by Aaron Dries
The bird sang.
Lynn sat upright, splashing her face. Chlorine lingered on her tongue. There was nothing under the shelter, nothing except the singing toy. It fell silent.
“Stacey?” she called out. “Tristan, is that you?”
There was no response. She scanned the hedges around the pool; from her low angle they seemed as tall as the cement fences behind them. Nobody was there, either.
Lynn looked at the bird again, so still and poised, its dead eyes staring off into nowhere.
Oh, don’t we spook easy? said a voice in her head. The batteries must be winding down, is all. Don’t they say they burn harder just before they die? That calming voice ushered her heart from her throat and back into her chest, where its beat returned to normal.
Lynn laughed and sat back down on the raft. The sky continued to stare down at her.
There was movement against the trees. She splashed again, freckling her face with water. Breath escaped her, some hidden weight forcing against her breasts, but after a few slow-moving moments, it lifted. Oxygen. Panting.
There was nobody there.
It was just the beach ball drifting past the underwater light at the end of the pool. Its shadow was projected against the hedge, a crescent of darkness creeping by.
Lynn didn’t laugh this time, just a half smile. You’re giving yourself the willies, said the voice.
“No shit.”
You’re literally jumping at shadows.
“I don’t want to go back inside. I’m enjoying myself.” Her own words didn’t sit right in her waterlogged ears. “Stop talking to yourself.”
Lynn lurched back on the raft, her skin screeching against the rubber.
The water was calm now, and she floated across its surface, eyes closed. The lingering alcohol buzz took the edge off her fear. Lynn chose to focus on Costa Rica instead. If I’m having this much fun at a random villa on the outskirts of Managua, just imagine how much fun I’ll have at my resort.
She thought about drinks with novelty umbrellas, of waves on the shore and the salty ocean air, talking to her husband on the telephone when she arrived and telling him—
Something rustled.
This she hadn’t imagined. Lynn inched the length of the pool, her chin just below water level, eyes wide. Staring.
The hedges. The trees. The walls. The shelter. The bird. The chairs. The gap among the palms that led back toward her room.
Nothing.
Okeydokey, I’ve had enough of this bullshit.
Her husband and Costa Rican beaches—even the stars themselves—were forgotten as she paddled closer to the shallow end, facing the villa. Her feet brushed against the bottom of the pool, toenails snapping backward as they flicked the pebbled cement. It hurt a little, but she pushed the pain aside and waded through the water, forcing her upper half into the heavy air.
There was an electric crackling. She stopped.
Behind the bird, suspended on a wire at the very rear of the bamboo shelter, there was a bug zapper. Lynn hadn’t even noticed it was there, just as the insects themselves continued to beat at the cage, unaware of the ashes of their kin.
Adrenaline pumped through her body. Lynn was at the end of the pool, her knees doubled up underneath her. She felt exposed now that she was out of the water. The handrail leading up to the recliners was on her left—almost within reach. She chanced a final glance around the yard.
The back fence. There was nobody under the shelter, in the wicker chair or standing under the bug zapper. Nothing.
Lynn spun around and looked at the palm trees, and then below them at the dark, knotted hedge. Moonlit water lapped at her sides. There was nothing near the hedge on her right, so she glanced down at ground level. Beneath the branches of the hedge were roots and a thin glow from the lights at the rear of the villa. There, she saw the man’s face.
Lynn gagged and flailed backward.
He was lying flat against the ground on his belly, snakelike, with eyes as dark as buttons peering out at her. Water shadows wreathed across a manic smile—only it wasn’t a smile, not really: the lips were pulled back to reveal the neat white teeth beneath. It was a grimace at best, something pained, although maybe—just maybe—born of pleasure. Lynn recognized the high forehead, the sunburned cheeks.
Tristan.
“Oh, fucking Jesus!”
There was only one way back to her room, and that was through the palm trees at the side of the shelter. Meaning that she had to near Tristan to access the door.
She wasn’t wondering about why he was spying, or how long he’d been lying there—her only thoughts were of getting out of the water and back to her room. If he was playing a joke, then she didn’t find it very funny. The fright in her system boiled over into anger. She snatched up her towel and pushed it against her chest.
Another insect exploded in the bug zapper.
She ran, feet slapping against the tiles, moving so fast the parrot didn’t even detect her presence. Earlier, she’d passed through the palm trees, their leaves tickling her skin, and the scent of the earth and loam had enticed her. Now the leaves felt like perverted hands grabbing at the fat she couldn’t work off fast enough, no matter how hard she tried—
(it’s not my fault! I keep on trying to get Ray to buy healthy, but it all makes him fit to be tied)
—and the soil reeked of decay.
Lynn rounded the corner and saw two doors: the closest one led to Stacey’s room, the second to her own. She slipped, her legs sliding sideways, and landed flat on her stomach. She’d snapped her head to the right to avoid breaking her nose, which was lucky in one way.
Unlucky in another.
There was no time to register pain, but the terror was as immediate as electricity. Tristan was right next to her, peering out at the pool. Only he ended at the neck. Insects had crawled out from under their rocks to climb into his mangled throat muscles.
Lynn tried to get up. Her hands and upper arms ran scarlet. She could smell copper, could taste it on her tongue. She’d slipped on a puddle of blood. Garbled, messy sounds erupted from deep inside her, noises she’d never expected to hear because she’d never expected to make them.
She skidded to her left and saw Stacey’s door. Crawling, screaming. Her palm slammed against the wood and the door flung wide; it had been open a fraction the entire time. She saw the sheets, the almost-black blood. A lifeless hand dangled over the edge of the saturated mattress.
The bird started singing again.
Lynn snapped around. A patter of boots against the tiles as the shadow descended on her, swooping down low. And then there was nothing.
5
At first there was the throbbing, a slow-lolling thing inside her head, but once she managed to open her gummy eyelids, there was the stink of blood and chlorine. It sickened her.
Ropes bound her to the chair, the same chair that she’d sat on for breakfast earlier in the day. Only now Lynn wasn’t in the kitchen, or at least she didn’t think so; she had to push aside that terrible throbbing to see where she was. Shuttered windows. A closed bamboo door. Humid condensation dripped down the walls.
She could hear a soft hissing coming from somewhere in the dark before her. The jade screen of the CD player, which was stuck between stations, peered at her—a glowing, unblinking eye from the ocean ink.
They were in the back room near Tristan’s bar, and it was hot. Swampish. Sweat pooled in the hollow of her collarbone. She wanted to scream, but could manage little more than a whisper.
“Quiet,” came a voice.
Christmas lights sprang to life with a spark of electricity. They were wrapped around the body of the speaker, the woman who had attacked her. The woman who had taken a blade to their host. To her best friend. She looked as though clothed in the stars she’d admired from the pool, her form revealed in the glow. A bloodied machete was in one hand and a tumbler of alcohol in the other. Every breath, a wet rattle in her gullet.
The stranger
stood, the wicker chair she’d been sitting in crying relief. She wore toothpaste-bright Reebok running shoes. Unscuffed. Unmuddied.
“Stacey,” Lynn moaned.
The hand, draped over the side of the bloodied mattress. It had ended at the elbow.
Sobs wracked her body, but she fought against them as she fought against the ropes. Her screams were powerful now.
“Quiet.”
The stranger shuffled forward, careful to not loosen the Christmas lights from her body. The cord uncoiled out behind her. Lynn could see that she was white, maybe in her late thirties—could see strength radiating from her body like heat. The woman’s face was cold, with skin cast tight over its high, prominent forehead, casting eyes into darkness and pronouncing the baldness of her skull. Without the definition of eyebrows, she looked as though crafted from devil’s porcelain, a half-made china doll that didn’t break with ease.
The CD player continued to hiss.
Lynn’s scream ran dry as the stranger drew close. Her slick right arm reached out at her. Touching her with rubber-gloved hands. She snapped at her, teeth clamping down on air.
“No, no,” she said, her voice a parody of kindness. The words were knowledge, a narrative laid out between the two of them, as plain to see as the floorboards beneath their feet, depicting yet another life about to end in agony.
The woman smiled, seeming to despise her prey, and reached out again. She still held the drink, a lime wedge floating on its surface. She bent low, the cord pulling taut behind her. The two-pronged plug clung to the socket; soon it would fall out and they would be swallowed by the dark. The concept sent Lynn into screams again, lashing out—but missing every time. Exhausted, she slumped against the chair. Lynn glared at her from under a blood-caked brow, but the fire brimming in her eyes didn’t last. The cool of memory. She wondered where her children were and what her husband was doing right now.
Paint tins in a basement somewhere, collecting dust.
6
She fucked her with the machete and left the body to the mosquitoes. A cold shower followed. For two hours straight, she wiped down every surface that she’d touched through a blurred cataract daze. Muscles rippled under her layer of freckled skin as she buffed the door handle with a rag. Even though the night was cooling, even though she’d showered, the sweats still came, tickling as they trickled down her ribs, down her spine.
The soiled rags thrown into the burlap sack she’d brought with her. Inside were used tissues and two chewed-up ears of corn that she’d nibbled on over the three-hour period she’d been hiding on the property. Waiting had been tiresome but worth it—the payoff too, as it always was if she didn’t rush things.
Got to make it last, baby doll. Last real goo-oood.
She wasn’t always quite so disciplined, but on this occasion, she’d impressed herself by just how long she’d managed to hold out. It was hard not to get too excited when they squirmed and fought and screamed the way these three had, and in the throes of the pièce de résistance (that oh-so-silken beat), glazed over and realized that no, they weren’t going to get out of this alive. That the last things they would hear would be the intonations of her British accent; the last things they would feel would be the ropes about their limbs and the burn of her blade.
She’d stumbled across the two women and the man at the airport and followed them home from there. Trolling had paid off.
Carnage was laid out before her.
A smirk.
She dropped the sack beside her foot, stretched the knots out of her back and rolled her head. Bones cracked and fell into place. A smack of her lips. Cluck. She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She’d kill for another drink—that hideous desire reaching out to her, like the arms of a persuasive dead friend wrapped in fetid, warm rags—but didn’t dare touch any of the taps now that she’d wiped them clean.
A great burden had been lifted from her body; it wouldn’t be long until it returned. And when it did, she would have to troll again, which meant more waiting. They were exhausting, these yearnings. Soon, the aches would come. But she had to be patient. The way she figured, patience was like one of the many muscles in her body: a part of her that would grow soft and spent if she didn’t work on it with at least a little discipline. It was hard but rewarding.
She lifted both hands and framed the scene with her fingers.
“Click,” she said. The picture lingered in her eyes as a bright flash sometimes bruises the eye. This was all she would allow herself, as taking real photographs was just too risky, but were she to have indulged—just one harmless shot each—they would have totaled eleven.
Eleven people. Eleven cries for mercy.
She spared a moment for number twelve. What would it be like? How would it taste? And what then of lucky thirteen?
These thoughts were candy colored. It made her smile, even though those aches were now starting to creep in. It always would.
She would never stop. Couldn’t. There was no choice, no option. She had to keep moving, keep trolling. If she stopped, went back to the United Kingdom and put away the blade, she was certain that she would die.
The sack made her hands itch, but she didn’t care. She left behind the slaughter, stepped outside and climbed onto the rented motorcycle she had hidden among the trees, watched over by agonized faces in the bark. Along the way, she passed two small children dancing around a pile of smoldering trash. The sting of longing for some other life, some other time. They waved and laughed at the color of her skin, making her feel insignificant again. She kick-started the motorcycle and rode into the night, stopping only to weigh down the bag and throw it from a bridge and into a river.
Her room-for-hire was tucked away on the outskirts of Managua, and stank of mold and wet paper, fueling her hay fever into overdrive. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t. “Got to keep moving, keep moving,” she said, over and over, as she packed up her clothes and toiletries, sweat rolling down her face and beading off her nose.
The passport was on the bed, and inside it was a name next to her picture: SUSAN SYCAMORE, it read. She was thirty-nine years old and, as illustrated by the swirls of multicolored ink stamped across the pages, had been on the road for nine months. Beelining it from one developing country to another wasn’t easy or cheap, but like patience (like making it last real goo-oood), it was worth it.
Chapter Four
Amity and Caleb
1
Palm leaves gave way to reveal the elephant’s wizened face. Its trunk arched upward and trumpeted red dust through the air, hazing Amity’s and Caleb’s matching imitation Ray-Bans. Their legs were draped behind the animal’s huge ears, tapping its guitar-string hairs. They hugged chest to back, unharnessed on the crest of the elephant’s neck.
The air reeked of jungle stench, elephant funk.
It was their sixth day in Thailand.
“This is fan-fucking-tastic,” Caleb said, wiping the soil from his face. It didn’t matter that Amity couldn’t hear his sentiment; they both knew how the other felt. Their bodies were electric.
The elephant trod over rocky outcroppings, pushed though the boughs of nareepol and banana groves, startling birds and whatever spirits the locals believed lived there. They crested a hill, and the ocean off Phuket Island opened up before them, twinkling sunlight on a bed of blue.
Amity laughed and gestured at the ground, where two toddlers played peekaboo around a television-size mound of elephant dung. Their parents, the owners of the animal rehabilitation center, stood close by; father toyed with a large black spider as though it were nothing more than a yo-yo.
“It’s all so strange.”
Caleb’s eyes were wide beneath his 150 baht sunglasses. He covered his mouth with the back of hand as though embarrassed. Strange—it was such a simplistic thing to say, stupid really—but hell, he didn’t care. And besides, who was around to listen and judge? Certainly not his sister.
“Wow. Somebody pinch me.” The wonder of being ov
erwhelmed was addictive.
“Coo-ooooee!” he announced to the landscape, so shrill and loud his voice cracked. An echo answered back, just as enthusiastic, and it confirmed to him that yes, this was all real, and that he shouldn’t be ashamed of the little tears of happiness caught in his eyelashes.
Evans Head had never been so far away.
Amity thumped against the bed, her belly full of the rich and spicy foods they had bought from a street stall on their way back from the reservation. Whatever plans she’d mapped out for her day would soon be sacrificed at the altar of sleep. She had a mean case of almost-Christmas-Day-esque lethargy going on.
It’s hot, I’ve gorged on mountains of food and now all I want to do is have an afternoon nap. Thank God for air-conditioning.
Their resort room was crisp and cool, a stark contrast to the tepid humidity clogging up the Phuket air outside. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, at the skittish refracted light from the balcony wind chimes, and thought that there was one upside to the high temperature: I’ve got to be sweating off whatever weight I’m putting on, and that’s totally fine by me.
Smiling, she shifted onto her side, restlessness keeping her awake. There was a stack of soiled clothes heaped near the bathroom door; her brother was showering.
To distract her from ever-tempting sleep, Amity slipped her iPhone from the pocket of her cutoff jeans and logged into her Twitter account. She thumbed out a quick status update that simultaneously appeared on her linked Facebook homepage.
Amity Collins @agirl93
#Thailand rocks and is beautiful. Crazy place. Having an amazing time!!!!! YOLO.
And YOLO was right. You only live once, so why not make the most of it?
Their two-week resort visit was to be the first and last significant monetary splurge of their six-month trip, and Amity could already tell how much she would miss the creature comforts around them now. And it wasn’t just the poolside cocktail bar, or the beach massages, or even the buffet breakfast (although it kind of was)—it was the joy of an air-conditioned room, the convenience of a decent Wi-Fi signal. They would soon be staying in a string of hot and overcrowded Thai backpacker hostels—with the weird toilets they couldn’t put paper into, with the showers that didn’t work.
