The Lost Island

by Douglas Preston

  47

  GIDEON AWOKE. The rising sun streamed into the little cave on the cliff face. He could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling about. Amy was still sleeping. She looked flushed.

  He sat up and clutched at his brow. His head was pounding, and there was a terrible taste in his mouth. He drank from one of the canteens and took stock. They had two liters of water, the last two granola bars, and two pieces of pemmican-like food, wrapped in banana leaves, given to them by the Indians. The medical kit still had plenty of bandages, antibiotics, and painkillers.

  He crept to the edge and peered over. They were perhaps two hundred feet above the sea. But from the vantage point of the cave it was impossible to see upward. From the silhouette he had seen of the island the night before, it was at least a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred feet high.

  When he turned, Amy had awoken. He put a hand on her forehead. It was warm.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Not bad,” she said.

  Gideon didn’t believe her. He gave her the canteen, and she drank deeply.

  “Let me take a look at your wound.”

  She lay back. He unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it aside. The bandages were already dark with fluid. She winced a little as he removed them. Gideon tried to hide his fright and concern. The wound was still closed and he didn’t dare remove the surgical tape, but he applied more Betadine and some topical antibiotic ointment and put on a fresh dressing.

  “Thanks.”

  “Amy, you got that saving my life. How can I thank you?”

  She just shook her head.

  “How did you know to rescue me?”

  She took a deep breath. “iPhone took me down the beach to a cave. But it was iPhone’s behavior that tipped me off. He seemed to get more and more nervous. When it started to get dark, I tried to question him and he was evasive. That’s when I began to fear something bad was going to happen to you. I confronted him, and while he denied it, he really started to sweat. So I pulled my gun out of the bag and tied him up. And then I went looking for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  She said, “Did you see that huge skull?”

  Gideon stared at her. “You mean, you saw it, too?”

  “Damn right I did. It took me a moment to realize—that it was the skull of a Cyclops.”

  “And I thought it was just a hallucination.”

  “Hic sunt gigantes. ‘Here there be giants.’ The map didn’t lie—there were Cyclopes living here once. They were going to sacrifice you to the Cyclops god.”

  “I was so zonked, I was ready to have my throat cut without protest…I feel like such a fool.”

  “You were drugged.”

  “They gave me a black root to consume. That’s got to be the true lotus. It was incredibly powerful, made me forget everything, made me feel so wonderful I never wanted it to end—just like what happened to Odysseus’s men.”

  “So what was the pod they gave us?”

  “A fake lotus, a ceremonial substitute? Or maybe the aboveground part of the plant.”

  Amy licked her dry lips. “There’s something else—something I should have realized earlier…You know this Phorkys Map we’ve been following? Phorkys was a minor Greek god of the sea, a son of Poseidon. Just as Polyphemus was supposed to be the son of Poseidon. In other words, Phorkys was the brother of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. If that doesn’t connect Phorkys to Odysseus and the Cyclopes, I don’t know what does…”

  She was rambling, sweating, her forehead beaded. Gideon felt it again. “You’re running a temperature.”

  “I know. As soon as possible—before I get any sicker—we need to finish this climb. Because I am getting sicker.”

  “You can’t climb in your condition.”

  “I can do it now. In another six, twelve hours, maybe not. I’m coming down with a fever. It’s getting worse. We can’t stay here. There’s almost no food or water. We’ve got to shoot for the top right now. Otherwise we’ll die here.”

  She struggled to sit up, grabbed her drysack.

  “This is crazy,” Gideon protested.

  “Crazy, yes. Our only option, yes. Just follow my lead. We’ll climb fast and free.”

  Gideon looked at her. This was one determined woman. Nothing was going to change her mind. And as he mulled over the problem, he realized she was probably right. They had no other choice.

  In silence, they ate the last of the granola bars and drank some more water. And then Amy started climbing up the rock above the cave.

  The pitch was terrifying, an almost vertical face of volcanic rock, but with plenty of cracks and bubbles that made for good hand- and footholds. Gideon followed below her, watching where she put her feet and hands and trying to follow suit. He asked a few times how she felt until she told him to shut up. She was doing well, it seemed to him: climbing steadily, silently. The birds cried, the surf thundered below, the wind swept over them. And still they climbed. As they rose, the difficulty varied, depending on the verticality, but the dizzying space below became only more terrifying. Five hundred feet, he judged; six hundred, eight. He tried not to look down, but it was necessary in finding footholds. They couldn’t see up; there was no way of knowing how much farther it was to the top. Gideon’s arms ached and he wondered how Amy could do it. He could see a dark stain spreading on her side, staining her shirt. The wound had opened again and was bleeding.

  She began to slow down, fumbling longer for hand- and footholds.

  The clouds started rolling in, and there came a rumble of thunder. It began to rain. Several times Amy slipped, rocks tumbling as she hung by both hands for a moment while her toes sought a purchase. The rain came down harder and began streaming down the sides of the cliff, adding a slipperiness to the climb, carrying water and debris pouring over them, getting in their faces and eyes every time they tried to look up.

  Amy slowed further. Even in the easy stretches she began to struggle, and at times she stopped and swayed. There was nothing Gideon could do. He was deeply frightened for her—but she was right: they had to keep going.

  They finally came to a large, horizontal crack, which Amy crawled into and immediately collapsed. Gideon followed. They were soaking wet and water was now pouring down the cliff face in miniature waterfalls, the wind lashing the rocks.

  Gideon saw Amy’s face for the first time in hours. She looked awful—pale as ivory, her lips blue, her eyes clouded and jittery.

  “Rest,” she muttered. “Rest. And then more climbing. Must be…must be close to the top.”

  It was clear to Gideon that Amy wasn’t going anywhere. He said nothing but reached out to feel her forehead.

  She drew away. “I’m fine!” She shivered again. “Rest. Then climb.”

  Gideon laid a hand on her forehead anyway. She was so hot it frightened him. He rummaged in the drysack and removed the medical kit, took out some ibuprofen and offered them to Amy.

  She took them.

  Next he brought out the bottle of amoxicillin. There was another antibiotic in the kit, labeled azithromycin. Should he give her both? Or would that have an adverse effect? Was the wound getting infected? Or was the fever some kind of bodily response to the injury? God, he wished to hell he knew more about medicine.

  He gave her both. She took them with trembling hands and then seemed to lapse into a kind of half sleep.

  What a place to be, Gideon thought: jammed into a little crack barely three feet deep on an exposed cliff face maybe twelve hundred feet above the ocean, unable to move, lashed by rain and wind, with a companion who was sick and growing sicker. The sky darkened further and a peal of thunder roared above them. More rain lashed down, developing into a massive downpour. It was like sitting behind a waterfall. Gideon fished out the canteens from the drysacks and filled them with the dirty water now streaming down the sides of the cliff. Amy began to shiver uncontrollably and he took off his shirt and forced her to put it on, despite her feeble protests.

  She was going downhil
l. He took out the sat phone. There was very little battery left. Shielding it from the rainstorm with his body, he turned it on. The screen came on, the SEARCHING FOR SATELLITES legend appearing.

  The searching went on and on. They were clearly in a bad position, jammed into the cliff. He tried to hold it out, chancing the soaking, but the searching didn’t stop. The battery symbol began to blink red, fast. The display dropped from two percent remaining to one percent. And still the phone couldn’t locate satellites.

  He quickly shut off the phone. He would have to make the call from the top.

  “What…are you doing?”

  He squeezed her hand and tried to smile. “Trying to call Glinn. No luck—we’re too close to the cliff.”

  Ten minutes went by in silence as the rain poured.

  “I’m frightened,” she whispered.

  This admission scared him more than almost anything else.

  Her face was small, her eyes burning and moving restlessly about, her lips white and trembling. Her reserve of determination, the stoical mask of self-assurance that never left her, had crumbled away. She looked terrified—as well she might. There was no way she could keep climbing in her condition—she was stuck in this horrible little crack of rock. They were in a lethal situation. He needed to think, try to work out the options.

  “What do we do?” she asked, almost plaintively.

  Gently, Gideon spoke to her. “You rest—let me worry about it.”

  There was silence for several minutes. She squeezed his hand. “Talk to me. Please.”

  “It’s going to be okay, Amy.” He felt lame saying it. He was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be okay.

  “My name isn’t Amy. It’s Amiko. Stop calling me Amy.”

  “Of course. Amiko.”

  She let out a long, shuddering sigh, her eyes closing, opening, as if in slow motion, her hand clutching his like a frightened girl. “My father was Japanese. My mother, Swiss German. I was…born in Japan.”

  “You don’t have to tell me all this, not now—”

  “I have to talk,” she said. “I need to talk. I want you to know some things. If I die.”

  “All right.”

  “My father had three sons from a previous marriage. All pure Japanese. He was very traditional, very old-fashioned. My mother was…a cold, cold woman. When I came along, I just wasn’t what my father was looking for in a daughter, I guess. I tried, I tried so hard to earn his respect and love. I did it all. But no matter how many karate courses I took, or ikebana, or music lessons, no matter how many A’s I got in math, no matter how many Vivaldi concerti I played on the violin…It wasn’t enough. I was a girl. And I wasn’t Japanese. Not in his eyes.”

  She paused, breathed hard.

  “When I was twelve, my father was transferred to…a job in America. My older half brothers, all successful with their own careers, stayed in Japan.” She paused again. “I always felt out of place in Japan. Now, in the US, I felt even more out of place. And my father…he didn’t understand America. He was a fish out of water. Things went downhill. We never seemed to have any money, although my father seemed to have a good job. My mother left—just walked out—I never knew why. And then, one day, I came home from school to find my father dead. He…he’d killed himself.”

  “Amiko, how awful. I’m so sorry.”

  “And then it came out. He’d been laid off eighteen months before. To save face, he continued to leave the house dressed in a suit every morning, not returning until the evening, spending his days in libraries, employment offices, and finally in parks and other public spaces. That was it for me. I was seventeen. I think maybe I wanted to die, too. I just left everything behind. Worked my way through college, by myself…That’s when I tried acting. I was good, but that was no way to make a living…Went to graduate school. That’s when Glinn found me. I did a few black-bag jobs for him, researching treasure maps with my knowledge of ancient languages, and then…following up on what I learned. And here I am.”

  She closed her eyes, opened them again.

  “And your mother?”

  “Card on my birthday…Gift certificate for Christmas…Never saw her again.”

  Gideon felt terrible for her. And all this time he’d been feeling sorry for himself, thinking he’d had a rough childhood. No wonder she’d been forced to overcompensate, show a thick veneer to the world.

  “Water…I need water.”

  Gideon put the canteen to her lips, and she drank. He felt her forehead. It was burning hot.

  And now it was growing dark. Night was coming on. The rain poured, thunder rolled across the waters, illuminated by flashes of lightning. The roar of the sea filtered up from far below, the cliffs shuddering even here with their great power as they struck the rocks.

  “Talk,” Amiko whispered. “Please.”

  Gideon hesitated for a minute. “I’ve got a terminal condition.”

  Her reddish eyes swiveled toward him. “What?”

  “It’s called an AVM. This big knot of veins and arteries in my brain.”

  “Can…can it be operated on?”

  “No. Inoperable. Incurable.”

  “How long until…?” Her voice trailed off.

  “Ten months, give or take.”

  He didn’t know, exactly, why he was telling her this. It wasn’t as if the mood needed to be any bleaker. Somehow, it was all that was coming into his head.

  “Oh, Gideon,” Amiko murmured.

  “It’s okay. I’m reconciled to it.” Maybe, in some strange way, it would make her feel better—knowing she wasn’t the only one of them bearing a secret burden.

  “So that’s why you wanted to be the first to try the lotus,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  They fell silent for a moment.

  “Don’t let me sleep,” Amiko pleaded.

  But she sank into a fitful sleep anyway, shivering and moaning, her head tossing back and forth. Gideon looked out over the darkening ocean, a feeling of despair washing over him.

  48

  AS THE EARTH darkened into night, the rain lessened into a fitful drizzle. Amiko’s fever remained high. Gideon hoped that when she woke up, she’d be stronger, but as the night wore on and her fever only got worse, he realized this wasn’t going to happen.

  Only one possible solution presented itself: he would have to finish the climb solo, rig a line, and then come back for her and try to haul her up somehow. He could call Glinn from the top, but a rescue would take a few days at least and by then, jammed in this crack, exposed to the elements, she’d be dead. He had to get her to the top, into some kind of shelter, with a fire.

  He went through both drysacks and combined the ropes. By measuring them out, he figured there was about a hundred feet. It wasn’t climbing rope, but it was sturdy marine nylon and it seemed like it would hold the weight of a human.

  He racked his brains, trying to figure out just how this would work. Amiko was now beyond doing much for herself. He couldn’t just drag her up the rough rock. He had to make a sling of some kind, like a seat, and pull her up that way. He would have to climb to the top, estimate how far it was, fashion a sling, set up a top-rope, climb back down and put her in it. Climb up, haul her up.

  Emptying one of the drysacks, he packed it with the rope and essentials and strapped on one of the headlamps. The battery was good, the light bright. Amiko was still sleeping. He decided to let her sleep, wake her up on his return. He quickly scribbled a note, I’ll be back, and tucked it in the crook of her arm.

  He took a deep breath. He hoped the note was true—that he would be back.

  Loaded down with the single drysack, he edged out of the crack and looked up. In the darkness and rain the headlamp could only illuminate about ten feet, but he picked what looked like the easiest route, mentally registering the hand- and footholds and pre-visualizing the climb. Then, with another deep breath, he pushed his way out onto the cliff face.

  In the dark and the rain, without Amiko, it
was more terrifying than ever. The wind roared up from below, carrying with it the sound of the surf. Confused raindrops lashed about in the beam of his headlamp. The worst was not knowing how far he had to go—one hundred feet? A thousand?

  The rock was crumbly, friable, and wet. He lost his footing at one point and ended up dangling in space, holding on by his hands alone. He got a foothold back just as one of the handholds gave way, a bunch of rocks peeling off from the cliff, and he swung by a hand and foot for a moment as the rubble plunged down. He recovered his grip—and then, distantly, heard the clatter of the falling rocks as they struck far below. The near-fall left him utterly paralyzed with fear, clinging to the cliff. He couldn’t move. His heart was galloping, he was hyperventilating, and his head seemed ready to explode in the storm of terror.

  Ride it out. Get yourself under control.

  Slowly, he came back to himself. Staying put was not an option. He had to go up. Up, up, up. He repeated it with each breath. That was the only way he and Amiko would survive. But the fear was still with him, like a monkey on his back now. And he was going to have to come back down, and go up again.

  Don’t think about that now.

  He resumed climbing. Shift a hand. Then a foot. Transfer weight. Detach the other foot. Find a new foothold. Move the other hand. Begin again. It was like a slow mantra.

  The rock was becoming increasingly rotten. Another foothold gave way as he transferred his weight and he dangled again, his arm muscles screaming with the effort before he found a new purchase. This could not go on much longer. And then—just when it seemed he could go no farther—he came through a notch in the lava and saw just ahead a mass of dripping vegetation. He pulled himself up, seized a tree trunk, and scrambled into the welcoming cocoon of the forest, throwing himself down on the forest floor—blessedly, wonderfully, safely flat.

  He lay there for a while, trying not to think about what he had to do. First, the good news: that last climb had been no more than a hundred and fifty feet. If he could somehow lengthen his rope with vines, he could haul up Amiko. And the jungle around him looked rich with hanging vines and creepers.