The Islanders

by Wesley Stein

  I wondered to myself what she had seen in those strangers. What did Jacey know that we didn’t? I pulled her along to follow Joanna.

  Sprawling along the north shore like a colony, were dozens of bungalows, huts, and cabins. Some were built high on stilts. Torches lit up pathways from hut to hut and some wooden walkways extended out over the water, leading to suspended floating cabins. Tiers of various heights had been constructed to house smaller huts, some on top of others. The tallest of the lodgings formed a large square that rose from the center of the village, a gathering place.

  Then we caught sight of something ahead, beyond the floating cabins, that made all of our hearts soar. There in the bay, not too far offshore, was a small yacht. And farther out, beyond the twin peninsulas that enclosed the bay, was a cargo ship.

  “Let’s head to the middle of the village,” I suggested with a smile. “Maybe there’s an information center or something.”

  Joanna smiled too and my spirits lifted even more. An information center. But as we started, I felt Jacey’s energy lag behind us. She wasn’t following.

  We turned but kept moving away from her until we realized she had just seen something. We swiveled our heads when Jacey pointed toward the trees at the base of the mountain, not far from the cave through which we’d just gone spelunking.

  There, tipped onto its side, was the boat we had lost on the other side of the island.

  “That’s our boat,” I said.

  “What the hell?” Joanna asked.

  I heard a sound and turned. My sisters heard it too. We turned back toward the village.

  Doors creaked open. Huts were illuminated, fires were ignited, torches lit, and before we knew it, the whole colony of beachgoers was waking up, coming alive. As they began to emerge from their dwellings, we could see that all of them were wearing the same silky white robes.

  Joanna called out to them.

  “Can you help us?”

  They did not speak, not to us and not to each other. It was creepy. Joanna and I were surprised, but Jacey didn’t seem to be.

  “Let’s go,” I said and we stepped forward, toward the crowd of robed people now forming near the boardwalk in the sand. Joanna tried again.

  “Please,” she said. “We were stranded at sea. We need help.”

  They lined up as we passed by, none of them reacting to us much, except the occasional smile. We noticed they were all nude, under their robes. We could see bulging body parts and silhouetted shapes through the sheer of their garments. I turned to ensure Jacey was behind us, and she was. I reached out my hand for her and she took it.

  We quickened our pace, and Joanna led us down the boardwalk, through the strange crowd of sleepy tourists, to the center of the colony.

  Here, a large fire had been burning in the middle of four viewing platforms arranged in the shape of a square. Behind the platforms, the boardwalk intersected with others to lead to different quadrants of the village. Amid the intersections were tall huts, framed with the trunks of large palms and thatched with layers of their dead fronds.

  From the huts, men and women were emerging to take a look at us. Some were nude, with no robes at all. And they were beautiful.

  We stopped and surveyed the area. This was not an information center, and we weren’t at a resort.

  We stood near the square, which was more of an arena, with rows of tiered seating rising from the four sides. The square was surrounded by tall huts, built high up on stilts, wrapped in wooden viewing platforms.

  Then we heard a sweet voice call out from one of the huts above us.

  “Welcome,” she said. We turned to see one of the women, now donning a white robe to cover her torchlit body, emerge from the doorway of a hut and pause at the railing of the decking.

  “We need some help,” I said nervously.

  The woman’s face expressed concern. She moved toward the stairway leading from the deck to the boardwalk.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, placing a palm on her chest.

  “It’s a long story,” Joanna began. “We were kidnapped and marooned at sea. We ended up here.”

  “I see,” the woman said calmly. She began down the stairs, making no rush of it. “But you’re safe now,” she continued. “My name is Juliet. Welcome to Three-Hook Island.”

  CHAPTER 3

  ADAM’S HEARTH

  Thirteen Years Earlier

  “Mr. Sanderson, your cooperation is crucial if you expect to make a deal,” Special Agent Langston Free said. His jacket was off, exposing sweat rings beneath his arms. “I suggest you give me what I need.”

  “Your deal isn’t good enough,” Sanderson said.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “It’s been almost two years, Agent Free. You need a new hobby.”

  “I need to close this case,” Free replied. “And I plan to do just that, with or without you.”

  “What do you want me to say? It was a good deal for me,” Ben Sanderson said.

  “I bet it was. Did you force him to go?”

  “Of course not,” Sanderson replied. “I didn’t want him to go. But I wasn’t going to stop him.”

  “You stood to make a lot of money if he never came back,” Agent Free suggested.

  The FBI man was here on behalf of a Civil Rights Unit task force related to human trafficking.

  “You were law partners, right? Tell me about his plan. Start from the beginning.”

  Sanderson took a deep breath, then let it out in a huff.

  “One day, Mark walks into my office and says he’s moving to Tahiti.”

  “Tahiti?”

  “Yeah. I say ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ and he starts going on about something he found in the Alps.”

  “The Alps?” Free asked as he made a mental note. “What did he find?”

  “Mark was crazy rich,” Sanderson said. “He’d take that hot wife of his and those girls all over the world. He was treasure-hunting.”

  “What happened in the Alps? What did he find?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a what. Maybe it was a who.”

  “Who did he find?”

  “I have no idea,” Sanderson explained. “But whoever it was, they filled his head full of things. When he came back, he was calling himself Claudius.”

  “Hamlet,” Free whispered.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” the detective said. “Keep going.”

  “He wouldn’t stop talking about an island, where rich people go to retire. He said he and Rachel had been invited there, given a priceless map.”

  “Priceless?”

  “Being invited is a bigger deal than you can imagine.”

  “How big?”

  “Like, sell your law practice and move to Tahiti big.”

  “Abandon your three children big?” Free asked.

  Sanderson took a moment to consider the question, then nodded solemnly. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and decided to tell more of what he knew.

  “The place is a playground, a Garden of Eden. Mark and Rachel sacrificed their girls to live there.”

  “Is it a sex thing? Human trafficking?”

  “Plenty of sex,” Sanderson said. “I don’t know about human trafficking. But to hear Mark talk about it, you could have anything you wanted.”

  “So his girls were off-limits?”

  “His wife wouldn’t allow it,” Sanderson said. “But I think Mark would have brought them if he could. I think that’s why all five of them went down there. But Rachel won out in the end, so it was just the two of them who disappeared. They left the girls, left them with me.”

  “And we know how that turned out, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he tells you he’s moving to Tahiti, and you should buy out his half of the law practice?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you agreed, right?”

  “Sure. It was a great opportunity for me, financially. I didn’t know the girls
would come under my care as part of the deal, at that time.”

  “Why would Rachel go along with it, if she was a good mother?”

  “I never said she was a good mother,” Sanderson corrected. “I only said she didn’t want her girls to be stuck on an adult-only island. Rachel liked nice things. She liked to look nice and drive nice cars and live in big houses and go on lavish vacations. So she looked the other way on most things she disagreed with Mark about. She wouldn’t have left them with me if she’d known.”

  “Known what?”

  “What I was,” Sanderson answered. “But I guess I didn’t even know what I was until those girls came along.”

  “Well, you’re a sex offender now. And you’ll have plenty of time to ruminate on that while you sit in prison. It’ll be a decade before you’re eligible for parole. Hell, I bet we’ll have flying cars by then. Unless you can help me out.”

  “I thought I was helping.”

  “You shared a safe deposit box with Mark,” Free said. “I want access to it. I want the map.”

  Sanderson thought for a moment, squinting his eyes and picking at the cuticle of his left thumb. Finally, he shook his head.

  “Sorry, no.”

  “You’ll do twelve years,” Free warned. “Minimum.”

  “That’s okay,” Sanderson smiled. “Twelve years in here is a blink of an eye compared to the rest of my life in paradise. I’ll get out one day, Agent Free,” Sanderson said as he stood, a baggy orange jumpsuit disguising his height. “And when I do, I’m taking a flying car down to Tahiti to find my old buddy, Mark.”

  “You’re a real piece of shit,” Free said as he buzzed opened the door to the visitation room. “Do you know that, Sanderson?” He was fed up and called for the guard. “Come get this asshole!”

  There was another buzz and a click as the guard came through the second set of doors and collected Sanderson.

  The noise persisted as they passed back through the exit, leaving Free alone in the visitation room. He could barely hear the prisoner say under his breath, “From now on Agent Free, you can call me Tybalt.”

  Free froze and considered where he’d heard that name.

  “Romeo and Juliet,” he uttered to himself.

  

  “I am the leader of the people of the northern shore,” the woman said. “You must be hungry, tired. Please, come up to my cabin.”

  The lady moved gracefully up the stairs, pausing halfway up to turn her head and ensure her guests were following. Joanna paused, but went after her, and so did I. Jacey was more hesitant, but she came along too.

  “What is this place?” Joanna asked as we made our way up the steps. Juliet did not at once respond but waited until we were standing on the deck, overlooking the beach. The sun was bright orange and reflected off the wave tips like a million knives.

  “Three-Hook Island is an ancient place,” she said. “As old as the Earth itself. We’ve come here, throughout the years, to live in peace and solitude, away from the chaos. We’ve come to indulge in pleasure. This is a year-round resort, and we need never leave.”

  She turned and stepped into the doorway of her hut.

  “Please, come in.”

  We followed her into the hut and I was surprised by how large and well-appointed it was inside. Juliet had all the comforts of a five-star hotel, including an oversized king mattress, a jacuzzi tub, and a full kitchen.

  “Would you care for some juice?” Juliet asked as she opened a small refrigerator. “I have apple juice and orange juice.”

  “Thank you,” Joanna said.

  “Either is fine,” I added.

  “I’ll have some water,” Jacey said quietly. It seemed like our host was going to ignore her at first, but eventually Juliet turned and smiled beneath squinting eyes.

  “Of course,” Juliet replied. “I’ll have some brought up for you.”

  We were parched, starving, and very tired. We had not slept in over twenty-four hours. We drank the juice she’d poured for us, then we drank more. And before we’d left her cabin, we had consumed every drop of fruit juice that Juliet had. But it wasn’t altogether satisfying, leaving our mouths feeling sticky. We asked for water again, and she had finally sent for some. But it never came. She sat and watched, a satisfied smile on her face, as we ate and drank. We ate fruit and roasted boar and cornbread muffins.

  When we were finished, we sat on cushions situated around the room and watched while our host changed clothes.

  Juliet went to the corner of the hut, where a line of rope was strung from the wall to a post. A short white dress was draped over the line. Before we knew could avert our eyes, Juliet had slipped off her robe, her figure glistening suddenly in the soft morning light.

  Her breasts were shapely and her hips were cocked to the side, the ball of only one foot touching the floor. She threw the sheer robe over the line and pulled the dress over her head and down.

  We only rested a few minutes, breathing in and out in near silence, while our feet were raised on cushions. For while Juliet joined us, her eyes closed and her breath measured. Then she clasped her hands together and quietly said, “Good.”

  Juliet led us back outside. We stood on the deck again and surveyed our surroundings.

  The villagers were still waking up, starting their day. But their routines were anything but typical. Juliet smiled as she watched two men arrive in the square, each holding large bellows. They rekindled the bonfire at the village center.

  “The fire is always burning,” Juliet explained. “It’s a tradition.”

  “The cargo ship,” Joanna pointed beyond the bay. “Who does it belong to?” Juliet laughed and put a hand to her chest.

  “It’s mine, dear.”

  “Yours?”

  Juliet smiled again and offered several tiny nods. She seemed proud of the ship.

  “You can help us get home,” Joanna said. But before she could say more, loud drums were suddenly beaten below us and the dull booms rattled the platform. Juliet’s eyes widened.

  “I love the drums,” she said. “These are my favorite times of the day.”

  We watched three men, each wearing large drums over their shoulders, march into the square.

  Tum-ta-dum-dum.

  Tum-ta-dum-dum.

  Next, we saw five or six men arrive in the square and shed their white robes. They stood naked in the sand, near stone blocks and a circular wooden platform.

  Their sun-tanned bodies were muscular. Some joked with each other while others yawned and stretched. This was nothing new to them.

  The other villagers began to arrive at the square. As the drums continued to pound, people took seats in the stadium around the fire.

  Some of the women did not sit but instead went to the edge of the arena, where they too stripped off their robes. One woman stood at each side of the square and waited. The men diplomatically chose who would head in which direction and who they would leave near the fire alone.

  Soon, the men and women were having sex while others watched from the stands. More islanders passed by on the boardwalk. Some paused to watch, and others couldn’t be bothered.

  “There are three sexual expression times each day,” Juliet explained. “The men would never stop chasing tail otherwise.” She laughed. “They’re like dogs. They’d be humping our legs if we kept them penned up too long.”

  We could see the crowd growing below. Nude men roamed between the stands, waiting for a sexual partner to appear. Women came from the bleachers, stripped their robes, and found the men. Couples were entering the arena, some to only watch and some to take part.

  “We need a way home,” Joanna said above the sound of the drums, which had softened since the crowd gathered.

  Juliet ignored her and turned to face the steep mountain behind us.

  “That is Adam’s Hearth,'' she said as she led us along the deck around the cabin. She motioned toward the peak.

  "It's a long-dormant volcano,” Juliet said. “Thi
s mountain is the protector and designer of our island. The lava flows which it birthed divided the island into three parts; the southwest shore, the southeast shore, and the northern shore, where you stand now.

  “There’s nothing on the Southern shores,” Joanna said.

  “No, there’s not,” Juliet agreed. “Not yet at least.”

  “When does your cargo ship depart?”

  “Beneath the mountain is a series of tunnels,” Juliet went on. “It’s a vast network of caves that extends from one end of the island to the other. I’m sure you’ll recall coming through the catacombs.”

  We nodded our heads. Juliet moved to the edge of the decking and placed a hand on the railing. She gazed out over the village and watched as scantily clad people moved from their huts to the square. More were joining in the ceremony. Moans of pleasure were rising above the din of the drums.

  “Each year more people come,” she said. “They find out about us from legends, stories they heard on the wind, much like Shakespeare himself did.”

  “Shakespeare?” I asked. Juliet laughed.

  “Not that Shakespeare,” she clarified. “Our founder. His name was Thomas Mills, a sailor from long ago, who was friendly with the natives.”

  “What legends?” The question came from Jacey. Juliet left the railing and began toward the steps.

  “Let me tell you,” she said as she stepped down. While she spoke, she led us to one of the boarded walkways where we strolled along together.

  “Do you ladies ever go to church?” Juliet asked. We looked at each other and shook our heads. We had gone once or twice, but nothing to speak of.

  “Not really,” Joanna answered for us.

  “Eons ago,” Juliet began. “Before the continents drifted apart, there was a garden.”

  “The garden of Eden?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Juliet answered. “The Garden of Eden. It was perfect. It had everything; flora and fauna of every size and color. The heart of the garden was a fountain. It was the fountain of life, the source of all knowledge of good and evil.”

  “I thought that was a tree?” Jacey asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Eve ate an apple.”