“Why?” I ask, yearning for my real father, my real life, not this.
“Why what?”
“Why everything? Why are we here? Where is here? What happened to everyone?” I don’t want to cry but I can feel a tingling in my tear ducts.
“Please try to rest now,” he says. So I close my eyes, hoping it will all be different when I wake up. Hoping I will be home, wherever that is, locked in safely, away from the world.
* * *
Instead I wake to a violent swaying. The ship is being tossed as if spewed between the maws of two blue sea monsters and we can hear the wind thrashing above us.
“It’s just a storm,” Venice says.
Just a storm? This isn’t any regular storm. A word from a book comes to my mind, a word from a book someone I love read to me. Maelstrom.
My stomach lurches and I pray that I won’t vomit the food that man gave me earlier.
“Just try to breathe,” Venice tells me. “Like Hex and Ez taught us. Remember?”
It’s almost worse to think about breathing. What if I’ve forgotten how to breathe at all? What if some part of my brain has been permanently damaged so it will always feel like I have to consciously control every blink and breath?
While I’m gulping air we hear a door bang open and shouting and stomping and bumping and then three other figures, also trussed up with rope, are here in the dark with us.
I can’t see their faces. One of them is sobbing, one of them is singing paeans like an angel, and the third is screaming obscenities while Venice tries to quiet them down.
“What the fuck?” the swearing one says.
“Hex, try to stay calm. There’s a storm but I think it will be okay. We have to keep it together.”
Hex? Hex is here?
“Fuck that! And who’s crying? Shut the fuck up with the crying, will you?”
That doesn’t sound like Hex.
The crying one makes shuddering, gulping sounds as he tries to stifle his sobs.
“Ez, it’s okay,” Venice says. “We’ll be okay.”
“Eliot?” says the crying one.
“No, it’s Venice, Pen’s brother.”
“Where’s my brother?”
“Ez, listen carefully, Eliot isn’t here. You are all under some kind of a spell. But I think when we can get off the ship it will stop.”
The singing one starts up again. Maybe he is an angel. The sound is celestial—if it were a color it would be pale blue—but the ship is rocking so hard I can’t really appreciate it. It’s like hearing angels sing when you’re tied up in hell. I go back to concentrating on not throwing up.
“Shut the fuck up, everyone! Stop singing!” The swearer.
“Ash, can you be quiet for a little while?” Venice says gently, which seems to be the only tone he ever uses. Maybe that’s a ghost thing. “It’s really nice but everyone’s having a hard time right now.”
The ship heaves and one of the bodies rolls closer to me and I can see his black hair, the white ovoid of his face. My heart strains against the rope around my chest.
“What’s wrong with you?” he practically spits. “Your eyes look crazy. Are you high? I told you not to get high anymore. You are such a mess.”
“Hex,” says Venice. “That’s Pen, your girlfriend. Do you remember her?”
“Bitch,” Hex mutters.
My stomach is working its way up to my mouth and I’m bathed in the cold sweat of nausea. The ghost boy wriggles closer so our shoulders are touching. “He doesn’t know who you are,” he says. “Do you know who he is?”
I remember a slim, black-haired person holding me in a bed, reading me stories while the world went to hell around us. But we were safe; we had each other. He would never have called me a bitch. He loved me, didn’t he? He …
The ship seizes again and the porridge erupts, splashing out of me in a puddle of stench.
“You’re disgusting,” he says, like he’s pumping me with venom, and it feels as if I might as well have disgorged my own heart.
I don’t understand why we were forced away from our home. For what? For this?
“Talk to him,” my little ghost brother tells me. “Tell him who you are.”
The singing and crying are louder now. I’m too sick to do anything. “I want to go home.”
“I know. But we can’t now. Tell him about you.”
“Hex?” I try. “It’s me, Pen.”
He doesn’t answer.
So I try harder, because that’s all you can do, isn’t it? I try to breathe and focus and follow the pictures in my mind, letting them lead me. “Do you remember? We, and our friends, fought Giants and witches and in the end we lost each other but finally we were reunited. You came back to me. We love each other,” I say. “I love you.”
I wait, expecting him to curse at me, but he’s silent. So are Ash and Ez. Even the ship holds its breath. But by now I should know the sound of silence before an eruption.
Something crashes and bangs, slamming us against the side of the ship, and just as Hex says my name, his voice different this time (perhaps with the dawning of recognition?), I am lost once again in darkness.
7
CADAVERS
WHEN I WAKE I’M LYING on wet black sand. It glints—shattered quartz crystal—in the sunlight that warms my back. Sunlight? Pure and bright the way it was, Then. The color of yellow crocuses. I dig my hands into the sand, rubbing the grains between my fingers. I try to sit up but my body is too sore and weak. My hair is heavy and, when I touch it, it’s matted with strands of seaweed and bits of broken shells. There’s a crusty patch of dried blood on my left temple, which accounts for the pain in my head.
I try to piece everything together in my mind, like when you wake up from a nightmare that you want to make sense of, a nightmare of sea monsters, of no lesser ilk than Scylla and Charybdis, but this is real. I am Pen. Penelope Overland. The Earth Shaker changed everything but I still live in a pink house by the sea. A Giant chased me and my family and friends onto a bewitched ship. It sailed us out into the waters and Merk, my birth father, also bewitched, tied us up and threw us into the lower compartment. Hex couldn’t remember who I was. He seemed to hate me. I tried to explain. There was a storm.…
Oh, god, Hex. Ez. Ash. Venice. Argos. Even Merk’s gone. And there is no sign of our ship with the portentous horse on its prow.
I force myself to sit up and look around me. I’m on a beach, in a cove. Clear blue water slides up onto the sand and then retreats. A forest of trees rises in the distance. Yellow, white, and purple wildflowers and tall sea grasses grow down toward the shore. I may be dreaming but I think I can hear bird songs.
Above me fly a flock of white birds. Doves? I can count twelve. There was a dove in the dream I had about my mother. In The Aeneid two doves sent by Venus led Aeneas to the golden bough, the enchanted branch he had to give to Proserpina, queen of the underworld, in order to be admitted to her realm to visit the shade of his dead father. So the sighting of these birds is especially significant (though I’m not exactly sure in what way), but any bird sighting would be.
It’s like a world before the Earth Shaker hit.
But none of it will matter without the people I love.
I call their names, one by one, but there is no answer. I stagger to my feet, dragging my sodden limbs across the sand. In the distance I see a dark shape lying prone. I don’t want to see. I don’t want to go over to it.
But of course I do.
It’s Hex. He’s flat on his back with his eyes closed and his mouth open. I throw myself on top of him and put my head to his bare, tattooed chest. I put my hands over his heart, fasten my lips to his, and try to remember how to give mouth-to-mouth. He is still. And cold. And paler than pale. I scream his name.
And then I feel a hand on my shoulder and I look up and he is standing over me, staring down at me. And at himself.
“I’m here. Pen? I thought you were … Pen?” Hex, who never cries, has tears in
his eyes. “Are you okay? Your head was bleeding.”
“I’m okay. You’re here.”
He falls to his knees beside me and we embrace, his warm skin crusted with dirt and salt. I’m never going to let go of him.
When we finally pull apart and look around us, the island swept with sunshine and birdsong gives me chills. Dead Hex still lies at my feet. Another hallucination? Or is this live one a figment of my imagination? No, I’m sure he’s real, though I can’t explain how I know.
“Where are the others?” I say.
“I don’t know, baby. There must have been a shipwreck. But we’re here so it couldn’t have been too bad. We’ll look for them. I have to show you something first.”
“No, we have to…”
“It won’t take long. You need to see.”
He takes my hand and leads me up the beach to where another body is lying. A girl with long, bony limbs and ragged hair. We kneel beside her and Hex untangles the fishing net caught around her legs and brushes sand off of her face with his fingertips.
She stares at us, with darkling eyes.
I gasp.
She’s me.
“Why?” I ask no one. I should know by now that there is no answer to why. Then I start screaming again, calling for Ez and Ash and Argos and especially for Venice. I can remember how he talked to me on the ship, helping me navigate the madness that had taken over. Merk had tied us up. I don’t scream for Merk.
Hex takes me by both shoulders and makes me look at him. “We have to stay calm,” he says. “Okay?”
I nod, staring out at the water. The waves seem benign, sparking in the sunshine. I’m not used to the sight of sun on waves; the sea at home is dark as lead in the gray light. I stare, mesmerized by it. I’d forgotten how wondrous the world could be but it still doesn’t make up for the fact that the rest of my loved ones are gone.
“Let’s start over there, Pen, among the trees, okay? We need to find fresh water before we do anything.”
So I pull my gaze away from the waves and we go toward the trees with peeling red and green bark and shiny dark green leaves, seeking water we can drink. I hadn’t noticed how thirsty I was. The sun felt good on my skin at first but my shoulders are turning red and the shade of the trees is welcome. The air smells moist and sweet and it doesn’t take us long to find a small creek with blackberries growing on its banks. Hex examines the berries and when we’re pretty sure they’re safe we eat them by the finger-staining handful and wash them down with the creek water. It’s clear and bright and refreshes us instantly. Something flashes by. A fish, which means there’s definitely animal life here, probably untainted, by the looks of it, and maybe no serious predators (meaning Giants), although that might be wishful thinking.
As we’re heading back toward the beach through the grove we see what appear to be two holes recently dug in the ground.
“They look like graves,” Hex says.
We stop and stare at each other. Graves? For our corpses lying on the beach? Are we meant to bury ourselves? Of all the things I’ve been required to do, this may be the strangest. The only reason I even consider this task, though, is that I don’t really want to look for the corpses of my friends and family back on the beach. What if we find their dead bodies? Even if it’s a wickedy spell, we might think it’s real. I’m relieved that at least there are only two graves here.
Hex and I go back to my body and lift it carefully. We carry it back up the beach to the trees. It feels small and stiff in my arms, and I remember carrying my mother’s body when I found her in Las Vegas just before she died. I can’t look at this corpse’s face.
Hex speaks to me softly the whole way. “I don’t understand this, Pen, but it seems like what we’re supposed to do, don’t you think? Like, let’s pretend we’re in a story or a dream. In the epics the burial of the dead is a very important, sacred thing.”
But even in The Aeneid they didn’t have to bury themselves.
We lay my body in the grave and go back to get Hex. He doesn’t weigh much more than I do. I try to keep my eyes on the live Hex as we carry the dead one to his final resting place. The two dead versions of us lie there and I don’t feel like crying; I don’t feel anything, except the same desire to get out of here and go home. What kind of spell is this? What weird magic? And what is it supposed to be telling us? That we must leave our old selves behind? What are we meant to learn from it all?
We shove dirt over our corpses and pat it down and then Hex breaks off sprigs, from a bush covered in white flowers that look like the lace of a bridal dress, and sticks one on top of each mound.
“What should I say?” he asks.
“Here lie Hex and Pen, warriors, storytellers, survivors, friends, and lovers. May their souls be reborn to do good and restore this planet,” I say, surprising myself. Since when do I hope to restore this planet? It’s too big a task, and now Venice and Ez and Ash are gone. If we don’t find them I’ll be lucky if I can restore my own heart.
Hex takes my hand and we run back to the beach. We go down to the water and search among the rocks. Something is lodged in the sand and I recognize the open mouth and staring eyes of the wooden horse from our ship’s prow. Severed like this it resembles the skull of an actual horse. That doesn’t bode well. There must have been a serious shipwreck.
I put my face in my hands, wanting to make all of this go away. “How do we not give up?”
“Because we have no other choice?”
* * *
In the dark space between my palms I see colors emerge and then shatter into fragments like bits of stained glass. Then the colors re-form into images. I see Venice holding Argos, standing with Ez and Ash. They are in a room where waterfalls splash down rock walls into shallow pools. Ash is singing and Ez is sketching. A young man is seated on a flower-covered dais in front of my brother and my friends. The smoke of incense partially occludes him but I see that his eyes are wide spaced, pale, and strange. He wears a crown of antlers, decorated with flowers, on his head.
* * *
“They’re okay,” I say. “Hex, they’re okay. I see them.” Usually my visions are of the more distant past but I’m pretty sure this one is something that just happened. Weirdly, the man looks like the one in the vision I had of the black quartz island.
I describe what I’ve seen to Hex.
He puts his arm around my shoulder. He doesn’t question these things.
“Can you tell where?”
I shake my head, no. The vision is gone.
“Let’s get some more to eat, and some rest,” Hex says. “Then we’ll look for them.”
He and I head back to the stream with the fishing net we removed from my corpse. Hex holds it; I don’t like the idea of touching something that was wrapped around my dead body.
We stand in the water and Hex swishes the net around; it’s easy to catch fish. They’re small and silvery and, I think, more trusting than they should be. Hex rubs two sticks together to ignite a spark and builds a fire. Then we clean and cook the fish on sticks and eat them. I’m not disgusted at all, although I never liked the idea of killing and eating an animal before. Hunger wins every battle, though. The fish taste fresh, moist, and clean.
“We should bathe now,” Hex suggests. He pulls off his shirt and jeans and slips into the deepest part of the water, a pool beneath a small waterfall.
I look down at myself; I hadn’t even noticed what a mess I am. My clothes are torn and when I take them off there are bruises all over my arms and legs. When I get in the water Hex uses his fingers to gently clean away the dried blood on my head. As soon as he touches me I feel like myself again. I lean against his shoulder in the water and gaze up. Sun sparkles through the leaves and the air smells of berries and flowers. It doesn’t seem right to relax when so much is uncertain. But my sore, tingling muscles are beginning to unknot in the water and I let myself close my eyes.
“What happened on that ship?” I ask Hex. “How long were we there?”
“Maybe a day or two? I don’t know.”
“You didn’t recognize me.”
He’s quiet so I open my eyes and look at him. He’s scowling. “What did I do?”
“You were angry at me. You said something about me not taking care of my child properly. Getting high. Like you thought I was your mom.”
Hex tosses his head so droplets fling off of the tips of his slick black hair. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t know it was me. It’s okay.”
“I don’t know what’s going on. Who is casting these spells or whatever they are. We need to try and find the others.”
I nod. “And then we have to find a way to get home,” I say.
Hex looks down at me, cocks his head, raises his eyebrows. “I’m not sure it’s that simple, Pen.”
I decide not to ask him what he means. I just want to find the others and leave. There might be fish and berries and fresh water, but there are too many signs of danger. If burying your own body isn’t a bad omen, what is? And besides, how do we know that any of this is real? If our corpses weren’t real, then maybe this whole island is a hallucination of some kind.
If I were home, I would never leave the pink house again, even if Giants tried to chase me away. I wonder if the house is there anymore or if Bull went back and wrecked it in his rage. I think about my art prints on the ceiling of my room, Ez’s paintings, our books, our vegetable garden. It might all be gone.
After we’ve bathed we dress in our filthy clothes. I wanted to wash them but they wouldn’t have dried in time and we both feel vulnerable enough without having to walk around naked.
We go back to explore the woods a little more, following the stream. The trees form a canopy over our heads and pink and white orchids grow up the trunks and hang from the branches. The ground is bright green with moss and the rocks glimmer, crystalline, in the sunshine. We hear birds; it’s unmistakable, and I even think I see a squirrel dart by.
When the air starts to cool we follow the stream back to our camp. As we’re collecting wood I hear Hex shout my name and I run to his side.
The Island of Excess Love Page 5
