by Victoria Fox
Kevin was first to see it. ‘There,’ he said, pointing.
In the mud, by the rim of the pool, shone a tell-tale glint. Angela went to fetch it. She lifted the necklace. The final fact settled.
The crestfallen group watched the still silver pool. Nobody spoke.
At last Eve said: ‘I’m sorry, Tawny.’
Angela sank to the floor, folding the jewels in her fist. The rain fell.
They held Tawny’s funeral at the beach, at sunset. The rain broke for a spell, a new sunlight spilling through the fractured clouds in fragile pastels.
There was no body to bury. No one wanted to speak the word out loud. Despite their time in this broken paradise, it was still too vicious a concept. Everyone knew that a crocodile was the worst way to go. It wasn’t painless and it wasn’t quick.
Eve refused to elaborate on what she had seen, it seemed prurient, a tragedy turned anecdote, but it wasn’t even the images that clung on. It was the sound. Tawny’s rattling cries would haunt her for ever.
Angela scooped a dip in the sand close to Tawny’s shelter. ‘Does anyone want to say anything?’
They had their private thoughts. Jacob remembered the supermodel he had met in an LA club. Angela remembered Tawny’s hands in hers as she had helped her out of the swamp. Celeste remembered Tawny’s lips, just days ago, vital and alive.
Eve remembered her arm, firm and constant, and her eyes full of bravery.
All shared the whisper of a common theme: that so far, they had been lucky. It was a miracle that they had survived this long. One of them was bound to die first, and if one could die, then the rest could soon follow. Thirst, twisted ankles, insect rash and sunstroke—that could all be fixed. Tawny’s death was a game-changer.
‘Tawny inspired a lot of people,’ said Angela, as she dropped the necklace into the sand, a final rose on a watery coffin. ‘We will miss her spirit and her personality, and commit her to peace in the next life.’
The others knelt to help pat the ground flat. Celeste started to weep.
Only one member hung back.
Kevin Chase observed the group through hooded eyes, familiar to him and yet distant, as if he had just arrived and stumbled across this strange, human ritual.
Behind him, the jungle called.
76
Day 37
Celeste and Jacob were gathering fruit. Batches of black and purple berries filled their arms, stained on their hands like blood. Tiny hairs from the fruit clung and itched against the supple buoyancy of their flesh. The rain had slashed much of their spoils to the earth, a jumble of colour on the ground. They bent to collect them, juice seeping. The rules were simple: eat what they recognised, and nothing dangerred.
Celeste was soaked but she no longer cared—heat or wet, it made no difference. She wore knickers and a T-shirt, slashed above the navel.
It was difficult not to notice Jacob’s bare, chiselled chest. Tawny’s demise both discouraged and deepened her desire. The idea that Tawny’s living, breathing, passionate body was now extinguished made her hungry for sensation.
‘I keep expecting to see her,’ she said.
Jacob stopped what he was doing. He turned, his eyes burning.
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘Do you think we’re next?’
He shook his head. ‘Tawny’s gone,’ he said, ‘but we’re not. We’re still here.’
On the return leg, laden down with fruit, Celeste tripped on a buttress root. She fell forward and stopped herself with a sharp, high, ‘Oh!’
The fruit scattered. In front of her, inches away, was a deep well.
Jacob took her shoulders and helped her up. Both stared into the abyss into which she had nearly vanished. It was impossible to see right to the bottom, so dense and incalculable was the drop. Jacob could feel her heartbeat through her ribcage, moving into his heart, and through his back, like a chain of heartbeats that would go on for all time: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He didn’t know if she was referring to the chasm or to something else. Jacob realised his hands were close to her breasts, encircling her waist but his thumbs were tracing her uppermost rib, where the bone met soft tissue.
‘It looks like a well.’
They should have moved away, then—but Jacob did not want to let go. He remembered Celeste’s body at the pool and felt himself go hard.
‘Do you think there’s anything down there?’ she said.
He released her, watching as she moved to the rim and reached over the edge.
‘Hello?’ she called, and it flew back at her, up and out into the world like a flock of tropical birds: ‘—lo, —lo, —lo …!’
Jacob scooped up a rock and tossed it in. They waited seconds before hearing its impact clatter on the rocks below, and the soft phush of it hitting water.
He dropped down next to her. The fruit was piled, bountiful heaps of glistening ebony, sweating and dripping in the hot rain; bursting so that rivulets of sweet, sticky sap seeped and oozed onto the wet ground, streaking it mauve.
‘Do you want to go down?’ Celeste asked.
The question hung between them like a gold ribbon, waiting to be caught.
Her deer-like eyes turned to his. Jacob remembered the secret treasure between her legs and a need to make love hit him in a way that, in spite of his years of conquests, was new and debilitating. It was physical. Innate. Brutal. It pumped his stiffening cock until he thought he would detonate right then, right there, before anything had been said or done, draping him in this strange, euphoric jungle magic that forced him into the deepest and truest part of himself.
Together, one mouth moved to the other. There was no distinction between who acted first, whose hand or whose leg was clasped round the other’s, whose sweat mingled or was mingled with, whose tongue caught whose. Jacob wanted to be inside her and not in the conjugal sense—he wanted to possess her, to climb through her and become her, forcing his tongue into her mouth, running it around her teeth, two small sharp points where her molars were and he thought she tasted of fire.
In seconds they were stripped. Jacob descended to her tits, hands kneading as he pushed her breasts together and pulled them apart, drawing the wine-red buds between his thumb and forefinger until the flesh beneath was pulled taut. Celeste moaned her rapture, and shit how he had missed this, he had missed fucking a woman, he had missed Celeste; all this time he had missed Celeste.
His tongue trailed a line from her belly button. Appetite overtook and he lapped the canvas of her perfect skin, up around her tits, taking one in his mouth and sucking it to the back of his throat, gathering the flesh with his fingers to fill his mouth more. A deep, guttural sound choked out of him, matched by her cries that sailed on the heady air like paper. Wetly the breast was released, flooded pink with blood and lust, the mark of his teeth around the puckered nipple, and then he took the other, harder this time, sucking and dragging like a man who had drunk nothing in a week, extracting water from the neck of a bottle.
Next his fingers found the place between her legs. She gave him a strangled shout, was dry at first but in seconds coated his touch with salty silk. Her bush was wild and it turned him on. When he bent his head, the glossy, soft hair engulfed him, saline on his tongue as he spread her wide open. She was thrashing now, out of her senses, and Jacob’s face was smothered in the scent of her, rich and raw and female. Her clit shone huge amid the shock of hair, shyly emerged from its hood of tender skin, and he flicked the tip of his tongue across it, up and down, in delicious, delicate circles, getting her hotter and wetter and wetter and hotter until her bucking thighs were at risk of stealing the breath from him completely.
This was a new Celeste, a woman in control: a woman at one with her body.
‘Coming, coming, I’m coming …’ she gasped.
Jacob flipped her round. Celeste’s arms were thrown over the rim of the well and he reached up to grab her hair, long now around the ears but st
ill with that exposure of neck that made him want to fang her like a predator.
‘You like being on the edge?’ he rasped in her ear. ‘You like it here?’
‘I want to go over,’ she begged, ‘make me go over!’
‘Not until you’re ready.’
He slapped her ass with the full sting of his hand, marvelling at the way her buttocks rose to meet his punitive force, smarting red at the point of impact. She lifted them again, pleading, and this time the flower between her legs parted to reveal that red, wet rose and he slapped her right there, right on the nub that sent her crazy, and he pushed three fingers deep inside to make her come, his thumb working her neat spot. He felt her tighten and soak him so much that he slid almost instantly out, but she wasn’t ready yet. She wasn’t ready until he told her she was ready.
Jacob hauled her up by her hair so she was kneeling in front of him, her back pressed against his chest. Her neck was laid open like a calf to the slaughter. Grabbing a clump of the black fruits, he smeared her bare breasts, then her face, feeding them between her lips so they spilled down her chin, and he did the same to himself, painting his forehead and cheeks and his stomach. He wanted to enter the void, to discover what was hiding, into the deep, dark pit, into whatever was left of his soul, and become it utterly. He wanted disguise, because disguise gave him freedom and freedom gave him fantasy. Not the kind of fantasy he had pursued at home, not the kick of the videotapes: this was more, this was dangerous.
We’re still alive …
You and me, we’re still alive …
She turned to him, eyes ablaze with tormented arousal, and worked his dick through her palms, smothering it with fruit and cupping his balls in the hot, sticky resin. When the head of his penis was loaded and glistening, she bent to it and closed her mouth around the shaft, tongue working from root to tip. Immediately he ejaculated, howling as a burst of yellow wings flew from the elevated trees. Slumping in defeat across her arched back, Jacob slipped a finger through the valley between her thighs, thick and woven and damp, past the hot swell and into the resistant knot of her asshole. Once admitted, she came instantly in shuddering, knee-dissolving spasms, his finger braced in place.
He and Celeste were, for those moments, painted yet unmasked, shrouded yet unveiled, more visible beneath that rush of purple juice than they had ever been before. They were animals. They were lovers. They were savages. They were born.
77
Day 40
Mitch drifted in and out of sleep. Rain pattered and drummed on the awning that Jacob had erected—their sleep shelters were useless now, the leaves and sticks sodden and the fire put out. Still the air remained hot, this heat closer and sultrier than before, their sweat mingling with raindrops.
Mitch dreamed in fitful, restless bursts.
In his dream, Tawny Lascelles was standing by the pool, her mouth ready to scream. But it wasn’t the crocodile that took her, it was a shadow: a presence with them in the trees, the nameless creature that saw their every move.
In his dream, the scream never came. Instead, Tawny was engulfed in bright white light, the same light that had hovered over Mitch’s home two years ago.
The same light that had led him to the cave …
Come back to us … Come back … They called for him.
If he did not go, they would take the others, one by one, until nobody was left.
He woke with a start, his heart belting.
Eve was on the sand, her arm curved under the spill of her stomach: new life to replace the old. By her side were Tawny’s ruined hair straighteners.
Mitch turned away.
‘I know what you think happened …’ Eve ventured.
He didn’t reply.
‘But you’re wrong. I saw it. I was there.’
Eve thought he was nuts to consider that Tawny had been snatched. But Mitch believed she was lying. Too ashamed to admit she was wrong after all this time, she had to make up a story like that.
‘What happened at Veroli, Corrigan?’
The question took him by surprise.
‘Was it real?’
Water leaked through the wood. A trickle fell by his ear.
Yes, it was real. Mitch had seen the withered body, if it could be called that, shrouded beneath a white sheet in Signor Rossetti’s outdoor cabin. The craft had burned up on entering the atmosphere; metallic fragments cast onto the protected parkland and collected beneath a tarpaulin-wrapped shack. As for the creature itself, its flesh had been scalded in the fire, a charred brick red. It was big, its head twice the size of his and its frame close to three metres tall. Its blood had been a rich, blackcurrant purple. Its toes and fingers had been webbed. Its eye sockets hung deep and long, almost joining with the nose cavity, and its mouth a puckered, stitched-on line. Mitch had stared at that mouth. What would it say, if only it could speak?
Others, too, had been invited to witness the spectacle at Veroli—those who could pay, who had a vested interest and were vowed to absolute secrecy. This was the greatest classified find since Roswell; the stuff Area 51 didn’t want them to know about. It was proof that extra-terrestrial life existed, that it was here, that it had landed. Mitch wasn’t crazy. The rest of the world was.
‘You believe Rossetti, still? Even after it was proved a hoax?’
‘Nothing was proved,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to justify anything to you. Leave me alone.’
‘I’ll stay, if it’s all the same to you.’
They listened to the thrum of the rain.
Mitch said: ‘Even now, in the state we’re in, you can’t resist.’
‘What?’
‘Hurting people.’
‘I’m not hurting people. Not this time. I’m interested, that’s all.’
‘Interested enough to write it up the second you get home?’
‘I don’t think we’re going home.’
Mitch grit his teeth. ‘You are. I’m not. They’ll come when they’re ready.’
‘You’re certain.’
‘They came for Tawny. What more do you need?’
‘Why didn’t they come for you?’
‘Tawny was a warning.’
‘Of what?’
‘That they’re close.’
He heard her shift position. ‘What does your wife think?’ Eve asked.
Melinda’s name swam at him like a stranger’s. Mitch hadn’t thought of her in so long. Three syllables, an empty word to fit an empty woman.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he said.
‘I’m not as shallow as you think I am.’
‘Based on evidence, I find that hard to believe.’
‘I’m a journalist,’ Eve said. ‘It’s my job to expose people.’
‘It’s your job to report the truth.’
‘That’s the same thing.’
‘Is it? The truth is something you’ll never get your hands on. You see the Veroli stitch-up and you see your truth; I see mine in what doesn’t come to light.’
‘We aren’t so different, then.’
Mitch faced her. ‘Everyone on this island has secrets,’ he said. ‘What makes you immune? People build lies to protect themselves—not to injure, or cheat, whatever you might think. If you want a hook, I’ll give you one. I miss my wife. There. Satisfied? I miss the person she used to be. I miss the person I married and it eats me up every day, and I will never get her back even if we do get out of here because she’s already lost. I’ve got nothing to go back for. I don’t even want to be saved. Put that in your precious paper, see if I care.’
‘I do care. That’s why I came to find you.’
‘I’ll bet that was a real coup.’
‘Do you think anyone’s going to give a crap about your story, even if we do make it off this island? The story’s dead, Corrigan. Your name was never even attached.’
‘More fool them if they don’t see. The end is nigh.’
‘Now you sound like a maniac with a sandwich board.’
&n
bsp; ‘If that’s what you think I am.’
Eve picked up the straighteners.
‘You’re smart, Corrigan. How else would you be where you are? And I’m not immune, far from it. We all end up where we do because of our past, and mine—well, it happened. But being here and going through this, we’re all cut from the same, aren’t we? It doesn’t matter what labels you buy, how much money you have or how many records you sold, when the chips are down we’re all the same. We’re all flesh and we all bleed. What can I say? Bad spreads—but I believe that good spreads too.’ She looked at her stomach. ‘I have to, don’t I?’
Ashamed, Eve fiddled with the charred tongs. ‘Every bad thing I ever wrote about Tawny, I hate myself for it.’
‘I know what my beliefs are,’ Mitch said, but the edge to his voice had gone.
‘That Tawny was taken by that thing you saw at Veroli …’
‘Yes. Or something like it.’
‘And our plane came down because of them?’
‘Yes.’
But Eve was only half listening. She pulled the straighteners closer and frowned at them. She was deeply focused, her eyes narrowed.
‘What is it?’ Mitch asked.
With a wrench she snapped them open, splitting them at their hinge. She fingered the plastic inside, coming to rest on something fixed in the pivot.
Her voice sounded weird. ‘And if you’re wrong?’
Mitch reached out. ‘What are you looking at?’
The cracked straighteners shook in Eve’s hand.
‘So much for your aliens, Corrigan,’ she said. ‘We’ve been set up.’
78
Szolsvár Castle, Gemenc Forest, Hungary
Voldan Cane’s mechanical summons ricocheted through the castle vaults.
‘Janika!’
The maid came running. Mr Cane was propped up in his four-poster bed, a drink by his side, out of which a long straw protruded. His question was immediate: ‘Is there news?’
