by Michael West
“They’re sleeping now,” he told her, his lips curled into the cruel smirk she’d seen so many times. “The wolves of the sea lying caged, with their prey as their jailers.”
Christine limped over to the open doorway, leaving a rosy trail on the floor behind her. “I’m bleeding.”
Tellstrom turned to her; shadow swallowed his face whole. He placed a hand on her cheek, his sun-kissed skin warm as a bonfire. She liked it. He moved his hand down her face and neck until it cupped her left breast.
“Alone at last, my love.” His cheek slid across hers; his lips pressed against her ear. “My queen.”
She felt faint and reached out to the railing for support. “I’m hurt.”
Karl glanced down at her bleeding foot, then smiled into her eyes. His own eyes were distant, cold, and unreadable. Christine knew some people in town thought Karl was crazy, but they didn’t understand him the way she did. On another night such as this, she’d come to him with an obscene longing, she’d given herself and her precious virginity over to him so willingly, and she’d asked him...no, begged him to take her away from Colonial Bay. But Karl told her that he could not leave, not as long as his mother was buried here. And then he cried. Until her parents, and everyone else in this damned town, saw the depths of his emotion, they could not know him as she did.
And they could never love him.
“I can take away your pain.” He laid her down on the metal grating. “Will you let me?”
Christine nodded.
Karl teased her with soft kisses, then squeezed down on her breast with all his strength. She cried out through clenched teeth, wrapped her free hands around his brawny wrist. May the gods help her; she liked it. All her life, her parents had told her she was special, but she’d never believed it until Karl came to her. Any girl in Colonial Bay could’ve been his, yet he’d chosen her. For once in her life, she had something of her own, something her parents would never approve of, something that hadn’t been planned. This was bad, and she loved it.
After a moment, he released his death grip on her breast and lowered his head to suckle at her bruised nipple, rousing it with the slow stroking of his tongue. She felt the moist warmth as he worked against her flesh, licking clean the bloodied claw marks he’d made.
Karl then turned his attention to her mangled foot; he pulled a glass scalpel from her heel and another jagged shard from between her toes. She bit down on her bottom lip, wanting to scream but fearing what he would do if she did. Karl dropped his mouth to her sole, wiped away the grime with the fondle of his tongue, and, when he’d finished washing her clean, he took a rag from a discarded toolbox nearby and wrapped it snugly around her wounds.
He wiped her blood from his lips and chin, smeared it across his face. “Soon, we’ll remind them how we were meant to live.”
Christine moved against him, the hollow between her legs aching for him to fill it, to replace the pain with the pleasure only he could give to her. She could sense his greatness, could feel his power. His vision of the world would become reality. She believed that.
“Thou shalt be lord of it, and I’ll serve thee,” she quoted from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, then kissed him, tasting the warm, salty copper of her own fluids on his lips and tongue.
He slipped into her, and in a few moments, her pain was forgotten.
THIRTEEN
A sense of dread curled up in Alan Everson’s gut and made itself at home. In the weeks since their discovery of the lost city, they’d made incredible strides. Despite what they had to work with, their motley crew of archeologists had managed to map and take extensive photographs of the ruins. Carol Miyagi worked day and night on the translation of Atlantean glyphs, and was now able to grasp the language — a hybrid of Egyptian, Greek, and Mayan pictographs. But with each passing day, their cash reserve dwindled. They’d been waiting for new funding from the Hays Foundation to arrive and save them from their money problems, but now...
He entered the cabin they shared and found Carol taking notes, one hand pressed to a large glossy photograph of stone etchings, the other speeding a pen across paper in her journal. Her reading glasses caught the light of a desk lamp, reflected hieroglyphics hiding her exquisite eyes.
Alan forgot his worries for a moment as he drank in the sight of this striking woman. He hadn’t told her he loved her, was not sure whether that was even the correct word for his feelings. At first, they’d just been two lonely best friends who happened to sleep together on these long expeditions (Once, Alan used the term “sex buddies” and Carol nearly fell out of the bunk laughing). Over the past year, however, he’d felt a shift in his feelings he was not quite sure how to interpret. They, like the glyphs Carol hovered over, were an alien language he could not decipher. The only thing Alan knew with any certainty was that he cared about her a great deal, and the news he bore would devastate her.
He knocked on the bulkhead, drew her attention away from her studies.
“Hey there.” Carol smiled and tapped her finger on the glossy. She’d once told him that she hadn’t learned to speak English until she was seven. Whenever an American told her she had a lovely accent, she had to hide her laughter. When she visited Japan, they said the same thing. “I’ve got it, Alan. I’ve been able to decipher about half of these. I can’t tell if it’s a mythology or part of —”
“Roger Hays...his son was just killed.”
“Masaka.” Her smile withered; she slumped in her chair and put down her pen. “Oya, maa.”
Alan didn’t know what she was saying, but the look on her face whispered, “this can’t be happening.”
After a moment, she looked up at him and spoke English again, “How?”
“Shark attack. I just got off the phone with Kravitz in New York. He said Hays is leaving tomorrow night to claim the body and make all of the arrangements.”
Carol nodded, still dazed. “Of course. Um...we should send some flowers. Did he say where the funeral would be?”
“No...he...he just said Hays wouldn’t be back in the office until sometime next month...” Unable to gaze at her, he looked at the floor. “And that he hasn’t signed the grant check yet. He won’t be able to sign it until he gets back.”
“Next month?” Her sympathy for their benefactor turned to frustration in an instant. “They can’t just wire the funds?”
“You know Hays doesn’t phone in his donations. He likes to make a big show of his philanthropy.”
“I can’t believe...who’s running all of his businesses while he’s away? He doesn’t have some underling who can sign a check?”
“The foundation is separate from his companies, Carol. He decides how the funds are distributed, and he’s the only one authorized to sign the checks.” Each endowment came by mail, accompanied by a press release showing Hays signing the check; the smile on the gangster’s face said, “See, I’m a good guy. Nothing bad going on here.” Alan shook his head. “Kravitz assured me that we will get continued funding, but he can’t go to Hays about this right now.”
She took off her glasses and flung them onto the desk. “What are we supposed to do in the meantime? We need supplies. We need more people... Christ, we still need the basics.”
“We should be able to work here another week or so.”
“And then what?”
Alan shrugged. “Then we dip into our savings...”
She looked at the ceiling and snorted.
“...Or we fold up and take a few weeks off.”
Carol stood so fast that her chair shot across the cabin floor. “We’ve only laid some groundwork here. Everything is still preliminary. The second we raise anchor, some other gejashiku will come out here with a larger expedition, better funding, and some decent deep-sea equipment.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid? I mean we’re only talking about a few weeks here.”
She began to pace like a caged tiger. “And if someone else moves in? Do you think Hays is going to want to
fund an expedition to go over territory somebody else has already covered? I know him. If he can’t lay sole claim to something and stick his name on it, he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
Alan thought for a moment. “Then we’ll get funding from somewhere else.”
“Who else will give it to us?” She pounded her temples with her index fingers. “I’m a kook, remember? They’ve made me a leper. Gangster or not, Hays was the only one who would even touch me. Without him, we’d be doing voiceovers for the Discovery Channel right now.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Carol. There aren’t any other expeditions circling like vultures, waiting for us to leave so they can swoop in.”
She stared at him, stunned. “Now who’s being ridiculous? This has been in Time, Newsweek...” She grabbed the printout he’d given her earlier in the day. “It’s on the front page of this morning’s USA Today! They’re not going to just sit back and politely wait for us to get our act together.”
It was true, of course. If this was Atlantis, and Alan had yet to see proof to the contrary, it was the greatest archeological discovery of all time. If they didn’t continue here, others most certainly would.
“You’re right,” Alan said. “But, again, we’re only talking about a few weeks. If we’d totally lost our funding and weren’t coming back, I could see it. But no one is going to jump in here and steal this from us, from you, as soon as we sail away.”
“How am I supposed to stop them? What do you expect me to do? Piss in the water and mark my territory?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t already.”
She glared at him. “Chikusho!”
Alan hated it when she cursed in Japanese. Rather than letting her bait him into an argument, however, he spoke calmly and offered her his most understanding face.
“Sorry. That was uncalled for. I know how important this is to you. But this is the hand we’ve been dealt here and I don’t see any solution other than to wait for —”
“I need to get to New York.” She moved away to her locker at the far end of the cabin, pulled out a knapsack, and threw it onto the bunk.
Alan blinked in disbelief. “You what?”
“I need to talk to Hays.”
“Like hell you do. The man’s son was just killed. Hays has lost a child, his only child. He’s a mess. Even mobsters have feelings.”
“I know that, all right...but I can’t just sit here and watch everything I’ve worked for be pulled out from under me.” Carol tossed some clothes onto the bunk. “I’ll give him my sympathy...and...and I’ll be a real baita and ask him to sign the check before he leaves.”
“He’s leaving tomorrow.”
“I’ll take the Sea Wasp 2. I’ll catch a flight out of Horta to Lisbon, and then grab the first plane back to New York. I’ll be back here the day after tomorrow at the latest.”
The Sea Wasp 2 was their twenty-five-foot outboard motorboat, a twin to the one they kept moored back in the States.
Alan opened his mouth to yell that she was crazy, but thought better of it. It was useless to argue with Carol when she was like this. Instead, he shook his head, speaking more to himself than to her, “Do you know how shitty this is? How inappropriate?”
“Yes,” she snapped, confusion and aggravation moving across her face in waves. “I know. I also know that I don’t have a choice. I have to go in person. A phone call would be too cold and inhuman. I’ll offer our condolences, explain our situation, then leave.”
“Fine. I’m going with you.”
“No. I need you to stay here and handle the expedition.” She chuckled, then added, “No sense in both of us looking callous.”
“I don’t want you driving a speeding boat in the middle of the Atlantic at night by yourself. And as your partner, I know you well enough to know that you’re not a people person. You need help with this.”
Carol said nothing. She produced a Harvard sweatsuit from the locker and stuffed it into her knapsack, not looking at him.
“Let me do the talking for you, handle this with the necessary tact.” He pointed out the cabin door with his thumb. “Nielsen can take care of things here.”
After a moment’s contemplation, she conceded. “Go tell Nielsen he’s in charge. He’ll love that.”
“He’ll do fine.”
Carol looked up from her packing. Her bottom lip trembled. She looked close to tears, but maintained her self-control except to mutter, “Thanks.”
Alan gave her a quick salute and left her alone.
FOURTEEN
What did Man do before fire?
Cornelius Shiva — Neil to his friends, Corny to the kids who used to beat him, Shithead to his father — knew the answer, of course. Before fire, Man cowered in caves and prayed not to freeze or be eaten. Before fire, Man had no power on this earth at all.
Neil sat in the gloom of a deserted warehouse, his face awash in the red and orange light that danced on the end of his match. He watched the wood blacken as fire ate its way down, felt heat as it neared his thumb and forefinger, but he allowed the flame to kiss his skin before extinguishing it. He tossed the spent matchstick aside and lit another, creating new and even more exciting patterns of light.
A flame was like a snowflake; no two were ever the same.
Fire had been Neil’s fascination most of his life, and he had the scar tissue to prove it. His right arm, shoulder, and chest were a mass of disfigurement that dated back to the night he burned his father alive.
They said murderers went to Hell.
Neil hoped that was true.
As he looked into the glow of his match, he dreamed of Hell’s conflagration. But, with his luck, arsonists probably had their own special Hell; an abyss from which they could gaze in upon the glory of the holocaust, but could never touch it, or bathe in its warmth. An eternity without fire...now that would be a pyromaniac’s Hell.
But what Neil did all those years ago...could it really be considered murder?
The police thought so. They’d called it cold-blooded and calculated. His shrinks, on the other hand, said he’d been acting out of fear for his own life, that the years of abuse he’d suffered at the hands of that man had somehow warranted the pyre.
Neil saw truth to both sides of the argument.
After all, Eric Shiva had been a drunken son-of-a-bitch, and a murderer in his own right. Neil watched through the crack in his bedroom door, watched his father beat his mother mercilessly, watched him rip at her clothes and mount her in the middle of the living room while All in the Family played on the television set. And, of course, Neil had been the sole witness when his father pushed her down the stairs and broke her neck.
His father had been arrested, but the death was soon ruled an accident. They’d found alcohol in his mother’s blood; after years of taking the man’s blows, she’d finally given in to his poison. And, just like that, Neil was sent back to live with her killer.
With his wife dead, Eric Shiva needed a new outlet for his rage. Neil’s ten-year old face had provided such a release; but he’d endured the names...
“Hey, Shithead, bring me my beer.”
“Come here, you little bastard, and fix me a sandwich.” “Clean this place up, you goddamn moron.”
...endured the bruises and black eyes in silence. He endured them because, late at night, in the privacy of his room, Neil Shiva would strike a match and burn his own flesh, would deaden his nerves to the sensation of pain. If he couldn’t feel his father’s cruelty, the man would have no power over him.
Then, two months to the day of his mother’s death, Neil’s bedroom door opened in the middle of the night. His father tore the pajamas from his body and pinned him to the floor like an animal. Agony stabbed through Neil as his father violated him, the smell of the man’s breath like the sickening vapors from a whiskey still, and, when it was over, his father slapped him on the back of the skull and left him there to cry and bleed in the darkness.
Neil curled into a fetal
position, episodes of violence replaying in his head, rage clouding his eyes in a crimson fog. And then, he saw it; his father’s face engulfed in hot flames, a screaming skull, crying out in agony as the limitless pain it had inflicted on so many others returned home to consume it.
Neil went to the garage and picked up a gas can.
With great care, he slipped into his father’s bedroom. He poured dark fuel over the area where Eric’s heart should have been, watching the clothing drink. He splashed gasoline onto sheets, comforters, and hands — hands that had lashed out against his mother, hands that had pinned him to the floor — then moved the spout to the man’s face and allowed it to hover there for a moment.
This man was not his father. This was just the bastard who happened to come inside his mother. This was the face of a murderer, a rapist.
This was a face he would burn.
Neil splashed amber fuel, watched as it ran into Eric Shiva’s nostrils, eyes, and ears. The pain must have been excruciating, because, even in his drunken stupor, Eric shot straight up in the bed; his eyes burned, but that was nothing compared to the burning yet to come.
Neil struck a match and tossed it. Flames, blue and swift, spread up the boy’s arm and engulfed his father in seconds. But Neil felt no pain; he was far too enthralled by the writhing torch that danced on the mattress before him, the burning mass that had once been a human being.
He heard screams, but they came to him as if from space, distant and removed from his reality.
They didn’t last long.
As Neil watched the man die, his guilt turned to awe, his shame to power. He didn’t have to cower in the dark like a caveman, afraid of the world. No. With the help of the flame, he could take control.
A thick blanket enveloped him, hid the bonfire from his eyes as it smothered his own flaming skin, and Neil was carried from the smoky room. There’d been a hearing, but Neil had little memory of it; what he remembered was the hospital that came after. He was at the mercy of others once more, separated from the flame. At first, he didn’t think they would ever let him leave, but he learned quickly what to say to the doctors, knew just what they wanted to hear, and soon he was freed. Did the staff think he was cured? Neil didn’t believe that for one second. The courts had only given them so much time, however, and New York was full of juveniles far crazier than he.