by Lucy Taylor
FATAL JOURNEYS
Lucy Taylor
Smashwords Edition
Overlook Connection Press
— 2014 —
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FATAL JOURNEYS © 2014 by Lucy Taylor.
Dust Jacket Illustration © 2014 by Bill Munster.
Introduction © 2014 by Jack Ketchum
This edition is Published and © 2014 by
Overlook Connection Press
PO Box 1934, Hiram, Georgia 30141
www.overlookconnection.com
[email protected]
First Hard Cover Edition
978-1-62330-028-9
First Trade Paperback edition
978-1-62330-034-0
E-book:
978-1-62330-033-3
This book is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the Publisher, overlook Connection Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction by Jack Ketchum
Summerland
Soul Eaters
The Butsudan
How Real Men Die
Sanguma
Tivar
Nikishi
Going North
The High and Mighty and Me
Wingless Beasts
About the Author
———————
For Danel Olson
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Introduction
by Jack Ketchum
Lucy Taylor’s no stranger to travel.
By her own accounting she’s “been on safari in Zimbabwe, jogged with a troop of baboons in Zaire, ridden a camel in Coober Pedy, Australia, hang-glided in Queenstown, New Zealand, gotten married on a beach in Fiji, scuba dived in St. Lucia, lost her passport, plane ticket and wallet in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, pony trekked in Iceland, and confessed her sins to a priest in Paris.”
Me, I’d like to hear about all of this. Particularly that last one.
But that’s just me.
She’s possessed of an adventurist spirit.
Elsewhere she’s said that “the safest I’ve ever felt in my life is when I’m in a foreign country where no one knows me, and I know no one, and no one on the planet, to the best of my knowledge, knows exactly where I am.”
I understand that and maybe you do too. When I was thirty I went to Europe for the first time and lost myself for four months in Greece. I’ve never been happier.
But there are places you really shouldn’t go.
Places that are dangerous to the heart, mind and body.
And these are the journeys she’s taking you on here. Some very far away geographically. Some much closer to home.
You travel to New Guinea, where women are still dragged from their beds and burned as witches. To Iceland, where a wandering spirit exacts sorrowful, endless vengeance. To the back roads of Mississippi on the Fourth of July in search of a child-killer.
You encounter deadly shape-shifters in an African desert, your husband’s ghost in Japan, soul-eaters on the icy slopes of Alaska. Your own drowned sister on your mother’s wedding day in the luxurious Bahamas.
You travel to Thailand to kill your best friend.
Commit multiple murder and urge a child you love toward her longed-for North Pole.
So many dangerous places to go.
Themed anthologies are common these days, some good, some not so good. And they’ve been around for a long time. Martin H. Greenberg was undisputedly the king of them. He compiled an astonishing 1,289 books before his death in 2011, a great many of them themed. Things really took off back in the late 90’s with the success of the HOT BLOOD series of erotic horror tales, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. In which both Lucy and I cut a lot of our respective teeth.
But themed collections by one author are another matter. Offhand, except for this one—and unless you count Sherlock Holmes and other single-detective, single-author mystery collections—I can’t think of one. So this is a pretty unique book.
Obviously the theme here is travel, locomotion, motion—and style-wise the stories themselves mirror that theme. These stories sail and drive you through them, diverse as they may be. THE BUTSUDAN has a quiet, measured pace, suitable for a story set in Japan, while HOW REAL MEN DIE jostles you through the streets and bars of Thailand with hard-boiled bravado. But both are under total control.
And that means they control you.
Lucy Taylor’s never been one for trivial subject matter even when she’s having the most fun with you, even when donning her cape and crown as “Queen of Erotic Horror.”
(Sorry, Lucy. I just had to bring that up.)
But it seems to me that her sense of gravitas has grown over the years.
Oh, she’s still telling a rousing good story, full of unexpected twists and turns, grabbing you with her characters. But inside the overall theme of journeying there are other—some of them very important—themes. About love and loss, friendship, the perils of childhood, redemption, freedom. She doesn’t toss them in your face. But she doesn’t toss them away, either.
So in that sense you’re in for a very rich journey here indeed.
Dangerous, though, and dark.
So pack your luggage well.
Bon voyage.
— Jack Ketchum, 5/4/13
Summerland
On that cloudless, blindingly bright morning, when everything in her life was about to change, twenty-two-year-old Sonya Olendski motored out from the dock to a reef about a mile offshore, dropped the anchor, and stretched out in the dinghy, feeling peacefully indolent as she gazed out at the flat, unbroken horizon, basking in silence and solitude.
Peace at last! At least temporarily, she had escaped the swarm of Olendskis and Olendski family friends who were descending on the Paradise Island beach house for her mother’s wedding the next day, none of whom—with the exception of her older brother Julian—she gave a jot about.
She’d left the three-story, eggshell-colored mansion known as Summerland, just as breakfast was being poured, Bloody Marys and Yellow Birds all around, half-potted relatives blundering about the kitchen, spilling things, laughing obnoxiously loud. Cousins Troy and Martin behind the boathouse, snorting controlled substances, Aunt Tanya bouncing around in a string bikini with her new, surgically enhanced rear end jutting out like a pair of flesh-colored balloons. And Mother, desperately vivacious, her face Botoxed to the impeccably bland smoothness of a Noh mask, issuing orders to the Bahamian staff, while her fiancé, one Harbinger Rampling of Traverse City, Michigan, sprawled on the veranda, reeking of Ricardo Gold and New Money. And Julian, her poor, long-suffering brother tasked with overseeing the construction of the wedding arch under which the two bling-laden lovers would speak their vows (as if Julian knew any more about construction than she did, they’d be lucky if the thing didn’t collapse before the couple got to the part about in sickness and in health.)
What did I even come here for? She thought disconsolately, but the question was ingenuous, she knew. She was here for a respite from her job in New York as
a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue, to sip rum drinks on the veranda overlooking the blue diamond Caribbean, and to spend time with her brother, of course, dear Julian. How long had it been? A year already? He’d given up on the MBA from Berkeley and was working in Australia now, setting up tours from Adelaide to Alice and beyond for well-heeled Americans, passing his time Down Under with some little sheila he’d shacked up with in Sydney. He hadn’t brought her with him, which didn’t surprise Sonya in the least. Julian was a solitary creature, a great catch if the right girl could snare him, but slippery as an eel and apt to give a nasty shock if he were cornered.
The tropical sun beat down on her, delicious and stinging as a keen little switch. The cradle-rock of the dinghy lulled her. She felt like a turkey basting. Rousing herself, she leaned over the side and splashed water onto her face, looking down as she did so to where the reef sloped away, the water darkening from pale, translucent turquoise to a rich royal blue hemmed in with gorgeous corals. A school of orange and white clown fish darted above the clustered antlers of some staghorn coral. It was as she was watching the fish weave in and out among the skinny branches of the coral that she saw the dead girl.
Dear God!
And recognized her.
In that first, stunned instant, her mind tried to deny what she was seeing, to reinterpret the pinched, discolored face and undulating auburn hair as a lushly colored sea fan waving languidly beside some kind of grotesquely speckled flounder whose yellow and brown scales and gills created a weird facsimile to a human face.
Her own face. The same face as her twin sister Vonnie, who’d disappeared from Paradise Island three years ago and was presumed dead.
Even as she thought about her sister, Sonya was reaching for her mask and snorkel, preparing to dive down, perhaps even try to drag the pitiful thing up into the light of day. But what then? Surely a drowned body would be too heavy for her to shove into the dinghy and, even if she were capable of such a feat, the idea of sharing the small boat with that dead, repulsive thing that so resembled her made her stomach lurch.
Masked now, she hung over the side again and plunged her face in. She saw the clown fish and the coral, but the body of the girl was…where? Then, there she was, the spectral hair and bloated fingers fluttering up beseechingly, Come down here with me, Sonya. Now!
With a jolt so fierce it made her gasp, a buried memory surfaced like a reanimating corpse:
Vonnie hiding in the tangle of ferns outside the boathouse that last summer, waiting for her, whispering urgently: Sonya, come here! I had the strangest dream last night, I have to tell you. Come here! Now!
Black panic seized her. She gave a strangled shriek, tore off the mask, gunned the motor and roared back to the dock.
It was, she later reflected, the worst decision of her life.
««—»»
Summerland, the name given by her father to the four million dollar ‘cottage’ he’d purchased on Paradise Island, Bahamas, in the late 80’s, was a rambling palm-shaded estate flanked by tennis courts and a sapphire-tiled pool surrounded by meticulously tended gardens of hibiscus, wild banana trees, bamboo, and birds of paradise. The lush foliage did much to mute the clamor, but as Sonya hurried toward the house, up the gated path past the gazebo, the din of merriment echoed through the tropic air like strange, off-kilter birdcalls.
A trio of young women in wide-brimmed pastel hats and micro swimsuits lounged on chaises by the pool, the fervor of their conversation noticeably quieting as Sonya dashed past. On the stairs to the tennis courts, she barely missed a collision with Aunt Willis, who tittered, “Your mother’s been looking all over for you, dear!”
Sonya made some vague sound of acknowledgment and rushed on. She was hoping to see Julian or, if not Julian, then Uncle Frank, who had a steady head about him when he was sober, but she was intercepted near the gazebo by her mother. The adrenalin was still roaring in her veins. She hadn’t taken time to arrange a coherent version of what had happened and blurted, “I saw a body out on the reef! It looked like Vonnie!”
“Keep your voice down. People will hear,” hissed her mother. Roberta Olendski wore a sheer white tee over a black bikini top, a sarong patterned with scarlet hibiscus blossoms, and a sneer of perfectly visible disgust under a shabby layer of maternal solicitude. Gripping Sonya’s arm, she led her away from the house into a series of cloistered nooks adorned with ceramic gnomes and stone benches. Julian and a pair of workmen were laboring on the wedding arch somewhere amid the greenery. She could hear the beat of hammers and male voices, abrupt, incurious.
Her mother stood very close and pronounced each word as though Sonya were a foreigner of limited English. “Now repeat what you just told me. Calmly. What exactly did you see?”
“I took the dingy out over the reef. There’s a woman’s body in about twenty feet of water.”
Roberta’s brightly lipsticked mouth drooped the way it always did when Sonya shamed her—the rejection from Bryn Mahr some years ago, the suitors from good families that she’d snubbed, the ‘C’ in social studies in second grade.
“You say it looked like Vonnie?”
“It was Vonnie. I’m almost sure!”
“You saw her clearly?”
“Yes.”
“What was she wearing?”
That stopped her as though her mind had run full tilt into a wall. She’d been so focused on the face…her face.
“I—I’m not sure. I don’t remember. She might have been naked, I don’t know. For God’s sake, what does it matter? It looked like Vonnie, and she was dead. Do you need to know more?”
“And what do you want me to do about it? Organize a search? Call the police, the rescue divers? I won’t do it. I won’t play into your childish games.”
“But what if it was Vonnie?” Her voice was like shattered glass now, cracked and jagged. She tried to contain it, was conscious that the hammers pounding in the background had stopped, the men silent now, attentive, the Bahamian staff undoubtedly entertained by the quarrel they were overhearing as much as Julian must be appalled.
“How could it be your sister? That’s absurd. No one’s seen or heard from her in three years.” Sonya opened her mouth, but Roberta raised a hand for silence “Oh, don’t rehash the same old theories. She didn’t run away. She had no reason to leave Summerland. That local girl, the one whose body washed up right before Vonnie disappeared, that wasn’t a coincidence. Whoever killed her murdered Vonnie, too. You know how your sister carried on. She crossed paths with the man who killed that local girl.”
“The girl’s name was Havana Brockton, Mother. And the police never arrested anyone. They’ve never closed the case.”
“They never will close it, either,” said Roberta savagely, “but that doesn’t change the fact that your sister’s dead. God only knows what happened to her—I don’t want to know, I’m not sure I could live with it. But I do know this, that even if Vonnie was alive, she didn’t find out about my wedding, secretly fly into the Bahamas and somehow manage to drown herself in a place where you’d be sure to find her, all within the past twenty-four hours. Even for a person of Vonnie’s dramatic abilities, that would be asking a lot.”
“Fine. If you don’t believe me—” She turned and started back along the footpath toward the house. Her mother’s voice, alarmed now, clawed after her.
“Wait! What are you going to do?”
“I’ll call the police myself.”
“You won’t!” Roberta’s nails bit into her shoulder, spinning her around. Sonya could see tendrils of peach-colored lipstick filling in the little vertical lines along her mother’s upper lip, ugly souvenirs from a one-time smoking habit. “You’re doing this to spite me, aren’t you? To spoil my day and grab the spotlight for yourself! Like the Christmas we were all in Aspen and you decided to nick your wrists and create a fine hullabaloo. Oh, you are so full of envy, consumed with it, aren’t you? I wish you’d stayed in New York City. I wish you’d go back there if you’re intent on r
uining the most wonderful day of my life!”
“This isn’t about you, Mother! It has nothing to do with you!”
From the corner of her eye, she saw a space open in the greenery and Julian glided through. A slender, agile-looking man in his late twenties with startling, sky blue eyes, he wore white chinos and a blue short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to reveal a wedge of deeply tanned skin. “What’s going on? No one’s going to ruin anything.” He put one hand on his mother’s shoulder, the other on Sonya’s. “What is it, Sonya? Too little sleep? And what’s your story, Mom? Pre-wedding jitters?”
Thank God for Julian, Sonya thought. Always the centered one, reasonable, clear-headed, making himself useful when everyone else was either running around like headless chickens or soused out of their minds. His calm, even baritone was comforting. Sonya felt herself soothed. She told him what she’d seen.
As she spoke, he cocked his head and listened with the thoughtful earnestness of a priest or a very good bartender, his face betraying no emotion beyond a single furrow between his brows, deep enough to slot a coin in. “Wow, Sis. A body? Okay, I suppose it’s possible. Not that you saw Vonnie, of course, but someone. That could be. Was the body caught in something, entangled somehow? In fishing lines maybe or seaweed?”
Confused, Sonya shook her head.
“Because if it was really a drowned person, they’d bob to the surface, right? That’s why they call them floaters. So if a dead body’s just hanging out down there, it would have to be weighted or snagged on something, otherwise the gases—.”
Their mother waved her hands as if flailing at attacking gulls. “I’m not listening to this! It’s too morbid and disgusting.”
Behind her, the voice of Sonya and Julian’s stepfather-to-be, Harbinger Rampling boomed “Disgusting? Only thing disgusting is I haven’t kissed my gorgeous bride in ten or fifteen minutes!”
He loomed up behind Roberta, a muscular silver-haired man with gorilla forearms and an over-sized bald dome like a gourd. He put his arms around Roberta and bent to nuzzle her neck.
“What’s this you’re arguing about? Something fishy on the reef?” He chuckled at his wit and looked at Sonya. “A body, did I hear you say?”