out the sound of the festivities and lie on the bed and think.

“What am I going to do, Junior?”

A warm lick on my forearm is the only answer I get.

Maybe with Jimmy’s newfound fame, he can convince Finn to come back with us so that Hannah might use her equipment in the lab to find the encryption key hidden in his hand. Which reminds me, she had better still have that longevity serum for Jimmy. I still can’t believe she lied to me. And about that of all things. Jimmy. My friend. I force myself to forget her betrayal, to focus instead on the next steps to getting home safe.

I’m more than a little worried that Jimmy really won’t want to leave the island now. But we’ll see. Maybe he’ll be bored with it tomorrow when things settle down. Maybe.





Part Three