A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  Judit’s husband, who at the time of the attack had been busy deleting photos from his camera’s memory card, was shocked into immobility. The camera, which moments before had so consumed him, now dropped to the ground. He could see the conch shell nailed into the back of his wife’s head in a picture-perfect composition—the contrast of light and dark, the red versus all that white… The whole mise-en-scène was even framed by a low-hanging tree branch that gave the shot some balance.

  Did we turn off the power to the television before we left? Rolf had no idea where the thought had come from. A nervous giggle escaped him.

  He watched the conch shell crumble as his wife arched her back. The spikes, however, remained embedded in her skull.

  Yes, you turned off the power. All is well.

  “Judit!”

  As he ran, he saw his wife in her wedding dress, the dress that she had debated over for so long.

  Piercing hazel eyes through a veil. She had tasted like a peach when he’d kissed her in front of the church crowd. His mother’s pearls had glowed in the flash of cameras. Judit’s bouquet lay between her knees in the Mercedes after the reception, rocking to and fro as the car made its way down the rocky road. They had been a little high—not much, but enough. A delicate mix of rum and the line of speed the best man had offered them.

  Her wedding dress, coiled up at the bottom of the bed. Their intertwined legs as they spooned, tumbling into dream.

  The monkey ripped Judit’s jaw clean off her face. There was something in that popping sound that reminded him of those flying Champagne corks, the thump of bedposts against their apartment wall on the night he’d asked her to marry him. On the other side of these sounds was the woman who had said yes, sprawled on her back in the sand. Bleeding. Dying. Right before his eyes.

  Rolf dived onto her chest, shielding her from the claws that had ripped jagged slits across her throat. He kicked one monkey in the face. It twirled on the spot but wasn’t deterred. Eleven of its kindred latched on to him—their reflexes so much faster than anything he could draw on. One of the animals lowered its jaws to him and scissored through the cartilage of his ear. The sensation of being tugged this way and then that way. Caught in a tide.

  The remainder of Judit’s face was inches from his own. Rolf saw his reflection in what was left of her pupils.

  A large monkey, otter-slick with blood, latched on to his hair and flogged his head against Judit’s, crushing his nose with enough force to send splinters of bone shooting up into his brain.

  But she wasn’t dead yet. She lived long enough to watch her husband die through a cruel, red veil.

  3

  They were a swarm of teeth and claws. Bristled backs. Eyes that didn’t quite understand what was happening or what they were doing.

  There was only the energy, the screams and cries whipping them further into frenzy. Some were surprised by how sweet and warm the blood was. Their muscles flexed, forearms digging into the sand in readiness to run and then leap. When there were no humans within distance to bite and squeeze and flay, they turned on each other.

  Flurries of brown and gray zipping across the beach. Tracks through sand and flesh.

  4

  “Aban, courir!”

  The fingers of the child’s left hand were now just stubs gushing blood, but as had been the case with the Swedes, the sensation of pain was yet to scoot up through his body and alight his brain. He didn’t understand what was going on, didn’t understand that he would never again color with his crayons on the butcher paper his papa bought by the roll, that his days of fingering the soupy interior of the cake tin (despite how much his mother—on the weekends that he saw her—told him not to) were over. Aban loved that she always gave in. He missed her.

  He watched his father vanish beneath their onslaught.

  “Courir! Courir!” came a final set of gurgling cries.

  Run.

  Run.

  The swarm thinned and drew together again—just like the birds that sometimes flocked above his papa’s house in Beirut. Aban had once inquired as to what breed they were, and his father, who had been leaning so close that the child could smell liquor he more associated with his mother, told him they were zarzour. “Which is also a province in Algeria,” Papa had added. “Where I once met a pretty woman.”

  Aban had so often wanted to ask his father who that woman was, but never did. His parents hadn’t been divorced for very long, and even at such a young age, he understood that prying into other people’s pasts was a bad thing. And deep down, Aban suspected that the woman from Papa’s little story was not his mother—that she, perhaps, was the great wound of his life, one that would forever bleed.

  A ring of gore. At its center there was the corpse, which writhed and danced in an imitation of life. The monkeys had hollowed out his father’s stomach and now played in the cave left behind.

  “Papa!” He wailed, shaking his fists as tears began to course down his cheeks, landing on his lips. The scene in front of him didn’t make any sense. It scrambled the mind. He could sense his instincts rerouting information within his brain like the telephone operator he’d seen in an old television show once. She was sitting behind a desk with a set of headphones wrapped around her head, sweating in the grainy black and white of the “olden days”, yanking cords from the switchboard and stabbing them in other holes. Click-click-click. Only these weren’t voices that were being directed; no, they were images.

  A dead kitten on the road that they had passed on the way to his mother’s house. Aban had tried to ask his father what was wrong with it, but had been told to be quiet. To look straight ahead.

  This image was now rerouted to the word DEAD.

  It made him cry again.

  He saw the old DVD player that they used to keep attached to the portable television in their kitchen. Papa often watched old American movies dubbed in French on it as he cooked. But the player just didn’t turn on one day. There was only static on the screen; Aban didn’t like the sound.

  DEAD.

  The upper half of the corpse shot upward, a bloodied puppet on a string. The throat bulged and exploded outward, revealing the glossy face of a monkey whose mouth was furrowed in a twitching carnage kiss. It dropped onto the sand and rolled among the grains until it was albino white, reflecting a rare ray of sunshine so bright it appeared as though lit by flame. His father’s head cocked to one side and an eyeball slipped from its socket, dangling, swaying on a thread of muscle.

  The switchboard operator turned to glare at Aban. There was blood dripping from her nose. He’d done the job for her.

  DEAD.

  Another monkey ran toward him but stopped short; it punched the ground in a defensive stance, squaring off its forequarters. It hissed at him, losing chunks of meat that plopped onto the trodden shells. Aban glanced down at them—unaware that he was dressed in a pinafore of blood—and saw that the meat was not just meat, but a part of his papa. An important part. The child’s stomach emptied itself in a lurch that shocked the creature. The meat was the chewed-up remains of his papa’s “boy parts”.

  Courir!

  Aban pivoted and ran toward the shoreline. He could see Nikom, the friendly tour guide, stumbling back onto his boat. Behind him was a horizon lost to stormy haze.

  Courir!

  The command reverberated through the child’s chaos. He could feel the first twinges of pain brushing against the raw nerves of his body, like the wings of the gentle zarzour he wished would swoop down and fly him away.

  5

  Nikom threw the anchor onto the deck in a clash of chain and iron. Panting foul-smelling breath, he dived to the controls, checked the boat was in neutral and that the shift lever was in the up position. He ignored the vomit threatening to spill out from between his lips and ran back to the outboard motor and started to prime it.

  Push-push-push-push-push.

  Don’t flood it, he told himself. Whatever you do, don’t flood it. His cigarette-stained fin
gers wouldn’t stop shaking.

  And through this all, he was thinking, I knew this would happen.

  Someday, sometime. I knew it would all come crashing down.

  He had spent many hours kneeling before the shrine in their house, praying to Buddha that his instincts would be proven wrong. Incense lit and blown through the rooms; whispers in the dimness. But ever since his older brother had approached him with the idea of indulging in illegal tourism trade to Koh Mai Phaaw, which his ever-ancient mother Thaksincha had always warned him against, Nikom had felt plagued by the inevitable. Haunted by spirits yet borne by their endeavor.

  He tossed the throttle into start and pulled on the choke, yanking the cord over and over. Icy cold bullets of sweat dropped onto the plastic casing; the drumming sound unnerved him further.

  Come on. Come on!

  The screams continued to echo from the shoreline, but the roar of the engine and the hum of the proper blades beginning to spin overcame it all. They whoop-whooped through the air. Nikom’s relief brought laughter.

  Aban slogged through the shallow water, startling fish that had been swimming through clouds of pink blood. His head was beginning to carousel—clashing screeches, spinning, dead-eyed faces—and he felt as though his body were growing heavier and heavier with every footstep. The sand was wrapping around his ankles, as firm as clutching hands, trying to hold him in place. His calf cramped up, and he cried as he pulled his feet from the slush and continued to propel himself onward. It was endless. He’d had nightmares just like this, where some monster from his comic books would be chasing him down a street, dreams in which his imagination would punish him by making all of his movements sluggish, enduring the torture of slow motion.

  Water splashed in his mouth. Ew, salty, he thought, spitting it out. Papa always said not to drink water from the ocean, no matter how thirsty you were. It could make you crazy.

  The temptation to glance back over his shoulder and look at the beach was strong, but he didn’t let it win. If he saw Papa’s body again—all bone and raw flesh and spilling blood—it would all become too real. As of now, this was just a bad dream, nothing more; a nightmare that he could wake from as soon as he was safe on the boat’s deck.

  Temptation was calling out to him, demanding his obedience. It growled, forming words that wrenched at his skin, that pulled at the sides of his face. Turn now, it said. He twitched his eyes in the direction of the beach for half a second, exposing the thick tendons and roadmap veins that kept them safe in their sockets.

  No, don’t do it, he told himself, knowing full well that he was going to anyway.

  But the dream is ugly.

  The voice of the temptation was persuasive too. Frisky. It was the same voice that sometimes said, Why don’t you put that bread knife in the toaster, Aban? Boy-oh-boy, imagine what it would be like to stick your finger in that power point. Tee hee hee hee.

  “Pas! Pas!

  No. No.

  But his pleas went unheard. Aban turned around, and lucky for him, he only saw the long line of blood-streaked monkeys at the water’s edge, slamming their hands against the hard-packed sand in frustration as he escaped into an ocean they didn’t dare enter. Their faces were feverish scrawls of red.

  He screamed.

  Thrashing, Aban drew close to the back of the boat. The last thing he saw was the blue paint peeling away from the stern in curly flakes; it reminded him of the wood shavings on the floor of Papa’s workshop.

  The smell of cut pine. There was a handcrafted rocking horse in his room, the varnish smeared with his little fingerprints. He loved it. Always.

  The outboard motor dropped down in an arc of whirring metal blades. They sliced through his scalp and butterflied his face.

  6

  Nikom wrestled with the motor until it hit the water’s surface, and only then, as a six-foot-high fan of spray shot up into the sky, did he realize why the motor had resisted. That spray was bright red, with a finger of sunlight stabbing through it, casting a rouge shadow over his face.

  His mouth was opened wide, salt alighting on the tip of his tongue. He didn’t register the taste; in fact he didn’t register a thing. The sight in front of him rendered him utterly powerless. Lame. Unable to do a thing. Nikom could feel himself emptying out, going pale. An unsympathetic, icy hand touched the back of his neck and squeezed. It was as though he no longer existed.

  The boat shot forward, the engine booming its wasplike screech. He saw the bright pink smear left behind in the waves and the black shape bobbing to the surface at its center. It was hard to tell for sure, but something told Nikom that the black shape was the child.

  And yet, at the same time, it wasn’t. It was Kalaya, his little girl, floating there in the churning froth of the lapping waves. Weeping, Nikom wiped his face. It wasn’t just ocean brine he saw lathered on his hands, sinking into the creases of his palms. There was so much red.

  I knew this would happen.

  And yet he had brought them here day after day anyway. The gamble he’d continued to make was etched with cruelty, but the sight of your family starving superseded it all. He couldn’t just sit there in their decrepit house, unable to find work, and watch Kalaya’s face grow gaunt and tanned.

  I just couldn’t.

  I won’t.

  His fingers curled around the accelerator stick and shifted the boat into top gear. The bow split through choppy waters. Hands that he couldn’t remember controlling gripped the steering wheel, piloting him further and further toward a life he no longer wished to live.

  7

  “COWARD!”

  Caleb watched the boat sailing away, whitecaps red in its wake. “Come back, come back.” His voice fizzled, snapping on the plea. He didn’t want to fall to his knees, but the shock of being left stranded was overwhelming. He had to fight to keep himself upright. The world was a whirling place of brown blurs, twinkling teeth. The more he tried to convince himself that this wasn’t happening, the more real it became.

  The more blood he saw.

  He was armed with a Coke bottle in each hand that he’d plucked from the sand. One was broken from where he’d smashed one of the monkeys across the back of the head, not killing it, but leaving it a writhing mess on the ground. He couldn’t believe that he’d done it. Caleb never thought himself capable of violence.

  Back in Danny’s cramped office in Lismore on the last of their visits together, Caleb had told his counselor about how he’d once defended himself against a schoolyard bully, Steve Grafton. Steve used to call him Monster Mash, and would press a finger to his nose and bend it sideways in an exaggerated echo of the wounds Caleb had suffered when trying to save his sister’s life. Steve used to think this was the height of humor, and sadly, he was not alone. An entourage of cackling hyenas followed Steve wherever he went. Caleb had told Danny—who’d stared straight into his eyes, perhaps with the knowledge that he was being lied to—that he’d punched the bully square in the jaw.

  It was important to Caleb for everyone to think that he was tougher than he was.

  In reality, it had been Steve who had punched him, and without provocation. His bottom lip had been split open. He’d fallen flat onto the field, blood beading against the dry summer dirt. Caleb could still see the bully’s shadow stretched out across the ground near him, see the shadows of the crows that circled above the school in the hopes of picking at forgotten sandwiches. At any moment, he expected either the birds or the bully to swoop down on him.

  Those blows never came.

  Caleb had watched Steve’s shadow slip out of sight, but he couldn’t hear the retreating footsteps over the pounding in his head. He remained there for a full five minutes, despite the green ants biting his arms, even after the school captain had rung the bell that signaled that recess was over and that it was time to go back to class. Only once the school-ground buzz had died did he pull himself up onto his haunches and wipe away the tears. The blood had already dried in the heat. His mouth tasted lik
e he’d chewed on steel wool.

  Two of the crows had fluttered down from the sky and landed on the soil in front of him.

  “Go away.”

  The larger of the two black scavengers squawked at him, tilting its head to one side and then another as though scrutinizing him somehow. Its bleat was different from the ca-aaaws Caleb associated with the bird. This crow sounded as though it had said the word fool.

  Caleb entered his classroom and felt the cool air caress his sunburn. He closed the door, slow and gentle, the clicking of the lock making his heart skip a beat. All of the faces turned to stare at him, and he could do nothing but stare back.

  “Caleb Collins, what on earth took you so long?” asked his teacher.

  Swallowing hard, he crossed the creaking floorboards until he stood in front of her, where he whispered that he’d tripped running back to class after the bell had rung and landed on a rock. He could sense Steve’s icy stare burrowing into the back of his head the entire time.

  His teacher had escorted him to the sick bay, where he remained until it was time to go home. The bunk had been hard and watched over by an old, rusted fan with ribbons flapping from the guard. Everyone had forgotten about him, apparently, because nobody came to dismiss him. So Caleb picked up his dust-covered backpack and left, even though he needed to pee. Once outside, he looked up at the sky for the crows. They were nowhere to be seen. He left the school grounds and walked home, becoming one with the quicksilver heat waves rising from the road. He found the stray puppy ten minutes into his journey…

  The Coke bottles were still in his hands, but they didn’t remain there for long. Crouched in a defensive pose, a wrestler in the ring, he was caught off guard by an attack from behind. His eyes blinked almost comically, and a gasp hiccupped from his body. The monkeys ripped, bit and tore as they climbed his skin, raking up his flesh, and climbed onto his back.