"What's with Mrs. Bigglesworth, here?" Zotz asked as I recapped the aloe vera gel and stowed it with the first-aid kit.
"Mrs. Who?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Wrong reference. Austin Powers not A Wrinkle in Time." He pointed at the cat. "Asian zombie babe goes into giant fruitcake; cat with mange and two tails comes out. What gives?"
The cat looked at him and then turned its head to look at me.
"There is a species of Japanese vampire who may take the form of a cat at times. The one characteristic that distinguishes them from true felines is they manifest two tails instead of one."
"So she's a cat now?" he asked.
The cat stared at me with wide yellow eyes that seemed more alive and more present than the dead, lifeless orbs Suki had stared at me with since her return from the watery depths.
"Maybe Silly Putty Monster absorbed too much mass for her to retain her human form. Or perhaps she needs to transform in order to heal." I shook my head. "I don't know! This isn't my department! I have a liberal arts degree for Chrissake! I should be lecturing on Shakespeare, not dissecting shoggoths!"
"What's a shoggoth?"
I blinked. The word had just popped into my head. For a moment I was back inside Mama Samm's skull gazing into the abyss and—
I jerked as if I had touched a live wire. And shuddered.
Zotz reached out and touched my shoulder. "Christopher? Are you all right?"
I shook my head. "No. I am not all right. I think I am well on my way to losing it. I don't know how much more of this crap I can take."
"We'll stock up on fire extinguishers," he said soothingly. "We'll issue flare guns to everyone . . ."
I shook my head again. "It's not that. It's not just monsters. Or the fact that I'm turning into one. It's all of it. It's Jenny and Kirsten and now my son and Lupé and Deirdre and Mama Samm—and, hell, even you and the passengers and every single person who comes into my orbit—I'm like a lightning rod for every shit storm the universe whips up within a thousand mile radius!"
"I know it's been a little rough, lately—"
"Lately? Ever since I got the vampire virus two years ago, it's been nothing but nothing but major suckiness. There's a reason we mortals are designed to wear out by the three-score-and-ten warranty specs. We're not made for prolonged exposure to living. I should have died with my wife and daughter at the intersection of 103 and US 69. Or, better yet, in that barn just outside of Weir, Kansas!"
"Hey," Zotz said gently, "you know the old saying. If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans."
"Yeah," I said, choking down an unexpected sob, "that's me. God's comedy relief. Other people tune in David Letterman at the end of their day. The Big Guy picks up His remote and points it right at me."
Zotz shook his head. "Oh, hey man, don't talk like that. It's not true! I mean, that's just wrong!" He patted my shoulder. "You ain't nowhere near as funny as Letterman. Maybe Leno on a really bad night, but even then—"
I rubbed my face. "Thanks. You can stop cheering me up, now." I gave myself a little shake. "The pity party's over. Let's go topside and look at the charts. We've got a lot of river to eat and very little time to do it in."
"Aye-aye, Cap'n!" He turned to the cat. "Come, Mrs. Bigglesworth."
I cleared my throat. "Zotz . . ."
"What?"
"Even if she doesn't eventually recover and become a badass vampire again—"
"Yeah?"
"—she can still crap in your shoes."
* * *
I don't know which was spookier, the green wash from the fish-finder screen or the red glow from the chart lamp: the demon's face moved back and forth between the two patches of illuminated darkness as we studied the charts and then checked and rechecked the screen to make sure nothing else was sneaking up from underneath us.
"So, our little bathtub sonar is still working?" I asked.
"Near as I can tell," the almost human creature replied from the pilot's chair. In his true demon form Camazotz Chamalcan couldn't adequately fit into the cockpit and maneuver himself, much less the boat. Obviously, it would be a simple enough process in human form but Zotz seemed unwilling to fully abandon his fundamental badassedness of a sudden. And somehow this down-sized, homogenized, semi-human compromise was more disturbing than the original giant bat-god abomination-from-Hell aspect when he manifested in all of his former death-god glory.
Still, I could hardly fault him after this latest turn of events; I planned on sleeping with a small arsenal for the foreseeable future, myself.
"Then how do Carpet Master and Throw Rug Junior manage to sneak up on us with nary a peep from the security system?" I asked.
"Good question."
"Bad answer," I grumbled.
"My best guess? The fish finder is programmed to detect objects of a certain size and conforming to a generalized shape. Perch, catfish, large-mouth bass, Deep Thing—the sonar picks it out of the background, recognizes it as separate and distinct from the water around it. Something big and flat, however, coming up off the bottom and rising beneath the hull isn't going to read like a suspended object. It's going to read like a sandbar or a shallow stretch of river bed. The fish finder wasn't set to sound an alarm for depth soundings."
"Can we correct that?"
"I think so."
"Well, make it so, Mister Zotz."
"Aye, sir!" he said, tinkering with the settings and eliciting an intermittent series of beeps, chirps, and clicks. "A trickier fix is the question of how we steer an 84 foot houseboat with a relatively shallow draft all the way to the Mississippi River and then down to New Orleans where a major storm is brewing?"
"Good question."
"Bad answer," he grumbled.
We'd gone to the GPS screen, first. The satellite charting system was great for local details and long-range overviews but a little clunky for checking details in-between us and our final destination until we got there. The paper charts were better for long-range details—like where I might anticipate passage problems or potential interceptions from our furry following.
I sighed. "Look, I've got wolves on the left bank and wolves on the right bank and I've already spent way too much time not going anywhere. I mean to move toward my people and keep moving by whatever means I can find. I'll sail this ship until she sinks or founders. Then I'll take another. Or go ashore and deal with whichever bunch of busybodies offers the path of least bloody resistance. At least that's the plan until I can come up with a better one. It may sound impractical or even just plain nuts but I can't not go forward any longer! It's my problem, not yours. You're welcome to take the dinghy. Seek your redemption on a surer, saner path. I don't mind. In fact, I rather insist."
Zotz stared at me with his newly disturbing, semihuman face, the greens of the GPS and fish-finder screens and the red from the chart lamp giving him an old, 1950's, 3-D, Technicolor Monster Movie vibe. "This voyage stinks of death and madness! I think great suffering and retribution lie ahead."
I nodded. "Yeah . . ." I murmured.
"Good enough for me! Where do I sign?"
I sighed and turned off the chart light. As I stowed the charts I reflected that Mama Samm would not approve of my taking Zotz along on what was sure to be the equivalent of a pub crawl for an unrepentant alcoholic. I just hoped she'd eventually turn up to give me hell for it.
"Oops," he said.
"Oops?" My head snapped up and I gave my demon pilot a hard look. "You don't drive my house down a river filled with mysterious lights, vicious fish folk, and giant, tag-team amoebas—amoebae—slime monsters—and just say 'oops' like maybe there's a teensy problem."
"Naw." He had fired up another stogie and had liberated a can of beer from his secret stash (for medicinal purposes), promising me that he could navigate unimpaired. He tipped a yachtsman's cap back from his nearly human brow as he continued. "Just remembered, that's all. Been a little busy and distracted ever since you got back."
"An
d?"
"Mama Samm said you wanted some research on four sets of coordinates.
I did? "Oh yeah. Sure." Mind like a steel trap—closed tight. "What did you find out?"
"For the most part, not a hell of a lot," he groused. "Unless it's that the two of you have a wicked sense of humor." He shot me a look but when I failed to confirm his suspicions, he continued. "I mean, I expected that these coordinates would—well—coordinate with some kind of actual landmark. Like land: an island, a reef, a shoal—something other than empty ocean. But only one set of longitude and latitude numbers conforms to the position of an actual land mass—or two, if you count make-believe."
"Lincoln Island," I said.
He almost lost his cigar. "Then you know?"
I nodded, staring out into the darkness. "Mama Samm gave you the first set of coordinates out of a French edition of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island. Interesting book. Verne, a Frenchman, wrote a novel about five Yankee prisoners during the American Civil War—how they escaped the Siege of Richmond by hijacking a hot-air balloon and flying off into the unknown. The unknown being a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, some 2500 kilometers east of New Zealand. The castaways named it Lincoln Island in honor of President Abraham Lincoln."
Zotz nodded and turned the wheel to make a course correction. "Yeah, I pulled the book off the shelf and thumbed through it. Lots of action and that Cyrus Smith guy was always inventing stuff out of raw materials. But I guess the big whoop-de-do is the return of Captain Nemo and his submarine."
"The Nautilus," I appended.
"Yeah, well, the problem is there ain't no such island on the charts, the satellite photos—nothin'."
"Actually," I said, "that's not the only problem. The Mysterious Island was written in 1874 and chronicled events that were supposed to have transpired from 1865 to 1867. It's a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which was published four years earlier and covered Captain Nemo's adventures from 1867 to 1869. That means Captain Nemo dies and the Nautilus is scuttled in the sea caves of Lincoln Island before he takes Professor Aronnax on his memorable voyage in the first book! Yet, Cyrus Smith, our ingenious engineer-hero in the second book, recognizes Nemo and the Nautilus from the descriptions in the Aronnax Journals. Which, if you want to further nitpick, won't be published under the title 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea until 1870—a couple of years in the future at that point."
My demon pilot goggled at me. "How do you know crap like this?"
"I told you, I used to teach American and World Lit. Too bad knowing crap like that doesn't seem to count for anything when it comes to so-called geriatric gods and pseudopodinous probiscae."
"Yeah, well. Bottom line. No island at those coordinates, mysterious or otherwise. On the other hand there is a mysterious island of sorts at the second set."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It's like haunted or something . . ."
Chapter Fourteen
Blame Edmond Fanning. The American sea captain may have used up any good luck concerning Palmyra Island when he discovered it on a voyage to Asia back in 1798. The good captain was sleeping in his cabin one night when he found himself awakened by a strong premonition of doom. Not once, not twice, but three times he found his sleep disturbed by an overwhelming sense of dread. More than disturbed: he awoke having left his bunk and walked about the ship while still asleep—something he had never done on any other occasion in his life! Out on the deck of the Betsy, all was calm and quiet, though it was too dark to see any distance in any direction. Still, the charts showed empty ocean: they were near the center of the Pacific, about a thousand nautical miles south-southwest of Hawaii—about halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa. Nothing was evidently wrong but he gave orders to the helmsman on duty to heave to until daybreak in hopes that he might sleep more peacefully.
At sunrise Captain Fanning and his crew stood at the railing and looked out over the killer reef lying before them, now revealed by the early light of day. Had they continued on their original course during the night, the ship would have been ripped to pieces and all hands lost in the darkness. Fanning and his crew were doubly lucky: not only did they narrowly avoid disaster on the northern portion of the reef encompassing Palmyra Island, but they continued on their way without stopping to make landfall. And though he did note the position of the unknown and unnamed island in his ship's log, he failed to file a timely report. Credit for the unnamed island's discovery went to another American sea captain.
A Captain Swale had the "good" fortune to become the official discoverer of the island and give it its name when his ship was caught in a storm in 1802. Blown off course and into the hungry jaws of the island's voracious reefs, Swale's new find took on the name of his shattered vessel: the Palmyra.
Fourteen years later a Spanish pirate vessel named the Esperanza foundered on those selfsame reefs. Already holed and broken from a fierce battle that had crippled her and killed most of her crew, she remained afloat long enough for the few survivors to transfer their treasure—Inca gold and silver—to the island. A year passed without rescue. The remaining crew buried their loot beneath a tree on Palmyra and then constructed rafts, attempting to return to civilization. A single survivor was picked up by an American whaling ship but exposure, dehydration, and pneumonia had taken their toll: he survived only long enough to tell a sketchy story before the secret of the treasure died along with him. None of the other rafts or survivors were ever recovered.
In 1855, a whaling ship—perhaps in search of the Esperanza's Incan gold and silver trove—was consumed on the deadly reefs of the island. The ship and her crew disappeared as if they had never existed.
To this day ships and yachts and sailboats have continued to disappear or have had calamitous encounters with Palmyra and its reefs. And each account differs from other sea disasters with just that extra detail or two that turns the whole set of circumstances—odd. Abandoned sailboats found drifting, shipwrecked crews that no one would agree to rescue, charts of the island found washed ashore thousands of miles away . . . and survivors' tales of the overwhelmingly creepy feeling of being watched by the island's uninhabited jungles.
Even the U.S. Navy came to recognize the "Palmyra Curse". During World War II the island was used as a refueling station. Its position, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, made it ideal for a long-range operations base—both for submarines and air operations. President Roosevelt signed an executive order identifying Kingman Reef as a U.S. National Defense Area, declaring it off limits to foreign planes and surface craft back in 1941—it's close by on the charts. The order has apparently never been rescinded.
Too bad for our fighting men—or subsequent generations of visitors—Palmyra isn't the tropical paradise that many Pacific islands tend to emulate.
The reefs that surround Palmyra are actually a triple threat. Not only do they devour unwary ships but they harbor large colonies of Ciguatera algae and appear to be the Pacific nursery for the grey and black-tipped reef sharks. The problem with the former is that this particular strain of algae is very poisonous—not to the fish that feed on it, but to anyone expecting a seafood diet while visiting. And the problem with the latter is that the lagoons and beaches are off-limits for swimming as well as fishing. Even wading is a deadly gamble.
And then there were the technical mishaps. Like the time a Navy patrol plane went down just off the island. It disappeared without a trace—not even flotsam or jetsam or an oil slick to mark its impact. Or the flights that would take off from the runway and inexplicably turn the wrong way and head in the opposite direction of their flight plan. More than one flight was never heard from again—somewhat understandable as World War II had commenced in the Pacific—but there were other incidents, as well. Planes that would circle the island, unable to find the runway. Or fly over Palmyra without being able to see the island at all. There was a reason sharks frequented the waters surrounding Palmyra.
After World War II the Navy abandoned th
e island. Over the decades that have passed since, it has been visited by yachtsmen and sailors of various stripes and several attempts to colonize the island were made. No one stayed for any length of time. Conditions always turned bizarrely difficult. Even vinyl would rot—a situation difficult to reproduce anywhere else. All accounts agreed on a similar tone that something was not quite right and that the place filled visitors with a sense of foreboding.
This was even before the double murders of Mac and Muff Graham in 1974. Muff's remains were washed up on the beach a few years later. Her body had been burned, dismembered, stuffed into a metal cargo box, weighted, and sunk offshore. Mac Graham's remains remain unfound. Prosecutor Vince Bugliosi wrote a book, And the Sea Will Tell, about prosecuting the murder case against Buck Walker for the double murders.
* * *
"So," I said, as Zotz finally began to wind down, "does this island have hatches in the ground with underground bunkers?"
He nodded. "Yeah. It was a Naval installation, remember? There are still all kinds of gear and out buildings supposed to be there. Gun emplacements . . . runway . . . causeway . . . roads . . . ammo dumps . . ."
"Polar bears?" I asked. "Smoke monster?"
"What? Oh. I get it. Like the TV show." He snapped his fingers. As they were webbed the sound was rather unpleasant. "Maybe Palmyra was part of the inspiration for the writers."
"Well it sure wasn't Gilligan's Island. What about the other two coordinates?"
He shook his misshapen head. "This may or may not be the weirdest part . . ."
"Oh goody."
"There was this Indiana Jones-type guy," Zotz continued, "back around the turn of the last century. Globe-trotter, archeologist-without-portfolio, obsessive whack-job: had these outlandish theories about aliens and ancient archeology."
"Chariots of the Gods?"
"More like Dragsters of the Damned. This guy claimed to have discovered the ruins of giant alien civilizations—in Europe, the Middle East, Asia—even the Antarctic. He'd fire off these long, rambling dispatches to Derleth—"
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