“Go to hell.”
“I’m getting a little tired of hearing that.”
“I don’t give a damn.”
“At least that’s different,” I said, standing up casually and walking over to him, holding my knife in front of me. “Now I have a choice—I can either knock you out again and throw you overboard for a swim, or you can answer my question. Take your pick. I really don’t care.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Dare what? Throw you overboard? Why not? You tried to kill me.”
“You don’t have the guts to throw me overboard.”
That was the finale for him. I went into the bathroom and grabbed some adhesive tape I kept in my travel bag, returned, and asked him once more. “Last chance. Are you going to answer my question?”
“Go to hell.”
“I think we’ve covered that.” I hit him over the head again, then taped his mouth shut despite his squirming a little and dragged him through the open door to the veranda. Then I threw him over the rail, listening for someone to shout “Man overboard!” or something similar. But the ship was quiet.
I felt bad for about five minutes, then I locked the veranda door, slipped back into bed, and went to sleep on my now sheet-less bed.
Probably in about the same length of time it took him to drown.
Then I went to sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
I came out of the darkness into a misty glow. The flickering fires of the gaslights provided scant light. A row of bars stretched in front of me, boisterous groups of men teeming in and out into the street, most of them drunk, some clinging to women. Tenement houses huddled along the next block, and I wobbled toward them.
They looked familiar. After a moment, I realized that I lived in one.
Smokestacks stabbed the skyline beyond the tenements, and the streets and people around me were covered in grime.
I was the only exception. I was covered in blood. It was dripping from my chest.
I was running.
From her.
The young neighbor girl who lived a couple of apartments from me. She’d been stalking me for weeks, until a few minutes ago. When I walked into the street where the gaslights were absent, she appeared out of a side street and stabbed me. Her aim was off a little, so I still lived, but my energy was fading fast.
I could hear her footsteps gaining on me.
She was pretty, but there was a depth in her eyes that a fifteen-year-old girl shouldn’t have. Ageless, full of darkness.
My daughter had said that she was the goddess of evil, whatever that meant. My wife was afraid of her and said that she was trying to kill the three of us. I knew that my family was right, but it made no sense. The girl had just moved in; how would she know anything about us, and why would she desire our deaths?
But I felt that I’d known her for a thousand years.
Now I was almost to the river and she was still gaining. My chest was beginning to hurt. I staggered, almost tripping on a crack in the sidewalk.
She was immediately behind me. I stopped and turned at the edge of the river, the dirty water splashing below me against the seawall.
“Why do you want to kill me?” I asked, bewildered.
No answer, just a look of anger and determination. Her hand holding the large knife swung again. I stepped out of the way, stumbled, and fell.
The water was cold and dark, infusing me with the memory of another plunge into water sometime in the distant past.
I tried to inhale air, got only water, unsuccessfully tried to cough it out of my lungs, then descended into a deeper darkness.
I awoke covered with sweat, so wet that I felt I had just climbed out of the river in my dream. I rubbed my eyes as I searched my mind for the meaning of my dream. I didn’t recognize its location, just that I was somehow familiar with the dark and dirty street, as well as the river.
But what about the girl who had chased me?
She was familiar as well.
I climbed out of bed, threw my pajamas on a chair, and went to take a shower. After washing my hair, I glanced down at the drain.
There was a small clump of dirt in the grille.
The second full day at sea, we bounced through rough water, aiming for Ocho Rios, Jamaica. We’d left the Bahamas behind sometime during the night. I wandered around for a while, then took my book, climbed to the top deck, and read, drifting to sleep from time to time. In the clear sunlight my naps were dreamless, not like the night before. No mad girl chasing me with a knife, though I continued to feel that someone was watching me.
At four o’clock I stood up and looked westward. A few minutes after four we were supposed to pass close to Punta Maize, the easternmost point of Cuba. I squinted into the sun and thought I saw a smudge on the horizon, but maybe it was only my imagination—though from my height above the water, the horizon should have been at least twice the distance to Cuba.
We were in the Windward Passage. In the early 1700s, a slave ship named the Whydah was seized here by “Black Sam” Bellamy, a famous pirate. The Whydah became his flagship, until it ran aground off Cape Cod about two months later, having attacked and captured loot from a number of ships on its path northward. It was full of gold when it capsized in a storm, and the ship and its gold weren’t rediscovered until 1984.
I looked westward again. The smudge was gone. Had it been the pirate ship? My imagination had run wild last night; was it doing the same today?
After we raced through the Windward Passage, it was a straight shot to Ocho Rios, 523 nautical miles from Vacation Cays, though it wouldn’t us do any good to arrive before dawn.
Tonight, was casual dress for dinner. It seemed a little odd to me that after we lay in the sun in our bathing suits the day before on Vacation Cays, we had to rush back to our rooms and put on our formal wear. Today, with hours to prepare, the dress was casual. I wondered who did the planning.
I wasn’t much for wearing a bathing suit to dinner, so I put on a pair of dark blue Dockers slacks with a light blue polo shirt. My entire table had arrived before me. Obviously, Eve and Eme’s side was one thug short. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to resist saying something for long, so I tried to concentrate on the menu. The entrées included Beef Wellington, lobster, and salmon in a dill sauce, an appetizer of fruit marinated in kirsch, and a cold cherry soup. The menu made me wonder how a chef could fix two thousand meals three times a day and still have his food come out better than anything I could ever cook. I decided not to wonder too much and simply enjoy it while it lasted. In less than a week I would be back in my Whistler condo near Vancouver gazing out over the ski slopes and contemplating my future. It was a future I could not imagine, and I had no idea where to even begin my planning. I wondered who Anthony Simone had found to replace me, if he had.
After I ordered dessert, my patience finally failed, and I stood up and walked around to Eme. She smiled at my arrival. Her mother gazed at me with eyes of the purest emerald green I had ever seen, and my heart was gone, though I certainly could read nothing in those eyes. I could read a great deal in the eyes of the older woman and the two remaining goons, however—primarily a desire to commit murder upon me.
“Did you have a nice day?” I asked Eme.
She shrugged. “Pretty good.” She saw me appraising the empty seat and said, “John didn’t come to dinner tonight. Hasn’t been around all day.”
“Probably went for a swim,” I replied, then felt the raw anger on my back as I returned to my side of the table for dessert. I would certainly have to be careful. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so obvious.
It probably didn’t matter. They k
new I had killed him; there was no point in trying to hide the truth. The question was: what would they try in retaliation? They weren’t likely to accept what I had done without revenge. I would have to be careful, but I wouldn’t be scared off. Very little scared me anymore.
After climbing into bed that evening, I quickly descended into hell.
Usually when I flipped off the lights, I could still see a glow through the veranda door curtain from the balcony light. But tonight, once the room lights were off, the walls of the room twisted and wobbled, then plunged into absolute darkness.
After a moment, the darkness lifted slightly.
The gaslights were gone. The river was gone. The sooty grime from the smokestacks was gone.
Replaced by a row of huge old stucco haciendas along a dark street. A few people walked along the dirt street in the pale moonlight. One or two carried something like a lantern, a glass case with a burning candle inside.
I knew that I lived in one of these old houses. This was just our city house. My family grew henequen and sisal outside the city on our plantation, near the old ruins of Dzibilchaltun and the Temple of the Seven Dolls. But we preferred to live in Mérida, near the town square and the old cathedral.
My wife’s mother owned everything, both the plantation and this mansion. I was just a peon in the hierarchy of the city.
As I walked along the road, I knew that the mad one was still after me. I could feel her presence. I expected a sharp blade to stab my back at any moment.
I turned around but saw no one. But far away, from one of the houses, I heard a faint cry.
“Taat! Taat!”
It was my daughter, and she was calling for me in a distressed voice. “Father! Father!”
I ran in the direction of the voice, stumbling through the streets in terror, eventually reaching a giant mansion. I dashed inside to save my daughter from the evil one who hunted us.
When I entered our house, I found my wife sitting in a large leather chair in the entrance foyer, crying.
“She was here,” my wife said. “She threatened our daughter and now our little girl is sobbing in her room, afraid to come out.”
“She” was the woman who lived in a mansion across the wide street, the daughter of the governor of Yucatán, the woman I was supposed to marry. In my dream I somehow knew this, though I remembered very little about her. Why was I supposed to marry her instead of the woman I had married? And why did she hate our daughter so much?
I raced to my daughter’s room.
But I was too late.
When I entered her large bedroom, I found my daughter lying on the floor, blood pooling around her. Then I felt the sharp blade of a knife enter my back. Agony grabbed me and shook me back into the darkness.
Somehow, I knew that years had passed.
Now we were being herded along with an endless throng of people up narrow stone steps into a large church. The lawn in front of the church was packed with huts full of our scrolls and tablets that carried the entire history of our people. Piles and piles of the scrolls occupied the spaces between the huts.
White men wearing metal coats and helmets and riding horses herded us. Most of the men carried long swords. I could smell the rank sweat from the crowd around me, the fear, the unwashed clothes and bodies, smells that permeated into me through open pores, like an infection. I felt horribly filthy, but I knew I was no worse than every other person here. There were so many in our throng that there was no room to lie or sit down when we arrived at the top of the short flight of steps. The people around us stood until they collapsed in exhaustion, unconscious, usually forever. Once in a while screams would echo from the far side of the church, but my daughter and I were left alone, as was everyone around us. Unless they fell and died, of course. Then they vanished. I wasn’t sure how. They just did.
My wife was nowhere in sight. Was she already dead?
A man in a black robe appeared next to me and asked something. I couldn’t hear him. Maybe I didn’t want to, but my daughter beside me replied clearly.
The man in the robe motioned to one of his men wearing a metal coat, and we were taken from the church out onto the lawn and shoved into a small hut, already full of my people and scrolls.
Slowly, more and more of my people were forced into the hut with us, until it was packed.
The small man in the black robe, who I now recognized as the bishop of our territory, stood at the front of the lawn, and he began shouting. “These books must be destroyed! They contain nothing which is not superstition and lies of the devil! We will burn them all, so that future children of your people will not be affected by the lies in them!” Then he walked down the stairs onto the lawn full of scrolls and huts.
A pale soldier appeared carrying a large torch, bursting high with a terrible flame, and the bishop tossed it through the open door of the first hut, into the piles of scrolls and branches that had been packed in with the codices around the people in the hut.
A roaring blaze erupted, accompanied by screams of pain and terror. We were toward the back of the rows of huts, away from the flames at first, but I could immediately feel the heat.
The bishop moved from one hut to the next, one pile of scrolls to the next, lighting each with the torches his soldiers kept handing him. The lawn was soon blazing with an intense fire, spilling a painful heat around it.
Part of my mind was enthralled with the scene before me as though I had seen it before, but most of me felt an overwhelming sorrow as the entire history of our people died. There were carvings and glyphs on the buildings and temples and stelae, but they were nothing compared to the centuries of our history contained in the scrolls around us, and the lives consumed by time who had recorded that information.
I could see that most of the people near me felt as I did—we were watching our history vanish in flame, knowing we would soon follow.
“Taat! Taat!” my daughter screamed, but there was nothing I could do. I grabbed her and squeezed her, but all too soon the flames jumped from the hut in front of us to ours. I looked around to see a path of escape, but there was none. The flames were everywhere. I had waited too long. I hugged her, knowing she was feeling the same agony I felt from the fire as it consumed us.
As we burned and screamed in pain, I knew I had failed her.
Just before the darkness consumed us, I wondered fleetingly where she was.
I awoke drenched in sweat once again, realizing that I was not alone.
A misty figure bent over me, something in her hand.
I snapped on the light in the headboard and blinked my eyes, trying to clear the debris from my sleep.
Looking around, I examined the room, but no one was there. Even the curtains covering the door to the balcony were motionless. Not a flicker of movement. No sign of anything.
The rest of the night was an adventure in tossing and turning. I was afraid that if I went to sleep, I would be attacked by dreams, and though I could see no one, I was convinced I wasn’t alone.
What was happening to me?
I remembered the last dream as clearly as though I were there: the burning of the scrolls in front of the church, the screaming of my daughter and the rest of my people as we were burned to death.
When I awoke, I was no longer in my bed. I was lying on a lounge chair on the top deck in the bright sun. My face was hot.
My sense of time told me it was almost nine o’clock in the morning.
How long had I been here sizzling in the sun? I remembered waking from my horrible dream of being burned to death. I was still in my bed then. But I also remembered falling back to sleep, without any more dreams.
I must’ve a
wakened and wandered up here sometime during the rest of the night, though I didn’t remember doing so.
Sleep clinging to my eyes and brain, I staggered out of the chair with difficulty, my face and arms burning. I wandered over to the breakfast buffet in the interior of this deck.
After I finished eating, I returned to the outer deck and found a lounge chair near the back of the ship that wasn’t in the sun. I flopped into it and stared out over the ocean, watching the wake of the ship vanish into the distance.
The dreams seemed so real. What did they mean?
Every time I left my room after the adventure with my intruder, I stuck a short thread in the door when I closed it. If it was still in place when I returned, I assumed that no one had been in the room. The only problem was that George, my steward, often cleaned the room while I was gone, so it wasn’t a foolproof method. So anytime I opened the door, I stood off to the side so at least I wouldn’t be shot while standing in the doorway.
Nothing happened when I went back after breakfast, even though I had no idea when I had left or whether I’d put the thread in place. But no attacks, no threats to my life.
After breakfast, we docked at Ocho Rios. I went ashore after the ship was cleared for passengers to disembark. I turned down about a hundred and five taxi drivers. Everyone in Jamaica must drive a cab, or at least have a relative who does.
I wanted to climb the Dunn River Falls, but I was worried that I would be too vulnerable, so I just walked into town and looked at some of the shops. I didn’t wear any jewelry myself, since I didn’t need a watch, and I had no one to buy for, so I didn’t even bother to go in the jewelry stores. I could easily have afforded a few dozen Rolexes, but I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would spend that amount of money on a watch. I merely bought a couple of boxes of Jamaican rum cakes, a pound of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee, and some pepper sauce. I asked for the mildest pepper sauce available but suspected it was still hot enough to trigger a volcano in my mouth. I would find out later.
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 3