Part 3, "the final chapter" as they say. Sorry this took so long!! Thanks for reading.
In the rear of the bungalow there
was a box containing a first aid kit; there was also a small fire axe, an
extinguisher, and a faded map of the island. The map was comically undetailed,
but it had the information Sandra needed: latitude and longitude. She had
Googled the place before Josh brought them here (still thick-throated with
grief, she still had to struggle not to be angry with him) and she knew the
closest land was the Turks and Caicos islands; these were the less popular
southern brothers of the Bahamas, the spits of land only placed on charts as a
courtesy. She made the kids stay in the bedroom as she checked all the windows
and the single door; nothing lurked outside in the bright sun. Nothing waited
to leap up at them, eliciting a final scream.
It was so tempting to think she’d
imagined what she saw, that she had snapped under the stress of dealing with
her family, with her troubled self-image and the nagging suspicion that the
kids would grow up maladjusted and leave her stranded in a nursing home with
Josh. But that temptation was a slippery slope, and it led directly downhill to
denial.
Sandra knew all about denial. One
day, she’d come home to find Josh boxing something in the kitchen, taping up a
battered Amazon box. Curious, she’d asked him if he’d brought his work home
with him—half-joking, half wondering why he would bother when they worked him
so hard already. He’d spun around, knocking the box off the table and into the
stove. Nothing had spilled out, but she’d seen what it was.
Prescription bottles. Dozens of
them, taped together like machine-gun magazines with an accuracy and skill that
spoke of countless hours on the Amazon packing lines. Josh had leapt to close
the box and hide his little secret, but she’d seen enough. They’d had a small,
terse argument: he’d insisted it was a one-time “favor” for a “friend.” What
kind of “friends” he had, she didn’t know; outside of his weed guy Damien and
the toothless alkies at Sonny’s Corner, Josh had few friends to speak of. He’d
lost most of them when the kids were born, drifted apart from them as often
happened with old connections after a sudden change in lifestyle. Like, say,
suddenly having to provide for two perpetually screeching kids. Okay, that was
an exaggeration; they didn’t scream perpetually.
But Charlie had been a noisy baby, and Tam a fussy one. Between them, they were
a force to be reckoned with.
Sandra hadn’t believed him for a
minute, of course. But she hadn’t called the cops, either. When you live with
someone long enough, you begin to understand what makes them tick, what keeps
them going. What she’d seen in Josh’s eyes wasn’t just shame: there was
determination there, as well, and even a little pride. Whatever he was doing,
he thought he was doing it for them, for their dysfunctional little family
unit. So she left him to his work, and put it in the back of her mind. She
certainly hadn’t caught him doing it again; likely, she thought, because he had
begun doing it somewhere else.
She’d known they couldn’t afford
this bungalow on their own, not on his salary. Despite the outhouse and the
lack of entertainment, this was a rich man’s retreat: literally a private
island. She hadn’t questioned that either, hadn’t demanded to see the receipt
for the rental of the bungalow or what bank account he’d paid it out of. It
certainly hadn’t been theirs. And so
in a way, she was responsible or partially responsible for bringing them out here.
She was just as guilty of trapping them on the island as he was.
All of this seemed to make his loss
hit harder; if she’d just had someone to share the blame with, the creeping
terror would’ve been easier to deal with. Hefting the fire axe—it was more of a
crowbar-axe combo, gimmicky stainless-steel, barely the length of a kitchen
cleaver—she found herself convinced his death was on her. She’d let him go out
there. Hell, she’d been glad to be
rid of him, for a few hours. In a roundabout way, it was almost as if she’d
murdered him herself.
That’s
not true. And you don’t know he’s gone—maybe he’s out there, still. Maybe it’s
just the finger. No, she didn’t believe that for a second either. If he had
survived his maiming, where was he? No, Josh had run afoul of… something.
Something that had killed him quickly, quietly. That dark shape in the water…
“Mom, do we have glue?”
Charlie’s voice brought her back to
reality as she stared out the window at the beach. Her little Charlie, her
little man. He was being so strong. “I don’t think so, honey. Let me check.”
But she didn’t check. She kept staring out at the shore; something was
bothering her, something seemed odd about that beach but she didn’t know what
it was—
There. That rock, that rock hadn’t
been there when they’d arrived. It was the size of a beanbag chair and just as
lumpy, and it had no place in the shallows where it lay. Which led to the
obvious conclusion: that it wasn’t a rock.
It didn’t move, or jerk, or burst
into life as she watched. But it did seem to move up and down, that dark pebbly
hump, that dome of gray silence. It was breathing, she realized. Something out
there was alive, and it was breathing, and she felt without a shadow of a doubt
that it was watching them. As if waiting.
She pulled down the blinds.
There was no glue to be had—if ever
a handyman had visited the island, he had taken his tools with him. Really, the
whole place seemed slapped together with such disinterest that she wondered if
drunks had built it. The toilet paper supply in the outhouse had been so
limited that they’d had to ration it, the generator needed to be fed gasoline
every morning or it farted exhaust and died, and the pantry was so shallow it
could barely hold all their food. This wasn’t a home away from home; more of a
doll’s house, a facsimile of a vacation house. And it was their fortress now,
this lousy stoner’s palace.
Maybe even their tomb.
The book said to keep her chin up,
though, so she kept her chin up. She helped Charlie fit some of the phone’s
pieces together, held Tam when she cried, and didn’t tell them about the dark
shape in the shallows, the fat lumpen thing that heaved ugly breath in and out
of itself. And as the sun began to dip down towards the horizon, she didn’t
think of what they would do at night, how they would get through. Not thinking
seemed more sane than thinking, at this point.
Outside, the dusk was beautiful and
stained with colors; the splash of vibrant light across the horizon filled the
whole sky with blues, and purples, reds and scintillating oranges that crashed
across the stratosphere and made the whole world into a postcard. Oblivious to
the picturesque sunset, the thing in the water waited, still hungry. Biding its
time. Waiting for the right moment.
All predators in nature, after all,
are patient. They know when the time is right; instinct speaks to them, and
they move in for the kill. As the sun melted down into the endless blue sea,
the thing in the water began inching forward. Sandra did not see it; the kids
were locked up safely in the bedroom, and they were in the opening stages of
trauma, fear numbing their brains and making them stiff and jaded.
The thing heaved its liquid bulk up
onto the shore, arms uncoiling like a flower opening at close of day. It
unspooled its great limbs and began hauling itself over the dry sand, the
particles sticking to its enormous body like tiny hitchhikers. Its rolling eyes
with curious inhuman slit-pupils swept the beach, which was filling with the
gathering dark. No prey here.
Yet it remembered; it had seen
prey, and it remembered. More importantly, it had seen where the prey had gone.
Moving with effort, almost with
pain, the great hunter dragged its starving mass up towards the house.
Inside, Tam had finally stopped
crying. It seemed she had no more tears to cry. She was thinking of Daddy, of
the man who had been so strange lately but still her father all the same. She
was trying to wrap her head around the concept he was dead. She knew things
died, of course; Tam was at times an eerily pragmatic child, unconcerned with
the passing of insects and small animals. But this was different; her dad was
not a bug. And her dad was gone.
As she sat struggling to digest
this, Charlie pushed his glasses up his nose. He was sweating; they had turned
on the ceiling light to help him work but it was slow going, especially without
any glue. He’d been forced to use the price tags on his schoolbooks (good old
Mom had insisted he bring them, and now he was glad) to meld together certain
parts, the adhesive on the stickers binding loosely together the parts they had
broken. Guilt filled every inch of him, but he managed to keep it in by
focusing on the task at hand. He had stretched the dead phone out on his
mother’s bed, the white sheets like a surgeon’s operating table. He screwed the
receiver back into place, wedging it in with strips of saliva-wetted paper from
his textbooks. He puzzled over how to reconnect a shredded wire, finally
twining it back together with his fingers, meticulous. They didn’t need every
part back in place—just enough to send a signal. Just enough to reach whatever
private satellite whirled silently overhead, waiting for them to call for help.
“Charlie, I’m sorry.” He turned to
see his sister peering over the edge of the bed. Her eyes were nearly crimson
from crying; in the light of the single ceiling lamp, she looked like a pale
little ghoul. “I’m sorry I called you those things.”
He blinked. Thrust suddenly into
the role of phone-repair-boy, he had entirely forgotten about their argument.
“It’s… fine. Don’t worry about it. We got other stuff to worry about, right?”
She nodded. “Look, when we get out of here I’ll play as much Scrabble with you
as you want. And I promise I won’t cheat, ever again. Kay?”
The edges of a smile tugged her
lips. “Kay.”
Their mother appeared at the
bedroom door, carrying a pair of plates. On the plates were a pair of bologna
sandwiches. “Hey, you two. I know it’s not much—”
The lights went out.
In the mindless panic that
descended, before their night vision arrived (Tam’s first; she had always had
keener vision than the rest) the plates thumped to the floor, bologna slices
flying. Tam shrieked. And Charlie put his hands protectively over the half-dead
phone, terrified someone might nudge it in the dark and destroy his work. Later
he would wonder why he didn’t go to his mother, or his sister, but the answer
was simple: Josh wouldn’t have, either.
“It’s alright. It’s
alright—everybody just calm down.” Sandra sounded like she needed some calming
herself, but she fumbled through the moonlight from the window and pulled Tam
close to her, reaching for Charlie. “It’s the generator. It’s just the
generator. I’ll go out and fill it again. It just ran out of gas—that’s all.”
Charlie heard something, then, in
the absence of the whirr of the ceiling fan and the ever-present, distant
rumble of its power source. Something moving in the silence. “Mom, shush.”
“I’ll just be a couple minutes, I
promise, I’ll get out and come right—”
“Mom, quiet!” The urgency in his voice sent both Tam and their mother
into silence. For a moment, utter stillness descended on the beach house. In
that stillness, they heard it.
Something moving against the walls.
Heavy, wet, scraping and slithering, pushing and probing. Had it been there the
entire time, or had it only just arrived? They couldn’t know, but Sandra felt
an ugly stab of fear in her guts as the thing outside pressed its mass against
the wall. There was a quiet, yet utterly repulsive squirting noise, like an
enormous boil popping.
What
is it? came the thought, to all their minds at once. What’s out there? Even Sandra, who had hoped against hope that Josh
might come back, knew better than to go and open the blinds. The moonlight fell
in sharp blades across the bed, across the wreckage of the phone, across her
children’s frightened faces. Then something passed in front of the window, a
heavy hump of shadow that rose and fell almost in the same instant. That window is almost six feet high.
Had someone stowed away on the
boat, intent on stalking them? It couldn’t be—the area was too small. They
would have noticed. Which meant it had to be something else. That lump in the
water… The thing was on land now. Watching them. Waiting.
She gripped the axe tight.
“Everyone stay here.”
“Mom?” Charlie’s eyes were moons in
the dark, the reflection of his glasses flickering and gleaming. “Mom, where
are you going?”
“We need that generator on.” She
stared at the door, half-open, the pale circles of the fallen plates beside it.
“We don’t. We’re fine, Mom. Don’t
go out there.” He was begging her, softly, with as much dignity as his fear
allowed him.
“How are you going to fix that
thing in the dark?” she asked him, a little more harshly than she’d meant to.
“There was no flashlight with the first aid kit. How are you going to fix it in
the dark, Charlie?”
He swallowed, the clicking of his
throat audible. Outside, the hump-thing squeezed its body against the side of
the bungalow. Sounds like the slapping of soggy ropes on tin sheeting rang and
boomed throughout the small space.
It
wants in, she thought.
“Get against the wall.” She ushered
them, shepherd-like, away from the sounds. There was a small bureau beside the
bed, an ugly faux-mahogany thing, but it wasn’t high enough to block the
window. They stood, all together, a huddled little family unit being stalked as
surely as any Neanderthal clan was harried by a sabertooth, and waited.
Eventually, the sounds stopped.
That worried Sandra. Her
palpitating heart would have found some relief if the thing outside had crashed
through the window, or hammered on the walls in an attempt to break through. At
least then they would have been able to see it. This pensive, squamous silence
sounded too patient, too much like thinking
for her. She did some quick math: forty feet to the generator. Forty feet back.
How fast was this thing? It must’ve been strong, to take her husband so
quickly, but from the sound of it, it moved slow. She thought she could outrun
it: she had done four years of track in high school, after all, and lacrosse in
college. The years since had done some damage to her fitness and waistline,
sure, but the muscle memory might still be there. “I’m going to be out for a
minute, okay? Just a minute. I just have refill the generator.”
“Mom…” Charlie clung to the hem of
her dress, in a way he hadn’t since he was four or five, when his precocious
demeanor told him he had to “outgrow” such things. “What about us?” Tam began
to whimper. Worried she might cry, Charlie pulled her close and shushed her,
but she shoved him away.
“You two will be okay.” She nodded
at the door. “The bureau is small. Get it in front of the door, and don’t move
it until I get back. Okay?”
“It’s a vampire,” said Tam in a
strangled squeak. They both looked at her; the idea was so absurd that Sandra
half-smiled. Then she realized her daughter was being serious; she had glimpsed
a few scenes of Queen of the Damned
when she and Josh had watched it last year. And who was she to laugh? They had no idea what was out there. “It’s gonna get you. Don’t go.”
“It’s not a vampire, sweetie.” She
hefted the small axe. “And whatever it is, it’s not going to get me. I’m going
to come back, and we’re going to get out of here, and then we’re going to go
back to New Hampshire and never, ever, ever go on the beach again. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Charlie. He put a hand
on his sister’s shoulder, and this time she didn’t push him.
“I’ll be back soon.” Her heart
began ramping up its pace again as she opened the bedroom door. “Love you two.”
The last thing Charlie and Tam saw
of her was the edge of her sundress, sweeping around the doorframe. That memory
would lodge in his mind afterward, like a piece of broken glass in the soft
tissue of his brain, able to call up pain whenever he brought it back.
Like a charm.
Sandra
pushed aside the mini-fridge and went out into the night, with nerves jangling
and humming under her skin. Survival instincts—mostly bred out of the human race,
by centuries of complacency—were telling her to get back inside, where it was
safe, where her children were safe.
She ignored the instincts, because they did not have the capacity for long-term
thought, and in the long term, her children were going to die if they did not
get the lights going.
She’d
tripped over things in the dark while leaving the bungalow, and her toes throbbed
as she closed the door behind her and located the generator hut under the
moonlight. The air was sickeningly warm, flowers hunched under swaying palms
lending a false sense of security, all of it soaked in the salty breeze coming
off the ocean. The night was still and quiet; strips of cloud hurried across
the moon.
From
the back of the house, there was a scraping, like teeth on metal. Then a slow,
steady shuffling, like a sack of wet cement being dragged over sand. The sound
froze her on her feet for a second. Then she began to run.
It’d
been a long time since Sandra had sprinted anywhere, and she felt it as the
blood pounded in her ears and her unused joints sent out pangs of complaint.
Years ago she’d been spry enough to chase down the kids, but then had come
iPads, wireless broadband, and all the gewgaws which helped keep them still and
silent, the way Josh wanted everyone. She’d lost her reflexes, and she felt it
keenly as she tripped over a protruding rock, bashed her knee, and then
scrambled up like a sack-race participant who’d forgotten her sack.
The
shuffling grew closer. It was not fast, this thing, but it was persistent. She
promised herself she would give it a chase, if nothing else. Sandra spared a
glance over her shoulder as she closed the forty feet between the house and the
hut.
She immediately wished she hadn’t. It
was easily the size of car, a knotty pyramid of pale flesh oozing over the
white sand. Rope-like arms spilled out in front of it, to carry its liquid
bulk. It was like a giant stress ball, malleable and wriggling, covered in
hook-tipped tentacles. In the dark, she couldn’t see if it had eyes or a mouth
or what the hell it was, but it was
big. And it wanted her.
She
felt her middle jiggling as she ran, and she burned with shame despite her fear.
If they ever got out of this she would be back to the gym, you bet your ass, back
to the gym every goddamn day and make no mistake about that. She’d be like
every other up-and-coming woman on the block—a gym bunny, a cardio fiend, a
Zumba queen. She would bust her ass like never before—if she survived, that
was. The axe in her hand was slippery with sweat, and seemed inadequate now, a
monkey’s Stone Age toy to fight a colossus.
Almost there! The generator hut
rose up in front of her—she grabbed for the latch, hauled open the tin door and
tried to ignore the stink of gas. She’s
safe, ladies and gentlemen, she’s home free! Slamming the door shut, she
fumbled for the light switch, which didn’t work—of course it didn’t work, stupid, the fucking genny was out. Idiot!
She
tried to think through her panic as the shuff-shuff-shuff of the tentacled thing drew
closer. She had been out here with Josh, once, and then again when she went
looking for him. There had been something on the wall—she searched blindly in
the dark, her heart in her mouth; in her groping she dropped the axe, and it
clanged loudly on the sand-strewn concrete. There: a small flashlight, on a
hook. She flicked it on, and nearly blinded herself. Probably the only one on the island, she thought. Hell of a thing to skimp out on. They wouldn’t need to turn the generator on,
she realized, if she could just get it back to the house. If she could just
stay away from that thing a little longer.
Shards
of moonlight broke through as a rattling crash shook the hut. It trembled like
a shark cage as (whatever-it-was) smashed into the sides, with terrifying
force. She bit back a shriek and held the door shut, white knuckles gripping
the latch in darkness. There was silence for a moment, and then she felt shock
run up her arm as the door handle wiggled up and down. That was no mindless
assault—that was a test, like a chimpanzee slowly catching on to a Pavlovian
test.
It understands doors.
How?
How could—It didn’t matter. She had a light. There was a chance, a slim chance,
she might be able to get back to the house before the horror outside pulled the
door open, or bashed through the wall. But she couldn’t just dash out there.
She couldn’t. If she got torn to bits, who would protect the kids? She felt
sick, thinking of them as orphans. Without her, without the light, they would
die.
Unable to dislodge her, the thing
outside rammed against the frame, a vomitous slapping sound rolling through the
genny-hut as its arms slapped and scraped on the thin barrier between Sandra
and death. She flinched away; a crack of light appeared on the edge of the
door, and a mass of pulsing meat filled it. The thing made no sound, no roars
or growls or shrieks, but it stank—God,
it reeked. It smelled of the ugly, black-blind depths of the ocean, of rot and
blood and the grave. Sandra’s sweat fell in her eyes, but she didn’t dare take
both hands off the handle of the door. She didn’t dare give it another
inch—already, she could hear the serrated hooks on the ends of its arms
scrabbling to get into the tiny gap. She wouldn’t give it an inch, or that
would be the end.
The crawling beast mashed itself
against the shack, and she caught a glimpse of one transparent, rheumy
goat’s-iris in the glare of her flashlight, as it tried to press through the
cleft of the doorframe. Then a booming crash, as it whipped its arms at the tin
roof. Then silence, deep and broad, as it withdrew.
The hut, beaten and battered,
creaked around her.
The stench of gasoline was making
her vision. She could stay in here forever, she thought, if only that awful
thing would leave her alone. But inside, that same strength that had directed
the children during her panic took hold again. You’re just going to stay in here? Let it fuck with you, push you
around, keep you in a box?
Just
like Josh?
That sealed it. Her days of
high-school glory, athletic and intellectual heights she could have reached had
her husband not kept her down, set Sandra’s veins afire. Whether it was
desperation, or arrogance, she decided she would take her chances with that
thing. No big squid, or mutant or hybrid, was going to keep her from her
babies.
She picked up the axe. Turned the
door handle. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.
“Fuck you!” she screamed, hurtling
out into the night. She swept the flashlight in a quick one-eighty, raising the
axe. Where was it? It was huge, a bloated monstrosity, and it had just been here, where the hell did it go?
In the blue midnight, she saw
sucker-marks trailing across the sand. Saw the glistening trail of slime up the
side of the shack. And with the slow-motion terror-laughter of a dream, she
smiled at her own idiocy. It understood doors; why had she assumed it didn’t
understand traps?
Half a ton of cephalopod came down on her from
atop the shed. Her death was not slow, and did not come easy. Dozens of
twisting suckers with razor-hooks dug into her, muscular folds of flesh filling
up her mouth, her nostrils. Two suckers worked into her eye shot, and the hooks
plunged in, twisting, searching.
Sandra Harrison died alone, in
squamous silence, her flashlight rolling across the sand and arrowing its
fragile beam up at the uncaring stars.
“Where’s Mom?”
Charlie wished his sister hadn’t
asked this question. Mostly, it was because he didn’t know, but it was also
because he had been wondering it himself. He didn’t like to admit that he was
lost, but staring at the gleaming pieces of the phone under the starlight, he
had to make this confession. It hurt, but he had to face the facts. Mom had
been gone for half an hour; they’d heard smashing, then a shout. Then, nothing.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The vastness of the space around
him, might not be apparent to Tam, but Charlie knew. He’d seen the charts in
the boat they’d ridden here, the laughing Rasta-man whose dreads might’ve been
a wig the way he’d been fussing over them—Charlie had seen that man’s charts,
and this place was less than a dot, less than an inkblot on the map. It didn’t
even have a name. In a stroke of originality, someone had scribbled “Gull
Island” over the dot. Truly inspired.
Except they hadn’t seen any gulls
in their time here. Not a single one. No wheeling seabirds had cried to wake
them in the mornings, or crap on them while they played on the beach. And Dad
hadn’t caught any fish—not a minnow, not even a single, undulating jellyfish.
It was almost as if something had been keeping the wildlife away. Something
that had moved in and dominated the foodchain, destroying the natural order.
Something that had waited three days, to seek out fresh meat.
Josh wasn’t concerned with its
species right now, or where it had come from, or what unholy urge made it crawl
on land and eat the flesh of human beings. Two thoughts dominated brain. The
first concerned how to get off the island. A pragmatic boy, he was not one to
panic, or lose control of any situation he still had a snowball’s chance of
hanging onto. The second was the concept of his mother’s death.
His father’s death, he could
handle. He and Josh (he had thought of his father largely as Josh, for several
months after discovering a second cell phone taped to the inside of the
glovebox in the family car—all the numbers in there were foreign, and some
quick Googling had revealed them to be for a Thai phone-sex company) had never
been close. It was painful to lose his dad, of course; he was not so jaded, and
there was a part of him that sincerely loved his father. Yet another part of
him rejoiced: Dad was gone! Good riddance, this devil-Charlie jeered. Hope he
enjoys his speed-ride all the way down to Heck.
But his mother… She had always been
there to play good cop. Patch him up when the kids at school tried to shove his
chess-club pieces down his pants, leaving ugly bruises. She had been there to
hound and tongue-lash the school board into transferring him, over and over,
whenever he was marked for cruelty—and he always was. You didn’t memorize radio
repair manuals at his age, and not expect a few hard knocks. Now she was gone.
The smell of her, her perfume, clung to him as a memory of sanity and patience.
Now that island was gone, and he
had a very different island to deal with: one that wanted to kill him. Not impossible
to handle, sure, not for someone who had beaten the reigning middle-school
chess champion not one but three times in a row. Challenging, though, with
grief clinging to him—and fear. He was very afraid. So he pushed that fear
away, pushed it and pushed it, corralled it with simple math: Mom and Dad are gone. That leaves just us
now. No room for collapse, Charles. No room for silly games and feelings, no
space for breakdowns or panic. Only room for efficiency.
His sister was saying something.
“What?” he snapped, irritated, and then sorry.
She was shaking his arm. “Please,”
she whispered, sobbing. “Please come back.”
“What are you talking about?”
She wiped tears from her eyes. It
was amazing, how many tears Tam could summon; sometimes he wondered if it was
her only talent. “You’re back. Good. Good-good, you were gone for… your face
went all dumb. For like, an hour.”
He blinked. “Oh.” Sometimes his
mind did this. If there was a big problem to work on, it would send him away,
put him in a safe quiet space where he could work undistracted, no matter the
parental fights going on down the hall or the obnoxious Disney movies playing
in his sister’s room. Sometimes, he was gone for a long time. Now he’d done it
and left Tam alone in the bungalow, hunted by an insane, impossible creature.
He needed information.
“Did it come back?” he asked,
putting a hand on her arm. She was pale-faced, probably dehydrated and hungry.
They would both have to deal with that at some point; it had to be late, past
his bedtime and certainly past hers. “Is it still out there?”
She shook her heard. “I heard it.
It wented… Went back out to the ocean.” Her syntax was falling apart. Her words
didn’t always come out right, when she was upset. Both of them, he realized,
were falling apart—detached logic or not. They had to pull together. There were
no adults to help them here.
“Okay.” He took a breath, the first
one consciously drawn that night. “Okay, that means we have some time.”
“Maybe it went away,” said Tam, the
hope in her voice heartbreaking. “Maybe it’s gone, and Mom’s gonna come back?”
She was seeking approval from him, backup, protection.
She wasn’t going to get it. “I
don’t think so,” he said. She shrank against the wall, and pulled herself into
a bundle on the cheap carpeting. He sat down beside his sister and put an arm
around her. Even as he did, his brain was jerking into high gear.
A creature that size, big enough to
claw at the window of the bedroom, must have an enormous calorie requirement.
Common sense and biology alike dictated this. Therefore, there was no reason to
think it would stop at Mom and Dad—it had emptied its environment, after all,
and expanded outward to drive off gulls, local fish populations and probably
pick off unsuspecting fishermen, for all he knew. It would be back, once it had
finished its grisly meal, and they would be next.
Unless they stopped it.
How to fight such a thing? It
clearly had no special vulnerability to blades; Mom hadn’t lasted more than ten
minutes against it. Guns, perhaps? He knew his father had one; Josh had often
gone to it in the middle of the night, checking the safe behind the hallway
mirror like a different father would go to the refrigerator for a snack. What
he’d been afraid of, Charlie didn’t know. But he never would have brought that
ridiculously oversized Colt down here—his father had seemed like he had nothing
to fear, from the moment they’d stepped off the boat. Nothing to worry about. That sure worked out for you, thought
Charlie bitterly.
Why had the thing gone back to sea?
To eat its meal in peace, perhaps. To stash it in some watery tomb where it
kept a larder. Or—
“Because it has to,” he realized,
astonished at his own thought.
Tam looked up at him. “Huh?”
“It only came out after dark,” he
said, and found himself grinning: a mad, stupid grin that split his face.
“Because the sun was too hot. It needs to stay wet, or it dries out, like a… an
amphibian, or a mudfish, or something. It can’t take heat!” Tam nodded, as if
following along, though her eyes were lost and distant—traumatized. In his
excitement he decided her trauma could be dealt with later. They had a chance,
now. They had a shot at survival!
Fire, perhaps? Yes, they would have
to burn it. But what would they use for fuel? All the gasoline was in the
generator shed, and he doubted his parents’ thin summer clothes would make
satisfactory torches for long—they would need a light. And if they had fire, he
realized, he could finish fixing the phone. The stove was electric, run off the
generator, but his father had been a smoker, a chronic smoker. And forgetful.
Charlie moved to the bureau and began
rifling through it, dimly aware how embarrassed he would normally be to touch
his mother’s underthings, his father’s starchy boxer shorts. He found a
hairbrush, an ounce of pot in a plastic baggie, an old-fashioned pipe… and
there it was. His father’s lighter, forgotten in his excitement to go out and
catch a big one.
“Here,” he said, handing it to Tam.
“I’m need you to hold this for me. Okay?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice very
small. “Charlie?”
“What?”
“Is the big thing gonna get us?”
He sighed. “Maybe. But not if we’re
smart. Okay?” She looked doubtful. “Hey, come on. I know you can be smart. You
knew how to deal with Mom and Dad, way better than I did.” He hated to talk
about them in past tense—it scared him, made things real somehow. But it was the truth. “You use your brain whenever
mine’s off like a mile away. You gotta be my backup. Please?”
Slowly, she nodded.
“Alright. Now it’s gonna come back,
and it’s gonna be looking for us. We have to fix the phone before that
happens.” He instructed her on how to hold the lighter, and helped her steady
it as it flared to life under her tiny fingers. “Fix the phone… and get ready.”
Alone in the dark, in miles of
black ocean, the two children began their work.
The great hunter had returned to
life-giving saltwater. The dry air of the island burned it, sapped its
strength; it had taken its time picking over Sandra’s body and gnawing the
softest parts off, and it was shriveled, papery. It had no concern about
scavengers approaching ; it had already eaten them all. It had drained the seas
of life for miles around, and now had only plankton for company.
It soaked in the sea, regained its
strength, and emerged once again.
Lurching onto the beach, its malign
intelligence guided it back to the place that had been the source of its best
meals: the bungalow. It probed and prodded at the walls, tentacles coiling over
the cheap doors and windows with their Tyvek HomeWrap poking from under fake bamboo
exterior. Eventually it found an open window; it knew by now that doors could
be locked, and every second of wasted energy meant it would have to go back to
sea sooner. It heaved its enormous body up onto the wall, and began the
laborious process of squeezing itself through the window.
Invertebrates, lacking skeletons,
are able to pass themselves through spaces far too small for their size—given
enough time. The hunter of Gull Island was no exception. Mashing itself against
the tiny windowframe like a vast blob of putty, it heaved and shoved until it
had applied enough pressure to ooze its form into the living room, great oozing
piles of its reeking flesh pouring onto the slate inside. The arms followed,
razor hooks whipping and grasping for a handhold in the cool dark space. Its
arms latched on the couch, shredding it; its mass filled nearly half the room,
its bulbous top half grazing the ceiling. Unconcerned with the lack of light,
the creature began to explore.
Outside the water, its hunting
capacities were limited. Without the ability to sense electrochemical
signatures—the alert flags of prey—through water, it was reduced to using its
eyes and arms alone. It dug beneath the couch, looking for soft meat to slice;
it fumbled through the kitchen, crushing the stale bread and a half-finished
sandwich Tam had started that morning and then forgotten. Arm after leathery
arm filled the bungalow, each one seeking with a mind of its own, controlled
independently. One of its legs knocked over the big-screen TV, and it recoiled
as the machine crashed to the floor. Arms poked, scraped, confirmed there was
no threat, and the hunt resumed. It popped open the mini-fridge to find bologna
and alcohol, useless substances that were ignored completely. Where was the
prey?
At length, it discovered the
bedroom. The flickering light from beneath the door fascinated it; it had spent
several minutes playing with Sandra’s flashlight earlier, and this illumination
held it hypnotized. It worked a tentacle under the door, groping, grasping
until it found the bolt on the inside. With a click, the door was unlocked, and
the creature barreled into the room, doorframe cracking as it pressed its mass
through.
No prey—but there was heat! Such
terrible heat! Something had been done to an object in this room, something the
animal had no understanding of. Tam and Charlie had set fire to the bed, a few
minutes before escaping. They had left the window open, the heavy bureau
knocked over to serve as a stepladder. Clothes were scattered over the floor,
and several of the drawers were empty.
The hunter had no awareness of
this. It was both horrified and obsessed with the hot, dancing light spreading
across the bed. It stretched out one tentacle to touch the flames, and when the
grasping claws at its tip met fire, its pigmentation changed to a disgusted
gray color and it surged away in one bubbling, liquid motion. Bad! The light
was bad, very bad, it hurt. Worse, it was dry,
hot and dry and terrible. The thing from the water had discovered what it felt
like to be burned.
It was not pleased.
Over a thousand pounds of
cephalopod crashed out of the bedroom, not bothering with patience, simply
ripping the doorframe apart on its way out. Its skin flashed and pulsed with
bio-luminescent rage. On some dark, instinctual level, it understood that it
had been tricked. Why? It had only wanted food. Why was this happening?
Seeing the front door open, it
squirmed towards the welcoming moonlight. It would soak in the brine for a
time, and then return. The night was long, and it was still hungry. But there
was a curious pile by the door, something soft and lumpy, blocking the way.
And the door hadn’t been open
before. It remembered that quite clearly. There was a shape standing over the
lump. The horror paused, its curiosity mingled with frustration, which dashed
in colorful patterns over its skin.
Charlie stood over a pile of
clothes soaked in his father’s best bourbon, his every limb trembling. The
thing was lit from the back by the blaze in the bedroom; to him, it seemed a
thing from nightmare, as tall as the ceiling and covered in hook-tipped limbs.
Twin eyes like bulging, transparent tomatoes rolled and bugged at him. He could
almost sense its anger, and he had to laugh.
An octopus. For all its smarts, its
deadly hunger and its subtlety, he could see it plain: the horror unmasked was
only an octopus. Huge, of course, bigger than any he’d ever read about, and
equipped with the kind of claws you’d expect on Freddy Krueger, but still an
octopus. A dumb fish, he realized sadly, had killed half his family.
“This is for Mom,” he said, and
flicked the lighter over the pile of clothing.
The bourbon wasn’t as high-proof as
the salesman in Bermuda had claimed—the sticker was a lie, pressed on to entice
thirsty tourists—but it burned just fine. Hawaiian shirts, bras, socks and a
single piece of lacy lingerie Sandra had brought to entice her husband burst
into flame, scarlet tongues leaping upward. The creature, which had been rippling
towards him, pulled back. It was scared, he realized with a thrill of animal
glee. It knew from the bedroom what fire was, and big or not, it was scared.
“That’s right,” he said, backing away. “Burn.”
He fled into the night.
The animal in the living room
turned and twisted, its clever murderer’s brain filling with panic. The door
was blocked with more pain-light, and it had nowhere to run—it couldn’t squeeze
back through the window, not in time to get away from the dehydrating smoke and
the blooming heat. Much like the late Josh, it had never evolved to counter a
strategy like this. Its ingenuity, its ruthless hunting, had run up against a
threat it could not understand. And now it was trapped in a house aflame.
The fires had spread from the bed
already, licking the bedroom ceiling, coiling over the stained rug beneath the
bedframe. The single framed picture Sandra had brought of all of them together
blackened and cracked on the nightstand, the faded print from a long-gone era
of Polaroids crackling and crisping. The fire spread; smoke filled first one
room, then the next. The bungalow was burning to the ground, just like Charlie
had planned.
Outside, he sprinted across the
sand to his sister, who had dutifully hidden among fallen palm leaves. They
watched the ugly glow of fire spread, and heard the banging and thundering from
within. Josh wished the thing would roar, or scream, or give some sound of
surrender, but it did not. Only the helpless thrashing of its arms could be
heard, booming through the night. “You okay?” he asked Tam.
She sighed. “My iPad’s in there,”
she said, sounding very distant.
He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s
okay.” In one hand, he held the repaired phone, and he flicked the lighter over
it, squinting at the emergency number taped under the receiver. “We’ll get you
another—”
The creature smashed through the
wall of the bungalow, half its body afire, arms whipping and pounding the sand.
Terror and fury had driven it mad, and it whirled and bubbled, its eye fixing
on them. The other eye had popped from heat, and was running in filthy streams
down its blackened shape. Charlie froze, his finger poised over the patched
satellite phone.
He had seconds to react. Seeing the
lighter, the thing was coming towards them, and not slowly, either; instinct
was telling it to return to water, but now the hunter had learned a new
sensation, one that burned sick and furious inside it: Hatred.
Charlie pressed the phone into his
sister’s hands. “The rocks,” he stammered. The car-sized beast was hauling
itself at them, whipping hooks thrown out in front of it. It wasn’t just going
to kill them, he realized; it was going to tear them apart for what they had
done to it. He wondered if it understood revenge. “The rocks we climbed the
first day. Get on top of them, call the number.”
“No,” she said, and clung to him.
“No, no—”
“Do what I tell you to, dammit!” he
screamed at her, and sounded so much like his father that it disgusted him for
a moment. He shoved her, and she staggered, betrayal in her eyes. “Go!” She
nodded, and hugged him, quickly. He hugged her back. For all her brattiness,
for all his jealousy, he did love her—and he would probably never see her
again.
She dashed away, propelled by the
kind of terror only a child can know. He stood his ground as the thing
approached, holding up the lighter. The beast would have a choice to make;
pursue the smaller, weaker prey, or come after the more dangerous target—the
one that had nearly killed it. Any ordinary animal, one that was motivated only
by hunger, would have followed Tam. But this thing was not ordinary, and he had
done more than hurt it. He had made it angry.
Without even pausing, it closed the
gap between them and swept its arms out to embrace him. He rolled away; it was
big, but clumsy, its body unused to the heaviness it experienced on land. Hooks
of bone smashed into the palm fronds around them. He leapt up and began to run;
it followed.
The generator shed was close by,
its walls dark and high, a stain of blood marring the earth in front of it. He
stepped over his mother’s blood with a stomach-jerk of revulsion, and pulled
himself inside. He would not have long before it got inside.
In Charlie’s mind, efficiency had again taken center stage. One way or another, the creature was going to
get him. The island simply didn’t have a shelter big enough to keep it out. And
once it ate him, it would move on to Tam, dehydration be damned. It would not
stop until it had killed its tormentors. That was what monsters did: they kept
coming. Like his dad, plowing forward through life, an idiot brute with no
conception of how to escape the trap he’d set for himself. Charlie pulled the
door shut to the generator shed, and held it for a moment, long enough to hear
the claws scraping on the other side. It would expect him to hold the door;
that would buy him a few seconds. Enough to do what had to be done. Enough time
to take Option Two.
Gagging at the smell inside the
shed, he hurried to the ladder, which stretched down into a hole—a sort of
bunker. He realized only belatedly that the reason they’d put the generator
underground was the same reason he was now feeling his way down greasy rungs
into the dark: they needed it away from the house. Far away from visitors, in
case anything happened.
And accidents happened, didn’t
they? Tam was an accident, he knew that much. His parents had never meant to
have her. And when they had, it seemed like everything had unraveled. His mom
had found a new joy; for his dad, the children became a chore, something to be
resented. This made his choice easier to make. He would not resent his sister.
He would not choose himself over her.
He flicked the lighter as he
reached the bottom; at the same time, the beast called his bluff and pushed
open the door. Illumination spread, and Charlie saw things. Terrible things.
The wetness on the ladder hadn’t
been grease. He shrank against the wall, horrified: his mother’s shredded body
lay in the light of the small flame, her skin stripped from her, intestines
devoured and eyes dug out like truffles removed by some rooting hog. It had dumped her down here, like a candy
wrapper, discarded. She was a mess, and he turned away from her, his mouth
filling with vomit, and tried to forget the sight. There was no time for grief,
now.
Soon there wouldn’t be time for
anything.
He found what he was looking for in
the back of the generator basement: a tiny, cramped space, it only had enough
room to house the generator itself—and dozens on dozens of plastic cans of
gasoline. How often, in the movies, had he seen the hero kill a monster with
gas? Countless times—but the hero always escaped, always lived another day.
Always came back in the sequel to do it again, and again, and again.
Not
this time.
The cracked, peeling tentacles of
his pursuer were twining down the ladder, bone razors rasping on concrete. He
poured a can of gas onto the floor, then another. The cold stinking oil slopped
around his feet. The creature followed him down into the depths slowly; perhaps
the fumes confused it, or perhaps it knew it had him cornered. Perhaps it was
having fun, he thought.
He stood ankle-deep in gasoline by
the time it reached the bottom. Its mass filled the ladder-shaft and plopped
into the tiny room like so much excrement. And before he could lower the
lighter into the gasoline or perhaps drop it in dramatic slow-motion, the
creature reached out and tore his arm off.
Charlie didn’t have time to scream,
only feel a vague sense of surprise. The next tentacle whipped across his
throat, pulling out his voicebox and trachea with a pop and a spray of red, and
he slumped over with a distant sense of failure in his fading brain. It hurt,
yes, but it hurt more that he had failed his siter. His baby sister, who he had
bullied so mercilessly.
I
love you, Tam.
The monster feasted, among the
gasoline and the filth. It turned Charlie’s severed, dripping arm around in its
appendage like a toy. At last, it brought its attention to the curious object
in Charlie’s drained, white fingers. Pried it loose. Toyed with it, brought one
claw over the silver wheel that summoned flame from nowhere, as if by magic. By
now, leaden gasoline fumes had filled the tiny cavern below the shed.
The creature’s inquisitive nature was insatiable. It had to know; how had the boy accomplished his trick? How had it
been hurt? The claw stroked the wheel, then pressed, turned it. One try, two
were not enough: it was a persistent devil, and it tried a third time. That was
the charm.
The fumes, and the gasoline
slopping noisily in the depths, went up in a plume of fiery rage that bellowed
into the night sky, lighting up the air over the island like a Roman candle.
Curiosity, the oldest hunter in the
world, had claimed a new victim.
The next morning when the rescue
helicopter arrived, Tam was sitting on the rocks just as she had been ordered,
playing with the phone. She was rocking back and forth slowly, deliberately.
The paramedics and authorities swept the island, pulled her into the
helicopter. Inquiries would be made, body parts examined. Months later, she
would be told her brother was a hero, that an unexpected runoff of
some-or-other chemical had caused an exponential growth in certain wildlife.
That warmer seas and changing climate had encouraged the increase in size of
blah-blah-blah.
Yet Tam never responded, never
voiced a shrill cry of joy or a sob of terror. She had a notion in her
survivor’s brain that if she had just been quieter, just been better behaved,
they never would have come to the island. It would be over twenty years, before
she spoke again.
Out in the blue empty of the
tropics, the waves crashed over one another in raucous joy. Gulls floated on
warm thermal wind, and the illusion of a paradise on earth, of infinite azure
beauty, persisted.
And no one questioned this
beautiful lie.
