by William King
“Elizabeth, I am over here,” and it took little time for her to get to me. She spoke as she cradled me in her arms, saying, “Mason why did you leave camp? I have been worried sick about you ever since. I thought that I would never see you again.”
“Elizabeth, just how in the world did you find me?”
I had already known the answer, but I wanted to hear it from her. I wanted to hear her finally admit that her mother was watching over the both of us.
“Oh Mason, I will tell you that it was a sight to see. I awakened in the tent and noticed a bright light before I even opened my eyes, and for some reason I looked over at my mother’s portrait to find it was the source of light. It was glowing. The source of light seemed to leave the picture frame and flutter around inside the tent. Mason, I swear to God my mother spoke out to me. She said that you were in trouble, and I followed the glowing light straight to you.”
“Elizabeth, do you still believe that it is impossible for me to know her after what has just happened?”
“Mason, all I can say is that I am truly sorry, can you ever forgive me?”
“Elizabeth, there is nothing to forgive you for, I love you.”
I turned my back so she could not see my tears and said, “Elizabeth I did not mean...”
I never got to finish the sentence as she grabbed me, spun me around and said, “Mason, do not ever apologize for loving me. I have been blinded to the truth for so long, but now I finally see that I as well love you very much, with all of my heart. I just did not realize just how much until I thought I had lost you forever. I made a promise to myself that if I found you alive I would never deny that love from you any longer.”
She pulled me into her arms and gently kissed me with her warm and moist lips, and as I kissed her back my hands slowly made their way down between her legs, inching their way closer to her sweat spot. Elizabeth’s hand had already made it to my hot rod, which was ready for action. As I unbuttoned her pants she said, “Mason, I want you inside me right now,” as I pulled them down, along with her panties. I grabbed her from behind and followed her to a soft sandy clearing where she laid down on my t-shirt and said, “Come on, give it to me big boy.”
I slid my hands upwards and across her soft smooth stomach, slowly moving them towards her firm breasts and squeezed them, as she moaned and sunk her nails into my back and said, “Don’t stop, keep going,” as she climaxed her sweet spot gripped my hot rod tighter and tighter until I could not stand it any longer and erupted. The both of us were so hot and bothered that neither of us could stop nor control ourselves, and our passion only lasted for approximately six minutes, but it was great.
Elizabeth softly spoke, “Mason will you marry me as soon as we get back to the Nickel’s?”
Only in my dreams have I heard those words come out of Elizabeth’s mouth. However, I knew that Bastelet would never let us get married, especially on this island, where her powers were at their greatest.
“Elizabeth, you know that I love you with all my heart, and I do want to marry you, but you also know as well as I do that we could not possibly try to marry with that evil bitch Bastelet just waiting to destroy us. She is just waiting to devour the both of us. The pain would be much too great for us to bear if that were to happen.
“Bastelet will do anything within her power to keep us apart, especially if we try to marry on this island. She will ruin everything for us if we let her, so we must not let that happen.”
Elizabeth kissed me again with her hot moist lips and said, “Of course Mason, you are definitely right about that. I just got carried away for a moment, but as soon as this ordeal is over, we are going to have the most luxurious wedding that you have ever seen.”
Once more, the dreadful drums began to beat with furry, taking away Elizabeth’s loving smile as she said, “We will return later when it is light, but for now I think we had best be getting back to our camp.”
When Elizabeth and I made our way back to camp, we found it in ruins. Bastelet had once again done her handy work, destroying everything in camp, right down to the destruction of Elizabeth’s mother’s portrait. The both of us did our best to keep our composure, but we were way beyond any reassurance. I yelled out at the top of my lungs, with all the pent up hatred and atrocious feelings that I possessed for her black-hearted evil spirit and said, “Bastelet you black-hearted demon, evil daughter of Satan. I will beat you at your own game, do you hear me. If I were you, I would not think that just because you have demolished our camp that we are going to leave this island. Elizabeth and I will find somewhere else to go, and I think I know just the place. Elizabeth’s aunt Cassandra’s dilapidated shack will do just fine. She hated you with a passion, and maybe that will give her some comfort.”
I screamed at her until all my anger was spent, and waited nervously for her to respond, but she never did. She was quiet, planning bigger and more bizarre things for us, no doubt. Bastelet knew that the fastest way to make me lose hope would be to destroy the one thing in which I was counting on to show me how to eradicate her evil ass, and that was destroying Elizabeth’s mother’s portrait. I had told Bastelet that we were going to occupy Elizabeth’s aunt Cassandra’s old house only to tempt her into battle, and the more I thought about it the better it sounded. The beating drums continued as we tried to recover anything that was salvageable at camp. The cleanup was swift and did not take as long as I had thought, due to the fact that there wasn’t much left to recover.
Now that our only source of shelter for the night had been destroyed by that evil bitch Bastelet. I knew that Elizabeth and I had to find something else to shelter us during the cold nights within the jungle, and thought of Cassandra’s little old house. Elizabeth and I discussed what our next move was going to be when she said, “Mason, we have to hike back to the Nickel’s place and have everything that can be repaired fixed and everything that cannot be replaced, including our tent that had been ripped into pieces by Bastelet.”
“Elizabeth, why not use your aunt’s old place. I know that I had said it to nag Bastelet on, but it would seem like the most logical thing to do for shelter.”
“Mason that place is so old and dilapidated that the floors would probably give way from our weight alone, and besides it is hard to say what kind of animals are living inside it.”
“Elizabeth, just for the sake of argument, let’s go have a look inside, it is worth a try.”
“Alright Mason, we will go have a look inside, but that does not mean we are going to stay. We will need the machetes because the place has been overgrown with vines, and it will take a while to cut through.”
I got the machetes out and we were on our way when Elizabeth growled, “This is a complete waste of time.” I paid no attention to her and kept walking. We walked less than an hour when we seen it up ahead, halfway hidden by overgrowth and directly in our path. We had just begun chopping our way through the overgrowth when Elizabeth said, “Mason, I do not like this, not one bit. We will need to hurry if we want to use this place for shelter tonight.”
That had been quickly taken care of as it had taken very little time to cut our way through the overgrowth, and we were standing at the doorway of Cassandra’s home. Once inside the old shack it looked as if it had been petrified, but surprisingly the furniture was still in fair condition. From the look of the place, it looked as if Cassandra had left in a hurry. The table had been set as if she had been ready to sit down for a meal, and the food that had been left untouched was now petrified.
“Elizabeth, from the looks of things one might almost swear that your aunt Cassandra had left running for her life.”
“Mason, I know exactly what you are thinking, but you might as well forget it because we are not staying in this dilapidated place. In fact, the two of us are leaving for the Nickel’s and the sooner the better.”
“Elizabeth, you can leave if you want to, but I am staying here,” I said irrefutability with a calm voice. “I have a strong feeling that this ol
d place contains more than meets the eye.”
“Really Mason, I simply cannot believe that you are really saying these preposterous things. Suppose my aunt Cassandra had been running for her life just as you claim, and whatever she had been running from might possibly still be here.”
“Elizabeth, you are exactly right, that is what I am counting on. I will bet you one-hundred dollars that Bastelet was somehow involved with whatever had happened here. I am going to have a look around to see if your aunt Cassandra had left any clues behind since it seems as if she left in quite a hurry, care to join me?”
Elizabeth replied with a frightened look on her face, “Mason, I know exactly what you are thinking, and we are not staying here, no way are we staying the night in this place.”
“Elizabeth, you sure have a stubborn streak to you, and it is showing. I wonder which of us is the most stubborn.”
I did not want to argue the point any further so I decided to try to tease her into changing her mind.
“Mason, I sure in the hell am not stubborn. I am practical, and something surely tells me that it would not be practical for us to stay here for the night.”
“Elizabeth, I am not leaving here until I get some answers. I simply refuse to let all that we have gone through end up being for nothing. I have made up my mind, you can go back if you wish, but it will be without me. It makes little difference to me at this point.”
“Mason, you are leaving this place with me even if I have to forcefully carry you over my shoulder.”
I laughed and said, “How do you suppose to do that?”
She was furious, and I wanted to say anything that I could to make her stop and think for a moment that she could be throwing away our only hope of finally finding out the truth.
“Elizabeth, if you try to make me leave, I swear I will...”
“You will what Mason?”
“I will turn you into a toad, and leave you that way until I can find out the answers to all of my unanswered questions.”
Laughing hysterically she replied, “I really believe you would if you could, wouldn’t you?”
Laughing uncontrollably, I could barely understand her as she playfully said, “Are you going to put some sort of a spell on me Mason?”
Elizabeth stopped laughing and said, “I suppose that if you are that determined to stay in this dilapidated place. I have no alternative except to stay here with you. Oh, please listen to me when I say do not underestimate the powers of your supernatural opponent. Bastelet gets her powers from the darkest reaches of Hell, and so far, she has been unseen. She has godly powers, and I will try to see to it that while you are destroying your opponent, you do not destroy the both of us along with her.”
I suppose she was right, I had been preoccupied with the idea of destroying that evil bitch, and only thought of Bastelet as a parasite who feed on the souls of innocent people, leaving them to walk the spiritual realm of the world as lifeless Zombies without rest, for all eternity.
“Elizabeth, I promise to be as careful as I possibly can be in this atrocious predicament that we are in. I am going to check out the den Elizabeth. I saw a small desk when we opened the door.”
With any luck at all, I was hoping to find at least something that would be helpful to us. I slowly opened the desk drawer and emptied all the contents onto the top of the desk, but I saw nothing of importance, only the usual things that one would expect to find in a desk. Paid receipts where goods had been delivered by the ships that had anchored once a month at the island. I found some personal letters I supposed were from Cassandra and Laurence’s friends and relatives, and that was it.
Once I finished going through the top desk drawer I replaced everything as I had found it, except for the letters, those I kept to examine later. When I opened the second drawer to the desk, I found much of the same, ledgers, receipts, and order blanks for purchasing the needed items for her survival. I closed the drawer and opened the next one and that is when I became very confused. The papers that I had found would in my opinion be used by an expert Parapsychologist. The notes on one of the papers I had seen before, as I had studied them long ago when I was studying for my own Parapsychologist Degree. I finally pieced a small piece of the puzzle together. Cassandra’s husband Laurence had not been a scientist as I had once thought him to be.
I called out to Elizabeth and asked, “What kind of work did you say your uncle Laurence did?”
“Why do you ask Mason?”
“Well, the papers I found in the desk draw look as if they belonged to a Parapsychologist, or something along that field of study.”
As she examined the papers that I handed over to her, she replied, “That is a pretty damn good guess Mason. He was a Psychology Professor. I would have to say Mason, you and my uncle Laurence would have gotten along famously together. He studied an awful lot about the very same things that you believe in.”
“Elizabeth, why didn’t you tell me this before? I might have understood a lot more about everything that has happened to us in the last month.”
“Mason, I am terribly sorry, However, I just had not thought to compare your work with that of my uncle’s.”
“Elizabeth, your uncle Laurence had to have a secret hiding place where he kept his notes. We must find it before it is too late. Elizabeth, did either of your parents ever talk about what your uncle Laurence did, or explicitly say what he was doing on Devil’s Island?”
“I am afraid not Mason, they were pretty careful about what I might over hear. However, there is one thing that I overheard my father say. He had stated that he wished Laurence would give up his operations on the island and come back home to England. I always got the impression that my father never really approved of whatever it was that my uncle Laurence had been doing on this island. My uncle Laurence was, that is from what I can remember, even stranger than my father. My father had loved his brother very much, but because my father had such a strange way of projecting his love, when my uncle Laurence did visit, the atmosphere was filled with some sort of tension from the minute he had arrived to the minute he left.
“My mother had been a different story altogether where Laurence was concerned. She had a terrible fear of him for some reason, and one day I had overheard her say to my father that he would one day go straight to Hell, and unfortunately take the rest of us with him. I never again heard her say such a staggering remark about anyone, and she had never given a single reason for it, at least not that I had ever known. Mason I always thought it was rather strange that my father had loved Laurence and hated my aunt Cassandra, and my mother loved Cassandra and was really terrified of my uncle Laurence, I could never figure it out.”
“Elizabeth do you really believe that your mother feared Laurence because of his work, or do you think it was something more of a personal reason?”
“I really could not say for sure, although I loved my parents very much I realize that there had been a great deal of things that I had never known about them, and I am no longer sure that I even want to know.”
It was hard to miss the hurt in her eyes as she said, “Mason the memories that I have of my father are very complicated to say the least. You can say that they hang on a balancing scale. I can believe that they were good because I know nothing to prove differently, and I do not believe that I want to uncover anything that would tip the scale and scar what memory I do have of him after all these years.”
“Elizabeth, do not torture yourself. I am sure that your father was not such a bad person. From what you have told me he was a strict man, and yes even a little dominating to say the least, but you have to remember that your mother could have never loved a man who was less than kind and forgiving.”
I walked over to her and placed my arms around her to give her some reassurance. I felt her body begin to tremble as she cried out for the very first time. I could do nothing but hold her firmly until all the pent up emotions were washed away by her tears. She looked up at me, the strain now gone from he
r face and said, “Mason you are so much like my mother, in many ways I see her within you.”
“Elizabeth, I take that as the highest compliment that I could ever be given.”
“Indeed it is, for there is nothing or no one that I loved and respected more, until I met you.”
The moment quickly ended and I placed it deep within the depths of my heart to use some other time when memories were all I had left to look forward to.
“Well, if we expect to stay here tonight we had better start clearing us a pathway. I will take the kitchen and you can start wherever your curiosity takes you.”
I knew that she would quickly disappear as soon as my back was turned. Once in the kitchen I discovered that it had not been in too bad of shape after all the years left abandoned. The rusted handle of the old water pump had still worked perfectly, which I used to pump some water to make some hot tea for the two of us. Then I built a fire in the old cast iron wood burning stove from the wood that had been left. Only God knows how many years ago to boil the water for some hot tea. The heat from the fire soon began to take away the dampness within the old shack.
When I was through I walked into the living room, and Elizabeth was nowhere to be found. Therefore, I went outside and called out her name, but received no answer. I walked around the old shack too where the gravesite came into view when I heard the sound of a rifle go off close by. I screamed out Elizabeth’s name, but I got no response, only silence filled the jungle. I ran to the edge of the clearing where the jungle canopy started and screamed out Elizabeth’s name again, and this time she came running out from underneath the jungle canopy like an animal that was being hunted.
“Mason Williams, what in the hell is going on, why are you screaming out my name?”