Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  White splotches at intervals in and out of shadows, and a long vine that connected ground to tree, tree to palm, branch to branch. It twisted back on itself and then continued. Tamara knew what it was even before she stepped closer to look. Thick waxy leaves, elongated. Here, bristlelike hairs on the end of each, instead of the brown ends like those in Jerusha Fistler’s apartment. Huge white blossoms gave off a sickly scent like that of rotting pineapples and lemons and a hint of gardenia. They reminded her of pictures of exotic orchids. But she knew this to be the night-blooming cereus.

  Backra had been stopped by a wall of vines and other vegetation. He stood motionless, staring at it. A vine above his head moved, lowered part of itself as if to get a better look at the sleeping man. As it did so, it unwrapped for at least the five feet Tamara could see. It had an eye that shone back at the moon and a forked tongue that swept the air before it. The snake lowered onto Backra’s naked shoulders, and Tamara lunged forward to pull him away, but she struck something hard. Her feet slid out from under her, and she fell backward, to sprawl on something icy. Her breath was knocked from her lungs, and her senses spun.

  The sudden cold scared her, and her breath returned with a gasp. Places hurt around her body. Bright lights swirled in front of her eyes. She wondered if the snake would get her before she froze to death. The cold air was crisp and dry, the smells now were of earth, metal, and frost. The colored lights swirled away, the white ones fell thick and wet on her skin and soaked into her nightgown.

  Through the snowflakes, Tamara could just make out the huge doors to Iron Mountain’s six-hundred-foot portal looming above her in the darkness. She lay spread-eagled across the tracks in front of them.

  Interim

  Time and Again

  Ralph Weicherding was a reporter for a UPI bureau based in Guatemala City but responsible for all of Central America and most of the Caribbean. He heard the news from a contact while on a stopover in Belmopan, the capital of Belize, and was on the next flight to the coast, certain that the contact must have been mistaken. No one could keep a lid on that kind of story for hours, let alone days. But if there was such a story, Ralph was determined to get to it before his counterpart from Reuters. The lack of real news in this region was enough to make a grown reporter cry.

  He arrived in Belize City only to find all planes at Mayan Airlines either conscripted as search planes or mysteriously grounded. No flights to the cays allowed. Delayed but undaunted, Ralph Weicherding took passage on the daily supply boat to Mayan Cay. The engines ground ominously and the crew had to shout to be heard over them. Coral heads broke the water in places. Stretches of coral banks that extended close to the surface darkened huge patches of sea. Then they’d enter an area that was clear and deep. They were about an hour out of San Tomas when the supply boat jerked and nosed into a wave no one had apparently expected. Ralph had been dozing, and was awakened by the captain’s shouts, followed by a cold drenching as water cascaded over the deck.

  “Aye, what’s your name again?” The captain was from the U.S. and sounded like a New York City taxi driver.

  “Weicherding, Ralph.” He picked himself up out of a puddle.

  “Come over here and see this, Weicherdink.” The captain yanked Ralph around the wheelhouse, where his crew lined the rail. About two hundred feet away was a gleaming white ship.

  Even the gun turrets were white. And the towers topped with complicated radar devices. And a helicopter on her rear deck that several sailors seemed to be working on or preparing for flight. The only colors were the black letters on her side—D06—and the flags she flew. The top one was the red-and-white crisscross on blue of the Union Jack.

  “Bit much for these waters, isn’t she?” Ralph asked.

  “Get Belize City,” the captain ordered through the wheelhouse window. “Only one destroyer that size ever been around here. That’s the Gloucestershire.”

  “I heard she was lost.”

  “Don’t look lost now. In a clear channel. Ought to make it in with no trouble. Where in hell’s she been?” He waved back at a seaman on the destroyer’s deck. “And how’d she get right here so quick?”

  Heavy static from the wheelhouse and a “whumping” sound that flashed across the water and hit them with the impact of a shock wave. Ralph felt sharp pains in his ears and a momentary pressure against his chest that stopped his breath.

  HMS Gloucestershire was gone, more as if she’d never been than as if she’d vanished. No disappearing in the gradual sense. The destroyer just wasn’t. The men on the supply boat stood silent, staring at empty water, holding on as the boat pitched. The static from the wheelhouse silenced too, and then:

  “Belize City, here,” a very English voice. “We read you, Bella Donna. Over.”

  “Tell ’em never mind,” the captain yelled, and slid his back down the exterior wall of the wheelhouse until he hunkered, lips puckered, eyes darting with the rapidity of the thoughts in his head.

  Ralph knew how he felt. Whatever was happening here, it was too unbelievable to make news. If the bureau chief decided to send it out at all, some of the newspapers might use it—put it on their back pages maybe. He doubted any of the TV networks would touch it. Only the kooks would pick up on it.

  Too much hard stuff like terrorism, revolution, hostage-taking, impending war, energy crisis. That’s where the stories were. With all the American tourists that came to the Caribbean, he thought just one good hostage story wouldn’t be asking too much. But this …

  Ralph Weicherding sighed and sat next to where the captain of the Bella Donna hunkered. “I had a dream once,” Ralph said, “where the Reverend Jim Jones rose from the dead and started a whole new suicide colony right here in Belize. Down between Placentia Point and Monkey River Town. My territory.”

  “Talked to a ‘Naivee’ over a beer and darts couple o’ weeks ago in Mingo’s Bar,” the captain answered. “Said the British put something as big as the Gloucestershire down here to show Cuba their support for the U.S. in the Caribbean. Kind of a deal with Washington. Don’t know if he knew what he was talking about. She ain’t been here hardly a month.”

  “Why’d you radio Belize City and not just hail the Gloucestershire?”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t know what to say to something that big … and clean. One good whiff of this garbage scow and she’d probably blow us out of the water. Keep the world clean for Englishmen or something. You say you’re a reporter?”

  “Yeah. But this is one story I don’t know how I’m going to file.”

  “See those tanks over there?” The captain gestured toward a row of crates containing scuba tanks. “Them’s for the Mayapan Hotel. Classiest place in San Tomas. Lost most of its rental gear in an accident out here somewheres. Same day as that destroyer turned up missing. One of the guides and a bunch of divers didn’t come back.”

  “I was on my way to Mayan Cay to interview some of the survivors.”

  “Most of ’em have been sent back to the States and some of ’em to hospitals. Now, the stories they had to tell before they left, about how this accident happened, are something else. Something you ain’t going to believe, and neither am I. We’d even be embarrassed to repeat ’em. Now, you heard any news reports about them stories?”

  “Lid’s been put on the whole thing.”

  “Nothing to keep those divers from talking when they get home. And most of ’em are home.”

  “They can talk all they want to, but if nobody listens, they—”

  “Exactly.” The captain of the Bella Donna began to whistle significantly. He walked past the excited crewmen, who were still discussing the freakish phenomenon, and nonchalantly peed over the side into the clear blue waters of the Caribbean Sea.

  Ralph headed up the beach for the Mayapan, his clothes stiff and scratchy from his salt-water bath on the Bella Donna.

  A tall bronzed man in swim trunks crept among toppled headstones and tumbled concrete coffins. Three other men stood poised on the far side of
the cemetery, spread out at even distances as if to catch whatever the first man flushed.

  “I say, you don’t plan to cut her up again, do you?” said the man with a British accent and a dead pipe.

  “There she is, Doc. To your right.” This was the balding man in the middle, who had a glass in his hand. An angry scar ran from his chin down his neck and under his shirt. “Watch out, Bodecker, here she comes.”

  Ralph Weicherding was beginning to wonder if he should pull a camera out of his gear bag when the man called Bodecker, who was on the end closest to the water, gave a yell like an attacking Comanche and leaped into the air.

  “I got her. She’s mine!” Beer spewed from the bottle in his hand as he landed on his chest and stomach in the sand and a little tan dog dodged the fingertips of his other hand. One of those village mongrels Ralph saw all over Latin America, this one was plumper than most. It had its ears laid back and wore a look of hysterical terror. Whoever said animal faces were incapable of expression had never seen one so small being chased by four big drunks.

  Because of heat and hunger, these dogs were usually sluggish, but this one scampered, dashed, dodged, and swerved like a seasoned football player. Suddenly it broke and headed straight for Ralph, the bronzed guy in the swim trunks right behind. Ralph dropped his bags, and before the panicked animal realized its mistake, he had it by a front leg, and before it could bite him, its pursuer had a hand ringing its muzzle.

  “Orderlies!” the pursuer yelled to the others and to Ralph. “Thanks.”

  There were scabs and scars on his arms and chest, yellowing bruises. It took the two of them to hold the struggling dog until the others got there. They released it to the three helpers, and it still almost got away.

  “What’d you do, Doc, grease her?”

  “God damn, Doc, you’re gonna pick every last flea off me.”

  “You did promise, Mr. Alexander, to discuss the matter I mentioned if I helped you catch this … this creature.”

  Mr. Alexander swept them all a formal bow, so low Ralph could see abrasions on his back too. When he came up, he held a pair of tiny scissors like the ones Ralph carried in his suitcase to cut thread if he had to sew on a button. Alexander held them high, and they returned the sun’s rays. His smile was too wide and rather abandoned.

  “Hey, you’re not really going to cut that dog?” Ralph asked. “That’s kind of … sick, isn’t it?”

  “Belly up, and hold her still,” Alexander ordered his orderlies, and snipped and tugged out tiny threads in the lower end of the dog’s stomach.

  Bodecker grinned at Ralph and winked. “Stitches. She’s the Doc’s patient, you know.”

  They flipped the animal over, and she leaped from their grasp before they could set her down. She was away across the beach like a tan streak.

  “If you’re smart, you’ll hide in the jungle for a coupla years,” the balding man yelled after her. “This man’s crazy.”

  The crazy man blew on the end of the tiny scissors. He looked very smug.

  “You, Doc, are basically a nurturer,” Bodecker said with that serious authority that can be brought off only by the inebriated. “You just think you’re a cold asshole.”

  III

  Something in the Air

  24

  Dixie Grosswyler had become more aware of her dreams since she’d come to Mayan Cay, but had only lately begun to find them disturbing, interfering with her rest, becoming almost more real than her daytime world.

  She’d been married and divorced twice before she was thirty. The last husband had moved her down here so they could manage the Mayapan. Two years later he took off with a lovely guest and divorced Dixie by mail. She’d stayed on, managing the hotel for a Florida-based company, determined to make enough money to return to Texas and live in a state of financial independence.

  Dixie would play around with men, but never again would she trust one. She earned an annual salary plus a commission for every increment of profit. The Mayapan ran full for about four months—when it was cold and nasty in the States. The occupancy rate was hit-and-miss the rest of the year. Her nest egg wasn’t keeping up with inflation.

  She dreamed now of walking along a scarred hillside she’d dreamt of before, and falling into a hole like Alice descending to Wonderland. Instead of finding a fantastical new world, she’d found a labyrinth of dark tunnels, and the harder she looked for a way out, the more panicky she became, and grew claustrophobic to the point of fearing she’d suffocate.

  Dixie woke, surprised to find her bed unrumpled after the agony of her struggles and herself unable to stay in the enclosure even of familiar walls with the memory of them. She slipped on sandals and a shapeless muumuu and hurried through the office and out to the veranda. She sucked in night air and shivered with reaction rather than chill. Spits of adrenaline still set fire to her nerve endings.

  Folding her arms against her middle, she paced the veranda from end to end, her sandals crunching coral sand that had encroached on black-and-white squares of paving tile. Lizards scuttled behind potted plants. The moon wasn’t half-full and sat low in the sky. Night shadow darkened all but a faintly luminous sea.

  Dixie leaned against a supporting post and hugged herself tighter. She had to get more sleep. Every night this happened it made her increasingly nervous and depressed. And that was bad for business.

  The form of an obviously naked man glided along the water’s edge, outlined by the subtle light of the water. Dixie blinked. Only two men of that height on the island, Thad Alexander and Roudan Perdomo. This man was white.

  My God, what’s he up to now? Grabbing a beach towel left on a lounge chair, Dixie rushed toward the dock. He’d reached the end of it and stood looking out over the water. Then he turned sideways, raised his arms, and spoke silently to the air, as if rehearsing for a play and pretending a fellow actor was at hand.

  “Thad? Who are you talking to? And what are you doing out stark naked?” She wrapped the towel around him and tucked it in at the waist. “Not all my guests can handle this kind of thing, fella, and none of the locals. Thad?”

  He just stared into space as if there was someone there. His eyes twitched like a dog’s would when dreaming. But Thad’s eyes were open.

  “Hey, zombie, this is old Dixie talking. Where are you? Jesus, you’re not asleep?” She shook his arm, and he jerked. His skin felt hot.

  “What are you doing in my dream?” His voice was thick with sleep.

  “Dream? Everybody in this place dreams. At least the rest of us don’t go around without clothes on.”

  Dreams were more often a topic of conversation on Mayan Cay than anywhere else she’d lived. She did remember hearing of Stefano catching Thad’s dad out sleepwalking, and she told him of it, guiding him down the dock. He was wobbly, and she wondered if it had been a mistake to wake him so suddenly. They talked of dreams as they walked along the beach, and he began to shiver. His skin felt chilled now under her hand.

  “Isn’t it funny you weren’t cold till you woke up?” She put an arm around him. “I don’t remember so much talk of dreaming when I first came to Mayan Cay. Maybe I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t have so many myself.”

  “Hey, My Lady of the Rum Belly, how were the pickin’s tonight?”

  The little bitch Thad had performed drunken surgery on approached along the beach but stopped at his voice. It gave a startled yip and ran off.

  “That’s gratitude. After all you’ve done.” Dixie realized she was jealous of the dog.

  “Far as she’s concerned, all I’ve done is cause her pain.”

  “You really like animals, huh? I mean, besides the fact they provide you with a living?”

  “That animal is a fellow creature who has gotten the short end of the stick in this world.”

  “You know, you were almost sane when you came to this island?” They’d reached the door of Edward P. Alexander III’s house. Dixie snuggled closer to his son. “Offer another fellow creature a drin
k?”

  It was too dark to see his expression, but his hesitation revealed they both knew what she was asking for. He relaxed against her, and a light line opened in his face as he smiled. “Sure, why not?”

  Later, Dixie wondered who he was pretending she was as their hands explored the other’s body and she felt the rough and healing places from his day of horror on the Metnál. Perhaps he thought of the ex-Mrs. Thad Alexander.

  No matter. Dixie knew he’d be a part of her fantasy life for a long time, even if he never touched her again.

  25

  With the sutures removed from his patient, Thad consented to talk to Geoffrey Hindsly. He told him of the Ambergris and his father’s crazy notions about ancient machinery running amok. He didn’t expect Hindsly to believe any of it.

  The next day he went out with Eliseo, Don Bodecker, and the Englishman to set a marker buoy where the “thing” had risen above the water. Harry refused to go. No one bothered Martha with the plan. All they had to do was to locate the submarine and they’d know they were in the right place. The U.S. Navy would fly in a group of specialists—oceanographers—to investigate the waters marked by the buoy.

  Don Bodecker was grim. And sober for the first time Thad could remember since what they all referred to now as the “accident.” Their wet suits ruined, both he and Thad wore T-shirts and blue jeans.

  “This really isn’t necessary.” But Hindsly gazed curiously over the side of the dive boat, a smaller version of the one in the accident. “The experts will be here shortly and surely can discover more than you.”

  He’d impressed them with the credentials of the luminaries about to descend on the Metnál. A geologist would take samples of any volcanic rock found in the area. A chemical oceanographer would check for unusual chemical properties or imbalances in the water—acidity perhaps—or the ozone content. An ichthyologist and biologist would check out the fish, live coral, and plant life. Every conceivable aspect of the mystery would be probed by those with the knowledge to solve it.