Fatal Journeys

by Lucy Taylor

  As he approached, he saw a nest of shadows, low to the ground, diverge and reconfigure, then caught a glimpse of a pink shirt and let himself exhale. The old man was asleep in the pavilion, the noise he’d heard undoubtedly was snoring. More movement—undulating, languid. He saw what looked to his uncertain eyes to be a wild crown of Medusa dreads whipped back and forth—a host of unwelcome images besieged his mind—but it was the hyena’s glaring eyes and not its mane-like, ruffled tail that finally made the scene before him recognizable.

  The hyena’s eyes flashed, then vanished into the fog only to reappear a few feet away. The grumbling, growling intensified. Blacksburg, shocked motionless, counted five sets of eyes.

  A frightful snarling commenced as two of the hyenas, snapping wildly, fought over a choice morsel. Bits of skin and gristle flew. Blacksburg glimpsed a ragged nub of bone attached to a scrap of pink cloth.

  His breath caught in a stifled gasp. A hyena’s head jerked up, and it raised its gory snout to test the wind.

  Blacksburg shoved away from the pavilion and plunged headlong into the fog. He tried to remember the location of the jeep, thinking he might be able to lock himself inside, but the drifting mist cast a surreal opaqueness across the dunescape. Nothing that he saw was recognizable, the blank facades of the buildings as alike as weathered tombstones.

  Ahead the murky outline of a crumbling two-story building floated up out of the fog. An empty window gaped. He hurled himself through it, tripped, and landed atop the piano he’d seen earlier—its ancient keys produced a wheezing bleat.

  Behind him a sagging door led into a low hallway. The darkness was crypt black. He groped his way along, stumbling over obstacles—a plank, an empty drum of some kind—until he half fell into a small enclosed space, a storage room or closet. He huddled there, heart galloping, listening for the murderous whoops of the converging pack.

  Blacksburg?

  His own name sounded suddenly as alien and frightful as a curse. It floated on the hissing wind, at once as distant as the moon and close as his own breath, Aamu’s voice or maybe just the scrape of windswept sand. He cleared his throat to answer and found that he was mute.

  They call people by name to lure them out.

  Although never in his life had Blacksburg been superstitious, now some atavistic fear crawled out of his reptilian brain and commandeered all else.

  He tried to tell himself his frantic mind was playing tricks, but an older knowledge told him what he feared the most, that what called to him was no hyena but a shape shifter, a nikishi, that would split him open like the old man, from groin to sternum and feed while he lay dying.

  Blacksburg!

  The piano suddenly coughed out a great, discordant cacophony, as though four clawed feet had leaped onto the keyboard and bounded off.

  The door he’d come through creaked, and then a single animal sent forth its infernal wail into the hollow building. At once other hyenas, some inside, others beyond the walls, took up the ungodly cry.

  Knowing he was seconds from being found and trapped, he bolted from his hiding place, raced up the hallway and hurled himself through a window that was partially intact, crashing to the sand amidst a biting drizzle of shattered glass.

  Without pause, he got up and pounded down the duneface, arms pinwheeling, skidding wildly.

  The hyenas converged around him.

  The largest, boldest of the beasts feinted once before going for his throat. Its teeth snagged his shirt, taking with the fabric a strip of flesh from Blacksburg’s ribs. He fell to one knee, one arm up to guard his jugular, the other to protect the pouch across his chest—even knowing, beyond all doubt, that both were lost to him.

  The ecstatic yips of the hyenas were suddenly drowned out by the roar of an approaching motor. The Hilux teetered at the top of the dune, then careened straight down the face, sand spewing out behind the tires, high beams punching through the fog. It slammed onto beach, suspension screaming, bounced off the ground, and veered toward the hyenas. The pack scattered. Blacksburg staggered to his feet, as the jeep skidded to a halt beside him.

  “Get in!”

  Aamu flung the door wide, and Blacksburg launched himself inside, the jeep lurching into motion while his legs still dangled out the door. A hyena leaped, jaws snapping. He screamed and kicked out. The hyena twisted in mid-air and fell away. Blacksburg muscled the door closed.

  Aamu gunned the engine and the jeep tore away through the fog.

  She drove like a witch, outdistancing the pack by many miles, before she turned to Blacksburg and said gravely, “I looked for you on foot at first. I called your name. I knew you were close by, but you didn’t answer.”

  “I didn’t hear you,” Blacksburg said, shame making him curt, resentful of her. They both knew he’d been afraid to answer, that in that desperate moment, rationality had failed him. He’d believed the hyena pack to be nikishis and one of them was mimicking her voice. He was a fool and a coward, just as all along he knew his boss DeGroot had judged him privately to be. In that moment, when he felt as though she’d seen into his soul and found him wanting, he made a harsh decision.

  He told her to stop the vehicle and switch places. He would drive.

  ««—»»

  Later, when the mid-day sun was high and blazingly hot, Blacksburg decided they’d come far enough. He’d been driving for hours while Aamu slept. Now he halted the Hilux in the middle of a sun-blasted stretch of desert bleak and desolate as a medieval rendition of hell, shook her by the shoulder, and said, “Get out.”

  She sat up, blinking groggily. “What…what are you talking about?”

  “It’s simple. End of the line. Get out.”

  “I don’t understand.” She looked around at the miles of barren, retina-searing whiteness. “Is this a joke?”

  He barked a bitter laugh. “Did you really think I was taking you with me? I can get to Angola on my own.”

  “But…I’ll die out here.”

  “Yes, I imagine so.”

  For a woman contemplating her very short future, she appeared strangely unmoved. “But we are going to Luanda.”

  “One of us. Not you.” He held his hand out. “And by the way, I want my diamond back.”

  “Then take it and be damned!” Before Blacksburg could stop her, she yanked the diamond from around her neck and hurled it out the window as casually as if she were discarding a wad of gum.

  He swore and struck her across the head. The bandanna came off. He saw the dried blood in her hair, the fresh blood flowing from the wound at the top of her ear. He stared at his hand, where her blood stained it.

  She dragged a finger pensively along the scar that ran along her cheek. “You know how I got this? My uncle cut me with a knife. But I was merciful and let him live. Last night I was merciful again. I killed him before I fed his flesh to the hyenas.”

  Using sheer force of will, Blacksburg hauled himself back from the brink of panic. “You think you scare me? You’re crazier than your uncle was. If I can kick my old boss into the ocean when he was trying to climb into the lifeboat, I can damn sure get rid of you. Now get the hell out of my jeep.”

  She didn’t budge. Wild hunger, wanton and insatiable, raged in her eyes. Her lips curled in a soulless smile. “Yesterday I could have killed you on the beach, but I was curious about what kind of man you were, about what was in your heart. Now I know. And now, you know me.”

  Her voice was lush with malice. Her face, as she commenced her changing, was radiant with cruelty.

  “See me as I am,” shrilled the nikishi.

  At once, her slashing teeth cleaved the soft, white folds of his belly. She thrust her muzzle inside the wound, foraging for what was tastiest. The salty entrails were gobbled first, then the tender meat inside the bones, his life devoured in agonizing increments.

  Hours later, a hyena pup following a set of jeep tracks came across a human skull. It seized the trophy in its strong young jaws and headed back to its den where it cou
ld gnaw the prize at leisure.

  Going North

  “Why do you want to go to the North Pole?” asked Aunt Gish as she and Pruitt waited in line at the Galleria Mall to see Santa Claus.

  Pruitt shrugged, wishing she’d never said anything about the North Pole. She didn’t know if she could trust Aunt Gish with something so important. In her seven years, Pruitt had learned not to trust anyone, to play along with what the adults wanted when she had to, but better yet, to stay out of their way.

  Pruitt wasn’t even sure if it was okay to talk to Santa, but she figured she had to take the chance. Even a mall Santa was more than just an ordinary grown-up. He was someone who might be able to help her.

  The Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale was crowded with shoppers, adults carrying packages and scurrying around so frantically they reminded Pruitt of roaches carrying off crumbs when you turned on the light in the kitchen at night, and little kids, some excited, some shy, one or two bawling like babies, who were standing in line to see Santa.

  Pruitt Nelson and her Aunt Gish were near the middle of a line that stretched from Santa’s big, star-dusted throne all the way to the WalMart at the end of the mall. They’d been waiting almost an hour already and Pruitt was worried: was Aunt Gish going to become impatient and drag her out of there before she had a chance to talk to Santa? Especially since Aunt Gish hadn’t even gone to the ladies’ room to do a joint or a line or anything. Neither Miriam nor Daddy could have put up with the Mall for five minutes without a smoke or a snort.

  Aunt Gish seemed to be doing just fine, though, and Pruitt was grateful, if a little surprised. She’d already heard Daddy telling Miriam that Aunt Gish was crazy, that the reason she hadn’t come to Mom’s funeral two years ago was that she was locked up in the loony bin in New York City after getting hysterical and threatening to shoot herself right there in the principal’s office of the school where she used to teach second grade.

  The line inched forward. Pruitt could see the shine on Santa’s nose, the fake snow on his knee-high black boots. Help me, she thought. Please help me.

  “It’s real cold at the North Pole,” Aunt Gish said, long after Pruitt had assumed the subject was dropped. “Why would you want to leave Florida, where it’s warm and sunny, to go live in a place that’s so cold?”

  “Because I hate it here,” said Pruitt, crowding up behind a fat toddler with a lollipop stick protruding from his mouth like a very thick hypodermic syringe. “I hate the Palmetto bugs and the hot weather, and I hate…” Pruitt started to say “Daddy and Kenny and Miriam” but decided against it. Aunt Gish was Momma’s older sister, after all, and she might repeat what Pruitt was getting ready to say, and Pruitt might get smacked around.

  “And what makes you think the North Pole would be better?”

  But Pruitt didn’t answer. She just clamped her lips shut tight against her teeth and waited while the line crept forward, inch by inch, toward Santa.

  Pruitt knew perfectly well that this red-suited, lumpy-looking man with the white beard and the crinkly brown eyes wasn’t the real, the one and only, Santa Claus. She’d already seen one Santa ringing a bell next to a kettle outside the Sears store on Federal Highway and still another waiting at a bus stop, leaning up against a lamppost, looking puffy-eyed and hung over. She figured, however, that these assistant Santa’s probably reported back to the real one at the North Pole and that they probably filed their information (which Pruitt imagined like a kind of police report) with the Big Man himself.

  So when she was settled on Santa’s lap and he asked her what she wanted most for Christmas, Pruitt told him, and Santa laughed and said that wasn’t possible and Pruitt, who didn’t think what she’d asked for was the least bit funny, punched Santa in the eye with her small, knobby, fist and then burst into frustrated howls.

  ««—»»

  “Are you gonna beat the crap out of me?” asked Pruitt as she and Aunt Gish drove out Sunrise Boulevard toward the subdivision in Lake of the Pines where she lived with her father and his girlfriend Miriam. It was the first time that she’d spoken since the disaster with Santa Claus, when Aunt Gish had come swooping down like an enraged falcon and snatched Pruitt away, demanding to know what Santa had said or done to so distress the child.

  “No, of course, I’m not going to beat you,” Aunt Gish said. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “When I’m bad, Miriam always says she’s gonna beat the crap out of me and that she wishes I was dead.”

  Aunt Gish fumbled in her purse on the seat between her and Pruitt, pulled out a Bic and a pack of Winstons, and lit a cigarette. Pruitt noticed that her fingernails were so badly bitten they looked red and infected, and her hands were trembling. She figured that must be because Aunt Gish hadn’t gone to the ladies room to smoke or snort or inject anything during the whole time that she and Pruitt were out.

  “Pruitt, I need to ask you something. When you hit Santa Claus, was it because he did something to you? Did he touch you where he shouldn’t have? Your private parts, I mean.”

  “Between my legs?” asked Pruitt.

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean the way Daddy and Kenny touch me when Miriam’s not around?”

  A delivery van was backing out of the driveway of a Furniture Warehouse and Aunt Gish almost broadsided it, swerving out of the way just at the last second and making the tires of her Plymouth squeal. She pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store at the next corner and shut the motor off.

  “What do you mean, Pruitt? Who’s Kenny? What do he and your Daddy do?”

  Pruitt realized that she’d said too much, but Aunt Gish kept asking questions, so finally Pruitt told her a little bit, that Kenny was one of Daddy’s customers who came around a couple of times a week with lots of cash, but she left some things out because Aunt Gish got very white and started biting on her lower lip and a drop of blood leaked out that she didn’t even seem to feel. Pruitt thought what Aunt Gish probably needed was a very stiff drink, as Miriam would say, but she was scared to suggest it.

  “Santa didn’t hurt me like Daddy and Kenny do,” said Pruitt, deciding it was time to change the subject. “I hit him ’cause he laughed at me when I said I wanted to go to the North Pole.”

  Aunt Gish poked at her weepy eyes with a Kleenex and lit another cigarette, holding it outside the window so the smoke didn’t get in the car.

  “You want to go to the North Pole really bad, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Pruitt. “I have to.”

  Aunt Gish started up the motor again. “It’s still light. We can’t go to the North Pole, but do you want to go to the beach?”

  “What about Daddy and Miriam?”

  “Fuck ’em,” said Aunt Gish.

  Pruitt was impressed that her geeky-looking aunt would say such a thing and thought maybe she’d been wrong to think Aunt Gish was just a nerd and a weirdo. It was an easy mistake, though. Aunt Gish was enormously fat and looked frumpy and old in a candy cane blouse which was meant to look Christmasy, but really just looked dumb, and a brown polyester skirt and ugly brown shoes, and her hair (which was the same color as the shoes except for a thick streak of white at the top) tucked up like a huge mushroom that was sprouting out of the top of her head. She’d seen Miriam snicker when Aunt Gish first waddled in the front door and Daddy had muttered to Miriam that Aunt Gish’s clothes must be “nuthouse chic” and that maybe it was the shock treatments that had caused part of her hair to go white.

  “Yeah, fuck ’em,” whispered Pruitt under her breath, and if Aunt Gish heard, she pretended not to.

  They drove over one of the bridges crossing the Intercoastal Waterway and parked in the lot of a motel across the street from the ocean. Aunt Gish took off her clunky shoes and her hose and Pruitt took off her Keds and they walked down onto the sand, which was still warm even though the sun was now almost down, the light slanting off the waves so fiercely that it looked like someone had tossed a million silver coins onto th
e water.

  Aunt Gish was very quiet and after a while, Pruitt looked up and said, “Are you mad at me?”

  Aunt Gish looked surprised. “Of course not. Why would you think that?”

  “You’re crying.”

  “Because I’m sad,” said Aunt Gish, “and I’m angry. Oh, Pruitt, I’m so angry I could…I’m just very angry, but not at you. You haven’t done anything.”

  They continued up the beach together, passing beneath a pier where people were casting poles off into the silvery water and pelicans swooped and rose against the glitter of the sea. At one point Aunt Gish reached to take Pruitt’s hand and lead her around a jellyfish, but Pruitt pulled her hand away and stepped around the jellyfish herself. She didn’t want to hold hands with Aunt Gish or anyone else. It made her feel trapped, like her hand was being molded into a part of the adult’s body and no longer belonged to her. Of all the scary feelings that Pruitt had known in her short life, the feeling of not belonging to herself was the scariest of all.

  After they’d walked in silence for a while, Pruitt got her nerve up to ask the question she’d been wondering about ever since Daddy first told her that Momma had had an older sister who’d moved to Florida and bought a house trailer in Delray Beach.

  “Daddy says you were locked up in a place for crazy people in New York. Were you really? Or was Daddy just making it up because he doesn’t like you?”

  Aunt Gish laughed and almost reached for Pruitt’s hand. Then she must have remembered that this was something Pruitt didn’t seem to like, and she let her hand fall back by her side.

  “Your Daddy’s right. I had what they used to call a nervous breakdown, but really that just means I cried all the time and couldn’t eat or sleep or work and I didn’t want to live.”

  Pruitt remembered when her mother was alive and acted that way every time she couldn’t get her crack. She’d gone out one night, very late, leaving Pruitt with her father, and she never came back. There’d been a stabbing, said the policeman who came to the door the next day. Something about a drug deal gone bad that Pruitt’s mother got in the middle of.