A Place for Sinners

by Aaron Dries

  What happened here? What?

  Amity’s eyes shifted from the octopus in the pool and focused on her manic expression rippling across the water’s surface. It took a moment to realize that the person staring back was her. She sighed. She’d been thrown off by the look of understanding in the reflection’s eyes, by the intuition carved into that face. It was primal. It was chilling. And then she knew.

  We’re the reason they’ve exterminated themselves. We’ve penetrated their home and they’d rather fucking die than have us here—

  “Oh, Amity.”

  The whispering voice was silky and smooth. It was intimate, a voice that sounded as though it knew every one of her secrets—even the ones about the man she had met on the Internet—and still loved her for it. This was why she wasn’t afraid. Besides, this stranger’s breath must have been nothing short of magic to slice through her deafness the way that it had done.

  Gooseflesh prickled her body. The darkness was over her now, cutting her in two. Her own shadow stretched out long before her, warped by the step and steep of the terrain. She followed its length, arching her neck, and saw the mystery speaker.

  It was a man.

  He was tall and his clothes changed with the shifting light, a kaleidoscope suit. Formless and undefined, he stood at the mouth of the cave, beckoning to her with both hands. A sheet of cardboard was strapped to his head—a printed black-and-white face. Two holes had been punched out for the eyes, but there was no twinkling to be found behind them, just blackness. It was her father’s face, taken from the photograph that sat on her bedside table in Evans Head.

  “Keep going, Amity.”

  Something clicked. She almost felt it. Something had turned on inside her, somewhere in the backstreets of her brain. She wasn’t certain, but she thought it might be—

  (she probed for the word, reached through the dark. Found it. Held it. Owned it.)

  —acceptance.

  It was her dead father standing there and calling out to her. This fact couldn’t be disputed because it felt so damn right.

  She smiled. “Pa.” The word was stripped of her usual self-consciousness. The vibration was sweet. It was not RED. It was PALE BLUE. Amity laughed.

  “Don’t give up, sweetie. You’re so close. Push yourself. The cave is dry.”

  He beckoned again. The gesture tugged at her chest; she gave herself over to it and followed. Dean Collins had her, hook, line and sinker, and she gave herself to him willingly.

  A flower of memories, blooming at an impossible speed.

  Sitting on her father’s knee at a barbecue in their backyard. He was bouncing her up and down. She was wearing her red slicker, the rubber squeaking. Her mother was there too. There was sauce dripping from her sandwich as she leaned forward to take a bite, splattering across her gown. It was dusk and the barbecue smoke was keeping the mosquitos away. A man whose name she couldn’t quite remember sat across from them. He was broad shouldered and black. He held a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His face was a bowl of kindness; she could see it in his eyes.

  Then it came to her: this was Clover, the man who had killed the dogs on Chinaman’s Beach with her father’s shotgun. In saving her life, he’d burst her eardrums. Her mother kept his obituary in one of her Memory Lane albums.

  She was crying in her bedroom. Her father had a wooden spoon in his hand. He looked so disappointed in her. Amity couldn’t recall what she’d done to elicit such a punishment, but it must have been severe. Afterward, lying on her bed and sucking on her thumb, her father came into the room and hugged her. “I’m sorry, little luv,” he said. “Please don’t do that again. I hate hurting you. I just don’t got it in me.”

  Another petal.

  Amity going up to her parents’ bed late at night, her Raggedy Ann doll tucked under one arm. “I think I feel sick,” she told them moments before vomiting across their legs. Afterward, her father lay in bed with her, stroking her forehead with a wet cloth.

  Another.

  Another.

  She burned for him.

  It seemed appropriate that he was clothed in a kaleidoscope of shifting density and hue; it reminded her of all the shirts that he used to wear, and how they had defined him.

  Shirts.

  Each one was an event that he’d never had a chance to attend with her.

  Birthdays, Christmases, her graduation from Saint Catherine’s, the day her grandmother passed away.

  All of those missing days were spelled out in this flickering weave, which was undoing and reknitting itself before her eyes.

  Take me back, the kaleidoscope seemed to say. All of those missing years are waiting for you. You just have to want it. Come to me.

  Amity broke in to a run. “Pa! Pa! Don’t go.”

  She wanted to hold him and tell him who she really was. She’d long ago grown tired of pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Her Facebook and Twitter presence had filled just some of the space he’d left behind—places where her whining was accepted, where she could cheapen herself, where the boring and the mundane were slotted between flickers of honesty.

  Amity wanted—strike that, she needed—a father. Or at the very least, she needed what even Facebook claimed to have: a moderator. Binary code just wasn’t going to cut it.

  Amity’s foot slammed against something. She hardly felt it at all. Looking down, she saw an old, splintered tree branch whitened by sun and salt. It rocked against her sandals. Amity looked back up. Her father was gone, as she had known he would be.

  It was the crushing feeling of waking from a dream in which you won the lotto or finally found Mister Right. Yes, it was just like this. Only worse.

  You’re a fucking idiot, Amity.

  I know…

  Do you like torturing yourself, is that it?

  No, of course not.

  You just like making bad situations worse.

  That’s not it at all. I—I—

  You’re losing it. You can feel it, can’t you? It’s like a rope—

  (Yes, the rope!)

  —tying us together, everything together, and it’s fraying. I’m going to fucking drift away; it all is. And you’re going to be left behind. Stark raving mad. There ain’t no loony bin out here, girl. There’s just the dark.

  Amity stood at the threshold to the cave.

  You’ve got to keep your smarts about you, okay?

  Okay.

  Go inside. Get out of this god-awful wind. The shadow’s almost here. Now. Now!

  Wait.

  Amity bent down and picked up the long tree branch she’d almost tripped over. It was heavy in her hands yet lighter than she’d suspected it would be. The weather had drained it completely dry over time. Mother Nature could be a vampire, and Amity had no intention of becoming her next victim.

  Her fingers gripped the smooth surface; the branch was like bone. She shivered.

  Good, girl. That’s the Amity I know and love. Keep the rope strong. Keep it strong.

  She cradled the wood with both hands, holding it the way action heroes held their weapons in the movies her brother sometimes made her watch (Caleb had to explain to her why Arnold Schwarzenegger’s subtitles were always written in broken English—“No; that’s how he actually sounds!”). She was locked, loaded, and could already feel herself growing stronger. Or at least this was what she told herself.

  The shirts Amity’s father used to wear were not the only things she remembered from her childhood. There were other things. Other events… There had even been this one time when she’d wandered from a tent where her pa and Caleb had been sleeping, and she had fallen through some trees. She’d been spat out on a landscape similar to the one she currently stood on. In that place, long ago, there had been monsters with fleas in their fur waiting for her. Foam dripped from their mouths.

  The lead bitch had bitten her. Coveted her. She had the scars to prove it.

  Amity tensed and peered into the mouth of the cave. The last time she’d fo
und herself in this position, she’d almost died and all sound had been seized from her ears. Amity would be damned if she would allow anything like that to happen again.

  6

  At first sight the cave didn’t seem much bigger than a single-car garage. It was divided in two by a gradient of light versus shadow, and even then, shadow was closing the gap. Soon there would be no illumination at all.

  The branch was slick beneath Amity’s palms. She extended it out in front of her, ignoring the searing sensation from the wound in her right palm. A trickle of blood ran to her elbow, grew fat, and plopped onto the ground. The rocks on which she stood were worn and almost looked glassy, covered in patches of white moss and bird shit. She could smell damp, wet earth and something like rotten fruit.

  It was impossible to tell how far back the cave stretched—or if it narrowed down in size like a funhouse forced-perspective room—without stepping further into the dark. And she didn’t want to do that, not even if her ole pa was in there somewhere.

  Stomach knotted. Teeth clenched over her lower lip. Her eye twitched.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late to go back and find somewhere else to hide out. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the final rays of light arching around the cove, silhouetting the cliff the woman and children had fallen from. This was answer enough for her. If night fell and a storm rolled in off the ocean, she’d be royally screwed. The decision had been made for her. Like it or not, this was her home for the night, and all things considered, she could have fared worse.

  But why was her skin prickling? Why the butterflies of anticipation fluttering in her bowels? Why did she feel like she was being watched? And it wasn’t for the first time either. She’d sensed it before, back in the jungle.

  You’re being an idiot. Calm the hell down. Sit. You need to rest.

  Now when she blinked it was not just the faces of the dead family she saw. There were wild dogs prowling there. They inched forward on gnarled legs, eyes glinting. Each swipe of her eyelids brought them closer.

  Closer.

  Amity gave another minute’s pause and then exhaled. She loosened her grip on her makeshift weapon. It hung, clublike, at the end of her left arm, dragging against the rocks. Her muscles unwound.

  There were no eyes watching her from the dark, and yet she felt them. And there were no hands reaching out to touch and turn her head, and yet her head was turning without her seeming to have a say in the matter. Amity’s eyes locked on the right-hand side of the cave—the side still exposed to the dwindling sunlight.

  What the hell?

  She took a step toward the wall, the stick’s point carving a line through the grunge underfoot. Her eyes were wide and absorbed it all.

  Amity knew that her mouth had dropped open, a habit that she had always been self-conscious of—

  (“Close your mouth or the flies will get in,” her mother used to tell them when they were kids, although in what cadence or pitch she’d long since forgotten, as was the case with all voices. Her own included. Amity guessed that it was the image that had stuck with her more than the expression itself: that of black flies swarming around the kangaroo roadkill that paved the road into Evans Head. Those flies would feast, fuck and leave their larvae under envelopes of flesh, and then, unsatisfied and pregnant, they would wait for her little lips to part.

  Her mother had many expressions, though only some still rolled about in her head. But by far, “close your mouth or the flies will get in” was the worst, simply because it didn’t just speak of bad habits. It told a tale of death-starved things squirming in the throats of children.)

  —but she was way past caring now.

  Amity stepped close enough to the cave wall to inhale its chalky loam. She brushed the rock. It was cool, submissive to the shifting sun. Scratched into its face were etchings, carved by a delicate and controlled hand, some time ago from the look of it. The dust and salt and grime were thickly coated, but the illustrations could still be clearly seen. It was almost like a primitively drawn comic strip spelling out a narrative she wasn’t sure she was brave enough to read.

  There were threads of writing here and there. Amity had seen many of the signs up and down the coastline and scoured countless menus to recognize the basic shape of Thai script, which was distinguished by arcs and gentle curves. These cave scrawls bore no resemblance to what she’d seen since arriving in this country. These words were harsh and jagged, violent strokes against stone.

  They’re not letters, Amity told herself. They’re characters. Japanese.

  She took a step back, composed herself. The scythe of shadow was drawing on the cave and soon the story would be hidden. But did she really want to know what cards the island kept close to its chest? She already knew they weren’t alone—wasn’t that enough? She honestly didn’t think it was, which was why she took another step back so she could view the drawings in full, even though she was worried that reading on would reveal her guilty part in these peoples’ destruction.

  Are you sure you want to do this?

  Yeah. I think I do.

  And what if you learn that those people back there—that woman, those children!—didn’t jump? What if you learn that they were pushed? They had lives before we arrived, didn’t they? We’ve done something to set them off. What if you realize you are the one who slit those kids’ throats?

  Amity closed her eyes, a deliberate move. The faces of the dead were revealed to her.

  Their eyes were open. They looked into her. Mouths moved. Goldfish pleas. Amity crossed the cove and kneeled by the mother’s side. The waves didn’t dare touch them. All was still. The sun had frozen over.

  “Whatever it is we’ve done,” she began, “I’m so, so sorry.”

  The dead mother continued to speak, unheard.

  “I want to take it all back. All of it. But you need to tell me what crime we’re guilty of. Please.”

  Blood filled the woman’s mouth. The waves coveted them.

  7

  It spoke to the artist in her, this sometimes chaotic but always-intricate carving. And her eyes, accustomed to drafting professional works for money, could see that what stood before her was a testament. A confession. Amity had never felt so shallow as a creative soul. Never in all of her years had she ever come close to making something half as pure or honest as this. It shamed her.

  She leaned in and blew against the wall, swirling dust captured in the shaft of yellow light. Enough details were revealed for her to tell that the narrative ran downward in right to left columns within a lanky rectangle, a frame of horizontal text.

  The first drawing in the top right-hand corner was of a man. He was bent on his knees, though in pleading or thanks she couldn’t quite tell. Yet. The limbs were well defined, the face a rough scraping of dashes—the eyes, the mouth. But she could see that he was strong. More than anything else, that was what she took from the rendering. Above the figure was something that looked like a bird, or maybe even an airplane.

  This same man appeared in the next drawing below, which like them all was separated by another Japanese symbol. The man was standing this time and was holding an old laborers’ pick—an inverted T with the top slash curved to a point.

  So he’s a worker. Doing what?

  Beneath his feet were deeply etched ladder rungs. No. Not ladder rungs. A railway track.

  Amity swallowed. She imagined kneeling on this very spot with a blade in her hand for months on end—because that is how long this would have taken. Whoever did this had had plenty of time to spare, not to mention patience, and whoever they were, Amity suspected they were angry about something. Furious. You didn’t just kneel down and make work like this because you were bored, or just determined. She could sense the tightly held frenzy between the carvings, a blade that must have slipped so many times. There would have been cramped hands. Cuts.

  Lots of them.

  The next drawing was of a bridge. It was wide but unfinished. There were more of those bird-airplanes above
it. Three wavy lanes were engraved below.

  Water.

  Next, the strong man was on his knees again. The pick was by his side. Standing behind him was a tall stranger with broad shoulders whose body was divided by an angry streak across his hands. Amity didn’t just suspect this was a rifle; she knew it was. That incessant chill, which she’d felt before, grappled with her again.

  The memory of a noise, and that memory was RED.

  The same bridge was obscured by angry slashes in the next drawing. It was hard to tell what this signified. Rain. Fire? Amity reached out and touched the gashes in the rock.

  Not rain. Flames. Explosions.

  Christ, what went on here?

  Next, the man was running. The image reminded her of the pedestrian crossing sign that lit up at the main intersection in Evans Head. She used to have to touch the buzzer to feel it vibrate, the sound to walk lost on her.

  The pick was still in the man’s hand.

  Six depictions in the clay and she was already invested in the story.

  Next, the man was standing beside a second figure. This second person’s hair was shoulder length, the legs long and thin—a woman. Amity could see that this companion had been sketched with considerably more care than the man had been, as though in respect to a precious memory. Cramped hands and spilled blood just might have been worth it for this particular artist.

  Next, the man and woman were in a boat crossing more wavy lines. Her head rested against his shoulder. The boat seemed small, and although it had a mast, it bore no sail.

  Next, the boat was docked on a straight line, the water behind them now. The two figures were standing on that line, at the end of which were trees. Amity’s mind animated the sequence.

  The man and woman stepped onto the sand, relieved and exhausted. It must have been murder out there on the ocean in a vessel of such diminutive size, but somehow, perhaps even surprising themselves, they had survived. They had arrived on a beach—and it made sense that it was the same stretch of land where Amity, Caleb, Tobias and the other tourists had docked.