by Wilson, David Niall; Brown, Tonia; Meikle, William; McCaffery, Simon; Brown, TW; T. A. Wardrope
“What do you mean?” Jonas asked.
“They were taking us to meet their god,” she glared at him as if he were a child. “We walked toward bright outside light and found ourselves standing on a stone ledge that overlooked a narrow green valley. The leader raised his decorated arm and pointed to the valley. I followed the line of his finger and saw a large, dark, and hairy body, lying among the rocks and trees. The giant gorilla looked quite dead.”
The producer had not included this part of the story when he gave him his background notes. Alex’s version of the legend was filled with great details. He wished he had brought an audio recorder. He had to remember as much as he could, get some more details, but not look like he was interested. He leaned back and crossed his arms in front of him––the universal gesture of disbelief.
“The gorilla was dead, like it had just died of a heart attack. The leader pointed at us—more exactly, he pointed at Ronald. Ronald reddened and took a step back. I didn’t know what I could do… I don’t think any of us did. Three of the Tortuga Caniba walked forward and pulled Ronald closer to the edge. We all knew what was going to happen next, but we couldn’t think of a way to stop it. I suppose we didn’t believe what was happening.”
Alex paused, allowing her full meaning register with Jonas.
He nodded, he got the point, and he should believe what had happened and avoid their mistake. Alex didn’t understand subtlety in the least, which was good, because neither did his producer.
“The men pulled Ronald’s arms behind his back, and the leader drew a three bladed weapon from a pouch and held it out for everyone to see. He pointed it at Ronald, and then used his free hand to pull grey powder out of the same bag and throw it over the edge. The powder drifted into a cloud on its way down. Without any warning, the leader raised the weapon and slashed it across the lower part of Ronald’s throat. His blood came out like a fountain, and the leader guided Ronald’s body over the edge of the rock. The leader watched the body fall. We couldn’t see over the edge, but it didn’t matter; we couldn’t really see anything after we saw Ronald get murdered—we were blind with shock. The rocks under us shuddered.”
Jonas waited, looking down at the picture on the table. There wasn’t much of a story here. The damn gorilla was dead. What was she thinking? No matter how big it is, who cares about a dead gorilla? Dinosaurs are pretty big, too, but they aren’t a big mystery. He was wasting his time.
Checking his watch, he realized that his next bus was in five minutes.
“The gorilla rose slowly, and stood at its full height. From the ledge it was easy to see the creature was huge: fifty feet. We knew it was tall, though, so that wasn’t that main shock. The horror was discovered as the gorilla turned to face the shaman and our group. It was so close, and so still… we could see its facial features. The skin was draped across the bone, torn in places so the rotten meat was exposed. The giant eyes were opaque and unmoving, insects swarmed over its skin, and the massive stench of a hundred dead animals drifted off of its fur. A stain of fresh blood coated its dead, limp lips. The creature opened its mouth and roared out a shattered, wheezing noise. Half its teeth had fallen out; the tongue was blackened and full of holes. The gorilla was dead, but still moving.”
“You’re telling me this was a goddamn zombie gorilla?” Jonas blurted out.
“I’m telling you that the gorilla was dead, yet it was animated. I don’t know what to call it.”
Jonas pulled the photo closer, trying to distinguish the decay she was talking about. There was too much blur and graininess to see that kind of detail. Even so, the photo could have been altered. The producer was not going to go for this story, at all. Maybe there was another twist. He decided to wait for the next bus, but he needed answers real fast.
“Even if everything you say is true, Alex, I don’t understand how you made it here to tell me about it,” Jonas said.
“The gorilla turned away and moved toward the thicker jungle. The Tortuga Caniba walked us back to Bodden Town in silence. Of course, we were in all kinds of shock, so the walk back was a total blur. We went back to our hotel, went to our rooms, and spent a couple of days to ourselves. Eventually we met in the hotel bar, wanting to create a believable story with regard to Ronald’s death. We all agreed that it had happened, we all remembered the gorilla, and we even agreed that it looked like it belonged in the ground… not above it.
“Arnold had been nodding along, but he finally spoke during a sustained pause. During the time we were apart, he found someone in town that knew something about the Caniba. Legend and hearsay said that these Caniba had worshiped the giant gorilla for centuries; they sacrificed anyone they could to keep the god’s favor. One day, the gorilla died. Scores of islanders died as the Tortuga Caniba piled on the offerings to the dead god. Finally, they sent a shaman to Haiti, and he came back with the secrets of re-animation. They brought their god back from the dead, and continued their sacrifices, but not to gain his favor—to keep the gorilla from destroying the island.”
“Didn’t anyone notice the smell?” Jonas asked.
“Their god was too terrible for many of the Caniba. They fled the jungles and the island; only the most fervent stayed with the tribe. The group’s numbers diminished until they were nothing more than a circle of fanatics bringing sacrifices to the gorilla. We had the misfortune of meeting those few that remained,” she said.
“I don’t understand why the island would put up with them if they are carrying on with these sacrifices,” he said.
“This sect of Caniba is a doomsday cult. They believe that on the day they run out of sacrifices for the god, he will leave the island and go out to destroy the world. If they are threatened, they will cease to appease the gorilla with sacrifices. The dead gorilla will destroy the world. They must be left alone.”
“Right,” Jonas said. He took one last look at the photo and then pushed it towards Alex. He pushed his chair back as if he were about to leave. The visit had been interesting, but didn’t really do much for him as a practical matter.
“You tell a great ghost story, Alex,” Jonas said. “ I don’t know what any of this has to do with my screenplay or movie gig. I can’t even use this stuff you’re telling me because I can’t see not getting laughed out of the office.”
Jonas stood up and pulled on the office door. The door didn’t move, he pulled it again, hard, and the door didn’t open. The knob didn’t turn. He faced Alex; she was still sitting on the table as if he were supposed to sit back down.
“I would like to leave now,” he said.
“If anybody on that island sees or hears about your movie, they will come and kill us,” she said. “Or the Caniba will release the gorilla. You cannot write that movie.”
“If I don’t, they’ll find someone else. Are you going to track them down, too?”
“Yes, until this story is buried… where it belongs,” she said.
Jonas jerked the door hard for emphasis.
“Fine, let me out, so I can go home and erase the script,” he said.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jonas lied.
* * *
The bus ride away from the museum gave him time to do research with his iPhone. In the time it took to get home, Jonas determined that there were five people on her team, like she said. He found a photo of the group in an academic journal––saw a younger Alex, Ronald, Arnold, a woman named Jennifer, and a man named Fredrick. There was no mention of Ronald’s disappearance, or of the giant gorilla, just that their expedition was cut short due to weather. The article also said the group was planning to return at an undetermined time.
Arnold’s name popped up a few lines lower on his search results. Jonas popped that article open, saw that it was from the same journal, but published two years later. The photo showed Arnold standing alone on a wharf outside of Bodden Town with a few bulky bags next to him. Four paragraphs explained that he returned to the island to pick up where
the earlier expedition had left off. Why hadn’t Alex mentioned this? Jonas scanned further and further through the search results and found no mention of Arnold’s return or his findings.
By the time Jonas sat back down in front of his laptop, he had worked out the steps he needed to take to get to Tortuga: flight to Haiti, short boat trip to Tortuga. He could be on the island in less than a day. The flight would shave a bit off the top of his advance on the script, but it was a reasonable expense for the kind of research he could do. If he could wrap his script around a “true story”, it would be easier to market. A giant gorilla story with even the slimmest of facts behind it was much better than one that was total fiction.
Jonas packed his bags for a short trip and stuck a note to the refrigerator for his roommate. Sixteen hours later, he climbed out of the rusty boat that had taken him from Haiti to Tortuga and set his bags down on the rickety wooden dock. The sun was near the center of the clear blue sky, the heat was well into the 80s, and a thick wash of humidity stuck to him. No one met him on the dock, and as he looked down the length of the wharf, he couldn’t see anyone at all. He draped his bags over his shoulders and marched through the port of entry. No one checked his passport; no one offered to carry his bags; and no taxis waited.
He walked over a rough open patch that might have been a building once and stepped into a three-way intersection. The main street ran from northeast to southwest, and it was empty in both directions. None of the feral street animals he expected could be seen, either. Dry roads and dirty buildings were neglected to near collapse. A few dirty, parked cars sat on the street; many were covered with palm leaves and debris from the overhanging roofs. The island was nearly silent; there was hardly a breeze. Jonas double-checked the map he had printed out, then crossed the street to follow the third road to the southeast.
Building after building went past, without any sign of residents or merchants. Weather-damaged aluminum lay amid broken glass and splintered wood on the street. Bodden Town was abandoned or deserted, and had been for some time. Why hadn’t the boatmen told him? Were they so desperate for fares that they didn’t want to scare him off?
He reached his destination and saw the sign for Fort des Trois Hotel swinging loose. He wondered how soon he could catch a ferry back to Haiti, as there was little hope of getting anything out of the trip. He wanted to spend as little time as possible in the ghost town.
Forty feet from the front doors of the hotel, he heard the distant squawk of an AM radio sending reggae out into the empty street. A drifting hint of pipe tobacco. A wisp of smoke floated out of the front windows of the Fort de Trois.
Jonas kept his distance, looking into the hotel without standing directly in front of it. The glass was broken out, or maybe had never been there, so the raw light of day poured into the lobby. The lobby was small: a front desk, a collection of coffee tables and chairs, and a single elevator in the far dark corner. What had been a lush carpet was water damaged, and peeled at random squares. A shadow of a man sat near the front, smoking a pipe and staring at the street.
Jonas stepped closer to the man, but stayed outside of the hotel itself. The man at the table was shirtless. He had a series of red rings painted up the lengths of both arms. Three small stripes sat on each cheek. Jonas noticed that his sockets had been filled in and darkened with black paint, making his features resemble a living skull, rather than a human face. Still, the man looked very much like Arnold.
“Arnold?” Jonas asked.
The man stared at Jonas over the top of his glowing bowl. He rolled the pipe stem against his teeth, keeping his eyes locked on Jonas. The man was impossibly lean, as if his thin muscles were stuck right to the bone, with a shortage of skin pulled tight over it. He hardly resembled the photo taken before his solo expedition.
“Arnold? Is that you?” Jonas asked again.
The man set his pipe down, but left his mouth slightly open––open enough that his cracked lips showed yellow and jagged teeth. The teeth moved up and down as his jaw quivered, like he was trying to speak but had forgotten how. A scent of rot drifted off of the man.
“There are so few of us left,” the man said.
“Where did everybody go? What happened?” Jonas asked. The man didn’t seem to hear any of the questions.
“I wasn’t expecting you. It’s a shame there is only one of you. Not what we need. Not that I am ungrateful, the course was set sometime ago, and what must be, must be. I’ll give you the choice of who goes first, though. It’s all I can do,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Jonas asked. Something awful had happened on the island—he wondered how much Arnold knew about it. Jonas wasn’t afraid of the skinny man, but what if there were more dangers in the shadows of the alleys outside? What if the Tortuga Caniba were real?
“When the time comes, I can go first, if you want,” he said. “Or, you can go first; I would understand completely.” The man picked up his pipe again and drew in a massive cloud of smoke. He exhaled and watched the whirls of smoke twist in the sunlight. A strong breeze destroyed the cloud and brought a stronger scent of decay into the room.
“I don’t understand what you are asking,” Jonas said. He knew this was almost a lie as he said it. He had a growing fear that there was a fatal result of going first, something at the hands of the Tortuga Caniba. Maybe murder-suicide. Whatever it was, Arnold was assuming that Jonas would be more than willing to cooperate. He was wrong: in a few minutes, Jonas planned to steal an abandoned boat if he had to, and get back to Haiti.
“We could flip a coin, I guess,” Arnold said. He reached into his pocket and fiddled with loose change. Two separate rumbles moved through the floor, making the tables and chairs vibrate. The sound could have been some massive machine moving down the street toward them. The sound could’ve been a low-grade earthquake. Arnold set his pipe down and glared at Jonas.
“Or, there’s no rule that says we couldn’t go at the same time. Not like we’d be too much for him, right?” Arnold cracked a slightly off-kilter smile. “He’s got two hands.”
More rumbles, strong and deep. Jonas wanted the noise to be the tremors from an approaching quake. An exploding gas line could be possible, too. There were so many things the noise could be made by. A stronger wind blew into the room; it carried an overpowering stench of mold, spoil, and compost. Whatever was going to happen, Arnold was content to die. Jonas didn’t want to believe that a giant dead gorilla was working its way towards them. Whatever it was, it was coming, and he had seconds to flee into the maze of one and two story buildings that sat between him and the shore. He had to get what he came for first.
“Arnold, why did you come back here—why did everyone else stay away?” he asked. Arnold stood up, wiped a streak of sweat off of his face, and looked at somewhere far beyond Jonas’ shoulder. Four impacts, very close; the walls of the hotel shook.
“Once you’ve seen the god, you can’t go back to the regular old world,” he said. “This is the only miracle I’ve ever seen. Besides, the Haitians stopped picking people up from this island a long time ago. They think it’s cursed.”
“Alex and the others went back to normal,” Jonas said.
“Really?” Arnold asked. “She got you out here, didn’t she?” Arnold shrugged hopelessly and walked slowly out of the hotel and onto the uneven asphalt. The ground shook as something heavy shifted its weight. The thick reek of decay was almost too much to take; Jonas covered his face with the lower part of his shirt. Some part of him wanted to go out into the street and see the thing, to prove to himself that it was real. He knew he should be running away, dashing through the streets to get to the wharf and a boat. Despite the smell, he stood and watched Arnold.
A shadow fell over half of the entire block and covered Arnold in thin darkness. Arnold closed his eyes and stood still in the street, head facing the ground. Jonas wanted to grab him and pull him back to safety, maybe for kindness, maybe so someone could verify his story. The thing pounded the grou
nd again, just outside of the hotel, and the tables and chairs bounced on the floor beneath.
Jonas gagged on the odor, turning away from Arnold and the street. He ran to the back of the hotel. As the kitchen door swung shut behind him, he heard the grotesque sounds of bones snapping and skin bursting, then a muffled scream, which trailed off into silence as its source flew higher into the air.
He pushed open the back door. The smell of weeks-old kitchen trash drove away the other stink. He ran past the trash and followed a dirt path that served as an alley. A tall man stepped into his path, blocking his way. The man was thin like Arnold, but had long black hair, tan skin, and the eyes of a native South American––not Haitian at all. His skin was covered with scores of the red circles and there were more than twenty red marks on his cheeks and face. His eye sockets were painted a deep black.
Jonas’ breath left him as he searched for something to say to the shaman. He raised his hands, from instinct, and waved them in the place of words. The shaman drew a triple blade from behind his naked torso and held it between the two of them. Jonas raised his arms to block a strike, but the blade flashed past them, and sliced into his throat with a deep, stinging cut. His blood splashed out and warmed the front of his shirt. He clutched his throat and fell to his knees.
The shaman bent down to meet his eyes. He put a hand on his shoulder; the feeling was faint and fading. Darkness reached out from the edge of his vision, added to the spots dancing in his sight. White eyes and a face that was coated in red paint consumed his line of vision.
“Either he was going to come to you,” the shaman said, “or you were going to come to him.”