by Aaron Dries
She limped back to the fallen tree, to the strange animal she couldn’t name. Its eyes peered up at her and she wished it would look away, that more than anything. Her fingers gripped the rock’s jagged surface as she lifted it high over her head. Amity bit her lower lip.
You can’t back out of this now. You got to do what’s right. Do to it what you would want someone to do to you. Mercy.
Mercy.
Dirt from the underside of the rock pattered across her head. Her body rocked to and fro under the weight, forearms quivering.
The jungle grew still for her. Winds died. Both bird and butterfly were nowhere to be seen.
It took a great deal of will power to do what needed to be done. But she did it.
It all came back to her the moment the skull shattered, when the animal’s forelegs thrashed for the final time. Her mind kicked.
She saw the decrepit man in the cave with the crabs in his cancers, creeping toward her on his laborer’s pick, remembered the way he had reached at her with shale-claws. There had been a second person then, whose shadow had been cast across the wall of stories.
Amity had spun around and seen his form: the outline of dreadlocks writhing about his head like Medusa’s snakes, two eyes glimmering within all that shadow. This stranger had held out his hand and blown a Eucharist of mushroom-scented dust into her face.
And then the darkness.
She dropped the rock and stumbled away from the dead animal. The island’s stillness evaporated and the wind picked up again, swirling the fog into thinning and thickening curls. Birds dived from tree to tree, casting shadows over the ground.
It’s not just me, Caleb, Tobias and the other tourists out here. There’s other people. People who were either too stubborn or too damn afraid to kill themselves like all the others.
I’ve got a savior out here somewhere.
The sensation of being watched returned. The jungle itself peered down on her with pitying eyes, just as she had peered and cast pity over the trapped animal. Her headache flared again, and yet it was nothing compared to this new unease.
Why did the stranger save me only to set me loose again?
Her heart started to race again. The heat was more cloying.
Maybe I’m wrong on that last point. Maybe I’m not alone.
Amity raced ahead, past the fallen tree, and watched a bamboo field emerge from the fog. Each ridged stalk swayed under the bulk of its foliage. The ground was soft with pine needles and moss. It would be so easy to lie down and fall asleep against it, to simply give in and let the island take her at last.
“No,” Amity said. The vibration in her throat was silent music to unhearing ears.
Her jaws were clenched. At the foot of the field there were snapped, scattered stalks of bamboo. They were white and bonelike, and the piece she picked up felt incredibly strong despite being so light, just as the stick she’d dragged into the cave had been. This new find was well over a yard long and was tapered to a sharpened point, perfect for swishing through the spiderwebs strung between the trees. But then again, she imagined it would come in handy should anything more threatening dare come her way.
Before continuing on, Amity turned around and looked back at the way she’d come. It was hard to see with all the fog, but she could have sworn there were shapes moving back there. Scavenger shapes.
Wild dogs teeming with fleas and dribbling ropes of saliva. Twinkling teeth and eyes rolling around to peer at her before the feed.
Amity could hear their growls.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the Night, the Shark
1
The night before. Her exhaustion was as thick and clinging as the darkness.
She came to a thin stream, lit up by sporadic twinkles of lightning, and rested. She sensed that she had been here before. It was hard to tell if the imprints in the mud were footprints made by herself before or by an animal. Either or, they were full of water, struck by rain slicing through the trees, bubbling and spitting like oil in a pan. She drank from it. Her face hurt, pounded as a bruise will pound. Only it wasn’t just her face, it was everywhere. In every limb of her naked, shivering body.
The cold was inside as well as out.
She lifted her head and saw a universe above, strangled by tree-hands. She bathed in the tears it shed. All around her the island continued to scream its song, as she sat there in the dead water. Every time she gritted her teeth, the jagged shards of broken bottle dug deeper. When she touched her upper lips with a fingertip, she felt points through the flesh.
The woman who used to be Susan Sycamore had never thought it possible to be so tired. It was like insomnia, that screeching urge to sleep despite the breaking point nudging you awake every time you threatened to dip below. No comfort. No light.
There were moments when the shark receded in a way she never thought it would, and the woman she once was would clamber to the surface. It took even more energy to keep her under control.
Insects crawled over her. Played in her wounds.
There was a wet rattle in her throat, the sound of sickness breeding sickness.
She spat into her palm and in a flash of lightning saw a dollar of blackish flesh. Sycamore didn’t know if it was hers or if it belonged to something she’d eaten. It washed away and sank in the water. It had weight.
There was no right way to go; there was only the urge to keep moving. If you stop, you’ll die, she thought. If you stop, the hunger will take over and the pain will getchya. It’s trolling you now. Can’t you see? So she stumbled on.
An image slipped through: of Susan in her little Volvo in Crouch End, edging into a drive-through car wash. There had been the suds spray, a speckling of color turning to slush. And then came the washers. They thumped against the car, against the glass. She’d been afraid of them for some reason. They slapped and scrubbed like something wild. Fingers clamped against the wheel. Knuckles turned white.
The jungle around her was just the same. Every shadow was full of leathery leaves sluicing up and down her body. They grabbed her, wrapped around her. She had to push them aside, sometimes ripping at them to break through. It wasn’t enough. The jungle wanted her, and worse, her fatigue was letting it win.
Her hand reached up into the air, the tendons so tight it was hard to make out where arm began and vine ended. The island pulled her under.
2
Susan Sycamore holds the gun in her right hand. It’s a semiautomatic, sleek and brutal. It’s heavy—not just with the weight of metal but also with intent. She is about to open the world with a wound that will never heal. The halls of her school will run red.
She drives to work and parks in her normal space. Her handbag is slung over one shoulder, a briefcase in one hand—she looks just as she does on any other normal day. She passes the kids running through the schoolyard gates with an enthusiasm that will fade, especially after the first class bell rings. Her high-heeled shoes clink against the hallway linoleum, the clickedy-clack of normality, of sowing what you reap. In the staff room she sits with the other teachers, a little more indifferent than usual. She speaks to her coworkers in brief, birdlike sentences. Squawks of acknowledgement and half-laughs at their stupid jokes. They all think they are so clever, so unique, but she knows that they all look the same on the inside. They are just guts bound in skin, with a light burning somewhere down beneath the shit.
First period goes as planned. Her writing on the whiteboard is sloppy. It’s cold in here. The heaters must not be working. The kids act as they do any other day, except for one or two who stare at her as though they know they are going to die.
The walls are covered in drawings on cheap budget-cuts butcher paper. These are the My Dream Holiday assignments that the kids turned in at the end of the prior week and hung with pride. They ripple against the wall as though touched by ghostly fingers, so she guesses the heating must be on; she alone feels the chill.
Sycamore glares at the drawings again. Skeletal renderi
ngs of children riding bikes and playing football. The colors are bright. But not as bright as the exploded faces bursting across them.
She can smell the gun smoke, even though she doesn’t remember the semiautomatic going off. The surviving children scatter, stumbling out into the hall. Some of the My Dream Holiday drawings tumble to the floor under the weight of bone fragments and brains, a red carpet for her grand appearance. Her heels do not click anymore. She is barefoot now.
The dream is always like this.
She goes barefoot into the corridor with the weapon still in her hand. The transition from being inside the classroom and outside strips her of her clothes, and she stands there under the flickering fluorescent lights as bare as the day she was born.
3
Her eyes opened to blackness. It was still night, and she was still living, even though the dream had died. It had fully slipped away by the time she sat upright. Sleeping helped a little, helped to tease her with energy enough to stand. It was easy now, or at least by comparison.
Things got a bit hairy back there for a while.
No, not hairy. Leathery. A shiver scuttled through her.
The jungle vine and leaves and branches that had wrapped around her before the dream had fallen away, were flaccid in the moonlit curvature of her muscles. To say that she was replenished would be an exaggeration, and she was convinced there was still more fuel in her to burn.
Got to keep on moving. Got to do what I’m meant to do.
It didn’t take long, though, for this confidence to waver. A sugar high at its peak, and the drop on the other side was severe. Every step she took was closely followed by a stumble; behind every breath there was a choke creeping up on her.
“No.” Gasp. “No, not ah-ghan.”
Troll. You have to find more food. If you stop, you’ll die. You know this. You’ve always known this.
Now that the rain had stopped, the mosquitos had returned, and she could feel their stingers sucking away at her. Susan could feel their stingers.
Her hands slapped at them, and for every insect exploding under her palms there were five more swooping in to take its place. It was like walking through a field of hypodermic needles, each drawing blood through diseased little points. Something snagged in her head.
It was the memory of taking out the trash, racing along the side of her apartment block as though trying to outrun the trail of bin juice splashing across the tiles. She’d reached the general waste bins near the fence, facing a street that always seemed wet with rain, and had seen the spiderweb strung between the two dead trees. The spider was nowhere to be seen, but the silvery threads were freckled with beads of water. One droplet fell to the ground and she followed its path, watched it splash against a hypodermic needle lying on the tiles.
“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” she had said aloud. The bin juice, stinking and warm, was pooling between her toes. And yet it was what she thought it was.
A junkie’s throwaway, right there in front of her.
Her mind told her to say things like, “I could have just stepped on that! What if one of the kids had come out here and trod on it? What diseases would they have contracted? AIDS? Hep B, or C, or whichever one dealt out that rumored death sentence?”
These were sane and rational thoughts, thoughts that any sane and rational mind would listen to.
Susan Sycamore had ignored them. But she did toss the garbage; to have left it there in front of the bins would have attracted squirrels or maybe even one of those foxes people sometimes reported seeing in the city. She wasn’t silly.
Then she picked up the needle by its plunger and skittered back into the apartment block. Her movements were conspiratorial, as though she were a secret agent in charge of important documents, not a housewife with a used, blood-speckled syringe in her hand.
She had no idea why she kept it. Just as she had no idea why she sometimes took it out of the handbag she kept in the crawlspace behind the wall and held it to her husband’s face as he slept.
No idea.
Moonlight splashed the ground in an atlas of blue continents filled with civilizations of swarming mosquitos. That wasn’t all. She saw mud. It was everywhere.
She bent down and scooped up handfuls of it, pressed the cool muck to her breasts. A little yelp escaped her; it was Susan’s voice, distorted by the mosquitos inside the glass-toothed mouth. Fingers sluiced wet soil over skin until she was covered from head to toe. The insects that had been too greedy to fly away were drowned, and those that had lost the sense of heat radiating from the flesh beneath gave up and become one with the cloud dancing through the trees.
The new cool sunk in. Her smile speared her gums; the pain was sweet.
Mosquito wings continued their electric whine until it was more than just a whine. It was a plea.
Please come down again. Please. Please. I’ve missed you.
The sugar high ended and the ground kissed her good night.
4
“Be my little superstar.
When day turns to night.
Be my little superstar.
Shed a little light.”
Her third child comes screeching into the world and tears her up. Sycamore knows she’ll need stitches, and the pain is so bad she blacks out. Only no, it isn’t black. It’s blue. Sand swirls around her in delicate, slow-moving somersaults. It’s beautiful here. She’s alone and there isn’t all the screams of children, or the encouraging, clenching hand of her husband, whom she hates more than anyone else on this planet for sticking his cock in and out of her, over and over again, trying to fuck her into some kind of meaning.
The ocean is calm.
Things are good here. Home.
She thought she knew what that was. Home was safety. It was her husband, leaning in close to give her a wet one on the lips. Maybe she had loved him once, way back in the dark of his college room, beneath the sheets, even though she sensed that he sensed something evolving within her, even then. He’d gazed at her with some kind of understanding, a look that seemed to say, I know I’m playing with fire here, but I’m going to do it anyway.
Every burn an understanding. A gift.
Burning. Light. A half-remembered song from her childhood, something her mother had sung to her. It comes to her at night, sometimes.
“Be my little superstar…”
5
“…When day turns to night.
Be my little superstar.
Shed a little light.”
The words jingled through her head as the world began to wrench itself back into focus again. It was still night, but the moon was alabaster bright. She lifted her face off the hardening mud and felt the layer of grime cracking across her face. The humidity was back in full force.
She pushed onward and stopped when she came to the trees where her victims were hung.
They are snagged and speared by branches. Hung like pictures on a wall. A testament to all of the good times, captured neatly in a frame.
Her hands were stretched up before her. She formed a rectangle with her thumbs.
Click.
“Be my little superstar,” she sang, her throat hoarse and dry. “When day turns to night. Be my little superstar—”
The corpses begin to burn for her, their light shining up through their cuts and slashes. There is the girl she hit with the brick. The child she snatched up here in the jungle. There are the two overweight American women and the waspy man she trolled in Nicaragua, her final stop before landing in Thailand.
They are all here.
“Shed a little light.”
She could taste them even though her tongue was numb. Each had been different. Unique. Each had made her wonderful. It reminded her that there was still so much light yet to be swallowed on the island, so much more illumination to be shed.
The junkie’s needle.
The plan to slaughter her family, those seven hidden letters.
The recurring dream of taking a gun to work, of
making the halls of the school run red.
All of the others whom she had consumed. All of those long hours spent trolling.
What were all of their shimmering life-lights revealing to her? What did they illuminate? She had wondered about this before, but the question had never been more persistent than it was now.
There was no answer.
The light could shine as long and hard as it wanted to, but it would only ever shine on farther layers of nothing-upon-nothing. She’d long ago given up on finding out why she did the things she did, of discovering why her hunger had no end.
She watches her victims melt into the dark until there is little more to see than the moon-washed branches they had been hung in. The shark moves toward, among them. There is more light out there somewhere. The running girl.
Out there.
I’ll never give up. Never. I’m gonna make it last. Gonna make it last rea-aaaaalll good.
The air thickened with fog sometime between then and dawn.
6
The birds and other animals sang for the new sun, perhaps with gratitude. They had escaped the fate of the food chain for yet another night.
Ca-caw! Ca-caw!
I live. I live.
Most of the mosquito cloud had dissipated, replaced now by moths dodging trees, grasshoppers escaping the shark’s swishing legs. Everything smelled like wet woodchips, the kind someone she’d once known had sprinkled in a square patch of garden in their apartment block’s shared yard. It was rank, honeyed.
The land sloped beneath her feet. She stepped over rocks covered with moss. To the shark, the ground itself was indefinite and inexact, as though carved from barely controlled fear.
The shark’s senses jackhammered.
A hiss threaded through broken bottle teeth, bringing with it a fine red mist.
