World's Scariest Places: Volume Two

by Bates, Jeremy

  Elizaveta wondered whether Jesus would go through with his threat of getting her visa revoked. She knew he had the means to if he so pleased. If you had money in Mexico, and you were well-connected, you could do whatever you wanted, regardless of the law. Case in point, one night she and Jesus went to a trendy restaurant without a reservation and the owner refused to seat them. Furious and embarrassed, Jesus called a friend who ran the government’s consumer protection agency, and the next day inspectors shut down the restaurant.

  So if he wanted to get her visa revoked, he could do it. Not that she really cared. Her visa expired soon enough anyway. The bottom line was that she’d wasted her opportunity in Mexico, wasted it pursuing Jesus, pursuing a life that could never be, and now, whether it was sooner or later, she would inevitably be getting on a plane back to Russia.

  3

  Elizaveta was nodding off and tugged her head up. She was very lethargic. Keeping her eyes open took all her concentration. She wasn’t sure whether this was a consequence of remaining awake all night, or whether it was a symptom of the scorpion’s venom. She rotated her shoulder for the countless time. It had been stiff for a while now, the area around the puncture wound tingly and tender, almost as if a low-voltage current was running beneath her skin.

  At least she hadn’t suffered an allergic reaction. She wasn’t drooling or twitching. She could still breath and speak normally, which hopefully meant she wasn’t going to drop dead from respiratory failure. Yet the scorpion sting still concerned her. She’d seen a picture of a young boy in a magazine once who’d been bitten on the ankle by a snake, and his entire lower leg had turned black and rotten, like something that belonged to an unwrapped mummy. And maybe, if she didn’t receive anti-venom soon, that would happen to her shoulder. Her flesh would necrotize, spreading out from the puncture, consuming her shoulder, her arm, destroying cells and tissue, rendering her limb dead and useless, so the only medical option available (if they ever got off this island) would be amputation.

  Jack reached over and took her hand in his, suddenly, unexpectedly. He shifted so he was facing her, then leaned toward her. His lips pressed against hers. Their mouths parted, their tongues explored.

  Elizaveta’s heart raced. In the back of her mind she wondered whether Jesus was watching them—and realized she didn’t care.

  Jack liked her after all!

  His hands moved off her waist, down her back, slipping beneath her shirt. They were soft and warm on her bare skin. They moved up. His fingers unclipped her bra. Then his hands were moving down again, beneath the waistband at the back of her shorts, beneath the elastic band of her panties.

  He kissed the side of her neck, gently, affectionately, his lips like butterfly wings. He nibbled her earlobe. Tremors of pleasure tickled down her spine.

  “Jack…”

  Then his lips were on hers again, silencing her. Her breasts, loose in her bra, pressed against his chest. Her groin pressed against. He was aroused.

  His hands sank deeper down her shorts. They clutched the cleft of her rear, strong now, rough, pulling her tighter against him. One curled around the inside of her thigh, moving higher, brushing her—

  A noise startled them apart.

  Elizaveta opened her eyes. The room was cauldron-black. Someone had extinguished the candles while she’d had her eyes closed.

  Jesus?

  Where was he?

  Her heart continued to race, though no longer from pleasure but fear.

  She heard the noise again.

  Rusty hinges?

  “What was that?” she whispered.

  “Trapdoor,” Jack said.

  Why would someone be going down into the crawlspace?

  Or were they coming out?

  “Jack—”

  “Shhh.”

  A heavy crash. The hatch slapping the floor. Then scuffling.

  Someone climbing the ladder?

  Elizaveta jammed a hand into the pocket of her shorts and produced her lighter. She clicked the button frantically. Metal struck the flint three times before a spark ignited the butane and a small flame whooshed into existence.

  Holding the lighter high and in front of her, she gasped.

  Two dolls stood before the trapdoor. They stared at her with their glass eyes and their furtive smiles. One wore a diaphanous tutu and nothing else, and its head seemed to have been transplanted onto its body from another doll, as it was much too large and a different skin tone. The other wore a dirty white infant bodysuit, its face and limbs charred black in a number of places.

  They started toward her, their movement jerky, like clay animation.

  Their brows furrowed in anger. Their smiles turned to snarls.

  “Shoot them!” she said, but no sound escaped her mouth.

  The topless one with the transplanted head seized Jack by the hair and dragged him back toward the trap door. It disappeared down the hole, dragging Jack after it like prey into its lair.

  The remaining doll cocked its head, studying her.

  Its bodysuit, she noticed, was undulating. Something was beneath it. No, many things were beneath it, moving, squiggling.

  A black scorpion scuttled out of the neck hole, up the doll’s face, into its hair. Another one followed. More emerged, dozens, hundreds, spilling out from the short sleeves and where the Velcro extension closed over the crotch.

  The plagued doll opened its arms for a hug.

  4

  Elizaveta jerked awake, momentarily disorientated, unbalanced, the tatters of the nightmare raw and disconcerting.

  “You okay?” It was Jack. He spoke quietly.

  She looked around the room. The candles still burned. Jesus and Pita appeared to be sleeping against the opposite wall. The trapdoor was shut.

  She nodded. “Bad dream.” She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. This made her aware of the stiffness in her shoulder. She rotated it experimentally.

  “Still hurts?” Jack asked.

  “A little,” she said.

  “It will be okay. If nothing bad happens in the first couple of hours after a sting, nothing will.”

  “So you are potato and scorpion expert?”

  He imitated her voice. “Las Vegans know scorpions.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You can’t do Russian accent.”

  “Da. It ees easy.”

  “No—you have to tighten throat. Seriously. And speak from bottom of mouth.”

  “I eem Boris. I vill conquer Yevrazia.”

  “Yevrazia?”

  “Eurasia.”

  “Maybe you better keep practicing.” She noticed him still holding his folded tank top against the wound in his side. She frowned. “Has it stopped bleeding?”

  “Think so.”

  “Think?”

  Grimacing, he peeled the shirt back. She leaned closer for a better look. The gash was lipless and filled with blackish-red blood, though it no longer seemed to be bleeding.

  “It’s fine,” he said. He applied the shirt to it again.

  “If we didn’t drink all the vodka, we could disinfect it.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I can get some water, try to clean—”

  “You said you had a bad dream,” he said, changing topics. “What was it about?”

  Elizaveta hesitated. She didn’t like being dismissed. She was worried about him. But he clearly didn’t want her fussing over the wound, and maybe that was for the best.

  “Dolls,” she said. “Two came out of trapdoor. One took you.”

  “Took me?”

  “Down the hole, to crawlspace.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. It was dream. Strange things happen in dreams.”

  “Didn’t you go down to get me?”

  “It was your fault. You didn’t fight. You just let it drag you down.”

  He shook his head. “I would have fought it.”

  “You didn’t,�
� she said. “Anyway, I had my own problems. The other doll was covered in scorpions. It tried to hug me.”

  “Did you fight it?”

  “Why are you so upset?”

  “I’m not. I just wouldn’t have gone down that hole without a fight.”

  “It was my dream, okay? In your dream, you can fight doll. You can fight one hundred dolls if it makes you feel like man.”

  “I actually did have a dream about a doll earlier,” he said. “I heard a noise in Lucinda’s room. I went in. There was a doll lighting a candle.” He glanced across the room at Jesus and Pita. He lowered his voice further. “It was Pita.”

  “The doll?”

  “She said Solano caught her and turned her into a doll.”

  “Da, that is something she would say.”

  “She said Solano caught you and Rosa too.”

  “And turned us into dolls?”

  “Yeah.”

  Elizaveta thought about that. “Was I a cute doll?” she asked.

  “I didn’t see you. I woke up first.”

  “Oh.” She smiled.

  “What?” he said.

  “You dreamed about me.”

  “I guess. Indirectly. You weren’t actually in the dream.”

  “Do you dream about me often?”

  He chuckled. “You dreamed about me too.”

  She almost told Jack what happened in her dream before the dolls arrived, but she didn’t. Having a dream about someone was one thing; having an x-rated make-out session with them in the dream was something else entirely. She said, “Rosa asked me earlier if we would see her again.”

  “When we get off the island?”

  She nodded.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Maybe.”

  Jack shrugged. “Maybe we will.”

  “She wants to have a sleepover.”

  “A sleepover?”

  “You, me, and her.”

  He didn’t reply, and she couldn’t read his face.

  Then he said, “Where?”

  “At my house.”

  “I heard you had a nice setup.”

  “It’s a guesthouse.”

  “Are you allowed guests?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe I can check it out sometime?”

  Elizaveta’s chest tightened. Her mouth went dry.

  Was Jack asking her out?

  “If you want,” she said nonchalantly.

  “Hey,” he said, “there’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

  She held his eyes. “Yes?”

  “I’m wondering what you might think…”

  “Yes?” she repeated.

  “That newspaper clipping—the one about the firecracker explosion.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t let her disappointment show.

  “We figured Solano caused it, killed all those people, came here to hide out and ended up staying. Well, what if his family didn’t die in the explosion. What if he didn’t leave them behind either? What if he brought them here, to the island with him?”

  “Swiss Family Solano?”

  “I’m serious, Eliza. It’s possible.”

  “And nobody ever saw them?”

  “If the cops were looking for Solano and his family, then it makes sense he would keep them out of sight. A single guy living as a recluse on an island is a lot less strange than an entire family living there.”

  “But keeping them hidden for fifty years?”

  “This island’s not exactly Times Square. Pepper said nobody even knew about it until the city council discovered it ten years ago. How hard would it be to keep his wife and daughters hidden from the occasional local who came by to trade dolls for produce?”

  “So you’re saying it’s not just Solano after us? It’s his entire family?”

  “No, I’m saying maybe I was wrong. Maybe Solano really is dead. But his wife and kids are still here, or maybe his wife is dead too and just his kids are here.”

  “Why would they kill Miguel? Nitro?”

  “Imagine you’ve lived most of your life in hiding. Then your father dies, the person who has protected you all that time. Then strangers begin showing up on your island. How would you react?”

  She considered this in silence. Then she nodded. “You know, Jack, maybe you have solved the mystery a second time—”

  Rosa screamed.

  5

  Bedlam ensued. Rosa continued screaming. Jesus and Pita were awake and on their feet and demanding to know what was happening. Jack was pointing the pistol at them, ordering them to stay put while telling Elizaveta to go check on Rosa.

  She dashed into Pepper’s room. Pepper remained fast asleep on the bed. Rosa sat bolt upright next to him, staring at the window.

  She crouched next to the bed. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

  Rosa turned her head. Her eyes were huge. “I saw it,” she said.

  “Saw what?” she asked.

  “It was looking in the window.”

  “What was, honey?”

  “A doll,” she said.

  6

  Elizaveta refused to accept this. For starters, the window was far too high off the ground for a doll to look through. Perhaps if five or six of them stood on each other’s shoulders, the top one could peek in. Nevertheless, a troupe of acrobatic dolls was simply too farfetched to believe. Which meant Rosa had either seen someone or something else, or, more likely, she had imagined it. “What did it look like, honey?” she asked.

  “A doll,” she said.

  “But…what else?”

  “It had long hair.”

  “So it was female doll?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Did it say anything?”

  “It waved at me.”

  “Waved?”

  Rosa demonstrated using a princess wave, her little hand tilting left and right at the wrist.

  “Then what happened?”

  “You came in.”

  “And it went away?”

  “Yes.”

  Elizaveta considered this, then said, “Maybe you were having nightmare?”

  “No, I wasn’t! I saw it.”

  “Maybe you thought you did. But sometimes when you dream, and you wake up, part of the dream comes with you. It can confuse you.”

  Rosa obviously wasn’t happy with this explanation. She squared her jaw and stared at her lap. Elizaveta almost told her to go back to sleep, but what was the point? She likely wouldn’t be able to. Plus, it was almost dawn. “Do you want to come with me to other room?” she asked.

  Rosa’s disposition immediately brightened, and she nodded.

  Elizaveta offered the girl her hand, and they returned to the main room. Jack was still pointing the gun at Jesus and Pita. They were arguing but stopped when Elizaveta and Rosa appeared.

  “She was having a bad dream,” Elizaveta told them.

  Pita’s mouth turned down in a bow of disagreement. “She wasn’t screaming like that because of a dream.”

  “She thought she saw something at her window.”

  “What!”

  “A doll.”

  “A doll?”

  “She was dreaming—”

  “We have to go!” Pita snapped, everything about her changing in an instant, animated by fear: her posture, her expression, the sound of her voice. “This is too much. We have to go. We need to go. Right now. The storm’s passed. We’ll take the canoe. We can go right now—”

  Jack shook his head. “We can’t all fit in the canoe.”

  “Yes, we can, the four of us, we can fit—”

  “What about Pepper and Lucinda? And Rosa?”

  “Rosa can fit too. We’ll send the police back for Pepper and Lucinda.”

  “We’re not leaving them behind—”

  “Nitro’s dead, Jack!” Pita exclaimed. “Something got him! It got Miguel too! And now it’s come for us. Whatever it is. Okay? Maybe it’s a ghost, maybe it’s not. I don’t know a
nymore. But whatever’s out there, whatever Rosa saw, it’s hunting us. Don’t you get that?”

  “And you think you’ll be safer out there in the dark than in here?”

  “It’s getting lighter.”

  “Stop trying to be a hero, Jack,” Jesus said. “Think of the greater good—”

  “No,” Elizaveta said, shaking her head. As much as she wanted to leave the island too, she knew Jack was right. They couldn’t leave anyone behind. “We can’t go.”

  “Then stay,” Pita said contemptuously. “Stay here and die. Jesus and I are taking the canoe.” She turned to Rosa. “Do you want to come with us?”

  “Well…I guess if Jack wants to wait…I guess I should wait.”

  “Do you want whatever was at your window to get you? Do you want to end up like Nitro? Do you want to end up dead?”

  “Enough, Pita,” Jack said.

  “Because that’s what’s going to happen,” she went on, her voice turning harsh. “You’re going to end up dead, and whatever’s out there is going to pull out your eyes. Is that what you want? Is that what you—?”

  Elizaveta slapped Pita across the cheek. The sound was loud and flat, like a clap.

  Jesus said, “Bitch!” and moved toward Elizaveta, as if to ram her with his shoulder. Jack stepped forward and cracked him across the temple with the butt of the pistol. His eyes rolled up in his head, so for a moment there was nothing showing but the whites, then he dropped to the floor like a felled tree.

  Pita’s right hand went to her cheek, which had already flushed red. Her bottom lip trembled. But instead of crying, she spat. A gob of saliva splattered against Elizaveta’s chin.

  While Elizaveta was wiping this away, Pita swung an overhead punch at Jack. It was easily telegraphed, and he batted it away.

  “Stop it, Pita,” he told her softly. “Stop this.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she said, and now she was crying.

  “I’m trying to help us.”

  “You’re not! You’re getting us killed.”

  “It’s still dark out there. It’s dangerous. Wait twenty minutes, and we’ll all go to the pier together.”