by E. R. FALLON
“Will you come with us? We need your help with something,” Katie said.
“Why should I?” The doctor stared at the side of her face and grinned. “You have the Mark.” He squinted at Julian. “And you’re Elvina’s son. I knew I remembered your face from somewhere. You were the boy who was spying on us one night.”
“And you were the bastard who knocked me out,” Julian said.
“Have a good night.” The doctor put the key in his pocket and shakily grabbed his cane from where it leaned against the building’s red-brick façade.
Julian grabbed the doctor by the arm. “You’re not going anywhere.” The cane and the bag landed on the sidewalk with a thud.
Katie dashed to the corner where they had parked the car and pulled it alongside the sidewalk.
“Excuse me. Just what do you think you’re doing?” The doctor tried to break free from Julian’s grip and shouted, “Someone help me!”
Keeping the somewhat frail doctor in place wasn’t too difficult but Julian’s brow dampened and his hand muscles quivered as he dug his fingers into the man’s arm.
“Be quiet. We’re not going to hurt you, and we’ll let you go after you help us. Give me your cane and cell phone, and get in the back seat.” He touched his other hand to the back of the older man’s soft head and just about shoved him into the car.
“But I don’t have a cell phone,” the doctor said.
Julian raised his leg and kicked the man’s shin inside the car. The doctor winced and Julian held out his hand until the doctor passed him a phone. Julian put the cane and cell phone in the trunk. He jogged back to the sidewalk, grabbed the doctor’s bag and got into the seat next to him. Katie slowly drove off.
The Thorn in Side motel was ten individual units painted pink and white with the rooms connected to the main office by a herringboned path. The motel’s pink and white seashell neon sign flashed ‘Vacancy’.
Katie parked in an empty space near the rooms and checked them in. It occurred to Julian as he sat with the doctor, who smelled like damp wool, that he didn’t know the man’s real name.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The old man was vainly examining his reflection in the rear-view mirror and fixing the few remaining strands of his hair. He smiled at himself in the mirror and didn’t look directly at Julian.
“Actually, I don’t care if I find out,” Julian said.
“I didn’t plan on answering you. Do you really think your plan will work outside your mother’s cellar?”
“How did you figure … I don’t see why not?” The thought had concerned Julian initially. He looked away then turned to the doctor. “We can promise to let you go after and to not tell the police who you are. Given your track record, I know how selfish you are.”
“Elvina’s behavior is jeopardizing the rest of us anyway.”
Julian stared out the car window. Katie was talking to the clerk, a lanky blond man, inside the brightly lit check-in office that stood out in the dark.
“I saw you injecting a boy the night you attacked me. Where did you get the drug or whatever it is you use?” Julian asked the doctor.
“We use a little to sedate them – what I also did to you – then we transport them to where we want them to go, usually to your mother’s cellar. There, we give them a larger dose, and that’s what completes the process. I have my supplier off-island get it to us here.”
“What is it you’re sneaking in?”
“Tell you or what, you’ll kick an old man’s leg again? It’s parts of a tree.”
“From where?”
“South America. It’s called ‘the devil’s breath’.”
Julian’s back stiffened. The small branch that was on the stand in his mother’s wine cellar, and what was also abbreviated in reverse on his mother’s license plate.
Katie returned to the car, carrying a key on a chain with a seashell-shaped tag bearing the motel’s name on both sides. They helped the doctor out of the car.
“Please, I need my cane to walk,” he said.
Julian took the cane then the cell phone, which he kept, out of the trunk. He passed the cane to the doctor, and he and Katie took him into the room and turned on only one of the many lights.
“The dimmer it is in here, the better,” Julian said to Katie.
The one bed in the room was covered by a faded red blanket. The walls were papered over in a green bamboo pattern. Julian walked across the carpeted floor to the window and had to tug the bottom of the shade twice before it snapped up. The night sky was clear. Across the road on the beachfront was a group of teenagers, the boys wearing baseball caps and the girls in sports team sweatshirts, sitting around a bonfire that flickered orange and white in the dark. He could hear them laughing. No moonlight touched the sea, which was like rippling silver liquid mercury in the night. He pulled down the shade.
Katie left the room for a moment and came back with the shopping bag and the doctor’s old black satchel. Julian took it from her then called his mother from his own cell phone to give her their room number.
Seconds after Julian finished the call, the doctor’s cell phone pulsated in Julian’s hand and a dreary ringtone played. Julian glanced at the screen.
“It’s my mother.” He tossed the phone at the doctor. “Answer it, and try to sound relaxed.” Julian stood poised, and Katie took his hand and gently squeezed.
“Elvina. What a pleasant surprise,” the doctor answered the call. “Yes, sure, I’ll meet you there.”
Katie sat down on the edge of the bed, and Julian got the cell phone back from the doctor.
“Are you okay?” Julian asked Katie.
“I just want this to be over with.”
Julian rubbed her back. He set down the doctor’s bag and took a wide elastic bandage out of the shopping bag Katie had brought into the room. He held it out to her. “You might want to wrap this around your chest.”
Katie went into the bathroom with the bandage and closed the door. She came out and positioned herself face up on the bed. Julian draped the yellow cloth over her. He carefully moved her hand and tucked a few strands of her hair under the cloth.
“She should be here soon, right? I’m a little nervous,” Katie said.
“Just a little?” Julian smiled. “You’re doing great. Hang in there.”
The doctor sat on a small bench that appeared to have come as a matching set with the vanity table in the room. Julian sat down across from the doctor on the tiled floor, as cold as slate.
“I know what you’re doing,” the doctor spoke to him from the stool.
“You already mentioned that in the car.”
“Do you think Elvina’s going to fall for your trick?”
Julian stared over at him. “Please shut up. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to inject anyone. All you have to do when she comes in is sit there and pretend like you just gave Katie – who she’ll think is my niece – the correct dose, and that you are waiting for it to work.”
“Then what happens?”
“Then you can leave.”
“I do hope she falls for it, for your sake.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Julian said.
There was a knock on the door.
Chapter Thirty-Two
His mother arrived at the room dressed as though she were meeting her friends for lunch. She eagerly pushed her way in and held her hands to her face as she glanced at the bed where Katie was lying under the yellow cloth.
“Thank you for taking the cloth from the house. I feel right at home,” she said to Julian.
She smiled at the doctor. “Lovely to see you here. Thanks for coming. You’re okay with me taking this one all on my own?”
The doctor hesitated, and when Julian glared at him, he nodded calmly. “Yes, I gave her the dose right when I arrived. I forgot my stopwatch, but according to that clock on the wall,” he said, indicating with his eyes, “she was given it nine minutes ago, and it takes ten
to work, as you know.”
She scanned the room for the doctor’s black bag, and when she found it, her face relaxed. She took Julian’s hands in her cold ones.
“Remember what we discussed,” Julian said.
His mom let go of him and frowned. She removed her cardigan and handed it to him to hold. “She’s tall for her age, isn’t she?”
“Katie’s brother is tall, too.” Julian let his breath out slowly.
“Yes, I remember he is. Mind if I peep at her?” She walked toward the bed.
“No,” Julian called. He had said it too abruptly. She would be suspicious. “I mean, I can’t look at her. Please don’t take the cloth off. It was hard enough for me to go through with this and put her under there before you came. I can’t bear to see her face,” he said, hoping it would sound believable. He held his breath.
“I understand. I won’t look,” she said.
“It’s time,” the doctor said from the small bench.
“Go on, mom.” Julian tried to sound upbeat.
She glanced up at the clock then stared at him. “You’re very concerned.”
Julian could feel his forehead dampening, but he couldn’t dry it with his hand because she’d notice. “It took a lot of time for me to set this up for you.”
She positioned herself at the foot of the bed, still watching him. She concentrated and scrabbled at her nose.
“That’s strange. I’m not feeling it. Hold on.” She eyed Julian across the room. Her upper lip was quivering and dotted with glistening sweat. She seemed tense and disoriented.
“Is everything okay, mum?”
She leaned forward and her toes cracked in her shoes. “That’s more like it.”
Katie’s mouth opened under the yellow cloth, and small, weak puffs of purple smoke dribbled out like a leaky faucet toward his mother and stopped.
She looked over at Julian. “Something’s wrong. It’s not working. I don’t feel anything.” She backed up and moved toward him.
The purple smoke fell back into Katie’s mouth behind the cloth with a sound like a soft whirring of dove wings. Julian’s mother paused and stared at the yellow cloth curiously. A lock of Katie’s dark hair had fallen out. “Wait a minute.” She walked back to the bed and moved the cloth slightly, exposing Katie’s temple. “A Mark?” She reached and plucked the cloth off.
“You’re alive,” Julian said, and ran to hug Katie.
His mother quickly reached down for Katie’s necklace. “I read you?”
Katie pulled back on the bed.
Julian’s mother faced him. “How could you?”
“I love my family,” he said. “And you’re not my family anymore.”
She stared with horror at her arms gradually being covered with dark scales like bark, as though they were two boughs. She flung open the motel room door and charged out to the street as if a force had taken control of her.
Julian ran to the doorway and watched the blackness into which his mother had disappeared. He walked out and called into the crisp night air, “Where are you going?”
“The woods,” was all she said, in a raspy voice, between shallow breaths.
Katie stepped out of the room and massaged his back. “It’s okay. It’s how it’s meant to happen. She’ll keep running until she reaches a free spot in the forest and—”
“I know. She’ll turn into something as ugly as she really was.” Julian’s heart sank a little. When he was a small boy walking on the street with his mother, he had always reached up for her hand when they were about to cross the road, and she’d always squeezed him back. He could count on that. Katie’s eyes, tinged with gold, were staring back at him. She touched his face.
“It was only a matter of time,” he whispered. He was looking forward to giving Molly and Katie a big hug together. “I smell something sweet, something like oranges?”
Katie’s face was lit by a wistful grin.
“How do you feel?” Julian asked. “I was concerned she would hurt you.”
“I feel all right, surprisingly.”
The doctor skulked past them out of the room with a grudging smile, leaning on his cane and carrying his black bag with the yellow cloth peeking out, in the other hand.
“Don’t let him get away,” Katie said to Julian.
“I had to promise him we would let him go.”
The doctor pushed the cloth the rest of the way down into his bag and hobbled along quickly, his cane scraping against the street. By the time Julian went to search for him, he was nowhere in sight, having vanished into the night’s blackness as stealthily as an alley cat.
Katie unclasped the necklace with the onyx stone and handed it to Julian.
“Get rid of it. I don’t want anything of hers around the house.”
Julian closed his fingers and held the warm necklace in his hand.
“It’s time to call the police.” He took out his cell phone.
“What will you say?” Katie asked.
“I guess I’ll tell them the parts they’ll believe.”
“And that would be?”
“She buried someone in her backyard.”
“Paul?”
“She wouldn’t tell me,” Julian said, and held her as she trembled against him.
***
In the morning edition of the Blackthorn Echo that Julian read at breakfast the next day, a reporter wrote that eyewitnesses to Molly’s accident maintained that it had been as though his mother was trying to lean out the open car door and grab Molly, not hit her. A dishevelled-looking man in torn clothes had jumped in front of the car as though he was trying to protect Molly. Instead, the car swerved to avoid him and struck her, then sped away, while the man took off in fright.
Julian showed the story to Katie then got up to leave for work. As he was walking from the house to the driveway, he passed by a group of trees that, along with the sea, had always defined Blackthorn Island.
One tree in particular was hooked and diseased, its bark patched with an oozing black fungus. It was as though the tree’s branches were reaching out for him. For a moment he thought he saw his mother’s face inside the trunk hollow, but then the eyes, nose and mouth disappeared back into the tree.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Two days after they’d tricked Elvina, Katie sat at her mother’s kitchen table, drinking coffee while her father worked in the garden.
“We were so glad to hear Molly was okay. I don’t know who was more shaken up when we heard about the car accident – your dad or me,” her mom said, and paused to take a sip from her cup. “It’s such a relief she only sprained her arm.”
It was lovely hearing her parents refer to themselves as ‘we’ again. “Thanks for watching Molly for us the other night.”
She smiled. “It was no trouble at all. Did you enjoy the film?”
Katie had told her mother that they wanted to see a movie in the city, and Molly stayed with Katie’s parents while Julian and she were really taking care of Elvina. “It was okay.”
Her mom got up and tied the window curtains back. Through the window overlooking the garden, Katie could see her dad pulling weeds. While their living arrangement was a little unusual – her mother hadn’t let go of their separation entirely, but her parents were living together again – it seemed to Katie to be working. Her mother stepped back from the window and sat across from Katie then Katie reached over to touch her mother’s hand.
“I’ve always wondered something …” Katie paused.
Her mother smiled at her to go on.
Katie didn’t know if her mother was ready to hear her question, but she couldn’t lock it away any longer. So she breathed out. “Why didn’t you tell the police about the white and red rose you gave Paul? He had it on him the last time we saw him. It was never found.”
She took her hand off Katie’s, stared down at her hands and touched her nails. “I didn’t think of it at the time. There was so much going on. It was a horrible time for me, for all of u
s.” She looked up, and her eyes were damp. From the expression on her face, something else was on her mind. “Did I ever tell you I saw a man on the island who looks like them, like Nat and Paul?”
Katie struggled to form words. “No. When did you—”
“I saw him before I had my breakdown. He jumped in front of my car. I followed him into the woods. I think I saw his cave.” Victoria’s eyes stayed downcast.
Katie wanted her mother to know that she didn’t think she was crazy. She knew better than anyone how peculiar life could be. “Alex and I have talked about the wild boy tale since we were girls. Of course, he would be a man now.”
Victoria’s eyes widened when she saw Katie believed her. “I wasn’t able to go into the cave. A woman scared me away.”
Katie thought of Mrs. Eastman shouting at the shabbily dressed man under the clock tower. “A woman? Was it someone from the island?”
She hesitated and Katie moved her chair back then got up and pushed it over to her mother’s side of the table.
Her mother moved so that Katie could hold her hand.
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to someone, like dad? He might have been able to do something.”
“Can you imagine your dad believing me?”
Katie paused before she said, “Maybe it’s time to be completely honest with dad. Go outside and tell him.”
“He’ll think I’m having another breakdown.” Her mom laughed and pressed Katie’s hand. It was good to see her happy again.
Katie wouldn’t let her mother laugh it off. She urged her mother off the chair and ushered her out the side door to where her father was working outside. Katie waited until her mum walked down the two steps leading into the garden, then went back inside the kitchen and peered out the window. His face reddened as she talked to him, but he hugged her tightly and she squeezed him back. It was a moment that was meant to be private. Katie sat down again.
Her mother returned through the side door.