Terminal Island

by Walter Greatshell

  The angel makes a gesture of kissing or blowing into the sculpture, and clasps it to her breast. Holding it there, she rises slowly upward and out of sight. The light goes with her, abandoning the grisly, ruined stage to utter darkness.

  The curtain draws shut.

  Henry imagines that this is the end of the show, and is frustrated to the point of desperation when no one moves.

  “Is that it?” he demands drunkenly.

  “Shh!”

  The four bloodied stagehands reappear. Now they are wearing white aprons and carrying a vase with a large white flower, a covered silver platter, and a table and chair. Acting like fussy waiters, they quickly set the table at the edge of the stage and stand back as the mare-woman appears. She is haughty as a queen, regally allowing them to seat her and then holding them back with an upraised finger as if to savor the last moment of anticipation…then lowering the finger.

  With a grandiose flourish they remove the lid of the platter. To Henry it is a bit of an anticlimax—sitting on the plate is the bison’s head.

  The horse-woman stabs into the head with her knife and fork…and the head screams. Strange, discordant music accompanies the screaming, accelerating in tempo and volume as the head not only cries out, but writhes and bleeds—blood wells up from the platter, spilling over the edge of the table into the woman’s satin-gowned lap. She is unfazed by the mess or the dreadful screaming, serenely cutting off a piece of meat and eating it.

  The screaming stops. She dabs her masked mouth, then contemptuously tosses the bloody napkin on the table. A low drumbeat can be heard. The waiters stiffen, standing bolt upright and looking out over the heads of the audience. The mare-woman rises to her feet.

  It is the bull-man. He bursts through the double doors of the theater, gold horns aflame, holding up the glowing white figurine in one hand and pointing accusingly at the woman with the other. Trumpets blare as he strides down the center aisle, trailing smoke and sparks.

  The stagehands seem to visibly shrink, trying to skulk away, but there is a deafening crackle of electricity and all four abruptly jerk up short like marionettes, jets of blue flame shooting from the tops of their heads. With a horrible screeching sound they wilt, smoking, to the floor.

  Standing in her bloodstained gown, the mare-woman doesn’t flinch, but awaits the onslaught with grim fury of her own, looking imperiously down as the bull-man approaches. He stops before her, chest heaving with rage…and then seems to weaken. His horns sputter out, and the pale light within the figurine goes dark. As if burdened with invisible chains, his arms slowly fall to his sides; his shoulders slump and his great head tilts back as if in weary supplication to some nonexistent deity. It is as if he cannot remember what he came here to do.

  The mare-woman looks at him coldly, unrelenting, in a posture of icy dignity. Fully composed, she tosses her head scornfully and turns away, leaving him standing there at the foot of the stage. His stature seems to have remarkably shrunk.

  The lights go down.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ACT FIVE:

  RESURRECTION

  The curtain opens upon black-light again, but the forest has been dismantled, the scene of slaughter cleaned up. Only the bison’s fluorescent white skull remains, littering a barren hill that is the antithesis of the earlier day-lit grassy mound. A single stark tree marks the spot of the murder. Rising out of the background is a diseased-looking moon, oppressively huge.

  A slim, nude figure sits in the branches of the tree, silhouetted against the moon’s poisonous green glow. Her back is to the audience, but Henry can tell it is the same girl who was raped; the one who gave birth to the horned child. The wind moans as if across barren plains.

  “Iacchus!” a deep voice shouts from offstage. “Iacchus! Where is your sister? I know you are hiding her from me! Where is she?”

  The bull-man appears, picking his way along the path as if following vague directions. He is still diminished; not nearly the terrifying specter he first appeared. In his hand is the ceramic figure. “There you are,” he says. As he approaches the girl, she weightlessly drops down and turns to face him. There is a loud rattlesnake hiss.

  She has no face; only a black pit.

  The minotaur climbs halfway up to her, careful not to intrude too close, holding up the white enamel figurine as some kind of peace offering. Her void of a face stares blankly down at him for long minutes. Impatiently, he ventures nearer, trying to elicit some response. As if coaxing a zombie, he gently takes her limp hand and places the figure into it, folding her pliable fingers around the slender base. She does not flinch or drop it.

  Encouraged, he takes her frail body and lightly sits her down on the black grass, kneeling beside her and nudging her legs apart. Then, with agonizing care, he guides her arm so that the statue’s head is pressed into her crotch. As it goes in, the bull-man trembles with the strain—there is a flicker of lightning, a delayed beat of thunder. He pushes it in deeper, her head lolling against his shoulder as if unconscious. A low, humming sound becomes audible, the swelling vibration of an approaching train.

  The statuette slips in all the way to its base, and the bull-man tenderly lays the girl on her back. Then, like an exhausted athlete, he falls back on his haunches and takes a great gulp of air, as if he had been holding his breath. With his muzzle turned upward to the heavens, he doesn’t see the girl move. She is too fast.

  With a single unhurried motion, she removes the bloodied figurine from within herself as if removing a dagger from its sheath, raises it high over the awful void of her face, and with both hands plunges it with savage force into the bull-man’s right thigh.

  BWAAA!

  With a harsh epiphany of trumpets, the minotaur falls backward, clutching his leg in agony. There is no sign of the statuette; it is completely embedded, more deeply than it was in her. Stage-smoke billows up, and ichor black as crude oil erupts from between the bull-man’s groping hands, splattering and fouling the luminous snowy-white of his head and body. For a moment it’s hard to see anything. With a volley of lightning and thunder, gusts of rain begin to lash down.

  As her father continues to writhe, the hollow-faced girl serenely threads an enormous needle and then crawls like a spider over his body. Straddling his leg, she jams the needle into the black lip of the wound, causing him to spasm backward, his hands fluttering in agonizing pain. Then she begins to sew, closing the figurine up inside him. Her posture is brightly industrious; if she had a mouth, she would be whistling. As she continues, he seems to fall into a stupor.

  The rain and noise gradually die out. Faint light begins to come up, the dishwater hues of pre-dawn, canceling out some of the black-light and revealing hints of true color, the welcome drabness of reality. The moon fades from view.

  Finishing up, the girl rises from her stitching as from a job well done. Looking appraisingly at the sky, she gets down on her hands and knees and seems to sniff the ground, probing for something. All of a sudden she burrows headfirst into the black earth. Sinuous as a lizard, she squirms underground in a series of thrusting, wriggling pulsations, driving up a mound of soil behind her heels. In a matter of seconds she is gone.

  The bull-man—her father—lies still.

  For a long time nothing seems to happen except that overcast light slowly comes up. It is a bleak scene: the muddy hill, the lone tree, and the polluted body of the minotaur. Then, so gradual as to be almost unnoticeable, there is a change in his wounded leg. The bloody thigh with its zigzag black stitches is growing, swelling. There is that rumbling freight-train sound again. As the leg bloats, Henry can hear excited whispering around him in the audience: “Shh! Look! Look!”

  The leg straightens and pops rigid from the pressure, and suddenly the bull-man awakens, roaring with terrific pain. Steam shoots from beneath his body, and hairy roots come snaking out of the ground to pin him down.

  BWAAA!—now it appears that there is something moving within the drum-taut skin of his thigh, a rou
nd, tumorous bulge growing outward as through a membrane. As the flesh stretches and becomes translucent, the shape of a face can be seen pushing through—a childlike head with glowing red nubs for horns. In awe, people begin to chant, “ZAH-GRAY-OOS! ZAH-GRAY-OOS! ZAH-GRAY-OOS!”

  A sinkhole opens beneath the bull-man and he falls out of sight. A second later the hole erupts in a pillar of fire at least ten feet high, its radiant white heat reaching to the back of the theater.

  BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!—the theater goes pitch-dark as the last chord is struck, ringing to infinity like the last bar of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

  Suddenly in the dark there’s an arm around Henry’s neck, choking him.

  He’s too weak and doped up to put up much of a fight. Powerful hands pin his arms and a cloth gag is jammed in his mouth. As someone binds his wrists and ankles with twine, a burlap bag is roughly thrust over his head. He is carried up the aisle.

  What now? he thinks, weeping helplessly. He tries to scream against the gag, “You fuckers!” —but it is muffled to nothing.

  He feels himself being carried out of the dark theater and downstairs to the lobby, then around a corner into a smaller room, then down a second, more cramped flight of stairs and finally into a dank, uncarpeted space where the sound of shuffling feet echoes off the walls. There is a bass thrum of machinery. Through the burlap hood he can see twinkles of flame.

  They sit him on the cold concrete floor and hog-tie his wrists to his ankles. His hood is removed.

  Henry looks blearily around. He is in a large basement of some kind—a cavernous room with stone walls and a low ceiling of plumbing and heating conduits, everything furred black with greasy filth, the pipes densely interwoven as the roots of an enormous tree. The tangled machinery glimmers redly overhead, lit by torches mounted to either side of a massive steel door. An industrial dungeon.

  Around him are at least a dozen other people, all gagged and bound, staring around in logy wonder. They are strangers to Henry, and seemingly to each other as well; there is no sense of fellowship or recognition. Like him, they are all doped up. The whole group has been propped in a semicircle facing the imposing door. Some are trembling with fear or cold.

  We look like a bunch of POWs, Henry thinks.

  For a long time nothing happens.

  The floor is hard, and Henry’s tailbone begins to ache. It’s a bad position to be stuck in: with his wrists and ankles tied together, he can’t shift his weight as he’d like—the only option is to let himself fall over, and he won’t do that. He is still dizzy from the drugs, so it’s hard to stay alert.

  There is a sudden loud clanking of bolts and the door is heaved open. It is fiery-bright inside, and two men in coal-black leotards and blackened faces emerge from this furnace to grab a man in the first row and drag him through the door. It slams heavily shut behind them.

  It was so sudden, Henry doesn’t know what to make of it. Those men looked exactly like the weird stagehands from the play—if they weren’t actually the same ones. Is this part of the show, too? He looks around at the other captives, trying to make significant eye contact, but they’re far away, lost in their own dark musings.

  The door crashes open again, the creepy mimes popping out to drag another victim inside. Like the first man, this one does not struggle, going limply to whatever fate lies within that burning room. But this time, just before the door closes, Henry hears a gag-muffled scream—a scream of total blubbering terror.

  “Behold Iacchus,” a powerful voice says.

  The scream is cut short.

  Shit, Henry thinks. I gotta get outta here.

  Trying to clear his head, he takes a few deep breaths and scoots sideways, bumping into the prisoner on his right. The man looks at him with alarm, and Henry indicates as best he can that they should work together to undo each other’s bindings. The man watches Henry’s performance with maddening incomprehension, as if escape is an alien concept. Frustrated, Henry looks down the row for any sign of understanding, but the other men are either staring at him in the same stupefied way or completely out of it.

  The door opens again and another man is taken.

  Over the course of the next…half hour? Hour?—he can’t see his watch—Henry works on persuading the men and on loosening his own bindings, twisting his hands every which way to try and attack the knots. Every five or ten minutes he is forced to stop and play it cool as their captors select another victim.

  No good. The twine is too tight, and the more Henry struggles the tighter the knots become—these creeps really know how to tie them. The only other alternative is to cut it, but there’s no sharp edge of any kind to rub against.

  Finally it is down to him and one other man. Henry implores the guy to help him, making what sounds he can to get across the urgency of the situation, but the man is a zombie. Henry even tries to force help on him, clutching at his bindings, but the idiot catches him by surprise with a head-butt to the temple that almost knocks Henry senseless. When the door is flung open again and the man dragged through, Henry watches with a sense of furious contempt: Good choice, asshole.

  As a last shot Henry squirms across to the wall, trying to find a protruding edge of stone that he can scrape against. Anything. He does manage to loosen his gag and goes into an all-or-nothing frenzy of contortions hoping something else will give way. The bonds are so agonizingly tight from his efforts that all circulation is cut off, but at this point...

  It is his turn.

  The door is flung open and they come for him. Henry fights as best he can, shouting, “Don’t touch me! Back off!” but they grab him under the armpits and haul him through like a piece of furniture.

  Entering that smaller chamber, Henry’s frantic gaze is drawn to the source of the firelight: three flames burning in the eyes and mouth of what looks like a huge, hideous jack-o-lantern. It is the mask again, that same grotesque face he first saw as a child, carved in stone beneath the wharf, and then again at the head of the procession outside his hotel. This one is made of hammered metal joined with rivets, scorched by fire. The sight causes him to gasp, “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Iacchus,” someone corrects.

  At least ten feet high, the leering mask is bright red and dripping, its tusks freshly painted with blood. The two flames in its eyes are propane torches; the fire in its mouth an open furnace, an incinerator, through which Henry can see a clawed hand charred black. There is a deafening roar of ventilation fans.

  The great mask is an altar, a low table at its base piled with offerings. An artful arrangement of nature’s bounty sits waiting to be burned: hearts and flowers, meat and veggies—the white horns of Angel’s Trumpet. The glistening collage of flesh is weirdly elegant by firelight, like a painted still life of overripe fruit. The floor before the altar is smeared with blood, quantities of which have been collected in a trough—the better to brush it on the idol. There is also a bloody sledgehammer and a medieval selection of cutting tools.

  On the shelf is room for one more heart.

  Henry struggles like an animal, screaming in wild-eyed rage and despair at this last second of life. Then someone grabs his head and holds it steady. A brutal hand is clapped over his eyes, but between the fingers Henry glimpses something bright and sharp coming at him…

  Then he is gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ACT SIX:

  SALVATION

  It takes him a while to come back. For a long time there is only the blackness of the grave—Henry can’t think or move. Is it over? Where am I?

  At first it is soothing, womblike. He gradually senses heavy fabric encasing him like a cocoon, and the weight of earth pressing in. When he tries to turn his head, dirt crackles down along folds in the stiff cloth. There is only the slightest space above his mouth from which to draw shallow breaths.

  Henry shudders, waking in abject panic. I’m buried alive! Uncontrollable spasms wrack his whole body and he starts hyperventilating, thoughts careening wildly. Ruby! Moxie!
The panic attack comes in waves, rising to peaks of hysterical frenzy and then settling into troughs of hopeless, sobbing resignation. How long will it take to suffocate? The waiting is intolerable, and there is not a single thing he can do about it. Let me die, he prays. Take me quickly.

  Weak from exhaustion, Henry hears something. There is a scraping sound from above—the sound of someone digging. All at once he can feel it! Hands burrowing down to him, pushing off the heavy mounds of soil. The thick canvas is peeled back.

  Weeping gratefully, Henry shields his eyes to see the beautiful face of a child eclipsing the light.

  It’s the horned boy. There is a golden haze around him, a tunnel of light, and in this brilliant glare his nubs are glowing, his body sun-shot and nearly translucent, ember-red at the extremities. He is wearing a sort of loincloth, and his hair is a mop of copper-bright dreadlocks. The eyes gleaming in that elfin face are solemn and glad.

  “What is this?” Henry asks, his voice a cracked whisper.

  Smiling, the boy takes Henry’s hand and strains backward, pulling him up. The earth is light and dry. Henry accepts the help and shakily rises out of his grave. As he struggles to his feet, there is a loud rushing noise like surf—what sounds like an approaching wall of water. Henry cringes in fear…then stands straight.

  It is the sound of applause. A standing ovation.

  Beyond the bright lights is a crowded auditorium—Henry is on stage.

  The set around him is a field of shallow graves, burial mounds exactly like the one from which he has just emerged, against a backdrop of sky and clouds.

  The boy moves on. Leading Henry by the hand, he stops beside the next grave, pondering it, then abruptly drops to his knees and starts clearing away the loose dirt. In a moment he exposes the tarp and shoves his arm in. Drums begin pounding. Up to his elbow, the boy strains backward, pulling something out of the earth.