For long moments, even Pete Woodrough's private conviction was shaken. Then he came back to a firm belief that Delmonico was alive. He knew there had to be a natural, rational answer to this. Exactly what that answer might be, he couldn't begin to guess-maybe the newspapers had been wrong-but he knew in every fibre that he himself was alive. He also knew that if he was ever to possess Desiree, he would have to keep up his game of make-believe.
They all went back inside and, by tacit consent, did not sit down again at the table. They went to their rooms and got their pails and felt their way down to the lake shore two by two and, carefully avoiding the putrefying fish, scooped up buckets of water, foreseeing the needs of the morning.
And Pete and Desiree slept together that night.
* * *
Desiree was right: No plane came the next day.
"Things will go from bad to worse," she said.
For lunch on this sixth day, they went to the pantry. There were canned goods and nothing much else. Beans, carrots, peas, tomatoes, corn, more beans; spaghetti and noodles; fortunately, also goulash, hot dogs, Spam, sardines. They made their selection and hunched around their table, in the ghastly emptiness and silence of the dining room, mopping the sweat from their faces with paper napkins.
That afternoon, Desiree moved in with Pete and they celebrated the event appropriately. Afterward, she said, with real fear in her voice, "Oh, I'm scared, Pete. I'm scared because I'm too happy. Somehow, this will be taken away from us-it has to be." For the first time, she cried.
To Pete, the happiness they had found with each other was proof positive they were alive and well and living in anywhere but hell. But he said nothing about this and continued to humour her. And why not? he asked himself: That tactic was paying off handsomely.
During dinner (Spam and canned macaroni), the candles ran out. Each had brought down the only one he had; all burned out within a minute of each other.
Woodrough felt his way to Montenegro's room. It was dark and stifling; there was the stench of fasces in the air, so strong that Woodrough chose not to enter.
"Mr. Montenegro," he said through the door, "please tell me where there are some candles." There was no answer. Woodrough spoke again; again no answer. Finally, he entered the room, and then he went back to the others. "Montenegro is dead," he reported.
"How can he be dead?" Martin asked. "You can't die around here."
"If you're part of the staff, you can die," Desiree said. "Just to be a problem for us."
There was nothing to do. They stumbled up to their rooms, sat in the darkness for a while, complaining, weeping, cursing and drinking, and went to bed early.
Before breakfast on the seventh morning, they discovered the new complication of their lives: The savages had struck. The larder was almost empty. They had crept in during the night and had carried off nearly all the food, including all the canned meat and fish. The guests were now virtually without protein.
"You see?" Desiree said to Pete. "Their function is not to kill us but to make us miserable."
"But this is serious," Pete said. "They'll come back and we're hopelessly outnumbered. We'll have to take all the remaining food to our rooms."
They did so.
At lunch that day (vegetable stew), the Hunsickers and the Dugans drunk, they discussed their predicament. "Every day, something else will go wrong," Desiree said. "First the electric lights went, then the air conditioning, then the running water, then the fresh food, then the service, then Montenegro. Very soon, the canned food will run out, then the liquor and you can no longer blunt the edge of it. Then the insect repellent, the toilet paper, the soap. Night after night, the Indians will pick this place clean and we can do nothing to stop it. Our clothes will rot and the bed linen. Always, at the last minute, when things have become unbearable, rescue of some sort will come." She repeated the word, with a bitter chuckle: "Rescue!"
Martin Dugan burst suddenly into high laughter and it was half a minute before he could say what was on his mind. "That bet, Central America. Hunsicker, we aren't in Central America. You owe me a thousand bucks. Come on, pay up, you cheap welsher."
Al had been drinking more than eating and saying nothing. Now he raised his eyes and one saw in them the despair and the rot. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cheque. "This is a cashier's cheque for twenty thousand." He endorsed it and tossed it across the table. "There's your lousy thousand," he said thickly, "and another nineteen thousand. It's all yours. You got your money, OK? And now, what ya gonna do with it, you silly bastard?" And he, too, burst into laughter, dirty and prolonged. It was Woodrough's worst moment: watching this idiocy take place while he said nothing.
Always the most enterprising, that afternoon Woodrough sought a solution to the problem of illumination. He found neither candles, flashlights nor lanterns; but he did find a drum of kerosene and made up lamps of wicks floating in a pan, which he distributed to each couple, to the dining room and to the kitchen. He noticed a progressive demoralization. The men had not shaved; the rooms were in complete disorder; all except Desiree were drunk.
No one went down to the dining room for dinner that night. Two by two, they crouched over their feeble, foul-smelling lamps and ate from their cans and drank their bourbon or gin.
On the eighth morning, they learned that the Indians had, of course, raided them again. No one had thought to save the liquor supply: Now it appeared to be gone, every last bottle that was not upstairs.
"They'll get themselves into a drunken frenzy," Mary wailed. "They'll murder us all."
"Can't you get it through your stupid head," her husband snarled, "that we can't be murdered?"
"There's something I don't understand," Laurie said. "What would happen if I stabbed myself in the heart?"
They were in the kitchen; Martin held out to her a large knife. "Try it," he said.
"Boy, are you funny," she said with contempt.
"You'd 'live' on," Desiree told her, "in hideous pain."
At dinnertime, it became apparent that the Hunsickers regarded the food that they had carried upstairs as their personal property and refused to share it. Harsh words were exchanged and very nearly blows.
Once again by themselves, the Hunsickers took up their private quarrel. "I backed you up on the food there," Mary said, "because I don't like those others any more than you do. But actually, of course, you are completely in the wrong, as usual."
And Al: "By God, I'm daunted, I'm truly daunted, when I think of an eternity of what I've already had to endure for twenty-seven years."
Only Pete and Desiree were at peace. They lay in each other's arms, happy and unmindful of the heat.
"Darling, do you think we will get older?" she asked.
"I don't see how that could be possible," he answered.
"Anything is possible," she answered sombrely. "We could get just enough older for you to stop loving me and then stop."
"Baby, I'll never stop loving you, no matter what happens," Pete whispered. "Never."
And the evening and the morning were the eighth day of eternity.
* * *
On the ninth day, early, the big old PBY23A squashed down on the lake and taxied up to the dock and about 20 people climbed out. All of the dead souls were still asleep, but they woke up when they heard the engines and rushed out to their balconies. Thus, Mrs. Peter Woodrough's first sight of her husband was in pyjama bottoms and in the company of a woman whose nightdress you could see right through.
The other arrivals were a repair crew and an American in charge, who introduced himself as Harris to the guests who assembled, hastily clad, in the lobby.
"Thank God, you're all right," he said. "You can't imagine how concerned we've been-you're in all the papers.
It's blown our cover completely-now the whole world knows we're down here in Nicaragua."
"It's part of the false hopes!" Desiree cried. But, seeing Mrs. Woodrough bearing down on her husband, and the look on his face, she kn
ew that they were back in the real world after all.
The doctor who had come along, sent to find Montenegro, found his corpse and reported to Harris. "About three days dead, I'd estimate," he said, looking at the guests with indignation; and Woodrough, at least, felt shame enough to blush.
"How terrible for you," Harris said. "There's no way we can apologize for what you've been through. That storm you had-that was Hurricane Clea, my friends-that was a real dilly. For four days, there was nothing in the air, but nothing, on the whole Atlantic Seaboard."
"You didn't wonder about the lack of radio contact?" Hunsicker demanded.
"Of course we wondered," Harris said. "We were frantic. We saw the maps' of the hurricane; we knew you'd been hit. But for the first four days, we couldn't do a thing. Of course, we don't own an amphibian and it's not so easy to rent one, let me tell you-it took this long. Thank goodness we found out Delmonico was in Tegucigalpa and could talk him into flying in here to reassure you."
None of the six wanted to look at another. Mary spoke up. "We'd read that he was dead."
"That's how we could get him," said Harris. "That was a publicity stunt that backfired. Get his name in the papers. But the newsboys found out right away that it was a phony and he got a very bad press, indeed. Well, his agent thought maybe this rescue operation would help patch things up. So he flew in. It's been a hideous week for you, I know, but we'll get you out of here just as soon as you have your stuff together."
Al Hunsicker intercepted Martin Dugan just as he reached his room. "About that bet," he said, red in the face. "It seems we're in Central America, after all. But I'm willing to call the whole thing off. So, if you'll just-" '
"Oh, no-no-no-no-no," Martin broke in. "I wouldn't think of it. I lost fair and square and I'm gonna pay. You just wait here a second."
He went into his room and came out after a short while.
"Here's my cheque for two grand, the thousand you paid me and mine for the lost bet." He put it into Hunsicker's limp hand. "I'll just keep that cashier's cheque," he said, "that you were so generous as to endorse over to me, in front of witnesses."
He stepped back inside his room. "You silly bastard," he said, and closed the door.
Desiree was about to enter Pete's room to collect her belongings when she heard the jay-voiced Mrs. Woodrough on the other side of the door, giving her husband hell. Reference was made to a naked whore, whom Desiree recognized as herself. She was about to retreat from the door when it was flung upon and Pete erupted into the corridor, his wife screaming after him, "Gome back here, Peter Woodrough!"
To Desiree, he quickly said, "I know where there's a bottle of Jack Daniel's stowed away in the cocktail lounge. Come on-I think we both need it."
They walked toward the lobby, desolated by the latest turn of events. "Oh, Pete," she said, "what I was convinced of half an hour ago would be preferable to what we've got now."
He nodded grimly but said nothing.
Even before they reached the lobby, their noses told them a ghastly experience awaited them there. The lobby, where a few minutes before there had been such a bustle, was completely empty. No Harris, no doctor, no rescue crew. Only Montenegro's body on a stretcher, urgently calling for burial.
Pete and Desiree looked at each other with horrid surmise. Of one accord, they ran to the window. There was no seaplane at the dock. There were no crates of supplies on the lawn. There were no people.
"But it couldn't" Pete wailed, "it couldn't have taken off without our hearing it!"
Desiree burst out laughing; it was a sound in which triumph and despair were compounded. "Of course it couldn't," she cried, "if it were real! Oh, marvellous! It's just like you said on the plane, Pete-this outfit does its thing with good style! This is another one of those superb touches!"
Pete's face went slack. She had been right all along. "It was just to torture us," he said in a whisper. "They've left us exactly the way we were."
"Not quite," said Desiree.
For behind them, they could hear an approaching torment: the strident, petulant, vulgar voice of the late Mrs. Peter Woodrough, deathlong addition to their group.
Pete spoke hollowly: "The latest superb touch."
"The latest," said Desiree, "but far from the last."
THE END
Richard Davis (ed) - [Year's Best Horror Stories 02] Page 17