Divine Fantasy

by Melanie Jackson

  “What is your real name?” he asked, almost as though he heard my thoughts.

  I resisted for a moment and then answered him truthfully. I half expected him to laugh, but all he did was shake his head. His voice was sympathetic.

  “Parents. Did you know that my middle name is Gwinnett?”

  “Yes, and that’s pretty mean too.” I recalled another fact about Ambrose Bierce. He was the tenth of thirteen children and his parents had christened them all with names beginning with the letter A; Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia and Aurelia. His father had gone alliteration mad. Maybe other kinds of mad as well.

  Okay, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll tell you this part because this won’t be my name for much longer. It is—was—Joyous Jones. That was my name. Really. Sounds like a porn star, doesn’t it? It was a mistake too. I was supposed to be Joyce, after my paternal grandmother, but the Jamaican nurse at the hospital misunderstood my mother, and thinking my parents glad that their flawed child hadn’t died after all, I had ended up as Joyous.

  A less appropriate name would be hard to find.

  “It was an accident. That’s what they always said.” I told him about the Jamaican nurse.

  “But they didn’t correct it,” he pointed out—not cruelly, but he didn’t seem inclined to sentimentalize my childhood and pretend that it had been happy. I was grateful in many ways. I’m not into revisionist history. Sooner or later a lie, however well intended, will come around and bite you in the ass. Sticks and stones will break the bones, but words…Well, frankly, my mental beatings were always worse.

  “They didn’t care that much,” I agreed. “The doctors told them there was every chance I wouldn’t survive my infancy, so why bother the lawyers?” I wondered sometimes—not often but once or twice during the terrible teen years when I had several painful cardiac events—if they didn’t want me, why they hadn’t just put a pillow over my face while I was still in the cradle, and made sure of things.

  “Your heart?” he asked. There was tension between his brows and his head tilted slightly as if he were listening. Probably no one else would have noticed, but I was beginning to know his expressions.

  Unable to stop myself, I touched my chest and willed my heart to remain steady and calm.

  “Yes. Though it turns out the defect wasn’t as bad as they thought. I won the lottery and got only the mildest form of birth defect. My baby wasn’t so lucky.” I bit my lip. Why the hell had I said that?

  “Nature can be pitiless.” There was no overt sympathy in his voice, but I knew that he was empathizing with my pain. He had lost children, too.

  “Yes, utterly pitiless,” I agreed. But not as cruel as people are to one another. And not as cruel as this insane Saint Germain. His shambling monster had taught me that. Imagine not being able to find peace even in death. Zombies sounded stupid, but surely there was enough awareness to know that their bodies were rotting around them. Can you imagine being trapped inside a corpse and unable to escape, compelled to eat people and do God only knows what else? It was too horrible to think about. I said the first prayer I had uttered in a long while that the zombies were too stupid to remember who they were and what they had lost.

  “Ambrose, are you afraid of anything?” I asked abruptly.

  “Hell yes. Just not large crocodiles or beautiful women with sad eyes,” he said, confirming one of my assumptions. “But I have a very lively fear of Saint Germain. He could do far worse than just kill me, if he got the chance. I can’t let him get hold of the lycanthropy virus. The world has enough trouble with AIDS and global warming. It does not need a feral zombie army.”

  No, we couldn’t let that happen. Not ever. I had never thought there was any cause I’d be willing to die for, but now I knew differently. Ambrose’s matter-of-fact statement of Saint Germain’s goals appalled me at a gut level. Everything human in me was repelled by what this creature was doing.

  “We’ll just have to make sure that he never has the opportunity.”

  Ambrose glanced at me. His super hearing probably picked up that this wasn’t a mere statement of intention but an actual vow.

  “Eat your dinner,” was all he said. “You’re going to need your strength.”

  I nodded and stuffed some lobster in my mouth. I’m sure it was good, but that night everything tasted of ash and sulfur.

  Homicide, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

  Sorcery, n. The ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  Chapter Six

  Though I had thought to spend the night with Ambrose, somehow I had ended up back in my own cottage and unkissed. It wasn’t that the thought of sleeping together hadn’t crossed his mind. Or mine. There had been leaning and tension and speeding pulses, but in the end Ambrose had pulled back. I would have been insulted, except that I knew he was frustrated with playing the gentleman. Or whatever it was that he was doing.

  Last night I had been tired and accepted his decision. Today I wasn’t feeling as complacent.

  I still had a strong suspicion when I awoke in my own bed that Ambrose was going to try to stuff me on a plane with the rest of the tourists, so I made sure I was nowhere around when the plane landed. I left a note that said: Forget it. I’m not going. See you for lunch.

  This wasn’t a day for bathing suits. The fog had rolled back about fifty feet from shore, leaving a clear patch for the amphibious airplane to land, but the air remained cold and the usually playful island zephyrs were unnaturally still as if waiting for the guests to depart. Grimacing, I donned a pair of jeans and my only long-sleeved shirt. I also stuffed my digital camera in my pocket. I’d decided that while I was hiding out, I would finally visit the mangroves and perhaps get a look at the mother crocodile. If I survived this vacation, I was going to have some amazing photos to share with…someone. Someday.

  It shouldn’t surprise you that I also took a gun. I figured Ambrose had left it with me for a reason.

  Ashanti seemed inclined to follow, so I shut her into my cottage before I left and added a line to my note warning Ambrose where she was. I didn’t want her turning into alligator appetizer or to be left on the island by mistake when everyone else evacuated.

  Thinking of appetizers made me realize that I was hungry again, but I decided not to risk getting caught by Ambrose over the breakfast dishes at what was undoubtedly a hurried buffet. I went out the door and turned left. It was the shortest route to the mangroves and had the benefit of staying away from the pier where people would be loading up to leave, but it did mean passing by the place where Ambrose had roasted the zombie.

  Unable to help myself, I detoured by the pit and took a quick peek inside. There was nothing to see. The crater had been emptied of bones and ash and refilled with dried grass and driftwood. The sight of fresh timber had me shaking my head. With everyone gone, there was only one reason to have this fire pit prepared.

  “Damn it.” I looked back toward the cottage and the pier where the white and blue plane was waiting. I could still leave. Physically, it was possible. All I had to do was turn around and pack my suitcase. That would take all of five minutes.

  However, I found that mentally this course of action was as impossible as ever. No matter how horrible things would get, I had to see this through. Ambrose was one hundred percent correct that we couldn’t let Saint Germain get hold of any lycanthropy virus. And if he did—well, there had to be someone to tell the tale. Also…well, I just needed to do this. I turned my back on the plane, rejecting my familiar place on the sidelines.

  The Spanish word for mangrove is mangle. I rather like this term because the mangrove forests on the island were dense, tangl
ed into woody webs and filled with brackish water, black mud that was rich in rotting organics, and secretive animals like miniature red crabs living in the pendulous roots that are heaving the small warped trees out of the salty water.

  There was also a bit of sandy beach, about four feet below the raised wooden walkway that was little more than a narrow bar, and I had no trouble seeing where the mother croc had been excavating a nest. I kept a wary eye out as I took a picture of the hidden beach; four feet was nothing to an eighteen-foot crocodile if she thought her eggs were threatened. I left her bit of seashore strictly alone, except for the mild molestation of my camera flash.

  Though I thought I was being cautious that morning, in reality I was nowhere near cautious enough. I’ve done some research since then and have learned that saltwater crocs can swim about eighteen miles per hour underwater and will eat sharks if those are dumb enough to get in their way. That they can be damned fast and silent on land was something I had already learned from my in-flight reading, and they are responsible for about three hundred human deaths a year. The recitation of these facts doesn’t begin to touch on the reality. They have one other trick. They can jump three quarters of their body length out of the water when they are going after prey.

  I was dangling over a rough railing about fifty yards from the beach, photographing an obligingly frozen bird that looked a lot like a white ibis, though it was much smaller, when I suddenly had a strong sense of being observed. Half expecting to find an annoyed Ambrose waiting to escort me to the plane, I finished my shot and then turned nonchalantly, preparing to brazen it out.

  It wasn’t Ambrose sitting in the mudflat to my right. It was the huge, giant, massive, enormous mother crocodile that had managed to sneak up on me without making a sound. The walkway was only about eighteen inches above the water at this point and I had no trouble seeing every one of the horny plates crowning her mammoth, tooth-filled head.

  The part of me not immediately terrified into babbling idiocy made note of the fact that this crocodile looked a great deal like an American alligator. It was broad in the chest—immense, colossal, bigger than any gator I had seen or ever wanted to see—and had a fatter snout than other crocodiles, which, my gibbering brain shrieked, was broad enough to accommodate my shoulders or hips, whichever it chose to swallow first.

  My hands, which seemed to have independent thought, decided that they would perform a last act and take a picture of the creature that would be having me for breakfast. It would make for an exciting obit column and might even put my books on some best-sellers lists—posthumously, of course. This task involved glancing down at the viewer to make sure she was in frame. I needn’t have worried. No matter where I pointed the camera, there was only smiling crocodile filling up the lens. She obligingly turned her head into profile and opened her jaws so I could see all of her enormous teeth. My handgun, tucked into my pants, felt totally inadequate for the situation, and I didn’t even reach for it.

  I expected death, but she didn’t attack. Not even when the damned flash went off. Twice.

  After I slipped the camera into my pocket and gulped a few breaths of air, I whispered a tentative hello. The beast swung her head back around but made no move toward me, and it goes without saying that I made no move toward her. Instead I began a slow retreat up the wooden walk, placing my feet quietly and praying that the railings were sturdy enough to catch me if I backed into them on accident. Once around the bend and out of her line of sight, I did some undignified fleeing until I reached the edge of the mangle and was again under an open sky.

  There I dropped to my knees and did some heavy breathing and muttering prayers of relief and gratitude that I hadn’t ended the morning in the creature’s belly. There is a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. There are none in crocodile-infested mangroves, either.

  I heard the plane take off a few minutes later, and figured it was safe to return to my cottage and have some breakfast, or at least something hot to drink since my appetite had vanished again. This was a good plan, and would have been easy enough to execute except for two things. My line of retreat was blocked by a monster crocodile, and the damned fog came rolling back in the moment the plane was gone, making it impossible to see her or much of anything else.

  I had two choices: circle the island in the other direction—not recommended in the tourist’s guidebook, since parts of the three-mile shoreline were rough and had tricky tides—or scrambling over the mountain thrusting up in the center of the island. I looked at the hill behind me, visibility down to about ten feet and getting worse all the time, and wondered, if I climbed high enough, whether I could break out of the suffocating mist.

  “Damn.” I looked at the path back into the mangroves. It was filling up with fog too. The eerie gray presence had waited only for the plane to leave and then moved swiftly to retake the island.

  Belatedly I recalled the fact that there could be zombies roaming around on the beach as well as crocodiles.

  I needed to get to the far side of the island, where there were big guns, hot chocolate and Ambrose, and with the one shoreline path definitely in reptilian hands and the other possibly now zombie territory, there was only one way to get there.

  The island’s “mountain range” would cause sniggers from anyone who lived in the Rockies or Alps, but the incline on the side of the ancient volcano was steep and slippery enough to be dangerous on a day when the fog was sufficiently thick to cause an early twilight. Fortunately, I wasn’t headed for any particular landmark. I needed to go up and then down, and there was a path somewhere, I assured myself. Even in the fog I would be able to find it eventually. I would go slowly, not strain my heart, and in no time I would be eating pancakes with Ambrose and a shotgun.

  The ascent wasn’t too bad, though I managed to tear my clothes while doing a panic dance induced by some giant insect dropping onto my shirt and squirting me with a noxious, stinging fluid. I shrieked in an unwisely loud voice and fell on my butt. Not content with a pratfall, I rolled a few feet in the mud, but was spared severe damage when the flaps of my jeans caught on some painful outcrop of volcanic rock. The pockets tore, but I was saved from injuries more serious than a bruised butt.

  The poor beetle scrambled away as soon as I quit thrashing. Hurting a bit but more determined than ever to get the hell off that mountain, I rolled to my feet and moved on. I chanted a soft mantra: nomorebugs-nomorebugs-nomorebugs.

  The summit was eventually reached but without any diminishment of the fog, and I celebrated my mastery of the mountain—and my not falling into the volcano’s basin, which had appeared quite suddenly—by having a lie-down on mossy stone and gasping for air while my heart calmed itself. If I had been doing this at a higher elevation I probably would have died. As it was, the strain was greater than I’d anticipated and I needed to rest for several minutes.

  Eventually I stopped wheezing and rolled back onto my feet. I didn’t stay upright for long. There were too many birds—I think they were birds—flying about in the fog in what could only be described as blind panic. The noises they made were awful, a sort of hissing-choking sound that made me think of tear gas or some other kind of poison. After getting slapped a few times and having my hair pulled by passing talons, I dropped back to my knees and made up some German curses that were completely ineffective in quelling the avian chaos.

  Cussing is fun and relieves stress, but my lungs began telling me that they really needed to get out of the sulfurous damp and away from the falling dung being dropped by the panicked birds. Also, my sniveling psyche, who seemed to be always with me on the island, kept whining that maybe the crocodile had followed me up the mountain and was even now sneaking up on me with its giant jaws agape. That was a highly improbably scenario, but there was no reasoning with my inner terror-stricken child.

  I managed to make most of the descent of the steep side of the volcano on the seat of my now pocketless jeans, though a lot of unwanted sliding and rolling in gritty mud w
as involved. I think I also managed to hit every tree and rocky outcrop on my way down, but broke nothing, not even any skin. I didn’t fall in the ocean when a cliff appeared—after I had slid off of it—but that was only because there was a stretch of sand and barrier of swamp grass warning me that it was time to stop my panicked rolling progress.

  Slowly, the sound of blood pounding in my ears began to fade. My vision improved somewhat upon exiting the thickest ropes of shrubbery and entering the feathery sea grass near the shore, but not so much that I immediately recognized where I was. I thought about shouting for Ambrose but decided to save my breath. His hearing might be acute but was surely of no use with the wind shrieking along the beach like the voices of the damned. The earlier calm was gone, and the sea itself was in torment and thrashing loudly as it hurled itself at this side of the tiny island with blows that I could feel beneath my unsteady feet. The waves were fanning the fog away, beating it back little by little. Which was odd, because the mountain behind me was as foggy and breathless as ever. The wind seemed unable to find it.

  The slowly revealed sight of the wreck-strewn shore and the white hellbroth beyond, dim as it was, would have daunted the bravest heart—which mine is not—so I was feeling pretty desperate indeed. Especially when I noticed that I was not on the beach near my cottage. Somehow I had gotten turned about on the mountain and ended up coming down elsewhere on the island.

  I rested on hands and knees, trying to catch my breath and also decide which direction to travel. Without the sun, I had no way of judging my location. Thick shadows that shouldn’t have existed at all fell heavy across the fungus-smeared rocks and dilapidated shrubbery that appeared silver in the thinning mist. Nothing looked familiar. Strings of something like cobweb but slimier dripped in strange crisscrosses on the sagging limbs, underneath which scuttled what I thought were rats but proved to be crabs fleeing the beach with a haste I had never guessed possible.