Terminally naive, whispers Ethan.
Too many things happen at once to properly absorb—a shock wave, a shower of broken glass, muted shrieks and wails. Her ears ring, there’s a stench like she just buried her face in a rotting corpse—she’s on her hands and knees, smoke, so much smoke she can’t see more than a foot in front of her—she has to run, she has to get out of here. Somehow she gets to her feet—heat, there’s a roaring fire, behind her—but she runs, past a dazed churchwoman just standing there, her jaw slack—past something crawling in the dirt toward her that she can’t—won’t—think about.
“JULIA!” the Reverend calls, his voice hoarse with rage. “JULIA!”
But Julia is running through the smoke, then into the fields, the machete still in her hand, charging for the cover of the jungle, taking giant strides, her lungs aching, sharp, needling pains in her back, blood trickling down her face. She hears others running behind her, but doesn’t dare turn to see how many, not when a single misstep, a trip, a fall, could be the end of her.
The jungle looms ahead, a mass of waiting darkness.
But someone—something—is closing in on her; she hears heavy footsteps hitting the dirt, labored breathing, the crack of broken vegetation. She’s about to turn to look—if she can’t run, she’ll have to fight—just as she’s yanked backward by the collar of her jacket. The force sends her to the ground, but she’s able to twist around, see her attacker.
One of the college boys whose name she can’t recall, drool slipping out of his mouth, right hand twitching violently, has her gripped tightly with his left hand. He doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with her now that he has her, and she tries wriggling out of her jacket but he’s too strong, and others are coming now too, emerging from the orange glow that surrounds the greenhouse, flames licking out from a massive hole in the roof. Has the fungicide had an effect? Is he returning to the shores of consciousness?
His name . . . If only she could remember his name, maybe she could reach him in the distant land where he is, conjure him back to reality. She tugs the mask off her face, throws it on the ground. Maybe if he can see her, he’ll recognize her.
“Please,” she says. “Let me go.”
Nothing. Either he doesn’t hear her, or he doesn’t understand anymore. It’s bizarre, his stillness, like he’s rooted into the earth, turned to stone. He doesn’t grab her with his other hand, he doesn’t try to drag her back to the Reverend.
A few of the churchwomen are close enough now that she can start to make out their faces.
So she does the only thing she can. She swings the machete through the air, severs his left hand at the wrist. If he feels pain, if he feels shock, he doesn’t show it, even as blood spurts out of the stump, splattering her face. He just takes a wavering step backward as if the loss has altered his sense of balance, and he needs to recalibrate. The hand drops from her jacket, falls to the earth, fingers twitching spastically, like a gecko’s tail.
She jumps to her feet and bolts for the jungle.
Tries not to think about those fingers. The way they seemed to edge toward her, like moths drawn to a flame.
CHAPTER 21
THE VEGETATION GETS THICK, FAST, so there’s no running now, just slipping and sliding and trying to cut through branches to keep something like a forward momentum. Some scattered moonlight makes its way through the canopy, not enough to really see by, just enough to illuminate the sheen of a large, dark leaf, a spot of muddy earth. Mostly Julia feels her way with one arm outstretched, her hand pushing through leaves and branches, suffering scrapes and scratches.
She can taste blood on her lip—whose, she’s not sure. What she needs is a good, big rock, something to hide behind. Or a tree she could climb. But they’re too thin here; she could practically wrap her hand around their delicate trunks.
Others are in the jungle now. She hears the crash of them entering the brush.
A thought occurs to her, a strange one. Something from Irene’s journals, about what to do if you happen across a nightmarcher on a moon-filled night.
Seriously? says Ethan. Why don’t you just slit your wrists with the machete while you’re at it?
I told you to shut up, and I meant it. Julia drops to the soft earth, lies flat, and closes her eyes. Simple. She feels the pain in her lungs from running so hard, the ache in her calves; she feels the scratches and cuts on her hands, and her own heart thudding in her ears, loud as a drum.
A bird overhead trills, and another, farther away, responds with its own lilting call.
Something nearby rustles the foliage. It’s a something that sounds like a person, snapping branches, pausing every once in a while before continuing.
Julia doesn’t move. Wishes another storm would make landfall. She’d welcome it now, a good rainfall, the cover of sound.
Crack. Very close. Every nerve screams run, run, run, but she forces herself to remain still. Pays attention to her breath instead. In, out, in, out. The last time she’d paid so much attention to breath was in her Lamaze classes, an eternity ago, on what might as well be a distant planet, but it does, strangely, help settle her.
Crack. Right next to her ear. Any closer and the damn thing will be stepping on her, but she remains still. Holds her breath.
The conch shell blows. Another crack, but just slightly farther away, in a different direction. Then the soft thwap of a branch hitting a tree trunk, even farther away. Hope starts to creep.
Just then, some kind of small, scurrilous insect lands on her exposed cheek. She can feel the soft tickle of it exploring her jawline, crawling over her bottom lip, until there’s the light brush of feelers right against her left nostril.
Goddammit.
She sets her jaw tight, willing herself not to sneeze. The insect creeps up and around her nostril, starts up the bridge of her nose, then does a U-turn, heading down for the tip. It pauses there. Turns around. Pauses again.
Then it lets out a high-pitched but unmistakable hiss.
Crack, crack, crack, the damn nightmarcher coming for her.
Julia jumps to her feet and plunges into the bush.
There are cracks and snaps and crunches all around her now, the whole tribe in pursuit, the only positive being the almost impenetrable darkness. She’s tripped twice, her right ankle is aflame with pain, and she knows what she is now, terrified prey, the rabbit, winded and shivering right before the dogs launch their final attack. She labors up a hill, and then slips and slides down the opposite side, getting a momentary glimpse of thick white clouds illuminated by moonlight. The dirt is muddy, treacherous.
Ethan so smug he doesn’t even have to comment.
She almost runs right into a large banyan, which seems to have sprouted out of nowhere, and her fingers instinctively search for gaps in the trunk—or not the trunk, roots she knows that are parasitically growing around a tree—and finds something that maybe, just maybe she can slip through. She lifts a leg, ignoring the sharp pain in her ankle from the extra weight, pushes it through, and yes, if she can get her hip in . . . she can, and there’s enough of a hollow for her to squeeze into. She pulls her other leg in, crouches down, feeling the brush of moss across her face. Slips her pack off and holds it on her lap, props the machete in front of her.
Her breath is heavy, ragged. Every inch of her is covered in sweat. Her damp hair clings to her skull.
There’s a soft rustle nearby. She tries to hold her breath, but it’s hard—her lungs are desperate for air. If they find her, what comes after? She can’t imagine the ultimate game plan the Reverend has in mind, but somehow she doesn’t feel like he’d want her to be a mindless drone. He seems like a man in need of company.
Crack.
Julia freezes. Reaches out for the machete. And then she feels something—someone—slip through the gap in the banyan, and there’s just enough light to see the soft outline of a small face.
The girl. Real, not a hallucination.
She reaches out a delicate hand
, cups Julia’s chin, whispers, “He told me I had to be brave, and quiet. Quiet as a mouse. You have to be quiet like one, now.” Then she places a solemn finger in front of her lips, for emphasis.
And Julia is. She holds herself completely still, so still she forgets for a moment where she is, maybe even who she is. Fear, anxiety, turning into vapor, lifting itself off her skin, replaced with an even calm. The girl nestles herself under Julia’s arm and presses against her chest, completely motionless. The weight is nice. A ghost of all the times Evie had curled up next to her at night to listen to a story.
There’s crashing, and grunting, and white light that flashes through the foliage—electric, a flashlight—but it might as well be happening in another time, another place, a movie she’s watching that could never have an impact on her.
“Julia!” The Reverend’s voice heavy. Desperate. “JULIA!”
One of the girl’s fingers reaches up and twists a strand of Julia’s hair around it, idly. They sit, and wait, and listen. Insects buzz in the brush; wind whispers through the leaves of the banyan. After some time, the probing electric light goes away. Searching elsewhere.
The girl twists her body around, separates clumps of Julia’s damp hair, begins to braid it, like they’re two children in a playhouse.
“They’re gone now,” says the girl. “You did a good job being quiet. I did too. Do you have the map that sees the island like a bird?”
“I do. But the power went out.” Julia unzips the pack. Her hands are trembling. She finds the GPS phone, powers it on. “I couldn’t charge it.”
The screen flickers briefly, then goes dark.
“Do you have the plug?”
She remembers. “Yes, I do.”
The girl sits back, judging her work with Julia’s hair. “I wish I could have a mother. And a sister.”
“Maybe you could come with me. I mean that.”
The girl sighs. “You don’t know anything about anything.”
Julia takes a deep breath, keeps her voice even. “Do you know where there’s electricity? Where I could plug the phone in, so you could see the island like a bird?”
“Where they do the science, where they have computers,” the girl says, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t like that place.”
“There’s electricity there?”
“What will you trade me?”
“How about the phone?”
“You already traded me that.”
“Yes, for the red flower. But I have the red flower now.”
Julia can sense the girl’s internal debate, but she doesn’t press. Wheedling, or desperation, could scare her off.
“You’ll stay?” the girl says then. “You’ll never leave? How about that?”
Julia swallows. She hates to lie, but there’s no time to explain a whole world beyond the girl’s understanding. “It’s a deal. I won’t leave you.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Okay.” The girl gets to her feet, barely having to crouch in their hidden banyan sanctuary. “It’s good to hide anyway when Kapu gets mad. Scary things happen when she gets mad.”
“When . . . what? I don’t understand—”
But the girl just slips back through the gap, leaving Julia alone with the end of her question.
Maybe there’s a world beyond her own understanding, too.
It’s slow going, at least for Julia. The girl, on the other hand, easily slips through the branches, over rocks, past trees, even in the darkness. After what feels like an eternity going uphill in ankle-high muck, they reach something like a plateau with firm ground, sided by a massive, steep cliff that drops dramatically all the way down to the ocean. Julia finally has to stop, catch her breath, bending over at the waist, gulping in large, deep breaths. There’s a twinkling light close to the horizon line—the carrier? The boat? Impossible to say.
She wonders if she’ll find Beth in this “place where they do science,” or whether Beth is already on a boat, heading out into safer waters. Maybe Irene’s coffin wasn’t empty at all, maybe that’s why Julia was dispensable. And Noah is still out there with the nightmarchers, stumbling around in the jungle with his mind in some other world altogether.
At least she has one flower sample. Maybe that will be enough to get Aunt Liddy to retrieve her, get her off this damn island.
The girl approaches her, takes Julia’s hand, and rubs the back of it with her thumb. “We’re almost there.” Her dress is wet, like she’s been out in the storm this whole time. Dark mud covers her legs, her hands, streaks of mud across her cheeks, but none of that seems to bother her at all.
“So, what happens on Kapu when . . . when she gets mad?” Julia asks.
The girl shifts her weight to her other foot. “Things. You’ll see. Beth isn’t supposed to be on this side of the wall.”
“What about me? I’m not supposed to be on this side of the wall either.”
The girl doesn’t answer, just takes a step back, tugs her hand. “You’re different.”
Julia wants to ask how, but the girl drops her hand and turns around, walking ahead, not looking back to see if Julia follows, disappearing so completely in the dark that it’s as if she vanished entirely.
“Come, Julia.”
Julia smooths the wet hair away from her face. Her hand feels for the jar in her pack—still there. But the calculus of everything ahead is overwhelming, so many ifs, so many buts, so many unanswered questions.
You should have jumped off the cliff when you had the chance, Ethan whispers. Why prolong the inevitable?
Because, she answers silently in her head, that’s what you’d want me to do.
It’s the perverse will to thwart her ex that gets Julia’s aching legs to move again. The ghost of Ethan, finally proving useful for a change.
They’re in a grove of trees, they’re in thick jungle brush, they’re crossing a trickling stream, slippery rocks dark as midnight. It all starts to feel the same. Julia has lost all sense of direction, of time, and she hasn’t been able to feel her feet for a while now; they’re just lumps propelling her forward as she follows the slip of a girl who is briefly illuminated when a beam of moonlight shimmers through the leaves.
Is this even real? Will she wake up in her bed in the bungalow, light streaming in through the muslin curtains? Or is this a nightmare, and she’ll find herself coming to consciousness out in the jungle, sleepwalking again?
Impossible to say. Her tongue is thick; she’d give almost anything for a glass of water. White fungus everywhere she looks, she imagines it growing in and down her throat, curling down into her stomach, spreading out through her limbs, like a new creature pulsing under her skin.
Never leave, never leave, never leave, whisper the trees. Leave, sleeve, weave.
She feels slightly disassociated, untethered. The girl hasn’t spoken a word, not since they stopped at the edge of the cliff, but other disembodied voices seem to crowd in, uttering fragments that make no sense.
—blessed are the meek—
—he never said you were pretty, he said—
—it wasn’t until the end, that I realized—
—Christ it’s hot, I wish—
—all I wanted was a baby—
Words in languages she doesn’t understand, the rise and fall of scattershot vowels and consonants.
Maybe they won’t make it in time. Maybe the bombs will rain down, burn the whole island to the ground. She can understand, in a way, why even the thought of it would make Irene run from the house in a wild panic, the shock causing her to forget everything else.
Jumping off a cliff is so much easier, says Ethan. Five seconds, then nothing.
She pushes him away and instead focuses on the trees—something strange about their trunks; they seem lithe, and supple, twisting and curling to the sky, all of them covered with a layer of fine green moss. Thick roots aboveground. Oval knots that look like eyes. Watching her. Them.
Finally the girl stop
s in front of a hill marked by a massive tree, larger than all the rest, with giant curling roots that look like frozen tentacles. She reaches down and tugs at something in the ground.
Julia hears the creak of rusty hinges.
A cellar door. An entrance. A gate. To what? The girl looks at her with an inscrutable expression, and then takes a step down what must be stairs, because she disappears again.
A soft hush—the voices in her head are gone. The entire forest seems to be holding its collective breath, and although Julia doesn’t know why she thinks this, she does, and it feels true.
All of a sudden light floods out from the entrance. Electricity. A place to charge her phone. Maybe food, something to drink. She hurries toward it, finds the cement steps that lead downward, and the girl waiting at the bottom in a pool of light, water dripping from her skin, a puddle near her feet.
The walls to either side are smooth concrete, once white at some point in time but now edged with green mildew and more of the white fungus. The overhead fixtures are cold and bright, the crumbling steps painted a red that’s fading. Like the tongue of a mouth. Something of a ’50s bomb shelter about it, and definitely not the work of the low-tech church. This would have taken excavators, equipment, and what the hell is generating that power anyway, all the way out in the middle of nowhere? More than what could be gleaned from solar panels or a lone generator for sure.
She feels Aunt Liddy’s hand at work. Flashes to the last time she crept into her great-aunt’s basement, the nasty surprises it held.
So of course, you should go in, says Ethan. What are you waiting for? Let’s see how far your insanity can take you.
She is so, so tired of taking his crap, or the crap she is delivering to herself in his name. So she decides to banish him.
You can’t banish me, he says. I’m the one who leaves you, not the other way around.
The Nightmarchers Page 24