bio

Mark Teppo has a fascination with sequences, conspiracies and hidden knowledge. He wears various disguises in order to be invisible and prefers to live close to water. There are not enough hours in the day for him to accomplish everything that he dreams of doing and, until Time deigns to stop for him (Time, not Death), he's writing just as fast as he can.

primary external link:
www.markteppo.com

CHANCE ISLAND: A FABLE FROM EMPIRE CITY

From the lighthouse on Cathedral Point, you can see the wooded shores of Chance Island. When the sun sinks past the horizon, its burning light always sets the trees on fire and, for an hour at sunset, the island moves as if it were alive. This is the hour when men forget the stories about Chance Island and their hands unconsciously begin to drift on the wheels of their boats. This is the hour when the compass needles swing to the left, when the pistons and drive shafts are seduced by a magnetic shift toward the west. You can read the warning on the nautical charts of Hammerstone Sound: Steer clear of Chance Island at dusk. The chart has been used by fishermen, merchant seamen, and recreational boaters for more than a hundred years and, other than corrections made to the recorded depths along the shipping lane, it hasn't changed.



A generation ago, there were two brothers who, like their father, fished on the Hammerstone. They, however, ignored convention and tradition and plied their trade using machine-fabricated nets and sophisticated fish-stalking devices. They fished before dawn and always sold their catch to the same fishmonger. There are rumors as to why they brought their catch to that singular stall. The one mostly likely true is that the elder of the two brothers once asked the fishmonger if he could marry the monger's only daughter. The fish seller turned him down, telling the fisherman that he wanted more for his daughter than a life of fish oil and scales.

"Fine," the fisherman said. "If I bring you a lifetime's worth of fish before I am thirty, will you let me drape your daughter in furs and silks and take her away from the salt air?"

While his brother was fair-haired and strong and had large hands with delicate fingers, the younger one walked with a limp, and a scar twisted the corner of his left eye. Even though he loved the sea, he never forgot that it could be cruel. The wave had taken their father, but it had left him his eye and leg.

Fortune is like that: You don't wonder at what might have happened, but simply hold out your hand and whether it be a hook or silver that lands in your palm, you wrap your fingers tight and hang on.

One day, his brother carried the last bucket of fish that he would ever carry up to the fishmonger's shop and placed it on the scale. As the needle tipped past the top of the scale, he stripped off his gloves and his boots and his heavy waders. He stripped off his colorless sweater, removed his knit cap, and laid his fishing knife down on the counter. He piled the rest of his clothing in a neat stack next to the knife and stood before the fishmonger and said, "I am done. I have left the sea."

The younger brother sat on the back of the boat and watched the fishmonger embrace his naked son-in-law. Two weeks later when he received the postcard from France, it was clear that his brother wasn't coming back.

He couldn't run the boat on his own and, for a few days, he considered finding someone to assist him with the lines and the net. But it wouldn't work; his father and brother were gone and the boat held nothing for him now but memories. He sold it and took a job as a guide on a chartered fishing boat.

He found that fishing for sport wasn't the same. He had no sympathy for the soft-fingered clients who squealed when they pricked their thumbs with the large barbed hooks. They found his stories of the sea flat, as they lacked hyperbolic drama and the requisite sea monster. He didn't know anything about stocks and bonds or the shifting price of gold and commodities. He looked at the dense row of trees on Chance Island and didn't see virgin lumber that could lay in beautifully straight rows across the floor of a mansion. He didn't wonder about the quail or ducks or other game birds nested in the thick brush that came down to the water.

Some months after his brother left the sea, a client looked to the west as the sun struck the trees on Chance Island. "How much would it cost to land me on that island?"

The boat's captain laughed and didn't turn his head. "More than you have."

"I have a lot," the client responded. "Name a number."

The captain did. And it was a ridiculous number.

"Done," said the client, staring at the fire dripping down through the verdant trees.

"Tomorrow then," the captain said, shaking his head. "When the sun is in the east. We don't land on that island at dusk."

On the following morning as the fog swept across the bay, the chartered boat left the channel and approached the shore of Chance Island. The captain stopped the vessel well away from the rocks and pointed at the small dinghy tied to the back of his boat. "This is as close as I get," he said, "You'll have to row the rest of the way. It's too dangerous for larger craft."

The client was carrying a long rifle in a water-proof case and he stood there in the bow of the vessel, blinking at the captain. He looked at the young fisherman. "I'll pay you what I'm paying him to row me ashore. And back."

The young fisherman had woken from a bad dream that morning, a dream where he kissed the ocean and found it did not return his affection, and he had been thinking about his brother and his new wife. When the client caught him with this question, he had been staring out at the fog, wondering what the weather was like in Paris.

The young fisherman looked at the small dinghy with its old and cracked oars and considered the money. Was this his second chance -- an offer in an instant, a moment of choice -- so startlingly unlike the one prior? "Sure," he said, taking the offered silver this time.

The boat ran aground in the shallows. The young fisherman knew how the tides ran, and yet he felt the waves shift beneath the old hull of the rowboat. The Hammerstone drove them to the island, pushing the old boat firmly against the stone shore. The bleached timbers of the dinghy bent upward and water started to leak into the bottom of the rowboat.

The client didn't notice. He sprang from the end of the small craft as soon as he heard the grinding sound of wood against stone. His fingers eagerly tore at the buckles of his waterproof case. "Three hours," he said to the young fisherman. "I'll be back in three hours." He dropped the case into the boat and turned his back on the craft and the young fisherman. His vision narrowed to the largest set of animal tracks in the sand beyond the rocky edge of the island and, rifle held tightly in his hands, he walked into the forest.

The young fisherman pulled the dinghy up onto the beach and turned it over. The gash in the bottom was long and deep and, exploring with his fingers, he discovered three planks that bent under examination. The dinghy might hold one, but not two, and only in calm water.

He had a tiny radio -- his connection to the fishing boat and the world beyond -- but when he turned it on, all he heard was static. He turned it off and put it in his pocket. He sat down on a nearby rock to wait.

Over the next half hour, the fog turned black and the water became white with chop. The rain came soon after, the myriad of animal tracks in the sand beginning to distort and fill as the water washed over them. The young fisherman retreated to the line of the forest, crouching down on the mossy side of one of the tall pine trees.

The client didn't return after three hours.

The trees protected the young fisherman from the rain and, after a few minutes of walking inland, he could no longer hear the surf as it pounded the rock-strewn shore. The upper branches of the trees bent and creaked overhead. In the distance, a branch snapped and fell to the ground. The air was thick with moisture; rain droplets threaded their way through the thick cover and became a mist that glittered in the half light.

One of the legends of Chance Island is that the spirits of dead settlers still roam the interior of the island. That story could not be true; no one had ever settled Chance Island. The apparitions that were supposed to haunt the dark trees were probably hallucinations brought about by the presence of marsh gases. But, as the young fisherman discovered, the ground was too hard for both the formation and the expression of such psychedelic fumes.

The floating skulls were most likely conjured by the imagination of frightened explorers; the play of light against the leaves and shadows created bulbous floating shapes that the imagination turned into baleful, drifting female heads. Their eyes were phosphorescent lamps, and the lank hair streaming in their wakes was nothing more than the shivering leaves of the maple and poplar.

One does not come upon two paths in the wood. In the dark wilderness, feverishly populated by the mind, there is never a fork in the road. There is only a single path that leads you farther in. The dark woods are not a maze, but a snare.

The storm was fading, the movement of the trees less pronounced now. He wiped a hand across his cheeks and shook the excess moisture from his fingers. The young fisherman heard a distant echo as if from thunder or a gun. He stopped and listened for the sound to come again.

On his left, the tree women floated, darting and hiding behind the thick trunks of the poplars. Their eyes were the color of ripe limes, and their mouths were filled with jagged teeth like triple rows of rusting halfpenny nails.

The young man looked behind him and could not see the path.

He never found the client. All he found was a filigree-colored tree with a black crow sitting in its branches. The bird's talons were long and white like fingers of dead men. The bark of the tree was hammered gold and it filled the surrounding forest with a yellow glow. The only blemish was a dark patch partway up trunk of the tree.

The young fisherman approached the tree and peered at the hole in the center of the blemish. He could smell the acrid scent of gunpowder and the metallic scent of the tree's sap as it oozed from the wound. The bark was thin and splintered about the tear, crinkling outward like tinfoil.

With the tip of his knife, he gingerly tapped at the hole and heard the sound of his blade striking metal. He pushed his knife carefully into the hole, feeling around the flattened bullet in the trunk of the tree. He worked it carefully, trying not to tear any more of the delicate gold skin. The wood underneath was smooth and dark red like the skin of a ripe cherry.

The leaves overhead rustled as he found the base of the bullet and popped the projectile out of the tree trunk. Instinctively he held out his hand for the shard of metal and, when it touched his palm, he flinched because it was still hot. But he didn't drop the bullet.

"That won't bring him back," she said, flowing up from the heart of the golden tree, her limbs pulling and stretching into its branches. Her hair was fine copper, and her lips were the color of the wood beneath the filigree bark. Her skin was the color of winter leaves.

"I know," he said, putting the bullet into his pocket. "It seemed out of place."

"The whole world is out of place," she said, a shadow flickering across her teeth.

"Can you help me find the other man?" he asked.

"Is he your blood? Your friend?"

The young fisherman shook his head.

"Then why do you care what happened to him?"

"For the same reason I took the bullet out of the tree," he said.

She laughed and, as she laughed, her hair began to twist and braid into a thick black dome like the cap of a deadly mushroom. Her skin grew darker and sprouted thorns and jagged flowers. Her shape draped the gold tree, swallowing its yellow light.

The young fisherman tried not to let fear show in his voice. "What is to happen to me?" he asked.

Around him, he could the hear the tree women laughing, their tittering voices like the drying screams of field mice as they were carried into the night sky by hunting owls.

"The same thing that happens to everyone who comes to the island," she said, her voice now as terrible as it was sweet moments earlier. "Your blood will feed the trees, your soft tissues will be given to my children, and the hard bones that I cannot crack with my teeth I will throw into the sea."

"What about the rest of me?" he asked. "What about my brain?"

"Given to the gulls."

"My liver?"

"Fed to the ferrets."

"My intestines?"

"Used to build snares for slow-moving men."

"My heart?"

Copper light flashed at the base of her neck as she turned her head away.

"You can't eat my heart, can you?" he said.

She whirled on him, flowing down the tree like an enormous serpent, her thorns and jagged leaves rippling like the teeth of an eager saw. "I can and will," she scaled to a shriek. She was growing larger, her black head spreading and opening like the hood of a cobra. "I always save the little heart for last," she whispered with delight. "So rich with fear. So tasty."

She giggled then, a wet bubbling sound, and bent her head toward his chest, her long fingers tapping at his breastbone, looking to find the space between his ribs.

The young fisherman thought of his dream again, the dream that crawled down the length of his spine during the night and nested in the pit of his belly, throwing its black tail over the arch of his pelvis. He thought of dying, and he thought of the weather in Paris. He thought of what his brother had kept and what his brother had given away. He considered what he was never given and what he had never taken.

He looked up at the face of the dark forest queen and saw the copper light that still glowed beneath her plated skin. As her long fingers touched his throat like the tender caress of a spider's legs, he leaned toward her and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

She hesitated, a long fingernail caught in the hollow at the base of his throat. It hurt to swallow, but he did so anyway. Then he kissed her again to make it clear that the first time had been no random accident.



There is no fork in the trail on Chance Island. There is only one way to the grove of the forest queen. There is the path by day and there is the path by night. There are two queens on Chance Island and they walk the same path but never at the same time.

At night the dark queen rages through the woods, shaking the rocks and throwing stones into the bay as if by filling the sea she can fill her heart. In the morning, when the young fisherman wakes and kisses her cheek, she softens and sheds the hard shell she covered herself with during the night. He smiles and pulls out the snarls in her copper hair and brushes the curled thorns and shriveled leaves from her skin.

And he never dies, the young fisherman, because nothing -- not even Death -- dares approach his bed while she stands guard. She never perishes either. Every day, she is born again by his kiss.