by Kate Danley
The door to the bathroom flung open.
"Hey, sis."
Brett, her beautiful brother Brett, her big brother who solved everything, stood before her soaked in blood. Entrails hung around his neck like a scarf. His eyes were glowing yellow. In his right hand, he was carrying a chain saw covered in chunks of flesh. He pulled the cord and it roared to life.
"Who's next?" he asked.
EPISODE 3
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dallas
“Who’s next?” Brett repeated.
Tanis Archer stood, frozen in place. Her darling brother was standing there, eyes glowing yellow, a buzzing chain saw in his hands, bloody entrails flung rakishly about his neck like a scarf. Like when the two of them were kids and they used to play Snoopy and the Red Baron.
“Who did this?” Tanis asked.
Her brother looked at her in stunned surprise. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Yes, it was. But what she saw and what she knew about her brother created an incongruity that she found impossible to grasp. She shook her head.
Brett raised the chain saw above his head. “You’re next!”
She ducked down behind the bed. There was toolbox next to her on the floor, its contents strewn across the carpet. Screwdrivers, pliers, a claw hammer. Her father’s tools. The only things he’d left behind when he walked out on them years ago.
She slid under the bed, praying that her brother could defend her, praying for a clear head that could help her make sense of this atrocity. Brushing against something with her arm, she caught it so it wouldn’t clatter and give her away to the madmen who had no doubt invaded the house. She looked at the object in her hand. It was one of her mother’s many snow globes, a Currier and Ives snowscape in three dimensions, a sight that Tanis, growing up in Texas, had never seen in real life. The globe was leaking down her wrist. Tanis took a closer look at it. Suspended in the liquid, along with the flecks of white glitter, there floated a human eye.
Screaming, Tanis scuttled out from under the bed. In her panic, she grabbed the first thing her hand fell on—a claw hammer. Springing to her feet, she raised the hammer above her head, ready to brain whoever came at her.
There was only Brett. He was standing there, just as she had left him, chain saw above his head, his eyes glowing that unearthly yellow.
“Are they gone?” she asked.
“What?” Brett shouted over the whirring of the electric chain saw.
“Who did this, Brett?” she yelled.
“Duh,” Brett said, rolling his eyes. “Who’s holding the chain saw here?”
The conclusion was obvious, but still Tanis couldn’t wrap her mind around it. How could her brother have done such a thing?
“You?” was all she could say.
Brett shrugged. “I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little chain saw.” He sputtered with laughter just like he used to do when they were kids. “Run and hide. You’re next!”
Tanis didn’t run. She stayed rooted to the floor, her mind demanding an explanation, her hand tightly gripping the hammer. Her brother wasn’t rotting. There was none of the decay on his face or body that would attest to Mr. Dark’s infestation of his spirit. The only thing that looked out of place in her brother’s appearance was the yellow glow of his eyes. And her mother’s guts around his neck.
“Come on! Run!” Brett said, annoyed. “It won’t be any fun if you don’t run!”
He was talking just like he did when they were kids and he wanted to play hide-and-seek
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
“Yep,” he said, “if I can catch you.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you after I’m done,” he said. Then he came at her, chain saw growling.
Turning on her heels, she bolted from the room. Running towards the kitchen, she thought back to days when she used to scoot across the hardwood floor in her socks while Brett used to chase after her, holding a plastic ruler in his hand and pretending it was a gun.
Racing into the kitchen, she heard Brett’s footsteps close behind her and barely had time to circle the table before he was in the room. She looked across the dirty dishes at Brett as he raised the chain saw.
“I have to do this, sis. It’s the only way to save you!” He leaned forward with the chain saw. All at once its whirring stopped and it sputtered to silence.
Brett looked at it, annoyed. He grabbed the electric cord, which dangled loose from the chain saw.
“Goddammit!” he said. “And it’s my own fault, too. I made such a big deal about ‘going green’ and getting an electric chain saw to clean up the yard. Said it was ‘better for the environment’ and would ‘save the earth.’ Ha! Like the earth was ever going to last that long.”
Pulling on the cord till the plug came around the corner, he picked it up and brought it to a power outlet. He was about to slide it in when he stopped for a minute and sat down at the kitchen table, weary.
“Do you mind if we take a breather for a second?” he said. “I’m beat. Do you have any idea how hard it is to dismember a human body? It took the whole day! And I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to put that eye in that snow globe. That took, like, two hours, and in the end it didn’t even look that cool, not really.”
Tanis gripped the back of the kitchen chair with one hand and said nothing. She held the hammer behind her back.
“Sis,” Brett said, “would you mind making me a cup of coffee? I could really use the pick-me-up.”
What could she do? She crossed the kitchen to make her brother a cup of coffee. She set the hammer on the counter.
“How have you been?” she heard herself asking him as she filled the Mr. Coffee and waited for it to perk.
“Not bad,” he said, “I can’t complain.”
“Why did you kill Mom?” she asked, still hoping he’d deny it and give some explanation, however impossible. She’d believe it. She’d have to.
“I had to,” he said simply. “You understand? I saw. I saw what is going to happen. With these eyes.”
Tanis swallowed. “Your eyes are yellow.”
He looked at his refection in the toaster. “Yeah. They’ve been like that. Ever since I could see it. It’s weird, huh?”
“See what?”
“What’s going to happen. To everybody.”
“What? What’s going to happen?”
He shook his head. “Better that you don’t know. Don’t ask. I didn’t want Mom to go through that. So I cut her throat. While she was watching Jeopardy. I waited till she got an answer right, then…It’s the way she wanted to go.”
“Why did you cut her up like that?”
“To make sure she didn’t come back. She wouldn’t have wanted to come back. Not like that.” He looked at his sister full of love. “I’ll do the same for you. You don’t have to worry.”
Picking up the plug, he got up and walked over to the counter, starting to insert it into the power outlet. “Trust me,” he said, “it won’t hurt. Well, maybe a little, at first. But after that—”
Tanis flipped the table and sent it sailing towards Brett. She grabbed her hammer off the counter and ran down the hall to the laundry room. Running to the back door, she grabbed the doorknob and tried to fling it open. It wouldn’t budge. Locked? She grabbed the key off the hook by the window and slid it into the latch. Still the door wouldn’t move. It was then that she saw the nails driven into the doorjamb.
“I nailed it shut,” Brett said from the doorway, over the buzzing of the chain saw. “You can’t get away.”
She turned to face him. She still had the hammer in her hand. She raised it, showing it to him.
“What,” he laughed. “Do you think I’m going to stand here and wait while you pry the nails loose? Come on, just let me kill you.” He said it like he was ten, asking for her extra Eggo at breakfast. “It’s better that way. You have no idea what’s coming. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it with my eyes. I have to do
it.”
She struck him on the forehead with the hammer.
He looked stunned.
She hadn’t hit him hard, not hard enough. And she’d used the face of the hammer, not the claw. She knew she hadn’t stopped him.
He shook his head and looked like he was about to cry, like he did when they were kids and she pulled his hair instead of tickling him. She just wasn’t playing fair.
Then he screamed and lunged at her, the chain saw pointing towards her belly.
She swung again. Brett fell back, the claw of the hammer buried in his temple.
The chain saw clattered to floor, spinning wildly on the linoleum. She kicked it aside and bent over her brother’s body. He was still breathing, but his eyes were rolled back in his head and he was making a gurgling sound in the back of his throat.
His eyes. They weren’t yellow anymore. They were brown and peaceful and they looked like her brother’s eyes. She cradled his head in her lap and gently pried the hammer from his head. It came loose with a gush of blood, which she stopped with a T-shirt from the laundry.
Pulling her cell phone from her pants, she called 911 and said her brother was hurt. Then she bandaged his head as well as she could, made a pillow for him with old linens, walked out the front door, got in her rental car, and started to drive.
She knew she couldn’t stay and give an explanation of that hellish scene in the house to the paramedics or to the police. She couldn’t explain it herself.
She had to go and find the one person in the world who could help her make sense of all this. She shifted behind the wheel and pulled the paper out of her pocket. The one with the smear of blood and phone number on it. The one she’d meant to throw away a dozen times but always saved.
She dialed the number, even though she was driving. Safety wasn’t her primary concern anymore.
The phone rang and a man’s voice answered. “Yeah?”
“Matt Cahill?” Tanis asked.
“Yeah. Who’s this?
“The girl who came back from the dead.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Matt said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean
The wine-dark sea.
Ever since she had read Homer in high school, Heather had wondered what that phrase meant. Achilles, mourning his dead friend Patroclus, had lamented with passionate distress over “the wine-dark sea.” What had that meant? How could the sea be the color of dark wine? Did that mean the water was red? Or was Greek wine actually colored blue, as some scholars had suggested.
Looking out over the ocean, Heather Paxton knew the answer. The sea was red. The red of dark Merlot. The red of blood. Maybe it was the sunrise that was causing this odd optical illusion. Any other time she would have naturally gravitated to such an explanation. Now?
“The ocean is turning to blood,” Captain Marcos said.
He was at her side on the prow of the science vessel looking at the Byzantine ship they were towing, sitting in an ocean of blood.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, playing as always the voice of reason to Marcos’ superstitious ravings. But her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart was pounding like a jackhammer and she was wondering if she reached down and pulled up a handful of that water and put it to her lips, would it taste salty like the sea or salty like blood?
“We’re going to go back to her,” Heather said. By her she meant the Byzantine ship. Heather didn’t usually personify vessels, and it sounded odd as she said it, even to her.
“Can’t I talk you out of it?” Marco said wearily. “Look at the sea. It’s a warning.”
She just turned and walked off. Heather was tired of arguing with Marco about the “evil ship.” She was exhausted with the man’s superstitious belief that the ship was somehow alive.
And besides, she was calling Heather. She caught herself as she thought this. Was the ship calling to her? Of course. It was calling to her as a major historical and scientific discovery. But did it live? Did it breathe? Nonsense, Heather thought as she climbed into the dinghy and told the mate to cast off.
# # #
The ship was huge. Heather had been on it many times, but the same thought kept recurring in her mind. Huge. Far, far bigger than any Byzantine ship ever recorded. Or imagined. It looked like the standard oar warship of the period, a dromon it was called, but increased in size as if by magic or movie special effects.
A dromon usually had fifty or sixty oars—this monstrosity must have had five hundred. She checked her flashlight, took a deep breath, and went below.
She hadn’t entered the bowels of the ship before. Heather had told herself to wait until more equipment arrived, until the ship was safely in harbor at the University in Seattle. But she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to record this marvelous find before…
Before what? Was she letting Captain Marco’s doomsday prophecies affect her?
She turned on the recorder and went down the steps, narrating as she went, partly to calm herself and partly so that her colleagues back in Seattle would understand the marvels she was observing.
They ought to be observing it with her. The video feed ought to be bouncing off the satellite and right into their lab. But the cell phones and communications weren’t working right now. It was as if they were in some kind of vortex, cut off from the outside world. At least, that’s what Captain Marco said. The frightened fool.
She reached the lower deck. Where the oarsmen had sat. And some of them were still sitting.
“Some of the bodies of the oarsmen are still sitting at their stations, in an incredible state of preservation, as you can clearly see.” She kept her voice steady. She was proud of how little of the emotion she was feeling was registering in her tone.
“The Byzantine oarsman was usually a professional. A sailor paid to row and to fight. These men were clearly slaves. You can see how they are chained in place. You can see how some of the chains are broken. There is evidence of a struggle. You might say a battle. Between members of the crew. Perhaps it wasn’t a storm that brought this great ship down. Perhaps it was a slave mutiny. Or some combination of the two.”
She trained her camera on the strange inscriptions that lined the inside of the boat.
“These symbols are very odd. Some of them are Greek. Something about a transaction and infinite wealth. I’ll translate it later. But those inscriptions further down. They aren’t Greek or Latin. They aren’t Egyptian or Sanskrit. They aren’t any language that I recognize. They are in some ancient writing, unknown to modern scholars.”
She heard her voice starting to tremble and she turned off the camera before it could record her breaking down in tears. This was bigger even than she had thought. This would make her, carve her name in eternity, like those carvings in the beams in front of her.
She felt her heart race and tried to calm it, to bring it back to a restful, peaceful pace. Taking a deep breath, she bolted for the stairs and ran up them.
Back to the blue sky and the glassy water, which was no longer red but rather a beaten, steel gray. That was better. She looked up at the sun, riding low on the horizon just above the broken mast, and breathed in the fetid air of the dromon. It seemed to Heather that it smelled like home.
Back on the science vessel, Heather asked Captain Marco if the communications were working. She wasn’t surprised when he said no.
“We’re totally cut off from the world,” Marco said in his usual ominous tone.
“And where are we?”
“According the navigational computers, we’ve traveled five hundred miles in the last hour.”
“I told you, the computers must be malfunctioning. Which direction do the computers say we’re going?”
“Due east.”
“Well, at least we’re towing the dromon in the right direction.”
“You don’t understand, do you?” Marco was deadly serious, as always. “The dromon, as you call it—it’s towing us.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Bronx, New York
Tanis had never been to New York City before, and what knowledge she had of the city came mostly from TV shows. But the Bronx didn’t look like Sex and the City, and this particular section of Prospect Avenue didn’t look at all like Gossip Girl. Vacant lots boarded over with graffiti-decorated pieces of plywood and busted-up apartment buildings with barred windows crowded around Tanis in the dark night like no sight Carrie Bradshaw had ever seen.
The narrow street was so full of potholes and warning cones that driving down it would have been like navigating a slalom track. Tanis wasn’t driving, though. Once Matt Cahill had told her to meet him in New York City, she had driven as far as Arkansas, ditched the rental car, and taken the train from there. Now here she was in the Bronx in a neighborhood called Crotona.
That was a Greek name, Tanis reflected, thinking of her father, George Toxotes, and her own black hair and olive complexion. The bitches used to call her wetback and spic and Tanis used to yell back at them that she wasn’t Mexican, she was Greek, goddammit, and proud of it! Not that she would have minded being Mexican or that she was particularly fond of being Greek, but she doted on her father, and anything he was, she wanted to be. Until he left them. Until he cut them off entirely from his life.
She shook her head and concentrated on the task at hand. Meeting Matt Cahill.
Across the torn-up street was a small community garden, a one-lot plot of land behind a chain-link fence surrounded by razor wire and urban decay. A small green sign on the fence read “Garden of Happiness.” Tanis didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
