by Aaron Dries
The last son lowered his shoulder and let the monkey in the tutu crawl down his arm. It grabbed on to the bark and turned to face him. It was sleek and frail and hungry for sugar; the monkey had no idea that there would be no more boats bringing them drinks and fruit for quite some time.
Staccato light silvered the island as lightning tore the clouds apart. The air was thick with burning ozone. The last son raised his head to the rain and let it fill his mouth. He swallowed and then began his descent.
Chapter Nineteen
Nowhere, Here
1
She stands before the burning sugarcane and listens to the wicker-crack of the flames. Lightning thrashes somewhere, so bright it hurts her eyes. Amity is naked but not alone. She can see people running back and forth ahead of her, between where she stands and the field of fire. Nobody stops to see if she’s okay. Their steps are mistimed; some fall. Some stop to stare before going on their way.
Something moves between her feet. The ground is covered in fur, not grass. It reaches up between her toes. The ground is breathing. She can hear its wet rattle. Amity wants the sound to go away.
The rain comes. She wants to go back home, knows that Evans Head isn’t too far from here and that she can probably make it. Sure, her feet will ache and she’ll maybe catch pneumonia in the attempt, but at least her mother and brother will be there on the other end.
And yet she does not move.
Amity looks at her hands. They are red. It isn’t rain falling from the sky.
Even though she can hear her surroundings, her own voice is lost to her ears as she begs for help. There aren’t any vibrations. The heat from the fire grows hotter and hotter against her skin.
There are no more silhouettes running back and forth. She is alone. She is not alone. There is another presence, and it’s lifting her up into the air. Her stomach knots.
Put me down, God, now, please!
Nobody listens because nobody can hear her. She isn’t as naked as she had at first thought. There is something over her head, hot and clammy as a wet sheet—and just as suffocating. Even though she can’t see it, Amity knows from the chalky smell that it’s the old World War II gas mask the man she had met on the Internet had been so fond of, the one he kept in his “bag of tricks”.
She remembers going to his house and knocking on his door. It opens. He stands there. She goes inside. He makes her a drink and soon after makes a move. She is repulsed by him. He says he is different from other guys. He shows her his bag, pulls out the mask. He says that he wants her to wear it, and if she doesn’t, he will tell everyone online who she is and what she came here for.
Amity runs away from that place. She lives with the fear he put inside her for a long time. He never contacts her again. Her secret is sown.
But the mask is bound to her head now, a rubbery embrace growing tighter and tighter. She sees the world through its two bug eyes, watching as the ground shrinks beneath her. There is another man down there, dressed in a kaleidoscope suit and wearing her father’s black-and-white face. He’s waving to her as she rises up in the air.
Lightning fills the sky. Every drop of rainwater glows, a sea of stars.
There’s tightness between her legs. The pain is instantaneous, a thing of its own. It plows inside her, filling her up. The wind whips her naked flesh.
Something is on top of her, up here in the sky. They’re spinning together, weightless in the storm’s frigid heart. Sweet-smelling smoke from the fire below churns around her, takes shape. She sees a blurred face bent close to the gas mask, close enough to block out all else. And then it’s gone again. There’s just sky. Another flash of lightning.
It’s a dog on her, fucking her. Thrusting. Tearing her open. It’s jaws glimmer with teeth. The rubber squeaks against her face, her panting as loud as crashing waves. If this is what sound is like, then she doesn’t want it back. She wants the silence again. Needs it more than anything else. This is horrible. This is the hell her mother has convinced her children they will one day end up in.
The pain has a color and the color is RED.
It isn’t one of the wild dogs in her. It’s a blur. No. It’s a man, only she can’t see his face. He’s too close to the mask and is hazing over the glass. However, she can see what’s behind him, perched on his shoulders. It’s a monkey. Its strong hands thump against the man’s neck, rabid with exhilaration. Its mouth is open in a wide yawn of exposed teeth. The monkey isn’t alone. There are others all around her, watching and screeching and pulling clumps of hair from their heads. She can smell mud and crushed leaves and the foul richness of his soured breath.
Another blaze of lightning.
Amity tries to fight him off but her body is heavy. The mask is sucking the energy from her body and it’s getting darker again. Even the strobes of light in the clouds seem to be dimming. The pain in her is subsiding. She can feel herself slipping away. There’s a strange odor. Strong, but very clear. Mushrooms.
Take me home, she asks the sky. I want to see my room, the one I was so desperate to get away from. There will be the calendar on the wall. The crack in the plaster, the one I like to trace with my fingers. My phone will be beneath my pillow, full of messages from all of my friends. Ma will come in and check on me soon, even though she secretly hates us. She’ll make breakfast for Caleb and me.
We will be pretend-happy again.
Together we’ll go to Pa’s grave and pull up all the weeds. Even though the weeds will grow back.
Chapter Twenty
The Final Day
1
A caul of mist painted the world a dull, headache gray. It was so bright it blotted out all else, and was every bit as consuming as the suffocating blackness she’d woken to once or twice through the night. It took a few moments for the light to dim and she watched, panting, as her hand began to fade into view.
Concentrate, Amity told herself. Concentrate harder. Her pupils cranked, once, twice. It wasn’t an easy task, but she did it. The next step was to digest what she was seeing.
There were black things stuck to her skin, wet, matted leaves…maybe.
Wrong.
Amity sat upright—every muscle in her body pleading with her to stay put and punishing her for her disobedience with thumps of stabbing pain. What she had mistaken for leaves were leeches grown fat on her blood. Black elastic bodies did contortionist flips as she flailed about; their mouths were latched tight to their food. Nauseous and still half-blind, she screeched as she yanked them off. Some exploded in her hands, others dropped off and plopped back into the puddle between her legs.
She was nestled between the enormous roots of a tree. Finding a sturdy hold on the bark was hard, though she managed, and used this grasp as leverage to yank herself up off the ground. Her head swayed into disorientation, and she didn’t stand a chance of stopping the vomit from ejecting from her system.
Her head boomed and she stupidly thought, Oh man, I’ve really got to pick up some aspirin from the shops. And some Gatorade. And food—God, that more than anything else.
What the hell are you talking about?
Amity wiped her mouth. Everything tasted like dirt, like the dusty flavor of old mushrooms. She continued to gag as she scrambled away from the tree and dived into her misty surroundings, plucking at the leeches as she went. Her hands quivered with revulsion and she danced on the spot, too afraid to crush them beneath her sandals despite the gluttonous way they had fed on her. She slipped her shorts down over her hips and found, just as she’d suspected she would, two more leeches attached to her pubic bone.
She swatted them without thinking twice and squealed as they popped.
2
Amity gingerly pulled her shirt back over her head, confident now that she was parasite-free. Her fingers wouldn’t stop shaking. The sensation of her saturated clothing slipping over her skin repulsed her; it clung, weaseling against her like unwanted kisses. Despite this, she put it on. Right now, a little bit of something was
better than a shitload of nothing.
She broke down. Buried her head in her hands.
The reverberations of a dream sneaked up on her, amorphous and indistinct. It wasn’t images she was recalling, rather a weird, niggling sensation of being soiled and frightened. Some obscenity had filled her mind during the night, as though Freddy Krueger, or something equally vile, had paid her a visit. This pervasiveness dimmed enough for her to take in her surroundings.
The mist didn’t seem to have any end.
It all struck a familiar chord, even down to the way the morning light was slanting through the canopy.
Her headache was a living thing and was punching holes in her concentration. It was far worse than the one she’d woken with after her big night out in Phuket, on the night they had met Tobias.
Tobias.
She allowed herself a quiet sigh. Amity wanted to will herself to blame him for everything that had happened, for setting them on the course that had led them to this place. She didn’t have it in her, was too far gone to hate. Wishing, on the other hand, was very immediate and within reach.
Wishing that she weren’t lost in the jungle, wishing that she had never bought their tickets out of defiance, wishing that Caleb and she had never left Evans Head.
Amity crouched down against the dewy grass, more afraid and confused than she’d ever been in her life. The last thing she remembered was being in the cave, where she’d been running her fingers over the wall carvings. After that, there was only unfocused, nightmare dreams of crabs and dogs and monkeys and lightning, a vicious whirlwind of assault.
BOOM.
Her hands shot to her groin. An unexpected burning sensation flared between her legs and spread across her thighs and into the contours of her abdomen. Her knuckles whitened as her fists clenched, squeezing blood out of the back of her right hand, where her makeshift bark bandage was starting to come loose.
Amity started to count. One, two, three—groan—four—breathe—four…
The jungle stared down at her; it had no end. Trees loomed above her, motionless and indifferent as the birds in their branches. Humidity drew what little water remained in her system out through her skin. The pain withdrew, the fire extinguished.
A minute passed. Her head buzzed. She didn’t feel like she was just having a hangover; it was far more like coming down. Everything had a shimmering hyperreal quality to it—the light shimmering on the wet leaves like liquid mercury, the pinpoint swirls of dew flying before her eyes. And her thirst… God, her thirst!
Shaking her head worked a little. She rose to her feet again, limped on.
All she could think of was that her brother was out there somewhere, and he was waiting for her to come back to him. Family meant everything. She had no intention of letting him down.
I’m not giving up. I’m holding on to the rope. See, I told you I would. Aren’t you glad?
Hello? Are you there?
3
Amity continued through the mist, although where it ended and the unfocused haze of her mind began was blurred. Her thoughts were becoming slippery; they were running away on her, and she was too numb to reach out and snatch them back.
Through it all she didn’t let go of the rope. That was what all of her strength was focused on now. Keeping a firm hold on it would get her to safety, or so she hoped. The notion of letting it go terrified her. She sensed that doing so would plunge her into a murky place she stood no chance of escaping from, an island within an island. That couldn’t happen.
Hold on.
In the meantime, there was nothing else to do but continue taking steps, one after another, over and over, repeat. Even though it hurt, even though the jungle refused to relent, she kept on assuring herself that she’d be damned if she would give in. Amity was maybe even starting to believe herself. A little.
She stopped to pass foul spurts of shit and then wiped herself clean with handfuls of grass. The act made her cry. The island had stripped her of so much that the loss of even basic humility came at a cost. Even though she was trying so hard to fight it, Amity was weakening.
More steps. Rubbery blades brushed her thighs. The slick sensation reminded her of where she was, despite seeing nothing but the cave with the carving in front of her. Two places at once. In no places at the same time. There had been something in there with her, back in the cave, but she couldn’t remember who or what it had been. It was a mental itch that couldn’t be scratched, no matter how she tried.
She stopped near a plant with trashcan-size leaves cupping bowls of rainwater. Amity saw her reflection in one: a bruised and battered skull framed by hair that looked as though it were turning white. She’d aged years in the space of a day. Amity splashed her hands into the water—
(it isn’t me it isn’t me it isn’t me)
—and lifted them and drank in great, greedy gulps. The moment the liquid touched the pit of her stomach, her senses grew more distinct. Things became more vivid. Tightened.
The mist didn’t appear quite so thick. The heat wasn’t as oppressive as it had been moments before. Her duel with the headache began to swing in her favor.
You’re not dead yet. And don’t you forget it.
She splashed more water over her head and let it run down between her shoulder blades, oblivious to the eyes watching her. It was so cold she started to cough. It felt good. Hell made heavens of the smallest things, she realized, and in this place even water could be divine.
4
A held breath. The stalker’s gaze held strong. So close, so close.
5
The wind picked up, sieving the mist. A curtain drawn. There were more trees beyond trees beyond trees. A funhouse carnival mirror trick going on and on. Amity had never felt so claustrophobic, despite being outdoors. She was discovering that the very nature of being on an island was to have all ways barred to you. Surrounded by water, cut off from the world.
Trapped.
Tropical birds flapped through the air—blurs of brilliant color shedding feathers. A bright green snake with yellow eyes slithered the length of a fallen branch beside her, a sight that should have sent her into girlish wails but evoked little more than a raised eyebrow. Bugs teemed. The wind continued to blow, soothing her skin.
Nothing. Everything.
Hold on to the rope. Squeeze it tight.
Slippery thoughts.
Amity stopped, a breath held tight in her lungs. It almost hurt. Release.
There was a fallen tree. Prior to the wind shaking it to the ground, it must have stretched thirty feet into the air. But now it was just another something once grand now something spent, and she was sad for its defeat. The great branches looked strong. Looked being the operative word. They were obviously no match for the gusts blowing in off the ocean. Amity traced its bulk, which lay against the uneven ground, and she saw the animal pinned beneath it.
She stepped closer, winced. Her arms folded in against her chest, an involuntary, slow-moving chest beat. It hurt to look. She did it anyway.
The creature was familiar—something that she’d maybe seen on a late-night television documentary, though it had been so long ago that the possibility of naming its breed was impossible. It reminded her of a pig, and yet it wasn’t. The skin was black and wrinkled with age, except for what she could see of its rear half, which tapered off to white. Its hind legs and quarters were beneath the branch. Amity sighed for the animal, saw the pain in the meek geography of its face. It didn’t have a nose in the traditional sense; instead it bore a lengthy proboscis. She pictured it rummaging for ants or scrounging between low bushes.
An herbivore. It’s a friendly animal. Something of the earth.
Its twitching ears were like that of a hippopotamus, not that she’d ever seen one, of course—not in real life; all she had to draw from were boredom-induced YouTube trawling. But its eyes were universal. Yes; those she didn’t need any reference for. They were small and round and brimmed with tears, matching pits of misery and pai
n.
The stocky animal was still alive, and although Amity couldn’t hear its braying, she knew that it was. It was screaming for help.
Amity stared down at it and was reminded of the baby elephant she’d seen back on the mainland, the one whose legs had been bound in leashes of barbed wire for the enjoyment of passing tourists like herself. Blood absorbed into dirt. The flash of a camera.
She walked away.
Stopped.
The rock in front of her looked deliberately placed there for her to see. It was so obvious in a way, as though this were a test on some elaborate reality television show. Only where were the cameras? And what kind of audience would watch such a cruel joke? Amity wondered who in their right minds would find entertainment in the cries of an animal caught beneath the weight of a collapsed tree, or in the sight of a young woman with the rest of her life ahead of her lost in a jungle designed to destroy her.
There were no answers. There was only rock.
Test or no test, she picked it up. It was the size of the football her brother used to kick around the backyard when they were young, the one that had—as all well-loved footballs do—ended up going through a neighbor’s window. Caleb had denied that he was the culprit until he was blue in the face, even though they all knew it was him. Amity could still remember her mother closing the door to Caleb’s room, the flash of her brother’s crestfallen face before the lock slid into the jamb.
She’d put her hand against the door and closed her eyes. There were no vibrations to be found. Whatever scoldings were going on in that room were worse than her mother’s usual yells and threats.
They were whispers.
Amity held the rock against her stomach. Small, colorful bugs that had been hiding beneath it fell onto the leaves like M&Ms slipping from a bag. Only these M&Ms had legs and were scurrying for safety. Her stomach rumbled.
Don’t worry, little guys. I’m not here for you. Yeah, I’m starvin’ like Marvin, but I’m not here for you. Not yet… God, I hope it doesn’t come to that.
