by Aaron Dries
And neither Susan nor the shark was ready to go down that route. Not yet. There was still so much more light to be swallowed. So many more photographs to be taken, click after bloodied click.
You’re a fool. You know what’s happening here. The writing’s on the wall.
Yeah, the writing was on the wall, but that didn’t mean she had to read it. In a way, she was thankful the monkey in the tutu and all of its little friends moved with such speed… There would be no time to beg.
The monkeys were within striking distance. Each wore a Frankenstein’s monster mask of skins and stitching, binding together all the faces of all the men, women and children she’d slaughtered. It made her happy to see that there was no light behind the sockets.
It was all inside her.
I won, remember? I got you all. And each of you was fucking pathetic. You were all just wasted wax. The only thing that was good and special about you, I took and made my own. That’s what I was born to do. I am the big bang.
I am cannibal.
Susan’s heart stopped. All sound was gone. The sky darkened. She was in the ocean again, back where she belonged. Down here she was innocent. Here, she was not victim to her nature. She just lived. Her hunger was normal; it was in her bones.
Gills opened for a final time. Water rushed in. Her black eyes rolled to white as she breached the surface, jaws widening in readiness for attack.
Teeth met teeth.
The monkey ripped Susan’s face right off her skull.
11
Flies covered every inch of Amity’s body, a second skin of twitching hands praying and rubbing together. It took all of her energy to hold on to the one thing she had left.
The rope.
She almost laughed when she thought about all the things she and Caleb had filled their travelers’ backpacks with—a perfectly allotted solution to any problem that might arise!
Look, everybody. See how smart we are?
There had been her clothing in the plastic drawstring bags. Toiletries in a rubber case. Chap Stick. Her USB. Kindle. Camera. The first aid box, filled to the brim. Tampons in a waterproof carrier. Bottle opener. Passports. Pocketknife. Laundry powder.
The list went on and on, dwindling down into an ellipsis that wasn’t worth punctuating.
(Going, going—)
And yet it wasn’t just the contents of the bags that had been taken away from her. She’d lost her phone and the world trapped beneath the touch screen—her other personalities and the alternate realities in which she was normal and could hear and was just like every other young woman her age. She’d lost her family.
(—gone.)
All that remained was the rope, and even now she could feel it fraying.
It’s hard to hold on to something when you don’t exist.
This was true. She no longer had a body, or at least that was the way it felt. It was as though someone had pulled the life support cord out of the wall, only she continued to live on. Disconnected and yet alive. And it wasn’t so bad. There wasn’t any pain.
Amity floated.
Her eyes were half-open, half-closed. Things drifted in and out of focus. The flies warmed her body as they drank and shat and planted maggots in her clefts of exposed flesh. They were raping her, and she strangely sensed that this wasn’t the first time things had gone this way.
But it was too hard to tell reality from dream. The two had wed and eloped in sin. Her mother would be displeased.
And what sin was it that she had committed, she wondered again?
What did I do wrong?
What did I do to deserve this?
She became distracted by one of the bodies in front of her. A layer of wet leaves and coiled intestines obscured it, but she could make out one muscular shoulder above the muck, and one extended arm. It reached up as though caught in perpetual waiting, waiting for someone to pull it up out of the death pit.
The skin was opal white. Two fingers were bent at an unnatural angle.
Amity found herself leaning forward; the flies flew into the air, buzzed and then resettled on her. It was a man that she was looking at—that, at least, was a given—and there was something on his forearm.
She dragged herself over dead mouths, exposed spines.
Closer.
And still in the back of her mind there was that gnawing question.
Why did I deserve this?
Why?
It was a tattoo on the man’s skin. Amity blinked, unsure if she was seeing what she was seeing. She was.
There were just two little words on the flesh, and each bore great weight in its own right. Yet when combined to form a sentence, the power was unrivaled.
The words were Family and Love.
Amity’s hand dropped back onto the ground, fingers slipping into a young child’s mouth. She disturbed the cockroaches that had been wriggling around in there. They ran up her arm, leaving little red scuffmarks.
Family love.
“Caleb?”
Deafly muttering her brother’s name distracted her from the one thing she knew she had to do: hold on to that rope. The already fraying cord slipped over her callouses, scraping away flakes of dried skin. It burned. And even worse, she could almost hear the sound of the rope whizzing away, and that sound was the same color as the words inked into her brother’s forearm.
The color was RED.
Amity Collins watched her brother’s fingers began to curl inward and cling to the wall of the pit. He grabbed an exposed root and pulled himself up out of the bloodied water. The flies swarmed and reformed around them like something going to liquid and then coming together again, just as the sparrows seemed to do when they flocked above Evans Head.
When she and Caleb were young, they watched the sparrows from the roof of the house. Together they would sit there on the corrugated iron, their knees pressed close together as they pointed at the shapes the birds made as they dipped and dived. They would laugh, even though they knew the laughter would be short-lived, because soon their mother would find the ladder against the side of the house and they would be discovered.
Tanned hides. Banned games. Confiscated pencils and footballs.
But climbing up there was worth it, even with the loss waiting in the wings. Always.
Caleb stared at her with understanding. Amity heard his soft voice for the first time in many years. Pain throbbed between her legs again.
“Amity, your sin,” he began, exposing his bloodstained teeth, “is the sin of survival.”
Her brother’s breath stank of mushrooms.
12
There were little punches of light in the dark. They shone enough for her to catch hints of swinging dreadlocks, sweaty arms. A melancholy face. Amity didn’t think she’d ever seen anything so sad. A flash of white sky. Fog. Clouds.
She was being cradled, could sense her weight against his.
Another blade of light cut through.
There were hundreds of bottles all around them, sliding by as he carried her to the center of the clearing. Amity could tell that the earth was raised here, raised like a great chest holding in a lungful of air—and for all she knew, perhaps it was. The island was alive. She knew that now.
The bottles petered off at the top of the crest. She saw an upturned boat. The hull was worn and scraped and whatever paint had covered its boards had peeled away long ago. It looked like a wooden igloo the way it was just sitting there, upside down. That made her laugh a little.
She was lowered onto sand. Dreadlocks scrubbed against her.
It was hot here. She didn’t like it. Her skin was going to get burned.
I need some cream to protect me. It’s in my backpack. In a baggie. So it won’t go everywhere if the lid comes off. Don’t want that. Nope.
No-ooooppppe.
Amity watched the man push against the boat with one of his enormous hands. A door opened inward. He bent down and stepped inside. She thought of a story she’d read once, or maybe it was a movie�
�she couldn’t remember which—but whatever it was, it featured a scene in which people went through miniature doors leading to even smaller rooms with even smaller doors, and on this went until everything had shrunk down to the size of a thimble.
Funny. Ha-aaaaaaaa.
The same hands that had carried her before now materialized out of the dark doorway. They curled around her ankles and dragged her underground.
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Three
Beyond the Last Day
1
Janine Collins walked up Yarran Street. It was quarter past five in the afternoon. A Thursday. The day had been hot and restless for the most part, threatening to split open and storm at any moment, only those rains hadn’t come. The skies teased in this part of the world, a place where crops, livestock and livelihoods were dependent upon the turn of the weather.
She waddled along the path, dandelions chasing after her.
Her thoughts were of her day at the Saint Vincent de Paul Opportunity Store where she worked. Memories rang like bells and were just as deafening. She didn’t see the waving neighbor and was almost run down by a boy pedaling his bicycle as though it were going out of style. No; all Janine saw were the faces of the customers she’d served; all she heard were the echoes of their stupid questions, the ca-ching of the old-school register.
Under her arm was a green cotton Woolworths shopping bag full of odds and ends, the kind of stuff that nobody actually buys in those stores. Old soda streams. Limbless children’s toys. This was the stuff she just couldn’t get enough of.
Sighing, Janine stopped to drag a wad of mail from the box out the front and then continued toward the verandah. Only her shoes were laid out near the door; a twisted tinge of sadness threatened to make her go to water again. She did her little juggling trick with the brick of letters and the bag as she jimmied the house key into the lock. Success. She entered the dimly lit hallway, leaving behind the squeals of children as they chased after the ice cream van on its final block for the day.
The house was overflowing with bric-a-brac, further piles of unread books and old records that she knew she would never end up listening to. They didn’t even own a player! That wasn’t the point, of course; owning them was enough.
She knew the place was starting to stink. Didn’t care. Janine kind of enjoyed it—newspapers and mice and all things nice.
There had been a time not so long ago when all of the mess had been confined to her bedroom. Now it had finally broken down the door and vomited through the rest of the house, spreading like a disease. And Janine refused to accept that there was a problem. Diagnosis diverted, thank you very much.
It was impossible to see the living room floor anymore. It was easier to climb over the treasure—
(and treasure was exactly what it was)
—than it was to clear it away when she wanted to make her way to the television set. Changing the channels had become an ordeal since the room had swallowed up the remote.
Janine didn’t put on the ceiling lights, deciding instead to run all the ornate lamps she’d collected. Their luminescence made everything softer. Fewer shadows that way.
Jingle-clank of the keys against the kitchen table.
A wisp as letters and catalogs fanned across other forgotten letters and catalogs.
The three grandfather clocks continued to tick away around her. The phone rang just as she set the kettle over flame.
She shuffled to the receiver and snatched it off its wall holster, flicking her long, unwashed hair from her eyes.
Probably one of those damned telemarketers again! Haven’t they got anything better to do than bother me?
“Hello.” Impatient. Stern.
“Why hello, Janine. It’s Father Lewis here, returning your call. From the way you answered, I guess you were expecting an unwanted sale.”
“Oh, Father! It’s so nice to hear your voice. And you’re right. Those buggers always call right around dinnertime. Don’t they eat too, I ask you?”
“It makes you wonder, dontchit? So how are you? I’ve got to admit, it’s been a while. I haven’t seen you at church for almost—what would it be, well, a month now.”
“Has it been that long, really? Good golly; time gets away on us, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does. How have you been keeping? Is all well?”
“What’s well is well. The rest? The rest is a bit of a slow slog, really.”
“Janine, would you like to organize a house visit?”
“Ah, no. No, I don’t think so. Not yet. Soon. I’ll be coming to church this weekend. I’d love to talk to you after the Saturday night service, assuming you’ve got the time.”
“Of course I do, Janine… Are you sure everything is okay? Excuse me for saying so, but you don’t sound okay.”
“I, augh. I guess I’m just missing my babies.” An awkward laugh.
“I see. Oh, that’d do it, all right.”
“Not that they’re missing me none, of course. They don’t even bother to try and get me on the Skype anymore. Would a text message hurt, I ask you?”
“True. True. And on Skype, you say? I’ve heard about that. It works fine?”
“It works when it works, but what good is it at all if they never get on it to call me?”
“How long has it been since they’ve touched base?”
“I don’t know. A month, maybe.”
“Janine, you know what kids are like. They’re off having fun, and well, you know how it is.”
“Yeah, I know all right. I’m finding out the hard way.”
“It’s not easy. I think coming to see me on Saturday would be a good thing. We’ve all missed you. Everyone has been like, ‘where’s Janine?’, ‘where’s Janine?’”
“Have they? Oh, that’s nice.”
“It’s true. You’re missed… Dear, I can hear you thinking from here.”
“Gee, Father. You can read me like a book. I’m a right royal mess, God’s honest truth.”
“They really should be keeping in contact more, not that I need to tell you that. I mean for safety reasons. Security. They’ll call when they run out of money, mark my words!”
“You said it, all right. For all I know they could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere, or off selling drugs.”
“Janine, you shouldn’t say such things—”
“But it happens, Father. It happens all the time. Don’t you watch those current affairs programs? It’s always about kids getting caught up in trouble overseas. I can’t watch those things since they’ve been gone. It gives me the horrors. I’m not sleeping.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a visitor tonight? I’m free at the moment. I’ve just had Maureen Templeton swing by the rectory with one of her blue-ribbon raspberry pies. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’m watching my weight and won’t touch it. I’m sure you’d enjoy it. Well, even I could be tempted. When the company’s right, as they say.”
“Thank you, Father. You’re a gem.”
“That’s what I’m here for, Janine. It’s important you don’t forget that. I’ve helped you out before. I know I can help you out again. I come with reinforcements, you know, and I’m not just talking about the pie!”
She laughed; she began to cry.
“Janine?”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Oh, this is just ridiculous! Don’t mind me. I’m being a nong. Silly, really.” She stirred the air with one of the catalogs.
“I’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll come by in the car.”
Janine slumped against the kitchen chair. The telephone was hot against her ear. She sat there, dolorous eyes swelling. “I need help. Things have grown ugly over here. I—I—don’t know where my rosary beads are, either.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“I need my kids back. They’re breakin’ me with silence. I can’t stand it. It’s all wrong. All wrong. Something’s missing. I can’t put my finger on it.” Janine put the catalog down
and rested her hand against her forehead. “I can’t feel them no more. I can’t feel my babies. A mother knows these things.”
“Janine. I’m leaving now. Is that the kettle screeching in the background?”
“What? The kettle? Yeah.”
“I thought as much. I’ll be there before it cools. Janine, I take my tea with two sugars. And light milk, assuming you’ve got it in the fridge. If not, that’s okay. I can handle full strength, will allowing.”
“Thank you. Thank you.” Janine stood and surveyed the room, drank up the sight of all her treasures spilling across the floor. “I’m afraid you’re going to hate me when you come.”
“I don’t hate anyone, Janine. That’s not how it works.”
She turned away from the table and walked through the doorway, into the back room with the big bay windows overlooking the yard. She nodded and smiled in reply to the priest’s words and hung up. The phone made a pleasant beeping sound and then went dead in her hand.
Janine stepped over a carpet of magazines, the kind that populate doctor’s surgeries worldwide, and stopped near the window. There was a delicate chill beaming off the glass, despite the heat. A little transistor radio hung from a nail driven into the wooden frame on her right. She couldn’t remember the last time it had been turned on; for all she knew it was the day she’d come home from work and found Amity and Caleb packing their big travelers’ backpacks.
Janine swallowed her regrets. They were dry. They were bitter.
Amity’s postcard, sent from Hua Hin, was slid between the letters and catalogs on the kitchen table. It sat there, unread, as Janine Collins switched on the radio and swayed to songs that made no sense to her and watched sparrows by the hundred dance against the thunderheads.
2
Amity’s eyes open to the darkness that is her home now. She is not alone. He is in here with her. It is his odor—all cooked meat, smoke and sweat—which woke her in the first place. She’d been dreaming, though of what she can’t remember. She has been in the dark for so long that even the bright glare of dreams unsettles her.