A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  (yes! yes! yes!)

  —and tripped as she flung them from her foot in a wet, twirling arc.

  She watched the landscape swing onto its side as she fell. The sand cushioned her. There was no pain, just that tingle deep down, building, swelling. She began to quiver, moaning again.

  Another crack of lightning boomed through the sky, so close this time it ripped a scream from her, emptying her out. The rain came down harder, pooling in her mouth, blending with her tears. Her smile was wide and manic. She gurgled as the laughter came again, brought on by a tingle that was no longer a tingle, rather a toe-curling sensation that was coming in waves, with each stronger than the one that preceded it. It all crashed—

  (now! God, yes. Yes! Yes!)

  —against her.

  The sky was a cathedral and in its wings there hovered a creature of great size. Its jaws were wide and lined with rows and rows of triangular teeth. It swam down toward her, its great tail moving from side to side in majestic sweeps. Its skin was of the darkest gray on top, unlike its underbelly, which gleamed so white it almost hurt to look at. However, none of this was as penetrating or as consuming as the creature’s eyes. They were black, lifeless mirrors in which she could see her old life. Her children and her husband, all of whom she had once despised. Now there wasn’t even this. There was just the nothingness. The shark had finally, after all these years, eaten it all.

  It had been with her always, right behind her life. Its fin always within sight. Sometimes, when Susan Sycamore had woken in the middle of the night, wanting to destroy the people in her little London apartment, she went to the mirror and saw it swimming behind the glass. The evocative ripples of watery shadows, silken and elegant, over its impenetrable hide. Now the shark, a great white, had caught up with her.

  There was a flicker of doubt, as wild as the lightning above her.

  “I’m not—

  (yes! yes! yes! yes!)

  —ready.”

  But she knew this was a lie. It was the other woman, her last lingering burst of energy. Sycamore smiled because she knew that weak and pathetic thing would be gone any second now and would never come back.

  The great white’s jaws opened wide, seeming to smile. Behind the teeth there was a field of stars, the kind that only a child who isn’t burdened down with responsibility and lies takes the time to notice. But Sycamore could see them now because all of the bullshit had been chewed and crunched and swallowed. She was naked in every sense of the word. She was open.

  “Now!”

  She arched her back against the sand, pushing her breasts up into the air. It was here, right now. The intensity blew out to bright, blinding her. Every muscle tightened and shook. Were it all to stop right now, if the shark were to swim away and choose someone else, she feared she would go mad. It was incredible. She didn’t want to be anywhere else. Nothing else mattered. It was delicious, this tightening. All of those teeth, dripping with blood and streaked with strands of flesh and skin and hair, descended over her. Her laughter echoed in the dark as she exploded. Over and over again.

  I’m here. I’m here now.

  One by one, the stars twinkled to life.

  She stood, the eye of the storm above her. All was silent except for the swish of her thighs as she approached the broken Coke bottle lying on its side before her. Sycamore bent down, picked it up and neared the tree line.

  Her movements were graceful in their complete lack of self-consciousness: the stride of the free. The wind blew sand in her eyes, yet she did not flinch or blink. Sycamore continued to walk, machinelike and unwavering—she even resembled a storefront mannequin, with her nakedness and shaved head, without the fat that clung to so many women of her age. And like a mannequin, her expression was fixed and empty.

  She stopped when she saw the man with no face.

  He was still alive, just, writhing in a puddle of shit and gore. His moans were unintelligible, thick with inky blood. Sycamore scrambled to recall what the man had looked like, but couldn’t, remembering only that he had sat next to the other young man on the boat and had spent much of their journey gesturing hand signals to the girl with the lovely blond hair. Brother and sister, she assumed.

  A deaf sister, no less.

  The man kicked at the sand, a beetle on its back. It was pathetic.

  There was laughter somewhere inside Sycamore, yet it refused to register on her face. She was distracted by the young man’s light as it shone up through the wounds in his skull, through his mangled chest. It was even there, in the bud of bloodied mess between his legs. It made her mouth water.

  “I eat you,” she said. Her voice was stripped of its accent.

  She dropped to her knees and put the broken bottle in the man. She then pulled it out of him. She then put it in him again. Out. In. Out. In. She repeated this until he no longer moved or moaned, until the light was free for her to swallow and chew on and leave to burn inside, with all the others that she had collected. Sycamore didn’t have the patience to make this one last, to last goo-oooood. The next one. Maybe.

  The eye of the storm passed over them all, the live and the dead. It seemed weaker now. Wearied somehow. Sycamore was not disappointed, nor was she happy. She was nothing. There was only the hunger for more food, more light. The desire was all-consuming and brilliant.

  Sycamore pulled the shattered bottle from the corpse, and a gasp of bowel gases hissed from the gash. The glass, or what remained of it, was green beneath all the blood. She wiped away the red and studied the color beneath, saw the dim sunlight reflected in its surface.

  The sky opened above and let loose a downpour that came in a wave. Sycamore watched it approach from the far side of the beach, tearing up the hard-packed sand as it went. The water petered against the remaining bottles that the monkeys had missed in their raid, drawing tinkling music from their spouts. Some of the bottles were made of clear glass; others were also green or blue.

  Bones cracked under her skin as Sycamore rose to her feet again and breathed deep and hard. Her breasts were pert and prickled with gooseflesh. Some part of her brain that she no longer had control over was making a decision on her behalf. She began to walk through the rain, heavy footprints trailing out behind her.

  She was a sliver of snowy flesh against the roiling ocean behind her as she searched for bottles of every color. Her eyes didn’t register any emotion or flicker with life; they seemed lost within the dark hollows of her gaunt face.

  With her clinking bounty of glass, Sycamore neared the tree line once more. There, she reclined on her haunches near a discarded coconut. Crabs scuttled sideways across the sand in front of her. She didn’t give them a thought. Some other time, they might have startled the woman she used to be, with their sharp pincers snapping as they ran. Not anymore. It was better this way, being complete.

  She began to lower the four bottles. Icy, watered-down soda trickled from their rims and warmed in the tuft of her pubic hair. Ignorant of this, she deposited them against the sand. The rain had stripped them of their promotional stickers, leaving behind a sticky residue on the green, clear and blue glass; and when dirt whipped from the trees when the wind gushed, it stuck to the bottles in crusty rinds.

  Pain didn’t enter her mind.

  Sycamore took each of the bottles and shattered them against the coconut. She got the sense that every time one of them came apart in her hands, she was taking a giant step closer to where she knew she needed to be. Each shattering sound was a herald.

  Nearer.

  Nearer.

  A mosaic of broken glass was spread out between her knees. She shuffled through the shards, picking out the stronger and larger of the pieces, and laid them out in a line across her thigh, seven in total. They lay there, staring back up at her like sharp, colorful arrowheads awaiting the yielding flesh of the enemy; in a way, that is exactly what they were.

  Only Sycamore had no intention of taking the glass and attaching it to the ends of sticks. Besides, what would she
use for adhesive? Weeds?

  Not a chance, she thought.

  Her heartbeat began to quicken despite itself. Her trepidation was evidence enough to prove that a little of the other woman lingered. The shark had left a little behind for her to destroy herself, which Sycamore knew was the right thing for it to have done.

  Soon the final threads to her old life would be severed.

  The wind blew hard again, pelting the last of the storm’s rain horizontally across the beach. Waves rolled and crashed in sprays of crimson froth. A confused, solitary seagull rode the breeze, frightened of the carnage below.

  “Closer. Closer. Now.”

  Her fingers did not shake as she picked up the first shard of glass, the piece closest to her pelvis. It was green and caught the light as she lifted it. Sycamore breathed against its surface, fogging the color until it coalesced into a single drop of condensation.

  “Pretty,” said the part of her that would soon be gone.

  Without thinking twice, Sycamore thrust the shard’s sharpest point up into her upper gum. It scraped shavings from tooth and bone as it slid beneath the skin and locked into place; it was almost as though it was meant to be there. That it was always going to end like this.

  There was heat, but no pain.

  Her mouth filled with blood as she stabbed the second, third and fourth pieces of Coke bottle into place. She stopped to cough, fat globs of flesh plopping against the ground, and noticed that her thumb and forefinger had been sliced open. Sycamore glanced at the wounds, each a red mouth puckering up in a kiss, and could see glimmers of white bone. A smile slit her face but didn’t last; she wasn’t quite finished yet. There were still three more pieces to go. She slid them into her lower gums with a grunt of satisfaction.

  The rain stopped falling, the final few drops swirling in the wind, catching the light—lost little fireflies. From somewhere deep within the jungle there came a hollow whistling sound. It carved the air and left a jagged stretch of empty silence in its wake.

  It was as though the island were calling to her, to the shark. Was there something in the soil that had drawn them all in, not just her, as a magnet draws in lead shavings? The husk of Susan Sycamore almost found supernatural the way the stars had aligned to conspire in their uniting. It couldn’t just be providence or luck. Within the jungle there would surely be streams that she would eventually bend over and drink from—perhaps it was something in this water, some element that man had yet to discover, that beckoned.

  Were there sirens among the trees, she wondered?

  Maybe, maybe not.

  The shark pulled herself to her feet.

  But I’ve counted the bodies and there are three of them in there. Hiding. Waiting. I can sense the blood pumping through their veins, waiting to be spilled and to slip into my body. Their light is shining on me, will soon be in me. With the others.

  I’m so hungry.

  Her eyes were buttons punched against her sunken face. She had forgotten to blink and there were tears pooling in her lashes. The shark’s naked skin was virgin white, except for the stripe of blood flowing from her mouth; it ran down her neck, down between her breasts and ended in the tuft of hair between her legs. She didn’t bother to wipe it away. It was her war paint and would help to shake the meat from the bones of her victims when they saw her coming at them from between the trees.

  Every muscle in her body was tensed in preparation for the hunt.

  Her mouth was a lopsided snarl of jagged, multihued glass teeth that made chinking sounds when she ground her jaws together. It was good to be alive.

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Amity

  1

  “You can hear me, right?” Caleb asks. They are sitting at the kitchen table. The room is dark. Faces lit by moonlight flowing through the back room windows like liquid silver. Her brother’s voice is angelic, revelatory.

  “Yeah, I can.” Amity laughs, covers her mouth. “It’s just wonderful.”

  “If you can hear me it means you’re dreaming.”

  “No, don’t say that. Please, Caleb.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. But if it makes you feel better, I’ve got something for you. It’s from Pa.”

  “What do you mean, Pa? What?”

  Caleb places a little transistor radio covered in My Little Pony stickers on the table. His hand, his Family Love tattoo slides back into darkness. He is gone.

  Amity picks up her gift and switches it on. Static blares. She toys with the tuner dial.

  “Hello?” lilts a voice from the speaker. “Can you hear me?”

  She figures it must be one of the truck drivers on one of the in-between frequencies, one of the ghosts roaming the highways around Evans Head, desperate to reach out and speak with the living.

  “Amity, darlin’?”

  No; it is her father. There are weeds growing up through his grave, and she and her brother sometimes go there to remove them.

  It is then she sees the length of rope laid out in front of her. It is thick and strong, though its tiny hairs are frayed. Amity thinks it looks like something she would see on a ship. For some reason, this makes her panic.

  “Can you hear me, darlin’? Come back if you can hear me. Amity? The rope—”

  2

  And then there was the vacuum, nothing else. She was one with her silence again. Breathe, Amity, she told herself, realizing that she was flat against the ground. Breathe now or you’ll die.

  Mouth opened. Bolted upright. Sucked in as much air as possible.

  And still, this was nowhere near enough. If oxygen were solid, then she would have grasped at it and shoveled it down her throat. Tingles fired as synapses that had disconnected in her brain rejoined—sparking, giving off light—just as copper strikes beneath a vehicle’s dashboard as the thief hotwires an engine. And that was exactly what she was doing: commandeering the vehicle again. Taking control. Now drive.

  That’s it. Let it in. Come back.

  Casually, Amity lifted her right hand and saw a tree branch speared through her palm. It was a foot long and about the thickness of a 2B pencil. Leaves were knotted up against the skin, partially inside her; the impalement had stripped the wood.

  Something whispered to Amity that this should be hurting, that there should be incredible amounts of pain. This wasn’t the case. There was just the thumping of the headache behind her temples, that sense of swelling and then release.

  Oh, my God. I’ve been—

  Amity didn’t know what to say. Stabbed was the word she was grasping for, and yet that didn’t quite fit the bill. I’ve been…speared.

  Was the world beginning to tilt, or was it just in her mind? Amity couldn’t be sure. Perhaps this was the end, and the island was folding in upon itself like a closing picture book, funneling her down through a crack in the middle. And then she would slip through and disappear, those trees brushing together in an applause she would never hear. End of story.

  No. She suspected that things were only just beginning.

  Stop. Stop this. Think. Now. I can’t. I’m falling.

  There had been birds flying through the air as she slid into dreams. And before that, the man in the Hawaiian shirt who had saved her life. Those animals would have torn her apart were it not for him. The thought repulsed her. She wondered where he was now. The world was all trees and mud around her, and she was very alone. Had he hit the upper branches in the fall, pinwheeling off in some other direction? It was possible. Amity wished he would materialize from the trees again, snatch her up in his arms and yank the branch from her hand.

  Come one, come all. View the human shish kebab in all her glory, right ’ere! Bring yer cameras. Watch her dance. She won’t put up a fight—

  Shut up! Just stop.

  The world, at least, paid attention and righted itself, though the screeching, manic voice continued.

  You disgusting freak show. Oh, they’ll come and lay down their hard-earned cash to see you. />
  A part of her admitted that this concept was as true now as it always had been—Amity and Caleb Collins, a regular Evans Head tourist attraction and gossip fuel. The faces of the local women whispering behind their hands, behind that week’s Catholic pamphlet at church, were branded in her memory.

  And where is Caleb now, huh? asked that voice. Amity wished—more than her rescuer’s return, more than finding the path that would take her back to her brother and the boat—that she could find the source of her self-contempt. And crush it.

  So do it. Go on. You haven’t got the guts. The freak is weak!

  Without thinking twice, Amity grabbed the branch with her left hand and yanked it straight out of the flesh. Her pain had a color and it was the color of the warm blood spurting over her face.

  She arched against the ground, rolled and curled into a ball. RED. RED everywhere. It devoured all else, including that other voice. For now, at least.

  Amity braved a look at the wound in her palm. It was an unblinking, weeping eye. She willed it to close, to stop staring. Please, make the blood stop coming! But the wound didn’t listen. Amity knew that in the end, wishing was for the weak, so she ground her teeth and dragged herself to her feet with nothing but her own fiery will.

  Spinning. Spinning.

  Locks of greasy hair stuck to her face. It itched.

  She drank up her surroundings. Everything was fragile, overfocused. Shrieking details. There was the cliff of sloping trees behind her (that’s where I fell, God, I don’t even remember landing, did I faint before I hit the upper branches?); there were the walls of the narrow valley on either side (I’m trapped, I’m trapped); there was the shallow pool of water she’d only just missed landing in, and the thin stream running downhill from its birth (there—that’s where I need to go!). That stream was a small waterfall bouncing off the rocks and shooting droplets through the air. Each drop caught the sunlight, formed a rainbow; its beauty was a betrayal. She had to look away.