by J. F. Penn
A path led up from the beach into dense forest. Crooked trees wound around each other, and parasitic plants on the trunks sapped their strength. The interior was an impenetrable dark green.
"We have two choices," Mila said. "We go back in the water, and I see where else I can take us." She turned and pointed to the water, where blue ocean stretched to the horizon. "Or we go up onto this island and see where the hell we are."
A screech came from the forest ahead of them. The sound of flapping wings and then a shadow fell upon the beach. Sienna looked up to see a huge silhouette against the sky, the bird's outstretched wings spanning thirty feet, much wider than any bird she had seen before. Its beak was a sharp hook as big as a scythe, and she could almost feel its gaze upon them, looking down from where it circled above. She wondered whether it could see through the border and how far away they were from its porous edge. It cried again, and there was an answering call in the distance.
Xander leaned back, his hand over his eyes as he focused on the bird. "Argentavis magnificens, extinct on Earth-side," he said with a smile. "We should discuss this at the forest's edge. They're hunters and big enough to carry one of us away."
15
Sienna felt a tug towards the interior of the island, through the darkness of the trees and onwards. She was sure the dark castle lay ahead of them on land, not by sea anymore.
"It's this way." Her voice was confident.
"Agreed," Finn said. "And I much prefer land to water." He took a few steps towards the trees and looked up at them. Sienna walked forward to join him. The dense foliage smelled of wet earth and moss, overlaid by the mold of dead leaves. A low buzz came from the semidarkness ahead, and Sienna caught sight of clouds of flying insects within.
"Looks like fun." Finn grinned.
Sienna pulled the sleeves of her top down, covering as much skin as possible as she smiled back. She was glad Finn was there. He was an outsider and as unsure of his place in the makeshift team as she was. They were a strange group, each with their own agenda. She turned to look back at the others. Mila stood facing the water, arms wrapped around herself as if she held herself back from diving into the blue and swimming away. Perry and Xander pulled the coracle further up away from the water's edge, bantering back and forth.
Sienna didn't know their individual reasons for being part of the Mapwalker team, but she understood Finn and his desire to free his sister. As long as they headed towards the castle, Finn would stay with them. And for that, she was glad.
Finn took a step into the forest and Sienna went after him, the others close behind. Within a few meters, the beach was out of sight. The canopy of trees rose above like a prison in shades of green with bars of thick tree trunks, hung with lianas, around them. The springy ground was dense with plants and entwined roots, tendrils wrapped around her ankles and seemed to drag back every step. The air had an intense humidity, every breath a gulp. Sweat trickled down Sienna's spine, and her clothes clung to her as moisture soaked through.
It was as if the land was decomposing, the body of the earth rotting, each footstep sinking into a bog of dead flesh. The ground opened like a huge dark mouth, roots of trees like decayed teeth waiting to devour any who stepped inside. The forest canopy cast a dark shadow, vines hanging down like sinister tentacles, a path of obstacles, an entangled world where chaos reigned.
Finn strode ahead, using his sword to chop down branches in their path. He was clearly used to the swing of it, his strokes confident. Sienna found herself mesmerized by the movement of the muscles on his back, his breath even as they pushed on.
"I think I came here a long time ago with my father," he called back. "We were on a hunt for wild pigs." His voice faltered. "But something else came out of the forest. I still don't know if we really saw it, or whether I just remember something that scared me as a child. But we didn't stay long after it had passed." He turned, and his eyes met Sienna's. "I'm sure it was nothing."
Sienna thought back to the warlord who ordered child sacrifice at the Tophet. What would scare a man like that?
It started to rain as they walked on and soon the ground was slick with mud, their feet soaked through. The sound of rain dripping on leaves was a calm meditation, a welcome respite from the crazy pace of the last day. Sienna turned her face up so the cool drops touched her skin, glimpsing the sky through the canopy of leaves above. A sky that linked such diverse environments. On Earth-side, she would have to fly, drive, then trek huge distances to get between a buried Turkish city of lava and a jungle like this. Yet here in the Borderlands, they rubbed up against each other, pushed together by the ridges in the map.
Suddenly, Sienna thought she saw something move in the trees, a shadow swinging like a monkey, jumping from branch to branch. A hoot rang out, a low sound that echoed around them.
The group stopped, bunching together back to back as they faced out into the jungle. Finn held his sword in front of him, arms wide in a fighting stance. The hoot came again, and it sent a shiver down Sienna's spine.
"Any idea what it is?"
Finn shook his head. "But we need to keep moving. We have to be out of here before it gets dark."
They walked on, ducking under huge branches and climbing over logs.
"Keep an eye out as we walk," Finn said. "Look for slimy and scaly textures that stand out against the leaves. And don't touch anything. Try not to put your hand out even to help yourself over a log. That's when you're most likely to get bitten."
Sienna wondered what kind of first-aid knowledge the team had between them, what training they had in general. She was the newbie, and in the haste of the expedition, she had missed out on whatever passed for the standard training program. But she trusted Finn to keep them safe. He took the lead here, this was his land, after all.
She felt a sharp sting on her arm and slapped at a mosquito the size of a coin. A splash of blood exploded from its body onto her skin. Sienna grimaced. It would be crazy to die of a mosquito bite in a jungle only miles from downtown Bath. She shook her head in wonder.
"Oh, that is cool." Xander's voice rang out.
Sienna turned to see him gazing at something on the trunk of a palm tree. A huge spider with a body as big as her hand and legs as long as her arm. It squatted on the bark, seemingly oblivious to their presence.
Xander pulled out his sketchbook and began to draw, sure strokes quickly recreating the shape of the spider on his page. He bent closer, and the spider reared up, fangs dripping venom. As Xander backed away, his eyes fixed on the creature, a smile on his face, Sienna couldn't help wondering what he did with his drawings. If he could only illustrate on maps created by others, did he have some pile of discarded maps with monsters on them ready to emerge into the world?
The rain grew heavier. The smell of the jungle intensified with the must of mold and the heavy fragrance of tropical flowers. Sienna felt suddenly alive. She had been slowly dying in the never-ending grind of her job back in Oxford. But this was adventure. This was geography made life.
She looked around with new eyes, noting the jungle seemed more Latin American than African. It was certainly as wet as the Amazon. A place where everything fought to survive, from the bugs biting through her shirt to the parasitic plants wound around the trees, up the food chain to the apex predators.
She tried not to think what they might be.
A skittering noise came from a log next to them. A giant centipede scurried across, its segmented body over a meter long in shades of ochre and orange. The striped legs all moved separately, and its head waved around as its antennae scanned ahead.
"This place is awesome," Xander said, with a wide grin.
A sharp cry rang out. They turned to see Perry wrapped in the coils of a huge snake, its muscled body completely encasing him.
"Titanoboa." Finn leapt forward, his sword outstretched to cut Perry free.
"Wait, don't harm it." Xander stepped in front. "It's a constrictor, so Perry has a moment. Let me try."
/> Xander reached out to touch the skin of the boa. Sienna recalled that such a creature, the largest snake ever discovered, had become extinct millions of years ago on Earth-side. But these huge ancient creatures clearly thrived in the Borderlands.
Perry gasped as the coils tightened, his eyes wide with panic.
Xander stepped closer to the snake, its scales shining as rain dripped off them, rainbow colors on a copper skin marked with bands of black. The snake's head stretched out towards him, its tongue flickering. He stood there, letting the snake taste his skin, eyes closed as if he was communing with it. Sienna glimpsed the predator in him, a reflection of the reptile, perhaps.
Finn stepped closer, his sword raised. "Hurry."
Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the boa unwrapped its coils from Perry's body. He dropped to the ground and the snake curled around the branch above.
Xander ran his hand along the boa's length, whispering something to it. When he turned, his eyes were as black as the snake's. Sienna blinked, and his eyes were green again.
"Time to go," he said. "It will be dark soon."
Mila put her arm around Perry's waist, supporting him until he caught his breath. They walked on through the jungle, stumbling over hidden branches as the light faded. It seemed like it would never end but then at last, there was a break in the trees ahead.
The quality of light changed from tropical green to a dull, cold grey as they approached. The edge of the jungle was a bright line where verdant foliage ended, and as they stepped out of the rainforest, Sienna could see derelict buildings clustered ahead of them, overgrown with weeds. The smell changed from lush jungle to the scent of smoke.
Tendrils of the forest reached out as if life wanted to encroach here but the green shoots curled up, dying on the black, brackish soil. The change in the landscape was disconcerting, like jumping through time and space all at once.
Finn bent and picked up handful of the soil, bringing it to his nose to smell. He rubbed it between his fingers before dropping it back to the ground, then wiped his hands on his clothes.
"I think this is Poveglia. I've heard rumors of it. They say the soil here is fifty percent human, made from burned and buried bodies." He frowned, looking ahead to the ruins. "They say it's cursed."
16
Finn looked back into the forest. It was almost dark. He gestured ahead. "Whatever is here, it has to be safer than the jungle at night. Let's find a place to sleep."
They walked on, catching sight of a towering spire ahead, jutting out from the low buildings and stunted trees, and covered with twisted foliage. The sky was the shade of bruised plums, a sickening purple and black that barely lit the way ahead. The rain was gentler, but the ground was muddy underfoot and the wind a biting chill, as they walked on towards what had to be their haven for the night.
Finn dropped back to walk beside Sienna. "They say this was once an institution for the mentally ill and a quarantine island for those with the plague Earth-side. There are even rumors of experiments done on those the world wanted to forget."
They passed huge ovens with crumbling brick walls and metal doors hanging off rusty hinges. Sienna nodded towards them. "I suppose they needed to bake a lot of bread to feed all those people."
Finn shook his head with a half-smile. "Those are not for baking bread. The guards would shovel the dead into pits here, and when they were full, they would burn the bodies. Many of them weren't even dead, merely a step away from the end. My father thought about using this place as some kind of outpost." He looked up at the bell tower ahead of them. "But no one would stay here."
The path wound towards the bell tower around the edge of a deep pit. Sienna walked closer.
Finn put a hand on her arm. "Don't."
But she couldn't resist her curiosity. She walked closer and stared over the edge. Skeletons lay tangled together, their skulls facing in alternate directions on top of a jumble of long femurs, spines and pelvic bones.
There were so many.
The pit stretched as far as she could see in both directions. She raised a hand to her mouth, swallowing down the bile that rose. But she couldn't look away. Who were these people? Had they been pushed over into the Borderlands during life or only after death?
As she gazed at the bones, she could see they had been lying here for a very long time. There was no flesh left on them, and the pit smelled only of earth. Sienna frowned and bent closer as she noticed one of the skulls had a brick shoved between its teeth. What the –?
Finn came and stood by her side, noticing what she looked at. "It's a shroud eater," he said. "Some thought them to be vampires that fed on the bloody cloth surrounding the dead and then spread the plague to bring more victims. The brick forced into the vampire's mouth supposedly stopped it feeding and starved it to death." He shrugged. "Or maybe that's why they started burning people. To get rid of the food supply."
"It's horrible." Sienna pointed into the pit. "There are children in there."
Finn sighed. "There are places here in the Borderlands your people on Earth-side chose to forget. But you can't write people out of history, no matter what you do. There are witnesses, but they lie dead over here."
Sienna saw a hunger for justice on his face and a search for some kind of truth in this brutal place. Perhaps not all witnesses were in the grave.
Finn turned, and they walked on towards shelter. As they approached, details emerged from the semi-darkness. The bell tower had cracks through the stone, gaping holes and glassless windows, exposed bricks and broken walls, lichen crawling up its side. The crumbled state of the buildings reflected the fallen state of the world. This place had once been alive and beautiful, and now it was decayed and forgotten.
At the bell tower, they pushed open an old door hanging off its hinges. Inside at least there were walls and a roof, shelter from the cold wind and the rain.
They walked through an entrance hall with bars on the windows to keep those inside from escaping. The place was a strange juxtaposition of medieval plague pit and modern psychiatric hell. Vines grew through every window, and ceilings had collapsed in most of the rooms, rotted beams dropping down with the pervasive smell of mold and rot. The empty ruins had only a faint echo of the life that had once walked here.
They passed one room where jagged holes and lumps of metal riddled the walls, the edges still sharp.
"What happened here?" Sienna asked.
"A group of prisoners got hold of a hand grenade," Finn said. "They gathered tightly around it and pulled the pin. Their bodies were blown apart and the shrapnel embedded in the walls around us. That's one way out of hell, I suppose."
They walked on and found a room with a row of bed frames stacked against peeling wallpaper. The window was intact, there was no draught, and it felt warmer than the rest of the building. There was even a fireplace with decorative blue and white tiles covered in dust and ash. Underneath, birds flew over an expanse of ocean.
"Home, sweet home." Perry crossed to the fireplace. He grabbed a piece of discarded metal from a bed frame and poked around up the chimney. "Looks alright. I'll get the fire going. Then at least we can warm ourselves."
There was plenty of wooden furniture in the rooms around them. They collected rickety old chairs, breaking them against the walls to make smaller pieces. Perry conjured a flame, and soon they were warm and drying themselves in front of the fire. Perry got out his travel kettle and began boiling water. "Anyone else for tea?"
Sienna sipped the hot drink, considering how much better everything seemed to be inside a shelter with warmth. Perhaps things weren't so bad, after all.
As the others huddled around the fire, she suddenly had an acute desire to get away, craving some solitude after what had been a confusing and crazy twenty-four hours. Had it only been yesterday when she had heard of her grandfather's death?
She stood up. "I'm going to take a look around."
"I'll come with you," Mila said, standing up and dusting off her cargo pant
s.
"If you don't mind, I'd just like some space."
Mila paused and then nodded. "Of course, but don't go too far. Holler if you need us."
Sienna stepped outside the room and walked a little way in the semi-darkness, listening to the voices of the team fading behind her. She pulled her pack open and found the torch. Mila said it was only for emergencies, but she wouldn't be long.
She walked down the corridor, her footsteps an echo of the past, clouds of dust rising in her wake. She shone the torch into the rooms on either side, catching glimpses of broken furniture, desks and chairs, and then in one, the light glinted off a metal cage.
Sienna stepped into the room, playing the light over the structure. As she walked closer, she saw a skeleton curled at the bottom, its arms wrapped around its head, a defensive posture it must have died in. She had read enough about the history of psychiatry to know about the atrocities committed in the name of science, but the cage was still disturbing.
A scratching sound came from the corner and Sienna spun around, her torchlight catching the thick tail of something furry as it scurried into a hole in the wall. A rat. Much bigger than anything she'd seen before. She shuddered to think of the food supply that would have sustained creatures here.
There was a door near the cage, and she opened it to find a small padded room beyond, the cushioned walls covered in lichen and mold. Rain dripped through a hole in the ceiling. Although the space was clearly man-made, it felt like nature was reclaiming this asylum, one room at a time. She shut the door and went back out to the corridor.
She turned to see the rosy glow of the fire coming from a doorway far back up where she had walked from. She considered returning to the team, but she was relishing this time alone. Sienna walked on and found a huge ballroom with a wooden floor that must have once been polished to a shine. Painted panels of flowers and fruit covered the walls. A pile of old suitcases in faded primary colors lay covered in dust and broken masonry from the partially caved-in ceiling.