by Grant, Ann
The German ’s grin spread across his filthy face. “Da staunste, was?”
Thock.
The hunter.
My heart raced at the horrible, familiar sound. A burning hole appeared in the German’s forehead. Blood spurted from his nostrils. The man’s eye glazed over as he tottered, died on his feet, and collapsed face down in the stream. Water spread over the silver box on his back. He was another prisoner.
A second thock hit the water. Whirling around, the prisoner gave the German a frantic shake, but the man stayed face down in the water with a bloody hole in his skull. Whispers rushed toward us, desperate, urgent, pleading over and over. The prisoner fled from the corpse and ran along the lake where the strange shadowy smoke drifted and twisted and drifted apart. When another thock echoed through the cavern, he plunged into the black water up to his chest.
* * *
Seconds later, a force ripped me out of the ruins to my bedroom, where I held my head, nauseated and panting for breath. The dull ache in my wrists radiated to every finger. The clock said midnight. I’d been away for two hours according to the gold lines on the side of the device. I’d discovered the controls. Then I leaned over the side of the bed and threw up on the floor.
Chapter 8
I cleaned up the puke with an old shirt, struggled into the hall bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. The purplish-red lines on my wrists had grown darker. I found some Ben Gay and a bottle of Bactine in the medicine cabinet and was trying to decide which one to slather on my hideous skin when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
Tap, tap on the door. “Amy? You okay?” Mike said.
“I’m fine.” My voice had that I’ve-just-thrown-up shake.
“I thought I heard you throwing up.”
“Yeah, that was me all right. I’m okay now.”
“You sure? You think it was the chili?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m fine.” No, I wasn’t fine. I stared at my haunted face and my purple wrists and wished Mike would beam himself back to the couch.
“Anything I can bring you? I could run to the store. The Giant’s open all night.”
“No, no, I’m okay. I’m over it now.”
“Okay,” Mike said, sounding reluctant to leave. “You call me if you need anything.”
“I sure will,” I told him.
He waited another long minute, probably to see if I was going to puke my guts up again, and then his footsteps retreated downstairs. I knew he would do anything in the world for me, but I couldn’t face him right now. I soothed my wrists with Bactine and slipped into bed.
I couldn’t sleep, though. The bones in my hands were killing me. After a few minutes, I got up to lay my wretched wrists on the cool windowsill and stare out the window at the stars, which turned my thoughts to Ben. I needed to buy some flowers for his grave in the morning, something with blue, his favorite color, like mine. We’d planned to do so many things before the wedding and now I—
The faint shriek of the kettle came from the kitchen. Mike was making tea or coffee. I waited. Sure enough, sixty seconds later, his footsteps started up the stairs and came down the hall. A teacup rattled in a saucer outside my bedroom door.
Tap, tap. “Amy?” Mike said in a low voice. “I brought you some tea.”
I cracked the door, feeling awkward in my long shirt, and took the cup and saucer.
“Peppermint.” He stared at my bare legs. “It’s supposed to be good for your stomach.”
“Thanks.” I started to ease the door shut.
“You sure you’re okay? What’s that smell?”
“Medicine. I scratched myself. See you in the morning.”
I closed the door. How many times had I said I was fine when it was obvious I wasn’t? I was surprised he didn’t slam me for it.
The fragrant tea did smell good. I sat down in the dark and tried to think. I was crazy to go back, but the clock said twenty after midnight, which left plenty of time before daybreak.
I put the tea down, skipped the useless shield, and turned on the flashlight, feeling like an addict with a secret obsession. Light flared across the device. Once it came to life, I found the gold lines again and pressed the one that represented an hour. Tingling pain ran through my hand when the probe grabbed my wrist.
* * *
The massive rock roof grazed the prisoner’s head as he waded in up to his chest. Water sloshed up to his chin. He was running out of room. When the tremendous roof finally met the water, he sucked in a lungful of air and dove under the surface.
I streamed after him like a phantom. He turned out to be an experienced swimmer, but I wondered how long he could stay underwater or if we would even make it out at all.
The black lake wound toward a distant wavering light. Nobody seemed to be following us. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see pale shapes on the lakebed. The prisoner plunged down and swam away with wild, hysterical strokes, but he’d disturbed something that popped up through the depths.
The empty eye sockets of a human skull gazed up at us. Below it a horrifying pile of rotting bones littered the murky silt.
The prisoner raced toward the light, made it out of the cave into an open body of green water, and broke the surface, gasping, his chest heaving for air. The first rays of dawn were rising through the rainforest. Birds shrieked. We were on the far side of the ruins, which loomed behind the lake in a forbidding mountain of carved windows and shadowy porticos.
“I’m here,” I said in his ear. “I followed you the whole way. Where is this place?”
To my disappointment he still didn’t react to my voice. He treaded water instead, spotted a stone hut near the shore, and swam toward it until he reached solid ground and grabbed two jagged rocks, one in each hand. I knew what he was thinking. Weapons.
Dripping wet, the prisoner left the shore and pushed through the ferns to peer inside the hut’s one small window. Through the modern glass panes we could see a sleek metal table with a camp chair, a metal cot, a pitcher and basin, and a cabinet with doors that was probably used for storing food or weapons, or both. The place looked like the hunter’s personal little Motel 6.
But the outer door was locked. With a weary sigh, the prisoner slipped into the smothering foliage and picked up a coconut from the ground, looking in all directions.
Something scrabbled in the green. Fur flashed behind bars. The prisoner parted the fronds and uncovered a trap with a long tailed monkey that looked as if it weighed about fifteen pounds. The silvery reddish brown monkey stared at him with frightened, almost human eyes and gripped the bars with its hands and feet.
No water. The sun had already reached the trap. The monkey held its mouth open from heat exhaustion or terror or both. I wondered if it had been in there all night.
The trap was a common live-catch model, but I couldn’t see primitive local people putting it there. The prisoner looked over his shoulder and opened the unlocked door, still holding one of the rocks. Horrified, I wondered if he was going to kill the monkey when it ran out and use it for food, but he let it escape and it scrambled up a palm tree.
The prisoner braced his legs and began to pound the trap, swinging as if he were possessed. Birds flew screaming from the trees. He broke the hinges, smashed the door off, and bashed the sides in until the bars split and bent down at crazy angles. When he finished, he sized up his masterpiece and placed the rock inside in the middle of the trap floor. A calling card. He couldn’t have made his message any clearer if he’d written Fuck You and Your Special Island Paradise.
He took one more long look at the wreck, picked up the trap door, walked to the lake, and sent it sailing into the green water. The door floated for a few seconds before it sank into the depths.
* * *
I lay in the dark for hours after I returned to my bedroom, obsessed with the rock the prisoner had left in the trap. Somebody was going to come after him for that one.
Eventually I gave up on sleep, googled mon
keys, and found a photo on Wikipedia that looked like the silvery brown creature I’d seen. A macaque. At least ten subspecies lived in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and islands in the Pacific. That didn’t exactly narrow anything down.
The device gleamed in the moonlight. It took everything in me not to pick it up again.
I drank my cold tea and pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The wind shook the trees against the house as if it were an evil force, but whatever terrors nature could come up with, they could never equal the darkness inside the human heart. I had to find out the name of the island. I knew it was a real place.
Chapter 9
“You want to go out for breakfast?” Mike asked me when the sun came up. He leaned against the kitchen counter with the same concerned look he’d had the night before. The short haircut really did make him look like a cop. He already had the nosiness. All he needed was a gun and a pair of aviator sunglasses.
I poured myself a cup of black coffee, careful to keep my wrists inside my sleeves. They looked even more horrible than they had last night.
“I’m going to skip breakfast and take the dogs out,” I said.
“If you’re still sick I can drive you to the doctor.”
“You don’t have to hover over me, Mike.”
He looked embarrassed. “I’ve just been worried about you. You don’t seem like yourself. So you’re going to walk around here?”
“No, Devil’s Den.” I intended to stay off the public road near the professor’s house in case John Savenue took a joyride to Fairfield.
“I’ll come with you,” he said with that same stare.
I hesitated. I’d been friends with Mike for a long time and wasn’t sure what was happening between us. To be fair, I did throw up, and my wrists did look awful, and he was a caring guy. He cared about everybody all the time, not just me. And the Devil’s Den area of the battlefield was deserted this time of year. It might be a good idea if he came along.
“Okay, you can walk Luna,” I told him. “That would be a help.”
We put on our coats and unlocked the Camaro. The immaculate car looked like an animal had never set foot inside it, but I could clean it afterwards. The dogs jumped in and settled down together.
“What happened to your Jeep?” Mike asked.
I avoided his eyes. “Nothing. Professor Wu wants me to drive their cars around.”
The classic Camaro was a dream to sit in. Once I put my hands on the steering wheel, I really fell in love with the beautiful car. We took the Fairfield Road for ten miles, turned onto the battlefield, and passed endless fields with pale monuments to the soldiers who’d lost their lives there centuries ago.
Mike kept looking at my hands. “How’re your wrists?”
“They’re okay,” I lied. “Seriously, you don’t have to hover over me every second.”
He didn’t answer, but I caught him watching me from the corner of his eye. We drove by the rocky slopes of Little Round Top, an innocent-sounding name for a gruesome hill where thousands of soldiers had shot and bayoneted each other into oblivion. The road forked. I headed into the parking lot for Devil’s Den and parked alongside a formidable jumble of boulders that cut across the land.
We were the only ones there.
“Luna’s easy,” I told Mike. “She’s old. She won’t try anything.”
He wasn’t a dog person. His face said he was doing this for me and would make the best of it. Luna hobbled along with him, ears alert, while Nikki and I walked beside them.
The four of us took the shortcut up a narrow stone staircase through the boulders to the top of the hill, where a lone oak spread its massive limbs. The oak was so old and gnarled that it could have been the Tree of Life standing over the valley. Before us, the wind poured over a low stone wall that enclosed the Triangular Field, rumored by the locals to be haunted, and rattled the dead leaves in the woods behind the wall. The snow-filled field sloped beyond the wall to distant farms and more woods on the horizon.
“I’m going to take the road to the Rose Farm,” I said. “It’s about a mile.”
Mike put a hand on my shoulder. “Have you thought any more about transferring?”
I stepped away from his hand, pretending to adjust Nikki’s collar. That’s all he’d done all morning, ask questions and stare and try to touch me. And the answer was no, I hadn’t thought about transferring. I’d been so caught up with the prisoner that I hadn’t thought about anything else. The nightmarish island had even distracted me from my grief about Ben.
But when I glanced at Mike, I knew he wouldn’t believe me if I told him about it. Mike wouldn’t even get it if I turned on the device in front of him. He wouldn’t see the evil.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” I began.
“Hey, wait a minute, stop,” Mike shouted at Luna. The old Husky bounded down the field and over the stone wall, trailing the red leash through the snow.
“Luna,” I called. “Luna, no.”
She raced down the remnant of the trolley line into the open brush. I was stunned to see her run. Then I shook myself into action and pounded over the field.
“She’s after a rabbit,” Mike panted behind me.
“Luna, stop!” I scrambled across the rocks, whistled, and shouted, but she ignored me, sprinted toward the woods, and disappeared into the brush again. When she appeared a moment later, a streak of white and gray fur on the far hill, Mike barreled past me and grabbed her neck.
“Hey, hey, stop,” he shouted, sliding across the ground.
I caught up with them. “Shit, she lost her leash.”
Mike kneeled down with his arms around her. The old Husky was panting like crazy, but her eyes were bright. “She just took off on me. I didn’t see it coming.”
“Her collar’s gone, too. This is awful.”
“I’m sorry, Amy.”
I shook my head. “The collar has all her tags, her ID and her rabies and license and I don’t know what else. I can’t believe this.” I took Nikki’s leash and collar and fastened them on Luna, who looked like she’d run out of steam, but I didn’t trust her now. Nikki would stay with me without a leash.
“I’m really sorry,” Mike said for the five-hundredth time. He took off, scrutinizing the weeds, but after twenty minutes we couldn’t find anything and gave up.
He kept apologizing all the way back.
* * *
“I’ll pay to replace everything,” Mike told me in the driveway at the professor’s house. He’d climbed into his truck and was lingering with the window down.
I shook my head. “They’ll show up. I’ll go out there later and look for them again.”
He turned the ignition. “You let me know if you want some company.”
Dark clouds moved across the sky. If it stormed, the rain would wash the snow away and give me a chance to spot the collar. After Mike finally drove off, I made coffee, grateful that at least nothing had happened to Luna, but before I realized what I was doing, I found myself in front of the hall closet.
I’d hidden the device in the coat before we left. With hushed anticipation, I slipped my hand inside the pocket. The evil thing was still there. The cool metal felt as if it belonged in my hand. I took it out and weighed it, and then, with every ounce of will that I possessed, put it back in the coat and shut the door.
The dogs followed me into the living room, where I did what I’d wanted to do all morning. I opened my laptop and googled the Grasslands, determined to come up with something.
“We expanded here this year,” John Savenue had said when I met him on Long Lane, but what did “we” mean? His personal family, a crime family, or a business group?
Dozens of newspaper articles showed up, but they didn’t mention John Savenue, only TriSphere International and a John Sun, who seemed to be their spokesman. No photos.
When I ran a search on TriSphere, development projects in the Appalachian mountain chain appeared from Pennsylvania through New England where the
mountains changed names, split up, and branched into the Canadian wilderness.
Some company. They were huge and mostly investing in rural areas fifty to a hundred miles outside major cities.
I went back to an earlier article that mentioned plans for South Central Pennsylvania, but it didn’t spell out any details. Some local towns showed up: Fairfield, Gettysburg, Biglerville, McSherrystown, and a string of other tiny boroughs in the middle of nowhere, and Hanover, which wasn’t all that small. The new West Hanover Mall that was opening at the end of November showed up in an article that said TriSphere had purchased it in the spring. Fifteen articles and no John Savenue. All of a sudden I came across Ben’s accident and couldn’t breathe.
Explosion Kills Reporter in One Car Accident, the ugly headline said. There it was, the photo of Ben’s blackened car upside down in a deep ditch. Over six weeks had passed since the paper had run the horrifying picture, but it might have been yesterday by the way I felt.
Ben Weikert, a 22 year old reporter for the Adams County Courier, died last night in a one-car accident near the site of the future Grasslands resort off Route 15. Weikert was on his way to interview Joe Goode, the owner of a farm next to the Grasslands, when his car went off the road. Police and Fire and Rescue responded to the scene and found the car engulfed in flames at the bottom of an embankment. Weikert was pronounced dead at the scene. He worked for the Adams County Courier for two years and was a student at Gettysburg College, where he was majoring in journalism.
The article continued with personal stories about Ben, but I couldn’t bear to read them. It also included a headshot of Ben and a photo of the farmer he’d been on his way to interview. I refused to look at Ben and focused instead on Joe Goode’s weathered face. The camera caught deep lines across the old man’s forehead, a huge gouge on the left side of his skull, and the sharp edge of the metal plate holding his head together. Ben told me before the interview that the farmer was selling his land because he’d been in a bad accident.