Island

by Richard Laymon

  Finally, screaming in terror, I hurled myself out of the chair and started to run away. My legs worked fine. What the hell had I been doing in the wheelchair? Elated, I sprinted for safety. But my feet started sinking in the sand.

  With each step, I sank deeper. Pretty soon, the sand reached my waist. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t wade any farther. I was trapped. It hugged me like tight, heavy trousers.

  I was terrified.

  Now, he’d catch me. He would come running up behind me with his ax or machete or ... chainsaw.

  It’ll be a chainsaw, I suddenly realized.

  I couldn’t hear it, though. Not yet.

  Had he given up the chase?

  I listened. Ocean sounds, bird sounds, bug sounds, but no cough, sputter and roar of a chainsaw.

  I smiled with relief.

  All of a sudden, down deep in the sand, hands caressed my legs.

  I woke up with a yell of fright and a splitting headache, and that was the end of my odyssey through a hundred dreams and nightmares at the bottom of the chasm.

  Some of my worst nightmares, though, were more pleasant than what I found on my return to reality.

  I was sprawled on my back, my head pounding with pain. I felt as if every bone in my body had been hammered. In some places, I felt numb. In others, I itched. In still others, sharp pains stabbed me.

  Above me, swarms of flies and other winged bugs zipped this way and that. Some landed on me, while others were happy to circle.

  A vulture suddenly flapped up into my line of vision, startling me.

  I saw the chasm walls towering above me on both sides.

  The gray sky above the chasm held a promise of sunrise —or night.

  Beneath me, I felt Matt.

  Waking Up Is Hard To Do

  Matt felt like lumpy, warm goo.

  I shouldn’t complain, though. Without him, I would probably be lumpy, warm goo.

  Still, he disgusted me.

  I had been napping for at least a couple of days, probably longer, on top of a naked, decomposing corpse.

  I, at least, wasn’t naked. Thank God I had my shorts on. Where my bare back pressed against him, we seemed to be stuck together. My skin, there, itched like crazy. Also, I felt squirming, crawling things; various critters that had apparently gotten sandwiched between us.

  Let’s not dwell on all that.

  I won’t even mention the smell.

  The moment I realized where I was - and what was under me - I let out a cry and rolled off him.

  It made quite a sound when we came unstuck. You might get a similar effect by dropping a large, hot pizza on the tile floor of your kitchen and letting it stay there for a couple of hours before you peel it off.

  When you peel it off, that’s when you get the sound.

  Rolling off Matt, I took some of him with me. I could feel gop and stuff glued to my back.

  I started to crawl away from him. Then I threw up. Then I crawled farther. It’s a wonder I could move at all. Aside from all my other complaints, I felt like a passenger on a twilt-a-whirl. I kept crawling, though, wanting to put miles between me and Matt.

  I probably made ten feet before I collapsed.

  I lay there groaning, sleepless and full of agony.

  The next time I lifted my head, the chasm was dark. I sat up and leaned back against a curving surface of rock.

  The full moon, directly overhead, shone pale light down between the steep walls. It lit most of the chasm’s floor. Including Matt.

  My silent partner.

  He seemed almost like an old friend.

  A long-lost buddy I might’ve shared some good times with once, but who had recently undergone some major changes for the worse - especially in the personal hygiene department.

  I had no idea who he might be.

  Gazing at his moonlit corpse over there, though, I found myself fancying him as an old prospector. He was Walter Huston. I was Bogart. We’d run into some tough luck - his a lot tougher than mine.

  ‘Reckon we won’t be buying no rabbit farm, Lenny,’ I said to him.

  Wrong movie. Wrong characters. But it’s what I said, anyway.

  ‘Shit happens,’ I told him.

  I thought about crawling over to him and taking a look at his face. For all I knew, I might recognize him.

  Could he be Keith?

  Maybe Wesley and Thelma had disinterred Keith, brought his body here to trick us ...

  No.

  Matt was too large to be Keith.

  He couldn’t possibly be Andrew, either. Again, wrong size. Besides, they would’ve had to fish his body out of the sea.

  So who the hell was he?

  Or she? Matt might be a female. After all, I’d never seen the body’s frontal areas. She couldn’t be a woman from our group, though; all of ours had been up at the top while the body was down here.

  Not that I’d actually seen Thelma up there. But I figure it must’ve been Thelma who attacked us from the rear.

  Anyway, Matt seemed too large to be Thelma, and his shape was all wrong.

  His shape seemed wrong, in fact, to be any woman at all.

  Not that he couldn’t have been one. Kimberly and Billie had looked at him, though, and they’d assumed he was a man: Wesley, in fact. Though we’d had doubts about his identity, none of us had doubted that the body was a he.

  I wondered, though.

  Matt was probably no Matilda, but I was curious. Would I recognize him - or her?

  Only one way to find out.

  I didn’t want to move, though.

  I especially didn’t want to take a good, close look at the stiff.

  a. It stank.

  b. His or her face was bound to be a wreck.

  c. He or she was a critter magnet.

  d. If I got any closer, I might start getting the creeps.

  e. Or throw up again.

  f. All of the above.

  So I stayed put.

  Then 1 squinted up at the top of the chasm and wondered what had happened.

  Obviously, I’d been knocked out cold and dumped into the chasm. What about the women, though?

  They hadn’t won the battle, that was for sure.

  If they’d won, I wouldn’t have found myself waking up at the bottom of the chasm, days later, alone except for a corpse.

  They would have taken care of me.

  Not necessarily, I told myself. Suppose they won the fight, but only after I’d gone over the edge? Someone climbs down to check on me. Kimberly. She mistakes me for dead, so they go off and leave me here.

  That didn’t seem likely.

  Not being an idiot, Kimberly would’ve noticed that I was alive.

  Thinking about Kimberly, I recalled the last time I’d seen her. She had been climbing down a rope into the chasm. She’d just dropped out of sight below the edge moments before the attack came.

  She wasn’t down here, now. I had already looked around. Nobody was down here except for me and the corpse. I scanned the moonlit bottom again, anyway. No sign of Kimberly, or anyone else.

  She’d most likely scurried back up the rope to join the fight.

  A losing fight, almost for sure.

  The last I saw, Wesley had been hot on Connie’s tail. Seconds after I went down, he’d probably whacked her head off with one of those machetes. Then he and Thelma had probably made quick work of Billie.

  So Kimberly, late in joining the fray, would’ve found herself standing alone against those two.

  She was tough enough to win.

  If she’d won, though, where was she? Why had she left me down here?

  They’re dead, I thought. All of them. Kimberly, Billie and Connie. Dead.

  Then I almost went nuts, but I kept a grip on one thin thread of hope: that they had somehow won the battle. They’d thought I was dead, and left me. And they’d gone on back to our camp at the beach. If I could get out of the chasm, I would find them there, alive and well.

  God, they’d be
so glad to see me!

  Not half as glad as I’d be, though, to see them.

  We would have a great celebration.

  I knew they were dead.

  Sometimes, though, kidding yourself isn’t the worst course of action. Instead of self-destructing, I got myself out of the chasm.

  For starters, I struggled to my feet. Then I roamed back and forth, checking in the shadows and bushes to make absolutely sure that Kimberly wasn’t down here.

  I found no one.

  I found no heads or other parts.

  I found nothing worth finding.

  Not even the rope. After the end of the battle, someone must’ve pulled it up. (Why leave behind a perfectly good rope?)

  Not that it would’ve done me much good. I could barely hold myself upright, much less climb out of the chasm on a rope.

  I did try to climb out without one.

  I never got very high, fortunately, because I kept falling. I fell three times.

  Then I made my way to the open end of the chasm.

  It overlooked a steep drop-off.

  I studied the situation for a minute or two. The darkness hid most of what I wanted to see. But I did notice that the treetops beyond the cliff were above me. Very encouraging: I was somewhat lower than the treetops.

  A fall might not kill me.

  That was about all I really cared to know.

  I lowered myself over the edge.

  Braced up with stiff, shaking arms, I remembered when Kimberly had paused in almost the same position and asked me to rescue her Swiss Army knife.

  What had happened to the knife?

  Just before being taken out of the picture, I’d seen it in my hand.

  Had I somehow slipped it into a pocket of my shorts?

  Not in my seat pockets, that was for sure. I’d spent plenty of time on my back and would’ve felt it pushing against my butt. It didn’t seem to be in my front pockets, either; they held the straight razor, Andrew’s lighter, Billie’s small plastic bottle of sunblock, and a pack of smoked fish. The way I was braced up against the face of the cliff, I could feel them all being pressed into my thighs.

  No Swiss Army knife there. No big surprise.

  Maybe the knife had ended up at the bottom of the chasm, though. If I’d still been holding on to it when I went over the edge ...

  I scrambled back up, got to my feet, and staggered over to the area where I had landed.

  The area included Matt. Or Matilda.

  Which goes to show how much I wanted the knife.

  A good knife like that could make all the difference.

  Also, it held memories.

  I wanted it badly.

  After sinking to my knees - perhaps a yard from the body—I dug Andrew’s lighter out of my pocket. I gave it a flick. A small spear-head of flame leaped from its top.

  By the shimmery yellow glow, I searched the ground. Staying on my knees, I circled the area, sweeping my gaze back and forth, trying not to look at the body.

  Looking at it anyway, from time to time.

  After a while, you get used to anything.

  Desperate to find the knife, I finally considered the possibility that the corpse might be hiding it. The knife couldn’t have fallen underneath the body, but it might’ve dropped out of sight in any of several places.

  My lighter was little use on some of them.

  I had to reach into the darkness under the chin and on both sides of the neck. I fingered the spaces under the armpits. I traced the entire body, crawling around it and running my fingertips along the crevice where its skin was pressed against the rock floor. I spread the legs apart and searched between them.

  That’s when I confirmed that the body was not a woman, after all.

  But I didn’t find the knife.

  So then I turned the body over. (In for a penny, in for a pound.) As he rolled out of the way, I felt almost positive that the knife would show up, at last.

  Kidding myself.

  It wasn’t there, of course.

  And, of course, I couldn’t stop myself from gazing at the front of the body.

  The man had a pulpy ruin where his face should’ve been. Also, the left side of his chest was split open.

  My guess is that Wesley and Thelma couldn’t be sure whether he would land face up or face down when they gave him the old heave-ho into the chasm. They wanted to make sure he would pass for Wesley, either way, so they didn’t spare any efforts in mutilating him.

  Who was he, though? He certainly wasn’t Keith or Andrew. Where in hell had they gotten their hands on a spare man to use for their trap?

  Giving up my search for Kimberly’s knife, I put away the lighter and returned to the open end of the chasm. I eased myself over the edge, and began to make my way down the sheer wall of rock.

  I made it to the bottom in record time.

  No bones got broken, though. Nor did I find myself unconscious. I was able to pick myself up again and get moving a few hours later, a while after the sun came up.

  I found my way, without much trouble, back to the lagoon. I came upon its shoreline near the south end. After emptying my pants pockets on a rock, I took off my sneakers and socks. (How great it felt to have bare feet!)

  I climbed down into the water and washed my hands the best I could, then cupped water to my mouth.

  Delicious!

  Cool, clear water, just like the song. (Not very cool, as a matter of fact, but it tasted wonderful anyhow.)

  After gulping down quite a load of it, I waded out until most of the lagoon came into sight.

  Nobody else seemed to be there.

  I submerged myself. The water felt like a soothing ointment on my battered, bruised and bitten skin. Staying under, I rubbed my face. I rubbed my shoulders, arms, chest, sides and belly, using my hands to wipe away the layers of filth.

  Then I took off my shorts and worked for a while at scrubbing them. They certainly didn’t come clean, but I got rid of the worst of the mess. Done with them, I waded toward shore and tossed them onto the nearest rock. Waiting no longer, I bent over and rubbed all the itchy, sore, grimy places from my waist on down to my feet.

  Later, I swam to the waterfall. I stood underneath it, the water splashing on my head and shoulders, running down me, spilling down me, flooding down me, washing off the last of the sweat and blood and whatever bits of Matt might still be clinging to my back.

  I must’ve stood under it for half an hour.

  Then I returned to the south end of the lagoon and climbed out. Nearby, I found a large slab of rock with a fairly flat surface. I crawled onto it and lay down.

  I slept. If dreams came, I don’t remember them.

  Later that day, I walked out onto our section of the beach.

  By then, I’d stopped kidding myself; I knew the women wouldn’t be there.

  The camp looked as if it hadn’t been touched since our departure, some days earlier.

  The fire was dead.

  But I found my book bag, opened it up, and took out my journal and one of the pens.

  My journal—my only companion, now.

  I sat down in the sand, crossed my legs, placed the journal on my lap, and opened it. After riffling through the great thickness of it, I came to a blank page.

  I wrote, ‘DAY? ANYBODY’S GUESS.’ I turned that page and wrote on the next, ‘Musings On My Return To The Journal.’

  When A Body Meets A Body

  It took one hell of a long time to write all that. Yesterday morning, I started to write about my hike upstream the previous night. I was only about half done with that when I realized everything would make better sense if I went back in time and told the whole business about our ‘last stand.’

  I can’t seem to be brief about this stuff. Next thing I know I’ll spend all day writing—and still have plenty left to go.

  I haven’t been building fires since my return to the beach (trying to stay inconspicuous), so writing after dark is out of the question. I had to call it
quits before I’d even gotten myself off the top of Matt.

  This morning, I finished about the chasm, and brought myself back to the beach.

  Now, I’m ready to tell the rest of what happened when I went upstream (two nights ago, now) to search for the women. I’d made my way about halfway through before breaking off to backtrack. But I need to get to the bad part, and get it over with, before I’m free to stop writing and do whatever comes next.

  I was last seen above the waterfall, running naked through the jungle with the straight razor in my sock.

  I found the place where Billie, Connie and I had joined up with Kimberly. Without her to lead the way, though, I had a difficult time finding the chasm from there. I became lost. More than once, I arrived at a boulder or tree that I recognized because I’d recently walked past it. I was roaming in circles.

  It didn’t bother me. I was in no hurry to reach the chasm. I didn’t want to reach it, in fact. But the chasm (the area above it, actually) was the place where I needed to go, so I kept searching for it.

  Eventually, I got there. Peering around a corner of rock, I scanned the scene of our battle.

  No bodies littered the moonlit field.

  I murmured, ‘Thank God.’

  Then I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it.

  I’d fully expected to find the remains of my three women on the ground near the top of the chasm. If not all of them, at least one or two.

  Relief overpowered me.

  The relief lasted about as long as my tears. I no sooner recovered from the crying than things came back into perspective; the absence of their bodies was an excellent sign. It didn‘t, however, guarantee they were still alive.

  Wesley and Thelma might’ve killed my women and dragged them away: buried them, burned them, sunk them, tossed them off a ledge, hauled them off somewhere to play nasty games with - God only knows.

  Or they might’ve taken my women away alive - as prisoners.

  Stepping into the open, I wondered if I might be walking into another trap. After all, this was enemy territory and we’d been ambushed here before.