A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  Small hands scratched at her neck, thumping without direction. It was funny. She had it pinned realllll gooooood. Its taste was bitter saccharine. The light was magnificent.

  Her prey gave a final kick. And then nothing.

  Lungs scorching from her sprint through the trees, the shark pulled herself together and looked down at what remained of the child. It was not her daughter. No. Her daughter was a teenager who had nothing but hatred in her heart for the mother who’d left them behind.

  The farewell note pinned to the refrigerator door had read: “I have to do this; if you’ll love me, you’ll let me go; I’ll come back when I’m done.”

  The shark had been mistaken. The child between her knees was foreign looking and tanned by the sun. It wore a skirt of bamboo strips and finely woven vine. It was a little girl, maybe between the ages of nine and ten years. The girl’s hair was black. A seashell necklace was strung about her broken neck.

  Insects flew around them both. Sunlight poured through the canopy. The island seemed content with the offering it had sacrificed to the shark’s greedy tongue. Beneath the layers of trees and animal cries there was a drawn-out musical note, like a mournful ghost.

  The shark studied the remains again and in an almost comical lightning crack of understanding knew what she had just consumed. Yes, it was a girl, and yet she was so much more than that.

  It was a scout, whose screams echoed still, reaching out to touch unseen ears.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Robert Mann

  1

  “That sounded like a kid,” he said aloud, knowing that only crazy people spoke to nobody. But it wasn’t just talking to himself that led to this conclusion. It was the way he looked—the torn-open Hawaiian shirt covered in mud and blood splotches. Were he to hold a mirror up to his face, he knew he would see a street artist’s caricature of straitjacket verifiability. No doubt about it.

  And it still went deeper.

  The insanity was beneath his skin, in the depths of the meat kingdom where the bedbugs were building their army.

  Don’t think about them. Think about that sound instead. Think about the girl you tried to help that you lost in the fall. Think about her. It’s time to step up to the plate, Mann.

  And then he heard the question—which wasn’t really a question but an accusation—come again. “You ain’t yellah, are you, Robert?”

  “No, sir.” He was close to tears; they teased, as they always teased. “No, sir. I’m not.”

  He was almost positive that the scream was that of a child and not the young woman he’d tried to save. It was too high-pitched. It sounded young.

  The itching came again, dragging him away from his fortitude. Fingernails returned to skin, scoured the red-raw flesh. There was no relief. If he kept this up, it wouldn’t just be sweat and grime he’d be pulling away. Soon his fingernails would be gummy with blood.

  But would that be such a bad thing? Perhaps, were he to look closely at his fingertips, he would find the crushed bodies of black bugs too. That, at least, would be some kind of triumph.

  Don’t think like that, Mann. Keep your head on straight. Focus.

  He stopped near the thin stream he’d been following downhill, drew back his head and glared at the canopy above. The words

  CALM IS AS CALM DOES.

  were printed across the sky in a font that “popped” in all the right ways. It was soft and soothing, as opposed to the bold lettering that most advertisements were splashed with. The point here was for the copy to become one with the graphic design, with the cool blues and greens of the foliage, not contrast against it.

  Beautiful. It was the perfect melding of word and image, and it was having the desired effect. The itching was subsiding; he could feel his heart easing back into its normal rhythm.

  Robert, who was smiling ever so slightly, was tempted to reach up and finger the page to see if the ink had dried. He didn’t. He watched the words fade as the scream had faded. Only it hadn’t.

  It had been cut short.

  He glanced at his wristwatch. It was five o’clock in the afternoon; nightfall wasn’t far off. That concept terrified him. He was running out of time to find the girl and to drag both of their sorry asses back to the beach—which he was sure the stream would lead him to.

  “Girlie! You out there?”

  His voice was hoarse and blistering. No matter how many times he called, she never answered. He hoped to a God that he didn’t really believe in that she hadn’t died in the fall, though there was a good chance that she had. Come to think of it, the fact that he’d survived was nothing short of a miracle. He remembered how the ground had been there one moment and gone the next.

  Trees grabbing him with brittle, bony fingers and forcing him into the jungle’s gullet.

  It had chewed him up, thumped at him from every angle, driving the air from his lungs and blood from his face. Things were hot and then cold. Pure violence that led to darkness. This had continued until he heard the tick of his wristwatch. He woke suspended between the lowest branches of a tree, the muddy soil a yard or two below. There, frozen in time, he spared a thought for Manhattan and the life he’d left behind.

  Robert wondered what diagnosis Donald, his doctor of nine years, would cast upon him—other than the obvious aforementioned insanity. A couple of broken ribs? A swelling in his left ankle that could only be the worst kind of sprain? Oh, what Robert Mann would give to walk into that officious bastard’s office and have him point out the obvious.

  “Girlie, answer me if you can hear me-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  He continued on, choosing to ignore his aches and pains. In addition to this, his balance was questionable at best, and he sometimes found himself veering off the shale bank and into the shallow running water. The sudden cool was not unwelcome.

  Robert stopped.

  He could have sworn he heard distant grieving. It was brash, unmistakable. And this wasn’t like the polite, churchgoing weeping he’d heard stifled behind monogrammed handkerchiefs at his father’s funeral. No; this was something altogether different. The sounds he could hear on the wind were primal shouts of torture and heartbreak, bereft of dignity or self-consciousness. He knew the sound because he’d heard his mother scream that way behind her closed door.

  The grieving stopped.

  Robert stood still, scanned for the source but came back empty-handed. The walls of the jungle were impenetrable on both sides, a prisonlike compound of vibrant, cross-stitched vegetation. Bizarre flowers of yellow and orange rubbernecked at him, almost contemptuously. An azure, foot-long lizard with slit eyes and a crown of spikes spared him a glance and then zipped into camouflage.

  There was nothing but the island. It was alive, though there was death within its borders.

  Robert’s entire body clenched, shooting hot bolts of pain through him as the trumpet began to sound. He gritted his teeth and stumbled in the water. Or at least he assumed it was a trumpet, as it held no tune or melody that registered with his ears. It was a kind of braying. It didn’t pluck strings of anger or fear. Instead, that melancholy call sang of defeat.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tobias and Matt

  1

  Tobias was sure that he’d been here before, although he didn’t know when. It was an intangible place. Haunted. The landscape was black, and what sights there were to see were carved into its opaque surface. The old roller coaster was a good example of this.

  It stood over him, rotting wood groaning against nails, an abandoned relic that signified some other time and existence. He was sure he’d ridden it once with his mother, back when he was a kid. He had been afraid. Yet logic implied that it couldn’t be the same one; that roller coaster stood within the walls of a shut-down carnival in Germany.

  He was confused but didn’t question it any longer. Tobias turned his back on it and trekked deeper into the dark. It was cold here in this nowhere place. He’d never experienced such emptiness.

  This mus
t be what it’s like to be blind. How horrible.

  His longing had teeth that bit and chewed at the back of his neck, in the hollow of his throat, in the deepest part of his belly. He missed the warmth of the sun and, more than anything, the comfort that Caleb’s presence brought with it. Tobias had never thought he would ever find someone who evoked such feelings in him, who stood to slip inside the steel of his resolve and stoke the embers beneath.

  It was love, he assumed, scorching him raw. And not the love a child feels for his mother, as he had experienced in the past, or that a man feels for his brother. It was not the kind of love that was familiar and bred into his fabric. It was utterly other. It was cherry-picked and yet not at the same time.

  Maybe he did not assume. Maybe he knew.

  Drained, Tobias continued on, squinting against clear-cut black. In the hush of the nothingness he could hear his feet tip-tapping across dried, fragile soil. It was like parchment. “Hello? Is there someone out there?” He then translated his shouts into German and announced them to the void.

  In answer, another shape began to emerge. It was a tall, white tree.

  2

  The monkey that had attacked him on the beach had taken with it two of The Body’s right fingers. This newfound pain had shocked Matt. Physical torment didn’t exist in that other place.

  It was invigorating.

  “That’s it, baby doll,” he whispered to his wounds as he bound them in banana leaf and dabbed them with moss. “It’s going to hurt like a bitch, but man-oh-man, a bitch’s better than nothing, yerrrr-right!”

  The bitch had bite. But to hurt was to be alive, and even pain was better than the nothingness below.

  As he trudged through the dense scrub, palming off trees that seemed to have minds of their own and tenacious grips, Matt found himself replaying the scene at the beach, wondering just how he had managed to commandeer The Body’s legs away from the bloodshed and into the island’s murky stomach. He could still make out the animal’s maw—those yellow snaggleteeth—as it ripped the Coke bottle from his hands and took the digits with it.

  All he’d felt was a tug. It wasn’t real until he touched those funny-looking stumps with his other hand, fingered the protruding bone. His scream had sent the animals into fervor, and they had come spilling from the trees to take them all. Except him. He was fast.

  I did this, he’d thought to himself as he slid backward toward the tree line. It’s all come together. I’m the great controller, can’t you see? I’m in charge here!

  It was as though the jungle reached out and claimed him. You did well, its touch implied. You gave them what they wanted. You were brought here to start this. They were born to end it.

  Even with the pain—which, push come to shove, he was tiring of fast—the thrill was outstanding. “Dude, what a rush.”

  He had rounded a fallen tree and descended a sudden, severe decline. There was light here, cutting through shadow. The dewy ground misted in newfound warmth. Vast boulders formed a V through which he passed, revealing deeper foliage, interwoven vines and aromatic bushes full of flowers. Insects leaped as the clouds opened. Little black flies landed on his back, flirted with the sweaty tufts of his matted hair. He didn’t bother to swat the mosquitoes, instead letting them feast on The Body’s arms and legs, on the curve of his throat. Their mouths sucked the blood from him. It itched. He stopped to piss against a rock and laughed. Matt was plugged into the ecosystem now; he fed it, and after grabbing a handful of low-hanging berries, it now fed him. They had fucked. Swapped fluids. Without a rubber. What greater risk was there?

  His hands rose above his head. “I’m here, you hear me?” He waited for his echo. There wasn’t one. “You wanted me, you got me! Woo-hooo!” Matt had danced and skipped back into the jungle on the other side of the sunlit clearing.

  Only the rush of not knowing what was behind the next tree, around the next turn in the trail, wasn’t enough. It was all too slow. Matt began to sprint, his feet slamming against the earth, ducking below low-hanging boughs. The island cheered him on. And he bled through it all. It wasn’t long before he began to feel funny.

  The jungle wasn’t as clearly defined as it had been minutes before. Things had grown gloomy. There was an odd tingling sensation running through The Body’s limbs. He was thirsty.

  “This, uh-hh. This is good. This is what it’s all about. Right here. Right now.”

  So he pushed on, even though the foliage was encroaching on him, even though some unseen weight was draping iron arms around his shoulders, making it harder and harder to move. Matt whimpered.

  “Push it. Push it.”

  He was in the thick now. It was damp here. A place of rot and dodging silhouettes. The semaphore blasts of sunlight through the trees were growing few and far between. Fetid stench slapped him across the face.

  I’m slowing. I’m dimming.

  Only that wasn’t all that was happening. Moments before he had run without reason or concentration, and the island had accommodated every misjudged leap and bound by sprouting a root for him to land on, forcing back a thorned plant so he wouldn’t slit open his shins. This was no longer the case.

  I’m falling.

  The ground sloped and he sloped with it. His makeshift bandages slipped off as he reached out to break his fall. Matt rolled and the landscape rolled with him, funneling down into a green carousel-swirl.

  Thump.

  Matt landed facedown in a putrid sludge of soil and decomposing bird corpses. Leaves pirouetted from above and landed around him with hushed fanfare. Blood spurted from his missing digits and lathered lifeless beaks and empty eggshells.

  (This—)

  Matt drew all of his concentration into a knot and yanked The Body back into line.

  (This is—)

  Breathe, you goddarned fink!

  (This is peachy.)

  He wheezed relief and pushed himself onto The Body’s side, that hot blood inky against the jungle floor. A chill crawled up his legs, across his torso. It filled his head.

  “Ouch, God. Hurts.”

  You know you like it. You betchya.

  Raindrops pitter-pattered around him, drumming against rocks hidden beneath a blanket of mist that glowed in places where the sun managed to cut through, and even then, it did so as though fearful of this place. Matt spat out a glob of phlegmy blood and swiveled onto his haunches. He could see the hole he’d punched through the vegetation with his fall.

  The Body’s heart began to race and Matt felt better. He’d almost become detached from his sensations for a moment there. If he didn’t keep a firm hold on the flesh, he ran the risk of giving it over to The Others. Tobias, no doubt, would be first in line to reclaim his former throne.

  The focus that had eluded him earlier was back, illustrating for him the hollow of silken majesty. Matt was lost for words—a first, surely. He knew, now more than ever, that this was where he was destined to be. He jolted at the sight.

  This very spot. The ultimate kick.

  Gnarled foliage had been pulled aside, perhaps by the same hands that had forced the island into such tortured poses and peaks. Strung between the walls of this shadowy cave were velvet-thick webs.

  3

  Tobias looked up at the tree in front of him and was in awe of its albino bark. It looked carved from tusk. He could have sworn that he’d been here before, though maybe only in a dream. The sense of déjà vu was incredible and lent the scene a texture that was both homely and terrifying.

  The tree’s highest branches blurred into darkness. From that out-of-focus place there now came a thin stream of bright red blood. Panting and eyes wide, Tobias stumbled back a step or two. His feet thumped against something. It was an old ukulele.

  The nylon strings thrummed a discordant tone that hung, vibrating, in the air.

  A memory wormed through his mind, blinked its single milky eye.

  He was alone in the hostel while Caleb and Amity shared a joint room across the road. Tobias ha
d been on the phone to his boyfriend earlier in the night, and once he’d turned off the light and tried to settle into sleep, he’d heard the sound of plucking ukulele strings and children’s laughter coming from the hall. He’d crept through the dark in his underwear and pushed the door open. There had been nobody out there.

  “Is there anyone here?” he asked the tree in no particular language and yet in all languages at once. “Where the hell am I?” If there was one good thing about this place, it was that all self-conscious clunks of his accent had been stripped away. Here, he felt efficient and impervious to the glares and contempt of those who judged people who were from different places, were of different colors, didn’t love as others loved.

  “We’re here,” came a thin voice.

  Tobias grabbed his chest, clutched the fabric of his shirt. If only he could dig his fingers deeper, through his rib cage and into the flesh beneath, and settle his thudding heart. It felt as though it were going to explode.

  A boy who didn’t look as though he’d yet cracked his teen years stepped out from behind the tree, holding the hand of his twin brother. Their physical appearances were strikingly similar, from the chubbiness of their cheeks to their matching denim overalls; it was only in their dim-witted eyes that Tobias could strike a note of difference. “Hallo?” Sigh. “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Joe. Joe Mccormack. This is Gus. Are you our brother?”

  Tobias had been on the gringo trail long enough to recognize an Australian accent, and this kid’s vocal tones were unmistakable.

  “Me? I’m…no. No, I don’t think so.”

  “But you’re Tobias, aren’t you?” asked Gus.

  “I am, but I don’t know you. I don’t even know where I am.”

  Joe took a step toward him, leaving his brother alone near the tree. “You’re below.”