by Aaron Dries
Amity couldn’t even begin to imagine how happy they must have been. Their sense of safety couldn’t be measured in scratched stone.
Next, the man and woman stood among those trees, holding a baby. A boy, as indicated by a small dash between his legs.
Next, the man and woman sat on a rocky outcropping. There were two children now, the second noticeably dashless.
The following two columns were dedicated to an incestuous lineage of second-generation children mating with each other, resulting in the birth of further children. Following the little crosses and circles and zigzags that were meant to differentiate each offspring from the next was growing confusing.
Amity rubbed her head.
It was also becoming harder to distinguish the first-generation children—now taller and broader in adulthood—from the versions of themselves in their younger days. It was like a slow-moving zoetrope, only instead of smooth transitions lending to the impression of passing years, there were distinct gaps and repetitions in the design. It wasn’t as though the artist had lost track of how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren the first arrivals must have had, it was just that Amity was in no state to keep up with it all. It was all blending together, just as their time on the island must have done.
She imagined that it must have been a demanding life living off the land, made harder by the defects that must have plagued the children as a result of their muddled bloodlines. For all she knew, some of them had been born without eyes or with extra toes. Maybe some of them had even been deaf.
Amity sank to her knees. The weight of the narrative was dragging her down. Her many wounds cried protest—so insignificant in the face of the story being told.
There were deaths inscribed, too. The second-generation girl, now grown into a woman, gave birth to a son on one occasion and triplets on another, but she died during that final labor. A solid, unmarked stake, kind of like a fence post, marked her grave. The delicately carved shapes next to it had to be flowers.
Amity held her breath as she continued, lives lived and ended in quick succession. There were more such posts, more graves. The third-generation children gave birth to a total of four others: a son (again, the dash said it all), another set of twins (a boy and a girl) and a final girl.
Another life over, the flowers as carefully drawn as the rest.
The children sat around a dead animal. A deer.
A family held hands under a full moon.
And yet through it all, over however many years had passed (by working backward, Amity estimated that the original man and woman must have arrived on the island almost…seventy years ago), the first man remained. It was easy to track his increasingly passive role in the story, because unlike everyone else around him, he didn’t seem to age. He remained the same throughout, and he always had his laborer’s pick by his side.
The scythe of shadow was almost fully drawn. Amity looked through the cave’s entrance and saw the final twinkle of the sun on the cliff peak. The day, like the story itself, had finally drawn to a close.
The final chapter was laid out before her.
For reasons not described in the pictures, the first man (albeit a little more hunched than he was before) left his surviving family. Amity squinted in the dimming light, bent forward again. Yes; he now appeared to be leaning on his pick for support.
Hmph. So not immortal after all.
Amity sat back on her haunches and couldn’t help but sadly smile. The first man—who long ago created bridges at gunpoint—had grown old as all men eventually do, despite always being young of mind. She interlaced her shivering fingers and tucked her knuckles under her chin. It was obvious now. It was the original man whose strength and artistry was on display here.
This isn’t just a story. It’s an autobiography. And it ends here.
Amity’s eyes traced the final carvings. The author had left his family behind. They watched him go and huddled close to one another for support. Her heart ached for them. These were people who cared about one another, who appeared to act with respect, loyalty and integrity. Though their faces must have been misshapen, their DNA strands as knotted and confused as the island’s many paths, they were as human as she was. They hurt as she had hurt, perhaps even more so.
They loved.
They feared.
It had grown colder, and Amity knew she should take her makeshift spear and break it into pieces for kindling, yet the promise of the final drawing held her in place. She doubled over, placed one hand against the rock for balance, and studied the bottom left-hand corner.
The first man was walking into a large circle. A cave.
8
Amity could smell him before she saw him. It was a wet-skin-beneath-the-Band-Aid stink. An aroma she would quickly have dismissed as disgusting, although this would have been a lie. It was one of those repellent self-musks that she guessed were normal to tolerate, or even secretly relish.
And why?
Because it didn’t just signify decay. It was the sweet smell of evolving flesh. It was rebirth.
She swiveled her head to the left and watched him materialize out of the dark. Time kicked, thrashed and seemed to stop. Everything did—the throb of her pulse, the vibrations of the crashing waves.
Everything except him.
He walked into the last wheeze of light—it glimmered against the milky corneas of his blind eyes. The man was ancient, more skeleton than skin. His mouth was opened in a shuddering sneer of overgrown teeth.
Amity was too startled to move. She stood there, lapping up the sight of him. Bile rose up her throat and stained her tongue. It was bitter, warm.
A shawl of knitted seaweed was draped over his shoulders. His jaundiced skin appeared so thin in places that Amity could have sworn she saw his inner heat radiating through, giving him an ethereal glow that prickled her flesh—a man who shone like the moon. A shit-stained beard cascaded over his chest, half-obscuring cancerous caves of flesh scooped out of his body.
Time bucked again, time enough to scream. Her hand clenched against the rock wall.
Something stirred in the man’s flesh caves.
As a candle burns brightest just before it blows out, the sunset bloomed and stretched out to illuminate the lives living on and in him. Crabs lived in his cancers, and ran back-and-forth sideways paths across his chest. Their multicolored shells were wet, as though dabbed with splashes of paint. Only it wasn’t paint—it was shreds of flesh in various states of decomposition. Putrid sequins. The crabs—the parasites—continued their dance as their host took another step.
His foot struck the cave floor—only there was no foot, just a withered stump of jagged bone and wilted skin. The moon man, still glowing, lurched with every movement and kept his balance with the aid of an equally ancient laborer’s pick. The blade was blunt. When it struck the ground, a cloud of rust stained the air.
Amity tried to yank herself up off her haunches but her hand slipped again, fingers running across the engraving and scouring her skin. She landed on her back. Time caught up with her and propelled the man at her with a speed that belied his years. He extended a hand to her, and she saw that his fingers were curled up on themselves, that they had fused to his wrist. There were long flints of shale embedded in the flesh where his digits should have been. Some were dulled, some not. And Amity knew that if they were sharp enough to carve through the clay walls, then they would have no trouble slitting her open gullet to groin.
Her scream ran dry. Darkness threatened to swish her away. She wasn’t so lucky.
There was a shadow on the wall beside her.
Amity moved as though in slow motion, giving herself enough time to wish that the intruder were her brother, or Tobias, or any one of the other tourists. Long enough to imagine the kisses of gratitude and relief that she would plant on their cheeks as they carried her down the rocky slope to where a rescue crew was waiting.
It wasn’t her brother. And it wasn’t anyone from the boat. She could t
ell this from the shape of his silhouette. The last ray of sunlight caught his hair, and she saw its matted length stretching back against his skull and down over his shoulders in loosely bound dreadlocks. His hand was upturned before his face, as though waiting for a priest to lay down a wafer of blessed Eucharist.
Hold on to the rope, said the voice in her head. Don’t let it break.
Amity Collins gripped it as tight as she could, despite the rest of the world dragging on it from every opposing direction. She could feel them tugging at her, those great, unseen hands—and she knew who they belonged to, had seen their dirty work lurking in every twist of her story. They were the hands of the cruel and insane.
The world was a color and that color was RED.
Keeping a firm hold on the rope was hard; it was greasy and slick. She was trying her best, as she always had. Her teeth were gritted together, the vibrations out of control now. There were thick, velvety growls of wild dogs boring down at her, working her terror into new heights.
She wanted it all to end. Was that so bad? Couldn’t she just slip away now and have it be done with? There was no mercy here; there never had been. That struck her as so terribly finite and unfair.
What was it that I did to deserve all of this? What crime am I guilty of?
What is my sin?
Tell me. Tell me, please.
The dark man blew against his palm and sent a spray of powder shooting into her eyes and mouth. It filled her nostrils and she dragged it into her lungs, burning all the way down. It reeked of earth, of mushrooms, and was a strange kind of sweet.
The cave was colder now, far worse than before. The scythe had fallen.
Chapter Eighteen
The Last Son
1
Wind gusted through the island, rattling trees both dead and living. It cast sand across the corpses on the beach, where nightfall made the blood seem black. This wind drove through the jungle, up its slopes, down its valleys. It sent spider into hiding, monkey into play. It was feral and fleeting, and unlike the rising and retreating tides, it had no master watching over its every move.
That hallowed wind. It created music at the island’s heart, a long drawn-out note. Nearly all that had heard its tune were dead now. Almost.
The island was not a place of ghosts, though it was haunted. It always had been.
2
The last son carried the girl over his shoulder, her snores in his ear. She smelled unlike anyone he’d ever held before—the scent reminded him of the rich and creamy deer milk his mother used to give them. He let her bleed into his patchwork shirt, not caring; this one was beginning to fall apart and there were plenty of materials below with which to sew together a new one.
He took her from the cave and down to the cove where his brothers, sister and mother lay dead. The ocean had swallowed them one by one and, finding their flavor unsatisfactory, had spat them back out again. They hung on the rocks, the youngest of their number facedown on the sand.
The last son never lost his footing on his journey down that rocky slope, his eyes having grown accustomed to seeing in the near pitch-black years ago. His movements were spry and nimble, despite the weight he lugged along with him.
He put the girl down, watched her shudder. She would not stir from sleep for many hours yet, and that was good. Her eyes, nose and mouth were sticky with the dust. It always worked. She might even come to like it, in time.
There was little in the way of moonlight, just enough to give the plankton something to glow about, enough for him to see how much his life had changed. The last son was alone now, and he knew he would never visit this part of the island again.
He took their bodies and dragged them to the jungle’s edge. There, he held them close and wept. There had never been pain like this before, not even when his father died. Agony threatened to rip him to pieces with all the violence the island could muster, which was unimaginable. And yet he faced such power head on. Just holding them was an attempt to keep them a part of his life, even though his efforts were useless. They were as cold as the water spray on his back. The island always won.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. This place was meant to be safe.
War had come back to claim them all, just as the old one had said it would. The belief that they would be untouched by the evil men forever had not proved strong enough. It was a truth he’d known since he’d found his kin dead in the jungle, torn apart by one of them. He’d sounded his horn. It had been he who let them know of the intrusion. And as the old one had said, it was better to kill yourself than to live under their watch.
His regret defined him now. It would have been better to track down the intruders—who had ventured too far—and to have slaughtered them all, one by one, instead of going to his mother with his brother’s blood staining his hands. But he knew he didn’t have it in him. That was the problem.
The last son’s tears patterned their broken faces. He shrieked on their behalf. They were still so beautiful. Death couldn’t rob them of the poetry in their eyes, in the cusps of their lips.
His howling echoed far, making snakes hiss, sending fruit bats into alarmed flight. There came a point when it mingled with the island’s hollow musical note, contaminating its loveliness with misery that had never been heard here before this day.
The last son glanced up at the rocky slope he’d just come down, at the cave overlooking the ocean. It was a dark eye against a dark face, but he could still make out the opening. The old one was still in there, as he had been for seasons on end, having retreated because he prophesied such a day would eventually come.
He hated the old one, now more than ever. And not just for his madness.
The old one had cheated death and escaped its guns and orders and whips. The old one had fled and, with the old woman, had claimed this land as their own. But death had come back for them as he had always known it would.
The last son left the girl on the beach, but not before covering her body in wet sand and mud, keeping her mouth and nose unobstructed. This way her heat would be contained within her body, but she wouldn’t draw insects or animals. He stripped a tree of its palms and covered her up. Before leaving, he took more powder from the pouch around his wrist and sprinkled it across her lips, tipped some into her partially open mouth.
Once he’d finished, he dragged his kin—two at time—into the dark by the locks of their hair. He had no idea how long he was in there, burying them next to the others. It was the pain that kept him going. All he wanted to do was sleep; this could not happen. They had to be in the ground tonight or else the island’s many animals would pick at them, and they would not stop until even the bones were gone. Tomorrow he would craft a marker with the old one’s tools.
There was still so much to do.
Once the job was done, he patted the graves flat and sat under a tree. Spiders played in his hair. The blade that he’d used to dig up the earth was still in his hands. Its edge was hot. He knew what he was supposed to do, knew that putting its serrated edge against his throat was what needed to be done. And yet he didn’t have it in him to go through with it.
Unlike his kin, the last son wasn’t bred to self-destruct. Even animals—which was all he considered himself—feared death. Though living would be torture, it must be better than death. Or maybe it was just that he was the coward the old one had predicted he’d grow into.
Yowamushi.
The birds were yet to cry. There was still time to go back and get the girl. He’d sensed the innocence on her, which was why he’d claimed her. She had betrayed them by coming as far as she had, and likewise, he would betray her by never letting her leave. This would be their symmetry.
3
The jungle had no design to it and was as fragmented as a night’s worth of dreaming, but the last son always knew his way. If forced to, he believed he could find a path by touch alone. The land was a part of him, just as he was a part of it. They mourned.
He sat in the fork of a ba
rren tree. It had stopped bearing fruit seasons ago, but he’d been scaling its heights since he was a child. There was comfort to be found in its old, dead limbs.
The girl was on the ground at the foot of the tree, tucked between two of its aboveground roots. She was asleep, as he knew she would be. He studied her deathly stillness in gloom as the island’s corridors writhed with life making the most of the night. Snake wrestled snake, lizard fed on slumbering butterfly.
A hot wind played with the last son’s dreadlocks. The island’s song could be heard from here, and he would return to its heart with the coming of the sun, but not before. And he would not be alone. Between now and then there was much that needed to be done.
The last son was not alone in the tree. He was surrounded by monkeys, perched in waiting. They occupied themselves by picking the fleas from each other’s hides and feasting. Their little faces were alike, distinguished only by variations of disease and blood splatter. One sat on the last son’s shoulder; it was dressed in the remains of a pink tutu. Its marble eyes were sad, downcast. It, like the rest of its kind, seemed to understand the gravity of their failure.
Their cowering before him was nothing new. They feared him as they had the rest of his family. He had killed many of them out of example. The twisted bodies were below the girl’s head and shoulders.
Warm, furred pillows.
It began to rain without warning, the drumming sounds of sky against sand. The last son watched the mud peel away from the innocent’s face and body. She looked frail, beaten, but strong and well fed. And so unlike anyone he’d ever seen before. Sure, there had been times when he and the others had watched visitors come and go, but it had always been from great distances.
Her skin was the color of tusk. It stirred him.
Water dripped down the monkeys’ faces. Blood washed from their bodies, staining the dead tree in inky rivers.
