by Jeremy Bates
“Have you forgotten that I’ve explored some extremely remote locations—”
“With an entire TV crew. That’s a little different than striking off with just Jacky—”
“We can more than handle ourselves. Stop being such a male chauvinist. Besides, who knows? We might even find some more evidence of your mermaids. Dr. Montero, would you like to join us?”
“Me? Oh no.” She shook her head. “My…exploration days…are behind me. I think I’ll be fine staying right here on the ship.”
Chapter 18
ELSA
Elsa took her coffee to the foredeck to let Marty and Radhika continue their argument in private. The sun was higher above the horizon now, revealing a dreary morning sky scuffed with gray clouds. Demon Island was off starboard, a green and lonely chunk of land, untouched by man. Admittedly her first reaction to Radhika’s invitation to explore the island had been curiosity and interest. Exploration was in her blood. It was why cave diving had become an irresistible pastime of hers. Of course, she was no longer the person she used to be. Her selfish desire for exploration had not only gotten her husband killed but had also killed that very desire in the same fell swoop. She didn’t need to go traipsing around an uncharted island in the hopes of solving a silly mystery. She was in her forties now. She was a still-grieving widow.
Dr. Murdoch and Radhika started shouting at one another. Elsa glanced through the window to the kitchen in time to see Marty storm off into the salon.
A moment later Radhika emerged on the foredeck with her coffee.
“He can be such a man-baby sometimes,” she said, stopping next to Elsa at the railing and staring out to sea.
“He certainly seems protective of you.”
“He has a big heart, even if he’s not very good at showing it. I mean, I know he’s concerned for me. But I’m not a little girl. I can make my own decisions.”
“You’re still going to the island?”
“As soon as Jacky’s up.”
“And Marty’s okay with that?”
“Of course not.” She sipped her coffee. “Which, I guess, is why he’s decided to come with us.”
Chapter 19
MARTY
After his argument with Rad, Marty went to the davit on the starboard main deck. Stowed against the crane-like structure was a 4.8-meter rigid inflatable boat (RIB), which was essentially a pair of synthetic rubber pontoons connected to a laminate hull. He went about checking the davit’s tracks for debris, then removed the boat’s cover. He was in the process of detaching the grips that held the inflatable boat in place when Rad and Jacky joined him. They wore their new bikinis under shorts and singlets, as well as big straw hats. Once again, they reminded him of twins.
“Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” he muttered. When it had become clear that Rad wasn’t going to back down from her plan to search the island for her castaway, he reluctantly told her he’d take them over in the RIB as long as they were all back on the Oannes by noon. It meant his morning would be wasted, but at least he’d have the afternoon to get another hydrophone array in the water.
“Sticks and stones, Marty,” Rad said, adjusting the beach bag slung over her shoulder.
His mouth twisted. “Your dog better not be in that bag.”
“Just some supplies.”
“We’re not going on a bloody picnic.”
“Sunscreen, for starters. Have you put on any yet?”
“I don’t wear sunscreen.”
“You really should, Marty,” Jacky said. “The sun’s bad for your skin. It ages you prematurely.”
“Think it’s a bit late to be telling him that,” said Rad.
“Will you two get on the boat so we can get this show on the road?”
Marty followed them onto the inflatable boat, then used a remote control to activate the crane’s wire pulleys, which lowered the boat to the water. With a push of a button, the clamps released their magnetic moorings on the prow and stern. They hit the water with a flat splash. He untied the painter line and got behind the wheel at the center console. He turned the key and shifted into forward, letting the boat idle.
When the engine was primed, he throttled up and accelerated away from the Oannes. Piloting a small boat through violent swells was dangerous, but Marty knew the principles of severe weather seamanship well. Even so, the sea was rougher than it had appeared, and he shot down the crest of a large wave too quickly, submerging the bow beneath the subsequent wave. Jacky and Rad, seated up front, shrieked as water drenched them. Marty, amidship, received only a light spray.
“Hold onto your hats!” he told them, tasting salt on his lips.
They stuck their hats between their knees. Rad shouted something back at him, but he couldn’t make it out above the roar of the wind and the growl of the motor.
For the next few minutes, Marty steered the boat through the roiling waves at angles so the boat rose and fell on its long axis, avoiding, for the most part, further soakings. When they reached the aquamarine coral reef surrounding Demon Island, the rougher seas subsided, and he trimmed the speed as they approached the beach.
“You’re the worst driver ever, Marty!” Rad said, looking green and releasing her death grip on the gunwale handle.
“I got us here without capsizing, didn’t I?”
He switched off the engine, hopped into the waist-high water, and dragged the boat up onto the sand. Unlike the well-maintained tourist beaches along Sri Lanka’s southern coast, this one was littered with clumps of seaweed, broken seashells, and deadwood. Behind grassy dunes fifty meters inland, a snarl of jungle climbed a steep, rocky hill, creating a nearly vertical wall of green that towered high above them.
There was no way in hell they were forging a path through that. Rad and Jacky were frowning at the impassable vegetation; they clearly had the same thought.
He glanced at his wristwatch. It was eight thirty a.m.
“Three hours and counting to find your castaway,” he told them. “Where do you want to start looking?”
∆∆∆
They went west along the beach, Jacky and Rad walking abreast and chatting gaily, Marty bringing up the rear. He’d taken off his boat shoes and was enjoying the feel of the sand beneath his bare feet and between his toes. However, his mind was on the work back at the Oannes this afternoon. Hopefully he and Pip would get another four hydrophones in the water. That would leave them seven more to deploy the next day which, if there were no more distractions, would be doable.
Then the waiting game would begin.
How long until they recorded a merfolk’s vocalization was anyone’s guess, but he was confident it would happen. Yes, the merfolk eaten by the great white could have been an outlier. It could have been on its own, lost or migrating or an outcast from society. There might not be another of the creatures within a thousand kilometers of Demon Island. Yet he didn’t believe that was so.
They were here. He felt it in his bones.
Gut feelings aside, logic also told him they were here. Most eyewitness reports of merfolk occurred in island coastal waters. This made sense if merfolk, like most marine mammals, occasionally hauled themselves out of the water onto terrestrial habitats. Lying about on the rocky shores or the mudflats of a remote, isolated island would be much safer than doing so on continental land where, historically, there were more dangerous predators—namely, the genus Homo. When Homo mastered fire, they were able to forge more complex and deadly weapons, becoming formidable hunters that hunted Australopithecus to extinction; they would have likely had no qualms doing the same to their distant, defenseless aquatic cousins.
Rad and Jacky had stopped up ahead. They were speaking excitedly.
“What is it?” Marty asked them when he caught up.
Jacky pointed to the jungle. “Can’t you see it?” she said. “That’s a trail right there.”
∆∆∆
They stomped up the stoss side of a dune to investigate, grabbing handfuls of the long grass f
or purchase. At the top Marty saw that Jacky was right. There was a clearly demarcated footpath leading into the dense growth of jungle.
“I knew we’d find our castaway!” said Rad.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” said Marty. “The path is too established to have been made by a single ranger—or castaway. It was likely made by boar, deer, and other wildlife.”
“That’s a total guess, Marty. I say we follow it. Some shade will be nice for a change.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jacky said.
Marty glanced at his watch and said, “We’ve been walking for an hour, which means we’ve an hour walk back to the boat. That only leaves us with one more hour. Half an hour down the path, half an hour back out.”
“What’s your point?” asked Rad.
“It’s not much time, that’s my point. We’ll get a little way in and then have to turn around. There’s no way we’ll get anywhere near the middle of the island, which was where the smoke appeared to originate.”
“It’s still worth a look,” Jacky said. “And like Rad said, it beats walking in the sun.”
“What I’m saying,” Marty said, “is why don’t we just give up the wild goose chase and turn back now.”
“You can go back, Marty,” Rad said dismissively. “We’ll meet you at the dinghy. Jacky and I are going to check out the jungle.”
With that, they descended the lee side of the dune, disappearing into the thick vegetation.
Exhaling heavily, Marty followed.
∆∆∆
Tropical rainforests are often incorrectly referred to as jungles. The actual ‘jungle’—tangles of overgrown, impassable vegetation—exists only at the margins of the rainforest, where the woodland has been knocked down by natural events (such as hurricanes or typhoons) and replaced with dense, ground-level flora. This was true of the rainforest on Demon Island, and the jungle fringe would have been impassable had it not been for the dirt path Marty, Jacky, and Rad were following.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t too long before the belly of the rainforest opened up, a consequence of the canopy depriving sunlight from reaching the forest floor. Small shrubs, ferns, and palms managed to thrive in the shadowy world, as did the moss, herbs, and fungi that coated the spongy ground and decomposing deadfall in shades of green. Higher in the dark understory, flowering plants such as orchids and bromeliads, as well as edible fruits, flourished. Vines and leafy creepers snaked their way up giant buttress roots and ancient tree trunks, searching for a way out of the gloomy dungeon in which they’d sprouted. Woody lianas, some hundreds of meters in length and as thick as telephone poles, coiled in gravity-defying loops from tree branches, linking them together to create a canopy superhighway for arboreal animals.
On first glance, the dusky emerald forest seemed tranquil and harmonious. In reality, a ruthless, invisible war was taking place, only at a pace too slow to see with the naked eye. Some species of trees regularly dropped their fronds and branches in an attempt to rid themselves from the freeloading, light-stealing lianas; other species swayed out of phase from their neighbors to snap the smothering vines and creepers; and still others had evolved peeling bark to shed cumbersome epiphytes, or produced toxins to ward off infestation by pests. Yet perhaps nothing illustrated the dog-eat-dog world better than the giant, prehistoric-looking strangler figs, parasites whose aerial roots encased their host trees in a living mesh, squeezing and killing even the largest victims before growing over their corpses to become colossi themselves.
Marty called a break before one such strangler fig, its roots merged into stout pillars as thick as English oaks. He swatted at a wasp flying uncomfortably close to his head. The drone of its wings was especially loud in the still, hushed forest. The silence was unnatural and disturbing; it was the silence of being watched by unknown eyes, as if all the creatures of the forest had stopped whatever they were doing to take stock of the interlopers.
Rad and Jacky sank down on a mossy log.
“Do you want bug spray, Marty?” Rad asked, rooting through her bag.
“If you two haven’t noticed,” he said, “our path has disappeared, which means unless we start leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, we’re going to have a heck of a time finding our way out again.”
“You want to turn back already?”
“I’m saying we don’t have a choice.”
Uncertainty hung in the warm, wet air as Rad and Jacky weighed their options. Marty took the can of aerosol insect repellant that Rad had produced and sprayed himself in a cloud of chemicals.
Rad said, “We were hoping to find a waterhole to swim in.”
Marty shook his head. “We have no path to follow. We can’t see the sky. If we get turned around, we could become hopelessly lost.”
Jacky said, “Maybe he’s right…”
In the distance, a troop of macaques belted out a series of barking calls. The sound echoed throughout the canopy. Suddenly Marty felt small and vulnerable, a fish out of water in a primeval world that had existed relatively unchanged for millions of years before him and would exist for millions more to come.
We shouldn’t be here, he thought. We need to leave.
Rad, appearing uneasy, said, “Okay, let’s head back—”
Jacky screamed.
Chapter 20
MARTY
Jacky and Rad leapt to their feet. Marty looked to where Jacky was looking. He saw nothing at first but palm fronds and shrubbery and shadows…before making out a darker shape, solid and unmoving, what might have been a head, and shoulders. The full man came into focus, and Marty wasn’t sure how he’d missed him in the first place. He had shoulder-length black hair and a long beard that reached the middle of his smooth, brown chest. He wore a necklace made of curved animal teeth and a loincloth suspended by a string around his waist. An axe was hooked over his shoulder, the wooden haft parallel to his right arm, within easy reach. He was staring unblinking at the group, his brow angry, his eyes intense.
From beside Marty, Rad gasped. She saw him too.
Unconsciously he moved his hand, found hers, and gripped it firmly.
Jacky was turning in a circle, her feet disturbing dead leaves, the only sound Marty heard aside from the blood pounding in his temples. She said something so softly he didn’t catch what it was until Rad asked “Where?” and he realized Jacky had said there were more of them.
More of whom? Marty wondered, picking out the other men camouflaged in shadows and vegetation, all of them statue-still, wraith-like, watching…and holding weapons. Axes, bows, spears. They looked as though they had just stepped out of the Neolithic era.
“What should we do?” Rad asked in a stilted way that suggested she was trying not to move her lips.
“Don’t do anything,” Marty told her.
Jacky had stopped turning. “They’re all around us.”
“What do they want?” Rad demanded.
“Likely nothing,” he said. “Stay calm. Maybe they’ll go away.”
The one with the axe hooked over his shoulder stepped forward. He was shorter than Marty, stocky yet muscular.
“It’s okay,” Marty said to him. “We’re leaving.” He pointed the way they’d come.
The man’s dark eyes showed no sign of understanding. The frown lines between his eyebrows bunched tighter.
“Follow me,” he said to Rad and Jacky.
He only took two steps when three of the tribesmen moved with the quiet stealth of hunters to stand shoulder to shoulder, blocking his path.
“Shit,” he muttered.
“What do they want?” Jacky hissed.
The one with the axe spoke, a quick, short burst of words.
“Did either of you understand that?” Marty asked.
“No,” said Rad.
“No,” said Jacky.
The man, presumably the leader of the pack, turned and walked away from them. He looked back over his shoulder and issued that same burst of unintelligible words.
“I t
hink he wants us to follow him,” Marty said.
“I don’t want to follow him,” Jacky said.
“We don’t have much of a choice, do we?”
∆∆∆
They had been walking for at least half an hour, allowing Marty time to try to make sense of the situation. Judging by the indigenous tribe’s primitive dress and weapons, they had lived on Demon Island for a very long time with little communication with the modern world. He doubted they had randomly crossed paths with Marty and the girls. The island was too large for such a coincidental encounter. It was more likely they had spotted the Oannes yesterday or today and had been watching it. Which meant they would have been aware of the inflatable boat coming to shore. Perhaps they had been shadowing the three of them from the forest the entire time. The question was, why? What did a few outsiders matter to them? Mere curiosity? Yet if that was so, why intercept them? Why march them like a chain gang to…where? To their village?
Did they, like other primitive tribes unaccustomed to Westerners, consider Marty with his lighter skin to be some sort of ghost person? An evil spirit? Were they going to find him guilty in a kangaroo court of witchcraft and punish him? Execute him? God forbid, eat him?
Holy hell, no. Surely the Sri Lankan government knew about these people. If they were indeed cannibals, they would have been reported in the news. The public would have been warned. This was the bloody twenty-first century, after all.
Marty cast a sidelong glance at Rad. She had her head down, watching the ground where she stepped. Sweat saturated the front of her singlet, creating a damp V. She must have felt his eyes on her because she looked up at him. Her face was drawn tight, etched with distress. He almost didn’t recognize her.
He offered a reassuring smile; she smiled back, though it was thin and forced.
The terrain angled upward. The leader kept up a brisk pace, walking easily despite the moist heat. Marty, already tiring from the long trek, began breathing heavily. Sweat stung his eyes. His thighs burned. Rad and Jacky, he noted, were also struggling.
