Under the Electric Sky Read Online Free Page A

executed military personnel were strung up in gibbets as a warning to all ships that entered the harbour. That practice began in the 1780s and lasted well into the nineteenth century. A kilometre in the other direction of Findlay’s Picnic Grounds sits Indian Point, so named for the natives who were exiled there in the 1760s in an attempt to diffuse growing tensions with European settlers in Halifax. That was the official reason, but the island was for all intents a prison for the natives who would occasionally swim to shore to attack the citizens of Dartmouth in retaliation.
    But here at Findlay’s on this late June night on the eve of the twentieth century, the party was winding down for the week with wistful regret. People were piling into their rowboats and sailing back across the tenebrous harbour to the cities, back to the real world. Late stragglers were jumping on the last ferry home to greet responsibilities in the morning: work and school, bills and decisions. In short, the dull routine of life.
    The new century would change McNab’s once and for all. The island between the cities, at the mouth of the harbour that stretched beyond, the place where at one time anything could happen, would be almost entirely abandoned a couple decades into this fresh century and erased from the collective memory like a long-dead relative whose face recedes more as the years wear on. The ferries would cease running services to the island, individual weekend excursions would be scrapped and McNab’s left to sink.
    But as the past has a way of lingering in the Maritimes, it would be lurking under the surface for years to come. The party was no longer confined to the island; it was about to embrace a larger audience. The vital spark of McNab’s Island in those days was destined to burn in all corners of the region because of a curious twist of fate that would bring a new lighthouse keeper and his family to the island in the spring of 1905.

A Young Man Named Lynch
    M atthew Lynch was a solid, hard-nosed Maritimer with salt water running through his veins. Born at Falkland Village on the western shore of Halifax Harbour in 1865, he spent his early life at sea in different pursuits that included conducting wreckage operations in the Atlantic and other diving activities. At the age of forty, he accepted a position to maintain the two-year-old McNab’s Island Rear Range Lighthouse and quickly fell in love with the little island, a place he would call home for the rest of his life. It was clear to Lynch the position would afford him the opportunity to continue living by the sea where his heart had always been. What wasn’t as clear was the effect it would have on his children.
    Lynch’s four children grew up on the island, afternoons interrupted in the summer by good-time carousers wandering through their backyard on their way to Findlay’s Pleasure Grounds, which happened to border their property. His youngest son William took a special interest in the festivities that occurred on the island during the summer months and for a boy, this kind of mirthful human revelry was worth exploring. William and his sister Gladys held weekly religious conversions, depending on which church was holding a picnic on the island that day, in order to participate in the different Sunday School races. On a few occasions the religious fraudsters were discovered and ejected from the grounds, but that hardly discouraged the young Lynch children. There was always a way to have fun on McNab’s in those days, especially for kids. The party was always raging and if it had to end early one day, that was fine, there would be another, better party the next. Quietly marvelling over the celebrations of life also proved a worthwhile exercise in expanding the Lynch children’s imaginations on certain evenings.
    Growing up with your backyard the centre of bacchanalian revelry for an entire city could have any number of psychological