Island

by Richard Laymon

  Maybe I would find my women alive, and rescue them.

  Maybe I would find their bodies.

  Maybe I would come upon Wesley and Thelma, and slit their throats.

  I had my razor.

  I was Rambo.

  I was Rambo until I left the beach behind. The moment I waded upstream into the shadows of the jungle - and out of the moonlight - I stopped being Rambo and became Chicken Little. I could see almost nothing, just a few pale speckles and scattered tatters of dim light that somehow made it down through the trees.

  I was tempted to turn back. If I went on, I would probably fall in the dark and bust open my face.

  I went on, anyway. Taking tiny steps. Hunkering down low so I wouldn’t have so far to fall. Keeping both my arms forward to catch myself.

  That way, I made slow progress up the stream.

  I fell several times, banging up my hands and knees but not getting hurt in any serious way.

  Frequently, I stopped to rest, stand up straight, and stretch to get the kinks out. Then I’d bend over again and continue on my way. In spite of the rest stops, all the bending tired me out and made me ache. I finally decided to take my chances and walk upright.

  It felt good, walking tall.

  I had farther to fall, and the falls hurt more, but I felt sort of proud of myself. I stayed high and even quickened my pace.

  Sometimes, I felt as if Billie, Kimberly and Connie were walking with me through the night. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. In front of me, behind me, wading by my side.

  Other times, I felt alone.

  Worse than alone. There can be comfort and peace in being truly alone. The bad kind of alone is not when you’re all by yourself, but when your only company is an unseen stranger, imagined or real, creeping toward you in the dark. You have nobody to help you. There’s no safe place to run. All you can do is keep going and hope for the best.

  That sort of aloneness gives you goosebumps scurrying up your spine. It makes your scalp crawl. It makes you feel like someone has shoved an icy hand against your crotch.

  That’s the way I felt, off and on, while I was making my semi-blind way up the stream last night.

  Off and on.

  Coldly spooked when I felt the loneliness.

  Warm and safe when the women seemed to be with me. Off and on. I knew it was only my mind playing games, but I couldn’t control it.

  Sometimes, I nearly screamed with fright and ran like hell.

  Other times, surrounded by my phantom ladies, I loved the darkness and warmth of the night.

  I felt the good way as I approached the lagoon.

  Raising my eyes, I saw the moonlit slab of rock where Kimberly had stretched herself flat, days ago, to scan the lagoon for signs of Thelma and Wesley. I climbed onto it. I lay down on it, in exactly the place where Kimberly had been. The warmth of the rock seeped through my shirt and shorts.

  She was with me. Her heat was in me.

  That’s how I felt, anyhow. It was only in my mind, but maybe that’s no great reason to discount it.

  Lying there, I slowly scanned the lagoon.

  In places, it sparkled with points of silver moonlight. Mostly, though, it looked black.

  This was not a forbidding blackness.

  The opposite. One look, and I wanted to be in it. Could hardly wait.

  I told myself that I hadn’t come up here for a dip in the, lagoon; I’d come to look for the women.

  To search for them beyond the far side of the lagoon, above the waterfall and farther upstream where we’d last been together. I wouldn’t find them here. Maybe not there, either, but that was the place to start.

  To get there, I needed to cross the lagoon.

  On my feet, I looked all around. No glow of firelight was anywhere to be seen. Nor did I see a sign of anyone’s presence. I listened. The only sounds were birds and bugs, plus some of the usual jungle shrieks and jibbers (God knows what they came from), and the quiet splashing sounds of the waterfall on the other side of the lagoon.

  Bits of moonlight lit the falls. Otherwise, they were black except for a few dim, gray streamers of froth at the bottom.

  I wanted to feel the waterfall spilling onto me. I wanted to feel the lagoon and the night air. I wanted to be gliding through the black water, naked.

  I took off my shirt and shoes and socks.

  Then I took off my shorts. Naked, I crouched and set them down. I pulled the straight razor out of the right front pocket.

  Though I wanted complete freedom in the water - nothing to carry - I suddenly found myself reluctant to leave the razor behind. Someone might steal it. Or I might chance upon Wesley or Thelma. Without the razor, how would I defend myself?

  After giving the matter some thought, I put on my right sock and slipped the razor down inside it against my ankle.

  Which was exactly the same way I’d carried Andrew’s Swiss Army knife up the tree to cut down Keith. I started to remember about that. It was more than a week ago, but seemed like it had just happened. I could fed the tree against my body, see Keith hanging ...

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ I said. Even though I spoke in a whisper, the sound of my voice unnerved me a little.

  Who else might’ve heard it?

  Standing up straight, I looked around. I stood motionless and listened. And started to feel very exposed and vulnerable. I began imagining that someone was out there, hidden in the darkness, spying on me, creeping closer.

  As fast as I could, I climbed down the rocky bank and eased myself into the water. My legs vanished. A moment later, everything below my waist was gone, as if I’d been sawed in half by a magician.

  Right away, I felt safer.

  It would be no trick, at all, to disappear entirely.

  My chills began to fade. My goosebumps started to go away. My tight muscles relaxed. A pleasant warmth seemed to be spreading through my whole body.

  I felt even better as I waded into deeper water. When it reached my neck, I looked down and there was none of me left to see.

  I had become invisible.

  Except for my head, of course. Even though I couldn’t see it, I knew that it showed.

  If anyone was watching.

  So I ducked below the surface to make my head invisible. Now, I was completely gone. Completely safe. I was all alone in the warm water, surrounded by a jungle where my enemies might be lurking ... I felt wonderful. I was not only safe, but invincible.

  Staying below, I swam. The water flowed along my body, warm and smooth. After a while, my lungs began to ache. I stayed below, anyway. Soon, I heard the shooshing and plottering of the waterfall.

  Underneath the falls, I found footing on the rocky bottom. I turned around and came up slowly. The curtain of dropping water pattered on top of my head, ran down the sides of my face, splashed softly into the water still covering my shoulders.

  My head was no longer invisible.

  I didn’t feel frightened, though - maybe because it would be so easy to disappear again.

  I stood up straight.

  And shivered as I did it. This was no shiver of fear, though. This was excitement. I felt daring and powerful as more and more of my body came out of the lagoon and into full view of anyone who might be watching.

  How different this was from my last time here! Only a couple of days ago, I’d stood battered and aching and desolate beneath these very falls. I’ll have to write about that in more detail. Soon. Not now, though. For now, I want to tell about last night.

  And how I continued to rise up under the falls.

  When I was bare down to my waist, I shut my eyes. The falling water splashed onto the top of my head, onto my shoulders and outstretched arms. It slid down my body like warm oil.

  This was where Connie had stood, naked, rubbing herself with her wadded T-shirt. She’d stood with her back to me.

  In my mind, I turned her around.

  I became her.

  I was Connie standing under the waterfa
ll, arms out, trembling as the water spilled down my naked body, showing myself to an imaginary Rupert.

  Which sounds a trifle odd, now that I try to write about it.

  Let’s just say I let my imagination run wild for a while, there at the falls last night. I had so many different emotions swarming through me, I’m lucky I didn’t go nuts entirely and stay that way.

  After a while, though, I remembered my reasons for coming up to the lagoon.

  Namely, to search for Connie, Billie and Kimberly.

  Not for their spirits, but for their bodies - alive or dead.

  And to see if I could get some idea about where Wesley and Thelma might be.

  To kill them, if I could.

  So I waded over to the flat rock where we’d taken Connie after she’d been knocked out. I boosted myself up, got to my feet, and climbed to the top of the falls.

  Even though I’d finally gotten back to business, I still felt strange. I was dripping wet and shivering - trembling from head to toe. My jaw even shook. The night probably hadn’t turned any colder while I’d been in the lagoon, but it felt as if the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. Also, I was gripped by a weird mixture of fear and excitement.

  At the top of the falls, I stood in a patch of moonlight and gazed down at the lagoon.

  My lagoon.

  It seemed like a wonderful place just then, and all mine. It was my own private swimming hole, a place where I could be completely free and completely safe, where I could dwell in my memories of Kimberly, Connie and Billie - where they would come alive in my fantasies.

  Better to have imaginary friends and lovers than none at all.

  In some ways, they might even be an improvement over the real thing. If they only exist in your mind, they can’t get killed.

  Plus, they cooperate better than ...

  (That’s me, going off the deep end again. Maybe I was having - am having? - a slight encounter with a touch of mental breakdown. Could that be? Tee hee hee. And I ain’t even gotten to the BAD part yet. The bad part about last night, that is - as opposed to the bad part when we got attacked several days ago and all three of my women ... Never mind. That’s for later, too. I should get back to last night.)

  I’ll skip over some of the weird shit I was feeling and thinking, etc., while I roamed the jungle naked with the razor in my sock. I’ve got so much to write about, anyway, without dwelling on stuff like that. (Not to mention that I’ve already filled up more than three-quarters of my notebook. I have about a hundred empty pages left, and that’s counting both sides of the paper.)

  Here’s how it went last night. From the top of the falls, I followed the stream uphill, climbing through the shadows and the moonlight toward the place among the rocks where we’d found Kimberly on the day I think of as ‘the last stand.’

  I wanted to see where it had happened.

  That would be the best place to start my search.

  The Calm Before The Storm

  Before I go on with the rest of what happened last night, I’d better tell what happened to me and the women at the chasm. Last night will make more sense that way.

  When I left off, we were wading upstream, Connie in the lead. Earlier, Kimberly had run away from us on the beach. She was afraid we might try to tone down her vengeance, so she wanted a crack at Wesley without us.

  We were afraid that, going after him alone, she might get herself killed.

  We hurried up the stream. Though we splashed quite a bit, we didn’t speak.

  Connie and I slapped mosquitoes, now and then. They weren’t as bad as they’d been on the day we made our first trip to the lagoon, but plenty of them buzzed around us and settled on us and sucked our blood and tickled, so we both worked at smacking them flat. (The critters didn’t bother Billie, of course. My theory is that they didn’t want to spoil her fabulous body by marking it with little red bumps.)

  Anyway, we waded up the stream at a good, quick pace, and didn’t speak at all for quite a while. We were afraid of giving away our position. None of us, I think, looked forward to a premature encounter with the enemy. If it came to a fight, we wanted Kimberly to be with us.

  About halfway to our destination, though, Billie broke into song.

  ‘Once a jol-ly swagman ... !’

  Connie twisted around. ‘Mom!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shhhh!!!!’

  ‘Let’s all sing,’ Billie suggested.

  Connie’s attitude had improved so much that she didn’t blurt out, ‘Fuck you!’ Instead, she asked, ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘It’s a great day for singing.’ Billie looked over her shoulder at me, and smiled. ‘Don’t you think so, Rupert?’

  ‘They’ll hear us,’ I said, and whacked my neck to mash a mosquito.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ she said. ‘Let’s get their attention, if we don’t already have it.’

  Connie lifted her eyebrows. ‘So they’ll worry about us instead of Kimberly?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Billie said. ‘It might not even occur to them that Kimberly isn’t with us.’

  ‘As long as they don’t see us,’ I added.

  Billie grinned. ‘If they’re busy watching us, they aren’t watching Kimberly.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But we’d better be ready for them.’

  ‘What the hell,’ Connie said.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Billie.

  Off we went, marching up the stream, the three of us singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ at the top of our lungs. Billie and Connie seemed to know the lyrics by heart - Andrew, the Navy lifer, had probably learned the song on shore leave in Australia, or something, and taught it to them. I knew most of the words, myself. (I’ve made it a point, since I was a little kid, to memorize song lyrics, poems, all sorts of quotes that impress me.) We sounded damn good, bellowing it out.

  Even though the song is mostly about death and ghosts, it’s so jaunty that I felt great singing it.

  We were flaunting ourselves, taunting Wesley and Thelma if they were near enough to hear our cheerfully defiant marching song.

  After ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ we sang ‘Hit the Road, Jack.’ I didn’t know the words at first, but caught on after listening to Billie and Connie. Then we sang, ‘Hey, Jude,’ which we all knew most of the words to.

  For our next song, I suggested, ‘We’re off to See the Wizard.’

  Billie laughed. ‘Oh, that’s rich.’ Rich, mostly, because I was lugging an ax. ‘You make a cute Tin Woodsman,’ she said. ‘I’ll be the Cowardly Lion.’

  Cute. She’d called me cute.

  ‘Gimme a break,’ Connie said. ‘We’re choosing parts? What does that leave me, the Scarecrow? Fat chance. What was he looking for, a brain? Thanks, but no thanks.’

  ‘You can be Dorothy,’ I told her, smiling.

  ‘What if I don’t want to be Dorothy? Dorothy’s a woos.’

  ‘That leaves Toto,’ Billie said.

  ‘A dog. Thanks a heap, Mother. If we’re gonna sing the damn song, let’s just get on with it, okay? You guys can pretend to be whoever you want, just include me out.’

  ‘Party pooper,’ Billie said.

  ‘You and the horse you rode in on.’

  ‘Cowardly Lions don’t ride horses,’ I pointed out.

  Connie gave me a narrow look, then smiled. ‘And doughnut holes don’t fly,’ she said, ‘but maybe you can take a leap at one, anyway.’

  ‘Let’s sing,’ Billie said.

  Without any more discussion, we started in on ‘The Wizard of Oz.’

  Turned out, none of us knew the words very well. We made an energetic botch of the song, then quit when we reached the flat, slanting rock just below the lagoon.

  This time, nobody went sneaking up the rock to take a look around. Connie leading the way, the three of us climbed its face. We stood at the top in full view of anyone who might be watching.

  We saw nobody.

  ‘Now what?’ Connie whispered.

  ‘Kimberly wa
s planning to come in from the rear,’ Billie said. ‘She’ll probably be over on the other side.’

  ‘Somewhere upstream,’ I added.

  ‘So I guess we swim across,’ Billie said.

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘I can’t swim anywhere with this ax.’

  ‘Leave it here?’ Billie asked.

  ‘Somebody might swipe it. Besides, what if we need it?’

  ‘Guess you’re right,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’d better walk around to the other side.’

  I expected Connie to say, ‘Be my guest,’ then dive in and swim across. I wouldn’t have blamed her, either. I wanted to dive in. The water looked wonderful. Also, it would’ve been very soothing on our mosquito bites.

  Connie surprised me, saying, ‘I’ll go first.’ Then she turned to the left and began to make her way along the shoreline. Billie followed her, and I took up the rear.

  It wasn’t easy going. A lot of climbing. A lot of ducking under branches. A lot of squeezing through tight places. A lot of tricky footwork, crossing ledges and steep slopes and deadfalls. A lot of huffing and sweating.

  I felt responsible. After a while, I said, ‘Are you two sure you wouldn’t rather go on and swim across? I can meet you on the other side.’

  ‘This is the last place we oughta start splitting up,’ Billie said.

  ‘You got a death wish?’ Connie asked me.

  ‘I just feel bad about making you do this.’

  ‘You’re doing us the favor,’ Billie said. ‘Hell, you’re hauling around our major piece of weaponry.’

  She was right about that.

  And very sweet to point it out.

  They both seemed to accept this rough haul as an unavoidable part of our mission to hook up with Kimberly, and didn’t blame me.

  We stayed as close as possible to the water. That way, we had a good view of the lagoon and most of the opposite shore, including the waterfall. We kept our eyes open for Kimberly. And we watched for any signs of Wesley or Thelma.

  Being at the rear, I watched our backs.

  I couldn’t help, from time to time, also watching the backs of Billie and Connie.