He wore a dark, loose fitting shirt with billowing sleeves and tight leather pants, all of it done in black. The boots on his feet were black as well. A silver buckle flashed in a bright square on the side of each boot. Even through a shirt that seemed two sizes too big, I could see the damage. His chest looked as if someone had taken a battering ram to it. Huge dents dimpled the cloth. Something wet and shiny leaked down the front. I looked closer and realized that my hands hadn’t looked black in the forest. They had been.
“I don’t know what I found,” I heard myself saying, “and he may die before we have a chance to find out.”
Chapter XXV - To Deal with A Devil
I don’t think I could have made a more dramatic entrance. Had I sprouted horns, grew wings, and told them my mother had slept with Pegasus, the faces staring back couldn’t have been more surprised.
Elsie moved first. She peered over the back of the couch and stumbled backward in shock.
“Jesus God,” she gasped.
The man, if he was a man, jerked at the sound of her voice, straining to catch sight of the woman. When he looked back, his eyes darted wildly from me to Keith and finally settled on Devon strapped to his bed in the corner.
He ran a thick gray tongue across lips that looked as parched as the Sahara.
I glanced down the sleeve of his shirt to his hands.
Five fingers, not three. At least he wasn’t related to the little beast that had crawled up Zachary’s throat.
The hands were thin and pale. Tiny black veins scored a maze under his skin, growing thicker and merging as they moved up toward his arms. At the point where they disappeared beneath the sleeves of his shirt, only two remained. Both looked like thick cords. One moved as I watched, wriggling as if it were alive.
He made as if to rise. The grate of bone on bone crackled clearly through the dense quiet. His mouth opened. A long string of bubbling drool slid out and leaked down the side of his chin. The sigh that slid out of him had the same lonely wail of wind rushing through a cavern.
The man groaned and fell back against the sofa. A spasm rippled through his body and tension faded from his features. Seconds later his head fell limp and his breath settled to a dull rattle.
“Never mind what that is,” Keith muttered beside me. “What are we going to do with it?”
I stood speechless. Everyone else seemed struck just as dumb.
Elsie finally took charge. “You need to get cleaned up,” she said to me. “Keith can stand watch while I get some of the blood off him.”
She turned to the younger man. “He so much as flinches, you empty that gun in his head. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be jumping away so fast I might hit the wall over yonder.”
“Go on,” she told me. “We can handle this. You hear that gun go off, you roust your butt out here quick. I don’t care if you’re naked as the day you were born. Come runnin’, you hear?”
I looked down. None of them had seen Marcy transform. None of them knew how quickly life could turn from coasting along in control of a situation to fighting for survival. I had no idea who he was, nor why something so hideous had carried him in on its back. The man could be anyone, or worse, anything.
“I’ll heat you some water,” Kate volunteered. I shot her a look that would have held surprise if I’d had the energy. The woman looked as if she were ready to pass out. I remembered how she’d acted when I brought Gabriel up from the dock and nodded in appreciation. Her mood scored the one bright spot in what had increasingly appeared to be an otherwise dismal future. At least she wasn’t running this time. I thought about that for a second and realized that maybe this time she should.
Keith nodded and clutched the rifle tightly. “Go on. I’ll watch him.”
I didn’t want to leave them alone. Yet, Elsie was right. The thing’s blood had soaked through my shirt, leaving my chest and arms a slimy mess. The rest of my clothes were just as sodden, still wet from the rain and from slipping through brush. Mud clung to the knees of my jeans and arced long brown streaks across my arms. On top of it all, I smelled as rank as a locker room after a double-overtime come-from-behind win.
Kate came by carrying pots from Angel. Between them they might heat a gallon of water. As nasty as I felt, the thought of a cold bath nearly made me groan. I grabbed one of the propane lanterns and lit it with a sigh.
She must have seen the look on my face. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring more. I promise.”
The girl was good on her word. By the time I’d scrubbed the blood from my hands, arms, and face, she brought in the big pot we’d used as a sterilization vat when we’d removed Gabriel’s leg. She poured the steaming water into the tub and ran cold water on top, testing it every few minutes with her finger. When she was satisfied, she stepped back.
Maybe three gallons tops clung to the bottom of the tub. Still, it was more hot water than I’d seen in a month. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a strip of cloth that looked like it’d been cut from an old flannel shirt.
“Washcloth?” I asked.
“That and privacy cover,” she said as she turned toward the door. “I’ll be back with more hot water. It would be nice if you used it to cover up the important parts.”
I did. She reappeared three times, carrying more steaming water on each trip. After the last pot had been emptied, she stepped back and wiped a strand of hair away from her face with the back of her hand.
“That enough?”
I sat with the strip of flannel covering what I considered my important parts. I figured that she must have agreed with my choice because she didn’t look offended.
“It’s more than enough,” I told her. “It feels like heaven.”
A yearning look slid across her face. “It looks like heaven. This may be the first time in my life that I’ve looked at a naked man and felt more lust for the water around him.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “If you want, I’ll wash up and leave it here. You two can share a few private moments after I leave.”
Kate wrinkled her nose. “No offense, but you’re a mess. I’m afraid I’d catch something.”
I stayed until I’d wrung every ounce of heat from the bath. I scrubbed everything, head to toe, important parts and incidental parts alike. I washed my hair in honest to God hot water, and with shampoo. By the time I’d finished, the bathwater looked like a mud puddle churned into a dirty, frothy scum. I wasn’t even sure it could be called water anymore. The consistency came closer to swill fit for hogs than anything else.
The cleaning seemed to take the edge off the weariness as well. Even my stomach had settled to a queasy feeling rather than a writhing mass of puke that couldn’t wait to be expelled.
Keith sat at the bar with the rifle across his knees. A single yellow light glowed from the center of the table. Everyone else had disappeared except for Elsie. She stood at the far end of the sofa looking down at the man with a frown on her face.
“Let’s smoke, Hill William,” she said and glanced toward the younger man. “You watch him, Einstein.”
He looked confused.
“Your brain works, which is more than I can say for some people,” she snorted and cut her eyes at me. “Come on.”
I followed her out on the back porch, closing only the screen door behind me. Denise and Kate had gone upstairs for some reason. Our village handyman might be willing to stand guard by himself, but I wanted to be able to get to him quickly if need be.
Keith had shored up the sides of the porch enough that nothing of any size could come through without a battering ram. Two crates from the Wall Street camp sat side by side on the little deck. Elsie took one as a seat, lit a cigarette, and passed the pack to me. I followed suit, wondering what the old woman had on her mind.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said as soon as I’d settled down. Weak light from the kerosene lamp inside filtered through the window. “He can’t be real.”
I pulled in smoke and let the calming sensation drift throug
h my body before I spoke. Rain clicked against the roof. The eave of the porch had no guttering. Fat drops poised at the edge, swelling until gravity overcame cohesion and sent them plummeting toward the earth in pale blurs. At the back of the station, water trickled into the cistern.
What I could see of the night looked peaceful. The heavy boards nailed up as a barricade served as a reminder that nights might never be peaceful again.
I switched gears back to Elsie’s last statement. “Neither can gargoyles, dragons, or demons.”
The old woman waved her cigarette in exasperation. The tip etched an orange path in the dim light. “So you’re just going to accept it?”
“Accept what? That I just cleaned about a quart of his blood off me? Yeah, I am,” I said in a voice that sounded just as annoyed as hers.
I leaned back against the wall and looked up at the boards nailed between the supports. Nothing had been simple since the day I landed in Atlantic. Dwight Little had been a turning point in many ways. The instant he pulled me over, he had set a chain of events in motion I couldn’t have escaped if I’d tried. He may have also accidentally saved my life. Had I not ended up with Elsie and Daniel, Angel might be sitting halfway down the coast with me strung from the mast and my own intestines forming the noose.
We had no place for the man inside. Elsie’s fears and my own distrust killed the idea of moving him upstairs into the sick room. I knew I sure as hell didn’t want to sleep next to something that might turn into a flesh eating ghoul overnight. I couldn’t imagine parking him upstairs where sleeping bodies would be laid out like a smorgasbord. A few weeks earlier, the thought would have been insane enough to send me out looking for a psychiatrist. At times, I still wondered if I’d wake up, focus bleary eyes on the clock across from my bed in Tennessee, and realize the whole thing, Fever to Island, had been nothing but a long and bad dream.
“Let’s put him in my room,” I said finally. I flicked ashes into a can Elsie had brought out with her. The weariness had returned with the new questions and new worries. “I’ll sleep in the main room. I don’t know what else we can do.”
The back door creaked open before she had a chance to reply. Keith stuck his head out. Einstein might fit him in terms of practical brainpower, but he looked more like he should be on an episode of Tool Time to me. The thought almost made me chuckle. If memory served me right, the assistant’s name had been Al, so maybe the nickname, Einstein, would work just fine.
He looked back and forth between us. “He’s awake.”
Elsie rose immediately and headed inside. I snuffed out my cigarette and followed her.
The man had pulled himself against one of the sofa’s arms and used it as a headrest. Lizard eyes flickered back and forth between us as we approached. The bandage Elsie had fixed around his middle already seeped blood.
He looked toward the corner where Devon lay half-naked in a pool of his own sweat. “Why is he tied?”
His voice carried the wheezing rasp of an emphysema victim a year after he should have been dead.
I followed his gaze. “He has The Fever. He’s in the later stages and he’s aggressive,” I said. “He killed a man today who had been his friend for years.”
The man’s eyes looked flat and emotionless when he turned back to me. The movement carried a distinct air of dismissal. He looked about as interested in Devon’s plight as I was in the art of Sumerian basket weaving.
“Do you have a name?”
The wet black pupils in his eyes stretched even thinner, carving a black slit across a bloodstained background. The tawny irises nearly disappeared.
“Call me Gorgol,” he finally whispered.
The name sounded familiar. I searched the crumbling remains of memories from college and landed in Mrs. Hick’s Mythologies and Legends class.
“Gorgol, I’ve never heard. But, the root sounds like Gorgos, which means dreadful. It’s the word that spawned Gorgon, the snake-headed women who turned sailors into stone.”
The man said nothing. His chest rattled with labored breath. He looked broken, but oddly, not beaten. His gaze carried an insolence that belied his position on the couch, surrounded by people who might not be able to choose whether he lived or died, but clearly could hasten death along. That fact didn’t appear to impress him at all, leaving me wondering what trump cards he still might have to play.
“Gather your people,” he said in is hiss of a voice. “I will speak to them all.”
I studied him for a moment then looked up and nodded at Keith.
He handed me the rifle and raced off toward the stairwell. Minutes later, everyone but Kelly and Devon had spread chairs from the table in a loose semi-circle around the sofa. The looks on the faces ran the gamut between shock and horror. Daniel sat on the floor behind Elsie, his back turned and his eyes closed. He had crossed his arms tightly across his middle and rocked gently back and forth. When I edged around to see his face, he looked terrified.
“Think,” Gorgol said suddenly, “why it is that your history is filled with things in which you no longer believe. Are you so pompous to believe that everyone who lived before you knew not what their eyes beheld?”
He let the question linger in the dead air. Elsie looked as confused as I felt. I had enough unanswered questions. I had no intention of letting him create more.
“What are you talking about?”
The haughty smile that twisted his lips carried as much pain as it did arrogance. “Demons, giants, dragons, elves - what you assign to folklore and myth. Entire races your kind says were created by unlearned and fearful ancestors.”
He paused and whispered so quietly I had to strain to catch the words.
“Things you have seen and heard of in recent days.”
I chose my words carefully. “We have reason to doubt. History only records them in ways that can’t be verified. We have no bones, no bodies, nothing to imply they ever existed except in the imagination.”
“And thus, we come to you, Wee Lee Um,” he hissed.
The sound of my name uttered in those three distinct syllables, the same sounds that had slid from a little demon and a stumbling corpse, the same words that had been scrawled across a dinner plate in blood, raised the hair along my arms.
Gorgol grinned. His teeth stood like thin yellow posts in the dark opening of his mouth. The moment didn’t last. A spasm of pain racked his body. Blood so dark it looked black bubbled against his lips. When the convulsions had passed, he licked away the froth and flicked his gaze around the tiny group.
“They lived. We lived,” he rasped, his breath coming hard and heavy, “until four thousand years ago. Your ancestor did something no man had ever done, William. He killed one of my kind.”
The crinkles of pain around his eyes fell away, leaving his gaze empty and emotionless. “I have died,” he wheezed, “a thousand times, butchered in wars, starved in famines so intense that people ate dry grass like cattle, and wasted away from diseases so malevolent the earth itself became a tomb.”
I glanced around the knot of people surrounding the thing on the sofa. We had our own Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Their names were Terror, Denial, and Shock. I figured the island would let Death retain his slot as the fourth.
Gorgol’s voice rose until it carried deep, liquid tones.
“Death had no meaning other than the pain of being ripped from one body before entering the next. Your ancestor, Wuhel changed that. The one he killed has never returned.”
“Who are ‘we?’” I asked.
A mirthless grin stole across his face. “Our name is legion, William.”
My mind went instantly to the image of Marcy crouched on the cockpit seat, Betty Boop peeking out from the juncture of her legs and throat bulging around babbling voices. I’d come close to killing Gabriel over that phrase. Hearing it from Gorgol generated no happy thoughts either.
“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded.
His lips twisted with impatience. “Call me what y
ou want. Every culture, every religion knows us. The name means nothing. What matters is time. You have little of it left.”
“Neither do you,” I mused, but his words were not lost on me. The excruciating weariness, the nausea, the lack of motivation painted too similar a portrait to Jessie’s last days.
His bloodless hands flickered. A finger curled motioning me closer. I hesitated. The man could barely move, yet his eyes betrayed a cunning knowledge that left my nerves jittering with alarms.
“Come,” he whispered. “You will be safe. These words are for you, only you.”
The finger beckoned. At the end of it, a long and dirty fingernail pulled at the air as if tugging at some invisible string between us.
I shrugged away the trance-like feel that had swept over me. “You’re dying,” I said bluntly.
“So are you,” he responded. “It doesn’t have to be.”
I glanced at Elsie. All the color had drained from her face. None of the rest looked much better. Tyler appeared to be the exception. He was pissed. I didn’t blame him. His sister lay dying of a disease that had to be tied to the crazy beasts that seemed to be turned loose on the world.
“What do you think, Tyler?”
He looked at me and wiped the hair from his eyes. “See what the bastard has to say.”
I turned back to Gorgol. “You heard the man. Fill us in. Whatever you have to say can be heard by the group. We’ve been living together. I guess we’ll stay together where you’re concerned.”
Anger swept across his pallid face. His eyes glittered and the slits grew to thin dark lines.
“The rest don’t matter,” he snarled. Spit flecked out of his mouth in little white globs as he spoke.
The Island - The Final Chapters Page 6