The Dark Atoll

by Marilyn Foxworthy

  At some point during the night, I heard Christie say, “Cold,” and I felt her hug me more tightly for a moment.

  CHAPTER Twenty-Two - The Haunted Mansion

  We woke up early. Not before sunrise, as if there really were such a thing now but maybe an hour after. We didn’t take time to eat. The wind would be up in a few hours, and we needed to be on land when it started to blow.

  It was only two miles to the northeastern tip of the island we were headed for and it only took us half an hour to get there. It took another 15 minutes or so to reach the island’s natural cove a bit farther south along the beach there.

  The cove was sheltered. Not quite an enclosed lagoon with a narrow inlet but it was sheltered enough that our canoe wouldn’t be blown out to the center of the atoll if it were left on the beach. It would be good for swimming and it was large enough that there would be plenty of fish. Maybe our lives would be just a little bit easier here.

  Maybe they would be quite a bit easier. The vegetation was thicker here than on many other of the little bits of land. There were coconut palms near the cove. We spotted some wild grapes. The strangest thing to me was that there was a little stream feeding the cove. Where was that from? There were no mountains, and no hills, and there wouldn’t be a spring, so where was this water coming from? It had been running for a long time. The tiny rivulet was only about a three or four across and just a foot or a foot and a half deep, but it was flowing from somewhere inland from where we landed the canoe.

  We pulled the boat up onto the sand on the north side of the cove and made sure that it seemed secure enough to withstand the winds that I expected again that day. Then we had a short meeting.

  Gathering the four of us together, I said, “Girls, I’m proud of all of you. We haven’t really talked about what happened yesterday. I mean, we did but I think that we will have more to talk about as we settle in today. The first thing to say is that I’m happy that Bebe has joined us.”

  Jeannie said, “Um, Jeannie.”

  I said, “Oh, right. Sorry. But I think Bebe is cute.”

  Christie said quickly, “Best Boobies!”

  Allie said, “Bitchin’ Body.”

  I laughed and said, “Buxom Beauty!”

  Jeannie said, “Not big bitch?”

  Christie said, “Not anymore.”

  Allie said, “Bebe, come on, we never knew you before. Not really.”

  Jeannie said, “But they called you Lana and you want to be Allie now…”

  Allie said, “Yep. But you seem like Bebe, no matter what it used to mean. We aren’t calling you ‘Bebe’ like they did; we’re calling you Bebe, like we will.”

  Christie said, “It’s cool. You are our Beautiful Buxom Bitchin’ Bodied Best Booby Bebe. I want to call you that. Our Beautiful Bebe.”

  We stayed quiet for a moment while the woman thought it over.

  Finally, she said, “You can call me what you want to, I guess.”

  She sounded dejected. She sounded like she was resigning herself to her past and the consequences of her actions as a big bitch. I wanted to help her, and I definitely wanted to honor her, but I also really liked calling her Bebe. It was cute.

  I looked directly at the girl until she lifted her eyes and saw me staring at her. I did my best to give her a look of passion and desire. I let my eyes speak to her about my love and arousal. And as I stared, I let myself think about how beautiful she was and how I had loved making love to her briefly in the water the day before. I remembered the feelings of our bodies merging in the ocean and I started to become physically, as well as emotionally, aroused by this very beautiful naked woman. I was doing it on purpose. I stared lustfully at her delicious breasts. I let my gaze slowly lower to her crotch. And the whole time, I poured my emotions and attraction into my eyes and into her wonderful body.

  And she watched me. She saw me looking at her. Not with a lust that made her an object for my pleasure but with a desire that made her the focus of my love, commitment, arousal, and appreciation. I imagined the lovemaking that we would have, and she could see every image in her own mind as my eyes betrayed every thought toward her.

  I narrowed my eyes and said intensely, “Bebe…”

  It had the effect that I was hoping for.

  She screamed, “Oh fuck!” and pounced in my direction.

  She knocked me off my feet, backward onto the sand, with her on top of me. And she wasted no time. In an instant, she was kissing me with her mouth and simultaneously reaching to position my erection at her slit. Our lovemaking was amazingly brief. It wasn’t even that great for me but Bebe climaxed very quickly. And afterward, she was spent. It took less than two minutes. Maybe less than that.

  These girls were raw. The past two decades had basically turned them into savages emotionally. Yes, they could be gentle and sweet and loving and thoughtful but when aroused, they had no filters on their actions. Allie had made love to me as soon as she felt a desire for it. Christie had done the same. Bebe had taken the opportunity in the water yesterday before we were even fully acquainted. And now, she had been aroused by my silent declarations and didn’t wait for any further invitation. But it wasn’t that they were promiscuous or even callous toward sex; none of these three had ever had sex with a man as far as we knew. Bebe had told me that she’d never been with a man. So had Allie but it wasn’t clear if she would have actually remembered it if she had. Christie was the same. No, sex was new to them but when they wanted it, they just took it. I had more built-in restraint. I should probably be the one to adapt, not them.

  Bebe was on top of me, and when she had caught her breath, she raised up on her elbows and looked down at me.

  She said. “What the hell? Florin, I…wow! OK. Yeah, wow! OK.”

  I smiled at the woman staring down at me and said, “So? What’s it going to be?”

  She gasped and said, “What’s it going to be? How would I know. Damn, from now on we don’t know what it’s going to be like any more than we did when we were told to get on the plane and then crashed out in the Pacific Ocean. What’s it going to be? All of a sudden, I feel like it’s going to be the same kind of wild ride but this time I’m buying a ticket, and nobody is going to keep me from going on it. Florin!”

  I said, “What?”

  She said, “I don’t know. Just Florin! What have you done to me? No, you can’t answer that, and I know it but back to your question, yeah, call me Bebe. It sounds so right now. The way you looked at me! My gosh! What the hell? And don’t say you love me. I know that. Wow do I know that. Is this what love is?”

  I asked, “What do you mean?”

  She looked at me wildly and said, “I don’t know! I mean, is this what love is? This um, what this is. The way I feel about you. The way you looked at me. The way I had to have you. The way I had to have you have me.”

  Our discussion went on like that for a few more minutes but Bebe finally settled down and hugged herself against my face for a few minutes and then we got up.

  It was decided: we all liked the name Bebe and that was what we’d call her from now on. She seemed to attach a lot of emotion to it now and hinted that there was a twinge of arousal just hearing me say it at this point. I don’t know how it worked as intensely as it did but like I said, in some ways she was a savage and where the emotional therapy might have worked to a small extent on “normal” people, Bebe and the others could be touched at a deeper unconscious level much more easily because their filters and baggage were different. I suspected that they hungered for real love and connection in ways that people in a different situation might not relate to, and that caused us to bond very quickly. There was so little kindness here, and so much need for it, that whatever I was doing was working like magic; or drugs. I thought that I understood.

  At age 18 to 22, these girls had seen their world collapse. They lost their families, all of their relatives, and almost everyone that they knew. They lost their homes, their countries, their possessions, and even their
clothes; and to some degree, all dignity. There was no one that they could trust or turn to and they had to learn to live with death, rape, betrayal, brutality, and simple survival. They ate raw fish. They never saw the sun. And some, like Christie, were walking dead. Maybe they all were. They had lost their capacity for nuance.

  But now, now that I had arrived, they were part of a family. They had a hero. They had a father figure and a husband and a lover. I was their big brother, their uncle, and the local policeman that they could turn to for help. Bebe had reached out to me and I offered her a place to belong. A place to be loved. A place to be safe. I gave Allie someone to remember her. I gave Christie choices and a place to be civilized and contribute. And they wore their emotions on the outside and acted with savagery.

  It was actually something that I was used to. I had grown up the same way. I hadn’t been brutalized but I had seen the world destroyed. I lived in an underground bunker for several years as the storms tore the face off the Earth that I had known and wiped away government and society. I understood them. Beautiful naked savages. Savages who were my family. My tribe. Gentle women who loved me; who I had killed for. It wasn’t their physical actions that were savage at all; it was their emotions. We were together, we wanted each other, and we would make it work. But there were no games involved in what we thought toward each other.

  As we left the beach to see where we were, it was apparent that this island was different. A very little bit of that might be explained by the fact that no one had set foot here for 15 years but that wasn’t all of it. The population of the atoll hadn’t been enough to keep back the vegetation on these little bits of land, except at the trade village and wherever the Breeders congregated. The jungle here was denser than I had seen so far in my travels for the past three weeks.

  There was no path leading away from the beach to the interior of the island but there were clues as to where we should go to find the house. On the beach were the remains of three overturned canoes, now buried by vines and bushes. They were more than remains of course, because the fiberglass wasn’t decayed or destroyed but they gave the impression of ruined reminders of a better day. They would be fine when we cut away the plants and cleaned them up. I assumed that these would probably be near the end of a path that would have led from the house to the beach. I wasn’t certain but it was as good a guess as anything.

  From where the canoes lay, we headed straight toward the center of the island. The wind was starting to pick up now and we hurried to get farther from the water where we might be more sheltered by the jungle. It was a jungle. Something was definitely different about this place. If I believed that it could be haunted, I might have been tempted to think that it was. There was something eerie about it, but I couldn't identify what. It wasn’t darker. It wasn’t hotter or colder. It was just different. We went carefully, not because of a sense of danger but because of the vegetation. About 30 feet from the sand, we started to see more signs that there had once been inhabitants here. There was a discarded and decaying rubber flip-flop sandal that had grown up in a branch of a bush. There was a handle from a shovel poking up from some other plant.

  Allie said, “Hey, what’s that? I never saw any of those before. It looks like something.”

  I looked to where Allie was standing, pointing off to our right, and was surprised by what she had found. About 30 feet away, it looked like there was a clump of corn stalks. She was right, corn wasn’t something that we had seen here so far. And I realized what was so strange about where we were. It was the vegetation. Not how much of it there was but how many kinds. As I looked closer, I recognized several plants that shouldn’t be here. Corn was one. The plants were scattered but here and there I could see things out of place for the native flora. There was what looked like it might be a berry bush. Maybe boysenberry or raspberry, or both. I spotted another plant and couldn’t see what grew on it but from the leaves, I’d guess that it could have been zucchini or pumpkins, or some kind of squash.

  Had the castaways who settled here and then died in some haunting manner planted gardens? Where did they get the seeds? Wait, there was a pineapple plant! And as we trudged on in the same direction, unless I was wrong, a citrus tree off to the left. It wasn’t huge but it could have been 20 to 30 years old. Old enough to have fruit, for sure. If the locals had known about this, surely they would have been harvesting this food. Well, more likely they would have harvested all of it and killed the plants in the process. Maybe they did but some seeds survived to start over.

  Oh wow! No, the previous tenants hadn’t planted this; it was older than that. I recognized this specific combination of fruits and vegetables. If I tried, I could remember about half of the list. Was it a coincidence? What was the simplest answer to this mystery? The simplest explanation was that at some point before the cataclysm, on one of my dad or my grandfather’s trips here, while they worked to get everyone off, someone had planted, or scattered, our Garden of Eden seed mix here. It looked scattered, as if it had been simply thrown to the wind to take hold where it would. If it would.

  No! It was me! I did it. I remembered it. It was on one of the trips that I had been on! I remembered taking several of the symbolic survival seed vaults and scattering them around an island with a big house. We had stayed there for a week. Pops thought it was fine. My dad questioned it but didn’t see the harm. He knew that we would never be back, and no one would be here to see it, and they wouldn’t survive anyway but it was symbolic and that was enough reason not to discourage me. I guess that over the past 20 years, some of the seeds sprouted and lived long enough to produce more seeds and reproduce. If I didn’t have anything else to do right now, I’d have sat down and laughed or cried.

  I explained to the girls what had happened, and we continued walking. It wasn’t far. Just a hundred feet from the sand, we found a patio. There wasn’t much concrete used here, or bricks, or even stone but there had been crushed oyster shells. Oysters had been cultivated for both meat and pearls in the past, and pathways were a good use of the shells. The area around the house was covered in shells. There were spots where the jungle had grown through the ground-cover, all the way to the walls but not everywhere.

  We approached the house from the west. As we walked out into the open in front of the house, everything seemed fine. There was a large house looking like it had been abandoned but left alone for 20 years or so. That was at first glance. A few steps closer it was apparent that first impressions were deceiving.

  There was a covered veranda on this side of the house with a table and chairs for seating six people. Two outdoor sofas sat nearby. And seated at the table were six horrible figures that had once been humans. Another four were posed on the sofas.

  Allie said, “Oh, look! There’s someone here!” but quickly went silent as she realized that the people were far from living.

  Bebe said, “Let’s go back to the beach and wait for Toni and her crew. They offered to do this. I’m surprised that they aren’t here already. Allie, Christie, let’s go back to the beach.”

  I agreed. I could have started the cleanup by myself, and I’m sure that Bebe would be able to help me but she was right, we could wait for Toni and her women. They were used to it. It was one of their roles. Messages, events and reporting, and disposal of the dead. But Bebe was right, I had also expected that they would already be here by the time we arrived this morning. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like appointments or schedules meant anything here. They would come when they came, if they decided that they wanted to. Maybe they’d be pulling up to the beach when we arrived.

  They weren’t. It was only a few minutes walk back to the beach. If there had been a path, it would have been less than a minute. We weren’t wearing shoes and it took a bit longer to pick our way through the plant-life. And when we came to the beach, Toni wasn’t there.

  Allie looked around and without a word, she walked out into the waters of the cove. Christie followed right behind.

  Bebe aske
d, “Where are they going?”

  I said, “Fishing.”

  That was what they were doing, wasn’t it? Fishing? Wasn’t that what Allie did if she didn’t know what else to do? Here we were and she didn’t know what to do, so she went fishing.

  I said, “The wind will be up soon. It’s blowing hard already but it’s going to get worse. We should plan for some shelter.”

  A few minutes later, Bebe pointed out into the atoll to the southwest, and said, “Canoes.”

  Sure enough, three canoes were headed our way. The occupants were paddling hard, working against the wind to reach our little beach before they were blown too far north. When they approached the cove, they didn’t slow down at all but drove straight for the sand at the north end where we had beached our own boat. The three canoes made a crunching sound as they hit land and 13 women jumped out of the boats and pulled them farther up onto dry land about 40 feet from where Bebe and I were standing. One of the women, Toni, marched in our direction while the others stayed with their canoes. But a second woman, a very slender girl, followed more slowly.

  This other woman immediately struck me as out of place. The way that she walked. She wasn’t in a hurry. She wasn’t idle. She was moving with purpose but strangely. She didn’t look at Bebe and me; she looked at the ground. And she looked at the sky and the jungle. The wind was blowing directly against her, but it was as if she didn’t notice it. No, it was as if she were at peace with it. It was weird. I got the strange impression that she was “with” it. Like some strange sea nymph or female wizard, so attuned to the wind that she was wearing it instead of clothes.