by J. S. Brent
“That’s the idea,” said Devin. “Get out of here! Get lost!”
My blood roared in my ears like thunder. Conscious that I was probably about to lose my job, I threw down my trowel and ran after the stranger and the amulet.
The emerald couldn’t have flown far, but the pathless wood was hard to navigate and even the man himself temporarily seemed to have been swallowed up by it. The contrast between the dry dust of the money pit and the leafy darkness of the wood could not have been more definite; the moment I crossed the threshold, I felt as though I had traded one world for another. The laughter of my coworkers watching me run off in the direction of a strange man suddenly faded into silence. I was keenly aware of the sound of my own breathing, of the knocking of my heart against my rubs, of the chirping of bugs in the undergrowth, of the creaking of trees and the rustle of branches and the low, distant rumble of unseen creatures.
Something was stirring in a cluster of trees to my right. Someone was mumbling and whispering and swearing to himself. Someone was wading through ferns and brushing aside heavy limbs struck down by lighting and reading imprints in the dirt like an amateur detective. The figure drew closer and closer until he emerged from the cluster and jumped back with a startled expression at the sight of me.
“What do you want?” he said coldly.
This wasn’t the welcome I had expected, though come to think of it I wasn’t sure why. “Are you this contemptuous of everyone?” I asked.
“Only those who deserve it.”
“What about people who are trying to help you?”
“No one wants to help me, sweetie,” he said, beginning to turn away.
Ignoring the condescending nickname, I said, “Maybe if you gave them a chance.”
He turned back round, looking at me with a surprised and aghast expression. “Are you just going to stand there and lecture me about how to conduct my social life, or do you want to actually do something useful?”
“That’s why I’m here.” Must every man be so stubborn? “Look, I’m sorry for how my boss acted. If it helps, I think he’s kind of a jerk, too. He had no right to throw away your amulet.”
“Does he push everyone around like that? Do you let him push you around?”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
“You could report the bastard. You could quit.”
It was my turn to stare at him disbelievingly. “Are you lecturing me about how to do my job now?”
He shrugged, wiping his sweaty brow with one hand. “Well, now that we’ve gotten the introductions out of the way, suppose you help me find this thing.”
It was a sign of his charm that, although we had spent the last 10 minutes arguing, I followed him instinctively and without any further questions into the deep woods. He spoke the suggestion with such authority that it never occurred to me to do anything other than obey. I managed to forget my annoyance at his condescension and lack of gratitude as we stepped over tall grasses, some of which he was able to push out of the way while others he hacked apart with a gleaming silver machete.
“If this is going to work,” he said, “you’ll need to actually listen. When I tell you to do something, you do it immediately. No questions asked.”
“Got it,” I said, resisting the temptation to be sarcastic.
“I’ve scoped out this whole wood. To our north, which is where we’re headed, it extends all the way to the beach on the other end of the island. Legend says the wood is full of natural abnormalities: walking lizards, dog men, tropical penguins, glowing land fish…”
“Have you actually seen any of these creatures?” I asked skeptically.
“No, but I have seen bears. Bears are a problem all over the island, but they tend to congregate here. I think that’s why my grandfather—”
But he never finished the sentence, for at that moment a massive brown boar suddenly lunged at him as though appearing straight out of thin air. With an ear-shattering yelp the boar leapt onto his chest, knocking him over, and continued to root around like a dog in search of food while I looked on, transfixed and helpless.
“Don’t just stand there, princess!” the man yelled. “Help me!”
“HOW?” I replied, feeling oddly upset by the suggestion.
The boar was now crawling up his neck and onto his mouth, threatening him with its enormous tusks. He managed to push it out of the way just enough to say, “My machete!”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Under me!”
He was, indeed, lying on top of the machete, whose gleaming blade protruded out from beneath his back. I quickly realized I wouldn’t be able to retrieve it without getting it out from under him. This was currently impossible because of the creature scurrying around on top of him.
“I can’t do it,” I said, tears of despair and fear filling my eyes. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” he balked. “I’m dying here!”
“You’ll have to turn over, or roll over, or something. I can’t get the boar out from under you.”
“Look, I don’t think you realize how heavy this thing is. Even if I could roll over, which I can’t, his tusks are just going to slice right through me. This is all up to you.”
I stood there for a moment, panicking and feeling stupid. This wasn’t how it happened in all the adventures I had ever read, where heroines faced down monsters and hobos with confidence and bravery, never a hair out of place. They would fire the pistol, send the arrow flying and the creature would be defeated and they would make a quip and keep moving. But no quips were forthcoming and the adventure was just as likely to end in both of our deaths, out here in a faraway jungle with no one to mourn or bury us or even acknowledge that we had ever lived.
“Don’t think about it!” said the stranger in a strangled voice. “Just do it!”
In spite of his earlier warnings I kicked at the man’s torso, hoping to turn him over. But he and the boar together were too big and they barely budged. The boar gave a low snarl as it licked his face with its long tongue. Next I tried to grab the machete out from under him, but this failed as well, because he was lying on top of the sheath and the only possible way for me to pick it up was by the blade, which sliced at my hands and fingers.
I was now covered in blood, and, what was worse, my rustling around under the man’s body had drawn the attention of the boar, who suddenly shifted and left his chest, scurrying after me. I screamed and ran in the opposite direction, as fast as I could go, but the boar was faster still, and seizing me by the legs with its tusks, knocked me over. I stumbled and fell onto the hard ground with a loud thud. This was it, this was the end of me, nothing heroic, just the embarrassment of running in terror and the humiliation of being cut open by a creature that came no higher than my knees…
And then it gave a final loud squeal, and was dead. The stranger stood behind it clutching the machete with a savage look on his face. The machete now poked through its ribs.
Gallantly he came over and offered me his hand.
“There are certain things that make you friends for life,” he said. “I’d say this is one of them.”
“I’ll have to know your name first,” I said, gazing down at the boar’s lifeless body.
“Henry,” he said. “My name is Henry.”
“I’m Olivia.”
* * *
We eventually recovered the stone, having followed Henry’s scientific projections of where it was likely to be given its trajectory. We did a sweep of the area, beginning from opposite ends and meeting in the middle, and I had recovered it within a few minutes. I handed it to him, though I suspect he could see the hungry look I gave it as I let it go.
“What is it, anyway?” I asked. “The stone, I mean.”
“It’s hugely important to me,” said Henry cryptically. “I wouldn’t have cared if it had been anything else.”
“Hypothetically, if I bought you dinner, would you tell me about it?”
Henry’s mo
uth widened into a smile.
Chapter 4—Henry
That night at Kim’s I ordered roast chicken and crab salad with mussels, while Olivia chose a more modest fish and chips platter. I tore into my meal with relish, having not eaten since the night before. Forgoing the use of cutlery, I used my teeth and hands to tear open the bird’s flesh. Olivia watched with an expression that was first surprised, then slightly horrified, before lapsing finally into a look of acceptance mingled with a kind of admiration.
She merely pecked at her fish, perhaps having lost her appetite after watching me eat, or perhaps wishing to compensate for the terrible manners of her partner by displaying better ones. After the first ecstasy of eating had faded I became conscious that we were being watched and whispered about throughout the tavern. But rather than making me slow down and eat properly, this had the effect of pushing me to eat faster and chew louder just to see their looks of annoyance, gravy dribbling down my chin and onto the collar of my shirt.
Perhaps wishing to escape embarrassment by directing her attention to something nobler, Olivia turned the green stone over and over in her hands, examining it with a look of appreciation.
“It’s remarkable,” she said, her black eyes glittering. “The moment you held it up, I knew I had seen it somewhere. But for the life of me I can’t figure out where.”
“I’d be very surprised if you had,” I said.
“I recognize the symbols, if nothing else. They bear an uncanny resemblance to the markings on the sides of the pit.”
The legends of the various treasures hidden on the island had drawn armies and corporations and solitary explorers from all over the world, which was probably its intent. There was nothing here but seaweed and crabs and the bodies of long-dead explorers, but as long as people continued to believe in the old stories, business had boomed. Gift and souvenir shops made a killing selling equipment to inexperienced explorers who didn’t know a trowel from a hand towel. Never mind that no trace of the ruined temple or any other bit of island lore had ever been recovered.
“And why are you so keen on the money pit?” I asked her.
She shrugged, seemingly offended by the question. “It’s a living.”
“Yes, but why this place instead of somewhere else? What are you here for? Treasure?”
She shook her head. Then said in a low voice, “Adventure.”
I smiled and held up my wine glass. She held up hers and they clinked.
She was certainly beautiful, a fact which I had tried not to notice for fear of becoming distracted from the conversation. There was something in the way she laughed, how she tossed her dark hair back across her shoulders; how she pressed forward when she spoke as if she had the most incredible secret, and couldn’t bear to share it with anyone else. She had a way of drawing you in, making you feel special. Even though we had only known each other for about half a day (not counting our brief encounter the night before), and had spent much of that day arguing and fighting off woodland creatures, she engaged me with an intensity and immediacy that made me feel as if we had been intimate for long years. Long-sustained layers of cynicism and affected world-weariness fell off of her as she sipped her wine and discussed the realities of archeology that movies never depicted.
“You grow up thinking it’s all going to be dinosaur digs and outrunning enraged natives,” she said sadly. “It’s not that romantic, but it is methodical. I actually enjoy the tedium of our digs. I find them relaxing, a way to clear my mind, almost like meditation. Maybe not everyone could understand that, or want it, but it suits me. I thought I wanted excitement when what I really wanted was the monotony of an endless routine.”
She shrugged and sloshed her wine back and forth in her glass. “Anyway. What are you here for?”
With a heavy sigh I told her about my grandfather and his recent disappearance.
“A year ago,” I said, “my granddad was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Doctors gave him less than a year to live. And I guess some people, when they get to that point, start making plans to relax and spend more time with their families? Not him, though. Not Granddad. He suddenly realized that he had spent too much time taking care of me.
“There’s a great moment in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbit where the main character, a pathetic, dull man who’s lived a pathetic, dull life, finally comes to the end of himself and has this pivotal realization. He says, ‘I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to do in my whole life!’ Granddad had so many plans, but they all fell by the wayside when my parents died and he had to take me in. There’s nothing like suddenly having a child to derail someone’s life. And after I graduated, and after Nanna’s death, he got to thinking and realized that he wanted to do some of those things he had never gotten to do before. And then when he found out he was dying of cancer, he realized if he didn’t do them now, he wasn’t going to. I mean, maybe you could travel the world as a ghost, but he wasn’t counting on it.
“So if he was going to see the world, this was his last chance. Granddad had had this crazy dream his whole life. Growing up I remember him talking about it constantly. He wanted to find out what had happened to our ancestors, our forebears.”
Olivia looked perplexed. “You mean other than dying?”
I pursed my lips, choosing my words carefully. “Our family hails from a large… clan, I guess you could call it, and many of them lived together and traveled the world together. They were semi-nomadic. They would vanish for long periods of time and no one would know where they had gone, but then they would turn up again in another part of the world.”
Olivia nodded thoughtfully.
“But during the second world war, they vanished and never returned. Of course this was during a time of mass deportations and wholesale slaughter, so it wasn’t that exceptional and very few people noticed. That was during the days when thousands of people could walk into a forest and not come out alive, and it wouldn’t be reported until after the war. My grandfather was just old enough to have served in the war, but had never visited his extended family. After he was discharged from the service he went looking for them and realized that no one knew where they’d gone. Last thing anyone heard, they had been evacuated to Oak Island to escape the Japanese conquest of the Pacific. So he made inquiries at all the hotels, shops and post offices nearby, but though several people responded that they had seen his family here, at some point they were no longer here. And this is where it gets weird: they didn’t leave. They were just… gone. One day they were together, eating breakfast, and the next day their encampment was completely deserted. How do you explain that? How do 500 people on a small island in the middle of nowhere just disappear?”
“It’s like Roanoke Island,” said Liv, referring to a colonial American colony that vanished, seemingly into thin air.
“It’s just as mysterious, but less famous,” I said. “I guess because of the times they were living in. But all my life Granddad had had a crazy notion that he would be the one to find them, and no one could talk him out of it. You know how when someone gets an idea in their head like that, when they start to think they’re the chosen one, it becomes a kind of mania, an obsession. He was normal in most respects, but not when it came to this. He felt he had a mystical connection, a blood-link that would help him succeed where every previous explorer had failed. He would be the one to find them.
“I remember the last night we spent together. He brought out a bottle of champagne and kept me up telling old stories about the war, how he met Nanna in Italy. I woke up late the next morning and he was gone. There was a note on the kitchen table saying he had gone to find the amulet, and he wasn’t going to throw away his only shot. He was an adventurer at heart. Like me, I guess. I’m surprised he ever got married.”
“I think I would have liked your granddad, very much,” said Olivia.
“You would have gotten along,” I said. “He was a loner. Heaven only knows how he ever got married. If it was up to him, he would’ve spent the re
st of his life backpacking around Europe, probably dying penniless in a canal. Luckily he met Nanna and she took care of him for the rest of his life. She talked him out of many a suicidal venture, but once she was gone and I was gone there was no one and nothing to stop him. All those self-destructive tendencies that had been held at bay by the responsibilities of his profession and family suddenly came roaring to the surface. He used to drink in moderation, but after her death I never saw him without a glass of wine in his hand.”
“But he loved you,” said Liv. “He must have, or he wouldn’t have been able to hold down a job and look after you, without a fuss and without wavering, for so many years. It takes a rare stability and, well, love to be able to do that. And he passed that love of family down to you, else you wouldn’t have trekked halfway across the world to come find him.”
I shrugged. “I guess so. I wasn’t just going to let him wander off without saying goodbye. I need that goodbye. Even if he’s no longer here to give it, I need to find him.”
