The Nightmarchers

by J. Lincoln Fenn

  Her mother’s face when she exited the library that day at Aunt Liddy’s. Stricken. Despairing. She’d nearly gotten into an accident on the way home, had run straight through a red light and almost hit a van. Julia remembers the blaring horn, her heart racing like that of a scared rabbit.

  You have your father’s nose, Aunt Liddy had said, back when they first met. She’d thought it was an anti-Semitic slight. It wasn’t.

  “But look how wonderfully you turned out, Julia, crooked nose and all. And you have no idea how important you are—you really don’t. You must be naturally immune now. You survived the infection. Our medication has never been more than a coarse, short-term solution. Even Father could only stay on the island three weeks at a time. I dare say you’re the Lucy in the next step of human evolution. I’m confident we can create a vaccine, and then, Julia, then . . . it’s all right there in front of us. Our own race of people—the master class, served by peaceful, obedient, happy slaves. Why the hell God didn’t set it out that way in the first place is the only true mystery of theology.”

  Julia laughs bitterly. “Huh. When you put it that way, sign me up.”

  “Don’t be glib, Julia. There are too many people on the planet, and not everyone is going to get to live in a house with running water and have a smartphone. War, revolution, famine—it’s all going to happen regardless. This is a controlled burn.”

  “Thank you,” says Julia. “I was having a hard time deciding what to do, and I think you just made my mind up for me.”

  “I had a feeling that you might be . . . recalcitrant. Which is why Ethan unexpectedly received an offer for a free excursion to Kapu two months ago, some kind of credit-card reward sweepstakes—Bailey did an exceptional job with the graphic design. And strangely, he didn’t come back. It was easy enough to buy off his lawyers—I gave them a very large check and the tiniest of fig leaves. I’m a family member concerned that reverting custody would endanger Evie due to your mental instability, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Couldn’t they continue the façade, at least until we found out what happened to Ethan? Let the girl summer with her great-great-aunt? I will give them this—they were hard negotiators. But money really does solve so many problems.”

  Julia’s throat tightens.

  “She looks so much like you, that girl. And if you don’t work out, then I have a backup plan. Like always.”

  It’s as though the very air around Julia has disappeared entirely, as if she just stepped through the airlock into outer space. Julia can’t breathe. She can’t even imagine breathing.

  And is that sound, in the background, is that the faintest echoing laughter of a child playing outside?

  Evie. Oh my God, Evie.

  “I look forward to getting your full report, Julia,” says Aunt Liddy. “Have a pleasant journey back.”

  And with that the line goes dead.

  What world is this, that she so inadvertently stumbled into? Julia can’t bring her mind to make sense of it, any of it. There are too many thoughts in her head, and none shed light on what to do next.

  “The witch,” mumbles Agnes. “She wants to put you in the oven and eat you.”

  Agnes’s skin is dry, has the rough texture of paper. Julia shifts her position. Her move jostles Agnes slightly in the process, and small flakes of something that looks like ash fall from her.

  “Why can’t she ever just be happy in a house made of candy? Why does she want to eat the things that shouldn’t be eaten?”

  “I don’t know,” says Julia. “Maybe no matter how much she eats, she’s always hungry.”

  Agnes blinks. Something vacant about her stare—a gradual diminishing. “Your kind is always hungry. One day, you’ll eat the whole world.” She places a hand lightly on Julia’s stomach. “It’s better to be Kapu.”

  “But Kapu is gone.”

  Agnes shakes her head. “We were on an island in the middle of the ocean. And now we’re on an island in the middle of the ocean.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Agnes smiles. Her cheeks are sunken. “Irene wanted to understand. But it’s not for you to understand. It’s secret.”

  Another missile is launched, but they’re so far away now it’s just a faint flash in the sky.

  Julia thinks about the cyanide in her back pocket. She thinks about Evie, playing in the sunlit garden, surrounded by that looming wall, now left with nothing but a brittle woman to turn to for love. She thinks about her own, foreign self, this other Julia that is bubbling beneath her skin. In time, she knows the new Julia will, like anything else, seek self-preservation, propagation. She doesn’t trust it. Yes, the cyanide is her best, truest option.

  But Evie. Evie.

  “Maybe she’ll come find you,” says Agnes. “Maybe she’ll put the witch in the oven, like Gretel, and follow the bread crumbs home.”

  There’s a fine mist of ocean spray in the air. The wooden planks on the deck gleam with it.

  “Maybe,” says Julia, stroking Agnes’s fine hair. “But where’s home?”

  Agnes uncurls herself, places her feet on the deck, wriggling her toes like they’re new. “Home is where you are.” She stands, grabs one of Julia’s arms, pulls. “Can we go look at the cabin?”

  Why not? Maybe there will be something in there to chase the cyanide down with.

  “I’m not scared, you know,” Agnes says. “I’m not scared of witches. You know why?”

  Every muscle in Julia’s body resists, but she conquers the fatigue and manages to stand. “No, why?”

  Agnes slips an arm around Julia’s waist. “Because I’m not scared to die.”

  The next moments happen so fast. No warning. There’s a slight pressure in Julia’s back pocket, then Agnes is running across the stern, gripping the cyanide package, which sparkles in the moonlight, and as Agnes runs, she leaves a cloud of dust in her wake, like she’s disintegrating in real time, and then she’s leaping up to the railing, and then she’s climbed to the top, balancing her arms out to each side, and then she jumps, and Julia hears the splash, and by the time she gets her legs to move, by the time she reaches the railing, all she sees in the dark water is a small white dress floating like flotsam on the surface of a dark wave, and then another wave takes it, lifts it high for a split second before it’s pulled down into the boat’s wake, and disappears.

  “Wake, bake, cake,” says Julia. She feels something surge in her belly, like the press of Evie’s foot against her uterus before she was born. And she hears them, distant whisperings, a cacophony of souls, thoughts, memories—a fish slithering through her hands; a gecko crouching under a broad green leaf; the back of a woman’s head, long hair reaching over the brown pew—for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable.

  She raises her hand, the one that was burned and blistering.

  The skin is smooth. Pristine.

  And a part of her knows that she didn’t survive the infection. A part of her knows that she now is the infection. A contagion that she’d only pass along to Evie. To the world. The monstrosity is growing inside her.

  Noah. She has to find Noah. They can’t go back. Samantha was right all along.

  Julia climbs the stairs to the cockpit, thinking about ways to scuttle the boat—there has to be something on board with which to bash a hole in the hull, or maybe even create a small explosion—although it’s a shame they won’t be able to flip a coin for the cyanide pill. Only two more steps, then a wooden door, and a brass handle, which she reaches for, turns, and then steps into the cockpit where she sees . . .

  Reverend Palmer standing next to Noah, who’s behind the brass wheel, steering.

  The Reverend looks at her, smiles. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  Julia feels her heart implode. “Noah? Noah, what are you . . . ?”

  But she knows. She can tell by the rigidity of his body, the way he doesn’t even register her entrance, and more than that too, she can sense the vacuous space in his b
ody where his mind used to be.

  Oh, Noah. Slowly she approaches him, pauses by his side and tentatively reaches out a hand to touch his arm—nothing. His skin is cool beneath her fingers, slightly clammy.

  “What . . . what did you do to him?” she asks in a hollow voice.

  “Nothing. She told me to come to the boat, make myself hidden in the cockpit until her arrival. Then she blessed him with the last of her Spirit.”

  “Oh dear God,” whispers Julia.

  “We’ve been preparing for this journey, well, since my father’s time. We have everything we need to begin again. Seeds from each and every native species on Kapu. An ark, so to speak.”

  She remembers Isaac roughly pulling and tearing the husk off the coconut. The boat is the husk carrying the coconut to a new land. Or maybe Julia is.

  She’d packed the machete in her bag. Could she kill someone in cold blood?

  Now, yes.

  As if he can read her mind, the Reverend says, “Go ahead and try.”

  Her hands shaking, Julia unzips her pack, grabs the machete, charges over to the Reverend, quickly raises her arm—and freezes. She can’t bring it down on the back of his neck. In fact, her hand opens and the machete falls to the wooden floor with a clatter.

  The new Julia won’t let her. The Julia underneath her skin.

  “You should go down to the cabin, get some rest,” says the Reverend. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

  She knows this is true. It will never let her hurt him, kill herself, or destroy the boat. It has a fierce will already, which, she also realizes, will only grow stronger over time. But she can’t let it loose on the rest of the world.

  She needs to find a place that’s uninhabited, a place no one would ever want to go. A place to bury Kapu’s secrets. But in order to do that, she has to convince the Reverend. And the Julia under her skin.

  All that’s available, at the moment, is the truth.

  “So what’s your plan?” she asks, keeping her voice neutral, as if it doesn’t make much difference to her one way or another. “Sail into a city somehow? Without identification? Money?”

  The Reverend looks out at the darkened glass. The boat rocks, ever so slightly. And beyond the windshield glass, beyond the bow, the black ocean meets the black night sky, no discernible horizon line separating them.

  “God will provide.”

  “I don’t think God has met Aunt Liddy,” says Julia. She stoops down and picks the machete up from the floor, slips it back into her sodden pack. Tries to zip the bag shut, but it jams. “My great-aunt has a plan, she always does. And a backup plan, and a backup backup plan.”

  “You don’t share the same faith. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “True, I don’t share your faith. Maybe that’s why, after all, I was chosen. Maybe that’s my purpose.” She slides the pack’s one good strap over her shoulder. “Because let’s say, by some miracle, you do make it to the mainland. How long before Aunt Liddy finds you, me? What’s on this boat? Her resources are unimaginable, her nature diabolical. She’s like Alfred, only worse if that’s possible.”

  He’s quiet. She can sense all the voices inside her become quiet. Listening. Good.

  “Trust me, I want to go back,” she continues. “There’s nothing in the world I want more. Because the only thing that means anything to me is my daughter, and that bitch has her.”

  The Reverend glances at her with the faintest hint of sympathy. “Well then, I am sorry for that, I am.”

  Julia takes a step closer to him. Her fingers tighten on the strap. “But to give Aunt Liddy what she wants puts the whole world at risk. The world all of us will live in. My daughter included.”

  “The world will be made anew.”

  “It will. But it will be Aunt Liddy’s world. Not yours. Not Kapu.”

  And then she thinks about the video she watched, replays it in her mind—Agnes under the scalpel, Irene walking numbly to the operating table with stumps where her hands should be—and she hears the whispers of thoughts, conversations running over each other, too fast to understand, but she knows it’s a conference of sorts.

  “She’s old,” Julia continues softly. “She doesn’t have that much longer to live, I’m sure. It would be wiser to wait. A good ten years should do it.”

  The internal whisperings grow louder—a debate. So then she thinks about that trip she took into her great-aunt’s basement, holding the broom like a sword. She thinks about all the dusty moths pinned to decaying velvet, the stiff figures of taxidermied birds, claws wrapped around old twigs, bound with wire. Some from Kapu.

  The whisperings turn into a cacophony.

  She can see herself even, a small, waiflike figure, slowly creeping toward the sheet that covered some kind of lumpen figure under the stairs. The thing that frightened her out of her mind. What did she do next? That’s right, she used the handle of the broomstick to lift the corner of the sheet from a safe distance away, her heart thudding loud as a drum.

  There was an old, rusting wheelbarrow under the sheet.

  Noah takes his hands off the wheel, cocks his head like he hears music, an inaudible tune.

  “What are you doing?” the Reverend asks. He turns to her, grabs her by the arm. “What have you done?”

  Julia smiles a crooked smile. “The Lord’s will.”

  On top of the wheelbarrow was a large jar filled with a yellow liquid. She kept lifting the sheet until she saw something that stunned her. Shocked her so completely that she’d hidden it away and out of sight in her mind, until now, this moment.

  The feet of a baby, translucent and pale, floating in the yellow liquid, and then short, stubby legs . . .

  The boat lists hard into a wave. “Stop it!” the Reverend shouts. “Stop it right now!”

  She’d dropped the sheet, turned and bolted for the stairs, catching the broom in the staircase railing, breaking it. Imagined it chasing her, snatching at her feet as she fled. And maybe it was chasing her, because here it is now, within her.

  The child. Irene and Alfred’s child.

  The whisperings continue to churn, and she can even pull out the odd word—abomination, madness, protect—but after a few moments they die down, as though a consensus has been reached.

  Noah puts his hands back on the wheel, turns it.

  The Reverend drops his hand from Julia’s arm, confused. “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe it’s a test of your faith,” Julia says.

  The Reverend gives her a sideways glance, not trusting, not yet.

  So she burrows into all the thoughts, memories inside her, all that remains of Kapu. Trying to find the one strand that will convince him.

  “Your father told you once that a light would come to guide you, a sinner who would be redeemed by the Lord,” Julia says. “In her was life; and the life was the light of men.”

  Now she has his attention. She can see both their reflections in the dark glass of the cockpit.

  “He’d want you to make sure that life was safe, wouldn’t he?”

  But he still seems hesitant, so Julia tries to find one more thing, and she does—a single word, the one that had been out of her reach for so long, that she had sensed the existence of but could never define. It’s the word she was trying to find in her dream, a word she never would have been able to comprehend without the creature growing in her belly.

  She leans over and whispers this word in his ear. “Behold.” Takes his hand, and places it gently on her belly, which already has a small bump. The thing inside her kicks.

  He looks startled, quietly amazed. And then he drops to his knees, tears beading his eyes, gazing up at her, rapt. “Blessed are thee among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”

  And it might just be her last act as the old Julia, although at the moment she doesn’t know if she’s saved the world, or just delayed the inevitable.

  EPILOGUE

  THE LETTERS

  DATE UNKNOWN

 
; My dear sweet Evie. I think about you every day—I wonder how tall you are, what your favorite class is in school, if you miss me. If you remember me. I have a journal that was on the boat, and a box of pens, but there are only thirty-six, so I’m trying to spread them out, these letters. I don’t even know if we’ll ever find each other again, but the Reverend says I must have faith, a term I’m coming to hate, because it means “no one knows for sure.”

  Your brother was born a year ago. Sometimes he reminds me of you, sometimes of Agnes, and sometimes of no one at all, like there are so many things inside of him, competing, that not one thing shines through. I can tell you he has sandy blond hair, and a significant bite, which we’re trying to temper, but he hates to wear clothes, and doesn’t like boundaries. He’s already walking, and often we’ll find he’s wandered off to another side of the island and is contentedly curled up under a tree, playing with stones. Sometimes he talks, haltingly, words bubbling out in different languages, although we’re trying to get him to adhere to English.

  I still call the Reverend “Reverend,” and he’s not horrible company. At least he doesn’t seem interested in anything more than a platonic “kinship.” He spends most of his days tending to the seeds he’s planted, all of Kapu’s native children, which are thriving here, even though this island is small. I have convinced him to plant the corpse flower on the other side of the island, because of the smell, for one, and also because it’s a reminder of what my future might be. Sometimes when I’m tired, I wonder if it’s just fatigue, or if I’m in the beginning stages of never moving again.