by Ann Halam
A little more groping, and we were in a tall, narrow cave, looking out over a hidden valley. We’d decided long ago that our island (if it was an island) must be volcanic, and the cliff at the back of our bay was probably the side of an extinct volcano cone. This valley must be inside the crater. That was astonishing enough, but there were buildings below us. Modern, concrete buildings, not grass huts.
“Wow!” breathed Miranda. “Civilization!”
She kept on staring, mesmerized, telling me the details that I couldn’t make out. Roads, fields, a big fence, a helicopter pad, something that looked like a football stadium, with floodlights! I looked around the entrance of the cave, hoping for more signs of Arnie. Something glinted, peeping out from a mass of creepers. I jumped, because I was afraid it was a snake. But it wasn’t. It was . . . I got hold of it, hardly able to believe my eyes. It was the machete.
“Miranda!” I gasped.
I stood there, holding Arnie’s machete. My heart was beating like a drum. Arnie had come through here, nearly thirty days ago, dropped his machete, gone down to those buildings. But why hadn’t he come back for us? What had happened to him?
“Hey! Miranda!”
She’d gone. For a moment I thought she’d vanished, like Arnie. Then I heard her calling, “Semi! Come down here, I’ve found a road!” I followed her through the lush undergrowth, clutching Arnie’s machete, and soon we were both standing on a graded stony Jeep track, with our mouths open and eyes popping in amazement.
“We’re saved! We’re saved!” yelled Miranda. We grabbed each other, jumping up and down and shrieking. Then we heard the rumbling of an engine. A big Jeep was coming up the track. It stopped. About a dozen men in pale-colored uniforms jumped out.
I stared at them, stunned. Miranda yelled, “Hurrah!” or something.
The men were big and brown-skinned; they had round curly heads. Their faces were blurred blanks to me. They talked to each other in a language I didn’t understand, and I began to feel that something might be wrong. They didn’t sound friendly. It flashed into my mind that maybe they were soldiers. Maybe we’d stumbled on something secret, like a military radar station. But surely they couldn’t blame us.
We couldn’t help being castaways.
“Semirah! Run!” yelled Miranda.
The men had grabbed her. They shouted at me, and pointed at the machete. “Oh, this?” I said. “Oh, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s not mine.” I threw it aside. Two of the men jumped at me, and I started to struggle. One of them hit me on my arm. It felt like a punch, but it must have been an injection of some kind. Suddenly I was looking up at the sky. My bad knee hurt where it was twisted under me, and then everything went black.
chapter five
I woke up in a bed. It felt very strange, after sleeping on palm fronds on the sand for so long. I wasn’t comfortable. I felt lost and uneasy, as if I wasn’t attached to the earth anymore. I lay looking at the tight white sheets, trying to remember how I’d got there. I was still dressed—and that puzzled me, because I seemed to be in some kind of hospital. I turned over and saw that Miranda was beside me in another bed. The room we were in was long and bright, with white painted walls. Tropical sunlight streamed in through the windows. Though we were lying next to each other, she was out of reach. There were bars between us, floor to ceiling.
There were two rows of five beds, exactly like a hospital ward. The other beds were empty. Each one of them was caged in bars. Miranda turned over, and looked at me.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. I didn’t last much longer than you did. I tried being quiet and obedient, but they knocked me out anyway. . . . You should have run for it when you had the chance, Semi.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Either they’d have caught me, or I’d have spent the rest of my short lonely life back on the beach, eating sand and playing with the sharks. No thanks.”
We laughed, and sat up. We were both still wearing our ragged “best clothes,” still dirty and sweaty and salt-crusted. No one had brought us any food or water. There was nothing in our cages besides the beds, no bedside cabinets, not even a light switch.
“How did we get there? Did you see anything on the way?”
“No,” said Miranda. “I was knocked out by the cave, the same as you. Those men grabbed me, they grabbed you, they put us in the Jeep and I woke up here just now. I don’t remember anything else.” She got out of bed and looked at the bars. The door to her cage was locked, not with a padlock but with a swipe card box that had a keypad of buttons. “Well, we’re still prisoners, but I don’t think we’re in paradise anymore.”
“That’s an improvement, anyway,” I said, as bravely as I could. “I was sick of paradise.”
I got out of bed too. My door was locked, the same way. We stood looking at each other, two dirty sunburned skeletons: with the bars between us.
“Maybe it is a prison,” said Miranda. “An Ecuadorian high security prison, on a lonely island with no other inhabitants. That would make sense. This could be the prison hospital. I suppose they put us in here because they didn’t know what else to do with us.”
“But they’ll let us go? Surely they’ll let us go?”
“Of course they will. Don’t be daft. Can you speak Spanish?”
“No. I can speak a bit of French; and I can speak Jamaican, I mean, you know, Jamaican-English, if that would help. That’s all.”
“I only speak French and a bit of German. I think they’re speaking Spanish.”
“But someone will understand English. Won’t they?” I pleaded.
“Bound to. People speak English everywhere. We’ll be on our way home soon.”
We were both frightened. There was something weird about all this. But Miranda was much better at keeping it down than I was. We heard footsteps approaching the door of the ward. We jumped back into bed and lay there. It seemed the wise thing to do.
The man who came into the room looked like a doctor. He was wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard of notes. He had white skin, the kind that never turns color in the sun, but just keeps on going red and peeling. He had wire-rimmed glasses and yellowish hair that was going thin on top.
“Good,” he said, standing outside our cages, “you’re awake.”
It should have been a big relief to hear him speak English. But it wasn’t. Maybe it was the way he looked at us—though I couldn’t see his expression clearly. Maybe it was the tone of his voice. He didn’t sound as if he was talking to two half-starved, ragged teenage girls who had turned up somewhere they shouldn’t be. He sounded . . . extremely different from that. He sounded cold, angry and also (which was very weird) afraid. When you can’t see people’s expressions too well, you pay a lot of attention to their voices.
“Where are we?” said Miranda. “What is this place? Is this a prison?”
He gave a short laugh. “No. The island is private property. You were caught trespassing.”
“But we couldn’t help it! We were shipwrecked, I mean plane-wrecked. Look, we’re sorry we were trespassing, but we’ve been stranded for over a month. We have to get in touch—”
“No need to worry about that at the moment. Come along.”
“We’re very hungry,” said Miranda, “and thirsty. And please can we use a bathroom?”
He unlocked our cages. “This way,” he said, shepherding us ahead of him out the door, “we want to give you a medical check.”
There were two of the big brown-skinned men in uniform, in the corridor. We went along with them willingly, we didn’t want to be knocked out again. Miranda kept on asking questions, but neither the men in uniform nor the doctor took any notice. We were taken to a room like a doctor’s surgery; the men in uniform stayed outside.
We were allowed to use a bathroom then. We went in together. Neither of us felt like staying outside alone with the strange doctor. It was an ordinary small bathroom, with a toilet and basin and a shower and a mirror. I
felt like a visitor from the Stone Age, sitting up on the gleaming white porcelain throne, and I was so nervous I couldn’t make myself pee. We stared at ourselves in the mirror over the basin.
“What a sight,” muttered Miranda. “Look at our nails! Look at our hair.”
“We look like very thin Flintstones.”
“We look like mad fakirs in India.”
If there’d been a window, I think we might have tried to wriggle through it. But that would have been stupid. “We’d better go out,” I said, “before they come in after us.”
“We’re on our way home,” said Miranda, firmly. “Soon. For certain.” We squeezed hands and returned to face our mysterious, scary rescuers.
Another of the big men had come into the surgery, this one dressed in a white coat like the doctor. He seemed to be a nurse. My feelings kept going up and down, bouncing like a yo-yo. When the doctor said “medical check,” I thought everything was going to be all right. That sounded like a normal thing to do with two castaways. But when the medical check was happening, it didn’t feel right. We were weighed, and our eyes looked at and our throats looked at, our reflexes checked. Our body fat (such as it was!) was measured with calipers. The doctor-man looked at my knee; at our feet. The nurse-man took blood samples, at which point I had to sit down very quickly. I suppose I was so pared down I didn’t have a milliliter of blood to spare.
Then came the really strange part. We had to do a sort of IQ test, on a printed sheet.
“What’s this?” said Miranda. “What on earth’s going on?”
“Please do as you’re told.”
“Look, we’re not applying for jobs here. We were shipwrecked, our plane crashed. We want to go home.”
“You’ll understand why we need this information, later. Please fill in the questionnaire.”
So we answered the questions, which were general knowledge and things like do you sleep well, do you make friends easily, do you think you react well in emergencies.
“Maybe it’s to see if being plane-wrecked made us go crazy,” whispered Miranda.
We had to swallow hysterical giggles.
The doctor and his assistant were wearing plastic gloves, so they didn’t actually touch us. They never looked us in the eye except when they had to; and hardly spoke to us. There’d have been more contact between a vet and a couple of sick rabbits. And they were afraid. I knew that, with every instinct. This gave me an extremely creepy feeling.
“You’re both in remarkably good shape,” said the doctor at last. “Considering that you’ve been living on the beach, entirely on your own resources, for well over a month, you’re in very good shape indeed. A recalcitrant infection in that left knee, but it’s not going to be a problem.”
“You knew we were there?” said Miranda.
We stared at him, completely astonished.
“Oh, yes,” said the doctor, shrugging, “of course we did.”
So then we knew. It was like waking up in the dark on the flight to Quito, and seeing the FASTEN SEAT BELT signs, and hearing shouting in the cockpit. This is it.
We’re in trouble.
But what kind of trouble could we possibly be in?
Miranda went on staring at him. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Skinner,” he said, biting his lip. “You can call me Dr. Skinner. Wait here.”
He went away. The big nurse, who was wearing one of those pale uniforms under his white coat, stood watching us, with folded arms. We didn’t like to speak to each other. I had the same weird tingling in my throat and stomach that I remembered from the night of the plane crash.
After a short while, Dr. Skinner came back. “Dr. Franklin will see you now.”
“Who’s Dr. Franklin?” asked Miranda.
“The owner of the island. My boss. Come along.”
“Someone owns this whole island?”
“As I told you. This is private property.”
“He must be very rich. Is he famous? Is he English like you?”
He laughed again, short and contemptuous. “So many questions” was his only answer. Our guards (they seemed like guards) followed us to the end of the corridor, where some automatic doors opened, and we were outdoors, in a big courtyard. The first thing I noticed was that it smelled like a zoo. Then I realized it was a zoo. There were long rows of cages, and several houses for bigger animals, with a sleeping block in the back and a fenced run out at the front. In the distance I could see a paddock with blurred brown shapes in it. Horses or maybe deer. The courtyard was well cared for, the pavement was clean, there were trees and flowering plants, but the smell of captive animals was very strong. I saw a couple of the pale-uniformed men moving around; they seemed to be tending the greenery. They took no notice of us.
All these cages made me think of the bars in the prison ward.
Dr. Skinner didn’t hurry us. He let us look. The first place we passed was a small corral where a few animals like little fat deer, with blunt muzzles and coarse gingery fur, were standing around doing nothing. “Capybara,” said Dr. Skinner. “Native of Argentina, related to the guinea pig. Very stupid.” One of the capybaras was sitting alone, next to the fence, in a strangely human posture. As we approached, it got to its feet and turned to look at us. It had the same blunt muzzle as the others. But its lips were puffy and red, which looked very odd. It made a miserable slobbery sound and shuffled off toward the sleeping house, moving slowly and awkwardly. Miranda caught her breath. Its back legs, though they were covered in ginger fur, looked as if they’d been put on the wrong way around. They were dumpy, dwarfish human legs—with human feet.
We stared at Dr. Skinner. He smiled unpleasantly and moved on.
The next enclosure smelled of pigs. There was a huge dark-colored bristly sow in there, lying on her side. She looked normal. Her stripy piglets, who were scrabbling around fighting to get at her teats, were like the piglet I had seen in the wood. They had human hands. The way they squealed and chattered at each other, in high-pitched almost childish voices, made me feel sick.
“Take your time,” said Dr. Skinner. “Why not? Take a good look at all our curiosities. You may learn something.”
There was a dark, covered passageway, night-lit, where a colony of things like bats stared at us from behind glass. They had leathery wings and pointed, animal faces, but they were hanging the wrong way up (for bats). Their naked, pale little human legs dangled down, kicking aimlessly at the air.
There was an aquarium, where something that looked like a monkey head with octopus tentacles crawled around and around in its tank, looking very bored and completely terrified, if that combination is possible. In another tank a group of lobsters (I couldn’t see what had been done to them) sat gazing at us, like the live lobsters you sometimes see in a seafood restaurant.
There was an aviary of bright-colored parrots, some of them normal, some of them with floppy miniature human hands or feet or patches of human skin sticking out between their breast feathers. The poor birds were tearing at these growths with their beaks. The floppy hands and feet reminded me of the shark-chewed limbs of the Girl Who Waved. Next to the aviary, in a run with some bare branches propped together as a sort of climbing frame, there was a spotted jungle cat, all alone. It wasn’t weird to look at, not in any way that we could see, but it crouched in a corner of its cage, its front paws over its cat face, moaning softly.
“Is this what you do?” said Miranda, finally. “You collect freaks? But what for?”
“We don’t collect them,” said Dr. Skinner, with a tight-lipped smile. “We create them.”
“You create them? How?”
“Gene grafting. Surely you’ve heard of genetic engineering?”
“But what are you trying to do?” I demanded. “What’s the point in it? Are you trying to turn animals into humans? That’s just cruel.”
“Animals into humans? No!” Dr. Skinner laughed with contempt again, as if he couldn’t believe my stupidity. But in his voice
I heard fear—horror and fear. “The animal experiments are steps on the way to a much greater goal. They were all essential to the project. We don’t cause needless suffering. But we’ve gone beyond them now. Have you seen enough?”
We nodded, very uneasily. He took us indoors again, through another door, out of the heat and into air-conditioned coolness. It was a relief to get away from the zoo smell. But I was beginning to think I must be asleep and having a bad dream.
Dr. Skinner tapped on a door, and a voice called, “Come in!”
The room was like another doctor’s surgery, only grander. A man, another white man, got up from behind a big desk and came out to greet us. He looked about fifty- or sixtyish. He was tall, he had broad shoulders and rather long, thick, gray wavy hair, almost to his shoulders. It framed a broad tanned face with a big nose and a wide, thin mouth. His eyes were very bright. I noticed them when he came close to shake my hand.
Later on, it was always his eyes that I remembered.
Later on, just thinking about those bright, cold eyes would make me shake with terror.
“Ah, Miranda, Semi. I’m very pleased to meet you at last.”
He shook our hands. He had a rich, smooth, calm voice, and an American accent.
“Do sit down. We have a lot to talk about.”
“First things first,” said Miranda, briskly. “Apparently you and Dr. Skinner know that we’ve been stranded on your island for ages. So you must realize we need to get in touch with our families. We need to contact the authorities, the British Embassy, tell them we’re okay and get ourselves taken back to Quito, or wherever is nearest. Is Quito the nearest city? We don’t know where we are. We don’t want to put you to any trouble, but we need your help. We want to go home.”
Dr. Franklin chuckled, and smiled broadly as if she’d made rather a good joke. He sat down again behind his desk. “I don’t think we’ll be contacting ‘the authorities’ just yet. Do sit down.”
So we sat down.
When I first saw Dr. Franklin, I was relieved. I didn’t like his eyes, but he seemed like a normal person, not spooky and mad like Skinner and the guards. I thought, Thank goodness, at last we’ve reached someone in charge, now we’ll be okay. But the moment I saw that smile, the relief began to drain out of me. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew there was something very, very wrong with this man. With everything.
