by Grant, Ann
Chapter 12
I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it coming. We’d known each other for years. I wondered if he’d been watching me the whole time, hanging back in the shadows, hiding his feelings, not saying anything because Ben was always there.
The house phone jolted me out of my thoughts. It had to be Mike again. I hurried to the kitchen, shaking my head over his persistence, but by the time I grabbed the phone the ringing had stopped.
Unknown Caller. I waited for a message to come in, but nothing showed up.
It was probably a wrong number.
Uneasy, I wrote it off, peeled my gloves off, and returned to my obsession. I was going to the island one more time. I would never be able to get Ben back, but there was a small chance I could save the prisoner’s life. There had to be some way to communicate with the man if he was still alive.
Four o’clock. I found the flashlight, shone the beam on the device, and felt the probe seize my bruised, swollen wrist.
* * *
Dusk had fallen over the island. Thousands of insects chirred as the last light of day descended into night. The prisoner stood with a rock in his hand in front of the hut’s one window while I floated behind him.
“I’m back again,” I whispered.
He didn’t answer. With amazement I realized I could see my faint reflection behind his shoulder. My phantom eyes gazed out over my phantom nose, anxious mouth, and long dark hair. It was either a trick of the twilight or my body was changing and becoming more visible.
The prisoner’s reflection stayed in shadow.
“Do you know the name of the island?” I tried to tap his shoulder, but my hand passed through his muscles and came out on the other side of his body.
All of a sudden he saw me in the window, whirled around, and stared into the rainforest. Breathing hard, he returned to the window and saw me again. He threw his hands over his shoulders, horribly agitated, trying to feel behind his back, and turned in a frantic circle, searching for the phantom.
“I’m here,” I told him. “Behind you.”
He screamed when he saw my reflection the third time, took the rock, and smashed the glass with a violence that shocked me. My heart fell. He must have thought the image was a lie, a ghost, an apparition. Then he knocked the shattered fragments from the window frame, pulled his legs up on the ledge, and squeezed inside the empty room.
I streamed after him, deeply disappointed. We’d probably lost our best chance to talk to each other, maybe our only chance.
Shadows fell over the sleek camp table, chair, and metal cot I’d glimpsed before. A cabinet stood against the wall, but it turned out to be locked. The prisoner braced his legs and raised the rock to do some serious damage to the cabinet doors when someone crashed through the distant underbrush.
Ominous footfalls pounded toward the hut.
The prisoner’s scream must have given him away and now there was nowhere to hide. He scrambled to the hut’s single door and grabbed the handle. Locked like the cabinet. The footfalls grew louder.
In a panic, the prisoner threw himself under the cot. My phantom body flew with him and we both saw it at the same time: a wooden trapdoor, painted gray to blend in with the stone floor.
The prisoner kicked the cot away, wrenched the trapdoor open, and leaped into the narrow black hole. Just before he pulled the trapdoor down, he saw a bolt underneath and slid it into place. Locked in. The light died out. We frantically wormed down into a claustrophobic tunnel with rough dirt walls that descended into the black unknown.
“I’m still here,” I whispered.
Thock. The shot blasted above us.
Thock, thock. More shots. Wood splintered and cracked apart. Dim light flooded the tunnel, but a thick shape blotted it all out, followed by a grunt and the sound of a big body squeezing into the opening. Dirt crumbled down.
He was coming after us.
The tunnel twisted every few feet. More dirt sifted from the walls. Bigger pieces, clods and pebbles, rained down from above. Another grunt came out of the dark. A hard object suddenly struck the tunnel walls, dislodged a shower of dirt, and hurtled toward us with terrible force. The missile went through my phantom hands and smashed the prisoner in the shoulder. Groaning in agony, he picked it up.
It was the rock from the trap.
More grunts followed. Thock. The shot missed, hit the bend in the wall, and filled the tunnel with a small avalanche of dirt.
Around another turn, a faint light appeared, and something else. The crash of the sea. My worried joy vanished when I looked up and saw the hunter’s boots and legs and face, his taunting smile and low forehead. Something glowed. Thock. He fired at close range.
The prisoner rolled like mad. The shot struck half an inch from his head. Dirt fell everywhere in huge chunks. Feet. Legs. Murderous six-fingered hands snatched out of the dark, followed by a vicious face with teeth full of dirt. The hunter grabbed the prisoner’s hood, went for his eyes, and the two men were on each other, tumbling over and over.
Gasps. Grunts. Hands clawing flesh. A sickening punch in the dark and a strangled cry. One man beat the other over and over with violent thuds. He had the rock.
Thock. The tunnel walls collapsed with a roar and buried us all. In the terrible silence that followed, I wondered if the dirt had suffocated both men. But a foot moved, and a leg inched out, and a body rolled free and gasped. One man, not two. He braced his arms against the piles of dirt and dug his way out until he stood on a rocky hillside under the open sky.
The prisoner was still alive. He began to scramble away from the tunnel with the rock still in his hand, looking back at the opening as he hurried toward the sea. I could feel his terror as I streamed behind him and expected to see the hunter’s face emerge from the hill at any moment.
Moonlight shone through fog that drifted over the shore. The sea was at low tide. In the distance small waves foamed over the sand and surged out again. Sweet freedom. I couldn’t smell anything, but I knew the air must have a fresh, salty tang. We were out of the rainforest. Insects chirred behind the towering walls and a faraway animal screamed.
“Did he die in the tunnel?” I asked, but the prisoner didn’t answer.
The nightmarish lava field lay before us. I thought he would try to cross it again, but he climbed down to the shore instead and began to half-sprint across the wet sand toward the horizon where the fog shrouded the coastline. His footfalls and the crash of the surf were the only sounds in the dark. He ran for so long I began to wonder if he would run all night. Then, he suddenly slowed down to stare out to sea.
Someone in a small boat was rowing near the tide line.
Chapter 13
“Hey,” a man shouted out of the fog. He waved one arm in a huge circle.
Panicking, the prisoner began to scramble over the rocks, away from the surf.
“Hey, hey, fuck no, man, they’ll catch you.” The man in the boat had a Caribbean accent and was calling in the same strange tone I’d heard before, as if he were underwater or at a tremendous distance.
The prisoner stopped with one hand on the rocks as though he couldn’t make up his mind while the man in the boat turned to pick up an oar. The telltale silver device protruded through the back of his gray clothes. Another prisoner.
That must have swayed my prisoner’s mind because he climbed down from the rocks, crossed the wet sand, and waded through the dark water toward the boat. Waves slapped against the hull’s peeling paint and splintered wood. The man with the oars looked as rotten as the boat. His salt-encrusted braids hung over blistered, leathery skin and a raw place on his skull where his ear was missing.
The prisoner grabbed the edge of the boat and swung himself inside. I floated in after him and hovered beside his shoulders, but the man in the boat didn’t notice me.
“Antoine.” The man held out a filthy hand.
The prisoner seemed to size him up and reluctantly shook his hand.
“No name?” Antoine sai
d. “Oh, they broke your jaw. Nice.” He leaned closer as though he was afraid his voice would carry over the water. “I know what they are and I found out where they’re coming from. I’ll tell you when we get away from shore.”
The prisoner nodded his head. Antoine took up the oars and began to row away from the tide line. The boat creaked as the two men moved into the drifting fog.
* * *
Seconds later, I came to in the living room with my heart racing a thousand miles an hour. I was back in the real world, back on the solid couch, my mind and heart and ears still filled with the sounds of the sea. The house phone was ringing. A violent ache pulsed through my hands when I got up to answer it, followed by sharp nausea.
The ringing stopped. It had to be Mike again.
I waited for the nausea to pass, hoping I wouldn’t puke all over myself. Luna and Nikki looked up expectantly. What time was it? Eight o’clock. Way past time for their dinner. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself into the kitchen, expecting to see a message from Mike, but three messages showed up, two from Unknown Caller. With a ripple of apprehension I went through them.
Hang ups again, which made no sense. John Savenue had no way of knowing I was staying in Professor Wu’s house. He couldn’t know. And the number was unlisted.
I was right about Mike. He’d left the last message.
“It’s me,” his subdued voice said. “I wanted to apologize again. I know everything’s been hard on you since you lost Ben, and anyway, I was out of line today and I hope we can go back to where we were before this happened….” His voice trailed off. “Uh, the reason I’m calling is because I’m collecting shoes and coats for a charity drive… mostly shoes, and Karin is donating some, so I thought I’d ask you, too, so if you have something you want to donate, give me a call and I’ll come by and pick it up, and that’s it, okay? Goodnight, Amy.” Another pause as if he didn’t want to end the connection, and then finally the click.
I erased the message. No, I didn’t have anything to donate. Maybe it would be a good idea to put some serious distance between us.
I found my coat and took the dogs out in the cold. Eerie clouds raced over the brilliant moon. Nikki wagged her tail and loped up the driveway, but Luna stared into the night with glassy eyes and sat down.
“What’s the matter, Luna? Come on, let’s go for a little walk.”
I nudged her until she got up, crunched over the gravel with her to the woods, and then, unnerved by the darkness and Unknown Caller, took the dogs in and fed them their dinner. Nikki devoured her food, but Luna just sniffed at her bowl, walked stiffly into the living room, and sat down again. She was an old girl. She had the right to an off night.
“Come on, Nikki,” I said on impulse. “Let’s go for a ride.”
I was going to the place where Ben died by the roadside. Until tonight, I’d never been able to make myself go out there.
Chapter 14
I rubbed more medicine on my hands and found the flashlight and the keys for the Jeep. I had to take the Jeep. I couldn’t drive out there at night in a light colored car. I didn’t expect to run into John Savenue anyway. Nobody would be at a construction site on a dead winter night.
The wind buffeted the Jeep. Nikki and I drove into Gettysburg, stopped for coffee at the 7-Eleven, and headed up deserted Chambersburg Pike. Everybody had either left town for Thanksgiving or else they were holed up inside.
“Baby, it’s cold out there tonight,” the radio announcer said. “Buh-buh-brrrr, twenty-three degrees. Time to snuggle up with your sweetheart. You’re listening to WNBX FM in Adams County, Pennsylvania, home of the Warriors.”
I didn’t have a sweetheart, but I was going to do everything I could to find out what happened to him. I turned the radio up to chase away my jitters. The hotels and restaurants gave way to black stretches of road and Christmas billboards that were already up: “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” and “Happy Holidays, Buckle Up.” A few cars and tractor trailer trucks raced past us in the darkness.
It seemed strange to be driving at night without Ben. I bit back my grief and gunned the Jeep toward Cashtown. When the land began to rise toward the mountains, a “Coming Soon” sign for the Grasslands Resort appeared. I took a narrow road after the sign into the deep woods and flashed my brights over the trees. The road must have been the original farm lane.
Ben had driven this way six weeks ago. He’d left the house in a rush, revved up about the interview, talking about how important it was because the old farmer had resisted selling off his land and abruptly changed his mind after a devastating accident.
Two minutes after Ben went out the door, he hurried back in to kiss me and raced out again. I remembered the quiet after his car vanished down the street.
“Here we go with another classic,” the announcer said. “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer. This one is for Tom from Tiffany in honor of that deer that wrapped itself around your windshield last night.”
I turned off the radio to watch for eyes in the woods. The deer were no joke. They could take out your car in nothing flat. Orange construction cones appeared in the weeds, followed by plastic fencing and barrels that blocked the road. My heart pounded when I saw the barricade. We were getting closer. I navigated past the barrels, bounced over the rough ground, and picked up the road again.
The woods thinned out and disappeared. Nikki sat up and made a low growl in the back of her throat. And then I saw the Grasslands. A chill ran through my body. I turned the headlights off and idled by the side of the road to get a good look.
A pale green glass dome rose in the center of a low building that sprawled with crablike arms across the stubbled fields. Light radiated out from inside the dome, but I could barely make out anything else because the shadows were so deep. The dome gave off the kind of dim light you see in places that have closed for the night, or the season, or were never open to begin with except in somebody’s nightmares.
The wind blew against the Jeep. I was crazy to be out here with just my dog.
The building with the dome looked like the center of the place, but the hulking concrete skeleton of another building stood nearby. Plastic sheets flapped in the wind. Probably hotel rooms or offices. Beyond this second building, a few outdoor security lights lit up a crane and some earth moving machinery with dirt-encrusted tires at the edge of an unfinished parking lot. There couldn’t be any construction going on now, not with the temperature below freezing. I didn’t see a car that a security guard would have driven in either.
But the dome overshadowed everything. Its eerie light drew my eyes and held them until I had to wrestle my gaze away. Ben had died somewhere out here on his way to interview the farmer, but it was so dark now I couldn’t see a farmhouse. Maybe they’d razed it. I started to feel foolish. I had no hope of finding the spot where the accident happened. It was too dark to see anything except that spectral dome.
When I turned my parking lights on, though, their glow caught a little white cross by the bend in the road. The people from Ben’s newspaper must have put it there.
I killed the engine and climbed out with Nikki, steeling myself, and took my time walking to the homemade memorial, boots clicking on the frozen pavement. Angry tears welled up in my eyes. The flashlight beam picked up skid marks and a gouge in the embankment where the car had veered off the road and flipped over.
“I wish I’d been here,” I whispered. “I wish I could have saved you.”
I shone the flashlight down into that hellhole, even though I could hardly stand to do it. So this was the place where my sweetheart had burned to death. The beam lit up the ditch. The uneven earth and clumps of grass threw distorted shadows up the embankment, but it was impossible to tell if the ground was still charred. It was just too dark.
Nikki nuzzled my leg. The wind swept away the leaves on the ground and almost sounded like whispering voices.
Why would Ben have gone off the road? Black ice? Trying to avoid a deer? He grew up in Adams
County and knew how to drive in the country at night.
The police didn’t tell me much after the accident because I wasn’t a relative. He died from burns and smoke inhalation and they identified him by his dental records, but nobody could explain why he went off the road. His parents put their house up for sale after the funeral and moved to their condo in Florida. I almost thought they blamed me for his death because he’d called me just before the accident.
But he hadn’t called because anything was wrong. He’d called just to talk.
“I’m at the Grasslands. You should see this place. It’s huge. Hey, wait a minute, there’s something in the field. What the hell is that? Wait a minute. Look, I have to call you back. Love you.”
Something had startled him. What? The light the farmer saw?
Growing angry again, I swept the flashlight away from the place where he died and across the field until the darkness swallowed up the beam. The rough earth didn’t give up any clues. Maybe there’d been a gas line explosion. An explosion didn’t seem likely because the gas company would have put the lines in the ground, something they did every day, but maybe there’d been a flaw in the construction or something else in the picture I couldn’t see.
I was sure of one thing, though. If a gas explosion caused the accident, it would have come from the Grasslands. There was nothing else around.
“Come on, Nikki,” I told her. “Let’s get a closer look.”
We slid down the embankment and crunched across the frozen ground while I looked for the tiny colored flags that would mark a gas line. I didn’t see any, but I wasn’t sure I knew where to look. It was so dark it might be impossible to see anything.
The wind picked up with that same odd, rushing whisper. It sounded like the whispers I’d heard in the ruins, but clearer and closer, without the distortion they’d had on the island. The unease almost seemed to come out of the earth itself. The old farmer had said he’d heard whispers in his pasture. He must have stood outside at night and listened to the whispers come across his land like the voices of the damned searching for something.