Phil turned and saw a man seated on a weathered wooden chair, meticulously scooping out the green flesh of a large avocado with a knife too sharp for the task. He was middle-aged, with a round belly, and wore a tight yellow t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. A faded Raiders cap did not completely conceal dull uncombed hair. His hands and feet were wide, his skin cracked and dry.
At his side stood a heavy wooden table on which was a plate of several more avocados, a bottle of beer, one of Phil’s cameras, and Halley’s pistol. Behind him, the sea reflected the blinding sun.
“El Diablo?” Phil said.
“You’ve come here to kill me.”
Phil shook his head. He pushed himself to a sitting position. His arms trembled with his weight. “We were here to interview you. I’m the photographer.”
“The game is up. There is no reason to lie anymore.” He wedged out a chunk of avocado and licked it off the blade, seemingly not worried that he could cut his tongue.
“I don’t want to die.”
“Of course you don’t. But no one brings a sniper rifle to an interview.”
“I came here to take your photo. The shot of a lifetime. I wanted to turn everything around. Make up for my mistakes.”
“How does a photo make up for mistakes? You lie to yourself. You lie to me.” El Diablo drove the knife into the tabletop. The blade quivered between the camera and the gun. “This photo would not save you. It would not erase the past. My past damns me. But I will not hide from it. You don’t get to undo your life. Here’s the secret. If you are scared of hell, you never should have walked that path in the first place.”
“Let me go,” said Phil, his body suddenly trembling in fear.
El Diablo tapped his finger on the camera on the table. “You claim you came here to take my picture? Fine. Though I still think you lie. To me and yourself. But I am willing to play along. I’ve never had a beautiful photo of myself taken. Come over here, pick up your camera and take my photo. I will look at the image and know whether you truly are a photographer or an assassin sent by your government to kill me.”
Phil’s head filled with excuses; he wanted to explain that he could barely stand, that the light was too bright and would wash everything out, that he wanted to set things up differently, but he knew those words would fall flat with El Diablo. He had no choice but to try to take the best photo that he could and pray that it was enough to convince the warlord that he was not sent there to kill him.
Phil crawled towards the table. The sand and concrete burned his palms and knees. Sweat dripped from his hair down the side of his face like sudden and unexpected tears.
El Diablo sipped at the beer, waiting.
Phil grabbed the edge of the table and pulled himself to standing. Dots danced across his vision. The waves turned black. Phil drew in several haggard breaths, enough to dissolve the dots and force the sea back to bright blue.
El Diablo chuckled beneath his breath. Phil suddenly hated the man.
Phil could see the sea clearly now, the white rollers endlessly rising out of the blue, racing towards the shore. Relentless, slowly eating away the shore, and returning everything to primordial chaos.
“Your chance, Mr. Photographer.”
Phil stared at the table. The avocados, the knife, the camera, the gun.
He had a choice to make.
He steadied his legs, reached out, and grabbed the camera. He could recreate the world with his lens. Hope could be shaped.
He thumbed the camera on, removed the lens cap. The camera felt substantial in his hands. Familiar. A part of him. This was his tool, his weapon, his sword to cut through uncertainty.
El Diablo sat in his chair, beer cradled in his lap, a half smile on his face, a sneer really, as if he knew something about Phil that he himself did not know.
“They come for us for our sins,” El Diablo whispered turning his head suddenly to look at the sea before focusing on Phil again.
Phil lifted the camera to his eye and framed his subject.
He saw El Diablo, but the man in the viewfinder was rotting. His skin was covered in seeping blisters, the outer layer blackened and curling to expose glistening red meat beneath. Roaches scurried out of his mouth and centipedes roiled in his eye sockets, shiny, slick, and thick strings of mucus snapped and reformed between the insects.
Behind El Diablo, through the lens, the blood-red ocean boiled. The sky above it was purple, marked with swirling vortexes of darkness which drew in and consumed the stars.
And something rose out of the sea, blacker than the darkest night, shifting in form, from shapeless to sprouting tentacles.
Phil tried to scream but he felt as if his breath had been drawn from him. The tentacled monstrosity rose from the sea, towards him. He felt its eyes, as red as the burning sun, finding him, probing, its mass drawing towards him. Phil wanted to run. The thing dragged forward relentless, unstoppable, a furrow of water, a birthing tsunami, skirting its edges. And Phil heard his name erupt from the beast as if it had marked him and was now coming for him.
Phil hurled the camera into the sand and screamed at the horror he was witnessing.
But the horror did not end.
The corrupted vision of El Diablo sneered at him, and the heavens ate themselves, and the squamous tentacled beast rose from the sea.
But, at the same, Phil saw El Diablo, untouched by decay, beer in hand, smiling, and behind him the white breakers rolled across the brilliant blue sea.
Both of them existed. The corrupted man and the untouched man. In the same moment. Two realities. Two worlds together.
Phil felt as if his mind were splitting. What he was seeing was impossible. He wanted to run but his feet seemed rooted to the ground.
“Don’t like what you see?” asked El Diablo.
Through his right eye, the eye through which he framed the shot, the nightmare lived. El Diablo was a living, talking corpse. The sky and sea boiled. A dark beast against the heavens.
He covered that eye with his palm and saw through his left eye. He saw an evil man holding a beer, a gun on a table, the comforting sea. Palm fronds swayed against the sky. He had returned to La Plata. The world was as it once had been, horrible, cruel, but tolerable, the nightmare rising from the sea invisible, hidden behind a veil.
Phil looked at the world through both eyes again. The nightmare returned, and he screamed.
Words did not exist for the madness that enveloped him. This could not be real. It could not exist. He had to escape this nightmare.
“The world is broken,” said El Diablo. “The veil has been torn.”
“It’s you,” said Phil. His naked limbs shook uncontrollably. “You caused this.”
“No. We all do unforgivable things that tear the veil. I murdered innocents. What have you done to open the door to madness? What was your sin?”
Phil had imagined that El Diablo had caused all of this, summoned this evil thing, but then he remembered the sports car in flames on the hillside, the explosion. He remembered Samantha being consumed by disease. He had abandoned her to face death alone. He had done something so cowardly that it had marred the path of his life.
He stared at the sea, and suddenly imagined a stone dropping in the water and waves rippling all the way to the horizon.
He needed to end this.
His gaze fixed on the knife. He knew what he needed to do.
He leaned forward, snatched the knife from the table; El Diablo fell backwards in his chair, hit the hard concrete, began cursing and calling for help.
Phil drove the knife deep into his own eye. Blinding pain dragged him into unconsciousness, returning him to comforting oblivion.
16
“Phil. Phil!”
He heard his name in the darkness.
The sound, small at first, a tiny voice as if filtered through a distant tunnel, grew to an urgent whisper, and Phil heard his own sudden gasping for breath. Electric shards of pain were drilling into his face, a million volt
s searing into the center of his head. He smelled the coppery tang of blood, the sharp stench of urine, and, beneath that, the salty musk of the sea. Sand pressed sharply against his cheek.
He wasn’t dead.
He opened his eye. He was still in the camp of El Diablo. The forest spread out before him, the spaces between the trees filled with shadows, their leaves glistening with drops from recent rain. He lay on his stomach, face sideways, staring across muddied ground, and focused on a line of black ants as they carried bright green leaf fragments in a gently undulating line. They tore down the forest and consumed it, rebuilt it into something else. An orchestra of insectile clicking and churring pulsed all around him, and for a moment he imagined himself the conductor; but he knew he controlled nothing. That he was insignificant.
“Phil.” The voice was clearer now and cut through the sound of the waves.
A pulse of searing pain gripped his face, as if a metal rod had been poked straight into his skull. He lifted a shaking hand and lightly touched the place where his eye had been. The flesh was swollen and hot.
Memories flooded back: waking in the barrel, meeting with El Diablo, witnessing the scarring sight of the other world and the unspeakable horror rising out of the sea… Driving that knife into his own face to break free of the hold the terrible vision held over him.
He withdrew his hand from his face and saw his fingertips glistening with blood. He would never see with that eye again. But the images of that unimaginable horror that had risen from the sea were gone. The world had returned to the way that it should have been. Even half dead, broken, blind in one eye, all of this was preferable to what he had glimpsed across what he could only imagine was the veil of madness.
“Phil!”
He pushed himself up to sitting, legs bent beside him. He tracked the voice across the sand and mud to a tree at the edge of the blurry jungle. He blinked until things came into greater focus. Xavier was bound to a tree with heavy ropes.
A wide gash cut across his forehead, his lips were swollen, his legs bare and bruised.
“He’s going to kill us,” said Xavier. “Untie me! We have to escape. We can run into the forest, or maybe find a boat at the beach.”
Phil glanced in the direction of the beach. Through the break in the trees he saw golden sand, blinding blue ripples. No towering monster. But then suddenly he could still sense it. It waited beneath the waves.
He fought against the desire to weep. Maybe it was not madness but something real.
“Did you see it?” he asked Xavier. “In the sea?”
Xavier was panting, gathering his breath. “Help me. They’ll come back for us. They’ll kill us! They took Halley. He was screaming, like an animal being slaughtered and skinned. Oh my god, what did they do to your eye?”
“It doesn’t matter if we escape,” Phil said. “Not really. That thing, it’s real, isn’t it?”
“Phil, snap out of it. We need to escape! Right now! There’s a machete in the truck. Grab it and cut me loose.”
Phil stood, stumbled, crashed against the truck, and collapsed to the ground.
He wanted to close his eyes, wanted the pain to stop, and when he opened them for the nightmare of La Plata to be gone. He wanted it to all be a dream.
He reached up until he hooked his fingers over the lip of the truck bed and slowly pulled himself upright. He fumbled the machete into his grasp and then just stood there, bent over the back of the truck, sucking in deep breaths, getting used to standing. He quivered weakly. He thought he could reach Xavier and hack at the ropes to free him, but after that… He wasn’t sure. He thought he would only be able to stumble a dozen steps into the jungle before he collapsed.
It would be easier to give up, to collapse here. He glanced again at the black line of ants against the jungle floor. Maybe the ants would shred him into a thousand pieces and carry him away, take all those pieces of flesh and bone and rebuild him, his remnants becoming walls to their home, his sentience swallowed by the world. Maybe then he could be hidden from the horror.
But then he heard Xavier again, and he thought of Xavier’s children, waiting for a father who would never return if Phil did not try to rescue him. Their father would vanish from their lives forever. The world which had seemed so solid and predictable would disintegrate and fill with pain. Chaos, uncertainty, and fear would eat away at them.
Phil felt a sudden wash of guilt. He vanished from the last moments of Samantha’s life. He chose to let her die alone, to face the horror of the unknown without him holding her hand. His world had been destroyed when he had made that choice. And now the border between sanity and madness had been decimated by his guilt.
He could not do that to them.
He sucked in a wheezing, rattling, wet breath. He thought of the beast rising from the sea. It could not have been real. The only true horror was himself. He had left his wife to die, alone. He had turned from his own humanity. His own fears and guilt had manifested in the world. That thing rising from the sea was his own creation. He had become the monster.
But perhaps hope still existed. If he unleashed those horrors, he could also undo them. He could turn his life around. Hope could conquer dread.
He turned, machete in hand, and took his first steps, fighting against buckling knees. The blinding fire of pain consumed the right side of his field of vision. He stumbled across the clearing until he reached Xavier, then grabbed the thick rope that bound him.
“Get behind the tree and cut at the rope.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Xavier laughed. “At this point, I’m pretty sure you could chop off my finger and I wouldn’t feel any pain.”
“I’ll cut you loose. I’ll get you back to your family. I won’t leave you here to die.”
17
Minutes later, after Phil had freed Xavier, they raced away in the pickup truck. Xavier drove, steering them up a rutted mud road away from the encampment and back towards the highway that led to the capital. He had somehow found one of his cigarillos and chewed on it, the unlit tip bobbing against his bloodied lips.
Phil breathed audibly, trying to slow the pounding of his heart. He felt wired as if he had drunk a gallon of coffee.
“We need to turn back,” said Xavier suddenly, taking his foot off the accelerator. A dark clot seeped across his brow. He smelled putrid, as if infection inched beneath his skin. “I can’t do this. We can’t just run and leave Halley.”
“He doesn’t matter,” said Phil. He squinted through his good eye into the side mirror, watched as the jungle consumed the road as they drove away from El Diablo’s camp. He wanted everything behind him to be destroyed. “He’s a killer. A murderer. He dragged us into this.”
Xavier slowed the truck and then finally stopped, the engine idling unevenly, as if it might stall at any moment. Phil thought that if the engine died, it might not start again, and a sudden wave of fear swept through him. They would be trapped on this road, still in the lair of El Diablo. He was broken, exhausted, on the verge of irreversibly slipping into delusion, and he knew without the truck he would not be able to escape. He might be able to stumble a hundred feet if he was lucky, and then his knees would buckle, the cold mud sucking at him, insistent. The shadow-people would creep out of the forest; the screaming woman and the calm man would return to slap him. He would be captured again, shoved back into the barrel, or worse - dragged out to the beach where that thing waited for him.
“Go, go, go!” Phil said. His voice was a whisper, inconsequential. “We have to leave, now! Didn’t you see that thing in the water? If we turn back, we die. If we don’t move, we die. We need to get out of here! What don’t you understand? We need to go as fast as we can!”
He thought of trying to pull the keys from the ignition, but he was tired, so tired, and could barely even lift his arms.
“You talked about it before. Making a wrong turn. A life lived with bad choices.” Xavier no longer looked young, his skin pallid from lost blood,
dirt inking age lines on his face, in his knuckles. “We have to do the right thing.”
“No!” cried Phil. “It’s too late for that. If we go back, the thing I saw will seep in through my other eye. I won’t know where to run! Please, drive!”
“We’ll get you help. I promise. There’s nothing back there at the beach. When we’re home in L.A., I’ll help you. I won’t abandon you.”
Phil turned in his seat and peered at the sky through the break in the trees; the same sky that hung above the sea. Bright, blue, cloudless.
But he knew what he saw was a lie. There were the unseen things lying beneath the surface. The memory of the horror rising from waves flashed across his sight, and he let out a whimper.
“We can’t leave him,” Xavier insisted.
“We have to.” Because that monstrosity was coming, and they would never be able to escape.
“We have no choice.”
“Please. Please don’t do this. I can’t go back.”
“Stay in the car, then. I’ll free him, and then we can leave again. It won’t take more than a minute.”
“It will find us. We need to escape, as fast as we can!”
Xavier’s gripped tightened on the steering wheel and he stared at Phil. “We’ll get you home, buddy. I’m sorry I brought you here. And I owe you for rescuing me. Big time. You’re a fucking hero. But now… It’s my turn to be a hero. I can’t leave him behind to die.”
“But you can,” said Phil. He thought of Samantha, the starving children, the injured at the refugee camp. “It’s not right, but you can. He’s evil. A murderer! All this evil taints the world.”
“If we do nothing and leave him to suffer and die what is the world we leave behind,” said Xavier. “We make the world evil. I’m creating a different world.”
He cranked the steering wheel and gunned the engine, tires spinning in the mud, the truck not moving for a second before the tread of the wheels caught on the ground and the truck jumped forward, racing back towards hell.
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