The day was nearly done by the time she reached the top again. Sara caught her breath alongside the skull-faced woman she’d killed.
And soon, the sky was black. It summoned jungle sounds she hadn’t noticed until now. She imagined an entire tribe of these things prowling the darkness, hunting for intruders. She wished there was a way to get word to Carly and Jean-Philippe.
“I’m sorry, Carly,” she whispered and turned toward the mountain entrance. “Please be safe.” The way inside the mountain was even darker, a passage straight into nightmares. She gave a dispassionate laugh when she saw the jewel plugged into the stone tongue. The taste bud had in fact opened the way. She wrestled it free and held it tight before stuffing it inside her pocket, half convinced it was a good luck charm. It had carried her this far...
“Okay,” Sara said, rallying. She reached into her supply pack and took a glow stick in hand. The snap of her thumb sent the darkness scurrying. Sara took the small pickaxe in her free hand and stared at the entrance, half with wonder, half terror.
The pirate was in there. With a knife. Fuck him, because she had an axe. Though, somehow, the advantage was his. He could sit in the shadows and wait. He’d see her coming because the light in her fist would betray her.
“Isabella,” she whispered, carrying the light over the threshold and into the musty air. Despite everything, just being here was validating. Like Blake hadn’t ruined their lives for nothing. She wished he could be here now and wiped her eyes with the back of her bloody hand.
There were steps. Lots of them. Descending deeper into what she had to assume was a man-made mountain.
The interior was confined, almost like winding stairs inside a lighthouse. She passed unlit wall sconces and tried to make her boots fall with stealth, but the echoes made gravelly clops.
The descending path led to a stone landing, though the stairs continued into unbroken darkness below. The wooden doors before her were ajar. She reached out and touched her palm against them. The wood flexed, soft to the touch. The pirate had gone this way. She should’ve gone somewhere else, but the descending staircase was anything but inviting.
Besides, Sara knew she had to kill that fucker.
She passed through and found a cold stone antechamber. A candle chandelier swayed on a rusted chain, delivering haunted house creaks. Two chairs sat on opposite sides of the entrance, withered by time and seemingly too brittle to hold any weight. The door beyond them was half open and flickering light danced inside that space.
She moved through, at last invading a sprawling living area. One center hallway stretched on, with doors lining both sides. Shorter hallways to her left and right led to other doors. A dirty carpet wore hints of long-faded royal red. It lined the floor in all directions, soaked by hundreds of years of humidity.
Stepping on it brought a squish of water. She goose-stepped and stuffed her glow stick inside her pocket. One path took her to an old kitchen complete with a rusted cauldron and sacks of old grain.
Sara headed back the other way. Mustiness tickled her nostrils and provoked a sneeze. She stuffed her arm into her elbow and held it there until the urge passed. Somewhere down the long corridor came the sound of rummaging.
They were the first people in centuries to be here. She imagined Isabella gliding through then-lavish surroundings, unimpressed with everything because Roche could not buy her love. And once he’d realized that, he decided this place would instead become her tomb.
Their tomb.
Knowing that, Sara could hardly be impressed by any of this.
So let’s put that money to good use, Roche.
Opposite the kitchen sat the library, loaded with books as musty as the furniture. They had yellowed and twisted pages, bubbled covers. Roche’s reading chair was positioned beside the fireplace, hobbled by a missing leg.
On the far wall, window indentations were blotted by small plates of stone. The pulley system under it implied there was a way to slide them aside and get actual fresh air and sunlight through.
Power windows. Gotta love it.
From down the hall, more rummaging interspersed with impatient grunts. It was impossible for Sara to search any further. The pirate was too dangerous, too rabid in his quest. And there was nothing in here with which to trap him, so she gripped the pickaxe. Only way to get on with it was to go through him. The more she thought on that, the better it sat inside her. This motherfucker had tried to throw her to her death twice in as many times as they’d met.
There would not be a third.
Sara slow-stepped toward the center hall, careful to keep her damaged back from scraping against raw stone. At the corner, she peered out at the empty space. It was suddenly as quiet as it had been the last three hundred years.
The pirate was going to have to pass this way on his way out. It was the only place where she could gain the upper hand. She waited with her fingers curled around the axe, trying not to think too vividly about the task at hand. The sound it would make when the blade broke his rib cage. The look in his eyes. The way his bowels would loosen.
Considerable time passed. The place stayed quiet. Maybe the pirate had fallen victim to the same kind of trap that had taken ribbons off her back, though she knew deep down she’d never be that lucky.
She shifted impatiently as the sudden onset of hysterical shrieking pinned her in place.
Coming from the darkness ahead.
Sara forced herself out of hiding. It might’ve been a trap, though not even Carly could give a performance that good.
The doorways she passed had all been opened. One of the spaces was a ballroom complete with a shiny floor that looked to be on fire because of the way the torchlight hit it. She crept past additional quarters, a dining space, other areas whose uses weren’t as discernable.
The hall was longer than she thought, and it seemed far larger than the space the mountain concealed. The torch sconces along the wall made her shadow loom large in a stalker’s pursuit.
The last room on the right neared, and the scream had diffused and become low-level grumbling.
Sara peeked in.
The pirate had discovered the bedroom. He stood at the foot of the bed, crumpled papers balled between his fists. He kept lifting one page to his face, reading it over and over, shaking his head and mumbling to himself. Then he tossed them across the floor with disgust and in the process found Sara watching from the jamb.
“I was right,” he said, sounding like a completely different person.
The bed housed two bodies. They were little more than jagged shapes at this distance.
“We are destined to die here,” the pirate said. He no longer seemed to care about much, steadying himself on the stone wall. He tossed his knife into a darkened corner of the room, signaling surrender.
Sara felt emboldened to step inside now that he was unarmed, because her blade wasn’t going to go slipping out of her hand.
The paper had her curiosity. She scooped the pages, eager for whatever had upset him. She floated the glow-light over what she instantly recognized as Isabella’s handwriting.
No translations. No way of knowing what was said. It was the first time since beginning this trip that Isabella felt like a total stranger. But then, maybe not. Because as soon as she glanced the bottom of the page, she thought maybe she could guess what the whole thing was about.
Down in the footer was a hand-scribbled drawing of a fish. Swimming beneath an old galleon that Sara guessed had been added for scale. The fish was double its size, and the front of its head had been colored in and drawn larger than the rest of its body, as if to emphasize the bone-like protection.
“My God,” she said.
“It is retribution,” the pirate told her. “The angatra will not let us leave. It will not let anyone leave.”
“She was never getting off this island...”
“Neither are we,” he said. “There are other letters here. In English. Journals from the night three galleons approached
this island carrying ninety men. Except...”
“The fish. I mean, its great, great, great grandfather fish.”
“Two galleons never got close. Attacked by the same kind of creature that plagues us. The last ship managed to anchor, rowboats ashore...”
She drifted to the bed as he orated. Two skeletons rested atop damp fabric, faceless cavities with jagged skull domes where the faces had been bashed free and removed.
“What are those things that attacked us?” Sara said.
The pirate held out another page. “It is here.” He dropped the stack at his feet. Sara took them. The pages were English scribbles and glowed green as she hovered a light stick over them.
Vernier never had any intention of taking the whore home. She rushed the beach as our rowboats came ashore, bloodied and hysterical, begging us to kill Roche, to kill him now, and take her away.
But Vernier was unmoved by her plight. Enraged by the massive losses we had incurred to reach land, determined to find reimbursement inside the pirate’s vaults. Vernier dragged the sobbing woman back to the keep where we suffered further defeat, for the mad pirate had dismantled his ship and lined the parapet with every last cannon, raining hellfire down upon us.
We managed to breach with six men remaining, imprisoning the pirate inside his own jail, leaving him to rot while we searched for a way inside his vault. Vernier wanted him alive so he could witness losing everything.
We rotated responsibilities. Three men searched the keep according to the whore’s words. This while the rest of us took the whore to bed, releasing our loneliness inside of her. Maybe Vernier wanted nothing to do with her, but if you could overlook her madness, there was plenty of beauty still prevalent.
But she was never meant as anything more than a distraction. Until of course I awoke one morning to find my crewmen slain, swollen throats and vomit the color of black tar plastered to their faces. I knew she had poisoned them, but why not me?
I rushed to find Vernier as he continued excavation, and he was nowhere. The galleon, gone. I was certain I’d been abandoned. I was certain that Vernier had loaded the treasure in the middle of the night and fled, but Isabella appeared on that beach, laughing at me, and what she said there filled me with irreparable horror.
“If you will not take me away from here, then I must keep you with me. Forever.” And her laughter was sinister enough to make me realize she knew exactly what she’d done. That she was not out of her mind. That she simply was not prepared to suffer alone.
It’s been at least a year. The whore’s belly is swollen and I do not know if the offspring growing inside her is mine, or the men whose names I can no longer remember. I ask her to tell me what happened to them, but she only laughs. And that laughter has invited my own madness. I hate her. And I hate this island.
The letter was unsigned. It was either unfinished, or the unnamed crewman had declined to identify himself. Maybe his admission was so vile that he’d chosen anonymity.
Isabella had seen her dreams dashed twice in one night. First, as fish chomped through two rescue galleons, and second, when the man she so desperately wished would rescue her, proved not to care at all. And it turned out, that was only the beginning of her problems.
The pirate stood beside Sara. He offered nothing in the way of comfort.
Sara stuffed the pages inside her pocket.
“There is no escape.” The pirate spoke as if this was his realization.
This guy was on a ledge and Sara wasn’t about to try talking him down. Better to let him jump. She went to the door.
“Anyone who comes here, dies,” the pirate said. “Don’t you understand?”
“What can we do?” Sara asked.
The pirate had nothing else to say. He waved her off and his shoulders slumped further. “Go,” he said. “It does not matter. It will never stop.”
“Unless we stop it.”
“My people try. They sacrifice themselves to it and its hunger only grows.”
Sara thought of the leper woman back at Emerald Tides who’d thrown herself willingly to this fish. They had probably been doing that for as long these things had grown accustomed to feeding on humans.
The pirate was vacant and Sara was glad to leave him there. Let him stew in whatever superstitions had slaughtered his ambition.
She was nearly to the damp entryway when he screamed.
She spun back around and saw the pirate stumble into the hallway, recoiling in the presence of another hulking skull face. It hacked his chest with an oversized bone hatchet and his dancing blood was darker than shadows in torchlight.
The pirate slid up against the wall with his forearms raised as a desperate shield. The killer towered over him. Its weapon so high and so fast the blade sparked against the ceiling.
Its head whipped to the side, catching Sara in its side-eye. Rather than follow through with the killing blow, it growled at the sight of her. The bone white skull mask was smeared in gore and dirt as it began to charge forward beneath the flickering torchlight.
Sara stepped back through the stairwell, onto the landing, and pushed the door shut. Another primitive squeal overhead. A shadow performing eager leaps down the stairs, rushing to catch the action.
The only place left to go was down.
Forty-Nine
Carly sat with her back to the water, right up against the shallows. She stared out at the man who’d nearly killed her. His body floated face down and the current dragged him along the Star Time’s overturned stern.
One of his equipment straps must’ve gotten snagged on some part of the yacht, because he ebbed in place, despite the ocean’s efforts to banish him.
Once she was certain the bastard was truly dead, and wouldn’t be pressing his thumbs into her eye sockets again, Carly began to settle her attention on the overturned ship, trying to determine what she should retrieve from the inside of it.
The diving tank on her back was clunky and heavy and she didn’t dare remove it. It had saved her life when she’d gone overboard. She’d been able to slip it around her back, pop the breathing apparatus inside her mouth and swim away from the maniac who pursued, chasing her into the deep with a gushing head wound that should’ve summoned every shark for miles.
Maybe the best thing to do was find Jean-Philippe and the others. The island wasn’t that big. The pirate was out there, injured. But not dead. If she could’ve hit him just once more, she might’ve been able to end this. Got off a few shots, though the rest of the magazine was soggy from her swim, denying her the full load. She sounded like that babbling government lunatic and decided to dwell on her failures no longer.
Carly was caught between these two trains of thought. She stood and stretched, beginning to slide the tank off her back when she spotted someone walking beneath a canopy of sloped branches. Right off, she knew it wasn’t one of theirs.
The shadows kept the figure hidden, but the way its hand raked through the leaves as it walked turned her into a statue. Because it grew more brazen then, stepping clear to reveal itself.
The thing was naked. Grotesque. It throbbed upright at the sight of her and made deranged chittering noises as Carly’s fear went airborne. Its head twitched from side-to-side at the sound of her whimpers.
Carly kept the diving tank on her back and took a few loud steps into the water. The splashes set the creature hobble-running for the shore. It lifted its face to the air, and its nostrils puffed like a beating heart.
Carly dropped the facemask over her eyes and chomped the rubber breathing tube. She turned and flopped into the water, pushing into the deep while watching the surface.
Disgusting feet stalked after her, turning little springs of coral into dust as the thing waded into the Indian Ocean up to its torso.
Carly hovered there, watching as the creature then broke right, swimming out to the stern of the overturned ship. It reached the government spook’s corpse and wrestled with it, tearing it free from whatever snag had caught it. Then it
swam back, towing the body behind it.
Easily distracted, Carly thought. Thank God.
The creature returned to shore, dragging the corpse up the shallows through a haze of coral dust and then out of sight.
Carly spun and paddled into the gloom, reaching for the small light attached to one of her shoulder straps. She would have to kill some time hiding down here while waiting for the creature to hopefully forget all about her.
If it would forget.
She didn’t know how much oxygen remained in the tank, but thought she’d have at least thirty to forty minutes left. It was better to go deeper in case that thing was just standing up there, expecting her to surface.
Past the shallows, the ocean floor dropped off like a cliff. She swam down along the vertical wall, glimpsing an overturned wooden hull nearly embedded in the floor on the next landing. Scattered across this seabed was a collection of broken and battered vessels, some of them relatively recent, others much older. Ancient.
Another ledge. Carly followed this declining mountain face downward. She reached the next landing and found a deep fissure there. An underwater canyon that ran beneath the mountain sediment and disappeared, as if years of shifting terrain had corked it.
Carly drew closer, the spirit of exploration inspiring her curiosity. No intention of going further, but she wanted to see, and pressed her facemask against the void, squinting.
The world beyond was ink black. One shifting shadow swirled and found shape as it rushed toward her, growing as it approached the fissure.
Jaws were wide and threatening. Lined with teeth so large they had their own teeth. Whatever this mouth belonged to spotted Carly at the hole, and charged to get her. The world’s angriest zoo animal, imprisoned in natural captivity. The ground held intact as the thing struck sediment and then knifed away, returning to the sanctity of shadows, and leaving Carly to witness a shape so spindly and alien that she’d never be able to describe it.
Ocean Grave Page 25