The eerie feeling intensified. It was just like that evening three years ago with Ivy. He had been confident that she would take his leaving well, and it had turned into a disaster. Now, faced with making a similar speech to Savannah, Jeff was suddenly petrified.
He opened the letter from the Newton Museum and read its contents. It basically stated what Mr. Blond had already told him.
“What is it?” Savannah called from the kitchen.
Jeff walked in. He tore a small piece of French bread off the loaf and dipped it into the bubbling red sauce. Giving it a second to cool, he ate it. “This is absolutely delicious,” he said.
“I know it,” Savannah said with a wide smile. “My spaghetti sauce is the subject of song and story. There’s talk of sainthood.”
“Well, if I get a vote,” Jeff said, “you’re in. Saint Savannah, Our Lady of Pasta.”
She pointed a saucy spoon at the letter. “You never told me what’s in the important mail.”
“Oh,” Jeff said. “Ah. It’s terrific news, actually. I’ve been invited to Australia. The Newton Museum.”
“Ooh!” Savannah squealed. “I saw a special on that place on The Discovery Channel. That’s wonderful! Congratulations! But why do they want you, of all people?”
Jeff sat down on one of the rough kitchen chairs by the table and poured himself a glass of red wine. “There are those who consider me a great and important artist,” he said.
“Yeah, and people go to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, too,” she said with mock scorn. “No accounting for taste. How long will you be there?”
Jeff hesitated. Now was the time. “Six months,” he said. “Maybe longer.”
Savannah sat down in the chair next to his. “Oh, that’s a long time.” Then she smiled. As always, her smile made Jeff think he could be happy looking at nothing else for the rest of his life. “But I can always finish my term when we get back. Who cares if I graduate this year or next? Not me!”
Jeff didn’t know what to say. “Well, are you sure you’d want to…”
“Am I sure?” Savannah said. “Would I pass up a chance like this? Not on your life, bub! When do we leave?”
Jeff took another deep gulp of wine. “I don’t know the precise date,” he said. “Not for weeks yet.”
As Savannah went happily back to her legendary spaghetti sauce, Jeff poured himself another glass of wine. Not for weeks. On the bright side, that would give him weeks to think of what he was going to tell her.
12
“WHAT IS THAT THING?” Hurley said.
Jeff looked back at Hurley, Charlie, Michael, and Locke with a helpless expression on his face.
“I carved this last night,” he said, knowing how insane this sounded. “I dreamt about this thing and I woke up and carved it. That’s why I didn’t get any sleep. I worked on it all night long.”
“Dude…” Hurley said. “Weird.”
Jeff sat down on the ground. Charlie wordlessly asked to hold the talisman and Jeff handed it to him. After he examined it for a moment, he handed it to Michael. Then Hurley and Locke took a good long look at it. Shrugging, Locke handed it back to Jeff.
“This is kinda like that stuff you showed me yesterday,” Hurley said. “But kinda not.”
Jeff was silent for a moment. Then he spoke. “All right, I’m only going to say this because there isn’t a lunatic asylum on the island for you to throw me into. You can believe me or not. The artwork I showed you, Hurley…I dreamed it all.”
The others’ expressions didn’t change much but Jeff figured that every man there thought he was totally bonkers.
“It started soon after we got to the island,” Jeff continued. “At first I thought art was behind me, something I could never go back to. Then one day I woke up and started sketching. The next morning I made a sculpture out of mud and rocks. And then I started carving things. Every day, something different. And every day it was something that I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t until last night that I realized what was happening. I had a terrible dream, and in that dream these awful creatures threatened me.”
“What kind of creatures?” Michael asked.
“I can’t say for sure,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “I’m not sure if I couldn’t quite see them in the dream or if I just can’t remember now. They weren’t like”—he gestured outside the chamber—“like that. They were probably human, kind of.” Then he remembered another detail. His face brightened. “Yeah, they were definitely human, because one of them was a woman. And she held this thing over her head and spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand. I woke up immediately and started carving.”
He looked around at the group. They were all listening intently.
Jeff continued, “The thing is, as soon as I woke up, the dream started to evaporate, you know, the way dreams do. But the image of this thing was rock-solid in my mind. I knew I had to carve it then and there. And that’s when it suddenly came to me that I’d been having dreams like this for weeks.”
No one said a word.
Jeff smiled a little. “Okay, who brought the straitjacket?”
Locke said, “If you need a straitjacket, then we all do.”
The others nodded.
“All of us have seen things,” Locke said, “experienced things that don’t seem to make any sense. What about that thing outside? Ask any of us to make sense of that.”
Michael said, “There’s something about this island. The ordinary rules don’t apply here.”
Jeff held the talisman up. “So,” he said, “do you think it means something?”
No one answered for a moment. Then Hurley said, “Dude!”
Jeff looked at him.
“Remember yesterday,” Hurley said, “when I told you I had seen stuff like yours on the island?”
Jeff said, “Yes, of course.”
“I just remembered, dude,” Hurley said. “Now I remember where it was.”
All eyes turned to him.
“The caves, dude,” Hurley said. “I saw this stuff at the caves.”
Locke extinguished the candle. “We need to get to sleep,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “What caves?”
Locke said, “Go to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Jeff lay down in the soft dirt. He placed his pack under his head and it made a passable pillow. The rain still pelted the ground outside and its gentle drumming made a soothing white noise. Jeff’s mind was racing with so many outlandish ideas that he was sure he would never go to sleep. But soon he heard Hurley snoring loudly. Then Michael joined in. Within a few seconds, Jeff followed.
But although Jeff found sleep, he did not find rest, for as soon as he was soundly unconscious, the things came again. This night, they were more clearly human than ever before. Jeff thought that they might have resembled druids in hooded robes or some ancient death cult in ceremonial garb. But this was more of a feeling than anything else; the figures remained frustratingly shadowy, like objects glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.
But tonight, they weren’t threatening Jeff directly, as he had felt in the previous nightmare. This time they bore on their shoulders a woman—the same woman who had held the talisman the night before. She writhed in their grasp, screaming desperate, terrified screams. As Jeff watched helplessly, they placed the shrieking woman on the ground and surrounded her. To his horror, they pulled out long, sharp knives and as her screams intensified, they knelt beside her, raised the knives high, and then brought them down savagely in thrust after thrust. In moments the area was swimming in blood but the woman’s screams did not abate.
But now, the sound Jeff heard was no longer the screams of the unfortunate woman, but the cries of someone else. The figures rose again and turned toward Jeff. One of them held something aloft. It was a newborn baby, covered in its mother’s blood. As the figure held the infant high over its head, the others dipped their hands in the pools of blood on the ground and began to paint on the walls
of the cave.
The blood was such a deep shade of red that it almost looked black, and the dream cave was dark and murky. But Jeff did not need light to see clearly the designs that the things were painting on the walls. He had seen those designs almost every day since he arrived on the island.
He had created them himself.
13
THERE WERE TIMES IN Jeff Hadley’s life when he was simply appalled with himself, and this was one of them.
He let himself in to Savannah’s flat that evening after work expecting to take her out to dinner. They had exchanged keys weeks earlier. Jeff had been relieved that Savannah had never expressed an interest in moving in with him and that she seemed to find the current arrangement very much to her liking. Each of them kept a toothbrush and a change of clothes at the other’s home and they came and went at will. Savannah’s need for a certain degree of solitude matched Jeff’s, so they seldom ran the risk of getting on each other’s nerves. It was, in short, nearly the perfect setup.
The date of Jeff’s departure to Australia was fast approaching. When he had first brought up the subject to Savannah, it seemed distant, giving him plenty of time to have a mature discussion with her, explaining that now would be the perfect time for them to go their separate ways. But the weeks passed and they never had that talk. Jeff determined that tonight was the night.
But when he stepped inside Savannah’s flat he could see from the foyer that her bed was covered with open suitcases beside which sat stacks of clothes.
“If you want a greeting kiss, you’ll have to come get it,” Savannah called brightly from the bedroom. “I’m neck deep in packing.”
Jeff walked over and stood at the door. He struggled to keep a light tone in his voice. “Going somewhere?” he asked.
Savannah laughed. “You never realize how much stuff you’ll need for six months abroad until you start trying to load it into little boxes. Perhaps we could live in a nudist colony in Australia. It would certainly cut down on the luggage.”
Jeff didn’t smile or offer a responding joke, and Savannah noticed immediately. Her face grew serious and she said, “Is something wrong?”
Jeff said nothing. He moved a suitcase to one side and sat down on the edge of the bed. At length he summoned up the courage to say, “We need to talk.”
No pleasant conversation has ever begun with those words. Slowly, Savannah stood up and sat beside him on the bed. “What is it?” she asked.
Jeff took a deep breath. He realized that he didn’t want to have this talk, that he didn’t mean what he was about to say. What he wanted to say was that he had never loved anyone as he loved Savannah, that all he desired of his life was to spend every day of it with her. But he told himself that this was merely weakness. She was so attractive, so vital, that naturally he was reluctant to split things off. That was the downside of his philosophy of leaving while things were going well—that was the time when it was always the most difficult to leave. But even as that thought flitted across his mind, he knew that it wasn’t true. He had never regretted cutting off his prior relationships, because none of those women had ever meant anything to him. But Savannah did. She meant everything. Even as he prepared to speak the words that would break her heart, a voice in his head shouted, What are you doing? You’re insane!
“First off,” Jeff said, his voice hoarse and low, “I want to ask your forgiveness for not having had this talk earlier. I am a coward. I admit it.”
Savannah just looked at him, her eyes wide with dread.
“You’re not going to Australia,” Jeff said, staring down at the floor.
Savannah swallowed hard. Her eyes glistened. “What…?”
“You were never invited,” Jeff said. “But you seemed so excited at first that I thought I’d break it to you a little later. And then I just never got around to it. I’ve been so afraid to hurt you, I suppose I’ve just ended up hurting you more.”
Savannah stood up. She uttered a sharp laugh. “Well, on the bright side, that clears up all these packing woes, huh?”
She paced around the room for a moment, looking at her clothes and possessions stacked everywhere.
“I’m so very sorry, Savannah,” Jeff said.
She sat down beside him again and kissed him on the cheek, and then forced herself to smile. “I won’t say that this isn’t a blow,” she said. “But I’ll survive. And by the time you return, I’ll have composed a really elaborate scolding, which will make your life miserable for weeks at a time.”
Jeff continued to look at the floor. A shadow of concern darkened Savannah’s face and she ducked her head slightly, trying to look him in the eyes. “What is it?” she asked. “You are coming back, aren’t you?”
Jeff nodded. “Yes, I think so. But…”
“But what?”
Jeff looked up sharply. The only way to do this, he thought, is to do it quickly.
“Come on, Savannah,” he said. “We’ve never had any illusions about what this is.”
“What do you mean?”
“This has been a wonderful experience, and you’re a terrific person…”
“A terrific person?” she said, a note of outrage in her voice. “A terrific person? So that’s what I am, is it? A jolly good bloke?”
“We both knew that this couldn’t last forever,” Jeff said, and even as he spoke the words, he knew he was lying.
Savannah stood up, furious. “We didn’t both know anything of the kind! I love you. I thought you loved me.”
Jeff looked at her helplessly. I do love you. More than anything or anyone in the world. “Of course I care for you,” he said, “but after this long separation…who knows what we’ll want when it’s all over. It’s best just to call it quits now.”
The anger drained out of Savannah’s face. She looked as if she had just been slapped. She whispered, “Quits?”
Jeff stood up. “It’s the best thing. We both know it,” he said.
Tears began rolling down Savannah’s cheeks. “Please stop saying what we both know. Obviously you don’t understand a thing about what I know.”
“My dear…” Jeff said. He gently caressed her cheek. She swatted his hand away.
She said, “What I know is that you’re the love of my life. And I know that I’m the one woman in the world for you.” She began weeping. “And you know it, too.”
Jeff walked toward the front door. “Once I’m gone, you’ll forget all about me. You’ll find someone you like even better.”
Savannah covered her face. Her body shook with sobs.
“I’m so sorry,” Jeff said.
He opened the door. Before he stepped out, he heard Savannah say in a low, breathless voice, “You will never live a day of your life without thinking of me.”
He knew it was true. But at the moment, he seemed powerless to change the course of events. He had known it would be difficult; he just had to remain brave.
Jeff stepped out into the hallway. As he closed the door behind him, he heard Savannah’s wails of grief as she collapsed among her half-packed suitcases. And he knew that every time he thought of her, he would hear that terrible sound.
14
HANDS ROUGHLY SHOOK JEFF awake. Squinting, he was surprised to find the chamber flooded with light.
“Get up, dude,” Hurley said, giving Jeff’s shoulders another shake. “Locke’s found a boar!”
As Jeff sat upright, he looked at Hurley. His face looked terrible. Its numerous bruises had left a painful design of ugly purple and black patches, and the cuts had become a ghastly road map of dark, dried blood. Hurley was wearing his T-shirt backward, so that the shredded part showed only his back, but Jeff assumed that his chest and stomach looked just as bad.
Hurley saw the way that Jeff was staring at him and smiled a little. “Hey, dude,” he said. “You shoulda seen the other guy.”
Jeff grinned. “I tried to. I really did,” he said.
“Come on,” Michael shouted from the mouth of the chambe
r. “We gotta go!”
Charlie added, “Take your packs. We may not come back this way.” Then he ran from the place, hot on Michael’s heels. Jeff slipped his pack over his shoulder, grabbed both spears, and went running out just behind Hurley.
Not coming back? he thought. I need to examine the walls. I have to come back.
“Over here,” Locke called. He was standing at the bottom of a shallow slope that led down from the chamber’s entrance. He pointed to a thicket about fifty yards to the west.
When the other four reached Locke’s side, he said, “Watch.” They all stood motionless, staring intently at the dense growth of bushes and vines. After what seemed to Jeff like an hour—actually it was only three or four minutes—the bushes began to rustle, gently but noticeably.
Locke said, “We’ve got him but we have to move fast.”
“What do we do?” Charlie asked.
“We surround him,” Locke said. “We pace it off so that we’re equal distances from each other and from the thicket. Then we try to get him to run out.”
Jeff said, “And the ones of us he doesn’t gore will stick him with these excellent weapons.”
Locke nodded. “That’s about the size of it,” he said. “He’ll run toward one of us, so the rest will have to get over there as quickly as possible. It may take all ten spears just to bring him down. I only caught a glimpse of him, but he’s a monster.”
I’ve had quite enough traffic with monsters after yesterday, Jeff thought. I don’t want any more.
Nobody seemed to think very much of Locke’s plan. But no one could think of a better one.
Michael sighed and then said, “Okay. Where do we go?”
Locke started walking calmly toward the thicket, motioning the others to follow him. Every time the leaves rustled suddenly, every man except Locke nearly jumped out of his skin. Jeff thought back on how adventurous and exciting this had all seemed yesterday. But now, with the imminent prospect of coming face to face with a huge, deadly wild animal, the entire enterprise seemed less thrilling than suicidal.
Once near the bushes there was no more talk. Locke positioned each man by walking him to his spot and pointing to the ground. Then he paced off twenty yards or so and placed the next one there. When every one was in place, Locke walked around the perimeter of the thicket, miming instructions. Throw the first spear, he demonstrated, then throw the other. To Jeff, the directions seemed easy enough. Just about as easy as getting an angry tusk in your gut from a charging hog.
Lost: The Novels Page 35
