The Nightmarchers

by J. Lincoln Fenn

  “Oh God, we can’t just leave her body here,” says Julia. “We should—”

  Noah grips her arm. “There’s no time.”

  “Come on!” Agnes shouts again, this time from the pebbly beach.

  Right. Julia starts scrambling down the hill again, Noah following close behind. Her ankle twists, sending a wave of searing pain up her leg, but she just clenches her teeth, keeps going. Six yards. Five yards. Four. She slides down the final three, breaks her fall by catching the last tree and wrapping an arm around its trunk.

  A strange knot protrudes from it, at almost exactly eye level. It almost looks like . . . a face. Julia reaches up, runs her hand lightly over its contours. Yes, two concave sockets, two high cheekbones, two small ridges that look like lips, and . . . something metallic embedded in the bark.

  The waves lap gently against the shore; a bird calls out from the jungle they left behind.

  A locket. A heart-shaped locket, and a gold chain, the trunk growing around it, almost covering it, but not quite. And a thin piece of cloth, almost buried in the wood. Lace, frayed by the wind and sun.

  Julia feels Agnes beside her, but she can’t tear her eyes from Irene’s face immortalized in a tree trunk. Agnes raises her fingers to her lips, kisses them, and then presses her fingers to two small ridges.

  “I was sad when she stopped moving. Eventually they all stop moving. It’s nice, mostly, because then they’re Kapu and always together, never alone. But I missed her arms around me. It hurt my heart.”

  Yes, Julia thinks. A good way of putting it. The lingering anguish of that last moment, hugging Evie close to her before she went off into the car with Ethan. She wonders if this might be better, to be frozen in wood, to watch time from the sidelines.

  Well, she’s supposed to bring back Irene’s remains. This is it. She reaches an arm up, tugs on a withering branch that’s dry, cracked. Breaks it off. Thin white filaments inside, like the strange thin thread Noah had pulled out of her belly where the leech bit her.

  A shiver races along her spine. What could it possibly mean?

  Agnes slips her hand in Julia’s, tugs it. “We should go now.”

  It could mean everything. Nothing. Julia turns to the boat, and sees Noah already wading to the ladder along the boat’s side.

  “Come, Julia,” says Agnes. “It’s time to make all the world Kapu.”

  The salt water is warm, even at this time of night, and Julia wades to the boat’s ladder, climbs aboard to the deck, Agnes following close behind her. It’s not a big boat—it looks vintage, something ’30s-ish about the brass and the fixtures—but it will take them away from Kapu, from the church, from the nightmarchers. She feels a pang—they don’t deserve to die—but there’s no choice, and they’re practically dead already. Nothing can be done to save them.

  She’s not even convinced yet she should save herself.

  Agnes nimbly climbs along the outer edges of the boat to where the rope moors it to the palm tree. She must be incredibly strong, because she makes short work of the knot, untying it and then letting it slip off into the ocean.

  Umbilical cord, Julia thinks. But what, exactly, is about to be born? She still doesn’t know.

  There’s a wooden cabin below, and a cockpit above, where she catches some movement—Noah must be in there, trying to figure out how to start the engine.

  As if she can read her mind, which maybe she can, Agnes says, “I will go help him. Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry. Right. She watches Agnes walk across the deck to the cockpit stairs. Climb them and open the door.

  The island knows how to pilot a boat. Or not the island, but the strange sentience that burrowed its way into every creature, transformed them, absorbed them. A place where the evolutionary tree was strangled by a rogue banyan. Her great-aunt was right about one thing: it’s a discovery that would put her on par with Darwin, for sure.

  Her body aches for rest. Maybe there’s food in the cabin. It would help to have something solid in her stomach to offset the vodka, which is making it hard for her to stand upright as the boat gently sways.

  She hears the rumble of the engine start, the rush of seawater being pushed out behind, and the boat lurches forward before it starts to turn. Will they make it in time, before the bombs start falling? There’s a part of her that should care more, but she feels distant, outside herself. She can only think about now. And now she stands on a wooden deck with a light breeze lifting her hair, smoky clouds hanging around a Polynesian moon rising right above the tall, jagged peak of Kapu. She leans on the rails; the brass is cold against her skin.

  She closes her eyes, feels the engine’s vibration in the railing, the water dripping off her clothes.

  There’s a click of a door being shut, and then she hears Agnes’s footsteps coming down the stairs, the slip-slap of her bare feet on the deck. Julia opens her eyes and finds Agnes standing next to her, excited, jittery. As the boat rides a low wave, Agnes clutches at the railing. A child, not-a-child.

  “I’ve never really been on a big boat,” she says. “I was on a small one once, a long time ago.”

  The boat chugs along, out of the cove, into the broader waters. Slowly, the island recedes, and Julia sees movement in the trees, figures emerging from the dense jungle at the top of the ridge.

  The nightmarchers.

  They climb down the steep slope, but with what intention? The boat’s too far away for them to reach.

  “They’re saying goodbye,” says Agnes. “In a way.”

  And there is something like a farewell in the way they all watch, each taking a spot almost equidistant from the next, new trees in the forest. They don’t wave, or speak, or seem to see anything in particular. But she can feel their minds intent on them, on the boat, on the distance growing between them. Fred, so confident, so in love with Heather; and the other college boys, boys no longer; and the trio of women—what were their names? She feels bad that she can’t remember their names—and Roger and Lois, who thought their wealth mattered here; and the churchwomen, whose names she never knew. A grove where people used to be.

  All of a sudden there’s an eruption of ghostly pollen from the flowers, particles that catch the glimmering moonlight, looking like mist. It seems to set off another eruption on the island, a mushroom cloud that rises up into the clouds, picked up by the breeze.

  “Don’t be sad,” Agnes says.

  Julia hadn’t realized she was, but in fact, a tear drips from her right eye. Strange.

  “Aren’t you sad to leave them?” Julia asks. “To leave the island?”

  “It’s time,” says Agnes. “We were happy in Kapu. We thought it was the entire world. But your family came, and gave us the apple. We ate the apple, and now we know. And because we know, we must go forth, multiply. It’s all in your book.”

  Julia doesn’t know what she means, but then she does. Adam. Eve. Genesis.

  “I like your fairy tales better, though,” Agnes says. “They have happier endings.”

  “They do,” says Julia. “Yeah, they do.”

  “It’s funny, isn’t it? You learned our secrets, and we learned yours.”

  It is funny, but not. She should push the girl who’s not a girl off the boat; she should strangle her to death; she should take the machete and hack her to pieces. She thinks about these things, but instead she reaches out for Agnes’s hand, which is cold.

  They’re farther out now. Already she can’t make out the faces of the nightmarchers. The beach is invisible; the tall cliff looks like something that could fit in the palm of her hand. She wonders in a loose kind of way where the Reverend is, if he’s sitting in the church, knees on the wooden floor, praying. Preparing for the final journey.

  Agnes turns her face up, smiles. “It’s going to be all right. Everyone is going to live happily ever after, you know.”

  A decision has to be made. Agnes sits at the very edge of the stern, dangling her legs over the water, propping her chin on the railing
, a hand hanging on each side, like the rails are a set of monkey bars. The island is now barely visible in the distance, just a low, hulking shadow faintly illuminated by the moon.

  Julia feels the weight of everything that’s happened finally, physically land. She can’t believe she’s still standing, and just that thought makes her knees feel weak, so she stumbles toward one of the deck chairs. Her legs ache; the salt water has found all the myriad cuts and pricks, and now they sting like hell. Her ankle is a ball of fiery pain; her hair smells like smoke. She lets her sagging, muddy, nearly destroyed backpack slide off her shoulders. Gingerly settles into one of the deck chairs. She can understand never moving again.

  And somewhere out there, the ship. What will the mysterious “we” do to her, Agnes? Nothing good she imagines.

  The package of cyanide rests in her back right pocket, the medication in her left back pocket. One pill will clear her mind, one will end it.

  She knows what poor Samantha would advise her to do. End it. Finish it.

  And Samantha would probably be right. Whatever the hell Agnes is, what all this is, should never reach another living human being, let alone a land that’s densely populated. Because she can still sense them. Not just on the island, but inside her, too. Coiled somewhere in her belly, in a place Noah with his tweezers could never reach, a nest of fine threads that contain all the island’s secrets. She knows them now, not like things she learned, but like things that come naturally, like the instant love for Evie the moment she first saw the sonogram, the fierce protectiveness that was beyond thought.

  Such a long time ago, when there was snow, when all the earth seemed like a hard, frozen ball, she sees what Agnes once was, a girl in a roughly woven dress, with her arms tied behind her back, forced into a hand-carved boat made of a dark wood. Alone. There wasn’t much left of her when she washed ashore, mostly skin and bone, but Kapu took her. Kept her close. So close they became the same thing. And when the others came, she was the interlocutor, the translator between worlds, until the man with the crooked nose came, and there was a war, and after the war there was a wall, and the girl disappeared into the jungle and became a ghost story, something to scare small children with on moonless nights.

  There’s an explosive sound of something like a jet taking off in the distance, and a rocket lights up the night sky. Julia looks up—it’s like a shooting star, a comet, arcing across the stars, leaving a plume of white, hazy smoke in its wake.

  The missile strikes the island. There’s a massive explosion, a thunderous roar, and a huge red ball of fire radiates up and out of the island’s center. More missiles follow. It’s hard to think she was just there; it feels too much like news footage, something she can turn off when the commercials start.

  But there are real people on that island. Or they were, once.

  Is she still a real person herself? Or is she now something else entirely?

  Of course, there’s only one person to ask.

  Julia reaches into her pack and grabs the GPS phone. Dials a number.

  It only rings three times before Aunt Liddy answers.

  CHAPTER 25

  “I UNDERSTAND YOU’VE HAD QUITE the adventure,” says Aunt Liddy from half a world away. “It’s good to finally hear from you. For a bit there, I thought you were dead or, worse yet, had changed allegiances.”

  Another missile strikes the island. Julia can see the carrier when it’s lit by the brief flashes of the ordnance being fired; it’s far away, but they must be aware of the nearby small radar blip of her boat.

  Maybe they’ll decide her future for her. “Yeah, I’ve been busy.”

  “Indeed. And I hear our paranoid government at work there in the background. I thought the whisper of controlling masses of people would get their attention, but apparently they’re afraid it could be used against them. On the one hand, it’s a shame, but on the other, I’ll have quite the monopoly when your boat comes to port.”

  “Why would they let us ashore?”

  “Oh, they don’t see you, my dear, if that’s what you’re worried about. There are a few crew members on board who will be taking an early retirement in exchange for installing a virus that gives us control over their radar systems.”

  Agnes drops her hands from the railing, pushes herself backward, and stands up, heads over to where Julia is sitting. She climbs onto Julia’s deck chair, settles into the nook of Julia’s arm, rests her head on her chest.

  Her skin is cold. Too cold. Julia absently strokes her hair. There’s no point worrying about what she’ll overhear. They’re connected now. She’ll know anyway.

  “Well, that’s comforting,” says Julia. “I’m surprised you’re not more upset, though, at the loss.”

  “It’s not a loss—it’s a transition. I thought you would know by now that I always have a plan within a plan within a plan. But we can talk more when you get back.”

  God, she just wants to sleep. She just wants to lie down in a warm bed and go to sleep. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

  “If what is a good idea?”

  “Coming back.” A soft breeze drifts across the boat, and she can almost smell them, the corpse flowers burning. “What have you done to me?”

  There’s a pause. Julia can see the reflection of the next missile in Agnes’s eyes. A burst of red light illuminates her dark irises.

  “Now that’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” says Aunt Liddy. “The answer is, I’m not sure. Whether Isaac intentionally kept me in the dark or whether he just didn’t know is unclear. But it appears that the subject of our family’s long-term experiment had its own designs.”

  Julia gets a vision then, of cities overgrown with vegetation, buildings crumbling into dust, broken highways, rusting, empty buses, an abandoned school with a tree growing through the center of it, red corpse flowers blooming.

  It’s peaceful. So peaceful and quiet. An end to a world of human-manufactured ills.

  “And what were your designs?” Julia asks.

  Aunt Liddy laughs. “Why, reinventing the world, of course. You can’t be a proper god until you make a race in your own image. One you yourself have created. That’s what Father always said.”

  It’s a Mobius strip of a conversation, one that twists in and on itself, leading nowhere. Julia thinks about throwing the phone in the ocean. But she doesn’t.

  “Well then, your father was a real piece of shit.”

  “He was a scientist,” Aunt Liddy says, ignoring the slight. “Nothing in the material world is sacrosanct. Even Irene was an opportunity to unlock God’s secrets. Father didn’t believe her letters, thought it was just her way of running off. In all honesty, he probably didn’t care too much. But the locket of hair . . . now that was intriguing. For a good month after we received it, the follicles continued to grow, so of course he made the journey.”

  Julia gets a glimpse of Alfred approaching a tent, the exact one that Irene had sketched. He holds a Panama hat in his hand; she hears music coming out from the tent, laughter, Agnes’s voice saying, “I spy with my little eye . . .”

  “Eventually, he got it down to a theory—a spore that caused people to submit to the will of invisible chemical signals, but which also promised cellular regeneration. The trick was how to separate one from the other. Because the problem with eugenics wasn’t just the ambition to create a master race; it was what to do with the chaff. Large quantities of unnecessary people can get quite ornery, if you let them. And Lord knows genocide makes for some bad publicity. But here, here was an opportunity to endow one’s progeny with special advantages and keep the masses calm and obedient, content with their lot. Make a profit on the antidote, so much the better. But Father was never able to move beyond theory. All the specimens taken off the island died. He took the failure as a personal affront, almost. The best he could do was run experiments with what he had. He’d always had a keen interest regarding in vitro fertilization. At the time, no one thought that prepubescent eggs could be h
arvested, fertilized, and implanted. Let alone frozen afterward for safekeeping.”

  Agnes reaches out, clasps her hand in Julia’s, entwining their fingers. Julia gets flashes of images—Alfred in surgical scrubs; a bloody scalpel in his hand pressing against soft flesh; Agnes screaming, bound by straps to a stainless steel table, naked, a gash in her belly.

  “My God. He used his sperm to fertilize Agnes’s eggs.”

  “Of course he did. Although the initial pregnancies were quite disappointing.”

  Julia sees one of the churchwomen stumbling through the jungle, clutching an engorged stomach. She grabs the trunk of a tree, trying to hold herself upright, but starts to shudder instead, violently. Tiny, snakelike tendrils burst from her eyes, flail in the air. Alfred approaches, holding a shotgun. He takes a moment to pull off his glasses, wipe them clean with a white handkerchief, fold the handkerchief, tuck it back in his pocket, before he raises the weapon and coolly shoots the woman in the head.

  “Then Father realized what he needed was a host that was similar enough, genetically, that the body wouldn’t see it as an invasion. Irene’s uterus was the perfect solution, although she wasn’t keen on the idea. Neither was Agnes, who, he suspected, was somehow subverting the experiment. But he used her love of Irene, and vice versa, to move the project along. Until they escaped, somehow, never to be seen again.”

  Agnes yawns. Dark circles under her eyes, and her skin seems paler—it practically glows in the moonlight.

  Agnes is dying. Julia doesn’t know how she knows, but she does, even as the impact of what Aunt Liddy is saying hits her.

  “Oh . . . oh my God. You can’t be serious. What a monstrous thing to do,” says Julia.

  “I agreed. Which is why, when he returned with the baby, I promptly euthanized it. God knows what he would have done to the poor creature. For a few months after, he eyed me strangely, but I think he knew I was too good with a scalpel to chance using me as subject number two. After he died, I briefly considered destroying the fertilized eggs, but that was just around when your mother came to me for financial assistance because she couldn’t conceive, and, well . . . we had plenty of perfectly good eggs just frozen and waiting. It would be my discovery, and mine alone. I couldn’t resist. Your mother never knew, not until I tried to explain it to her. I somewhat naively thought she would be pleased to be a part of such important research, but as usual, that was just my severe lack of empathy at work.”